It’s that time again when there are several games I have something to tell about, but not enough to need a separate post for it. Which doesn’t mean that the games mentioned aren’t worth checking… Well, one of them isn’t, but you’ll see.
AER Memories of Old is a very short exploratory game with nice music, fun flying mechanics, pretty visuals and kind of nice, if not particularly exciting, world. A fun thing to go with if you get it in a bundle (like I did) or buy it on discount, but other than that, might not be worth it, simply because it feels more like a really cool demo of an idea, rather than a proper full fledged title.
As such, while flying is fun, it’s disabled in the “dungeons” where rather unfun platforming and pretty boring puzzles are the focus. Where you’d run around, stumbling across solutions and then realizing you’ve just completed a dungeon without noticing. As such, the story feels more of an echo of a proper tale, and it ends on something that was probably intended to be evocative or “up to your imagination”, but in reality feels more like “and here we ran out of budget, so watch the credits now”. And unless you really, and I mean really, like flying and exploring a beautiful world while nice music plays, you’ll probably get bored very quickly, despite the short length of the game.
I did enjoy the game for what it was for how I got it, but if I’d never play it, I don’t feel like I’d miss much.
Lara Croft GO is a second entry in the puzzle “Franchise Square Enix owns GO” series after Hitman GO, developed by Square Enix Montreal (not to be confused with Eidos Montreal studio). All the entries in the series are primarily mobile titles, designed with simple turn based gameplay and touch controls so one thing I will say from the start – playing it with the mouse isn’t the best experience. But a definitely worthwhile experience. The idea of turn-based puzzles, where you think ahead and plan around obstacles and traps in a way, so you don’t run yourself in a corner on accident on small confined and usually fully visible from the start stages seemed like a no-brainer concept for the Hitman Go, but amazingly fits Tomb Raider really well too. In fact, I’d even argue that it feels closer to what Tomb Raider used to be originally than what it is now – you plan your steps, think about how your actions affect the world and plan the order of things to do, just like you used to 3D Prince of Persia jumps and encounters in early Tomb Raider series. Except, this time you do everything on your own pace.
All the main story levels are really well done, with thought out difficulty curve and definite feel of progressing and learning, which is always a good sign for a puzzle game. Most of the levels, with very few exceptions closer to the end, can be more or less thought out beforehand and completed on the first go, while some require a few retries until, usually very quickly, you get to the “aha!” moment and move to the next puzzle, with available paths and turn-based structure smartly limiting the ways you can fail and guiding you towards the solution. The first additional campaign tends to be a bit more punishing and frustrating, getting quite a bit tedious by the end, while the final bonus campaign of the game, while really good looking and having some clever puzzle basics, usually fails to be entertaining, lacking immediacy of the attempts and often focusing on boring column pushing instead.
Highly recommended, though probably preferable on a device with touch capabilities.
King’s Bounty: Dark Side is the currently latest title in the King’s Bounty series rebooted first by Katauri Interactive, which are sadly closed now, and 1C. And while every previous title in the series tended to be a clear upgrade over the previous one in most things, if not all, with series becoming especially fun to play even for crappy strategy game players like myself in Warriors of the North, Dark Side is where things go very much sideways and backwards. On one hand we have really cool concept of “dark” versions of troops we’ve seen before, an even more varied overworld map, campaign viewed from the eyes of “baddies” and all the features introduced in previous games. On the other – quests are designed almost exclusively over terrible backtracking and padding, written very poorly, unclear in a lot of explanations and not funny (that was the usual issue with the series though) and a lot of small bugs, even worse pathfinding and crashes.
The main gameplay is still fun, don’t get me wrong, it still has this hypnotic loop of fighting enemies, exploring stuff, finding treasures, leveling up to go back and fight harder enemies and etc. But problems arise when you realise that almost every quest is designed like this: We need to do X, but to do X we need to talk to XX and YY, who will tell us to do some magic stuff which requires a magic wand which is in 5 parts which are randomly scattered around (and may be in places you’ve been to before), so you collect the parts and then do another fetch quest to put it together, then do something else then you get betrayed and need to fight and then after a lot of stupid running back and forth you go to the gates of a castle and fight. Aka, most of the stuff is padded out, convoluted and usually completely pointless because it might still end in the “and then you fight anyway after spending 3 hours to avert the fight”. It’s dreadful.
I kept on going probably because I wanted some more rebooted King’s Bounty in my life right now, but after 21 hours of constant frustration I realized that perhaps if I really want to play King’s Bounty I might as well play a good King’s Bounty game and not this terrible unfun mess.