Category: Review

Game of the Year 2018: 1st Place

(You can read 2nd & 3rd place here, and 4th and 5th place here)

NOTE: This review will only contain some minor story spoilers from the Chapter 1 stories.

Where to begin with Octopath Traveler? I suppose since it’s a game about lots of different people’s stories, I should tell my own story about my experience with Octopath Traveler.

I normally wouldn’t go into why I bought a game when talking about it, mostly because the answer is usually that I saw it on the new releases list, thought: “Sure, why not” and that was that, but Octopath had a very different feel to it than most games. I’d seen it briefly advertised in a few Nintendo Direct streams, and while I thought it looked interesting, it wasn’t really something I was into since old-school hardcore JRPG’s typically aren’t my thing.

In the build up to it’s release however, I kept hearing about it more and more, but not in the way I usually hear about games in their build up. I had a couple of friends who were really looking forward to it and they would often retweet art and other content related to the game long before it had even come out. While the demo definitely aided this, I’d never really seen such a dedicated group of people so into a game before it had even been released. Normally, when I see people anticipating a game that much – especially a new IP – it’s on a huge scale, like with No Man’s Sky; but this wasn’t like that. It was such a niche title with such a dedicated fanbase, I couldn’t help but be intrigued, so I bought it.

Instantly upon beginning the game, it became clear to me just what was going to be unique about this game….It’s uniqueness. It sounds stupid, I know, but stick with me. While, yes, the cutscenes are all scripted and you can’t make choices to influence what happens, everyone’s journey through Octopath Traveler will be a unique one, and all the systems in the game are setup to aid that feeling.

You have to pick what character you want to start your journey with, which determines two main things. One, the character you pick as your starting character can’t be removed from your party until their story has ended, meaning they’ll be with you for pretty much your entire journey. Two, it determines what other characters are closest to you. While you can technically get them in whatever order you like, you can’t fast travel at the start of the game, so you automatically pick a direction to go in and get all of the characters in that order. So what does this achieve?

Well, the order I encountered all of the characters really did affect how much I connected with each of them. I started at H’aanit and went round the map clockwise, and sure enough by the end of the game, my main team was, H’aanit, Ophilia, Cyrus and Tressa, who were the first four characters I encountered. It goes without saying that very few people are likely to take the exact same path as you, meaning everyone who plays the game will connect with different characters in different ways, so everyone really does have an experience that feels unique.

So that’s what drew me into the game in the first place, but I don’t stick with just any old game for 5 months, so why didn’t I get bored and start playing something else? This is where we get to the meat of exactly why this game has such a hardcore fanbase, why I’ve ended up buying art and charms based on this game; it’s the characters.

If you take each of the character’s stories at face value, there isn’t really anything unique about them. A woman aims to kill the men who murdered her father; A man seeks vengeance on the man who betrayed him; A young girl seeks to travel and see the world against the wishes of her parents; and so on. While those stories aren’t that special, when you take these carefully created and extremely nuanced characters and drop them into those stories, suddenly it begins to feel like something new, and I become invested in a way that I never would’ve without those characters.

The idea of each character having their own “chapters” in their stories that are all separate is something that I wasn’t too sure on at the start, but I realised it was exactly the kind of storytelling that was needed to make sure that all of these characters got time to form and grow without it feeling like a big entangled mess; not to mention it’s a type of storytelling that is only really possible in a video game.

By the end of each character’s first chapter, I felt I knew exactly who they are, what their goals are and most importantly, why they’re going on this journey. The game took as much time as it needed to make sure that I was fully behind every single character and wanted to see them succeed in their quest.

Octopath Traveller, is much more than just a set of stories however, there’s a hell of a lot of “game” to this game as well.

Before I start talking about the mechanics, I should mention that I haven’t played many old-school JRPG’s like this one, and as such I don’t really know what aspects of the mechanics are unique to this game and what’s come before, so i’m just going to talk about what I did and didn’t like about it.

It’s a turn-based combat system, which has always been my preference to real-time since I like being able to take the time to think and strategize, and a turn-based system is best to allow me to do that. Each of the characters has a “job” which determines what weapons they have by default and their special skills, additionally, further down the line in the game you can unlock a secondary job for each of the characters. All of this allows for a massive range of different team compositions and strategies, all of which adds to the uniqueness that I’ve been talking about.

The boost system is also a very good idea. Boost Points build up every turn, unless you use boost points that turn, and depending on the type of ability, they can increase damage, or cause an attack to occur multiple times. This combines well with the “Break” system, where each enemy will have weaknesses to certain weapon types or magical elements and exploiting their weaknesses enough will break them, making them lose a turn and take 50% more damage than normal.

These two simple concepts add a whole new layer of complexity to the combat, it means you have to pick your spots carefully and plan several turns in advance to get the most damage possible out of your characters. This is especially important later on in the game, where you unlock “Divine Skills” that only work when a character has been boosted to maximum.

While you won’t need to use this deep level of strategy for every random encounter, where it really shines is the boss fights. The bosses are deliberately designed to be seemingly overpowered, with a large amount of health and high damage attack, in order to force you think about this tactically. It can be quite the shock at first, when you wander into the boss fight and it wipes the floor with you, but once you get the hang of the way you’re supposed to think, it’s a thrilling experience, with many of the late game bosses bringing extremely tense scenarios, leading to some of the most satisfying victories and most crushing defeats.

