Doom Eternal (PS4) Review

Doom Eternal (PS4) Review

Date Released: 20 March 2020

Date Played: 7 April 2022

Introduction:

As I was playing Doom Eternal, I kept thinking something was wrong with me. After playing Doom reboot back when it released in 2016, I was thrilled to play this sequel.  This enthusiasm was only bolstered when I saw the rave reviews upon the game's release.  Not only was it pretty much universally acclaimed by critics and the public alike, it made many top 10 games of the year list and even has a loyal group of followers that hail it as the best first person shooter of all time.  Needless to say, I felt like I was doing something wrong while I was playing.  I kept dying repeatedly when I would dive into the fray against Hell's legions, I found myself constantly out of ammo, the story was convoluted and full of too much terminology, there were long platforming segments that felt out of place, and there was a sort of resentment and distain building up inside of me as I played.  I couldn't put my finger on it at first, and would find myself playing for an hour and then being thankful when I could find a stopping spot so I could go play a different game.  It took me months to work my way through Doom Eternal and in the meantime I completed 11 other games.  

In a moment of frustration, I decided to do an internet search to see if there was anyone out there that felt the same as me, and unsurprisingly, there is a significant selection of gamers that felt exactly the same as I do.  After watching several video reviews and essays detailing the flaws of this game, it finally came together in my mind why this game fails to live up to the standards of 2016 Doom and falls rather flat in terms of game design.

Gameplay:

Doom 2016 was a fast-paced slaughter fest where you played as a god-like superhuman called the Doom Slayer who wants nothing more than to annihilate the denizens of Hell. You would enter these mini-combat arenas that were filled with waves of enemies and you just went to town having your way with them.  After dealing enough damage to an enemy, it would flash and allow you to perform a glory kill.  This would allow you to refill some of your health while you strung together kill after kill after kill.  The enemies stood no chance and you were a literal killing machine. It felt almost liberating being so overpowered in that game that you were essentially untouchable.  All along the way you find these bits of lore that the demons have written detailing how you are their coming apocalypse and how much they fear you.  It was an amazing power trip and I had a really good time with it.  

This time around, you play as the same character with basically the same premise. Like all of the other Doom games, Eternal is a first-person shooter where you explore different environments while searching for collectables and upgrades until you enter a combat arena where you square off against waves of demons. The gory and gruesome glory kills from Doom 2016 return that will allow you to refill your health while you battle.  You still have your array of weapons like the shotgun, chain-gun, BFG, rocket launcher, etc., and they all have multiple upgradeable firing modes and secondary abilities.  You can jump, grapple, and use launching pads to bounce all around the combat arenas that are more designed as a fun playground for combat.  At first, it seems like a continuation of Doom 2016 with more of a good thing.  However, everything isn't exactly as it seems this time around.  This leads me to my first issue with Doom Eternal.

1) Doom 2016 was so good and well thought out that the developers, ID software, didn't know what to do to improve upon it so they just started adding a bunch of new abilities.

Not only do you have to glory kill enemies to refill health, now you also have to chainsaw them to refill your limited ammo.  The chainsaw uses gasoline that you can find scattered around the levels. In order to kill larger enemies, you need a full gas tank of fuel to saw them apart, but lesser enemies will have to be killed constantly to keep your other weapons loaded with ammunition.  Luckily, the chainsaw always has a minimum amount of fuel that will replenish over time, but you'll need to keep an eye on its timer.  You also have a flamethrower that also works on a timer that you use to make enemies drop armor.  There's the super punch that allows you to instantly melee kill enemies if it's charged up.... There's the grappling hook that pulls you toward enemies, multiple shot modes for every weapon, multiple type of grenades you can cycle through that are also on a timer, a sword that you can collect charges for to instantly kill enemies, and probably several more that I'm forgetting. 

Overwhelmed? Me too. This is a whole lot of mechanics at your disposal that you would think would be really fun to use after you get the hang of things, but they honestly feel like they get in the way of what would make the game fun. This leads me to my second issue with the game.

2) Doom Eternal wants you to play it the way IT wants.  Not the way you want.

