Zoe E. Whitten

There wasn’t a review or any post last week because I had so much to talk about, and in all cases, I just wanted a little more time with each…thing before passing a verdict. So in my infinite wisdom, I chose instead to start playing another game that I figured I could get through in a few days.

Ah hahahahahahaha. Ha…ahem.

So, one week later, let’s talk about Grindstone, which I bought from the Epic Game Store. It is to date only the second game I’ve bought rather than just being a free game of the week, so that should say how much I was looking forward to playing this. First of all, it’s a puzzle game, and my love for those goes all the way back to Tetris on my first Game Boy. Second, it has a cartoony presentation that’s one part adorable mixed with two parts gory. As a fan of horror and cartoons, that sounds like a perfect cocktail for me.

It didn’t take long playing it before I started muttering, “This had to be a mobile game first,” and I did some digging to confirm that yes, this was originally part of the Apple Arcade offerings before moving to PC. I will circle back to everything that made me think that, but first I want to take more about the overall gameplay, the story, and the usual stuff that a review should dig into before hitting on the feely bits. Continue reading

You ever have a guest who overstays their welcome? They finished the wine and drank all your bourbon as well. Now they’re looking like they might go through the kitchen cabinets to find something else to amuse themselves with, and you just want to say “Well you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

That’s what Into the Pit feels like. It’s an absolutely gorgeous game with great music, art style and gameplay that should have been a 5 star contender. From the moment it opens with a short cutscene establishing the main character’s quest to find their missing cousin, the bold use of bright colors mixed with pixelated shadows make an impressive impact. In short order, the game guides said character to the eponymous pit to rescue not only their hell-bound cousin, but also all of the villagers who followed the town’s alderman on a false promise of finding riches beyond their wildest dreams.

Diving into the pit itself, the player is given weapons, a pair of magic “guns” bound to their right and left hands, as well as a talent that might be something like a chance to regain health after dispatching demons or being coated in poison so that enemy melee attacks will harm them in turn. From the center hub of each floor, there are four  areas that must be cleared to unlock another level down, leading eventually to the fifth floor where a boss fight is waiting. The dungeons are labeled, so you know what kind of rune is available to harvest, or whether there’s an imprisoned villager to rescue, or just a pool of health to recover a bit from the tougher rooms. To escape each room, a set number of mystic keys must be destroyed. Lots of early rooms will only have one or two, but deeper floors in the pit can go as high as four keys. (Oh, and lots of keys have a hidden ambush mechanic, teleporting in a large number of enemies as a form of defense. As a rule of thumb, if an area looks clear, it’s probably an ambush ready to punish player overconfidence.) Continue reading

This weekend, Blizzard released a beta build of Diablo IV, the “Server Slam” meant to test the quality of the game’s network and hopefully prevent the access errors that plagued the previous game. When this was first announced as another always online game, my interest sank rapidly. I didn’t get Diablo III until it moved to console and dropped the online aspect. Even then, I didn’t really care for most classes, and only managed to finish the game once with the witch doctor.

The thing is, after I got my new phone and found it could play Diablo Immortal, I reactivated my Bettle.Net account to see if it was as bad as I’d heard. I didn’t expect to play much, so I named my first character AynGonalaslong. I played for a few hours, and then I started other character classes to see how they were, and now I’m only missing notes on the Necromancer before I can give a full, proper review. But the short version is, I love playing Diablo Immortal. So, in light of my enjoyment of this always online game, I decided to see what Diablo IV could offer.

Much like Immortal, Diablo IV has a tutorial section that’s offline. As soon as I completed that, I got hit with massive lag. I thought it was my crap PC, so I removed the high definition assets and lowered all the graphics settings to low. That didn’t work, but on restarting the game, I noticed the other players popping up in the hub town around me and realized it was network lag. So I logged out for a few hours, had some lunch and tried again. This time, things were better. I still experienced moments of lag, but they were fleeting, and only occurred every few hours instead of being a constant slog through rubber band hell. (During my first attempt to play, every time I stopped moving, my character would slide backwards to meet up with where the server thought I should be.) Continue reading

When I got Borderlands 2 on my PS Vita, it had all the DLC pre-loaded, so I got to play Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep a while back. I mostly remember how often the difficulty spikes came close to breaking my desire to finish the story, with certain areas just being a pattern of me dying and running back from a spawn point to get killed over and over again. The DLC got turned into a stand-alone game, and between those two events, the hubbers and I have played co-op on Borderlands, Borderlands 2, and part of Borderlands 3. So I figured, why not see if going in with a buddy could make the harder parts less annoying.