Perhaps the biggest indicator of just how much I love this game, is the fact that I’ve scoured the web to find as much merchandise and art that I can, and bought way too much of it. Charms, art prints, t-shirts, I’ve bought so much stuff related to this game, and the only other game I’ve ever done that with is Pokemon. Even the soundtrack is absolutely brilliant, if I’d have wrote my “Music in Video Games” list now, “Battle at Journey’s End” would absolutely be on there as one of my favourites.

Octopath Traveller is an absolute triumph in game design and storytelling, it takes something truly special to occupy my mind for as long as Octopath has, and I still haven’t seen everything it has to offer. It is far-and-away my favourite game of the year and I am certain that this will stand for many years as one of my favourite games of all time.

And there you have it! Thank you very much for taking the time out to read this, if you’re looking for more then follow me on Twitter @10ryawoo to know when new stuff is posted, and make sure you also follow @lauren_cmonster who edited this article.

Thanks again for reading and I’ll see you soon!

Game of the Year 2018: 2nd & 3rd Place

As we move another day closer to 2019, it’s time to continue looking back on the year that was and talk about another two awesome games from 2018.

If you haven’t read my 4th and 5th place picks then make sure you check them out here before reading these ones!

As with yesterday, I’ve only played games on PC, HTC Vive and Nintendo Switch, so I haven’t played anything that wasn’t on those platforms, and I won’t be covering early access games since they’re not finished.

There’s no more time to waste, so let’s get to it.

3 – Omensight

With most of the games on this list, I end up talking a lot about one thing in particular that stood out to me and made it worthy of being on a Game of the Year list; this isn’t the case with Omensight. There isn’t one thing that stands out to me when I play Omensight, because it’s just all really well designed and so much fun.

The basics of the game are that the world has ended and you, the Harbinger – a deity like being whose job it is to stop the world from ending, have to relive the final day of the world over and over again to work out how to stop it. You can’t just do whatever you like however, you play through each day by following around one of four characters that are related to how the world ended.

Each character has very different personalities and for the most part are at each other’s throats the whole time. The game makes sure to not frame anyone as the bad guy at any point, but at the same time does point you towards a few assumptions early on, which get subverted later down the line. The writing forces you to see the complexities of the land from every angle, to the point that you find yourself naturally distrusting certain characters, which can affect your actions and decisions in the short-term, to both your advantage and detriment.

While the levels are mostly linear there are various points where you can branch off and explore, and the game encourages this, as pretty much everything in the world gives you further understanding of the story you’re caught up in.

The story also scales quite nicely, but with every new discovery, the threat of whatever is causing the apocalypse closes in more and more. While you’re never actually under any real-time pressure, the game does a good job of keeping you on edge towards the later half and you’re never truly safe, which is quite hard to achieve when you’re literally playing as an immortal ancient spirit.

That said you’re not immortal in battle, and for me this is what brings the game up from a great game, to one of the best of 2018. So much attention to detail went into the story, and in a game like this, I often go in expecting the gameplay to not be anything special in order to flesh out the story; but that’s not the case here.

A lot of time and attention was clearly put into making the combat and platforming mechanics of the game feel great. While the camera could be a bit more cooperative, every jump and swing of the blade feels important in this system. While most fights aren’t particularly challenging, you can’t just sit there and mash the attack button to progress.

The different abilities and attack types that you can unlock add just enough complexity to the hack-and-slash combat to stop it being boring, while not so much as to overwhelm you. I’m generally not massively into a hack-and-slash combat system, but here everything flows so well and feels impactful that I can’t help but have tonnes of fun playing it. Whether I’m hacking through waves of enemies or a single boss, there was never a boring fight.

Omensight is an extremely well-rounded game, with a compelling and popular story with a unique style of telling it, gameplay that matches up with that story perfectly and it never stops being fun to play at any point. I look forward to going back to this one at some point next year to experience it all again.

2 – Pokemon Let’s Go! Pikachu/Eevee

What? A Pokemon Game on my game of the year list? No way.

To the surprise of precisely no-one, I really enjoyed this year’s addition to the Pokemon franchise. I’d never played a game set in the Kanto region before, so this was also a brand new Pokemon experience for me and I was very happy with it indeed.

I’m not going to sit here and review the core Pokemon mechanics, because I’m sure you know whether or not you like them by now, so let’s just look at what’s new.

First of all, I think this was a great insight as to what the Nintendo Switch can do for the Pokemon franchise. Pokemon games always seem to be the ones that push the hardware to their limits and you can tell Sun and Moon were desperate to break free of the shackles the 3DS had them in. While it wasn’t the huge leap that we got from DS to 3DS, you can see that the developers were getting used to using this new hardware and this will have certainly given them the experience they need to make next year’s games look stunning.

I loved having Pokemon run around in the overworld in order to encounter them. It adds so much liveliness to the world, that the older games now look sparse in comparison. The new catching mechanics are something that seem to have split most people right down the middle, and I don’t really know which camp I fall into if I’m honest. I had a lot of fun with the new level of interactivity that this system provides, however being unable to battle a Pokemon, and thus having very little control over the catch rate, was rather frustrating. Moving forward I’d like to see some sort of hybrid of the two systems, or at least the option to choose.

