Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (PS4) - New Setlist, Same Symphony.

One of my initial downfalls of getting suckered into Kickstarters was when Castlevania luminary Koji Igarashi made a particularly bonkers teaser basically calling out Konami for giving up on what brought them to the dance, and just giving up on their most popular video game franchises. After being told "people don't want that kind of game anymore", he took the crowd sourcing platform to prove that wasn't true. 65,000 thousand people and 5.5 million dollars later I think he's successfully made his point.

But then development happened. Almost 5 years of it. The problem is, when you promise the moon and people pay you exorbitant amounts of money for these promises, you are going to be expected to deliver on them. So to say that this new game had a rough development cycle would be a massive understatement, but I'm getting ahead of myself. First? Let's at least see if they delivered on the game portion of it.

BLOODSTAINED: RITUAL OF THE NIGHT(PS4)

Bloodstained begins in 18th century England. The industrial revolution barreling forward and the Alchemy guild is worried about losing their influence of the nation's wealthy patrons. To maintain control, they intend to sacrifice people infused with demon shards to summon demons to the world, basically to scare people into believing in the guild's necessity. From the experiments, two shardbinders were successfully prepared to be sacrificed: Gebel, who barely survived the procedure, and Miriam, who fell into unnatural sleep just before they were to sacrificed. 

Miriam awakens a decade later to learn that Gebel has survived, and has now aligned with the demons. He has apparently summoned demons to the world and has taken refuge in a demonic castle to take vengeance on the guild. As a shardbinder, Miriam has the ability to fight back, and so she travels with some of her remaining guild compatriots to try to stop the demons, help the people, and hopefully save Gebel.

So ok, admittedly that's not a whole a lot of framing, but its enough for what we came here for. We want to wander a big castle, fight monsters, get more abilities, and cover a massive map. So let's get the major comparison out of the way because it is going to come up a lot: is Bloodstained a Castlevania game? Yes, in everything but its title. If anything, you can you see it as the culmination of all of Iga's previous Castlevania experiences and best ideas. It's going to be difficult to discuss everything becuase this game has a LOT of mechanics.

The obvious comparison is going to be Symphony of the Night which will draw the strongest comparison because it is more or les s the quintessential definition of the term "Metroidvania" as a genre because of the franchises departure from level based gameplay. Like SotN, Bloodstained starts us off with a brief tutorial area to teach us the basic controls of the game before letting us loose in an incredibly large and sprawling castle. We are free to explore until we find dead ends until we come across the necessary item or boss that allows to change how we travel or open new paths.

My initial complaint was slow movement speed, but ultimately it was never too much bother.
You do eventually get speed boosting items. 

It's combat system can be broken down to multiple parts spanning from pretty much every Castlevania from 1997 on. Miriam can equip what feels like hundreds of weapons that can drastically change how you approach your fights. Do you want a slow but heavily damaging axe to wail on baddies with singular precision strikes? Or do you want to put on some boots for weaker but quick damaging kicks to deal lots of damage very quickly.  You have a TON of options.

Sub items and abilities make their return from classic Castlevania and Aria of Sorrow soul stealing in the form of shard collecting (hence Miriam being a shardbinder). As you fight through throngs of baddies they will occasionally drop shards which allow Miriam to use in different ways as you have a number of them you can equip at once. For example, one is mapped to a single button to use like an old Castelvania game like a dagger or axe. One is tied to the right shoulder, typically one that has an ongoing effect (such as the dash). You can turn the right analog to aim Miriam's arm, and used the trigger for a targeted shot, and you can also have a passive and familiar equipped as well. By end game, Miriam will be loaded for bear.

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Thanks to the myriad of collectibles and book cases scattered throughout the castle you will find a number of books that give the weapons techniques too. So on top of their normal abilities you have more technical moves you can pull off as well. For example with some weapons you can do your standard "hadouken" quarter circle forward on the controller with an attack, and it will cause you to fire a projectile, or use a jump move, or heavy slash. They change with the weapons so there is a lot of freedom to play around.

From Order of Ecclesia NPC side questing returns. While you explore the castle you will often make trips to back to your home base location to buy new gear, upgrade your shards, fuse new equipment and so on. At your base there are a handful of NPCs there who give minor quests. One old lady wants food, one very angry lady wants you find monsters and KILL THOSE MURDERERS DEAD. You have a farmer who will plant seeds for you, and a woman who wants to bury nickknacks and old equipment.

Dis is Chompy and Snaps. They need to calm down.

Most of these provide varied rewards, and some of them are trickier to complete than you might think. Hunting the monsters is easy enough, but finding the correct drops for you to cook the right food dishes or craft the right gear for you to bury is going to take some patience and elbow grease to do. I am on a New Game+ run decked out with an high luck stat set of gear to try to increase the drop rate and even then it feels like the regularity of what drops is sparse at best. Typically the rewards for doing so outweigh the cost to create the item, but you will probably find yourself hitting a wall on the equipment one. "Oh I need leather shoes, oh I need a beret, oh I need Excalibur." Whoa, whoa, whoa lady. A bit of a jump there.

Bloodstained took a bit of a beating in the early kickstater because of its look. I got hooked by the concept art but when the E3 beta came out for backers, its 3d modeling was rough at best. They since polished it up to a nicer looking cel-shaded style of models, but there were a lot of little mistakes with eyes, eyelashes, mouth animations. They quickly patched some of these design problems out, but for a game that had a 5 year development it sure felt awfully unpolished. Ultimately, the gameplay animation and character design is good looking and satisfying, but I do wonder if 3d render was the way to go.

This mechanic annoyed me, because it only appears like 2 or 3 times in the game.

So you have plenty of time forget it existed before you will need it again.

The game has a pretty exceptional score, although probably pretty similar Castlevania fanfare if I am being completely objective. But it does have some, pretty notable tracks to it that will dig into your ear and set up shop. Some truly great tracks are Exorschism, Voyage of Promise, and Gears of Fortune. I really liked this soundtrack a lot and feel Michiru Yamane did an excellent job.

The voice acting however, I am a bit less charitable to. I wouldn't go out of the way to say that it's bad because the lines are delivered competently enough, but because of how the dialog is written it never feels smooth or natural. From what I understand, the English delivery of the dialog feels flat and uninspired in comparison to the Japanese language. Some of the conversation feels like it excruciatingly repeats things we have already learned. This is really unfortunate because a look at the voice actors in this one? They really assembled a pretty great cast who have done lots of voices from games I loved.

Play on, sister.

As I kind of eluded to, I felt the story was fine. There were some twists in the game that were almost painfully predictable, and there is one really big one that kind of buries the lead to ending sequence of the game, but ultimately I don't feel it really impeded my enjoyment on that front. Most people don't play metroidvania style games because they are super invested in the rich plotline. And if I am being totally honest here, having some what hokey story with some cheese to voice acting really kinda falls in step with what a lot of us loved about Symphony of the Night. Maybe that was the intention? If it was, that's brilliant.

