Gallery: Ace Combat 7

 

Now Playing: Budget Cuts 2 (VR)

I played Budget Cuts in 2019 and I concluded my review by saying ‘I know a Budget Cuts 2 is due soon and it’s something I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on. If it can refine, build upon and expand the existing mechanics, whilst also introducing a few new twists of its own and a longer, more substantial campaign, I can see it being a must have VR experience.’

So here we are in 2022 and I’ve just finished Budget Cuts 2. So I guess the question is, does the sequel succeed in the ways that I hoped for? Sadly . . . no. Not even close. Budget Cuts 2 is a disappointing sequel and, overall, a pretty bad game.

It’s a sequel that doesn’t expand, evolve or refine any aspect of the original game. The campaign is short – I ran through it in less than 5 hours even searching out all of the collectibles. The levels are more linear, despite some being larger in terms of scale. The puzzle aspects are all but removed. Even the stealth aspect is all but gone.

The combat sees the only new ‘twist’ with the introduction of a bow which, aside from being irritatingly awkward to use (as you have to keep opening your inventory between every shot) makes combat largely trivial and easy as you can safely pick off enemy robots at range.

There’s no aspect of Budget Cuts 2 that I’d say is better than the original. Everything is either on par . . or worse, and that’s really not what I was hoping for. To be a little more positive, Budget Cuts 2 does at least share the good production value of the original with sharp visuals and decent VA. And the game has some genuinely pretty good moments just, sadly, not enough of them.

And that’s all that I can really say in favour of Budget Cuts 2. The last level is pretty tedious as the game forces you to teleport from one button to another for about 10 minutes in an environment full of robots that can kill you in one hit – and if you die, you have to restart the entire sequence. And once you get through that crap, you’re then faced with fighting multiple waves of the same one-hit robots. Thankfully, this section has a couple of checkpoints, but it’s still bloody annoying.

Annoying and kind of sad . . . because I feel like the game should have been smarter than a finale where you’re just firing grenades at everything. I referred to Budget Cuts 1 in my review as a ‘low budget Portal 2’. It wasn’t a straight puzzle game because it also featured stealth and combat, but the stealth, in a way, was a part of the puzzle.

I was hoping Budget Cuts 2 would lean more into the puzzle and stealth aspects and present a series of more clever and elaborate puzzle based levels. Instead, it does the opposite and focuses more on simple, linear levels and combat. Which wouldn’t be so bad if those levels and the combat were really well done but . . . they’re not.

The bow makes combat easy but it’s not at all fun to use. It’s awkward to ‘reload’ and awkward to line up a shot. Enemy AI is also pretty terrible and easy to abuse. And sometimes it just stops working and the robots just get stuck. In terms of story, Budget Cuts 2 continues on from the original, but it doesn’t really feel like it goes anywhere.

I mean, it does, but because the game is so short it feels incredibly rushed. Factor in that absolutely terrible final level and you really won’t care about what’s happening or why, you’ll just want it to be over.

So Budget Cuts 2 doesn’t succeed at being a good sequel to the original, and it doesn’t succeed at standing alone as its own game. I really see no reason to recommend it even if you’re a fan of the original game. There’s really nothing here that’s worth your time, even on sale.

4/10

Eye of the Temple, The Break-In & Hubris (VR Demo)

During the Steam VR Fest towards the end of July I tried out a few VR demos that I thought were worth talking about. First up was Eye of the Temple which released nearly a year ago and was a game I was considering picking up in the sale. But I didn’t, not because I didn’t like what I played, but because this is one of the few VR games I’ve tried that I just don’t have the necessary play space for.

The game does warn you that you need a minimum play area of 2m x 2m and mine is only 2m x 1.6m but I figured I’d give the demo a spin and see if I could make it work . . . and within about 5 minutes of playing I’d already walked into a wall.

The game uses a pretty novel method of traversing the environment whereby you actually take steps in reality to move from one block to the next. It’s very clever the way the game always turns you back towards the centre of your play space, but they’re really not kidding with those space requirements – and to be frank, I’d say they really are the minimum – ideally you’d want 2.5m x 2.5m just to be safe.

It’s a real shame because I really like what I saw of it in the demo. The visuals were bright and crisp and it’s just a really neat concept for a VR game but, unfortunately, I just don’t have enough space for it. But maybe that will change in the future, so it’s one I’ll always keep in mind.

Next up was Hubris a science-fiction action / adventure game in which you play as some kind of special operative investigating a mystery on an alien world. Visually, Hubris is pretty impressive. The alien world looks great and there’s a good sense of scale. The game utilises a pretty decent climbing system that can feel a little awkward at first, but you soon get the hang of it.

