The Adventure Pals Review

Browsing the recent release lineup for a co-op game to play together, my wife and I happened upon The Adventure Pals. The promotional art and trailer featured a boy riding on a cute cartoon giraffe (my wife’s favorite animal), so of course we had to check it out. Did we make the right call by picking out a game based on aesthetics alone? Some thoughts:

Overview

Adventure Pals is a 2D platformer with RPG elements about a boy and his pet giraffe set in a wacky cartoon world. While the boy has fairly standard moves (jumping, wall kicking, and sword swiping), the giraffe gives him the ability to swing from grapple points, fly by spinning the giraffe’s tongue like a helicopter rotor (yes, you read that right), and quickly swim underwater (I had no idea giraffes are amphibious). When playing in co-op mode, the second player controls a set of characters equivalent to the first player’s (i.e. a girl with a very giraffe-like unicorn pal). Each player also has a pet rock that gathers items for them and protects them from spikes).

Pros

• When it comes to visuals, The Adventure Pals has charm and personality in spades. The goofy but cute look may be reminiscent of Adventure Time, but each of this game’s characters and enemies have a fun and unique design all of their own. The world design also looks fresh off a Saturday morning cartoon.
• To complement the wacky visuals, there is equally bizarre and humorous writing and scenarios. Throughout the adventure, the titular pals reunite a farmer with his pig (that is also his wife), rescue elderly people that have been turned into hotdogs, and intervene in a conflict between dinosaurs and sentient pieces of toast. Seeing what weird thing would happen next was definitely part of the fun.
• The Adventure Pals controls very well. It doesn’t take long to get the hang of the characters movesets. After a level or two, my wife and I were comboing up jumps, wall kicks, grappling, and ziplining to fling our characters around the map with ease. In general, platforming just felt good. Most combat can be gotten through just by mashing the sword swipe button, which is totally fine for this type of game.
• Everything explodes. You may have noticed in some of my previous reviews (e.g. Just Cause 2), I like a game that lets you blow things up. The Adventure Pals delivers with exploding enemies and explosive barrels that can be launched into groups of enemies. Setting up chain reactions to take out enemy mobs instead of fighting them head on was very satisfying.
• While getting from point A to point B in a given level is often straightforward, finding the optional collectables (i.e. cupcakes and stickers) provides an opportunity to really explore every little nook and cranny. Many of the levels seem simple at first but their intricacies become apparent if you take the time to find everything.
• Collecting the cupcakes unlocks new hats for your human character and costumes for the pet rock. These ran the gamut of cute, funny, and weird. This was more than enough justification to scour each level thoroughly.

Cons

• During our adventure, we ran into a few glitches that caused us to have to restart a level or deliberately kill our characters to reset a stage. For example, in one instance we locked our characters inside a room and in another case, clearing an area of enemies was supposed to trigger an event but nothing happened. These issues were infrequent enough to have minimal impact on our experience but were still a little jarring.
• With all the chaos and explosions on screen, it can sometimes be hard to keep track your character’s location, especially with two players. Many of our combat deaths could be attributed to losing our characters on screen, or confusing one player’s character for the other.
• Even though this is a 2D game, it seemed to put strain on the Nintendo Switch in some of the later stages resulting in frame rate drops and lag. There were only a few areas in the whole campaign where this came up, but it’s a shame that it was an issue at all. I’m not sure if this issue is Switch-specific or comes up on other versions of the game as well.

Overall, The Adventure Pals is a satisfying co-op 2D platforming experience that sets itself apart with quirky appeal. While I didn’t try it single-player, it may be a little too simplistic to play solo, but for those who have a partner and love cute cartoon creatures, The Adventure Pals comes highly recommended.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Completion Time: About 10 hours (100% completion)

Adventure Pals is available on Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox One, and PS4. If you’d like to listen to the game’s sound track while also supporting this blog, check it out on Amazon Music using the following affiliate link: Adventure Pals Soundtrack

Nintendo Switch Demo Roundup

Since finishing Blossom Tales, I’ve primarily been focusing on PC and mobile games for the last several weeks. However, the effects of Switch withdrawal have been setting in, so I decided to see what’s been going on lately on Nintendo’s hybrid console by rounding up some demos from recent or upcoming games.