In Doom 2016, you got thrown into these awesome combat arenas where you felt like this overpowered machine that could just mow over waves of enemies in the most awesome ways possible.  You were constantly trying out new weapons, getting in close and killing enemies, and stringing together these awesome kill chains.  In Eternal you're constantly low on resources to the point where you spend a lot of your time running AWAY from enemies instead of running TOWARD them. You run out of ammo, so you can't kill anything.  So you have to run around until your fuel for your chainsaw recharges.  Then, you chainsaw an enemy, get some ammo and dive back in.  But you take a few hits and your health is low, so you try to glory kill an enemy to get more health, but you get swarmed in the mean time so you run away.  You use your flamethrower to get some armor to stay in the fight, but now you're low on ammo again, but your fuel hasn't recharged.  You get low on health, but you can't damage the enemy because you have no way to deal damage with no bullets, so you run away from them waiting for your fuel to recharge so you can get some ammo... so you can shoot them... so you can glory kill them to get more health... rinse... repeat...   It starts to feel more like a puzzle game where you need to figure out the correct order to use your skills and which optimal weapons to use in every fight if you want success.  This leads you to dying a lot where you're thrown into situations that seem overwhelming unless you already know what's coming.  This leads me to the 3rd fault of the game.

3) The game feels like you need to memorize the combat encounters rather than improvise your way through them.

That's what made Doom 2016 so fun.  All the mindless killing and the awesome flow state you get into when you're in the thick of the battle.  Now, there are enemies that appear half-way through combat encounters that summon infinite baddies (the Archvile for you old school fans) until they're eliminated and there are totems that buff all the enemies that are hidden around the arena.  Both of these you'll have to search for in a frenzy to destroy them before things get too out of hand.  Almost every time one of these archviles appeared, I died because I had no idea they were coming and flooded the area with too many enemies.  I got tired of repeating the same combat scenarios over and over again until I slowly memorized where everything was and the correct order to kill everything.  It was exhausting.  It artificially adds a lot more difficulty to the game that's rather off-putting.  A lot of people will say the game is "harder."  It's not really much harder, it's just a lot less forgiving if you don't play each scenario in it's most optimal way.

I guess the developers realized how demoralizing these combat encounters were because they decided to book end them with a ton of platforming segments. These were the worst part of the game and almost made me quit several times. They often require the use of swinging from suspended poles, dashing through the air, hitting air currents, and wall grappling and climbing.  Many times, I would waste several of my extra lives during these platforming segments that were supposed to be easy... but I never felt like the controls were good enough.  This is the next issue.

4) Precision platforming in first person needs better controls than Doom Eternal provides.

Having to swing from bar to bar, dash to a crumbling wall, jump off it and dash through the air a number of times before going through a ring to replenish your dashes, etc., feels like a parkour obstacle course and would be better suited for a 3rd person action game rather than Eternal.  It just never feels like it works and I'm shocked that such a large portion of the game is devoted to it.  Not only that, but there are some swimming segments in the game that evoked an audible groan and eyeroll from me. I like exploring in Doom.  In fact, that's one of the big draws of the franchise.  But, I don't want to Ninja Warrior my way over giant bottomless pits in every level.

The last issue I have with the game doesn't involve gameplay.  The game requires a day one patch to add a bunch of content and Bethesda, the publishers, require you to make a Bethesda account before they'll let you play the game (even in single player) unless you completely disconnect your console from the internet.

5) Don't add DRM to single-player games.

Some of us gamers go back and replay their games 5, 10, even 20 years later.  You don't need to add online components to prevent players from accessing the single player content years down the road.  Bethesda's recent practices with requiring you to be online to play single player games has been so bad that it's actually deterring me from buying anymore of their games. What are you supposed to do when the online servers go down a few years from now.  At least you can still access the game by turning off your internet connection, but you shouldn't even have to do that.

In general, the game isn't as much fun as Doom 2016 and feels very tedious and like a chore to play. When I play Doom, I want to charge into the fight and wreck some demons.  I don't want to run away from combat waiting for abilities to recharge and looking for weak enemies to kill to heal myself or to get ammo.

Story:

Like I mentioned, you once again play as the Doom Slayer.  After the events of the reboot, you find yourself on a space station and realize that Earth is being consumed by Hell.  You have to find all of the Hell Priests that are hidden not only on Earth, but also in other dimensions and kill them to prevent all of this from happening.  It's a serviceable story and does a good enough job of carrying the action forward.  But, unlike the reboot, this time you're inundated with a ton of lore that's full of zany terminology that recounts the history of the Earth, the demons, the Doom Slayer, space exploration, and alien race, energy consumption, and a whole bevy of ideas that ID software have decided to include to try to fill in every nook and cranny of all the cracks in their story.

