I don’t expect much from a Transformers game. All I want is to control giant robots that can change into cars, shoot other giant robots until they explode and be able to switch between combat and vehicle form at will. That’s it. Thankfully, Transformers: Dark of the Moon delivers on all of those points and is a fun, if shallow, game all the way through. READ MORE
The First Templar has a lot going for it: unique setting for an RPG, limited party size (meaning that you’ll never pick up a character that you don’t use), well-defined levels with well-defined primary and secondary objectives and active combat skills that entrench you in the scenario rather than remove you from it. What brings it down is that, for all of its high points, The First Templar looks dated and controls like a PS2 game. Everything feels like it could and should have been pushed out just a bit further to take the experience from good to great. READ MORE
Akimi Village is the spiritual successor to NinjaBee’s A Kingdom for Keflings and World of Keflings, and it shows in just how much more streamlined everything seems. Like the Keflings games before it, Akimi Village casts you as a giant charged with building the infrastructure for a tiny society. Unlike the Keflings games, however, you have a reason for doing so.
Arcade racing is a tough genre to create a game in. Car handling has to be easy without being automatic, tracks have to be challenging without being too punishing, and the whole package needs to be accessible. Sega Rally Online Arcade manages to be accessible, and they nail the handling, but the same track design and easy handling that help make the game approachable by all comers also make it too simple to keep coming back to when hard drives all over the landscape have copies of Dirt 2 and/or Burnout Paradise stored on them.
And that’s really Sega Rally Online Arcade’s biggest fault – playing it makes me want to play other games. The easy handling pushes me toward Sega’s own OutRun while the rally tracks push me toward Dirt 2, and the lack of damage modeling makes me want to start up Burnout Paradise and wreak some havoc with fully deformable cars, big ramps, and the ability to make my car blow up over and over again.
Discounting the fact that when I play SROA I immediately am drawn to other games, what Sega offers up here isn’t bad; it just feels like an arcade game from a few years ago. The options are pared down from a retail game, the graphics are flat, the sound work is generic, and the racing never feels frantic and dangerous like rally racing ought to. Different race surfaces change how the car handles, but while slamming into a mountainside to help navigate a turn slows you down right then it has no permanent effect on your car’s performance. And you can’t leave the track; fighting to stay on the track is one of the things that makes rally racing so interesting, and it’s just not here.
It is fun to run championship mode races where you start in 22nd place and have to fight your way to first over the course of three two-lap races in order to unlock a special one-on-one event. The selection of cars is nice (though I find myself unable to select cars that aren’t made by Subaru or Mitsubishi), but the number of tracks is very limited. There are five different locales, and each of them has two or three tracks. Variety is the spice of life, and for a racing game that means I expect plenty of places to learn every corner of to shave another second off of my lap time.
The cars handle well although the presentation takes some getting used to. The camera is fixed behind the car so no matter what is happening the car is facing forward while the world seems to turn around it. This takes some getting used to, and it never does feel quite right. Corners are easily navigated, and I didn’t need to really let off of the gas until I encountered U-turns, even when my navigator called out for hard turns. This makes sense, arcade racing is usually more about steering than speed control, and needing to seldom use the brake means that SROA maintains a good sense of speed while you’re playing.
SROA is strictly a middle of the road game. Nothing really stands out as horrible, but nothing really stands out as wonderful either. I never was able to find an online opponent, but online races look to function the same was as quick races against CPU opponents except (presumably) more challenging. If you have either another rally racer or another arcade racer, there’s no great need to add SROA to your collection, but if you don’t have any racers and don’t want to spend a lot of money, $10 isn’t a bad price for what you get here.
Pros: decent car selection, fun championship mode
Cons: makes me want to play other games, no car damage, cannot leave the track
We all crow about originality in games, but what we really want is good iteration. GTA III was good, but it was many gamers’ first open-world sandbox. Do we all go back to it? No – we look back at games like GTA: Vice City for adding motorcycles and a protagonist who is more than a blank slate, Saint’s Row for taking the genre to its extreme while refining the gameplay even more, and Crackdown for turning everything around and allowing us to play in a similar sandbox with a focus on a more traditional hero. Similar to good iteration, skillful combination of elements can make for a great game as well. Look no further than Puzzle Quest for proof of that: the marriage of simple match-three puzzle gameplay and traditional RPG leveling and skills made for an enthralling game that kept gamers addicted for hours.
How does this relate to Outland? Well, Outland is the combination and iteration of several gameplay styles that don’t seem compatible at first glance. It is equal parts Ikaruga and Metroid. From Ikaruga, Outland lifts the idea of color playing a role in whether bullet-hell-style projectiles hurt the player but iterates on the idea by making red enemies only able to take damage from a blue player and vice versa. From Metroid, it lifts the general game design: the player explores a large map, gains upgrades and abilities as the game progresses, and battles screen-filling bosses in order to advance the story.
The art is beautiful and minimalistic. Everything is reminiscent of Aztec design, and color is used to great effect to communicate to the player how a section should be passed. Projectiles are blue, not only because blue is a pretty color, but because it communicates to the player that leaving the character red will make the next section difficult or impossible. The color-changing mechanic makes combat more challenging by throwing groups of red and blue enemies at you at the same time forcing you to be constantly aware of what color you are versus what color your enemy is because it won’t do any good to whack that blue beetle when you are a blue guy. Platforming sections also flex the color-changing mechanic by alternating blue-only platforms with red bullets and other arrangements that force color changes in mid-air and in the middle of a combat scenario.
Outland may not do anything new, but it combines elements from great games to great effect, creates a challenging campaign, and looks great while it does it. Outland is challenging without feeling cheap, artistic without feeling pretentious, and fun without being expensive. I am honestly surprised that Microsoft didn’t hold on to this one for 2011’s Summer of Arcade promotion.
Pros: Interesting art design, skillful marriage of shmup concepts with Metroidvania gameplay
Cons: It doesn’t pull any punches – as soon as a concept is introduced it is ratcheted up quickly
