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Vostok Inc (Switch): COMPLETED!

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You know Cookie Clicker or Cow Clicker or Clicker Heroes or that paperclip clicker? Pointless but somehow addictive, right? And you know that little known twin-stick shooter Geometry Wars? Great, yeah? What about those tamagotchi thingies? Lovely.

Now bung them all into the same game. That’s right, the same game. A single game with all these elements in. There’s no way that can work.

But it does. You develop planets in a solar system in classic clicker style: buildings generate money each second, which you use to buy more buildings. More expensive buildings, and upgrades to buildings, generate more money per second. You keep this up, increasing earnings through ever higher powers of ten.

But while doing this, you have to fly from planet to planet to develop each. And you get shot at on the way and oh look – it’s a twin-stick shooter now. Shooting enemies and asteroids provides more money, although it’s the developing planets that really gets you the big cash.

Use some of your money to upgrade your ship’s weapons and abilities, and then take on the boss before expanding your business empire into the next solar system.

Oh yeah, and while you’re whizzing round the galaxy, why not rescue some executives? They inhabit your ship and – providing you keep them fed and entertained virtual pet style – they’ll give you a money generating bonus. They’ll also give you a minigame each to play should you have some time to kill while waiting for money to build up. They play out on a replica LCD screen, and are simplified variations of Flappy Bird, Galaga, R-Type and even Doom. They’re hardly full of depth, but they’re fun (and hard!) little diversions.

Then, before you know it, 20 hours have passed. Oops.

The post Vostok Inc (Switch): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

North (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I read a couple of reviews for North, and although they weren’t exactly high scoring, they all said the story was interesting if a little short. Someone referenced Blade Runner. Another mentioned Papers Please. For reasons that became obvious when playing, specifics were missing somewhat from these reviews.

Then I saw it was only £2.79, and more than that I had some free eShop credit. Not only that, but I’d get some money back now Nintendo have that rewards points thing. Why not, I thought.

North is a narrative discovery game, and starts with you – a refugee from the (seemingly literally on fire) South – having just made it to a city in the North. Before you can apply for asylum, you have to prove you’ve been persecuted in your own country, convert to the local religion, and be fit for work.

This plays out in the form of walking round mostly pitch black areas, writing letters to your sister who is still back in your old country, and some slight interaction with alien figures and switches. It’s important to mention the pitch black areas, because on the Switch at least (Youtube videos of other platforms suggest it’s a Switch thing), some areas are too dark to see anything. Walls, slopes and space are all just black. I missed a door for ages because it was so dark.

One of your first tasks (and the only one that requires any sort of skill or dexterity) is to work. You get a drink from a vending machine which allows you to run, then enter the mines. Here, you have three jackhammers you have to activate (and collect the stones they produce), only you die if you stay in the mines too long. You can recover health by running back to the entrance before you die.

Dying just repawns you outside the mines, but I encountered a bug in doing so: I was unable to get more drink, so was unable to run, and therefore unable to complete the mines. If you can’t complete the mines, you can’t prove you’re able to work, and so can’t progress in the game, so I was stuck. I had to restart the game. There were a few other bugs – sometimes the wrong name of a door appeared on a door, for instance – but this was a biggie.

Hardness to see and game breaking glitches aside, the game’s story was enough to keep me playing. I can’t go into details here much as almost everything is a spoiler, but when you realise why the player is being persecuted, you suddenly realise how politically charged the game is. Especially since it comes from Moscow…

For some reason, it feels a lot like Bernband only more oppressive and more lonely. It’s amateurish in the way it’s built, with unfinished rooms and what I sense are Unity assets, but it seems like that’s just the means used to tell the story. It could have been done in Twine, or Inform, or PICO-8, so I can’t really mark it poorly for that. Apart from the lighting and bugs, of course!

Having played it, I can see how the reviewers had a hard time scoring North highly. It’s like trying to assess a film using the rules of reviewing a concert. Is North a great game? No. Is it a great story? No. Is it an important story to “play”? Absolutely.

Oh, and the title music track is a lovely Vangelis-style thing so it’s almost worth it just for that.

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Super Bomberman R (Switch): COMPLETED!

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A lot of people derided this at launch, but I know Konami have changed a lot since then. In fact, the multiplayer mode is – baffling graphics choices aside – a decent enough Bomberman game. Today, I discovered that you could change the viewing angle of the single player game with the L and R buttons and you know what? Single player is just fine now too.

Sure, the camera angle, even when fixed, is a bit odd and sometimes it’s hard to see what “level” you’re on as a result, but mostly it’s not an issue. I’d have liked it to be a touch more overhead (perhaps I missed another button combo) but it hardly caused an issue.

In fact, I completed it. And it was fun, and it wasn’t too long and you know what? It’s the only Bomberman game with a single player mode I’ve completed since the SNES/PC Engine/Mega Drive versions. Which says more than any description I could stick here would.