Kirby Star Allies

My wife and I have played through several Kirby games together and they are usually wonderful co-op experiences. Thus, we went into this one with high expectations. The general look and feel of the game appealed to us in classic Kirby fashion, but the “Allies” component yielded mixed results. Kirby rolls with a squad of 3 companions that can be controlled by other players or the AI. By combining his abilities with those of his allies, Kirby can use special combo skills that are a lot of fun to experiment with. Unfortunately having a team of four characters on screen along with flashy combo moves means that there’s a lot of chaos on the screen and keeping track of the character that you’re directly in control of can become difficult. Unfortunately, all this on-screen busyness (especially with the erratic AI companions) detracted from the more subdued co-op experience that we were looking for. I think we’re going to hold off on this one until we get a better picture of what the upcoming Yoshi game will be like that promises to scratch a similar itch.

 BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle

As I had mentioned in my Skullgirls review, it's been a while since I've really sunk my teeth into a traditional fighting game. Blazblue Cross Tag Battle mashes up several franchises but caught my attention in particular due to the inclusion of characters from RWBY and Persona 4 (I'm currently watching/playing both). The game also features characters from the Japanese arcade game, Under Night In-Birth, and of course, BlazBlue. The content of this demo was extremely slim, featuring only one character from each franchise and only one stage, but it was enough for me to get a sense for Cross Tag Battle's Marvel-vs-Capcom-style combat. I also appreciated that every combination of characters features unique animations and voice work. I have heard that previous BlazBlue games have featured pretty good single-player content, so I'm tempted to bite on this one if it gets good reviews.

Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido

Well, this was certainly the strangest of the bunch. In Nintendo's latest puzzle game, you play as a "sushi striker", a warrior who defeats their enemies by rapidly eating as much sushi as possible and then throwing the dirty plates at their foe. I was expecting a simple little puzzle game with a goofy premise as window dressing; instead, I found that Sushi Striker is a game with a fully-featured campaign featuring lengthy anime cut scenes, lots of voice acting, a sing-a-long theme song, and of course, one of the most bizarre plots I've every seen in a game. The game play consists of matching up different colors of sushi as the pass by on a series of conveyor belts and then flinging the empty plates at the rival sushi striker. The game also features some RPG-like elements with player stats and the ability to use special moves by partying up with magical creatures called "sushi sprites" (basically seafood-obsessed Pokemon). The game play and story were amusing enough to get my wife and I pretty interested in this game, but the $50-price tag gave us some pause. I'll be keeping my eye on this one.

Happy Birthdays

First up, I'll admit that the only thing I knew about this game in the beginning is that the promotional artwork featured some really cute drawings of dinosaurs. It turns out that beneath this game's cute exterior, lies a complex SimEarth-like ecosystem simulation game. In the beginning, the game features a helper character, appropriately named Navi, who prattles on tirelessly (and redundantly) about the game's mechanics. Once Navi is finally done with you, the player is turned to loose to tinker with the world's temperature, topography, moisture content, and a variety of other factors in order to get new lifeforms to spawn. For someone like me, who likes a game with structure, Happy Birthdays didn't hold my interest for long. However, for a natural born tinkerer like my wife, there is a definitely a lot of appeal to tweaking the terrain of a planet and then watching as new types of cute little critters are born; she spent several hours building mountains, rerouting streams, and collecting creatures. Thus, this a is a title whose appeal will vary greatly depending on your personality.

