Progress Report: November 2019

Tales from the Borderlands is easily my favorite Telltale game. It's got everything! A compelling story, heartwarming moments, hilarious skits, and a cast of unlikely companions who synergize incredibly well. If you're a fan of the Borderlands series, there are several cameo appearances and the lore of Pandora is further explored so I would so it's a must play for fans. Compared to previous Telltale titles, I generally found that I had more autonomy and that my decisions were actually meaningful.

Rhys and Fiona's back and forth bickering and retelling of events is done well. When one character embellishes some minor detail, the other is quick to call it out. Story reveals were unexpected, but often welcome, and because of the constant subversions, I was always on my toes.

I had some minor problems with the Quick Time Event sensitivity, and I found the detective portions a bit too slow paced compared to the rest of the game, but the game spaces these out well, so once you get past them, you won't see another one for some time.

The game ends on a high note with an epic final boss battle, that I'd rather not spoil, but I will say that all loose ends are tied up in a very satisfying conclusion.

Dust: An Elysian Tail is a fantastic hand drawn metroidvania with brawler mechanics. The animations are beautiful, really capturing the spirit of anime, in video game format. You can play the game however you wish, with your companion Fidget, even joking early on, to just mash the buttons, but if you can pull off combos, mobs will fall faster. The main story has you traversing 7 unique maps, each of which are hand painted.

The storyline is good, but felt a bit too restrained, considering it's about mass genocide of another race. You play as a Dust, your typical amnesiac protagonist who's trying to figure out who he really is. When you reach Aurora Village, you discover that General Gaius, the game's main antagonist, has been waging a campaign to exterminate the Moonblood race, and such to prevent further atrocities you set your targets on him.

Dust is incredibly nimble to control. Being able to fly across the map while auto targeting enemies made Dust untouchable in the sky. Once on the ground you have access to combo attacks and parries to quickly eliminate anything standing in your path. Single-handedly taking out an entire map of monsters in a single combo feels so satisfying.

Prototype 2 is an open world action adventure that plays most like GTA, but with mutants. The game is the sequel to 2009's Prototype. Set in a post-apocalyptic New York City after it's been ravaged by the Mercer virus, you play as the world's angriest man James Heller right as he is infected by the original prototype, Alex Mercer. He is then entangled in the ongoing war between Blackwatch - an organization dedicated to eradicating the virus, and Alex Mercer who is trying to spread it.

The game's three zones (yellow, green, and red) let you have a more varied playstyle depending on the area you're currently in. In the green zone, you will typically want to stay shapeshifted as security is tight and alerts will summon multiple attack choppers to chase you down, while the red zone is so far gone, most of Blackwatch will ignore you as they're too busy with other infected. There's a plethora of interesting side missions with story and upgrades unlocked for each discovery.

The game excels in game feel. In battle, your arms can shapeshift into various weapons and whether your pouncing with the claws, netting opponents with tendrils, or smashing tanks with the hammerfist, they all feel fantastic. Despite his mass, James Heller is surprisingly nimble and easy to control. Chaining together wall runs and glides to make your way across the map is fun. In the early game, getting exposed leads to some amazing chase sequences, where you must escape from helicopters before shapeshifting to blend into a crowd. This is no longer necessary late game as you can just use the Whipfist to hookshot yourself onto the chasing helicopters and take them out from the sky, but that's also pretty fun.

Playing with a controller is highly recommended, most of the time you will want to be sprinting, but constantly holding down the Shift key caused me some RSI issues, these went away when I switched to controller.

Overall Prototype 2 is a fantastic game, definitely worth checking out.

Mushroom Quest is a cute puzzle game of the Sokoban genre, where you push boxes around to navigate a maze. The puzzles utilize simple concepts in interesting ways, with some stages really training the analytical side of your brain. The design of the final stage alone is enough for me to recommend it, as it has so many different mechanics at play, all densely packed into a single 11 × 8 map. After a lot of trial and error when I finally got the solution, I felt like I was navigating a piece of art, every step that I made was deliberate and often served multiple purposes. Getting that final end screen felt incredibly satisfying.

My only minor gripe would be that level difficulty was a bit all over the place. Typically, level difficulty should increase over time, but many of the easiest stages were towards the end. I know this is going to vary from person to person and perhaps I just got lucky, but some of the later stages felt as if they should have been much earlier.

Overall Mushroom Quest is a fantastic Sokoban puzzler, and worth checking out.

