Kingdom Under Fire Crusaders and Heroes https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121420/Kingdom_Under_Fire_The_Crusaders/
im not entirely sure how to describe these. ive played them backkk in the days of og xbox and they were kickass then. its a strategy rpg of sorts that feels like some weird mashup of total war and dynasty warriors. i didn't know they'd made it to pc until i saw mandalores video on them. honestly he does a better job reviewing them then i can:
https://youtu.be/IYTsnNPu-0E
I still have my disk (and my Xbox, which hasn't been fired up since the last time I played it, I think.) Rented it and enjoyed it enough that I bought it. Looking back, it hasn't aged all that well. And yet, I remember the combination of some basic Dynasty Warriors-esqe gameplay combined with like, real-time commanding troops in objective-based scenarios was enjoyable. Handled really awkward on a controller IIRC but enjoyable. Like it wanted to be the grown up, 3d American Final Fantasy Tactics but with action and button mashing. It was enough I think I played all the characters and may have even beat it on the hardest difficulty. So it did something right to get me to stick with it that long.
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Just got done playing several hours of Source of Madness. It's in Early Access on Steam.
It's a 2d sidescroller rogue-lite, Souls-inspired Metroidvania. Yes yes, one of those now ubiquitous games. Rogue Legacy, Dead Cells, Salt and Sanctuary, Death's Gambit, Blasphemous, Bloodstained Ritual of the Night, this game is pulling from everything in terms of form and function.
It's got a few twists that got my attention though.
It's Lovecraftian. But it's like someone played Blasphemous and was like "You know what, I want my story to be even harder to grasp." If they hadn't named dropped Yog-Sothoth or have an item named the Eye of Cthluhu or mentioned Elder Gods, you could easily mistake this for something other than Lovecraftian.
Anyways, you play a cultist who is trying to....bring the Elder Gods back? Open the door to their realm? Something. You play, you die, you get to choose from a selection of cultists to carry on the mission, kinda like Rogue Legacy and picking your descendant, but they're just a randomized character.
What gives the game its real twist though is the art and the enemies: textures are designed by AI and the enemies are procedural generated monstrosities dragged from the depths of machine learning and AI.
So what you end up with is a fusion of Gothic architecture and Geiger-esqe textures. The game likes its gore but it's that weird, stringy, Geiger-y gore that puts you in mind of insects as much as it does flesh.
In terms of gameplay, it's more ranged focused than melee focused. You get rings and items to equip that grant you spells and you fight with those. Lots of spell flinging, lots of shooting enemies that are just off screen. The game LOVES its physics. There's physics objects everywhere. Your spells fling you around. Enemies knock you around and send you flying. Because of this, it handles in a very floaty fashion. Platforming is hit or miss but luckily so far there's not a ton of it. When you damage enemies, they gib harcode. Parts go flying everywhere, corpses mound up, limbs come sailing down from the sky 20 seconds after you've killed a thing. They've dialed the physics up to 11. There's some decent variety to the spells but they feel a little uneven. On one side you have simpler workmen-like spells that do the job just fine, and sound and look good, but are just kind boring. Like 3 different kinds of magic missile spells (slower but more damage, multi-shot but less damage, and then really fast firing multshot but low damage.) Two varieties of "flame thrower", one for fire, one for lightning. Resuable "turrets" that cast these same spells.....But then on the other side, you have screen shaking, exploding fireballs. Wave spells that will hit enemies dozens of times if they're in the path of it. Giant boulders that are actually physics objects and can smash enemies around. A goddamn BLACK HOLE. The cool spells keep me playing to see what else they have, but there are some runs when you get stuck with the less sexy spells and it's a little lame. All the gibbing and exploding goes a long way toward making everything feel satisfying, but if you subtract out all that glitz and glam, some of the spells rock and some kind of blow.
It's the enemies though that are the real stars of the show. They are weird and almost completely unreadable, a mass of flailing limbs and mouths. Sometimes you catch the vague hint of something recognizable but then it's moving too fast or got gibbed too hard and it's gone. It's like everything you fight was run through that Deep Dreaming website. While it's cool, in practice what it means is most enemies are squidlike, multi-limbed things that crawl, flail around and then launch themselves halfway across the screen to get you. In order to help you understand what bit is dangerous, one of their inevitable tentacles lights up with a big purple light to let you know it's time to get out of the way. Bosses are enormous, screen devouring monstrosities where you can barely ever get a glimpse of the whole thing, probably because your mind couldn't handle seeing it in its entirety.