If you're interested in buying or pre-ordering any of the games in this post and also supporting this blog, you can use the Amazon affiliate links below:
Kirby Star Allies
BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle
Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido
Happy Birthdays

Sea of Thieves Impressions

As someone who loved Rare’s games on SNES and N64 (Donkey Kong Country, Banjo Kazooie, etc), I’ve been curious about the studio’s most recent title, the online co-op pirate game, Sea of Thieves. Taking advantage of the free trial of Xbox Game Pass (which is also available on Windows 10), I’ve been giving this game a spin over the past few days. Here are my impressions now that I’ve had a few hours to get my sea legs:

• Even though Rare may have changed a lot over the course of the last 20 years, I was immediately struck by the way this looks and feels like a Rare game. The music, art direction, and overall quirky charm that pervades the whole game were recognizable and distinct.
• I appreciated the fact that in this cartoon pirate world, the water physics are very realistic. My pirate ship bobbed, rocked, and tilted on the waves exactly the way I would expect an actual boat to behave. For me this, this enhanced the sense of immersion, but for players that are prone to motion sickness, this may cause an issue.
• As you would expect from a game about pirates, the majority of one’s time playing Sea of Thieves is spent on your ship. I found that dividing up the on-ship tasks with my teammates to be the most satisfying part of the gameplay. Having to juggle steering, navigating, manning the cannons, adjusting the sales, and repairing damage ensures that all players have something to do and delegation and cooperation are the keys to success. The game offers 2-person sloops and 4-person galleons. While each of the two ship sizes have different layouts to accommodate their respective crew sizes, they offer similar capabilities.
• The general gameplay flow goes like this: Pick up some quests in town, sail to the island marked on the quest map, find the treasure or beat a specific enemy to fulfill the quest objective, return to town to cash in the spoils. In other words, each gameplay session is a series of pirate-themed fetch quests.
• Completing quests rewards the player with reputation points and gold. Reputation points allow you to take on more challenging quests that offer more valuable loot and gold can be spent in town to purchase clothing for your character and accessories for your ship. Characters do not have stats and all players have access to the same weapons and ships, thus anything purchased with gold is purely aesthetic in nature.
• Since everyone starts with the same gear and all the character upgrades are cosmetic, all players are on a level playing field. This makes the player-vs-player action (especially ship vs ship combat) the most exciting part of the game since it relies entirely on skill and teamwork rather than time/money investment.
• The downside of this balanced setup is that since the only reward for completing quests is gold, and the only thing to spend money on are cosmetic items, I felt like there was very little in-game incentive to actually doing quests. Players that come to games for a feeling of progression or accomplishment, might find themselves lacking motivation once they've gotten a feel for each type of quest.
• The game's structure and mechanics are very simple and there is no story or progression system to hook the player. Thus, one's enjoyment of Sea of Thieves after the novelty has worn off is entirely dependent on the social experience. The game's primary purpose is to provide a novel environment in which to fool around with your friends.
• Since Sea of Thieves is an Xbox Anywhere title, I was able to play on PC with friends who were using Xboxes. I have to give Microsoft credit for making the cross-platform experience so seamless.

Ultimately, Sea of Thieves offers a collection of novel and amusing mechanics that when viewed strictly as a video game, don’t necessarily come together to make a compelling package. However, with some imagination and the right group of friends, there is still the potential to have a lot of fun in Rare's cartoon pirate world. As someone who prefers a more structured gaming experience, I'm not confident that there's enough here to hold my interest after my 1-month trial expires and I feel that the $60 price tag is a little steep for the content the game offers.


However, if you decide that the pirate's life is for you, you can pick up a copy of Sea of Thieves and support this blog by using this Amazon affiliate link: Sea of Thieves - Xbox One / Windows 10


Acknowledgment: During my time with Sea of Thieves, I had the distinct pleasure of teaming up with fellow Twitch streamer, @BogusMeatFactor. Since he's a much more experienced player, sailing the high seas with him gave me a lot of insight into what Sea of Thieves is all about. Be sure to check out his Twitch channel!

