I have EXTREMELY mixed feelings about Assault Android Cactus in that I want to like it based on most levels and its graphical and aural charms. My problem is mainly due to the control scheme, although I do have several other complaints as well. Assault Android Cactus is categorized as a twin stick shooter, and it’s about androids (surprise!) on a freight ship whose AI has gone nuts and started killing everyone. I’d worry about spoiling the plot, except the plot is unbearably stupid and goes like this: an evil emo android showed up and told the AI that the universe is a lie and everything sucks, and the AI agreed and set about killing everyone to “save everything.” Stupid? Oh absolutely. But for video game writing, one can almost pretend this is some deeply philosophical shit.

The game’s title is also the “main character,” but right from the start, the player can choose from several other androids, each with their own unique payload of weapons. Further, by beating bosses at the end of sections, the player can unlock even more androids, including making the evil emo Licorice playable. All of these choices give players a lot of options depending on what kind of rate of fire on their primary weapons they want, and on what kind of secondary weapon they can deploy. Those include options like a flamethrower, land mines, missiles, a force field, and a singularity. (Because an indoor black hole is always a good idea, amiright?)

For the most part, the non-boss levels are fun if a bit frantic due to these androids having extremely poor battery life. This is for me another problem, as I’ve got no love for games that put me on a timer and demand perfect speed. It’s particularly frustrating to pop the icon for a battery, only to die while trying to reach it. (Or worse, while circling around it because the damn thing has decided to go in an orbit around your character without connecting.) And there’s one level called Repeater that I honestly was ready to murder someone over because it rearranges the floor underneath my character whenever I moved. I could turn a perfect circle and rather than return to my starting point I’d end up in a confusingly dense range of hallways, which conveniently only melted for enemies to take pot shots at me before rematerializing again to block my shots. Confusing doesn’t even begin to cover it. Continue reading

Bethesda…Bethesda never changes. I truly believe they are the only company who could get away with the things they do and still receive so much love from the community. The games can crash or glitch and still have people clamoring “game of the year!” with so many more qualified candidates out there. This year’s most qualified, Witcher 3, comes from a smaller team that went out of their way to make a world feel truly alive. By comparison, Fallout 4 feels like a lot of lazy half assing in so many ways. The vast majority of the sound effects in this game have been used in every single other Bethesda game in recent memory. Even the music playlist for the radio station has been heard before in previous Fallout games. The recycled engine is given some new next gen spit and polish, but aside from the prettier outdoor environments and new more colorful locations, the character models are often but ugly and badly animated.

The problem here for me is that I’ve seen other companies raise the bar higher and higher for what to expect in terms of character design and animation with each release, but Bethesda…Bethesda never changes.

However, this is actually the first Bethesda game I’ve played all the way to the end, (Unless you count Fallout Shelter, which I don’t.) liking and loathing it in equal measure. There is nothing I can praise in the game that does not instantly lead to a big BUT, and for every time I was enjoying my game, there’s at least twice as many times where I was left groaning, “This is utter bullshit.” Or yelling it, or even growling it. And I want to note that it was rarely the challenge level of the game that was the reason for my anger. Sometimes it might be a glitch or a crash, but more often, it was just lazy writing or coding.

But let me start off at the beginning. Bethesda never changes. That’s why yet again, Fallout 4 starts with the same introductory sentence. However, this time the world is fleshed out in more detail before the character creation process begins, and I think it hurts the premise even more than the previous entries. In this version, the war did not take place in an alternate fifties era. Instead, the world went on with the same culture and technology until 2077. Try to think about that. If a person from 1950 were frozen and taken to our time, they would not recognize quite a lot of the progress we take for granted. But not only did technology freeze, but so did all culture and art. So for this period of supposed nuclear peacetime, no one ever did anything in any field. Ever. The game actually contradicts this idea many, many times, and yet…Bethesda never changes. Continue reading

There’s a very small part of me that wants to go easy on the makers of Loot Heroes on the grounds that I only spent 2.99 on it, and really, what did I expect? Well for starters, I expected a game that was fun and relatively glitch free. Given the videos and reviews I saw, I expected something like the NES version of Gauntlet. What I got was a lazy, shitty little turd that I wish I hadn’t wasted my money on. I can only think of one thing to compliment in this game, and that’s the music. The music is nice and catchy, but everything else is awful.

Where to begin? Well first, there’s the shitty graphics, with just the barest minimum of effort put into the design of the dungeons and the enemies. There’s the boss monsters, who have the ability to deal damage through walls because their “hit box” is ridiculously huge. There’s the recycled sound effects, meaning it’s damn near impossible to tell if that one sound was my rune spell, an approaching boss monster, or a trap just outside of my hazy area of view. There’s the cheap tactic of opening a dungeon with 20 fucking enemies and two boss monsters already in my ass so that I’m dead before I can even look for a way to escape. There’s the monsters stacked all on top of each other so that it’s impossible to tell if the monster around the corner has one friend with him or ten. There’s the fucking glitches, where I could walk down an empty hall with no enemies or traps and still take damage.

How about those awful controls? This is supposedly a twin-stick shooter, but the aiming on the right stick is shit and will send 99% of your shots into a wall. When almost all of the game is tight corridors, that’s not the least bit helpful. One would think using the face buttons to fire in a straight line might help, but NO. Why? Because no matter which face button you press, it still only fires in an “auto aim” manner, usually at the wrong enemy. Additionally, auto-aim only works for a short distance, and then the face buttons fire in whatever direction the character is facing. Absolutely fucking useless.