There's also a shit ton of easter eggs in the game and hidden bosses to find. A lot of nods to Iga's previous work. Breakable walls which I know is a big thing for some Castlevania fans. there a bunch of items that change Miriam's appearance, and there is a room where you change her hair and appearance as well, which is was an unnecessary but fun little distraction that I enjoyed.

Sometimes you just need to summon a chair and take a break.

I am not sure how I want to approach my usual "What I didn't like" section of this review, because a number of the problems that I have/had don't necessarily come from the game itself. Some of  these problems stem from being a kickstarter backer of this project. For example, had I not kickstarter backed this game, would I have right to complain about the development time? Nobody likes when a game is delayed, and this one got delayed a lot. But when you back you get this feeling of entitlement I guess. So when you slate it for two years, and it takes you five? You better expect some backlash.

Granted, due to the ridiculous amount of money they got, they made a whole lot of promises. So many that arguably, the game isn't even fucking completed yet. They are going to release all the content over time to the tune of THIRTEEN DLC updates. Holy eff'n hell. Now I don't know shit about shit when it comes to game development, but it sure seems like something is wrong when a game like Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice which graphically is stunning, was able to pump out their in just under 3 years. While this game which would have fit at home on the ps2 took almost 5.

Some abilities are specifically just for movement, or function as keys that have no actual attack potential.

Then you have the colossal fuck ups of 505 Games involvement. First you decide to make the backer exclusive content "premium DLC" which basically means its not flippin' exclusive to backers at all, now is it? Then you don't even get it out a month after the game actually releases (I still don't have my codes for it). But then we have the fucking mindnumbing charging backers 60 dollars for an exclusive physical edition, THEN put the physical edition out in the store for 40. Big ole fuck you, right there.

But that isn't even the worst part, the Best Buy edition of the game comes with an exclusive steelbook variant of the games cover, which looks incredibly nice. But for the 60 dollar backers like me? I got a shitty cardboard slipcase. Many of which got damaged in shipping because they didn't have the courtesy of a padded envelope. But if that wasn't enough of a kick in the dick, they only made 500 extra of the steelbook and had the nerve to charge backers and additional 25 dollars for them. Making it now 85 to get what people at Best buy could get for 40.

Gotta find the weapon that works for you.

Now, they tried to spin it that the backers got access to content that balances things out, and I will admit that I thought the low res 8-bit Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon was excellent. But to say that getting this 10 dollar bonus, a cardboard case, beta access, and cheap DLC somehow balances things out is decidedly wrong, and even with weeks of damage control people are still furious. Rightly so, from where I stand.

And like I said above, for a game that had some a long development time, the lack of polish on this one is almost insulting. I couldn't believe how many graphical glitches I came across in my initial play though of the game. Thankfully they got on top of those quickly. But the game was full of technically glitches as well. These kind of bugs will be worked out, I know. But when the game breaks it really can go out of the way to mar my opinion of a game. If you look at my reviews for Death's Gambit and the Secret of Mana remake, game crashing is becoming a cardinal sin for me.

Some techs are easier to pull off than others, and depending on level and gear it can make or break a fight for you.

While I just said two paragraphs ago that I really liked Curse of the Moon its almost to Ritual of the Night's detriment. If there is any one gameplay thing that I could complain about its these two things: The difficulty curve and the boss fights. First off, After a pretty stable start it throws you up against a wall with a fight against another character. But if you get past it, its basically a gentle downhill slope to the final areas before the difficulty starts to ramp back up again. I did not find this to be a very challenging game after that fight and honestly that can be a problem of metroidvania's as a whole. Seriously, between Bunnymorphosis and the Portrait Shield shards? Anything that didn't cause curse was fucking laughable.

But with the boss fights specifically? There didn't feel like there was any real variance to how I needed to take care of them. Curse of the Moon's level based system made it a battle of attrition to reach the boss, and then needed to learn the enemy attack patterns and tricks to take them down quickly and safely. Ritual of the Night I basically could save before a boss, wait for them to make an attack and then unload with a fast attacking weapon until they dropped. I dealt with almost every boss this way. It just fed into the lack of challenge and feels like a disappointing step back.

This is one of the last hidden bosses you find. You might find his attack patterns strikingly..... Familiar...

On top of that, since I played Curse of the Moon first, at some point I started realize that I was going to be fighting all the same bosses from that game as well. There were no new ones, no extra ones. Some of them even used the same attacks. This actually diminished some of the surprise I had going into some of the fights because I already knew what to expect. If anything, I've already fought more challenging versions of it.

Let me just spoil something for everyone right now: There will be a part of the game where you need to swim. You need a shard from a specific enemy to do it. In the opening part of this game you fight these human teeth tentacle things. Once you open up an area with an underground lake, there is one more of those things in a different color palette in one specific area. You need the shard THAT ONE drops to get the water jet that lets you go under water. There, I just saved you like 4 hours of pointless wandering for an item that doesn't exist.

Literally almost everyone I know got stuck here. Finding that one specific enemy that gives water jet is key to progress.

I'm sure I can keep ranting on this one, but honestly that feels like I'm arguing two different things. So the ultimate question is, was Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night good? Honestly it feels like that's 100% dependent on if you were a backer or not. If like me, you backed the game, you probably feel short changed by a number of things, perhaps let down by what you didn't get, or what you don't have yet. I know some of the lack of polish bothered me.

But if you were to just judge the game by its own merits as if you just bought it digitally, leaving all the kickstarter stuff out of the equation? I would say that Bloodstained is an incredibly rock solid experience. For fans of Symphony of the Night it's going to feel like slipping into a comfortable pair of shoes. Every complaint I possibly had is basically diminished by the fact that I picked the game up and basically didn't stop until I finished it. I think I wrangled up like 20 something hours inside of 2 or 3 sittings. And, because of the way the DLC is scaled, that means like Shantae and Shovel Knight I am going to keep coming back to it to play the new content. That's good for replayability.

So to the everyman? I would Bloodstained is a good game, if not great. If you are looking for something to scratch that Castlevania itch, Iga is going to satisfy that it in all the right ways with this one, and for only 40 bucks that is incredibly reasonable for a game with this much playability. For the backers? Maybe they will come up with some extra bonus concessions for those who felt short changed. But ultimately? I am just happy that the game finally came out and it ended up being pretty good. Solid recommendation for this one.

"Arise myself and my shadow!"

Is forever burned into my brain.