6) Show me the story, don't tell me.

There must be over 100 pages of text that you can collect in the game that recount all of this complicated information about what's going on and how everything came to be.  Now, don't get me wrong, I like lore in games.  The Dark Souls games don't tell much of a story but do some fantastic world building with the lore you gain from the clues you find around the world.  Even Doom 2016 did a great job building the mystique of the Doom Slayer by leaving fragments of information hidden around the maps.  But, this time ID software jumped the shark with the amount of information they dumped on us.  It feels like all of this should have been compiled into some sort of fictional history of DOOM and published as a novel (a la Tolkien's The Simarillion) or something similar.  Most reviews I read and watched said they stopped paying attention to the story after a while.  I'm no exception.

Presentation:

There's not much to find fault with in this case.  Doom Eternal is probably the best looking of all of the PS4 games.  I was playing this game at the same time I was playing some PS5 games, and Doom Eternal holds up against them and even looks better in a lot of cases.  The graphics and textures are sharp and clean and the game runs at a pretty steady framerate.  Some of the areas like the hub area between levels and Exultia are beautiful and a nice departure from the heaviness of the rest of the game.

The music is industrial with a bit of a Djent flair and is right in line from what you would expect from a Doom game.  It serves its purpose, but I didn't especially find it memorable or catchy. This is coming from a life-long metal fan, but I found the riffs and chord progressions to be banal and almost intentionally pedestrian. At times the music lifted the experience, but mostly it felt phoned in.

Conclusion:

Doom Eternal is a great looking game that is bloated and inferior to the game that came before it.  The combat isn't as fun and has a really repetitive gameplay loop that sucks all the enjoyment and enthusiasm right out of me.  I could rarely play more than an hour at a time without getting frustrated or bored and it took me many sessions over several months to finish the experience.  While the game did start to pick up in the second half as I became more experienced with the mechanics and reconciled myself to play the way the game wanted me to, it never reached the grand highs that the critics lauded in their reviews.  It's still a decent game and there is some fun to be found there, but it doesn't hold a candle to Doom 2016.

Final Status: Beaten

Final Score: 7/10 (disappointing)

 

Raiden III (PS2) Review

Raiden III (PS2) Review

Date Released: 17 April 2007

Date Played: 16 February 2022

Introduction:

Raiden III is actually the fourth game game in the legendary, but highly overrated, Raiden Series.  Developed by MOSS, a company formed from the remnants of Seibu Kaihatsu (the creator of the original Raiden) this was the first game from the series to make it to the Playstation 2 where it was published by modern shovelware peddlers, UFO Interactive Games. It is almost a direct port of the arcade version of the game but does have some additional content to fill out the package. While sporting higher quality graphics, it isn't much of a departure from the earlier entries in the series and fails to innovate or change the gameplay in any meaningful way.  It was met with mediocre reviews from both the critics and the fans alike, and while it may have a few people out there who praise it, it's generally seen as nothing special by today's standards.

Gameplay:

Raiden III is a vertical shmup just like all of the other games in the series.  This time around you can only play as one ship (the red one) through the games 7 stages.  Luckily, there are 7 different difficulties this time around ranging from Practice all the way to Very difficult (much harder than the arcade version of the game).  As is standard with the series, your ship is very slow and chunky and the enemy bullet patterns are lightning fast.  If you've ever played one of these games before, you'll know that it's not the sort of game where you're supposed to react to the enemies and bullets, but rather memorize where they're going to be so your ship can be somewhere else.  In a bit of a departure the game has incorporated some danmaku elements to give the game a bit of a bullet hell feel with large swarths of bullets that you have to weave your way through.  Unfortunately, it tries to live as both a simple throwback to the original Raiden while adding the thicker waves of bullets and it leaves the game as feeling as though it's serving two masters but failing at both.  It never really gains a sound footing in the aspect and it's very obvious.  Your ship just doesn't have the manuverabilty that's required to make quick tap dodges like the game wants you to do.  This might be slightly easier with an arcade stick, but on the standard PS2 controller, you're going to be having fits.

Also missing is the Raiden series' ability to scroll the screen a little to the left and right as you're playing.  I know this is a much maligned feature because of the enemies that can hide right off screen and wait for you to scroll over towards them only for them to pop out of nowhere and blast you from behind with a bullet, thus ruining your run.  That means that this time you're confined to just the narrow vertical portion of the screen that you can see all of the time.  Not having any enemies hiding off the left or right of the screen is a blessing, but the space to which you're afforded feels very confined and claustrophobic.  Many of the enemy patterns push you to one side of the screen and make you feel like you don't really have the room you need to maneuver.  This also makes the game feel less like a Raiden game overall.  

