Hades (Switch) Review

 

Hades (Switch) Review

Release Date: 19 March 2021

Date Played: 24 April 2021

Well, what can I say about this game that hasn't been said already?  Hades is a rogue-lite hack and slash game from SuperGiant, the developers of Bastion and Transistor.  While Supergiant has made renowned games in the past and I have usually enjoyed them, there was always something about them that held me back from loving them deeply.  This isn't the case with Hades.  This game is a Masterpiece in virtually every possible sense.  It seemed to be every organization's game of the year for 2020 and would have been mine also had it not gone up against the Last of Us II, a game I had an extreme emotional experience with.   But even though it wasn't my top game of the year, that doesn't stop it from being one of the most engaging, addictive, beautiful, and downright best games I've ever played.  

For the last several years there have been a glut of rogue-lite games of every ilk.  They often share the same mechanics and a similar gameplay loop that can get stagnant.  Having to die over and over again in an attempt to unlock some small piece of content like a new item or character can become quite frustrating when you can't succeed.  You attempt the same thing over and over with no reward and no sense of advancement.  You've simply failed and wasted your run.   SuperGiant, in a stroke of genius, have eliminated this problem with the gameplay loop of Hades.

In this game, you play as Zagreus, the son of Hades.  You discover that the goddess who raised you, Nyx, isn't your birth mother.  You soon learn that your real mother, Persephone, has left Hades and is hiding on Earth.  You decide that you have to break out of the underworld and reunite with her.  Of course, your father forbids this and does everything in his power to stop you.   Fortunately for you, the Gods of Olympus have heard of your plight to escape and want you to come join you on mount Olympus.  They offer you boons to aid in your journey through the 4 levels of the underworld.  These boons act as the powerups and upgrade items in the game.  All of the gods have different aspects to their boons.  Zeus has lightning, Demeter has ice, Athena has shields, Dionysus uses poison (termed hangover), Poseidon is water, etc.  Choosing the best boons for your current build is paramount to your success in the game. The boons are also graded and have different rarities that determine their power levels.  An epic form of a boon will be much stronger than the common form. While it can be difficult to make the exact build you want because of the rogue-liteness of the game, there are lots of synergies available between the gods.  If you're lucky enough to get enough boons from the same god, they will offer you a legendary boon if you're lucky.  Sometimes the gods will pair up and offer you a unique duo boon that combines their powers. These can cause Zagreus to become extremely powerful, and it’s fun watching him dash around the screen causing all sorts of havoc.  In addition to this, you have 6 weapons to choose from that are unlocked over time.  These range from a sword, spear, shield, bow, gauntlets, and even a grenade shooting assault rifle. Combining these with the boons can really change up the playstyle of the game.  Also, each of the 6 weapons has 4 unlockable forms that completely change how they work.  Obviously, all of these options open the game up to countless possibilities of playstyles that keep the game from getting boring.  

In addition to this, there are other collectables to gather on your runs.  There's the usual assortment of healing items and health upgrades, money, weapon modifications (changes the playstyle even more), gemstones, and darkness (more on these later),   As you battle your way up through the underworld the 4 areas get progressively more difficult.   Each of these areas looks, feels, and plays totally different from the others.  Some are lava pits where you have to pay attention to your footing, Elysium forces you to fight fallen soldiers that regenerate if you don't kill them fast enough, there are enemies that constantly poison you and require you to kill them with a real sense of urgency..   All in all these areas are fun... but I do wish there was a little more variation than playing the exact same 4 levels over and over. The game is so fantastic, I want more content… I want more levels.   

Zagreus has his attack, a special attack, a cast, and a dash.   All of these can be modified and changed with the aforementioned upgrades.  The controls are simple, but work perfectly and it's a real testament to SuperGiant to know not to overwhelm you with too many controls in such a hectic game.  

I also encountered no technical issues whatsoever in my 80+ hours of playtime.  I never had a framerate drop, crash, bug, or anything at all. 

  

So, that's the gameplay.  It's pretty stellar and a lot of fun.  It by itself would make for a remarkable game.  However, remember when I mentioned how Supergiant fixed the problem with the rogue-like gameplay loop?   Well, that solution is what ascends this game to its masterpiece classification.  In between your runs, you get to wander the halls of your father's house in Hades.  You speak to NPCs and advance your relationship with them.  As you get to know more about their lives and how they came to be in Hades, you actually begin to care for these characters.  You WANT to know more about them.  Soon you'll be exchanging gifts to show your affection for them. Eventually, they will confide in you and  ask you to help them with their plights.  It's all very interesting and adds some worthwhile additional content to the game.  In addition to all of this, you can use the resources you gather during your runs to permanently upgrade Zagreus.  You can level up his weapons, give him new skills, add health, give the ability to reroll items, unlock decorations for the house, gain trinkets that change the gameplay, find companions to help you out on your journey.  Truthfully, there's so much to do and to unlock it can be overwhelming... but, gathering these resources means you'll be just a little bit stronger on that next run.  Did you die on the last boss? No worries, it isn't a wasted run.  You gathered resources and can upgrade your weapon to make it 5% stronger.  So, you'll have a better chance next time.   This constant stream of progression and the elimination of wasted runs is what knocked this game out of the park.  