The integration with Pokemon GO seems to be a fairly welcome feature as a whole, and as someone who didn’t use it at all during my main play through, it isn’t something that will hinder you should you choose to ignore it. Similarly the Pokeball Plus is a nice little peripheral that is a cool add-on for any big Pokemon fans, but I found the regular Switch joycons to be just as good to play the game with.

The game was also filled with lots of little easter eggs and subtle nods to earlier games in the franchise, this kind of stuff was really nice to see as a fairly long-term fan of the franchise, and seeing Jesse and James in an actual game for the first time in forever was a fun little thing to see.

Aside from the new stuff, this game is still filled to the brim with all the Pokemon flavoured goodness that has been in the franchise forever. I felt that just enough was shaken up to justify these remakes, but not so much as to completely suck the identity of the franchise out of them.

As a whole, the Let’s Go! games were a very faithful recreation of Kanto, which makes use of all of the lessons we’ve learnt in game design since the originals launched. I feel like this was another great outing for the Pokemon franchise, and seeing how the developers have been able to use the hardware has got me extremely excited for when Generation 8 is launched in 2019.

So there’s 2nd and 3rd place! Share this around on social media if you enjoyed it, thanks to @magiclollyl on Twitter and make sure to follow me on Twitter @10ryawoo where it’ll be really obvious what game I’m going to talk about tomorrow for my Number 1 pick and favourite game of 2018! I’ll see you there.

 

Game of the Year 2018: 4th & 5th Place

This one was really hard to organise.

As where with pro-wrestling, it’s fairly easy for me to pick one match over another, and thus rank them quite quickly, I find it much harder to do with games. Since games have so much variety to them, almost all of my favourite games every year appeal to me in different ways which makes it much harder to just plainly rank them based on enjoyment.

Add to that the fact that I played more games in 2018 that ever before and you’ve got yourself a rather tricky task when it comes to picking out the best. That said, I’ve mulled it over for pretty much all of December and I’ve got a top 5 that I’m happy with.

Since I have a lot more to say about games than I do about wrestling matches, I’ve decided to split this up into three posts, with 4th and 5th today, 2nd and 3rd coming tomorrow and finally number 1 will be revealed the day after.

I should also mention that the only platforms I own are PC, HTC Vive and Nintendo Switch, so if a game didn’t release on any of those, then I haven’t played it and won’t be ranking it. Additionally, if a game is still in early access, then I also won’t be considering it, since I don’t think it’s fair to review an unfinished game, I will instead rank those games in the year they eventually release.

Finally, before I get started I’d like to mention the other games I loved this year, but didn’t quite crack the top five, so: Dead Cells; Two Point Hospital; Into the Breach; Super Smash Brothers Ultimate and Return of the Obra Dinn, were all great games that I had considered for this top 5 at some point.

Now, let’s get onto what did make the top five, starting with….

 5 – Moonlighter

This was a game that, despite its May release, I didn’t find this one until a couple of weeks ago. However, once I started playing it, I played it every single day until I had completed it, and boy was it a fun time.

The basic premise of the game is that you play as Will, a simple young man who runs a shop called Moonlighter, and he lives in a town that was built around a series of mysterious dungeons full of weird and wonderful artefacts and treasures.

There are two different sides to the core gameplay, the first is the dungeon crawling. This has the many rougelike elements you’ve come to expect from games such as these, with random generation of rooms and progression through “floors” of a dungeon to progress. However, in this game your goal is slightly different. In most games of this genre, such as Dead Cells or Binding of Isaac, your goal is to collect upgrades and items along the way to eventually get to a boss and kill it to beat the dungeon, but that isn’t really your goal here.

There is a boss at the end of each dungeon (more on that in a bit), none of the items you pick up along the way will actually make you stronger or better in any way, instead your goal is to collect as many of these items as you can, and then escape the dungeon to use these items in the second side to the game.

The combat really feels nice, and with a variety of different weapon classes to choose from, you really can play the game whichever way you feel best. It follows the rules which I think all roguelikes should follow: Every enemy is easily killable on its own, however if you fill a room with them in a balanced way then it’s a difficult but fair challenge to clear every single room.

The boss fights are in a similar vein, it’s a fair challenge because I know all of their attacks are easily dogable, I’m just not good enough to dodge them. It’s that kind of game design that makes me determined to keep trying over and over when I die, and not just get frustrated and give up.

That second side of the game is where you manage your shop. You put out your items you retrieved from the dungeon on display in your shop, and then during the day people will come in and buy the items from you. As simple as that sounds, the developers were very clever in the way they implemented it.

See, instead of just slapping the item out and letting people pay the price for themselves, you have to be a proper merchant and assign every item a price. Of course, people won’t just pay whatever price you put on it and you have to gauge the reactions of your customers to work out if you’re undercharging or overcharging for an item. In addition to this, an item’s popularity in the town will fluctuate depending on how much of it you’re selling, and how much you’re selling it for. If an item isn’t in very high demand people won’t pay all that much for it, however if an item is extremely popular in town, you can bump the price up a bit and no-one will mind paying the extra coins.