You have 3 shot types that can be powered up or switched between by grabbing one of the 3 colored orbs that hover from fallen enemies around the screen.  The first is the red orb that's your spread shot, the blue orb which is a focused and powerful laser, and sadly the teal orb which is another laser that is hard to direct and control but is more powerful than the blue laser.  Missing is the the classic purple orb that gives the lock-on laser that is probably the most well known element of the entire franchise.  It's a total shame that it's not here and I feel like the remaining weapons are too boring and lack any sort of punch to make you feel like you have any real power in the game. Each orb will slowly cycle through the three colors as it floats around the screen, and if you pick up multiples of the same colored orb, your shot will become more powerful and pack a bigger punch. You also have 3 sub-weapons that continually fire with your normal shot while you hold down the button.  There are the missiles that are most powerful and fire straight ahead, the homing missiles that are weak but good about picking up straggler enemies you may have missed, and the new option, radar missiles, which are a combination of the two previous types and are a little stronger and home a little bit, but not completely.  Sadly, when any of these powerup orbs drop, they can be quite the challenge to collect because of the absurdly slow speed of your ship.  They also tend to hover towards the top part of the screen, enticing you to venture upwards to grab them and meet your certain doom.  To make matters worse, the orbs will also be stuck hovering on the screen where you don't want to collect them because you may not want to change your shot type, so you spend a lot of time avoiding the orbs until they cycle into the color that won't screw you over before you have to quickly collect them.  It's very frustrating and avoiding the powerups is sometimes as important as collecting them.  I rarely like this in any shmup, but it's far more grevious in Raiden because of the labor intense process of chasing down the orbs with your sluggish ship.  Finally, you're given a standard screen clearing, and life saving, bomb.  An extra one of these is usually dropped in each stage and knowing when to use them to save your hide from a lightning quick series of bullets from a boss is something you'll be dealing with constantly.

As you play through the games 7 levels, you'll encounter a dull and washed out city, and bland and brown ravine, a shipping port, an actually cool looking outer space level with a nice nebula in the background, and grey enemy fortress, another outer space level, and an enemy planet that's mainly just a field of brown grass.  It is all standard Raiden stuff, but feels especially bland in it's color choices and looks like a brown and grey mess most of the time. 

There are also score multipliers for chaining together kills in rapid succession, but they only go up to a 2X multiplier.  You can also collect various fairies and golden orbs for bonuses if you're playing for score.  In addition to this, you have the ability to do a score attack, boss rush, start from any level for practice, and even tackle the one and only new idea in the game.  This new idea is called Double Play and lets you play the game as 2 ships simultaneously.  You control the red ship with the left analog stick and fire with L1 and bomb with L2.  Likewise, you control the blue ship with the right side of the controller.  It's an interesting idea for sure, but not something your average gamer is going to be able to master without some serious practice.

Presentation:

Raiden III doesn't look very good and is the first in the series to begin the annoying trend of having chunky 3D rendered graphics instead of sprites.  In this PS2 version, the resolution seems strange no matter what you do in the display options.  Everything feels like it has too high contrast and is jammed in this strange and cramped vertical aspect ratio.  You have the ability to zoom in a bit, but it cuts off the top and bottom portions of the screen which you need to be able to see.  In the arcade, the game was displayed in tate mode with a proper vertically sized screen.  However, on the home port, it is put onto a 4:3 aspect ratio on a standard CRT tv and it is too squished with too much empty space on either side of the playfield.  All of this leads to the text in the game feeling too small and the bullets appearing very tiny and difficult to see.  If you're used to gaming on a modern tv, this game is going to feel like you're playing on a cellphone in portrait mode from about 4 feet away; and heaven forbid you try to plug your PS2 into a modern flat screen.  The game would probably look like a 3 inch wide strip going down the center of the screen with 90% of the rest of the screen acting as black bars on either side and enough input lag to make the game impossible.  Personally, I played the game on a 32" Sony Trinitron (the holy grail retro gaming CRTs) from a gaming chair just a few feet away and I was really struggling to make out what was happening on the screen.  Sadly, I don't know what the developers could have done to remedy this.  It's just the difference in sitting a foot away from an arcade monitor vs sitting much further away at home on your tv.  