Even after I "beat the game" I kept wanting to go longer to unlock everything.  After I got the "true ending" I still wanted to keep unlocking the game’s massive amount of content.   As if this weren't enough to keep you busy for the next 300 hours, there's a Pact of Punishment that allows you to increase the difficulty of certain aspects of the game.  Increasing these raises your heat gauge and allows you the chance to get even more collectables to unlock items or level up.  This Pact of Punishment serves to alter the game to an entirely new level and acts as the end game portion. The amount of content in this game is, honestly, unbelievable.  SuperGiant put so much love and care into crafting this game that I'm in awe. 

 After writing all of this, I realized I hadn't even mentioned the aesthetics of the game.  The graphics are beautiful and have that sharp contrast look of the other SuperGiant games.  It's very colorful with dark grays and greens with blood red mixed in.   The soundtrack is very nice (although not as good as their other games, in my opinion) and is performed extremely well.  Finally, I have to give a huge nod to the dialog, voice acting, and characters in this game.   Everything is written perfectly and performed expertly.  Every character in the game is unique, likable, and memorable.  The time I spent with them was memorable and most of the interactions Zagreus had with them often ranged from making me laugh and grin ear to ear, to actually tugging on my heart strings.  I also  loved the world and its charming character. Hades, despite it being the underworld, was truly a beautiful and amazing place.  

 In the end, I unlocked everything in the game and only needed to level up all of the items to their max levels.  I decided to call it here... for now.   I'm not even sure if you can ever truthfully finish the game.  There may be unlockables that go on forever.  You can always bump up the Pact of Punishment another level, or upgrade a chair in the reception hall, or level up your renown in the underworld.  Since I unlocked all of the usable items, and saw all of the possible story, did all the meaningful side missions, I didn't want to burn out on upgrading everything to its maximum level by having to grind runs over and over.   My time with this game was fantastic.  I never got bored playing it and could have kept playing for another 80 hours or more with relative ease.  But, as with all things in life, there's never enough time.  I'm not sure where this game falls in my list of my all-time favorites, but it's certainly high up there.   I have... and will continue recommending this game to anyone who will listen.  

Final Status: Completed

Final Score: 10/10 (Masterpiece)

Tower of Guns (PS4) Review

Tower of Guns (PS4) Review

Release Date: 4 March 2014

Date Played: 29 November 2021

Tower of Guns is one of those games that jumped onto the rogue-lite train back in the middle of the 2010s.  It seemed like every indie game that was being released back then had to worm its way into that category in order to grab a little hype or be relegated to the forgotten games purgatory every developer fears. Being a huge fan of rogue-lites I'm not one to complain. Several of my favorite games of all time are rogue-lites and I find them engaging and really like their mechanics. In case you didn't know, rogue-lites (or rogue-likes) are games that take inspiration from the old-school ASCII game, Rogue, and have similar features like randomized levels, items, weapons, enemies, and stats that reset every time you start over with a new game.  Often they also have a perma-death mechanic where if you die, you lose all progress and have to start from scratch each time.  Rogue-lites tend to be less severe with these mechanics and incorporate unlockable skills, items, and abilities that can be collected in a new run to give you an edge.  Yes, each run is new, but the pool of items available to you gets stronger each subsequent time you play.  I think this more forgiving spin on the "rogue" formula really helps with the frustration of losing your progress and gives even "failed" runs a sense of progression.  After a crushing defeat it's a lot easier to pick up the controller for another run knowing that you might be able to grab that awesome weapon you unlocked last time you played.

Grip Games, the developer of Tower of Guns, decided to take these mechanics and combine them with the twitch based first person shooter genre to create something that hadn't really been seen previously in the glut of 2D rogue-lites that were saturating the market. It steps away from the side scrolling action games, dungeon crawlers, and strategy games that dominated the genre and instead opts for intense and twitchy gameplay like Quake or Unreal Tournament to get its point across. Does it succeed?