The short answer is, it’s a mixed bag. Certainly, having someone able to revive me or vice versa did reduce the number of times needed to run back, and an extra set of guns dulled some of those difficulty spikes. But there are still times when, even after side questing to level up, the game just gets painfully difficult. I could just stop here and call this a completed post, but I want to highlight places where that is the case, while also talking about my positive impressions about other aspects of the game.

So, firstly, our team was made of one gunzerker, hubby’s preferred class, and one mechromancer, because who doesn’t want to summon a third player when the shit hits the fan? I tried to convince hubby to do a commando and give us a fourth “player.” But he loves dual weilding so much that logic wasn’t going to convince him otherwise. (And yeah, it bit him in the ass, and he later said, “I should have gone with the commando.”) Continue reading

You may recall in my last Versus series post, I said I would be pitting Anarchy Online with both Runescapes and Saga of Ryzom (Now just titled Ryzom) to sort out which one I’d rather pay a membership subscription for. I also said that decision might take a while, but it turns out, finding a winner was easier than I thought. But to draw out the tension, I’ll talk about the losers bracket first.

Anarchy Online ended up with the first easy loss for several reasons. Since I’d left, all of my old accounts were frozen, and some genius decided to get rid of the old tutorial in favor of a hot mess that they called a simplified introduction. The controls were somehow more terrible than I remembered, and the graphics were awful. Early levels were a chore, falling into a pattern of “fight, then sit down to recover health for two minutes.” Then when I finally got to the mainland, I was reminded how pretty much every starting solo and group mission fell into the same loop. Walk for ten minutes dodging high level mobs to reach a “cave.” (The interiors are always filled with hallways and sliding doors that someone installed for reasons unknown.) Fight a collection of enemies and collect an item. It’s boring, it’s ugly, and it controls like a tank. Hard pass, and moving along.

Then we have Runescape Old School, which fares much better despite also having lower quality graphics. Yes, I said in the contest between it and the newer version that it had less to offer, but no matter when I boot it up, I always find something to do, and it’s not always “go over there and fight X monster.” I might be baking a pie, or mining metal to forge new weapons and armor to sell. When I choose to fight, the combat is simple and relaxing. It’s just a lovely zen game where the whole point is “make numbers go up.” So if I did have a larger budget to toss out for subscriptions, I’d still want to get the full paid experience that this old school gem has to offer. Continue reading

First, let me apologize for the lack of a review last week. I got stuck playing Into the Dead 2: Unleashed, (Not really a bad thing from the fun point of view, but more for the scheduling issues) and this week’s entry took me a bit later to finish than I’d anticipated. My schedule also wasn’t helped by the number of times this week that I ran out of energy right around gaming time and opted for a nap instead.

I got Batman: Arkham Asylum as part of a generous free offer from Epic Game Store, which gave away all three of the Rocksteady Batman games. But like many EGS offers, it had to wait because of my old crappy internet connection. Then once we did get a better connection, it got lost in the backlog shuffle. But after I played and liked Gotham Knights, I remembered I had this other game full of Batman shenanigans, or Batmanigans, if you like. One ten-minute download later, and I was whisked backward into Bat-History, like *WHOOSH! BIFF! BAM!*

And also *wet fart*

I wish I could say I had a great time with this first outing of the trilogy, but I really didn’t. Part of it could be chalked up to playing a newer game with better tools and a nicer interface, but it really comes down to this game frequently repeating the same things over and over, as if repetition equals fun.  But perhaps even worse is how it takes the brilliant opportunities offered by Batman’s rogues gallery and squanders every last one on terrible boss fights or really, really pointless side quests.