Unfortunately I think, the texture and the creature gimmick does what most computer generated things start to do: look too samey. Yeah any individual monster may have one or more tentacles, eyes, things that shoot death balls at you, and per run in an area you can be like "ok the big green things that crawl on the ground like to leap at you and break apart twice into new monsters as you kill them." But that's about it as far as you can really appreciate them. And with the texture work, it's better but after a while your brain goes a little numb to the intricate and weird textures the AI cooked up.
Overall gameplay is kinda fast paced with lots of "holy shit what just happened" "omg that dude blew up 6 ways from Sunday". There's some finesse but it's not a precise game. It's quite messy in a lot of ways. It's hard to know sometimes what flailing purple bit is actually dangerous, when. Or hard to react when it's both purple and sailing across the screen spinning in circles. It's hard to predict how enemies are going to behave as they flop up through platforms or contort themselves to turn corners or climb, and then suddenly explode into lateral movement. In response, lots of the time you're just furiously dodging backwards, firing off every spell or attack in your arsenal at a mass of flailing death that just keeps exploding into more blood and ichor and limbs and gibblets, while your own attacks are tossing you around or screen shaking everything. You're unsure if it's actually dead so you just keep flinging spells, and there's more crunching and squashing and exploding. There's damage numbers in there, and health bars, but both are pretty much immediately lost in the flesh hurricane, or dudes seem to have way more life in the last 10% of their health bar than they did in the first 90%. So you just keep flinging spells into a pile of flesh and thrashing tentacles until it FINALLY stops moving and you hear the sound of money and blood being collected.
It's fun, but messy. There's not a lot of the precision of a well-timed parry, or super strict platforming tolerances like has been seen in other games. In the first level it feels fairly easy to judge things and avoid a lot of unnecessary damage, but the level following, both its design and the enemies start turning everything into kind of a clusterfuck.
Someone really added the "crunch" to the effects in this game. Spells sound good, feel good, feel like they have weight for the most part. (Although a lot of them sound like straight up space lasers.) There are copious amounts of sucking, squelching, crackling, crunching, roaring, chittering noises to accompany everything, to where when you're blasting 5 things at the same time and they're all blowing up, it's a truly disgusting symphony of noise.
There's a couple other bits to the game that I don't know if they add a ton of value, more like it feels tacked on. Like it's got a stat system and does Diablo style loot with random modifiers on it and a Diablo-style inventory (for a...rogue-lite?) with possible the busiest texture I've ever seen in a video game, courtesy of the AI. They say it's an homage to the "gritty days" of Diablo 2, but I dunno. Just kinda seems slapped in there, and with what I've seen in game so far, the items on offer and the variation potential there, there's not really enough to justify a Diablo-style loot system. Oh boy, a Tier 3 Fireball Ring comes with 5% Arcane Resistance, stop the presses and wake up Cthulhu.
Post game it's your typical rogue-lite. You earn blood from killing enemies, spend it between runs to get advantages to carry into the rest of your runs like unlocking new classes, more Estus Flasks to use, more dodges, unlocking higher tier items to show up in runs, etc and so forth. The game hub is a pretty massive cathedral with NPCs to talk to and areas looking like they'll be more to do there later. Hard to say at this point how far they'll go with it, or if it's just a lot of art and empty space for its own sake. Games like Blasphemous and Salt and Sanctuary, while great, never really fleshed out their content to the degree you'd get from a AAA game like Dark Souls. They don't have elaborate hubs with dozens of NPCs with long quest chains and yadda yadda. So I sort of doubt SoM will either. The trappings are there, but it's an indie rogue-lite for $16 and that should be kept in mind.
I think the idea of this game was based on the technology more than anything, and I think it works in a sort of body horror grindhouse explosion fest. Not quite sure about the story or what the point of everything even is but I guess that's Souls-like games for you. It can be easy to appear deep by just not having much to say. It's also easy just to slap Lovecraftian on there because of everything it brings with it, while not really living up to much of it. I can say at least the game looks and acts like it's a work of love so far. It might be worth a look little later on down the line when it's more....ugh, fleshed out. The first few levels feel pretty complete and I've yet to beat it, but there's obviously a lot more coming to the game, and maybe some balance and polish will help.
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Topic: Blurb on Games that probably don't deserve their own threads. (Read 294429 times)