Not really...  The first give away that Tower of Guns may not be a top-tier game is that it was published by Soedesco.  To me, they are the current equivalent of LJN publishing from the NES days.  Almost every game I've played that they published felt like a total cash grab and is usually a warning sign to stay far away. Their games are full of  all of the hallmarks of a budget title with subpar gameplay, cheap graphics, bugs, and unoptimized performance.   Unfortunately, Tower of Guns is no exception.  While the game does control well and is thankfully bug free, it doesn't offer much more to entice you to sacrifice your time to it.

You begin each run by selecting a gun with a silly name like "Peas 'n Carrots" or "Portable Pizza Oven."  At first, there are only these two guns to choose from, but as you make more and more progress with your runs, you can unlock eight more to round out the arsenal.  In addition to this, you also select a perk to give you a little bonus (or hinderance to your gameplay).  These range from things like starting with a triple jump, negating fall damage, etc.  There are plenty to unlock and they can drastically change the game. Also, there are several modes of gameplay available from the onset like Endless mode where you keep looping the game until you die, Dice Roll, where you get a random effect applied to you in every room, Hotfoot, where the floor is lava, and several more that change up the gameplay.  After you select this loadout, you dive right into the game and set out to defeat the titular Tower.

You'll notice that the art style of the game relies heavily on cell-shaded graphics with a gritty industrial look to them.  This can often been a wise choice when playing a game because this graphical style tends to hold up well over time and not look so dated years down the road. You can feel that this was the developer's intention and they really wanted people to play this game for years without it showing it's age.  And, just like the rogue-lite gameplay bandwagon, they also jumped on the cell-shaded graphical bandwagon. Ironically, once all developers learned this, it seems like it was a feature of every game for about a decade and in hindsight seems to date the games even more from that time period rather than guard them against the aging graphics they all so desperately feared.  Anytime I see a cell-shaded FPS game these days, I feel like I'm playing something from 2010... and I know I'm not alone in feeling this way. Not that that's a bad thing, per se.  It's just that what once made something stand out from it's peers soon began to make it blend in with the crowd.  Other than the cell-shaded graphics, the Tower of Guns also relies on a cartoony and exaggerated art style that give a bit of a whimsical feel and serves the tongue-in-cheek attitude the developer was aiming for. This kind of clashes with the gritty and metallic look of everything and makes the game a bit harder to take seriously.  In my opinion, a bright and colorful aesthetic would have suited the game much better and helped it stand out from it's peers. 

As for the gameplay, it's pretty basic.  You enter into the Foyer, which almost always serves as the first floor of the tower.  Each floor is populated by a handful of rooms that you have to traverse in order to progress.  These rooms act like a series of gauntlets that give the game an arena-shooter feel.  You'll have to run, dodge, strafe, hop, and shoot your way through each progressively tougher room.  The sheer number of enemies and bullets can often be overwhelming and comically over the top.  Some rooms will have upwards of 350 enemies in them and you can get swarmed and cornered pretty easily.  Luckily, you don't always have to kill them all and can instead sprint for the door to the next room, shoot it to unlock it, and then dive into the next arena.  As you kill enemies, they will drop coins, healing items, gun XP, active item fuel, and the occasional stat increase.  The gun XP serves to level up your weapon (to a max of 5) to give you a bit more firepower.  Getting hit causes you to lose gun XP, so you'll want to stay on your toes and try to avoid getting hit as much as possible.  With the crazy amount of bullets and enemies flying around the levels, this isn't exactly and easy task and you'll need to have quick reflexes to mitigate all the damage coming your way.  The stat upgrades you find can be what makes or breaks a run.  These include things like adding an additional jump height, armor, damage up, luck up, xp increases, and more.  Collecting these is essential and you'll need to get lucky with what drops as well as have some decent skill to string together a successful attempt. You'll also encounter items to purchase for the coins you've collected.  These are usually great and you'll want to grab as many of them as possible.  This is usually easier said than done as the "shops" are hidden in difficult to reach areas or tucked away out of sight.  Keep an eye open, or you'll miss them.