There’s also a swimming system that I’m not as comfortable with because rather than make ‘swimming’ motions to move in a particular direction, you move underwater by pushing away from the direction you want to move with your hands. So if you want to swim down, for example, you have to make this rapid ‘lifting’ kind of motion. It’s . . . a little odd and it doesn’t quite work and it’s a little too physical considering how much swimming you have to do in this demo.

I spent half my time in this demo just flapping my arms around like an idiot trying to traverse the underwater areas. I just don’t understand why they didn’t make it so you can make a forward swimming motion and move in the direction you’re facing. I did like shooting evil squids with a laser harpoon though. That was fun.

I think my main concern with Hubris is that it feels like a game aiming for a high level of production quality, with an extensive and substantial campaign, exploration, crafting, combat and fully voiced characters . . . but I’m not sure it’s a game with the budget to match that ambition. It feels a little too rough around the edges. It’s a game I’ll keep an eye on, but the demo didn’t quite win me over.

And finally we have The Break-In. After sinking over 100 hours into Phasmophobia in co-op with a friend, we decided to try something similar, but different. The Break-In is a game that, like Phasmophobia, you can play in or out of VR and you can co-op with up to 3 friends to enter a location and complete various objectives. You have a home ‘base’ where you select your mission, your target location and you purchase various pieces of equipment to take with you. You then load into the location and get to work. But rather than hunting ghosts and trying not to die, you’re stealing everything you can and trying not to get busted by the cops.

It’s fun, but rough. We experienced a number of bugs and control issues but despite that, we wanted to keep playing. It’s a game with a great concept and a lot of potential but it’s a game that still clearly needs a lot of work. The AI is kind of . . . bad which is a pretty big problem. There’s also a really bad balance between certain maps. There’s one where there’s practically nothing good to steal and another where there’s almost too much . . . and it’s far too easy to do so.

And the game just needs more . . . more challenge than ‘don’t get seen’. More tools like lock picks or drills for opening safes. In the demo, all the doors / windows are already unlocked and there’s no alarms to worry about. And more locations / mission types – like a bank job to break into a vault, or a mansion with patrolling guards.

It’s a game I’ll be rooting for because I can see how good it could potentially be, but it’s not there yet and it’s still got a long way to go.

Now Playing: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a really dumb name for a pretty good game. I say ‘pretty good’ because Sekiro, unfortunately, falls a little flat towards the end for reasons I’ll explain later. It doesn’t ruin the overall experience, but it does drag it down. If you’ve read my first impressions of Sekiro you’ll know I found the opening of the game to be pretty tough. You begin with very little health and very few combat options.

This can lead to a lot of frustration but stick with it, because once you get your first health upgrade, unlock a few shinobi tools and come to understand the important difference between health and posture, Sekiro becomes a challenging – but fair – and extremely fun game to play.

The story of Sekiro is . . . fine, I guess. It does feel like a missing piece, at least for me. I know a lot of players won’t care or won’t think it matters, but for me it can often be the difference between liking a game and loving it. I wanted to keep playing Sekiro because I was enjoying the combat and I loved exploring each new location, but I never really cared much about why I was doing so. I didn’t care because I didn’t really understand why.

The story is infuriatingly obtuse and vague about everything. A few times in the game I killed what seemed like a pretty important boss and was rewarded with what seemed like an important, story related item, but the game gave me no direction on what the item was actually for or how to use it. I ended up reading an online guide and discovered it was part of one of the game’s multiple endings, but to proceed with that or other endings, you had to perform specific actions.

Very specific actions. In one case, you had to ‘eavesdrop’ on a character multiple times by hiding behind a specific pillar in a specific room at a specific point in the game and then ‘resting’ to reset the eavesdrop prompt each time. How the f**k is anyone supposed to know how to do this without a guide? I mean, I guess someone figured it out, but I ain’t got time for this shit.

At one point I killed a boss only for him to scream ‘Robert!’ and I don’t know what the f**k that’s all about. Maybe there’s some lore text hidden somewhere in the game that explains it but there’s too much vague bullshit like this all throughout the game. I think that’s fine, to a degree – to let the player explore the world and uncover hidden stories and put the pieces of lore together themselves.

But you can take it too far – and Sekiro certainly does – resulting in a game where you don’t really know or care that much about what you’re really doing or why. Now, like I said, not everyone is going to care. But for me, caring and understanding why I’m doing something – fighting a boss or searching for an item adds a little something extra to the experience. But I never really did in Sekiro.

