Reseñas recientes de Baines

Simple but relatively short puzzle game that gets pretty cheap during sales.

Bytepath feels like a game that puts concept above gameplay. Starting the game gets an overlong "loading" sequence for such a simple game. Exiting the game requires using a command that is only listed within the middle of the Help screen. The game intentionally eschews quality of life ideas to sell an obtuse mystique.

The game itself is similar to Asteroids, except the screen edges act as walls that damage your ship upon contact. Worse, the playfield is tiny, and quickly becomes flooded with asteroids, enemy ships, and projectiles. While you can slow or boost your speed, your ship is always moving forward. Survival presumably becomes a matter of collecting and keeping as many powerups as possible, which requires constantly killing enemies and picking up the ammo icons they drop.

The giant skill tree feels as much like a parody of Path of Exile's skill tree as it does legitimate game design. The whole game feels something like a bit of a joke given digital form, what would happen if you crossed a simplistic shooter with a Path of Exile style intentionally (over)complicated skill tree and a very basic class/unlock system. At least it is cheap.

While the core "campaign" is built around a permadeath mechanic, you could always just fool around with infinite health in freeride. This has expanded with Workshop support, with modders creating a number of entirely new courses of varying sizes and difficulties that are played in freeride.

Dragon Knight is a somewhat clunky weapon-based beat'em-up. Despite the store description, it is not a rogue-like, it just has a pseudo-permadeath feature. Death sends you back to the start of the game, but you can unlock upgrades that carry over. I'd guess most of the game's popularity comes from there being an R18+ patch available outside of Steam.

Combat is mediocre. It is far from the worst I've seen, but it certainly lacks polish. The game does offer a variety of moves with each of its weapon types, there is a counter-attack system, and there are selectable consumables to use. It at the very least is not a game where your only option is to mash a single attack button. Attacks feel just a bit slow. The different weapon types don't feel that balanced, and again there is a feeling of a lack of polish within how some weapons operate. Hitting enemies displays a giant damage number balloons which can obscure your view of enemies preparing to attack you.

There are issues with the English translation, and the UI itself could use work. Several sentences are worded awkwardly or have grammatical mistakes. At least one weapon displayed its name in kanji rather than English. When using a gamepad, a couple of the command displays use the wrong button icon.

The description for one item says it continually recovers HP. I don't know if the description is wrong or the item is broken, because it doesn't recover HP.

I cannot speak for how it plays with a VR device, but without one I'd say it isn't even worth installing. For a game built entirely around 3D platforming, it gives little feel for where you are in space.

3D platforming has earned a fairly poor reputation. Game devs have implemented various tricks and techniques to make it more viable, more forgiving, and generally more fun. Climbtime offers none of those techniques. There were PS1/N64 era games with better feeling 3D jump controls.

Jump height is analog, but you commit entirely to that height before executing the jump, and your height can be anything from a tiny hope to a multi-story rocket. Jumps are very floaty, but you have almost no control once in the air. All you can do is choose to fall faster, and "faster" is still slow enough to overshoot your target if you don't execute the fast fall well in advance. The whole experience just isn't fun.

The heart of a Dynasty Warriors game is its combat system. DW6 has long held the title for worst Warriors combat system, oversimplified to become the truly mindless button masher. DW9 takes DW6's one-button Renbu system and tries to simplify it further; now you can mash a single button and the game will try to perform the most appropriate attack for the enemy being faced.

To this formula, Koei has added new contextual attacks that you can trigger with another button. Again, no thought is required, as all such contextual attacks are performed with the same button, the game will display the button prompts onscreen, and there is an ample response window. Positioning doesn't even matter, as the game will happily rocket your character 10+ feet to perform the attack. Block counter attacks return, but again they've been rendered mindless with their wide response window. Added to this mix is a poor copy of Arkham Asylum's counter system; stronger attacks by enemy captains and officers will bring up contextual attack prompts that will again rocket your character across the screen to interrupt their attack with a counter attack.

EDIT: After multiple updates, I returned to give the game another try. I've found my controller complaints are a bit less relevant. While the default right analog stick settings are still terrible, you can launch the game, go into the Steam Overlay, go to controller config, click on the right stick, and go to advanced options to both reach a detailed dead zone configuration as well as pick between multiple acceleration curved. With a bit too much time spent tweaking, you can make aiming the bow a more reasonable prospect.

As for the game itself, if anything my opinion has soured even further. DW9 is a boring game. For all its features, there is little interesting to do. Exploring is boring, because navigating isn't interesting nor is there anything interesting to find. Combat is way too easy and way too short to be interesting, particularly for all the time you spend running and riding to your next encounter. Enemy counts are low. Enemies are less of a threat than ever. The few aggressive enemies are undone by the contextual counter system. You have to severely handicap yourself and ignore the majority of the game's systems to see anything approaching a challenge, and even that can still be cheesed.