Death's Gambit (PS4): Facing Death

My friends. I have a confession to make to all of you: I am a fan of Dark Souls. I know, I know. I'll give you a minute to recover from this staggering bit of realization, but it's actually true. Before even! When From Software put out Demon's Souls they essentially created a game genre that was eventually perfected with their magnum opus: Dark Souls. Since then many companies made their own iterations to try to capture some of the magic. Some are bad, some are ok, some are compared even when they shouldn't be (look'n at you, Nioh). 

But it's the ones that try to take that gameplay style and mechanics system and blend it into their own creations that grab my attention. And when this one came out this past summer, there were certainly more than a few reviews of this one that I started to take notice. Made by White Rabbit studios and published by Adult Swim Games, I felt this would be a good investment for my recent PlayStation store gift card and sat down with....

DEATH'S GAMBIT:(PS4)

In Death's Gambit you play Soren, a knight in service to the nation of Vados. When Soren was born his father was drafted to a war known the "Great Expedition" per the fiefdom of their home. His father never returned, so Soren grew up under his mother, Evelyn, who tried to instill to him to live a life that is one worth remembering. As the campaign continued onward, eventually Soren's mother was also drafted and did not return.

To follow in his mother's footsteps, Soren also became a knight to join the Great Expedition as well and led a company into battle. The game begins shortly after this, where a Vil'dradur (A Dragon/Lizardesq race of people) warrior called Vrael is seen dragging Soren's body to a burning pile of Soren's company. Nobody else survived. Taking a jaded pity on Soren, he tells him to return to Vados. The battle was lost and there is nothing left for him here.

But just as he goes to leave the battlefield, Soren is confronted by Death himself. Death has granted Soren immortality, but only if he accepts a contract into Death's service, asking for a single favor. With nowhere to return to and without any cause other than to try to find his mother, Soren accepts the contract and continues forward.

As I eluded to in the introduction paragraph, Death's Gambit is a 2D metroidvania style Souls clone similar to the vein of my previously reviewed Salt and Sanctuary. Many of the mechanics that you would recognize from these games are going to be in play here as well as a number of unique mechanics as well.

While using the Souls comparison for the game mechanics, I would say its actual play style feels closer to Castlevania. It has a pretty arcade speed to it as the character moves reasonably fast and the jump is quick, although a little loose. It uses the face button scheme instead of the more traditional souls trigger system, which makes more sense given the 2D plane that you play the game on.

Combat is generally what you would expect. You are able to equip two different weapons (usually a melee and ranged) that will deplete your stamina as you fight, forcing you to back up and replenish before you can resume. You have a dodge roll move that like its Soulsian heritage also depletes stamina but gives you invincibility frames for a significant portion of the roll. This is a essentially the core, and about where the comparisons to Dark Souls ends.

You also have a "Soul Energy" gauge and this is bit of a clever mechanic because when designing your character, your character class actually directs how you actually fill this gauge. For example, I use a rogue in this game, and they fill the soul energy by attacking relentlessly and with aggression. But if you were to say play as the defensive minded sentinel, this gauge increases by defending or parrying attacks.

This gauge is how you perform up to 3 different special attacks, in lieu of a magic system. On top of having to fight to build energy for these attacks, your soul energy also degrades over time so you may not always have an attack ready to go at the start of a fight. These abilities also have cool downs that naturally force you wait between uses. In conjunction between the stamina, energy, and cool down it produces this interesting balance that both rewards aggression and pace, while preventing spamming abilities and forcing awareness of your limits and defense.

A good deal of the of the equipment that you use of the game pretty boldfacedly tells you that many of the weapons are stat specific, so right at the onset when you build your initial character you will have general idea of where you want allocate your built stats.

This too, follows the standard RPG/Souls stat system. I'd probably akin it more to Bloodborne as it's relatively simplified to Vitality, Strength, Endurance, Finesse, Intelligence, and Haste. You could balance your build if you like, but more than likely you will find yourself splitting between your main attack attribute and more life and endurance.

Much like its inspiration, your starting character is just a jump off point for you to customize.

Also, much like its inspiration, it bills itself as an open world game for you to freely explore and tackle in any order. It starts off on a somewhat linear starting point and once you reach the main sanctuary (eg: firelink shrine) you are then free to branch out in multiple directions and see what path works for you.

The experience system, however, has a few subtle differences that I really liked. As you know with most of the games aping this system as you gain experience, souls, blood echos, diamyo, etc you then use that level your character, purchase items, learn new abilities, and upgrade your equipment, when you collect it and you die, you drop it and have to go back for it. If you die again, it's lost. Right?

That is not Death's Gambit does things. It's equally more forgiving and punishing. Because now when you die, you don't actually lose your experience. So you will never find yourself caught under-leveled and panicking to find the next death statue you spend those points. Instead, you drop your phoenix feathers. These are your primary rechargeable healing item and they are in a limited supply. Say you have 5 feathers and you die in the boss encounter, you then warp back to your last save and have to go back with 4 feathers. If you die again before getting back to the boss, you drop another. Now you have 2 less and still need to get back to where you dropped them. It's a unique punishment to carelessness.

These feathers also have a interesting strength buffing mechanic. When at checkpoints you can choose to limit your supply of them for 10% damage increase. I think the max number of feathers you find is 10, so when I play in NG+ modes I find myself allocating 6 of them to give me 60% attack boost to really layer the damage on enemies and bosses. If 4 feathers isn't enough for me to fight then I am playing much to carelessly. These feathers are not lost for good because you are able to spend experience to reclaim them (including ones yo, but it does cost more to do every level higher you get.

I will say boss fights have an interesting reward mechanic that will keep you engaged. If you happen to lose in a boss fight, it takes you to a screen where it shows you the boss and their life bar. That life bar will deplete to the amount of damage you did. As it decreases it awards you the experience you would have earned by taking out that much health. When you try again, you won't be awarded more experience unless you do better than when you last attempted the fight. This provides a nice little psychological push to make you give the boss another try.

This game as an incredibly chill, piano based symphonic soundtrack to it. It never really dips itself out of the classic territories, and makes for very good ambiance music. I wouldn't really consider the soundtrack to be iconic in any capacity, but it does have a very somber opening theme that I enjoy, and all of the music seems fitting for the scenes. A lot of Souls comparisons could be drawn here as well.

But the best aspect of the sound design is how competently voice acted this game was.  Matt Mercer plays Death and he has pretty much become a staple in the video game voice acting world so naturally he just nailed his part. But a lot of the voice actors according to the IMDB pulled multiple roles, basically reducing all the roles of the game to about 10 or so voice actors. It was very impressively done, I didn't find any of the lines to be particularly cheesy and hokey. Once I actually started to progress in the game, the voice did a lot to help me get lost in the story.