This side of the game has a really nice level of strategy to it, since you can use the prices of items you already know to work out what a good price for a new item would be. It also means that during the day, you’re not just sitting there waiting for the cash to roll in, you’ve got to be paying attention to your customers to work out your prices and also make sure no-one tries to steal anything…

Of course, you don’t just earn money for the sake of it, so what is there to spend that money on? The spending of money is pretty well split in this game between three things: buying better gear for your character; buying upgrades for your shop and buying new facilities for the town, which will provide services to you, such as weapon enchantments and money investments.

These kinds of games that essentially work as one big loop of tasks that all feed into each other, is one that can often get quite tiring after being done for too long, so Moonlighter gets around this by giving you an endgame goal right at the start.

The town has four main dungeons just outside it, however at the start of the game three of them are closed. In order to unlock each dungeon, you have to defeat the boss of the previous one. Every new dungeon you unlock will have tougher enemies and deadlier traps, but will also provide much more valuable treasures.

Your main goal however, is to unlock “the 5th door” which is a final dungeon which has remained locked for centuries and you want to see what’s behind it. Each of the four dungeon bosses holds a key, so you need to defeat them all, this makes sure you feel like everything you’re doing has a sense of purpose to it, and it’s that exact driving force that kept me involved in the game the whole way through.

This game comes together beautifully, with both sides to the game stopping the other one from getting too tedious, and a main quest that really drives you achieve and see everything the game has to offer. If you’re a fan of dungeon crawlers, but also want something a bit new from the genre, then this is absolutely one you should check out.

4 – Quarantine Circular

This is a much harder one to talk about.

Quarantine Circular is a game made by the wonderful Mike Bithel, who made one of my favourite ever games in Thomas Was Alone. Bithel’s games are always so masterful in how they tell their stories, and since that is what drives the entire game, it’s hard to talk about it as a reviewer, since I don’t want to spoil a moment of it.

I’m going to try my best to do it without spoiling things, but anything I do spoil will be from the first chapter only so I can illustrate some of my points.

The game tells it’s story mostly through the dialogue between characters, although there are visuals on the screen whilst it’s going on to draw you in to the feel of the world. The basics of the story is that, the world has been almost wiped out by a disease unknown to the human race, and the military has captured an alien that they suspect might be to blame.

Most games at this point would drop you right into things, with the important military people interrogating the alien to try to get information out of it. That doesn’t happen though, instead the first two chapters you play as a low ranking engineer on the military ship with the simple job of installing a translator so the alien can understand humans and vice-versa.

This is a great way to introduce the player to the world, since you spend the whole of the first two chapters playing as a character who doesn’t really have much idea of what’s going on. It allows the game to explain things to you in its dialogue without it sounding like it’s solely for the audience. It also makes sure that it doesn’t present the alien as an antagonist in the first two chapters. While you do have the option to be mean to it, the game encourages you to simply listen and learn about what this alien is like from a personality perspective, which is very important for later chapters.

In Bithel’s previous game, Subsurface Circular, which was made in a similar style to this game, you played as one person the whole time which worked really well as you were solving a mystery. However in Quarantine Circular, you play as almost every character involved in the story at some point. While this could’ve taken away from the luster and mystery a little bit, it’s written in such a way that all it really serves to do is allow you to understand each of the characters as the story progresses. In order to make some important decisions later in the story, you need to understand exactly what every single character is thinking, and this is perhaps the best way to achieve that.

Oh, and did I mention, you get all of this for less than £5?

When it comes to pure story based games, I don’t think there was anything that drew me in or left a greater impression on me looking back on it now. Bithel always seems to knock it out of the park with these games, and if we get more of these in the coming years from him I’ll be very happy.

So that’s 4th and 5th place in my game of the year rankings! If you enjoyed it then please share it around. As always, you can follow me on Twitter @10ryawoo for more impressions on games as they come out through 2019, and @magiclollyl for editing this. Lastly, make sure to come back at the same time tomorrow for my 2nd and 3rd place picks!

WWE TLC Tables, Ladders & Chairs 2018: Every Match Ranked

The final WWE Pay-Per-View for 2018 is finally in the bag, and we’ve had this crazy year topped off with a show that was really…..ok.

While there wasn’t a match on this show that I can say I hated, but I didn’t feel the show was as good as I thought it would be when I read the card. The amount of matches really made the show drag a little, especially towards the end. However the focus of the show seemed to be in the right place, so it made for a decent night.

Now let’s talk about the matches themselves, as I rank them from worst to best.

12 – Carmella & R-Truth def. Jinder Mahal &      Alicia Fox
(Mixed Match Challenge Season 2 Final)

Not a whole lot to say about this one really…

I haven’t watched any of the Mixed Match Challenge this year, so I don’t really have any investment in what happened here. I prefer Truth and Carmella to Jinder and Alicia, but that’s mostly just by default. More to the point, there wasn’t anything noteworthy about the match either.

There were a couple of minor slip ups, but aside from that it was a pretty standard match that wouldn’t feel out of place on Raw or Smackdown. I know most people are digging the “Dance Break” thing, but I hate it with all my being, and of course the Singh Brothers were around so they had to go ahead and make it even stupider.