“Zoe, maybe you didn’t play it long enough to give it a fair chance,” you say. Nope. I played long enough to unlock the barbarian by fighting my way through to dungeon 30, and I unlocked 61% of all the trophies. I played as every class multiple times, for all the good that did, and I played long enough to collect enough class specific items so that three of my classes started at levels 2 and 3 instead of 1. In all that time playing, I went from a merely apathetic verdict of “meh” to full on hate for this piece of shit. The longer I played, the more I wanted to ask for a refund.

I give Loot Heroes 2 stars. I WANT so badly to give it 1, but I reserve that score for something so broken it’s unplayable. This is playable, but I can’t think of a single reason why I’d want to. Can’t delete this fast enough from my Vita to make room for something better.

Wait, what? A review for a PSP game? What year is this?! Well Mega Man X: Maverick Hunter is part of Sony’s October sale, and even if it wasn’t 3 euros, I would have picked it up. I’ve been craving a Mega Man game that I can play on my Vita, and this is an updated remake of a game I played but never managed to beat. See, way back in the SNES days, I didn’t buy a whole lot of games. I had to rent them, and this is one that I rented a few times without ever making any progress against any of the robot masters. Eventually I moved on to other stuff, and this slid off my radar. But now I stand (well, sit really) before you a proud veteran of BOTH game modes, waving the mighty banner of victory. Yes, I’m still a lousy gamer, but now I’m a lousy gamer who finally beat Mega Man X. Huzzah!

And you know what? I really love this game. There’s only a few minor things to complain about, and for the most part this is 2D platforming fun at its finest. The graphics are a bit dated, sure, but they’re still colorful and pop bright and pretty on the Vita screen. The music is great, and the controls are absolutely perfect. I’m normally a huge klutz who dies over and over because “wrong button stupid” but this is a game that just feels right soon after I started playing it. I think part of that is being able to play with the analog stick or the D-pad, but another part is that I really only need the four face buttons. No complex combos to remember, just pure button mashing platforming joy.

In this game there’s no Dr. Light or Dr. Wily because X was sealed away in a chamber by Dr. Light for future generations to discover. The scientist who does so, Dr. Cain, develops a whole range of robots around X’s design, but none of them have quite the range of emotions that he does. As Dr. Cain believes his emotions are the key to robotic evolution, his underling Sigma takes it upon himself to push X into evolving by going maverick. It’s admittedly a pretty convoluted story premise, but you don’t really need any of it to play the game. Continue reading

My time in Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt can be summed up as vast chunks of time spent skipping through the woods picking flowers and admiring the countryside and clouds, intermittently interrupted by occasional bouts of what-the-fuckery. Sometimes, these bouts were events one should expect in a fantasy game, such as accidentally kicking over a ghoul’s nest or tripping on a griffin, but I often came across glitches or outright crashes that gave me pause. Other times, I had troubles with the controls, or with the sometimes dumb rules of the crafting system. None of these are really deal breakers that make this a bad game, but they will be brought up in my review. So if you’re looking for a totally glowing review, this won’t be it. No, I’m here to get nitpicky and anal, even as I admit this here is a pretty game. Oh so very, very pretty.

Before I get started, I will admit this is sort of my first foray into the Witcher world. I say sort of because hubby has played the previous two games, and I sometimes watched over his shoulder. I can’t say much about those games because what little I saw didn’t pull me in and make me want to play them. But I do distinctly recall the moment that I saw one of the early game play trailers for Witcher 3 and watched a pack of wolves moving together to cut off Geralt’s escape, and I thought, “Well if that’s in the actual game, it’ll be brilliant.”

And it is, to a certain degree. (Even if that trailer completely lied and wolves never do what they did in the trailer.) Enemies of all types feel like they have actual intelligence, working together and planning attacks to flank and back stab in a way that makes every fight feel tense and challenging. So I rather like that, and I feel I should bring it up right away. It’s a shame this does not carry over to allies, but I’ll get to that later. This praise also doesn’t apply to enemies that suddenly glitch and become derpy, which happens frequently enough that it should be mentioned. The combat controls too will deserve their own separate rant. This is a long review, is what I’m saying. Continue reading

What? TWO game reviews in ONE post? Yeah, this may not always be the case for phone game reviews, but in these two cases, the games are just so simple that there’s not much reason to devote a full post to each of them. One I liked, and the other did nothing for me. I didn’t dislike it, but I also don’t find myself wanting to play it any more.

First, let’s cover Puzzle Quest 2, which is definitely my kind of game. The Puzzle Quest brand is turning into a big licensed property franchise, and a Kotaku review of the latest version sporting Marvel characters felt it was weak, and stated that the best in the series was the second game. I grabbed my phone, hoping that maybe, just maybe, there would be a Win Phone version. (Game makers, please don’t say a game is coming out on all mobile platforms when you mean just Android and iPhone. It gets my hopes up and then crushes them cruelly.) There was, and so I bought it and spent a long, LONG time playing it. I might still be playing through the story quest now, but after level 50, the game just erased my character and dumped me back to the beginning. I think eventually, I’ll start it over because I love puzzle games, but that loss of progress was more than a little hard to take.

What Puzzle Quest 2 is, is a match 3 tile puzzle with some context added to the turns-based struggles with AI opponents. They could have just made the game without the fantasy story and it would have worked just fine for me. But the idea is that each opponent is a different monster with different spells and defenses. As you progress down through this dungeon, you come across bigger and badder enemies, and each time you have to revise your playing style to counter theirs. You fire off your own spells by collecting gems of various colors, but you can also collect little fists to gather action points for using a weapon, or you can match skulls to do damage directly. And that’s pretty much it. Continue reading