As a sort of cruel joke, the developers decided to include a Difficulty UP stat increase to buff your enemies.  Picking up one of these can often kill a run and derail your attempt.  With all of the chaos going on during the game, it's quite easy to accidentally grab one of these as your trying to collect all of the items that drop from your fallen enemies.  Honestly, It's very frustrating and caused me to fail an attempt that was otherwise going extremely well up to that point.  These feel like the developers are giving you a big middle-finger as an insult and the game would have been much better without them. In a fast paced game like this, you want to keep moving and grabbing all the items the enemies drop before they disappear.  You can't do this and focus on killing the copious amounts of baddies when you have to constantly be on the lookout for a powerup that serves no purpose other than to troll you when you accidentally grab it. Yes, I know these sorts of items are found in lots of other rogue-lite games.  But, it doesn't suit this sort of gameplay well and detracts from your enjoyment rather than giving you some sort of crazy item that you have to make due with. It doesn't add a challenging mechanic, or wavy shot, or some other effect that throws a wrench into your gameplay but is potentially able to be overcome. Often these items have the chance to have crazy synergies in other games that can make a memorable and extremely fun run in the right circumstances.  That's not the case here.  Tower of Guns has no synergies I've seen and this item only makes the enemies take more damage and deal more damage.  It's a lazy item and shouldn't be in the game.  

After clearing a floor, you'll face off against a giant boss that is, just like every single other enemy in the game, a combination of gun barrels and spikes.  They usually involve the same strategy of strafing around and avoiding their shots while blasting them away.  Often, they are pretty cool looking and can have some interesting mechanics to them; but after a few runs, they all seem to blend together.  Once you kill one of these bosses, they'll drop an active item that you can use.  Unfortunately, these are usually quite underwhelming and often have a very narrow usage like insta-killing a specific type of enemy or making you shoot faster but be unable to move. Sadly, each time you grab one of these active items, it replaces the previous one.  So, each time you kill another boss, you only get a new choice of item rather than adding another item to your arsenal and getting stronger. As for the repetitive nature of the bosses, the same can be said of the general enemies in the game.  They are usually just turrets that fire different projectiles at you, floating enemies that home in on your location in large numbers to point-blank shoot you, or some form of tank.  It's only slightly funny that everything is a gun, because it is a Tower of Guns, after all.  But, I think the game could benefitted greatly by adding some additional variety rather than put all of it's money on the meme-like nature of the everything is a gun concept.

Eventually, you'll fight your way up to the top of the tower and face off against a final boss.  This takes about an hour to complete and each run usually gets a lot easier as your progress and collect more and more upgrades... if you make it that far.  The game could use some more balancing and you'll either find yourself very underpowered and don't make much progress.  Or, you'll be so overpowered that the game feels like it has no challenge at all and you'll just blow through room after room with little effort. Even then, though, you never feel... awesome.  I think part of the issue with making the player never feel empowered is a result of the guns themselves.  They don't really feel substantial or exciting and usually have very slow shot speed.  It's very frustrating to fire a gun and see the bullet slowly move towards its target for several seconds only to have the mark mindlessly move out of the way at the last second.  I almost always felt like the guns were working against me instead of for me and I was finding myself having to get right up in the enemy's face to make my shots connect.  This, of course, led to me taking additional damage.

As for the story, there really isn't much to say.  Every run, I guess you're playing as one of several characters that's trying to ascend the tower for some sort of revenge purpose.  The dialog is not very interesting and it's difficult to keep track of what the character is saying anyway due to all the busy chaos going on during gameplay. I mostly ignored it, honestly. It's nice that the developer tried to put a little effort (though poorly executed and misplaced) into the game to give it some sort of flair.  But, that effort could have been better spent elsewhere.  To pair with the lackluster story, we're also given a very lackluster soundtrack of mostly drones and ambient sounds.  It stands in stark contrast to the high intensity gameplay and really brings down the overall energy of the experience.  The game really could have done with some pumping and catchy music to keep you engaged during the countless attempts the developer intends for you to play.  It's a huge letdown and was a grievously missed opportunity.

So, what's my final conclusion.  Tower of Guns is a good idea that is just executed poorly.  It's not really a bad game, it's just very boring and unimaginative.  I don't even know how you go about creating a game that has hundreds of bullets firing at you from all angles while you dodge and move out of the way (all while returning fire) and yet still makes the experience feel...deflated.  All of the levels of the tower and all of the enemies look and act the same. You'll encounter the same enemies in the last room of the game that you encounter in the first room. There are probably 12-15 enemies that are just recycled for the entire duration and it's very noticeable before very long. Also, The guns feel weak and unfun to shoot and the upgrades are usually underwhelming.  The unlockables you get for your loadouts feel uninspired and too familiar.  And finally, the graphics, art style, and music are too derivative of things gamers have seen over and over again that it's almost impossible to describe without saying something like, "Imagine Borderlands but with no characters."  All of this just adds up to an underwhelming experience that really isn't worth more than a couple of hours of fun at most.  After you've conquered the tower for the first time, it feels like you've seen everything the game has to offer... and that's the worst thing a rogue-lite could possibly do.  

Final Status: Beaten 

Final Score: 5/10 (Mediocre)