The good news is that though the story falls a little flat, the gameplay certainly doesn’t. There’s a strong emphasis on stealth for much of Sekiro. You’re given a grappling hook that allows you to zip about the environments, taking position on rooftops or tree branches and plan your attack. You’re like Japanese Batman, taking one enemy out at a time without alerting the others.

Because a stealth kill, in most cases, is a one-shot kill, so if you’re faced with an area full of enemies, it’s a good idea to use stealth to your advantage – hiding in long grass, sneaking beneath buildings, and using tools and particular skills to distract, lure or blind enemies as you see fit. And stealth can really help with a lot of the boss characters too.

Bosses have multiple ‘lives’ – typically two – that you need to clear with a ‘deathblow’ in order to defeat them. And a stealth attack can instantly clear one of these, making a fight a whole lot easier. Obviously, you can’t stealth attack every boss, but most of the optional, mini-bosses are fair game. And once stealth fails or you’ve done as much as you can via stealth, that’s when the fun really begins as you get stuck into the combat of Sekiro.

If you’ve followed my blog you’ll know I love it when a game gives me options – it gives me lots of tools and ways to play and fight and approach encounters in different ways. And Sekiro certainly does this with a decent selection of shinobi tools you can unlock and upgrade as you progress. These tools, if utilised correctly, can make fights easier to manage and – in some cases – kind of trivial. But the game doesn’t force their use upon you – it’s up to you to experiment with them and figure out the best way and time to use them.

Primarily though, you’ll be fighting with your sword and playing to the strength of the health-posture system. There are some unique combat skills you can unlock, but like the shinobi tools, they’re more situational. The most important lesson to learn about Sekiro is the difference between health and posture.

You don’t kill an enemy by removing their health – you do it by breaking their posture and initiating a deathblow. That’s not to say that health isn’t still important – the lower an enemy’s health, the easier it is to break their posture. But you don’t really need to. In fact, there are some boss fights where you can posture break and kill your enemy despite them having a full bar of health.

You can break posture in different ways but primarily you’ll break it by deflecting enemy attacks by correctly timing your blocks. Every deflection builds their posture bar which, when full, will break and put them in a weakened state that you can use to initiate a deathblow and finish them off – or move onto the next phase if they’re a main boss with multiple lives.

Once I wrapped my head around it, I f**king loved this system because it rewards good timing and studying enemy attack patterns so you know when it’s best to deflect, attack and if necessary (because some enemy attacks can’t be blocked or deflected) dodge the f**k out of the way. It’s rewarding and satisfying, especially when you take down a boss without taking a single hit. It requires you to play aggressively, to get in your enemy’s face and stick with them, because the more hits you can deflect, the faster you can kill them. It’s a perfect risk / reward system.

The problem Sekiro has towards the end though, is that a few of the bosses stop playing to the strength of this system – their posture is almost impossible to break, even with very aggressive play. It’s like the developers decided to make these enemies ‘harder’ by forcing you to whittle down their health so you can break their posture instantly – but this goes against the strength of Sekiro combat because you’re then pretty much forced to play more defensively, using hit and run attacks to chip away at their health bar.

It’s tedious and nowhere near as much fun. And the final boss is a good example of this. Although you can posture break with aggressive play (though it’s not easy), the fact that the boss has 4 stages that you have to tediously repeat if you die at any point means it’s much safer to just chip away at their health by learning their attacks and waiting for an opening. It’s actually really easy to beat if you do that, but that goes against the way the fight should work.

Making things more tedious and difficult for the player just for the sake of it isn’t really ‘challenging’ especially when you’re making it very difficult for the player to play to the strengths of the combat system and instead play in a different (more cheesy) way in order to progress. It’s a real shame because I was thoroughly enjoying my time with Sekiro until the last third or so.

That’s when it starts to make fights more tedious than fun and also starts to recycle various bosses you’ve already fought. It wouldn’t be so bad if these were a new twist on the previous boss but aside from maybe one or two new moves it’s just the same fight, again.

I started Sekiro being a little frustrated by it because of its difficulty, then I really started to love it once I’d wrapped my head around how it plays, and then I ended the game being frustrated once again, not because of the difficulty, but because of how the game stopped playing to its own strengths and resorted to a series of bosses I’d already fought, and more tedious bosses that forced me to play in a way I didn’t really enjoy.

Overall, I’m glad I picked up and played Sekiro, and at one point in the game I was more than ready and willing to do multiple runs because I really was enjoying it a lot. But the last third of the game kind of spoiled it for me and makes me reluctant to jump back in, especially when I worked out how much I’d need to grind materials and money to unlock the last of the skill and tool upgrades. So I’m glad I picked it up and I’d recommend checking it out on sale, but I also can’t say if it’s a game I’ll want to play again.

7/10