I’m glad Mella & Truth won, but I’m not looking forward to Truth being #30 in the Royal Rumble, or the “comedy” sketch on Tuesday about their trip to WWE’s head offices.

11 – Elias def. Bobby Lashley
(Ladder Match)

Gimmick matches on the pre-show now? A bit weird, but alright.

I’m not sure that the guitar thing was really necessary for this match, it could’ve quite easily have just ended in a pinfall and I don’t think it would’ve made much difference. I know it was unlikely Elias was ever going to pin Bobby, but if you were just going to have Bobby lay Elias out immediately after the match anyway then what’s the point in even having Elias win?

It’s not like either of these men are about to compete for a title, and they’re certainly not in the running for Royal Rumble winner, so this whole thing was ultimately pointless. The match was at least somewhat entertaining, with some nice versions of spots we’ve seen in every other ladder match since the dawn of time.

These two men don’t really have the greatest about of chemistry together, so I really hope this feud doesn’t continue any longer.

10 – Natalya def. Ruby Riott
(Tables Match)

Who knew “tables with pictures on them” would be one of the major stories on this show.

I feel bad putting this match this low, because there was actually some stuff to like about it, but the overall story didn’t really draw me in at all. I liked all the stuff with the Riott Squad taking the bullet for Ruby in a couple of spots to make sure she didn’t lose, it was a nice way to make their present felt without having them directly hinder Natalya.

The main problem I had here was how slowly these two would set up every single spot. It wasn’t just the table spots either, even Natalya locking in the Sharpshooter felt like it took forever. It was a little bit annoying that the tables were so obviously pre-cut, but I guess you didn’t want a situation like Hell in a Cell 2016, where the women are too light to break the table when they fall on it.

It was a perfectly serviceable match, with nothing amazing to draw me in, and buckle up, because I’m going to be saying words to that effect a lot in this review.

9 – Rey Mysterio def. Randy Orton
(Chairs Match)

Please, no more chair matches.

I think that this was the only match on the show that was actively hindered by the stipulation, chairs matches just don’t really seem to work as a concept. For one, all it really is, is a no DQ match where the ring is surrounded by chairs, but more importantly it means that every single major spot has to involve chairs in some way.

There’s only so much you can do with a steel chair and while they’re good in small doses, basing a whole match around them gets old fast. While there were a couple of fun spots, including a rather nasty looking one where Rey went arse first into a chair, but nothing particularly outstanding, and although I didn’t hate this match, I can’t help but feel it would’ve been better without this stipulation.

8 – Dean Ambrose def. Seth Rollins(c)
(Intercontinetal Championship)

Oh….well ok then.

I really don’t understand what it was about this match, but it just didn’t click. The placement on the show probably didn’t help, being the second to last match on a show this long pretty much guarantees a worn out crowd, and they were almost dead silent the whole time.

The match also didn’t really feel like it was a fight between two men with the history that these two have. Dean needed to be a lot more vicious, and Seth needed to have a lot more energy and fire underneath him for it to really click like it should’ve. At the end of the day, you could replace Dean and Seth with pretty much any other heel and face on the roster and the match wouldn’t have felt any different, which really isn’t a good thing.

While they did touch on the story in the closing minutes, given how badly the story’s been built over the past month and how underwhelming the match had been up until that point, it didn’t really feel earned. Part of me wants to see them try this again, but another part of me really just want them both to move on.

It sucks that, in a year where Seth Rollins put on the match of the night on almost every show, he’s down this low on the final show of the year. Let’s just hope he moves on to blow the roof of Wrestlemania against Lesnar next year and we can all forget this ever happened.

7 – Braun Strowman def. Baron Corbin
(TLC Match)

How heroic of these good guys to all team up and beat the ever-loving piss out of their boss.

When I think about how all of this went down, I feel like I should hate it, but I just can’t for some reason. Sure, Strowman probably could’ve still beaten Baron with a broken arm, but this solution make Braun seem quite smart too. It was also a pretty clever way to get them out of this spot they ended up in, where Baron needed to be out of power, but Braun was injured.

Given how crap Raw has been these past few weeks, it was kind of cathartic to see one of the main culprits put to rest, although I’m not all in on WWE using him as a scapegoat for the whole mess. Corbin’s probably going to end up fading into the background a bit more now, and Braun can move on to lose to Brock Lesnar again at the Royal Rumble, but let’s just enjoy this while it lasts.

6 – Finn Balor def. Drew Mcintyre

I never thought WWE could make me feel simultaneously disappointed and pleasantly surprised, but here we are.

I really don’t understand the rationale behind Balor winning here. As much as I’m glad to see that WWE aren’t continuing to hand him loss after loss, I really felt like this was a match Drew needed to win, especially as it seemed like they were trying to build him up. You could argue it was a protected loss since Dolph Ziggler got involved, but this is the same Drew Mcintyre who damn near killed Kurt Angle, two small dudes attacking him shouldn’t really be a problem.

The match itself did feel more like an above average Raw match than a decent PPV match, but everything in it was solid, and Dolph’s interference does at least make sense from the character’s perspective. I really feel like Drew needs to be a much more vicious heel however, he shouldn’t be using rest holds and shouting at his opponent, he needs to be trying throwing them around the ring like they’re nothing.