Although I do have to knock that, for some reason, Soren is a silent protagonist despite having lines of dialogue that don't change from play through to play through. What is the purpose of this? I complained about it in Tales of Xillia 2 and it makes just about as much sense here. You gave him lines of dialogue, you armed your game with very established and competent voice actors, many of them already doing multiple roles. You couldn't have one of them read Soren's lines? Fuck, have Matt Mercer just use his Troy Baker voice to continue further to confuse me, and that would have worked just as well. I do not understand this decision.

Graphically, it's another game that draws inspiration from graphics of old so it's another one that resorts to pixel animation as opposed to rendering. That being said the games monster design is fairly well detailed with lots of different frames of animation. Some of them fair better than others, I will admit. There is one particular boss fight, The Tundra Lord Kaern, that has a failing attack that looks like it could have used a few more animation frames to look a bit more fluid.

That actually kinda leads to one of my biggest issues in the game. Salt and Sanctuary managed to completely nail the timing that made their game feel like a 2d souls game would feel. Its timing, fluidity, weight of actions all felt... right. Death's Gambit gives me kind of a loose, arcadey feel to it. Specifically when it comes to jumping. The jump is very fast and immediately halts the moment when you let up off the button, which makes the jump feel very bouncy and forced me to pay more attention to my jumps because now the timing is significantly more important.

Combat as a whole took some getting use to because depending on the weapon you chose it affects how you move in the battle when you swing. I first started the game as a Scythe user and I couldn't get the knack of it because the animations would move me so much farther forward than I was expecting to go and multiple times I'd helplessly fall into traps or miss my target because I was moving too much in combat. I eventually restarted and switched to daggers.

But even then, I found some of these controls to be somewhat unnatural. Perhaps that is not the correct word but some of these actions do not roll fluidly for me. For example, you have a kick move that you are supposed to use on enemies who are in a guard position, to do this you need to hold the button that draws up your shield, then hit a shoulder button that allows you to throw the kick. I never, ever get this right on the first time. I typically will take a hit or two trying to do this, and if I have more than one enemy after chances are I am going to take way more damage than I want to.

This game also has an incredibly frustrating barrier to entry. From a relatively stable easing into the game, one of the first bosses you come across is the Bulwark. Now, I've heard this guy can be beaten at level 20 (and there is already a level 1 speed run) but mother fucker this guy put a massive roadblock up in my game. Tack this on a period of still figuring out the controls and it's going to lead to a significant number of deaths in a row.  I'll be honest I was getting ready to put it down after a while

They say that the game is non-linear, but it really feels like it's not. There is a pattern I've found where the curve is definitely more forgiving and that you really should do because it unlocks all the necessary NPCs required to learn the skills in the game. I usually end up dealing with the Bulwark next to last. By finding this path it ended up giving a more fair leveling path and now I have pretty much have it down to memory.

The amount of equipment is tragically minimal. Most of the gear in the game only has one or two variants, and some weapons like the daggers there is no 2nd version at all. So you don't really need to worry about leveling up the wrong equipment because honestly there isn't much to level, just wear what matches your leveled stats. So it doesn't leave very much in the way of customization and that is pretty disappointing. This is also hampered in addition to the game's skill tree because there is no option to respec (even in new game plus), so it's entirely possible that you can miss big sections or treasures because you didn't commit to a specific skillset that allowed you to get there.

I was sort of prepared to go after the game for its story because it felt like your standard fantasy speechifying where they sling a bunch of names and fantasy terms together, and it felt like I wasn't retaining much of it because it doesn't sound like it means anything. But there was one area of the game that took a very strange tonal shift that caught me completely off guard, and by that point I was starting to find my groove in the game that was progressing a bit more smoothly. There is a lot of lore in this game, but again, like Dark Souls you have to go out and find it.

And this game feels like it is hiding a lot of secrets that I haven't unearthed. It has to be, there are too many mechanics that haven't been explained that have to mean something: You can cancel your contract with death, so when you die it deletes you game. You have to make story decisions on some characters at one point. NPCs can be killed (or murdered by other NPCs) and you can stop that, There is a NG+ option where you can raise the level from 1-10. There is an unexplained "fear" mechanic that has to do something.  So I hesitate to rip this story apart because they did actually put in a pretty significant amount of voiced over lore. There has to be more to this than what I am seeing.

Not every boss is beaten by fighting. Sometimes the goal is just to survive.

But worst of all, most unforgivably of all is this game crashes. Constantly. This game crashes with out any rhyme or reason to it. This game crashes when transitioning from one map to another, this game crashes when there are too many enemy projectiles on the screen, this game crashes when I am jumping to much and the animation doesn't catch up fast enough, this game crashes in the middle of dramatic boss fights in prompt of nothing that I can immediately see, this game FUCKING CRASHES WHEN YOU ARE SAVING YOUR GAME CAUSING ME TO LOSE ALL MY FUCKING PROGRESS WITH A CORRUPT SAVE.

This game has been patched more than once already, so the amount of crashes I have had with Death's Gambit is fucking unbelievable and ridiculous. No game close to release, and especially months after release should be crashing as much as this game has. So either the patches you are putting in is not fixing the problems, or you haven't even bothered to address them yet. Either way, it is a completely massive fucking black eye on this game because now I can't enjoy it to its fullest because I am constantly in fear of having this game just randomly close on me for no reason, and possibly lose all my work.

Look. The bottom line here is that I like Death's Gambit. It takes some pretty established mechanics and does a good job of implementing it and tweaking it for their own system. The sprite work is well done and the sound design is pleasing. It has fun boss fights when I get the controls down, and I'm working through a third play through of the game as I write this.

But son of a bitch it doesn't feel like it's ready yet. There is just no excuse of a multi-platform game to have this many problems months after its release. I hate day one patches but I would take 30 of them if it got this game to run properly. So I am torn how I want to deliver this. I want to give Death's Gambit a recommendation because ultimately I got a great deal of play out of it once the game started to click for me. But frankly, it might be worth waiting a few more months so they can hopefully address some of this shit.

If you lost your progress because you left Death's contract, that's on you. If you lost your progress because Death's Gambit crashed on you, that's on the devs. Purchase at own risk.

I'm going to be pissed if I finish NG+10

and there is no secret ending. 

Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight (Steam): A quiet, hidden forest treasure

Oh the steam summer sale. That magical time of the year where you spend money you probably shouldn't on games that you will never get around to playing. I've done it, you've done it. 90% of the time when I buy one game I was really looking forward to and about 10 that I never even touch. But every so often I stumble across one that seemed like it could be interesting if given the shot.

I've never heard of this series, but this is the 4th in the franchise. It also happens to be a prequel so despite it being the newest I get to start its story from the beginning. Would this be just another title that was purchased and then immediately forgotten to the pile of shame? Or would I stumble upon a gem to be treasured and valued? Let's find out.