The music in this game is absolutely terrible and some of the worst I can remember in any shmup that I've ever played.  It's just trance based techno that repeats the same phrases and beats over and over again.  It's completely devoid of any hooks or melody.  Heck, most of the songs don't even change chords and just hang out on the tonic chord the entire time.  There are lots of buzzes and whistle synth sounds that were cool at the time, but feel too much like you're hanging out in a laser tag place 20 years ago.  It's abysmal and brings nothing to the table to improving your gaming experience.  If it weren't so forgettable, I would almost describe it as "painful" to listen to.  

Conclusion:

Raiden III is one of the worst in the series.  It's extremely boring and is missing some of the best features that the series usually offers and is known for.  Despite it having "modern" graphics for the time, it manages to look worse than the games that came before it and markedly awful soundtrack rounds out the whole mediocre experience.  MOSS, the developers, continue these trend in both Raiden IV and Raiden V, but at least in those games it they try to innovate somewhat with more features and new mechanics.  This time around, they just make the same game that they had already made, gave it 3d graphics, removed the scrolling left and right, and took away the coolest and most well known weapon in the game. The one and only feature that is the standout of this game is the Double Play one, but sadly, it's not something your average player is going to get much use out of.  

Overall, Raiden III doesn't really do anything to stand out and doesn't feel good enough to be worth your time.  If you're in the mood to play a vertical shmup, you have countless better and more inspired options.  These types of games are supposed to addictive so that you pump in another quarter in the arcade or you try to make it just a little further towards that 1 credit clear.  At no point playing this game, did I really have any emotions or feelings other than, "I want this music to go away."  

Final Status: Beaten

Final Score: 5/10 (very mediocre and boring.

 

Fast Striker (PS4) Review

Fast Striker (PS4) Review

Release Date: 16 October 2018

Date Played: 29 January 2022

Introduction: 

Fast Striker started out as a homebrew game developed by NG.Dev for the NeoGeo MVS in 2010.  Shortly afterwards, it was ported to the Dreamcast (once again as a homebrew) before getting an official port to the PS4 in 2018.  EastAsiaSoft published the game and released it as a physical edition that was met with middle of the road reviews from both the critics and the public alike.  I played it originally in March of 2019 before deciding to revisit it again and wasn't surprised that my opinion hadn't really changed from that of the critics or even myself from my prior experiences with it.  It's a competent vertical shmup that plays well, has a few interesting ideas, and can even be a little fun. But, it definitely has the "homebrew" feel that so many of NG. Dev's games suffer from and you can feel how simple and barebones it is right from the onset.

Gameplay:  

Fast Striker is your basic vertically scrolling shmup.  You have a standard shot that fires upwards as you repeatedly tap the fire button (I hate having to do this) that becomes a focus shot when held down.  Just like with Cave games, you maintain your speed when tapping and slow down greatly when focus firing.  This will allow you to dodge various bullet patterns with adjustable speed as needed.  In addition to this, you also have a reverse shot to take out any enemies approaching you from the rear.  Bombs are absent from the game, but you are given several shields that will make you invulnerable and even able to crash into enemies for damage if you're so inclined.  Your firepower can be upgraded a couple of levels by destroying one of the spacemen floating around in the level and collecting the powerup he drops.  If you're fully powered up, he will drop a much needed additional shield.  Making sure to always destroy these spacemen, which can be difficult sometimes because they take quite a few shots to take down and tend to zip all around the screen as they take damage, is essential because you'll be using your shields very often to circumvent the very quick and thick bullet patterns that are thrown at you.  These bullet patterns are an odd mix of Raiden style that are super fast mixed with more danmaku style slow patterns that you have to carefully weave your way through.  This can be difficult as your ship is rather on the large side and can be a bit clunky to fit in between the gaps.  Sometimes, these patterns are a bit too much to handle and don't feel very well designed as they seem virtually impossible to dodge. You can tell the developers were intending for you to save your shields for these moments.  Sadly, this turns the game into more of a memorization exercise of when to use your shields for invulnerability rather than a skill test of dodging bullets. These sort of "memorizer" games can be fun at times, and Fast Striker is no different. But, don't go into the game hoping on your dodging skills to carry you the whole way.  

