Attack on Titan (PS4): Simple but Effective.

I wasn't too late to the party when this anime started making some waves. I made the foolish mistake of watching the first episode of it right before bed, so that wasn't a smart move. But like so many people I loved the series and have been ravenously destroying the mangas as they have been released. I am very clearly a fan.

I had kept my eye on this one since its release last year. I saw a number of youtuber's stream their own let's plays of it throughout the year and it seemed fairly simple in its concept and really needed to execute on two major fronts. I had it on my xmas list this year but didn't get it, but I did have a good amount of Amazon credit after the holidays, so with a little extra spending money to burn I got myself a copy of....

ATTACK ON TITAN:(PS4)

The campaign mode of this game is generally condensed telling of season one of Attack on Titan but for those of you who do not know: over a century prior to the start of our story, humanity was attack by this species of gigantic humanoid monsters called Titans. They devoured humans on site maliciously and without mercy. Humanity was pushed near the edge of extinction forcing the remaining populous into a city protected by 3 massive walls, With royalty and the wealthy class in the center, and the poorer and downtrodden in the outer ring. For over 100 years, these walls protected humanity.

We take the perspective of Eren Yeager, his adoptive sister Mikasa Ackerman, and their friend Armin Arlert. Eren has a long standing desire to see the world beyond the walls, and quickly gets his wish as a massive 100 meter Titan looms over the walls and smashes through it, allowing smaller titans to invade the city. Thousands of lives are lost, and Eren loses his mother as she is eaten by a titan. Eren swears vengeance to kill all titans and joins the ranks of the military, with Mikasa and Armin in tow.

Five years pass and they work their way to cadets before deciding what sect of the military they are going to station to, with working omni-directional gear that is used to combat titans when the walls are attacked again by the colossal titan. With another opportunity to fight, Eren submits to his bloodlust and takes the fight to the titans.

Armin, Eren, and Mikasa

Now this is somewhat of a simplified summary of the basic events that get the game in motion, but I glossed over quite a bit. The game, in all honesty, kind of does as well as the cut-scenes between missions give us rather brief expositions of the story to transition us to the scenes that take us to the next mission. It's not a bad telling and if you have never seen Attack on Titan it will at least keep you up to speed, but if you are looking for the plot line, you really should watch the show.

Thankfully in my case, I didn't give a shit about the story development because I have seen it before. What I needed from this game was to be successful at two things and only two things. One: is it fun and fluid to fly around the city using the omni directional gear? And Two: is to fun to use said ability to fly around to kill big dumb derpy Titans? If this game succeeded on these two points, I would consider this a worthwhile purchase.

So lets start with moving around. There is a standard run and jump which you will use pretty much never. For some areas like open fields you can ride horseback, but 90% of the game will involve you using the Omni-direction mobility gear (or vertical maneuvering equipment, whatever). It works fairly simply enough, you tap the square/X to fire off an anchor for your gear, It doesn't need to aim so long as you are in high terrain, and it will immediately yank you up into the air. As long as have a visible anchor symbol, you can continue to press the anchor button and you will swing continually as long as the environment allows.

I should stress holding it is all you need to do, I was trying to time my presses and it was slowing me down. You can also use the jump button to fire a burst of gas from your tanks to increase you speed or keep you airborne if you are trying to jump a wide gap or something. For the most part it works pretty easily, and the only real problem comes in sometimes when you smack into the side of a building. It doesn't work exceptionally great for going straight up in the air.

Flying around the map is a joy to do. 

When approaching Titans to fight you will be able to switch from mobility mode to combat mode. Its more or less a lock on, and when you lock in on a target you are able to fire off anchors into them. This allows you to swing around your target, and more importantly allow you to get above them. Titans will usually have 5 targets on their knees, elbows, and nap of the neck. As we know, you can only KILL a titan by attacking the neck, but occasionally there material drops in the arms and legs, so its wise to try to farm that when you have the chance.

Battle is somewhat straightforward as well. Once you are anchored onto your target, you can flip between the targets and re-anchor at will. As long as you are moving the analogs you will continue to shift your position and it will let you know about how far away from the titan you are. If you let go of the analog your ODG will start to reel your in towards the titan. Upon getting in range you can tag the triangle/Y to make an attack. You need to speed to really deal damage so you want to start from far enough away that you can build speed before the strike. Otherwise you'll need to use a burst of gas or you'll fudge the attack.

Flying with the anchors in combat can be finicky when doing it in close quarters or when fighting multiple titans. A titan will never trip up themselves or you on an anchor attacked to them, but if you swing and cross through a tree, building, or another titan the line will snap and you'll need to re-anchor. And these pricks will trip up your line and try to grab you a lot, so be ready for it.

Every single kill you make in the game is immensely satisfying.

Generally, when going through the game either in the story mode or online mode, you will enter a location with a main objective. You could dash right to the objective and take it down, but you will usually get a pretty shitty ranking for that. While traveling the map you will that other characters will be on the map and they may be in trouble. There are various side objectives that these characters are doing (like killing titans, defending a point, escorting someone to saftey) and you can go to help them to keep them alive. If you do, chances are you will gain better materials and they will assist you in the fights for the rest of the level.

