Battle Chef Brigade
This is a match-3 puzzle game meets 2D side scrolling platform beat-em-up. The plot is fantasy Iron Chef anime. Basically you kill monsters to gather ingredients, which then serve as the gems you match by stirring them around in your pans (grid). I'm loving it. The art is beautiful, the voice acting is charming, the gameplay has some variety with pre-made puzzles, and speed cooking (with no ingredient gathering).
The problem is that competing ramps up my anxiety, even though I've yet to fail, and I've read that you just get to try again. But I've also read there's a big difficulty spike. I'm not sure why I'm so worried about getting stuck in this game.
So to take a break, I tried: A Story About My Uncle
This game is bad. Really bad. I've heard a lot of people question why someone would make a first person puzzle platforming game, but Zeno Clash managed to be an interesting game despite being a first person brawler. Uncle has none of the redeeming qualities that Zeno Clash has.
First, let's talk about the gameplay, and how it just does not work. What the designers seem to want is a puzzle game where the player has to figure out how to traverse each area using a limited amount of movement skills, which reset after landing on the ground. This works in a game like Celeste, where the controls are tight, the level design is clear, and the physics are relatively consistent. Uncle has none of this. The controls are awkward, the level design is terrible, and the physics will have you attempting the same segment over and over because everything is so fiddly.
I was trying to complete a very long jump and the game had a pop-up message telling me "To cover a longer distance, rocket boost later, and aim well above the island". The developers knew this was a problem, but I don't think they realized that the problem goes well beyond players just not knowing the most effective way to deploy a new ability. The problem is that you have to grapple hook before you rocket jump, and it's hard to build momentum from that, because you don't so much swing from your grapple, as build up momentum directly toward the object you're grappling from, and if you got the wrong angle on your first grapple, by the time you're on your third it's really easy to be building momentum in a very wrong direction. And you only get three grapples.
If you've played Batman: Arkham City or Knight, imagine trying to get from one building to another by grappling, only you don't get to glide, if you even come close to hitting the object you're grappling from you loose most of your momentum, some of the grapple points are moving, it's difficult to determine their distance from you, and it's not at all clear where your final destination is. Oh, and there's no ground, just a void below to fall into, over and over.
Just before I gave up on Uncle, there was a room full of falling blocks that it expected me to traverse this way. A bunch of random blocks, falling at different speeds, in no set pattern, that I was expected to grapple to, and then land on to reset my movement abilities, and then continue on. Trying to figure out a random path each time, with blocks that might fall too fast to actually land on.
Oh, and the segment where a one-eyed monster, whose eye is a searchlight, will kill you if you move while it's awake. What's the point of this? Aside from making you wait 10 seconds for it to wake up, look around, and go back to sleep in between each grappling segment? Absolutely nothing. All it does is slow down the gameplay. You have to keep up momentum while grappling around anyway, so I'm not sure it's possible to take those segments slower, so it's not forcing you to move faster, just wait longer on the ground in-between.
And why are you making me trigger light sources with my grapple gun? The ridiculously short time the light lasts aside, do you know how annoying it is to try and turn on a light, only to realize that your grapple just hit the dark rock you couldn't see, but is still somehow blocking your grapple, and have it pull you off the path and down into the darkness?
But enough about the gameplay, let's talk about the creepy racist undertones to the plot! Blah blah kid goes to his inventor uncle's house and finds him missing, embarks on journey through mysterious portal to find uncle, meets aliens who speak English, blah, blah, blah. "I couldn't believe that I was having a conversation with someone who wasn't even human", "She was cute and I liked her, but she wasn't even human." The voice acting is bland, the art design is bland, the story is stilted, the world design makes absolutely no sense (How do the natives get around their crazy city with holes in the bridges, or nothing at all connecting their floating islands?) Oh, and the uncle you're searching for is the stereotypical white savior archetype who taught these aliens about science!
I'm done. I've got my trading cards, I won't be playing any more. With a mod to give unlimited grapples, this game might have been interesting, but the developers clearly did not know how to make the game they wanted to.