The gimmick of this game comes with the character select system.  There are no independent character select screens and difficulty screens.  Instead, each difficulty is tied to each of the three different characters and is focused around their play style.  This includes the scoring system as well as the tactics you'll need to employ to succeed.  The first of the characters is Popo, a blue robot, who is assigned to the Novice difficulty.  He has a spread shot for when you tap the fire button that focuses itself when you hold down the button.  He's very weak, but has the easiest difficulty on the levels, so it balances out.  As you kill enemies, they will drop star tokens that you can collect to increase your score multiplier and also your difficulty rank.  You play through the first 5 stages with this character before receiving a message telling you to try on Normal Mode.

The second character is a green guy called Max Speed (...sigh) and he plays much the same way as Popo except your firepower is greatly increased.  The playstyle is flipped with the tap being your spread shot this time around, and the focus attack being a very powerful barrage of lasers.  At first, this character feels much easier than Popo because you plow through enemies so much faster, but the difficulty catches up to you quickly and will give you a run for your money.  You'll certainly be doing a lot more dodging in this mode and you'll have to start memorizing patterns of you want to survive. You'll be collecting symbols with radiation warnings on them instead of stars this time around, but the scoring system is pretty much the same.  After clearing the 5th stage, you'll have access to the much, much harder 6th, and final stage of the game.

The third character is a pink female named Chloe Valentine and her difficulty level is known as Maniac.  Her attack style is very similar to the green guy, but she doesn't collect shields from spacemen.  Instead, you have a gauge at the bottom of the screen that fills up when you collect her scoring tokens and once it's full you'll get an extra shield.  This time around your score multiplier is on a timer and you'll have to continually collect score tokens before the short timer reaches zero.  Of course, the difficulty in this mode is much more difficult and will be a feat to 1 credit clear even for a very skilled player.

The final mode is called Omake, and is brutally difficult.  You'll be playing with a pallet swapped version of the green guy, but with the attack style of the pink girl.  Since the bullets are so fast and dense in this mode, you won't be required to collect any score tokens and your multiplier is now on a timer that is tied to killing enemies in quick succession.  It's the most fun mode by far, I just wish it wasn't the most difficult because there's no way to practice it other than playing the game from the beginning.

To help you out, you can get extends at certain point totals (they very by difficulty) and extra credits based on how many times you have continued over all of your attempts.  These extra credits max out at 9, but should be enough for you to credit feed through Novice and Normal if you put in some effort.  Still, if you want to make it through Maniac or Omake, you're going to need to put in some real practice because not even 9 credits is enough to make it easy on yourself. These modes would have be a lot more fun if there was a stage select or training mode to help you learn to route and memorize the levels.  Having to start a shmup from the beginning each time you want to make a little progress on it is a recipe for frustration and a great way to overstay your welcome.

One other theme of the game is environmental hazards during the levels.  More than half of the levels are focused around weaving your way through patterns of blocks, giant ships that move in formation around the screen, flashing laser walls, and indestructible orbs that continually spew streams of bullets at you.  These sorts of mechanic are pretty common in both vertical and horizontal shmups, but this time around, they feel a little excessive since most of the stages have them whereas in most other games that employ them you might only encounter them occasionally. 

Presentation:

Fast Striker isn't much to look at.  It was originally designed to be played on a console that was developed in 1989 and it really shows.  While many games for the NeoGeo have gorgeous sprite work and stunning uses of color that were remarkably advanced for the time and were essentially equal to what you'd find in an actual arcade, Fast Striker instead opts for Prerendered CGI backgrounds with chunky ship and enemy sprites. The backgrounds, while done well and impressive to see on a NeoGeo are very basic and monotonous.  They lack any sort of color and make the whole game have this sort of washed out look that really isn't very appealing.  The first stage you'll fly over a grey city, the second stage is a grey tunnel, the third stage is another grey tunnel with some blue accents.  Stage 4 mixes things up by having you fly through black space with a single planet in the background.  Stage 5 is a return to another grey tunnel, and finally stage 6 has you flying over a bundle of cables.  It's really, really boring and uninspired but you can tell that it was just the best the NG. Dev could do.  After all, this was done as a passion project for two guys who were struggling to fit CGI graphics on a system designed for sprites and limited memory.  In addition to this, the enemies are usually just blobby shapes or generic space ships that don't really stand out and all of the bosses are just a giant space ship or something like it.  Overall, the presentation is very generic and lackluster and isn't going to win any awards in the art design department.  Luckily, the game runs at a smooth 60fps so, you're not going to be inhibited by choppy gameplay.  