Obviously it isn’t perfect, but all the necessary power-ups are there, each world has gimmicks that work, the levels are pretty varied (some have “survive for” time limits, some require you to kill everything, some have you saving people), and the bosses are decent too.

Of course with a Bomberman game, the actual game is in the multiplayer modes. But Super Bomberman R’s (haha! R’s!) is a solid 3/5 on it’s own. How much has changed in the last year I don’t know, but that’s where I’d stick it now. And yes, I played the “bonus” world after completing the game too, in case you were wondering.

The post Super Bomberman R (Switch): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

The Lego Ninjago Movie Video Game (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I have to say, I’m a little bit disappointed with this. The Lego Ninjago Movie Video Game (yeah, that’s the name) isn’t bad at all, but there are a number of niggles that actually cause gameplay issues. Sure, there are the “usual” Lego game problems – crashes and bugs, mainly – but two things in particular are really game breaking.

The first is the strange darkness of the game. In the open, sunlit levels (like the beach) it’s fine, but as soon as it’s a bit dark or even just shadows, it’s impossible to see. A gamma slider would sort it, but there isn’t one. And when you play as Garmadon or Cole, who are both wearing black, it’s even worse.

The other problem relates to Lloyd’s “green build power”. Like the “master builder” power from the Lego Movie game, you have to stand in a certain spot, hold down a button, then move the cursor over three glowing items. The thing is, when you’re playing in split screen two player mode, sometimes you can’t physically “tag” all three items – the screen just won’t scroll to reach them. We had to have one of the two players drop out so the remaining player had use of the full screen. A bizarre bug that would absolutely come up if two player mode was actually tested – which it clearly wasn’t!

That said, these are pretty minor things and it’s generally business as usual for Lego games. There are a few changes to the formula, notably no red bricks and no “True Hero/Adventurer/Whatever”, but surprisingly these don’t change the game as much as I expected. The plot follows the film, although expands it somewhat with a load of extra sequences. For some reason all the characters get their elemental powers well before they do in the film – making the whole purpose of their journey a bit pointless – but that doesn’t really affect the game.

My daughter and I played the whole game in co-op (bar the above mentioned necessary drop-out), but as usual we’re only actually about 40% done. No doubt we’ll do some more.

The post The Lego Ninjago Movie Video Game (Switch): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Golf Story (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I was very much hyped for Golf Story, when it was first announced, and I leapt on it the moment it hit the eShop. Unfortunately, Stardew Valley came out just a week later so I only managed to get halfway through it. Until now.

The mantra of Golf Story seems to be that everything is golf. It’s not a full-on golfing game despite being entirely golf based, instead being a story driven adventure game. With golf. It has chatting and fetch quests (some of which involve golf). Slaying the undead (using golf), feeding birds (golf), melting frozen people (golf) and collecting ore (guess what? Golf). Golf. There’s even a mini-game which is almost a remake of the old NES Golf game, only that’s called Galf.

Then there’s the actual golf. Several varied 9 hole courses, each with gimmicks like ice, or turtles in the water you can bounce the ball off. Different clubs provide extra “powers”, such as super-high chipping, the ability to skip the ball across the water, or better control wedging out of a puddle. Despite these unorthodox abilities, Golf Story’s golf is surprisingly standard video game golf. It feels like Sensible Golf, or the old 16-bit PGA Tours, with the controls, spin and swing bars all intact. You always feel in control but a slightly mistimed button press, or a miscalculated wind adjustment and it can all go horribly wrong very quickly.

As you progress through the game, gaining access to each course, you play other NPCs in stroke and matchplay competitions. Despite each opponent being awful at golf (even the pros) mainly because of the style of play they focus on (Max Yards has no short game, the old folks from Tidy Park always play safe and have no range, etc.) somehow they remain challenging enough. Not least when your up until now foe had been hitting bunkers and trees without pause then suddenly gets a slam-dunk albatross hole-in-one due to a bizarre sequence of awry bounces and rebounds. Thankfully, they’re not unbeatable. Although the final tournament at Blue Moon Dunes was almost enough to end me.

Golf Story’s humour, unlike this upcoming pun, is above par too. Sometimes games can be a bit tryhard at making the funnies (see Undertale, to a degree), but Sidebar Games didn’t go overboard. There are pop culture references, sure, but they’re reigned in and it’s the quirky characters and their dialogue that makes it work. Coach’s constant putdowns, the TV guys interviews and inane drivel from the interviewees, and the totally out of place rap battle between the yoof thugs and the Tidy Park elderly gentlemen being some of the highlights.

It’s hard to find fault with Golf Story. There’s the odd bug (including a repeatable one where running between rooms sometimes causes you to get stuck in the “void”), some of the “find x of these things” quests are a bit tiresome as invariably one of them is impossibly well hidden or in a different area entirely, and there are the odd graphical glitches, but there’s nothing to ruin it. Or even put a visible dent in it.

Even if you’re not into golf, you can’t fore go playing Golf Story. And that was the worst pun ever, badly shoehorned in at the last minute. Sorry.

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