Rest in Peace, Bro: Thoughts on Broforce

American Bravado is fun to parade around. I’m not even from this country, yet I can’t help but chime in with the “Amuuurika, hell yeah”s of my more patriotic friends. That, combined with the numerous parodies of America’s best Action Heroes, is the selling point of Broforce, a Steam game currently in Early Access.

Broforce is an action platformer, where you run and jump through non-descript “foreign” jungles and towns, killing terrorists while on a mission to defeat the devil (seriously). You do so with the titular Broforce, a squad of Action Heroes that have nimbly avoided copyright infringement through names like “the Brominator”, “Bro in Black”, and “Bro Max”. Each character has special characteristics that make them stand out from the rest as you blast your way through the game’s destructable environments.

My favorite part in my 5-ish hours in Broforce is the unpredictability of it all. It truly makes the game’s emergent gameplay shine. As you go through a level, you find prisoners that you can save. Each prisoner gives you an extra life, but it also randomly switches you out to another one of your Broforce members. This small detail causes you to dramatically alter your strategy based on the level at hand.

You may be blastering your way through enemies as Bruce Willis, then all of a sudden find yourself switched to Indiana Jones. His whip doesn’t do much damage, but he has a limited flare gun that packs a punch, and most importantly, his pickaxe can quickly destroy blocks in the environment. Now your strategy shifts, and you find yourself destroying platforms and explosive canisters underneath your enemies, causing them to fall to their death, all the while swing yourself about on your whip.

These different scenarios make replaying through levels all the more fun, just to see what characters you get and how you can get them through a level. It also makes you ponder whether or not you should actually save a prisoner to get the extra life — do you really want to sacrifice the Bro you currently have’s time-travel powers to save another Bro? What if you get a melee character in a level that nearly demands a ranged weapon? These on the fly choices make Broforce shine.

One pet peeve I have, however, is that sometimes during boss levels, you’ll find yourself stuck with a Bro that really doesn’t work with the boss at hand. If you can beat the Helicarrier Boss as Cherry Broling, I gave you a hefty bro-salute, because it seems damn-near impossible.

Besides that, the game feels smooth as butter to play, easily staying within 60 FPS. It also has a charming pixelated art style, and though the game can sometimes be filled to the brim with explosions galore, it remains relatively easy to keep an eye on where your character is — though I sometimes stood still so as not to walk into the rube goldberg-like cacophony of chained exploding canisters surrounding me.

So check out Broforce! They have a pretty constant stream of updates, and it was definitely worth its price with the time I’ve gotten from it. And I still haven’t even touched the multiplayer aspects of the game yet.

Have you played Broforce? Let me know what you thought of it in the comments below!

Shovel Knight and What Makes a Good “Retro Game”

I got Shovel Knight! It’s awesome, even when it gets slam-my-head-into-my-desk difficult. Really good stuff by Yacht Club Games, a company with former WayForward developers, that have worked on…well, lots of stuff.

What I think Shovel Knight does best, though, and that many games of its ilk fail at, is that it is a “Retro Game” that is true to the name.

“Retro games” are all the rage these days. Go look at Kickstarter right now. There are a few things the site is obsessed with, currently: wallets,  documentaries, making some nondescript food item and getting a bunch of money for jumping on that bandwagon, and retro games.

My interest in this topic does not stem from the sudden surge of love for retro games. There are numerous other posts on the subject that you can peruse through. What I am interested in is what separates the good retro games from the bad ones.

Make no mistake, Shovel Knight is a damn good game, retro or not. But it has a few great qualities that separate it from other retro games.

Shovel Knight is tied to the design mechanics of the NES and other retro consoles. But it is not chained to those mechanics. It does not feel the need to be so faithful to the source material that it draws from that it gets hurt from a game-design perspective in the process.

There are no limited lives in this game, for example. You can die over and over again, with the only penalty being the loss of some of the treasure you collected. Plus, with skill, you can regain that money, as it floats in the air near the area of your death, waiting to be picked up again.

Then there is the fact that Shovel Knight allows you to choose your own difficulty, in a sense. When you pass a checkpoint, you can also destroy it, allowing you to obtain a bunch of treasure that adds to your score. On the flipside, this means that if you die, you’ll be brought closer to the beginning of the stage, losing time and progress. This allows you to customize your difficulty and progress as you see fit. I don’t have time to retry stages over and over again, so I can keep my checkpoints in place. But players who are more daring/adventurous than I can destroy them as they see fit. This is the sort of modern addition to a “retro” game that keeps it fresh and easily playable in today’s gaming landscape.

Even with these new modern bells and whistles, Shovel Knight plays like it were an NES game – one that I believe would be very popular were it released in that era. This gameplay extends itself in small and major forms, from things like jumping “in front of” the HUD, to the pogo-sticking of the old Ducktails game, to the fantastic NES-like soundtrack provided by the wonderful Jake Kaufman. The game also takes the Mega Man 2 and Castlevania approach to gameplay. It provides you a basic skill-set that can be adapted into any situation within the game, then sprinkles extra items that can be used to provide experimentation and different strategies. In short, Shovel Knight keeps all of the aspects that are enjoyable about Retro NES games, and removes the aspects that should be left in the dust.

Have you played Evoland? I have, and I hated it. It spends too much time trying to point at itself and say, “Look at me, I’m a game that tailors to your nostalgia!”, that it forget to spend time on being a good game.

Shovel Knight does not have that flaw. It focuses on being a good game first, and tailors to those more nostalgic aspects as icing on the cake. This, I think, is what separates Shovel Knight from other recent Retro Indie Games, and takes it beyond a something that’s attempting to cash in on a recent craze. I look forward to Yacht Club Game’s next effort – retro or not, Shovel Knight proves that they have what it takes to make games that are enjoyable.