Faerie Solitaire lets you play Spider Solitaire with power ups. For what it advertises, Faerie Solitaire delivers 100%. I'm just not convinced that there's any need for this game however. What does Faerie Solitaire have over the classic Spider Solitaire preinstalled on most Windows machines? The answer is Grind, the core game loop of Faerie Solitaire revolves around grinding hand after hand.

Story Mode is boring and artificially stretched out, slowly drip feeding you bits of dialogue every 9 hands. The story isn't even good, the protagonist is annoying and incredibly unlikeable, constantly crying or running away.

Upgrades are expensive, you'll probably have to get through about 70% of story mode before earning enough money to buy all the upgrades. Considering the length of the campaign it's a pretty significant grind. Aura Ring is probably the most useful upgrade and synergizes well with extra undos once you figure out the trick to trigger a charge.

Challenge mode is difficult, but not because of anything interesting, rather the game just ramps up the level objectives presented in a typical game. For example, instead of filling the purple bar in three minutes, you must do it in one. You can cheese some of these stages by switching to Story mode to collect more Wild cards, but I think this was intended.

Getting 100% Achievements will force you to evolve all the pets (pets do nothing BTW), which is heavily RNG dependent as you need roughly equal amounts of the three droppable resources (Wood, Stone, and Magic). Variance was the killer for me, by the time I finally got the last Stone I needed, I had in the excess of 33 Wood and 39 Magic. Thanks to the statistics page, I was able to see I played through 625 hands of Faerie Solitaire before getting to 100%.

If you are looking for a casual Solitaire game, then Faerie Solitaire will offer you hours of consistent, if a bit boring gameplay. Does it really innovate much over Spider Solitaire? Not really.

Franky Lettuce is a simple puzzle platformer where you collect three drops sprinkled in a level before heading to the exit. You can get stuck a bit early on because of some badly colored platforms (grey platform on black background), but after that, the game is easy. All the levels fit on a single screen, so you can easily plan your route beforehand. There are no enemies, the only thing that can kill you is terrain. There's no real interaction with the world, most puzzles revolve around jumping to and from a new platform type.

Achievements are a bit interesting requiring you to perform an additional task (for instance not stepping on certain platforms), but you are only given a hint at what that task is. You get a notification at the exact moment when you fail the task, so even if you don't understand the clue right away you can figure it out through repeated failure. These are a bit hit and miss, with some later levels just giving you the achievement for completing the stage.

Franky Lettuce is a short mediocre puzzle platformer. While it does have some interesting mechanics in how it handles achievements, the game itself is incredibly safe and boring. With so many great options for the puzzle platformer genre (FEZ, Braid, Thomas Was Alone, Toki Tori), there's little point in playing this.

Destiny Warriors is an RPG maker game with a Ninja Academy theme. It's essentially trying to emulate the Naruto universe without infringing on the IP. Everything from the emo rival to the spirits residing inside each character is blatantly ripped off, but this is clearly intentional.

The writing starts off passable (as the game is just borrowing the storyline from Naruto), but it falls apart midway through the game, with the main character J.C. becoming so dumb, that they can only communicate by swearing. Towards the end I'm impressed that the game felt both too long and rushed at the same time.

The game does initially talk about missions and a ranking system, but this was never mentioned again which felt like a huge missed opportunity to have some side quests and do some world building. Instead the game is fairly linear, giving you small windows to interact with a limited overworld, but once a mission is started, that access is cut off.

Enemy level's scale with your party's average, so grinding doesn't really help, although having a few low-level characters to bring down your party's average level can let you sweep certain encounters.

As someone use to RPG grind, the encounter rate in story missions felt noticeably high. The actual battles themselves, are fun, once you figure out which spells/skills to use as there's a bit of resource management when dealing with HP, MP, and TP. There are just way too many encounters though.

What I enjoyed most was creating overpowered characters, as the game has consumables available in stores that permanently increase your stats invalidating any need to level up, and eventually the need for any equipment, as you can just buy your stats from vendors. Having maxed out stats and doing 10k+ damage to the final boss was awesome.

Overall Destiny Warriors RPG is nothing special. It's using stock RPG maker assets, consists of linear gameplay that drags on. It has the complete opposite of a unique storyline, and even accepting that, the writing degenerates over time.

Ballistic Protection is a tower defense game that failed to balance their weapons. Napalms are easily the best gun as they have splash damage. Enemy mobs don't have any resistances which creates a dominant strategy of just building napalms everywhere. Even with this strategy certain stages (Level 6 in particular) are still incredibly difficult, but without any satisfaction after finally clearing it. If your looking for a tower defense game play Defender's Quest or Bloons TD5 instead.