Kholat (PS4) Review

 Kholat (PS4) Review

Release Date: March 8, 2016

Date Played: October 11, 2021

Up next on Horror Month 2021 is Kholat. Developed by Polish Developer IMGN.PRO. I added this one to my wish list after I saw Radical Reggie recommend it on a pickups video he did.  It sat on my wishlist for a good long while until it finally went on sale in the UK for $16.49 with free shipping.  I imported it and it sat on the shelf for a couple of years before being randomly selected to play.

You play as an investigator who is following the steps of the 10 Russian hikers that went missing during the Dyatlov Pass Incident in 1959.  It's a true story where their camp was destroyed and they cut their way out of their tent only to be discovered dead in their underwear many yards away.  They had cuts on their bodies and appeared to have the daylights scared out of them.  Many mysteries surround the case and a lot of them are still unanswered to this day.  There are plenty of supernatural and Earthly explanations theorized over the last decades and the story continues to fascinate a lot of people. Just reading the Wikipedia article of this strange event is fascinating and seems like the perfect setting for a horror game. I would consider myself to have a mild interest about the situation and was excited to try the game.  

From the title screen you're welcomed by magnificent music in the form of sparse piano accompanied by swelling strings and wistful female singling. It really evokes a sense of melancholy and uneasiness. It's truly spectacular and couldn't fit the game any better. The rest of the music in the game is also great and is used very well.  It is often playing and is the real star of the show.  On top of this is narration by none other than Sean Bean.  He of course performs wonderfully as do the other voice actors that were used to narrate the game.  

As for the game itself, it's a horror based exploration game.  It's kind of in that walking simulator genre, but is actually based more on an orienteering mechanic.  You're given a map, compass, and several sets of coordinates and are supposed to go investigate the 10 locations the hikers visited before that great tragedy befell them.  You can't see your location on the map and have to orient yourself from the clues you find and your surroundings.  Now, I'm just going to come right out and say it, I absolutely hate navigating around in this game.  I know how to use a map and a compass, but you normally don't have to use those in mountain passes that act more like mazes than open areas.  The vast majority of the time you'll be lost with no way to discover where you are until you randomly stumble onto one of the 10 locations or find a clue that will put a new marker on your map. The new pinpoints on your map are there to serve as markers to help you locate where you actually are, but often times they didn't seem to appear on the map in a location that resembled my surroundings.  For example, there was one clue on the right side of a long road.  When it appeared on the map, the icon was to the left of the road and set back a distance. This made me feel like I was going the wrong direction, so I turned around to retrace my steps.  It was only after 5 or so minuets of going back the way I came before I realized that I needed to turn back around and heat the other way.  These clues not only "help" with locating yourself on the map, but they also help fill in the story and are quite often voice narrated. Like I said, these performances are often really good.  The clues range from spiritual philosophy, supernatural explanations, and journal entries that help flesh out the whole situation. It does help build an atmosphere that is somewhat intriguing.  Adding to that intrigue is the gigantic world of Kholat.  It's snowy, mountainous, and forested. It can be quite beautiful, but it's so full of valleys and jagged peaks that it impedes your view of your surroundings and gives the game a very claustrophobic feel that isn't very welcome.  This works against the game in terms of immersion and the stupid orienteering mechanic.  There are also really short draw distances in the game.  So, even if you go up to a vantage point to try to plan your next move, you can't see anything in the distance.  

There are orange supernatural spirits in various locations on the map, and if you run into one of them you're done for.  You die and go back to the last new clue or location you discovered.  Sometimes this will set you back 30 seconds, other times it can set you back 30 minutes.  Often times, you'll just come around a corner and run smack into one of the orange spirits and have no time to react.  Or, an orange fog will come spilling down the side of the mountain and you have to outrun it.  It's all frustrating and feels cheap. When you die, you're greeted with a load screen that lasts about a minute before you can jump back in.  This makes these accidental deaths all the more irritating and rage inducing. I know these orange spirits (and the other supernatural events in the game) are supposed to add to the scariness, but it never really gets there.  They just feel like more of a hinderance to your progression rather than being the main mechanic of the game itself. I feel like the game should be about you escaping from the monsters that killed those hikers rather than it being about waiting for the monsters to get out of your way so you can go read more journal entries.

Speaking of running, it's mapped to the the R3 button in this game; which is idiotic.  Not only that, you have to continually hold it down to keep running.  This is such a terrible gameplay flaw that I can't overstate it.  After about 20 seconds of this, you'll have a hand cramp.  Hell, an hour after I stopped playing (as I'm currently writing this review) my hand is STILL sore from it.  This HUGE oversite is made even more grievous by the fact that there are unused L1 and R1 buttons on the controller.  Why couldn't the developers map it to one of the unused buttons, or at least give us a chance to rebind what the buttons do in the game? I know this doesn't seem like such a big deal, but trust me, when you play this game it's all you can think about.   You want to run so badly because you walk so slowly and everything is so damn boring that you just need to get a move on.  This button mapping gets directly in the way of you eking out what little enjoyment there is to be had in this game.

On the technical side, the sound design and score are outstanding (as mentioned earlier).  The graphics aren't great and have an early Xbox 360 feel to them.  I also encountered a fair amount of framerate drops that really took me out of the game.  These would often occur when you were near one of the 10 locations you're trying to discover.  These are usually accompanied by some sort of set piece to ratchet up the tension.  Unfortunately, when this happens and the framerate drops it basically gives you a heads up that something big is happening and spoils the surprise.  You can tell that the developers are pretty new to the game.  It's not uncommon for your first game to be a little rough around the edges, and this one certainly fits that description.  But, I can't fathom why they thought the orienteering mechanic would be something people would enjoy doing.  Walking simulators have a bad enough reputation as it is.  I'm guessing they didn't know how to tell the story they wanted to and relied on the walking simulator format as a vehicle to make it into a game.  Then, they added the navigation aspect to try to add some more "gameplay" to spice up the experience.  Sadly, this backfired, in my opinion and it ended up being a hindrance rather than a strength.

My final thoughts on the game are obviously very negative.  Other than the music and sound design I didn't enjoy this game at all.  The orienteering game mechanic isn't fun and makes playing the game a chore.  Piled on top of that is the fact that it's literally painful in your hand to run in this game.  It just makes the time you spent wondering aimlessly around the map all that more frustrating.  The setting is really cool, but they don't do enough with the awesome material they've selected and instead just focus on random bits of lore to add to the generally creepy vibe rather than construct a real story.  As I've mentioned before, I have a gaming sin called, "Esoteric Bullshit" where you have to wander around trying to figure out what you're supposed to do.  It's probably my biggest pet peeve in gaming and Kholat is a game built around that pet peeve.  You're always lost and can't even find your location most of the time and it just makes your time in their world feel like there's no urgency or direction.  I hated it.  I know the game got mixed reviews (mostly leaning negative), but I never though it would be this bad.  

I couldn't bring myself to finish the game and after 3 or so hours...  and with an aching hand I threw in the towel and decided to move onto something more worth my time. 

Final Status: Played for several hours... and quit.

Final Score: 3/10 (Bad)

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