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Hades II (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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Remember that other Hades II? The one with turtles in it? That was a great game, wasn’t it? I bought that because it was so much like Hades and there wasn’t really any other Hades-likes around that had good reviews. Oh, except for actual Hades II. Which I finally got round to buying.

Set a number of years after the first game, after Hades himself stopped being a Bad Dad And Husband and Zagreus brought the family back together, Hades II stars new addition to the family – Melinoë. She’s Zagreus’ younger sister, born after the first game and squirrelled away by Hecate, a witch in Hades’ employ, for her own protection when Hades’ own dad Chronos escapes from his prison and enacts revenge on his family.

Hecate has been training Melinoë for years, and the time has come for her to journey (repeatedly) back to Tartarus, defeat Grandad, retake the House of Hades and free everyone. And it plays just like the original game, really. Each run, you might progress a bit further, unlock something new, or gain enough of certain resources to enable permanent upgrades. Or luck might not be on your side and you fail horribly.

You see, like Hades and Teenage Mutant Hades Turtles, you get frequent temporary (for the duration of the run, or for a set number of rooms) upgrades and boons, but they’re generally random. You can stack the cards in your favour a little, to make it more likely certain upgrades will come your way, but it’s very possible you’ll end up with rubbish, a wealth of coin but not power, or several boons which don’t really work well together. But that doesn’t matter! Every failed run nets you something, so there’s always a sense of improving, even when you don’t.

Different to the first Hades is a choice – a few hours in, at least – of two paths. It turns out you’re actually needed to fight the war on two fronts, both on the way to Chronos, but also Mount Olympus is in jeopardy because Chronos has unleashed Typhon on the Gods, and he’s a bit big and nasty. That means you’ve two routes, with different levels, baddies, stories and goals, but the plot of the game explains why you need to do both. And complete both. Multiple times.

Other than that, and some tweaks to how certain rooms “work”, Hades II is “just” more Hades. The slick fighting and the massively varied builds you can create are well crafted. The seemingly endless, and rarely-repeated dialogue between you, your friends, foes, Gods and even mumbling to yourself, is incredible – as it was in the original game. Every character is well fleshed out and the voice acting is fantastic.

So, don’t expect anything too radically different if you’ve played Hades, but if you enjoyed that even just a little bit, Hades II is up your street. It certainly was up mine and I loved it from start to end.

PowerWash Simulator 2 (Steam 2): COMPLETED!

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You’d be hard-pressed, from the screenshots, to see that PowerWash Simulator 2 is actually a different game to PowerWash Simulator 1. And the gameplay too, in fact. After all, there are only so many different ways washing dirty stuff can be presented. Why, then, is this a whole new game and not just another pile of DLC for the original? Money? It’s probably money. Right?

There are differences, if you look closely. Perhaps the biggest, in terms of “gameplay” at least, is how they’ve done away with all the different types of soap. In the first game, different surface types required the purchase and use of specific detergents, so you’d need one for stone and one for metal and one for plastic and so on. Well, not only is there only one soap type now, it’s free and unlimited. Well, you can only have so much splashed on surfaces at any one time, but rinsing it off magically refills it to your washer so it is effectively infinite. This might not sound like much of a change but, in a game with very few possible changes, it’s a game, uh, changer.

I almost completely avoided using soap in the original, because of the cost and fiddly swapping it out and stuff, so cleaning took more “passes” than it could have done. Now, I foamed up everything with gay abandon. Game changer.

Another change is the addition of a new piece of equipment – the swing. You hang it from the top of a flat surface, and sit in it – giving you mostly free movement up, down, left and right to squirt much more easily than you would with ladders or the scaffolding. Both those, and the hilariously useless step-stool, return, but on specific levels the swing is an excellent new bit of kit. Could have really done with that on the tower at the fire station in the original.

There’s also a new plot. The dodgy Mayor is being dodgy, and the gems you recovered in the previous game that were required to keep the volcano in check have been stolen, but ultimately this just manifests as a reason to clean stuff, same as before.

The final change, which may well have been there before but I didn’t make use of it, was single console split screen co-op. I played on the Switch 2 so was disappointed it didn’t support the game share method of giving player 2 a Switch of their own to stream to, but it was still fun and, as you’d expect, halved the time it took to complete levels.

That’s all there is to say, really – it’s more of the same with a few quality of life improvements. Could it have been DLC? Probably. Should it? Well, chances are it’d have been about the same price anyway (I paid £15 for it, but the eShop price is £20) so it doesn’t really matter. It’s more relaxing zen washing, and it’s worth the entry fee, so I don’t actually care. Oh yeah, and there’s a toilet to wash. Winner.

Minishoot’ Adventures (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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Half way through the sentence where a reviewer described Minishoot’ Adventures as “The Legend of Zelda, only it’s a twin stick shooter” I’d already slammed the WANT button on the eShop. Yes, I know I could have bought it there and then (or at least pre-ordered it), but paying full price for any game, regardless of how good it is, just feels wrong. Often, I’ll put something on my wishlist and by the time it is in a sale I’ve totally lost all enthusiasm for it or, more frequently, totally forgotten what it was. But not this game. I checked the sales every week.

So I’ve finally managed to play it and it’s everything I wanted. You’re a little spaceship and you have to rescue other little spaceships and explore the world and the dungeons in it and fit baddies and big bosses, and get upgrades which improve your abilities or unlock new areas. There are some mazes, and puzzles, and somehow, somehow, despite the fact you shoot hundreds of bullets a minute and you look like something from Gradius, it’s still Zelda. Zelda with Geometry Wars gameplay. And it works.

The dungeons are fun and varied. The boss battles are a mix of wait-and-strike and bullet-hell. There are various sidequests, like finding engravings to expand the lore or racing a little fairy thing round a number of courses (where you can often cut corners, pleasingly), or collecting red crystals to use as currency to improve your shooting, speed or power. Getting every last item, trinket, and ticking off every last area on the map was addictive and I happily 100%ed the game.

More of this sort of thing, please!

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.