DW9 is seriously flawed at fundamental levels of its design. It isn't just a terrible DW game, it isn't a good game in general. Even the most mediocre open world games are still more interesting than DW9.

A Smash Bros inspired party brawler that both maintains its own identity and is entertaining.

Kill Team is boringly, painfully mediocre. It does nothing egregiously wrong, but it also does nothing particularly well either. Worse, there is no indication that it ever aimed above the minimum of competence. There isn't any reason to play the game; there are better twin-sticks. (Even some "worse" twin-sticks can be better simply because they at least tried to be interesting even if they failed.)

Level design is boringly functional, not interesting but not quite overly frustrating. Action is bland. Power-ups and perks are unambitious, functional but basic. Melee combat is moderately functional (this is primarily a twin-stick shooter, but some characters theoretically put more focus on melee) but not engaging or satisfying. Action is too often broken up by unnecessary but not quite offensively long cut-scenes, though the game also loves to zoom in the camera on models that weren't meant for close-ups. You can have really good lower poly art, but graphically again the game is just functionally mediocre.

Level design likes to use different elevations, but once you are in a situation more complex than just firing up or down a ramp, the game can have issues tracking targets that are at a different elevation. When dealing with different elevations, you can have situations where you can shoot enemies but they won't shoot you, as well as situations where enemies can shoot you but you can't seem to get your shots to track them.

The game does have some glitches. Even this seems to be mediocre in a barely competent fashion, with annoying issues but seemingly nothing truly crippling.

I wanted to like Tower 57. It is a rather pretty game. It is a game that looks like it received significant effort. That does not counter that the game commits a cardinal sin, it feels sluggish.

You slowly trudge around large levels. Level layout don't have a particular flow, so if you want to explore, you may find yourself slowly backtracking across nearly the entire level through already cleared rooms. There is a dash ability that will move you faster, but that has a cooldown timer.

It isn't just the movement that is slow, though. Tower 57 uses the approach where the basic gun has infinite ammo, but all special weapons have limited ammo (which is refilled by ammo pick-ups.) In Tower 57, the basic gun is punishment. There is no other way to describe it. It not only fires slowly, the individual shots do pathetically little damage. It takes multiple shots to kill even the most basic enemy. The only way to deal damage at anything approaching a reasonable speed is to use the ammo-limited weapons. Even when shooting crates for their money drops, you'll want to be using your special weapons. When searching for destructible walls, you'll probably want to be using your special weapons, and destroying those walls will probably see you using your special weapons as well. It just takes too long to do anything with the basic gun, even low to no-risk tasks. But while the ammo drops seem frequent, if you do use your special weapons that often, you will still hit spots where you run out of ammo and are forced to use the peashooter again.

Of course this assumes you even have a good special weapon. Each character gets a character-specific special weapon, and these guns are not created equally. The Cop's shotgun honestly doesn't feel much better than the peashooter, and its higher damage potential is countered by its abysmal range.

I haven't put much time into the game; it has completely failed to grip me. From what I've read, there are other elements of the design that will annoy me, though, even if I did continue.

Note: I later found out that this game commits another personal sin, Kickstarter backer gameplay exclusives. In this case, there apparently a seventh character (with its own special weapon) that was only available to Kickstarter backers.

Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe could have been an okay if simplistic air hockey game, but it is brought down by an incomprehensible grind, a lack of variety, and weak AI that appear to have unrestricted access to special moves.

While you can face a number of AI opponents, each with their own name and story, they all feel pretty similar to play against outside of their special move. As for that special move, while you have to build a bar through play to activate a special, the AI opponents can trigger them as often as they wish.

As for the grind, words fail to describe it. Matches are giving you around a hundred credits to win, while the cheapest equipment costs 5000 credits. (The game's economy is completely skewed, as it acts like it is a big deal to give you even a handful of credits.) Your basic income of tokens is two per 30 minutes, and they are used to play a completely random card flip game, where every single flip costs a token. (You'll mostly earn tokens through challenges, but there are only so many challenges to complete.) You can easily rack up your total score, but that is the one currency that is completely meaningless. (Score determines your place on the leaderboard, but since it is cumulative over everything you earn, it is only truly a measure of time spent rather than any indication of skill.) Every character has a list of boring "missions" that they want you to complete, but these missions are mostly just playing more regular matches.

For a buck or two, this might be a decent time waster, as long as you didn't care about unlocking anything at all. Except this is a $10 game.