MOMODORA: REVERIE UNDER THE MOONLIGHT: (Steam)

The tale of Momodora starts 400 years before the events of the first game, where a young priestess named Kaho travels to the eastern kingdom of Karst to investigate a spreading curse that is threatening her lands and village. Upon reaching the outskirts of Karst city she is confronted by a Knightess called Cath.

Cath informs Kaho that the source of the curse is coming from the Queen of Karst, but she has locked herself away in the castle. Cath advises Kaho to leave while she handles it, but the curse affects Kaho as well. They can't enter without finding crest pieces necessary to enter the castle so armed with only a bow and a maple leaf (the signature weapon of these priestesses), Kaho explores to find the crests to confront the queen and curse.

Uh, Nice to meet you too, Cath.

Wow. Very few games have such a cut and dry story these days. I actually had to fluff some of it up to get two paragraphs of description. Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight is a classic styled 2d Castlevania style game the borrows some mechanics from the Dark Souls franchise, done in the retro style pixel graphics that oh so often make me weak in the knees from the onset. 

Let's start with that, actually. From what I have seen in previous games, Momodora titles were typically done with small sprites that allowed for minimal animation detail (think Super Meat Boy). This iteration however the sprites are significantly larger, which allows them to have much more significant detail in their sprite animation. It clearly shows because all of the action animations have been beautifully detailed with multiple frames and poses to give it a very natural and fluid feel.

The dodge roll looks natural, the attack swings have a sense of weight that give a very realistic timing that just feels right. Characters and bosses have lots of signature motions to telegraph attacks which is incredibly crucial for this style of combat engine, and they appear to do a lot with a very minimal color pallet. Monsters and characters are all very differently and interestingly designed.

Bells function as checkpoints. Like Dark Souls bonfires they restore health,
refresh your items, and give you a checkpoint in the case of death.

Environments look like they belong right at home on the NES or SNES consoles, and while there is only so much detail you can give to castle corridors and caves, the environments make great use of parallax hiding details of the background environment in layers, making cityscape and forests look so much more impressive because it allows them add subtle details that fade with each layer of distance. I'm a huge fan of pixel art and good sprite work so this kinda stuff really appeals to me.

The map is long and sprawling much like you would expect of a Metroidvania game with locked doors, paths that require specific abilities to get through, and looping paths to provide short cuts back to other areas of the game. The game is not massive in its size but it is modestly sizable so it's certainly not a game you are going to blow through in one or two hours. I would say there are about 8 or 9 different areas that you'll need 4 keys to fully unlock.

Combat at its core uses very simple mechanics. I hate to constantly use the credit of Dark Souls because it's not the first to use the invincibility frames but much of Salt and Sanctuary's 2d styled combat rings familiar here. Kaho's running speed if I am being generous is moderately paced, so you will probably be using the dodge role to pick up the pace. When fighting you will spend the majority of your time with simple button mashing combos to swing your leaf, and then using your dodge roll to roll through or away from enemy attacks. If the situation demands you are also able to rapid fire your bow for weaker but safer ranged attacks.

Battle is augmented by the items that you can collect that give you various stat boosts and abilities. Some of them provide immediate effects like attack buffs, but a large majority of them have passive abilities such as lifesteal, status aliment resistances, magnetism for items and so on. You can only equip two and their affects could be for battle or for exploration and they can be restored at checkpoints which is nice. But, you will only get so many uses between them so you need to choose wisely based on your play style as well as alternate based on need.

The music of this game is generally chill, and kinda dark. The opening theme when starting in the forest opens with a very slow paced and somber tune. After that when going from castle outskirts, to cathedral, to caves and so forth the music sticks to more of an ambient droning rather than actual music, but when it does it tends to stick to pretty melancholy melodies.

Even the music when fighting a boss monster tends to stick to a relatively deep noted loop or an uptempo melody. I like the music in this game but I wouldn't say that it's catchy in any capacity. It's perfectly acceptable for the tension level of these moments, but I wouldn't say that the music is the strength of this game. It's totally serviceable but nothing to write home about.

Even when monsters are not violent, they are not friendly.

It isn't a very long game, either. Depending on your level of determination and frustration to boss fights, the entire game can be ripped through with bad and good endings inside of a couple of sittings. I think I managed to play through its entirety in a few days. Maybe spanning that 7-12 hour range. There is a new game plus where you can start with the equipment you collected, but it doesn't really change the game much.

There are also a number of difficulty settings, but I feel that normal really does provide the best experience. It provides just enough challenge that the game is not a pushover and will punish you for making stupid mistake or rushing too carelessly, but fair that you can learn patterns and make easy work of bosses so long as you pay attention and learn. I tried to start streaming this game on Hard and even knowing where things were or what patterns enemies had it was still punishing me to the point where I was struggling to make it to the first boss with increased enemies and reduced health.

And this is a minor nitpick at best, but I found the jump to be needlessly frustrating. Kaho has a relatively low jump height, but she does have a double jump. I supposed that would sort of lend to realism if it was reduced to a single jump, but with a double jump it feels like it should be much higher than it is. I don't know. I don't think it really affected battles as much as I felt they did. Again, minor nitpick.

I suppose my biggest complaint about Momodora is that its weakest aspect is probably its story. You are given a minor back story, and primary goal, but the game doesn't really seem to evolve past that point. Cath is the only major NPC that gives some meaty exposition and she doesn't feel like she in the game enough to really flesh out the story.

There are a couple of NPCs that you can speak to, but at best they give some minor explanation about an upcoming boss. After beating the game both bad and good endings, I didn't feel like I had much in the the way of resolution, and didn't have that strong connection to the universe it presented me with because it felt like it never really explored it, which is a real shame. Perhaps I will get more if I play the other titles, but for my first entry to the series I was left wanting more.

But despite those flaws I ended up greatly enjoying Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight and am very glad that I took a chance on it. That's really the one thing I can put trust into with steam reviews. If they say it's getting overwhelmingly positive reviews, I can generally trust that. This game feels like it would be right at home on the NES, but will polished modern controls. You can find it on Steam, PS4, and Xbox One for as low as 10 bucks, and it also goes on sale so I would say check it out. Good games like this deserve to be played.

Oh yeah, and you can turn into a cat.

Salt and Sanctuary (PS4): Soulselvania

A friend had suggested this title to me somewhat of a ways back and I gave it a causal nod, a quick viewing of the video and then pretty much forgot about it. It was pitched me as a game that I should give a try if "I liked games like Dark Souls". Somewhat recently it came across my mind as I had just used my speedway points for a free PSN card and had 20 clams to burn. Looking to mix up the pallet of the stuff I had been playing recently, I decided to take up my friends suggestion.

