(Originally Posted May 2018)
At the end of my post last week, I hinted at a new format I was working on to try to get some more regular content up here, and here it is: Triple Threat Review.
A friend of mine pointed out to me that, thanks to things like Humble Bundles and Steam sales, I have a lot of games in my Steam library that I bought at some point, but never got round to playing, so I decided to turn them into a bit of a review series. Once a fortnight, I will pick from my Steam list, 3 games to play for an hour or two, and then give you my first impressions on them. These games could be new releases, titles from a few years ago that passed me by, or even retro games I’ve never played before.
As with almost every type of review comes an obligatory scoring system, but with a series as basic as this, I decided to keep the scoring basic as well. Each game, will be given a score of either 1, 2 or 3. 1 being Bad, 2 being OK and 3 being Great.
Now with all the explanation out the way, let’s get into it.
Into the Breach
First up, is Into the Breach. It’s the latest game from Subset Games, who are responsible for FTL: Faster Than Light, a game that I have called one of my favourite games of all time, so I had high hopes going into this. After playing it for about an hour and a half, I can say that it’s certainly got me hooked in the same way FTL did.
The basic premise for ITB is that Earth is being attacked by the discount Kaiju known as the Vek, and you have giant mechs which can fight them; so far, so Pacific Rim. The way they justify you having an infinite number of goes is of course, time travel, which as always brings up a couple of world breaking questions, but we’ve all heard them thousands of times and I’m not going to rattle them off here.
Looking at the gameplay, I’ve been having a lot of fun with it, I’ve played three runs of it so far, and I feel like I’ve been improving at quite a steady rate. On my first playthrough, I found the game very easy to learn, and the tutorial is very good at explaining everything quickly enough so that you don’t get bored, but not so quickly that it all goes right over your head. The game essentially consists of lots of mini turn-based strategy games where, generally the objective is to survive the specified number of turns without all of your mechs dying or “The Grid” going offline.
The Grid is what powers up your mechs, and is powered itself by all of the buildings on the planet, which creates a very interesting balancing act; because while your mechs will heal themselves between battles, they don’t have much health and things go wrong quite quickly when you start losing them. While simultaneously protecting buildings, since they power The Gris, which acts as your persistent health across the whole game. This entire system can make for some very tough decisions, especially when you’re on the ropes and down to very low health.
As such, each turn is extremely tense and very enjoyable, you are told where the enemies are, where they’re going to attack on their turn, and where the next wave of enemies will spawn. Using this information, you essentially have to solve a puzzle of how to take as little damage as possible on the enemy’s turn, by attacking them with your three mechs. The mechanic that I think helps bring this out the most, is the “push” mechanic, as you can see from the picture at the top, the whole game takes place in a grid, most types of attack will also include a mechanic that pushes the targeted enemy one tile in one direction, this allows you to avoid taking damage without having to kill everything on the screen and it adds that extra layer of strategy, that makes this game that fantastic and fun game that it is, and a game I will absolutely be sinking more time into.
Score: 3/3 – Great
Distrust
I went into Distrust not expecting to have a great time, as it seemed to present itself to be some sort of horror game and I don’t do horror very well. So you can imagine my surprise when I loaded it up and instead got an isometric, exploration, puzzle game.
You control a small group of arctic explorers after their helicopter crashes and it’s your job to keep them alive as they make it to safety, while also solving the mystery of the “anomalies” floating about the place. You do this by exploring procedurally generated buildings and scavenging the place for food and fuel to keep warm and fed, while you’re also looking for things that will allow you to overcome obstacles such as locked doors and toxic gas, in order to progress to the next area.
I wasn’t all that into it at first. Things seemed pretty basic, but it eventually picked up a bit and I started to enjoy myself more. The exploration is the main thing that I enjoyed; as much as all of the buildings themselves are fairly similar, what you find each one is interesting, it may be something to help keep you alive, it may be something you need to progress, or it may be a weird item that you have no idea what it does; but either way, the game is able to keep its sense of discovery alive the whole time.
I’m not entirely sure how long the game is, when I booted it up it said I had 6 areas to progress through, but it didn’t make it clear if that was the end of the game or just the first section, and unfortunately I never got to find out as I died near the end of the second area. That’s another thing that concerns me about this game, I played for a little over an hour, and didn’t even get out of the second area, which means you could be looking at upwards of 3 hours per playthrough, which seems a bit long for a Roguelite. The point in these types of games is to learn by failure and lengthy times for each playthrough runs the risk of every death feeling more tedious, since you know you’ve got to play for another couple of hours to get back to where you were when you died.
Speaking of dying, it’s a game where death creeps up you without you noticing it, and then it suddenly jumps you and there’s not really a whole lot you can do about it, unless the Gods of random generation decide you’ve been good this year and gift you a useful item. It didn’t feel like I was slowly being worn down by the harsh conditions, it just felt like everything was fine, until it suddenly wasn’t and then I died.
That being said, I enjoyed my time with the game and I still want to go back for more, but I can’t see myself playing it over and over again unless it starts to show me new ideas in later areas, that make the early game slog worth getting through.
Score: 2/3 – OK
World to the West
Going into World to the West, I had no idea what to expect but I was very pleasantly surprised because, what I got was a light-hearted, beautiful adventure game that I’ve only scratched the surface of in my hour and a half of play.
The game has a total of 4 characters for you to control, each with their own skills and abilities, although I haven’t got the point where I’m introduced to the 4th one yet, so I can’t talk about them, but so far we’ve got: A wizard girl who can teleport and use lightning powers, a small child who likes digging holes, and an adventurer who can hypnotize animals to take control of them.
With multiple characters like this you’d expect there to be a lot of puzzles where you have to use everyone’s abilities to get by, but so far there hasn’t been much of that. Each of the characters seem to have their own separate goals and places to go around the world, only occasionally crossing paths with one another, which so far has been a really good way to establish all of the characters before they team up properly.
What I’ve enjoyed most about this game though is the world, it feels like it’s going to be a Metroidvania style of open world, where you progress through it in a linear fashion, but there are plenty of places where you can find secrets or backtrack when you get new abilities. It’s not nearly to the extent of other Metroidvanias, but it’s certainly in there.
Aside from that, the design of the world is just beautiful, every area has its own feel to it and the simplified graphics really add to the charm that this game has. I love how all of the elements interact with each other, and it keeps surprising me with new things for me to discover; exploration is one of the things I love more than anything else in games, and this has it in spades.
With all this lovely world building, they didn’t skimp out on the gameplay either, all of the puzzles have been well thought out, and very satisfying to solve. There hasn’t been much in the way of difficulty so far, but I would imagine that’s down to me still being early on in the game, I did get stuck a couple of times, but that was more down to me being unobservant, or the game pointing me in the wrong direction.
Overall, I absolutely want to keep playing World to the West, these are characters that I want to know the story of, and I’m interested to see how the game brings all these characters together to create an engaging story, and fun puzzles to solve.
Score: 3/3 – Great
And that’s it! I’d love to hear feedback on what you think of this new format, and let me know what you think of the games if you try them out! Like I said at the start, I’m aiming for this to be a fortnightly series, so share this around and get some interest stirred up before the next one!
Until then please follow me on Twitter @10ryawoo, and my friend @lauren_cmonster, who makes sure these articles aren’t just ramblings that only I understand. I hope to see you again soon!
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