I really hope this isn’t the start of a decline for Drew, because it seemed like things were going so well for him up until now.

5 – Buddy Murphy(c) def. Cedric Alexander
(Cruiserweight Championship)

Well that was fun while it lasted.

It’s a real shame that the cruiserweights got bumped to the pre-show once again, after putting on two fantastic main card performances in a row, but there was a lot of matches on this show, and I can’t really say that anything else could’ve been bumped to make room for this one.

Regardless, these guys don’t care what part of the show they’re on, they’ll still put on a great match if they can. While it did feel like they toned things down a bit due to being on the pre-show, it was still an entertaining match, with lots of fun action.

One thing the cruiserweights seem to be really good at, is winning over a crowd that usually doesn’t seem to care. The crowd started out dead silent at the start of this match, and by the end they were loving it. It goes to show that even if a good portion of that crowd probably have no idea who these guys are, they’ll still invest in a match if they like what they see. If only they’d go home and watch 205 Live afterwards.

4 – Ronda Rousey(c) def. NIa Jax
(Raw Women’s Championship)

I know I’ve said this pretty much every time she’s wrestled this year, but Ronda Rousey is really good at wrestling.

Clearly Natalya trained her well or something like that, because she just seems to get it, case in point: this match right here. There really aren’t very many people on the roster who could have a match that good with Nia Jax, maybe Becky & Charlotte, but there isn’t anyone else that good.

This match really was all Ronda, pretty much the whole time, Nia seemed somehow more immobile than usual, but Ronda was still able to make it work. She sold her ass of on basically every move to make sure it felt like it had impact, and was flying all about the place when she was on offence to really get the best out of Nia.

This is probably the last time Nia will have a major role on Raw for a very long time, considering Ronda didn’t seem to struggle too much in putting her away, and then Becky laid her the fuck out after the match.

3 – The Bar(c) def. The New Day & The Usos
(Smackdown Tag Team Championships)

Please, never move these teams to Raw, never.

While this was a very good match, it did feel a bit like it was one of the victims of the over stuffed show, but, these teams could pull a great match out even if they only had 30 seconds to work it. Everyone got plenty of time to shine in this match. I’m not sure I like the whole “only two teams in the ring at once” stipulation to Triple Threat tag matches, but they generally still seem to work and I’m ok with that.

My only real worry is where on Earth do these tag titles go next? This is the problem with only focusing on these three (admittedly brilliant) tag teams, is now you need The Bar to fight someone else and there really isn’t anyone build up enough. The Club have lost so many tag title opportunities, they’re basically a joke, and Sanity kept losing their matches and have been absent for months, with the exception of one underwhelming appearance at Survivor Series. Maybe we’ll get a NXT call up, but it’s not like Heavy Machinery ever stand a chance of taking out The Bar.

I have a lot more faith in the Smackdown writers than I do the Raw writers though, so maybe we’ll get something great in time for the Rumble. Maybe.

2 – Daniel Bryan(c) def. AJ Styles
(WWE Championship)

Who knew this one would be good?…..What? Everyone?! Oh alright.

I had to rewatch this one before I wrote about it, because I didn’t really enjoy it that much watching it live. Maybe it was down to how tired it was, but I just didn’t really get it the first time around, however everyone on Twitter really liked it, so I watched it a second time the next day, and it turns out that past me was very wrong about not liking this one, because this match was great.

Sure, it wasn’t anywhere close to the Styles/Bryan match I had in my head, but this was the match we needed, not the one we wanted. For one, Bryan showing up as The American Dragon was unexpected, and I didn’t even realise it at first, but this dude really is something else. After his return I was starting to doubt if he really was as good as we all remembered him being, but this match reminded me exactly why Daniel Bryan is the best wrestler in the world.

He’s able to blend his fast paced crowd popping babyface style so well with his slow and methodic heel pace that he can wrestle just about any style he wants and it still feels true to his character. More importantly he’s clearly done his homework on AJ Styles, with an answer to pretty much everything he’s got, and when he does get caught, it’s not long before he gets back on top.

The perfect example of this is the finish, winning with a small package after a match like that is brilliant, it feels heelish and cheap, but really he just straight up out thought AJ Styles and won because he was the better wrestler. We’ve got so used to heel champions cheating to win, that it’s really refreshing to see a heel win, because he’s just the better wrestler and that’s all there is to it.

I’d love to see just one more match between these two to really kick things into that final gear and get that truly awesome match we all know they can put on.

1 – Asuka def. Becky Lynch(c) & Charlotte Flair
(Smackdown Women’s Championship)
(TLC Match)

Hey! Smackdown finally main-evented a cross-brand PPV! Only took 8 sodding months.

What a match this was, everything about it was just great. It started just how it needed to, they didn’t rush to get to all of the weapons spots, they started out just wrestling each other like normal and built to all of the crazy weapon spots, it allows the crowd to get a feel for the match, instead of getting worn out with all the high spots early on.