In addition to the boring art style, you're also given an even more boring techno/trance soundtrack.  It sounds like all of NG.Dev's other games and rather than amping up the intensity of your gaming session, it instead lulls you into a sort of drowsiness that only serves to exacerbate the boredom you'll experience by the game's very dull visuals.  Just like the backgrounds of the game, the music is very repetitive and doesn't have much going for it in terms of originality or catchiness.

Conclusion:

Fast Striker is an ok vertical shmup that is a little too barebones. I commend NG.Dev for trying to do something new with the whole difficulty and game mechanics being tied to specific characters idea.  But, sadly, instead of this adding some novel content in the game it actually makes you feel more limited in your options.  The game would have been better served by sticking to the standard structure that well all know to work and letting us pick our preferred character, difficulty, and scoring mechanics independently.  

The gameplay and scoring is pretty fun and controlling the ships feels nice and fluid, but the bullet speed and patterns are a bit unbalanced and too focused on you having to rely on your shields.  Also, there's just too many environmental hazards that you have to fidget around with while trying to kill enemies and avoid their bullets. It often makes the game feel puzzle based like Ikaruga... but not nearly as well thought out or good and these feel like obstacles that are getting in the way of your fun rather than the awesome set pieces the developers were aiming for.  Sadly, the visuals and music really bring the game down a good bit. It's hard to get really invested in the game when the overall package looks so bland and amateurish.  If NG.Dev had stuck to a more classic NeoGeo look when developing this game, I could see it as being an above average shooter.  As it stands, its just an OK shmup wrapped up in a very ugly and pedestrian package.  

Final Status: Beaten

Final Score: 6/10 (ok)

 

Aces of the Luftwaffe: Squadron (PS4) Review

Aces of the Luftwaffe: Squadron (PS4) Review

Release Date: 11/16/2017

Date Played: 7/2/2021

This game is the definition of a Euroshmup in every sense of the word. It's a budget release and has the feel of a mobile game. This isn't surprising considering the developer, Handy Games, has a rather extensive track record of making mobile games. Even more surprisingly, this game received a physical release with all of the DLC included on disc. While this game isn't great and there are certainly more deserving titles who haven't received at physical release, I do commend Handy Games for putting out a product that you can actually put on your shelf.

You play as a team of fighter pilots returning to the US after WWII only to discover the skies have been invaded by Nazi planes. Surprise! Your job is to shoot them down over the course of 25 levels of wide-screen vertical scrolling shmup action. These levels are broken up into 5 campaigns of 5 levels each. There is a story of a bunch of Nazi commanders and their crazy ships who you have to dispatch before finally killing the big bad boss. The player's ship models look pretty good and have a nice design for being so basic and traditional. The backgrounds are very plain, but enemy bosses have a really nice and bizarre design that is usually centered around some theme like an eagle, a scorpion, train, boat, flying saucer. They are all pretty intricate and nice to look at and have a cool spin on the sprite work you would see in the Metal Slug franchise. Obviously, that was a huge influence on the design of this game. There are a lot of cut scenes in this game with character portraits that look straight out of a mobile phone game. They look very cheap and cartoony in a way that is very unappealing. These cut scenes are fully voiced, but the voice actors are clearly not native English speakers and they have very, very heavy German accents. There's nothing quite like hearing a guy that sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to voice a burly cowboy from Texas. It's all very painful to listen to and the translations aren't great to begin with which leads to a lot of awkward dialog. While it teeters on the, "so bad it's good" category, it never really gets there and feels more "cringey" than campy. These constant cut-scenes and their dialog do a lot to take you out of the action and make the experience more tedious than it needs to be.