What I’ve Been Playing: 1/19/2014 – Metroidvania Madness

Figured I’d just get a list down of the stuff that I’ve been cycling through, game-wise, as well as my thoughts on them. I’m always switching through games as time progresses…I also don’t finish a lot of them. Oh well!

SteamWorld Dig

I just finished Steamworld, and may post a review. It was a very addictive game, if a little short – I completed it in 4 hours. But it was definitely worth the price-tag. It’s one part Minecraft, one part Metroid. Your little robot goes about searching for ore in the depths of caves, obtaining upgrades that make mining more efficient. Everything about the game just felt right, from the wall jumps to the swing of your pickaxe. It gets a wholehearted recommendation from me.

Dust: An Elysian Tale

I was, at first, cautious about Dust. I had only seen photos of the game, and they didn’t appeal much to me. But pictures do not do this game justice. It is an incredibly beautiful 2D brawler, mashed with the exploration style of Metroid. You play as an amnesiac named Dust, together with a talking sword and a partner that is much less annoying than Navi from Ocarina of Time. Suggestion: play this game with a controller. It enhances the experience even more. Did I mention this was all created by one gu

Mass Effect 3

Don’t need to explain this one, I don’t think. I’ve been grinding through all three games, as I mentioned in a previous post. And while Mass Effect 3 has the best, most streamlined gameplay of the series, I feel like it takes away from the previous two games in the sense that it takes away much of the choice that came with Mass Effect 1 and 2. Sidequests and extra story are learned from eavesdropping on characters, with no input from Shepard, for the most part. Bummer.

Cave Story

Cave Story is what got me in indie/pc gaming, and for reason. It is one of the few games that I would define as pretty much perfect. There is little about the game that I can complain about. I bought the stereoscopic version of the game on the 3DS, and it surprises me how timeless the game still is. More than that, I can’t believe I first played this game ten years ago. 

Think about that for a second.

That’s all for now! What have you all been playing lately? Let us discuss in the comments!

Steam Game 2: Start!

Alright, next game up on the Steam Game Challenge is Mass Effect! I’ll be doing what I did with Bastion once again: Play for a few hours, give a Now Playing article for some first impressions, followed by a review once I complete the game!

Till then, here’s an awesome elevator talk between Garrus and Tali:

Steam Game 1: Complete!

I finished Bastion! One game of the Steam Challenge down, 63…err, wait…*Buys Oblivion*…Sigh, 64 games to go.

Look for a review soon!

The Steam Challenge: Cleaning Out the Backlog

The year is 2013, and I plan on taking the Steam Challenge.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been in this situation. You’ve bought a Humble Bundle…or four. Then the holiday sales start, and all of a sudden, you have eight new games under your belt. The list keeps going and going, and all of a sudden, you have sixty-three games that you haven’t touched!

What? Of course that’s not how many games I have in my Steam Backlog! What are you talking about?

…Er, anyways, this leaves me with a bunch of games that are rusting away, untouched. And that goes against the gaming creed! I paid for these games, the least I could do is spend some time playing them.

Enter the aforementioned Steam Challenge. I plan on playing every game that I own in my Steam Library, top to bottom, by the end of the year. Here are the rules, taken from the Reddit thread created for this challenge:

1. You must beat every single player game from start to finish on any difficulty.

   1a. With large RPG/Sand box games like Skyrim, you must complete the main story line and the main story line in all DLC expansions you own (ie. Dawngaurd).

   1b. In games where there is no ending or main story line (ex. Terraia and Sim City). You must play at least 10 hours.

   1c. If a game is far too difficult for you to complete (Super Meat Boy) you must complete 15 hours before rule 1 is satisfied.

2. You must play at least 7 hours of PvP multiplayer or complete every single co-op mission (ie. Left 4 Dead).

   2a. If a game has both you can either play one or the other (ie. Team Fortress 2).

3. You can either start from ascending or descending order; however, you are not allowed to skip any game except for a few exceptions.

   3a. You can skip a game if playing a game have become impossible in situations like the following:

   .Banned from multiplayer (if the game has single player, you must play single player component)
   
   .An online game (like a MMO) is no loner supported.
   
   .Your machine is not powerful enough to run the game.
   
   .Your OS or chipset is not supported.
   
   .Unresolvable issues that make installation or running the game impossible.
   

   3b. If you already have satisfied rules 1 and 2 on any game then playing that game is optional.

   3c. You may skip a game if there are essentially duplicates in your library (ex. You have both Half-Life and Half-Life: Source), but you must play one or the other. (this also includes Betas (ex., Team Fortress 2 Beta))

   3d. Game Jumping is allowed in situations where you would like to play a series of games in a particular order (such as order of release or in chronological order). In these situations you may jump a head to complete the franchise, once completed you have to go back and continue on as normal.

   3e. If you buy a new game, you must go back and satisfy rules 1 and 2.

   3f. If it is in your library, you have to play Amnesia to the end you fucking baby. Nut up man, it’s just pixels.

This challenge comes with another: With every game that I complete on the Steam Challenge, I will write a review of the game afterwards. So, I get both my gaming value, as well as writing practice. Win win!

I’ve changed the rules a bit, however. I have given myself three games to play and jump around from. As of now, its Bastion, Mass Effect, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This lets me keep from being bored of one particular game.

I’m ready to do this. To empty out my backlog, get out of my comfort zone, and play some games!

Are you willing to commit to the challenge? Let me know!