Every single spot felt like it built on the last, and they were able to set them up without slowing the pace of the match down, in many instances they made the setting up of a spot a key part of the match, so it all flowed perfectly. It’s hard to talk about the rest of this match without just listing all of the awesome stuff that happened during it, so here goes:

  • Asuka flipping Becky back first onto a ladder looked so damn brutal and rebuilt Asuka to her former glory in about 5 seconds.
  • Becky’s ladder dive was great, even if she did almost crush Charlotte’s ribcage.
  • There was a really nice catharsis in watching the women wail on each other with chairs and it made the whole thing feel so much more intense.
  • Charlotte spearing Asuka into the time keeper’s area looked amazing, and the fact that the barrier didn’t break properly actually made it seem even more brutal.
  • Then there’s the finish…

First of all, these women did a really good job of making it look like they were about to win when they weren’t. Usually in a ladder match it’s pretty obvious when someone’s not about to win, but there were a couple of moments in the last 5 minutes where I thought Charlotte had it in the bag.

However, the main article here is Ronda Rousey, who came out, pushed both Charlotte and Becky off the ladder, leaving Asuka to climb the ladder and win. Before I talk about the interference, I just want to mention how awesome a moment it was when the crowd realised Asuka was about to win, they exploded in cheers and it was beautiful to see Asuka finally get what many thought she should’ve got in April.

Does Ronda’s interference cheapen Asuka’s win? Well yes, it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t. Does this make me mad? Not really. I know a lot of people are quite upset about the finish to this match, and I feel like I should be too, but I’m just not. The match itself was so good that I don’t really mind and Ronda’s actions make perfect sense in the context of what’s been happening over the past month or so.

I’m not quite sure where all this is leading, personally I still hope it’s Becky vs Ronda and Charlotte vs Asuka II, either way it’s going to be an interesting time in the women’s division moving forward.

So there you have it! That was TLC 2018, overall it was a fairly average show, full of ok wrestling and a fantastic main event, not the greatest thing to end the year on, but certainly not the worst either.

Make sure to share this post around on social media, and follow me on Twitter @10ryawoo for more opinions on wrestling and the like. Stick around for the next few weeks as I will be starting to cover my end of year awards for both wrestling and gaming!

Triple Threat Reivew: Scanner Sombre, Hand of Fate 2, Stick Fight: The Game

(Originally Posted Jul 2018)

Welcome back to Triple Threat Review!

This is the series where I pick 3 games from my Steam list semi-randomly, play them, give you my first impressions and score them as either a 1, 2 or 3.

If this is your first time reading one of these articles then please check out the previous edition to find more games.

Now, please scroll down and enjoy the reviews!

Scanner Sombre

Scanner Sombre is one of the games that has been sitting, unplayed, on my Steam list for the longest. I got it in a Humble Bundle around a year ago, not too long after it was released, and I’ve been reluctant to play it ever since. Why? Well, it’s quite simple really, on the game’s store page, the first tag the game has is “horror”. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a total wimp when it comes to the horror genre; in films it doesn’t really bother me, but in games I can’t handle it. However, the laws of random generation picked this game for me to play, so I guess I don’t have much of a choice.

First of all, I was surprised to find that this game was developed by Introversion Software – who made the outstanding Prison Architect – so my interest was piqued since this seemed like quite the leap in genres to make.

The game starts quite simply, you’re in a tent, outside is complete blackness, with a lone light on top of a rock in the distance, so naturally you wander towards it and pick up your scanner. Then the game reveals to you its main gameplay. You are an explorer, who is exploring this cave for as yet unexplained reasons and instead of navigating using light, you use some VR goggles and a scanner to reveal the terrain and represent it in the form of coloured dots.

Straight away, this helps to curb one of the main problems many so-called “walking simulator” games come across, which is giving the player something to do while you’re telling them the story. Normally, just walking through samey looking caves would be quite dull, but because you’re constantly having to work out what the terrain even looks like, and with it being represented in a visually pleasing way, I found that made the game very good at avoiding boredom for the most part.

So what about that horror I was so terrified of? Well…there isn’t really much of it.

Granted, I only got about half way through the game, but in that time, there really hadn’t been much in the way of horror. Pretty early on you come across a figure that looks human, which will creepily turn on the spot to look at you as you move around it, and there’s a small jumpscare a little on from that, but that’s really it.

The game did do a pretty good job of keeping me tense for a while, but eventually that tension faded, sure, having no jumpscares for a while can actually be extremely nerve-wracking, but eventually I’d gone for so long with nothing happening, that I didn’t feel tense anymore and just kept going like normal.

It was at that point, that the game started to lose its legs a bit for me. After a while it began to feel less like I was exploring, and more like I was just going through the motions. I’d wander into an area, scan it, find the exit, rinse and repeat, and towards the end of my time with it, the moments that did try to bring the scares didn’t really have much effect, because I’d already become too comfortable in the world I was exploring.

Not to mention that the environments all began to feel pretty samey after a while. Although the scanning gimmick did keep things fresh for a lot longer than they normally would’ve been, it ran out of steam eventually, and in the last 5 minutes or so, I was pretty bored of it.

That said, I do still want to go back to it, I feel like if I go away from the game for a couple of days before touching it again, then I’ll be able to recapture some of that feeling that pulled me into the game when I first started playing it, and perhaps the second half will be a lot more enthralling than the first.

Overall, while Scanner Sombre isn’t much in the way of a horror game, it’s certainly a pretty solid addition to the walking simulator genre, it’s certainly no Gone Home, but it’s definitely a whole lot better than Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.