Yes, you aren't fighting alone. There are a number of varied survey corps members around as well as main characters. Each of these have a rank of effectiveness so naturally you'll want to help your teammates to get better support. For characters like Armin and Hange, who have the ability to control their teammates attacks, its almost crucial because it basically gives you a series of homing shots. 

Characters have abilities that develop as you level them. I mentioned strategists like Armin and Hange who have abilities that keep them safer in battle from a distance, but then you have heavies like Mikasa or Levi who can pretty much yo-yo themselves for multiple attacks, which allows them to bring down titans faster than other characters, There are also characters who are better at resource collecting. The story mode lets you run through a majority of these characters so you can get a feel for who you like when you go into online mode.

As you might have guessed, Levi is the most busted character in the game.

And for those who watched the show or read the manga before hand? Yes you will have segments where using a titan will be in play. But I'll be 100% honest with you? This is probably the most boring aspect of the game. You can run at speeds and slug it out and throw other titans, but it just feels like it turns into a regular brawler. A regular old brawler is not why I am here.

Lastly, as I've mentioned there is materials you get during missions. This is what allows you to upgrade your ODG or swords. There isn't a whole world of difference between the main types of gear. For swords do you want range, power, or capacity/durability. For ODG do you want speed, Range, strength, and capacity. Honestly, I found it best to just keep upgrading the standard gear because they were the most balanced, but if you dabble further into the online scout mode, you'll need to tailor your gear for harder missions.

In online, multiple players can use the same character.
So if you wanted 4 titans to play the game in boring mode, you could.

It should also be noted that your gear isn't indefinite. There is degradation to your primary equipment, namely the amount of swords you have to use, how long they last, and how much pressure you have to air dash around. There are scouts littered across the map that you can stop at for a quick re-supply, but with the right equipment I've found that this rarely is an issue. You also have the ability to trigger a decisive battle which will give you increased attack, and small boost to your gear.

The Scout Mode is more or less the online version of the game. You can continue to play increasingly challenging missions for more supplies and experience as well as a mod where you can scout multiple missions in a row. Whats nice about this is you have the freedom to choose what character of the majority of the cast you'd like to use. So when I played online, it was a lot of Eren's, Mikasa's, and Levi's. I was constantly hunting for materials so I often used Christa, which seemed to annoy most of the groups I played with because she is probably the weakest character in the game.

A weird thing about the online mode of the game is I was under the assumption that the party/room leader was who got to selection missions. I had this one asshole invade one of my games, My room was set that I was clearly focusing on missions at this level of difficulty, and after doing one of them this prick would go into the mission NPC, change my mission to a different mode entirely and then ready immediately, thus locking the mission in place and not allowing it to be changed. It was fucking annoying and I had to kick him because it was my room.

Because you are a chump, Armin. Grow a pair and fight like everyone else is.

I find the soundtrack to this game to be simultaneously great and generic at the same time. This is something the Tales Of series tends to struggle with. They managed to produce this epic sounding score that feels great when you are battling titans or flying around, but if you asked me to hum a few notes of my favorites, I couldn't do it because its all utterly forgettable. I honestly don't know how this is possible but its surprisingly common it feels like.

Graphically I guess you could say its got kind of a washed out cell shading to it? I don't know how to describe it but its something about the grittiness of how the characters are animated makes them contrast sharply to the backdrop and environment around them it works to make the characters pop in their otherwise grimy surroundings.

Using your decisive flare can get you out of pinch or give that last push on a hard titan 

The game honestly could have tooled with the upgrade and progression system somewhat. It feels like hunting for supplies is always a chore and if you are playing online good luck trying to get people to help you do it. You have to clear as many as you can as fast as you can to really get A and S ranks on your missions and most people just dash to the finish and kill the boss. You'll get C's for that. It causes you to miss out on a lot of bonus supplies for equipment that honestly is only marginally better than what you are using. Expect to be checking back a lot.

And one can argue that the game is incredibly repetitive. The real meat and potatoes of the game will be you flying around on the ODG in massive open environments around swarms of titans. The only things that break the pace are the few missions where you actually get to control a titan, but as I've said earlier, doing so takes away from what I feel is the fun part of the game. So yeah, not a whole lot of real variance to the game from the start to the finish. The biggest challenge really is learning its somewhat awkward controls. Even once you beat the story, the online missions are basically variants of story missions with slightly changing difficulty.

Not unless you are playing with friends, Hange.

But you know what? I played this game for HOURS. Went completely through the story mode, hopped online and did a bunch of missions with some random strangers, and I almost never got tired of flying around and hacking away at titans. The increasing difficulty of the missions some how did just enough to really keep me engaged with this game for a lot longer than it should of. Leveled up a bunch of characters and pretty much kept playing it till something new came out.

So I consider this worth the purchase I paid for it. It goes on sale often and will probably be looking a price drop sooner than later, so for what its worth I enjoyed Attack on Titan. While it might not be the most developed and fleshed out game to ever come out, I said at the onset that it had to do two things right and on that front it most certainly succeeds. If you are a fan of the series Attack on Titan will provide you with a fun experience, just don't expect to probably come back to it after you've moved on to something else.

I seriously don't get why the show is deviating from the manga for season 2.
That story is so friggen good.