SALT AND SANCTUARY:(PS4)

Much like its souls-ian predecessor, the story for Salt and Sanctuary is pretty scant, but if you follow along with what you learn from NPCs, you can piece it together. You are one of the worlds many Saltborne (oh yeah, this is unabashed parody). You are stowing away on a ship that is carrying your nation's princess, in transit for a wedding of political alliance. But during the course of the travel, you ship is ransacked by marauders. One of the dying crew pleads for you to find and save the princess.

As you battle through the ship and approach the main deck, you as set upon by mammoth beast called the Unspeakable Deep. It promptly smashes you into paste. The ship is destroyed, but you find yourself washed ashore of a beach. Collecting your resolve you decide to search out the princess, still. Upon meeting a old man on the beach and telling him of your creed, your adventure can then begin.

Good fuckin' luck.

So as my cheekily written title leads in, this game borrows incredibly heavy from the mechanics that made From Software's Souls series so popular. Right down to the menu, sound effects, and fonts used. it functions with a similar combat system, stat structure, equipment system, and inventory mechanics. Even saying it borrows heavily is being pretty generous.

But the biggest shakeup and what sets it apart from Souls similar games like Nioh, Lords of the Fallen, and so on is that this is all done in a hand drawn 2d style of gameplay. So some things change, primarily in the combat of the game. In Dark Souls you could lift your shield and circle while you wait for an opening, using your roll to protect you from swings. In S&S however there is no circling, and you have to bring your shield up to defend, parry, or dodge roll through the attack.

Ska Studios took great care to make the combat feel weighted and intentional.
Weapons and their use all affect how you approach every fight.

However, because of the new layout of the game there are new strategies that present itself. This game is only working on a 4 point axis so now you have ledges and stairs above and below you. So now you have a jump mechanic that comes into play and you can use the stage around you to evade or retreat if necessary.  The people at Ska Studios (bleh on the name) did a very good job of find a way to work all these mechanics into a 2d plane and have them work well.

It also has a familiar feeling to another 2d series of games, now that I think about it. The map is a giant expanse that has locked pathways and shortcuts that manage to loop you back around to checkpoints and previous areas. There are ladders to climb and knock down, leaps of faith to take, you will learn new abilities as you play along the game that open up new areas for you to explore, so its not a linear game. It's kinda like if Metroid and Castlevania had some kinda gamebaby. They really should have word for that.

Unfortunately, this means it also contains one of the most annoying combat features that you get in Castlevania games and that is the knock back. I can't think of how many times I would be fighting some baddie in this game and get hit with an errant shot that would almost always send me off a ledge plummeting down to my death. It almost happened like clockwork. 

Dying too borrows from the Souls convention. Where if you die, you lose all the salt you were carrying, which in this game functions as your XP to level up your character or improve you weapons. When you die, the monster that defeated you will hold it with some smoky mist around them and you have to kill them to get it back. If you die from falling from a ledge without having been hit by an enemy, instead a monster bat will spawn and attack you. Thankfully it is usually very easy to defeat and easy to gain your salt back. Even dying to a boss is somewhat forgiving since you don't actually need to beat them to get it back, just knock down about a 5th of their bar to at least save it for this attempt.

But S&S curiously also has gold that can be spent at shops as well. You can use this to get basic equipment, most of which you will find as you play along the game anyways. But you can us it to get small bags of salt for a little more leveling, or for some of the base level upgrade materials. Every time you die you will lose a portion of this, but I can't think of a single instance where not having gold inconvenienced me in some way. Don't really see why its in here.

You make offerings to add shops and functions, but when you pick they are locked in.

The art direction of the game you could argue is somewhat cartoony I guess? The character creator is somewhat goofy looking and you really don't have a whole lot of freedom other than hairstyle, color, and if you wear lipstick or not (boy or girl). But this is Ska Studios, and the art design is very reminiscent of one of their previously releases Charlie Murder. Stiff and a little janky.  Where the art direction really shines is in its monster design. The washed out color pallet and the stiff, almost old flash-esq animation really lends itself to the game's monster design.

An example where I feel it really shines is one of the earliest bosses in the game, the Queen of Smiles. Basically she is kinda of skeleton queen who can summon swords to throw at you, She's basically got a skull for a head without a bottom jaw, and it appears to be weeping blood. The way the characters are designed it just looks fucking awesome and with the kinda tense operatic boss theme that plays when you fight her, it just frames together a scene for a great moment. The stiff animations make it feel lifeless and creepy, and just lends to her overall design. Many of the bosses and monsters have this effect, and it's great.

I'm not ashamed to admit this fight took me more tries to beat than it probably should have.

One way how this game differs is in relation to cooperative play. Surprisingly, there is very little online play to speak of. You can sometimes find tombs where characters died in a section, break them to see a few after images to see how it happened, you will sometimes see a another playing in your shrines, but that's really about it. You can play this game two player though. Basically as you set up shrines around the world and you can place offerings to basically inhabit your shrines with villagers who provide various services to the player.

For co-op play, you need a sellsword. By talking to them you can summon an additional player for couch co-op. The catch is they have to be on a different account so they can't just use any other characters you have previously made. So if your co-op friend doesn't have the game, you can work around this by making a generic User1 account (on ps4) and make a character that way.

Other than that there doesn't seem to be much else in the way of online. You can't invade other players or be invaded, you don't see after images of players progressing around the same areas you are. You can't drop a sign to be summoned to help someone in an area just before a boss. So one hand I can't actively sunbro in front of a boss and farm salt, but on the other I don't have to worry about trekking for an hour into unfamiliar territory and have to worry about some jackass spawning into my game and ruining my progress, (there is plenty of other shit to do that).

The aforementioned boss fight theme is pretty great, but I find the soundtrack of the game to be rather lacking. Maybe not lacking but unimpressive. I've said the same thing about the Souls games sometimes, or the Tales series. The music or lack there of works for the game, but its not memorable. In many instances you won't even have music, just a couple of notable tracks here and there to punctuate things, such as boss fights or your home base.

S&S features a creed system that operates loosely like the covens of the Souls games, but without the persistent online mechanic, I found very little reason for it. You can't unlock certain items to buy without changing your creed, which causes you to be an apostate. You can change a shrine to your shrine which gives you sin, and doing either of these things will make people hostile to you, but if I am being honest I didn't find very much reason to do it.

Story and questlines are scarce in this game and much like the series it apes, much of it can be found by talking to the NPCs you come across on your adventure and it fleshes the tale out a bit more if you do. There doesn't appear to be a lot of them though. And spoiler alert, the original reason for starting the adventure never really seems to be addressed by the end of the game. I might have missed it, but I honestly don't think that I did.