The gameplay has an interesting spin that I haven't seen before. You play as a squad of 4 different characters that fly in formation. There's the ace pilot, the butch cowboy, the energetic sidekick, and the snarky female mechanic. They are all controlled simultaneously but mostly function in a passive sense. Each of these characters are leveled up individually and have their own skill tree. These skill trees add more health, firepower, active and passive abilities, drop rates, etc. While this is a cool idea which I do like... and it serves to motivate you to keep playing, but it's the hallmark of poor shmup design and a key component of most Euroshmups. Unfortunately, the squad formation takes up a lot of real estate on the screen and is a huge target for the enemy. Each of the 4 characters has their own health bar and if any of them other than the main pilot are shot down , they drop out of the fight until a cooldown timer completes. This happens quite frequently, but luckily the cooldown timer is pretty forgiving and they return to the action rather quickly. The enemy placement and bullet patterns within the levels is very poorly thought out and not interesting at all. Truthfully, it's some of the worst I've ever seen and looks to be just copied and pasted over and over again. Often the enemies will just fly in a grid formation and shoot straight ahead like a blanket. You're supposed to use your upgrades to tank the damage rather than learning routs and patterns to avoid them. The enemies never really shoot at you. Instead they just cover the screen in bullets and the developers rely on your upgrades to help sort out the mess. While playing, you pick up many different pickups that increase your firepower. You'll have homing missiles, flame throwers, chain guns, lasers, and more. Unfortunately, these all just come in a predetermined pattern and there's no strategy other than just getting more and more overpowered. To top things off, these upgrades have limited ammo. So, if you don't pick up the next upgrade in time, you revert down a level. This is such a bad design choice. Because of this very cookie cutter gameplay loop, the game becomes very monotonous very quickly. The mobile phone game feeling starts to shine through and that mindless grinding feeling sets in.

In an attempt to counteract the staleness of the game, the developers added in an extremely idiotic feature where every member of your squad has some sort of chronic ailment that throws a wrench into the gameplay. The main pilot has "motion sickness" that causes his plane to jerk around. If you move too quickly while sick, you'll lose health. The Texan has road rage and will occasionally go crazy and start smashing into things all over the screen. This includes you and the rest of your team. The sidekick has narcolepsy and will randomly just fall asleep and you have to defend him from enemies in the most stupid escort mission ever. Finally, the female mechanic (and healer of the group) is afraid of heights and will just fly off the screen at random times in the game. All of these are very frustrating and add a very unenjoyable element to the game. Rather than adding more difficulty or acting as a set piece to break up the repetitive action, they just serve to act as more of an annoyance than anything. They are predetermined by level, but there is one in EVERY level, so it's something you're constantly dealing with. According the peanut gallery of the internet, this is one of the most voiced complaints of the game... and with good reason.

To help with the blankets of enemy bullets and large hitbox of your squad, you're given a lot of lives, health, healing, bombs, and other tricks for staying alive. This is all imperative because your squad is so huge and there is often no possible way to avoid damage. A lot of the boss levels are poorly designed as well with little strategy and most of the screen being kill zones (I'm looking at you scorpion boss). This annoyance is lessened by the cool design of the boss' visuals. At least you have something nice to look at while you're on the verge of rage quitting. To overcome the poor design, you're supposed to grind the other levels to upgrade your squad and overpower the enemy. Grinding these levels and upgrades is made more unfun because of the somewhat frequent and long load times. Playing the same level over and over with boring patterns is hard enough, but constantly having to wait between every try is excessive.

So, what's good about this game? Upgrading your squad is fun and unlocking new abilities makes the game more enjoyable. It's nice to get overpowered and plow through everything. It certainly reeks of the mobile game dopamine rush you get from constantly locking new items and abilities. Also, the sound design of the game is fantastic. Everything is recorded and mixed extremely well. The music isn't very good or memorable, but it sounds amazing. At times it even has an epic flair that wouldn't be out of place in a big budget movie. The sound effects are good and punchy as well. I also like the concept of the game with the surprise Nazi attack. As I mentioned earlier, the game does feel cheap in its presentation... but it does have a sort of charm that is endearing.

This version of the game also has DLC included on disc called Nebelgeschwader where you can play as the... Nazis. That was a bold decision. Hopefully, they become traitors and turn over to the other side at some point during the game. I'm curious to know, but I don't want to put any more time into the game because the gameplay is so repetitive and a grind fest. I did spend about a half hour with it. While it was a more interesting group of characters, it seemed like a lot more of the same. It was time to move on.

I was able to beat the standard game in Normal mode with about half my time spent grinding for upgrades. The platinum trophy in this game seems very doable, but after too many hours spent with the game... and only being about 25% of the way to hitting all the trophies, I couldn't even fathom playing any more. You can really tell that this is basically a smartphone game through and through. The grindiness, lazy design, and budget forward look of this game are all huge turn offs and the clunky gameplay doesn't do much to help it. It's just very mediocre not only as a shmup, but as a game in general. I can't say that I would recommend this one to very many people.

Final Status: Beaten

Final Score: 5/10