But before we get into any of that, we should cover how this game gets started, which is vaguely similar to the comic of the same name. The Joker takes over Arkham Asylum. But where the comic had Batman away doing other things, he’s right there to see Joker take over with help on the inside as well as from reinforcements coming from his army out of Blackwood Prison. Also, while in the comic, the whole point of Joker’s plan was to force Batman to confront his own inner demons, in the game, somehow Joker’s managed to construct a secret chemical factory to make Bane-like Titans, which he promises to unleash on Gotham if Batman doesn’t stop him. Then he spends the entire game complaining about Batman stopping him after he invited the dude to do so. I just…what? Continue reading

I’m a bit late getting this review out because there is a lot of game to get through in Into the Dead 2: Unleashed before arriving to the final level, and that’s even before taking into account the daily runs, side stories, and regular and pro journeys. I wanted to see how this premium package compared to Into the Dead, which a sad endless runner with no story, terrible guns, and lousy execution of its core loop. I’ll get to that later, but what I’m saying is, the Netflix version of the sequel succeeds on every level, when it works. And it frequently mucks up in frustrating ways.

The easiest way to describe Into the Dead 2: Unleashed is that it’s a ride on rails, but with a small degree of side to side movement to allow for exploring within a level’s “corridor.” Ammo crates are scattered about and are highlighted by green flares, making them relatively easy to see and run towards. Additionally, some levels have chainsaws and shrub cutters to pick up and use as temporary weapons before they run out of gas. Other levels have mounted guns with a limited stock of ammunition, or armored vehicles with unlimited ammo that will eventually crash and return the player to running and dodging.

In the main story mode, the player’s character is James, an ex-soldier driving back home with supplies to wait out the current zombie outbreak. His truck crashes, stranding him a long way from home, and his sister Helen keeps choosing to move farther and farther away with his daughter Maggie in tow. James has no choice but to keep running to try and catch up to her, frequently panicking as Helen’s crappy decision making leads to ever escalating disasters. Continue reading

Ages ago, I played Relic Hunters Zero and was not a fan. A three-quarter top down twin-stick shooter, it had convoluted controls, repetitive levels, and weapons that all ended up feeling the same near the final levels of any given stage. The titular relics were okay, but not really game changing or worth experimenting with to find the sweet build right for me.

Relic Hunters Rebels is a sequel that does a better job of world building and crafting an interesting story, as well as making all of the weapons feel unique. The relics in this version all have powers that can be leveled up by playing the game, so all the way around, this feels like a better game. It even has better controls, and the auto-aim is more helpful than I’ve seen in many console and PC games.

And yet, it’s a mobile game, so you just knew something had to be ruined by the mobile game economy. We’ll get into all of that soon enough, but just know that the short version is, this game is pretty good if you can get it on Netflix instead of the free version. Continue reading

I found Raspberry Mash on Google’s subscription service, and it’s everything I could hope for in a mobile game. A rogue-like set in a dark fantasy world, it offers simple controls, satisfying gameplay that constantly stokes that “one more try” vibe, and simple but effective graphics that bring to mind The Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon.

It is also a sad reminder of how the FtP model is ruining games by injecting ads into even the best ideas. Why watch multiple ads just to get started on a run when you can grab your free gear and go? If you reach a shop slightly short of gold, why not log in with the Free Gold TV instead of watching another ad? Oh, did you die fighting the boss? Here’s one free continue. Or you get the “free” version of the game and have whole minutes of your life sucked away by ads, most of which are bold-face lies about how the real games play. (Fuck those fake ads.)

I cannot overstate that this game is so good that I would happily pay to play it on my phone, and yet I’m constantly shown how the brilliant design was corrupted to accommodate the modern “free” experience. Stripping away all of the mandatory ads creates a wonderful game where every run can grow from “interesting” to “amazing.” But just enough of the FtP experience lingers to show the hell that non-paying gamers have to suffer in. Continue reading