One complaint with the game is probably to some also one of the game's biggest assets: This game is fucking punishing. I've struggled with difficult games before, Even when I think I'm hot shit at Dark Souls when a sequel comes out I always have that moment of "Fuck this, this game is impossible." Whelp, Salt & Sanctuary that is prevalent as well. This game is going to chew you up and spit you out, and it will do so often. It is particularly rough in the early going when you are still figuring out all the mechanics and the the bosses will usually wreck you before you even get a chance to observe their patterns. This game is an exercise in stubbornness.

Some fights will greatly test your patience.

The difficulty curve was all over the place too. Once I finally got a decent build in place, I would mow through some enemies only to get fucked by one that was way more difficult than everything around it. Some bosses I would approach and bring down on my first attempt, others would just rip me a new one for 50 attempts. It never felt like a gradual build up.

Probably the thing I didn't like the most was the somewhat confusing skill tree system it uses. If you've ever played Path of Exile and looked at their skill tree you would have a good idea of what I'm talking about. This is a game where you kinda want to have an idea of what kind of character you are trying to go for at the onset, and you will want to work your way from there. You earn gems to move a node with each level, and some require multiples to do so. There is also a system of grey gems which let you remove a node and replace it.

The skill tree can be daunting. I just looked what what weapon I wanted to focus
and then followed the line that took me to the highest level of that weapon.

But what it doesn't explain, for example, is when you unlock the skill nodes for say Greatweapon 5 you don't need to have levels in great weapons 1-4 anymore. With enough gray gems I could reset a significant number of skill points, but I never thought to do it because it and respec as I needed. They still provide a stat boost, but really they are meant to fix a fudge up or if you went down a path you didn't want to for the end game of your character.

You can perhaps consider Salt & Sanctuary to be a Souls or Castlevania clone, but I really see it as a love letter to a pair of games that basically invented a pair of genres. The game will drive you to a fury, and make you want to spike your controllers, but it also provides that same level of satisfaction once you actually muscle your way through it. By the time I ended up getting all the way through it I seem to have burned a good 40 hours or more.

For a game that was like only like 18 bucks, I have to say that counts as a pretty worthwhile purchase.

Fuck the stupid Witch of the Swamp.
That fight was impossible.

Mercenary Kings: Kickstarting about 5 games into one package.

Around Xmas time I would occasionally pop onto places like amazon or whatnot and look at the crazy flash deals since most people don't get me games or such. I was looking at the massively discounted price for PlayStation Plus subscriptions, and on a whim got a few years of it, keeping me up to date for the next few years. What I have come to learn having never had this service until recently, is that the free games you get you keep as long as you keep the subscription.

This has been exceptionally handy with purchasing a PS4, because each month they keep releasing more and more quirky indie titles and in the dead zone early stages of a starting console, the new system needs games. This has actually provided me a pretty good number of different games to try which I have yet to review, but I have to take time to talk about this one because it stands tall over the rest of them so far.

MERCENARY KINGS

Mercenary Kings comes to us from the minds over at Tribute games, who brought previous indie success Wizorb and reunited the team behind Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game. Which means we are being treated to a wonderfully rendered 2D side-scrolling shooter in gloriously retro 16 bit pixel graphics.

The storyline for Mercenary Kings is a little lacking. The Mercenary Kings are an elite group of five military mercenaries who have been called in because Mandragora island, where the top secret Mandrake formula is being engineered, has been taken over by rival military organization CLAW and their leader Baron. A fruitless effort because CLAW has already made use of the Mandrake Formula, the battle is completely one sided and the Kings are cut down effortlessly.

But while the project's chief engineer has been captured, the other half of the project in Professor Bluebell managed to escape and meet up with the Kings with the secret of the mysterious mandrake formula. The bodies of King and Empress were recovered and through medical procedures, they were saved and given enhanced physical abilities to give them a shot at a little payback against the claw, and hopefully stop their aspirations of world domination using the mandrake formula.

So uh, how elite is this group if they could only afford one bed for recovery?

So this is probably an incredibly general gloss over of the story, and I'm not even sure all of that is right. I'll say right off that a significant portion of the story is pretty forgettable and ultimately not all that important. As you complete cutscenes there are usually little Metal Gear style vignettes between the characters to pad out the storyline and build the characters a little. But to be totally honest a lot of it is pretty bland and if you are like me will probably skip a good portion of it to get back to the action.

Speaking of, why don't we get right down to it shall we? The game starts off with a little bit of story and a small tutorial to acclimate you to the controls and let you hunt a few animals and find some chests. Once you complete this first mini stage you are treated to your base camp which is where you will meet all the various NPCs. Here is where you can jump into a private or public online game, check out the compiled bestiary, hang out in your characters tent (pointless), customize your characters color, buy supplies for the mission, or select and start your missions. There are more features you unlock as you rescue more of the team as you play through.

I feel a "Snake?... Snake?!.. SNNNNAAAAKE!" opportunity was missed here.

There are two very important people at base camp: one of them you start with, Prof. Bluebell, and from her you can purchase new mods for your character such as increased speed, more power, better healing, and so forth, but be weary what you take because they affect your weight, you do need to find the necessary materials in the stages to build these modifications. The other is one of the first people that you rescue, your gunsmith, and she is who you can purchase better equipment for your guns from, and thus she becomes the most important NPC in the base.

I don't play a lot of Borderlands but I am told that the mind bending weapon customization draws a strong comparison to that. When you talk to the gunsmith, you are given a list of parts of a gun you are purchase over several different types, each with stats to customize them in different fashions and producing different effects. I tend to use a sub machine Gun receiver for a high rate of fire and a light weight barrel and magazine so I an cruise at high speed while getting a decent number of shots before reloading. Not the highest powered weapon though.

The mods get more ridiculous as you go along... The Flusher... lol. 

You start off with a basic pistol, but you have options of handguns, magnums, assault rifles, sub machine guns, machine guns, shotguns, and sniper rifle parts spanning over receivers, barrels, magazines, stocks, sights and what ammo type you would like to use with them (which is the aspect that will have compatibility issues.) In order to purchase new parts you need to find the right materials in the levels, as well as saved up enough money to purchase the modifications, same as from the professor. So expect to chat these ladies often.

So once you have selected a mission to do, you are dropped off in the stage. The missions you have to do vary depending on what you selected. Sometimes its something simple like get from point A to point B. Sometimes you have to kill X amount of enemy, sometimes it wants you to gather X amount of a specific material, or sometimes you have to rescue hostages. Usually you will be doing them same map per rank of levels, but the changing objectives will occasionally switch between them or drop you off in different places.

This is obviously where the game shines. It its relatively simplistic in design and very familiar. Looking at the graphics alone, it looks likes the Scott Pilgrim vs The World game decided to cosplay as Metal Slug characters. Everything is detailed in very well animated 16 bit sprites that are brightly colored and given several frames of animation.

