I feel this way about Reverse: 1999, but for kinda complicated reasons.
It’s a game that I think is absolutely great. I think it has great characters, excellent writing, and the mechanics are simple but there’s room for depth and strategy. But it’s also a free-to-play gacha game and I feel like I can’t recommend something with that model, at least wholeheartedly. It doesn’t feel right to me. And it makes me wonder if my critical praise of it just amounts to being impressed by the lights on the slot machine.
I will continue to play it, but I won’t recommend it.
I bought Wanted: Dead in the steam sale. It’s stunningly incompetent in every aspect, but I’m not regretting my 12 dollars and I’ll probably play through all of it.
Like, it just feels so sincere ineptitude? Like some first timer’s big passion project that somehow got made, except it’s supposed to be “from the makers of Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive”.
It has an entire full-length (bad) arcade shmup as a mini game, although there’s not really any justification for it (or all the other mini games) to even be in there at all, it’s just there because someone wanted it to be. It’s a fascinating train wreck, to be sure.
The dev team are largely ex Team Ninja but they were being funded/directed by a rich Russian dude who had never made a game before and kept getting them to focus on mini games and the nonsense round the edges instead of the main combat. Crediting forum user gsk who supplied that information on here and on twitter.
That really spells out the picture for what’s going on with that game. I bought it cause it looked like some good old fashioned, PS2 style fun, but I just couldn’t get very far with it. I heard there’s an update that makes it better?
The update has made it easier and fixed some combat issues.
Some fights were EXTREMELY stingy on health pack drops so those have been dramatically upped. Some combat moves that one might consider to be critical were locked behind upgrades. These have been made available from the start and the upgrades replaced with something else.
They have also made the easy difficulty available from the start. I got about halfway through the game and had to restart using the easy cheat code because it was just too unfair. I had a much better time just romping through the silliness on easy.
If you can find it cheap and want a PS2/OG Xbox experience, stick it on easy and embrace the nonsense.
Right now I’d say the game I am trying that most fits this description is Honkai Impact 3rd. I’m playing it because I know people I vibe with like it, but man is it obtuse if you want to experience anything resembling a coherent story. A good chunk of it is told through manga outside of the game, and I had to ask folks for a guide on what order to play and read things because nothing was making sense.
The fan order shown here is great, but the game was not made to work in this way. The game seems to have been restructured to allow people to immediately jump to Part 2, which is much higher fidelity and basically unconnected from what I’ve seen so far of the first part, so I’ve played it a little bit. But right now I’m stuck grinding Captain Levels to be able to access the next side-story that actually adds context to the events of the main story, and there’s an open world area I can’t access because you can only unlock one area a week and the Part 1.5 open world unlocks by default, meaning I have to wait a whole week from unlocking that… I assume…
That being said, the setup manga Second Eruption (what do you mean Second Impact this isn’t Evangelion. Ignore our title “Impact 3rd”) was incredible and develops incredible characters who have only been mentioned in passing before. It makes me really excited to see what they do with it next… if they ever let me play the rest of the dang story!
Also gacha elements but having grown up with a lot of free-to-play games I don’t have as much problem with it as others.