Score: 2/3 – OK

Hand of Fate 2

Ok, so I’m cheating a bit with this one.

Hand of Fate 2 is actually a game I’ve already played many hours of, but it came out on Switch this week, and I’m never gonna get a better excuse to talk about it so here’s the review.

The first Hand of Fate is a game that had a genuinely very unique concept, the idea of combining  a board game with more traditional types of gameplay is one that I really think should be explored a lot more, and Hand of Fate really proves the idea has legs.

To be simple about it, you have a counter on the board and you move between cards on the table, each card will have some form of scenario or encounter that you have to deal with, either through quick thinking and timing, or by bashing in some faces. When you enter a combat scenario, instead of doing something like Talisman, where you roll dice, you instead enter a small environment and you directly control your character to fight the enemies.

In addition to this you have to manage your resources, you have your health and gold as standard, but there is also food, which you consume as you move from card to card; and fame, which you gain by completing encounters and is required to use certain items.

While, the original Hand of Fate was a tad limited in the encounters, and began to feel a bit samey after a while, Hand of Fate 2 completely fixes this. There are hundreds of different encounter cards, and while some are similar, most of them have their own unique twist in how to resolve them; with tasks such as following the right card, stopping the wheel or the pendulum in the right place, or some good old-fashioned combat.

It also fixes the sense of pointlessness you had in the first game as well, since you were just beating bosses in some vague attempt to beat the dealer at the game. While in this game, there are many scenarios and different ideas of what your goal is each time you play, one that particularly stood out to me was one where I was informed that in three days, a murder was going to take place and I had to work out who the culprit was and stop them. It gives this great context to your adventure that the first game didn’t have, and it really helped me immerse myself in the world and become invested in the overall story of the game.

You also get a great deal of deck customisation as many encounters will give you tokens that unlock new cards for you to add to future decks, some are items that will appear in shops or as random drops, and others are encounter cards, that you can put in the deck to either help you, or challenge you on your journey.

The only major criticism I have with the game is that the combat is somewhat basic. While you have a few items or abilities on a couple of buttons, generally you just mash the attack button until everything’s dead, stopping only on the odd occasion to block or dodge, while it can be fun, it does feel tedious at times and lacks a general sense of flow or grace.

This doesn’t bog down the game at all however, and isn’t really the main focus of things. The simple fact of the matter is that the core gameplay here is just too fun to put down, it has the sense of excitement that a good board game can bring, and each adventure is short enough that you want to keep diving into it again and again.

Score: 3/3 – Great

Stick Fight: The Game

The idea of a casual fighting game, is one that I don’t really feel has been done very well up until now, the game will either end up being too complex for casual players, or far too simple to be fun. Up until now the only game I can think of that got it right was Gang Beasts; so, when I saw Stick Fight: The Game, I had to take a look at it.

The first thing you notice about the game is the aesthetic, which is of course that of stick fighting flash animations from the early days of the internet, and honestly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long for a high profile one like this to come along, seemed like a definite money maker to me.

Anyway, the actual meat of the game is of course the fighting mechanics, which are pretty damn good for a casual game like this. Personally, I think the mark of a good casual game is something that let’s skillful players do skillful things, while still letting less skilled players do well, and that’s exactly how this combat system feels. When you’re going hand to hand, you will often find yourself just mashing the attack button and doing pretty well, but if you begin to step back and be more smart with your shots and blocks, then you’ll find that you’re able to do even better.

The only major downside is that any real complexity that the combat system has tends to go out the window has soon as weapons come into play. As in every stage, guns and spears and such like will rain from the sky for players to pick up, at which point the game becomes more of a mad scramble than a fight; however, you have the option to turn weapons off if you don’t like it, so it’s not too big of an issue.

One of the most interesting ideas I saw in the game was a pickup that only spawns on certain levels, and turns the player who picked it up into a sort of boss for everyone else to fight (pictured above). I found this to be a really fun way to mix up the established formula of the game, and it’s generally balanced pretty well, and I found it’s fun to play as both the boss and the person fighting it, and can really become a good test of how well you’ve got to grips with the game.

Speaking of certain levels, the majority of levels are very well designed, and there is a great variety of environments to fight on. Be it a pile of precariously stacked boxes, or a giant box that’s constantly rotating, every level adds a unique new layer of complexity to the gameplay that stops the formula from getting boring after you’ve played it for a while.

Although the game is most fun when played locally, it does also feature online matches, and it’s very easy to just jump in and play with randoms, or host your own private session for friends; and most importantly, there is very little in the way of lag. Occasionally I had a couple people jump about the place without explanation, but it was almost always down to my own terrible internet, but when my internet was running smoothly, I didn’t have any problems with online games whatsoever.

Overall, Stick Fight is a great addition to the resurgent “couch game” genre, standing tall next to similar games like Gang Beasts and Towerfall Ascension. I can absolutely see myself pulling this one out when I’m playing games with friends to have a good time.

Score: 3/3 – Great

So there you go! I had a really great time with the games I played this week and I’m hoping that we can keep this good will going into the next one!

Until then please share this around on social media, and follow me on Twitter @10ryawoo and thank you to the wonderful @lauren_cmonster for editing this one for me!