Apparently, I'm the only one with any love for the ladies. 

Its play style also rings of Metal Slug and classic Contra as you fly through the map blasting away baddies as they appear on the screen. But the levels aren't always linear and become even less so when you start to advance. In this regard I feel that the game rings familiar to something of the original Metroid or Castlvania or even Mega Man depending on what the layout of the level is. A great way to get acclimated to the stages are to start off with a gathering mission. This will allot you 30 minutes on the time to explore the map and collect whatever various gubbins you are set to find.

What makes this plan effective is you get a better idea of the layout of the maps, and the enemies tend appear in the same areas, and unless its a mission to clear them out they will respawn nearly indefinitely in these places.  So after doing missions like collecting you'll have a better familiarity for which paths are the easiest to take and where what enemies might show up. You keep the rewards you find as you play along, and get rewards at the end of the mission, but you get bonuses if you can complete these within a certain time frame. The first mission for example I couldn't do without equipping a pair of sprint mods and skipping most enemies.

Thanks to the PS4 removal of HDCP and USB use, I can finally start shooting some Next-gen Lets plays again

Throughout the stages you will occasionally stumble on NPC characters or chests around the map. Orange chests then to give up some kind of supply reward, usually something that the enemies of that area don't often drop or are less likely to drop, but there are also red chests that offer supplies to use in the map such as rations and first aid for health, C4 for big damage or path opening, grenades for damage, and shock bombs for capture. In addition to the chests, you also get a transceiver which allows you to have health and equipment airdropped, or lets you teleport back to the start, or quit the mission. Your transceiver use is limited though so use it wisely.

The game also features 4 player co-op, which is exceptionally handy for gathering missions. As you progress in the game, maps get bigger and the supplies you need are found in chests all over the place. So getting those extra bodies to fan out certainly help when you are racing a timer on a huge map. Since you are not handcuffed together, its possible you might never see a teammate, which can both good or bad. If the starting screen is any indication, it looks like the game could also feature split screen local co-op, but I haven't tested that.

I do have a bit of a problem with the matchmaking as it seems to be kind of random. I'll set myself to public and then while browsing a menu, I'll come back to see that there are 2 other guys running around my base waiting to start a mission. But then there will be times where I will wait for someone to drop in so I can pick a mission, then I am yanked from my game and plunked in someone else's, thus taking away my ability to choose the mission. So that can be annoying because unless you are inviting friends, there really seems to not be clear instructions on how to host a game.

So what don't I like about the game? Well, for one, its biggest knock against the game is buggy as shit. When I first downloaded the game I would get these drops in audio where the music would just stop for a second before continuing, like an annoying scratch on a CD in the middle of a favorite song (for you old people who used CDs). If this was the only problem I had with the game, then honestly I probably would have ignored it.

But it wasn't the only problem. Occasionally during play I will get these moments where the game will freeze for a second, and the cut back to real time. A lot of the times this isn't even an issue but there has been an handful of instances where I have taken damage from an enemy or miscued a jump because I missed that whole moment of animation. That's really annoying but its not even the worst problem.

The worst problem is that in rare (and sometimes not that rare) instances the game will just crash back to the PS4 desktop, and asking me if I want to send an error report. This is exceptionally infuriating because the time that it has most often happened to me is just after I have completed a mission. At the start and end of every mission there is a loading sequence where you see your guy/gal riding a chopper. On the way back once that finishes loaded you appear in camp. JUST as the load ends, the game crashes to the dashboard. And because you never made it back to camp, it didn't save your progress. Meaning the last mission you completed you had to do all over again.

This almost made me put the game fucking down for good, because I was doing an exceptionally difficult gathering mission that took me 29m:30s of 30 minutes to complete only to have it crash and throw out my progress. I only had one day where this kept happening to me, but hopefully this is something they patch up soon because the game is too good to be bogged down with annoying bullshit like this. '

The weapon shop menus can be kind of clunky and annoying as you play on. It starts off small and relatively easy to manage but as you play on you get a ridiculous number of options to pick from. What is annoying about this is the only filters the game has to offer are the things your purchased, and the things you didn't. This doesn't really filter things down all that much because ultimately you are going to be wanting to look at what new stuff you can buy.  What the shop menu needs is a filter so I can sort out the available items by gun type. I'm building around a sub machine gun build so I would be kind of nice to be able to just look at those parts.

I wouldn't mind if you there was more than 2 characters to play as too. You have all these characters at the base? Probably couldn't have been that hard to make a few more of them playable. Eh, maybe a future DLC pack?

I suppose the game can also get repetitive too. The missions don't often change as you move up in ranks, just the locations and the palate swaps and difficulty of the enemies do somewhat. Usually by some means of elemental damage, (the red guy attacks with fire? You don't say!). And I will say that it was kind of disappointing that you tease 3 different looking elemental baddies, only to have all three of the use the same attack pattern and AI. The bosses all suffer from this, once you learn the attack pattern it doesn't matter what color they are, they just become a fodder enemy. But then again, changing your gun type drastically changes you approach so maybe I am nit picking.

So I have this shiny new 400$ video game console, loaded with out the butt hardware and awaiting these awesome looking shiny new vidya gaimz and what am I doing with it? I'm playing a game that looks and sounds like it would be right at home on the Super Nintendo. And you know what? I am completely cool with that.

I think I have figured out why things like PlayStation, Xbox, and Kickstarter seem to be making a grab for games like this. It seems like the general populous has realized something that I have been saying since around the Playstation one era, is that graphics are not what make a game. A great game is what makes a game. So now we are seeing these incredibly high powered machines now getting these wonderfully retro designed games with features the old systems couldn't have handled because of size restraints.

Spoiler alert: Empress dies at the beginning

I think we are standing on the edge of a very, very exciting rebirth of retro style games. It's showing everyone that a game with a 2+ plus year life cycle of development with AAA everything doesn't guarantee success. But something with simple and solid mechanics and still produce an incredibly fun experience for just as long and at a fraction of the price. This makes me very excited and hopeful for the upcoming River City Ransom: Underground and hopes that that one also gets a console release.

At time of writing Mercenary Kings is free for Playstation plus users, and is 19.99$ regularly.  Despite the small handful of faults I could come up with the game is has still proven to be entertaining enough that for 20+ hours I am still playing it, still unlocking things, still trying to just complete the game. For an arcade game that is a hell of a feat, and even more so when I still have sealed full retail priced games waiting to be played sitting on my desk taking a back seat to these.

Mercenary Kings is currently available for playstation 4 and on steam, its an absolute blast to play single player or with friends, has a wonderful 16 bit charm, and once they get the bugs worked out might be a near perfect experience. Highly recommended title here and possible sleeper in the 2014 Ragey's. Get it.