Fire Emblem Warriors Review

Musou games, such as Dynasty Warrior, often get a lot of flak for being “simplistic” or “repetitive” but my wife and I have found that smashing through hoards of enemies in these games can be a satisfying, almost cathartic experience. For #MusouMonth, we played through most recent collaboration between Omega Force and Nintendo, Fire Emblem Warriors. We came away from our co-op playthrough of the campaign with these observations:

• Fire Emblem Warriors tries very hard to integrate the turn-based strategy elements of Fire Emblem into the fast-paced action gameplay of a Musou game. The results of attempting to blend these two very different genres are mixed.
• The first several missions of the campaign are primarily devoted to introducing Fire Emblem mechanics as they apply to Musou. Unfortunately, this is done with text boxes that pop up on screen and abruptly halt the gameplay. My wife and I found that every time we would get into a groove with the action, we’d suddenly be interrupted by “useful” tips like “Health potions restore your character’s health. If a character’s health reaches zero, they will die.” Thankfully after the first five or so missions of the 20-mission campaign, these tutorials drop off.
• The use of the Fire Emblem weapons triangle encourages the player to switch between characters in order to take advantage of enemy weaknesses. This helps vary the gameplay since making the most of this mechanic will mean playing as two or three different characters during each mission. However, after characters have leveled up a bit, it’s pretty easy to brute force your way through a weapon disadvantage. Often it's more convenient just to keep wailing on an advantaged enemy than it is to switch characters and then have to run that character all the way across the map to exploit the weapons triangle. A glaring exception to this is that a flying unit’s weakness to archers is absolute; a single arrow can instantly kill a Pegasus Knight. If that Pegasus Knight is a plot-critical character; that’s an immediate game over. Thus, we often ignored the weapons triangle but quickly learned to babysit our aerial warriors.
• A major highlight of Fire Emblem Warriors is seeing all of your favorite Fire Emblem characters rendered in HD and fully-voiced. If you’re primarily a fan of the 3DS Fire Emblem games, Warriors mostly delivers. However, while there are at least 20 different playable characters, from a gameplay standpoint, there feels like there are closer to five or six since a character’s class determines how they control and which moves they have. For example, Fire Emblem Awakening’s Cordelia and Fire Emblem Fate’s Hinoka don’t feel distinct from each other since both of them are Pegasus Knights.**
• In addition to the playable characters, a Musou game always puts some AI-controlled companions on your team. In most games of this type, the player has to rely on these characters acting on their own. Sometimes they make reasonably intelligent decisions, but plenty of other times they just get themselves in trouble. In Fire Emblem Warriors, the AI characters have far less initiative, sometimes acting on their own but often just standing around waiting for orders. What the game wants you to do is pause the game, open the map screen, and issue them commands as if you were playing a regular Fire Emblem game. While this may add a more strategic feel to the game, it comes at the cost of making the action feel disjointed. Perhaps this works better in single-player mode, but since the co-op is split screen, both players get disrupted every time the map is opened. As a result, my wife and I ended up mostly ignoring the AI-only characters unless they were partnered with a character one of us was controlling.
• As cool as it is to see characters from several Fire Emblem games teaming up, the story that brings them all together is very disappointing. Similar to the mobile Fire Emblem game, the two lead characters are original creations for the Warriors game and they encounter the other Fire Emblem characters through portals that start appearing throughout their kingdom. The whole thing just feels like a shallow excuse to make the characters interact; the dialog sounds like an audio production of an uncreative fanfiction.

Overall, the thing we wanted, Musou gameplay but with Fire Emblem characters, is here but with a layer of extra stuff that doesn't blend well with this type of game. Perhaps the strategy elements will work for some solo players, but our enjoyment of the co-op experience came from finding workarounds for the Fire Emblem mechanics in order to keep the action moving. While there is still fun to be had with Fire Emblem Warriors, the game falls short of the more well-rounded Nintendo and Omega Force collaboration, Hyrule Warriors.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐
Completion Time: 12 hours, 55 minutes (main campaign, normal difficulty)

If you'd like to pick up a copy of this game and support Tales from the Backlog, you can get it via this Amazon affiliate link: Fire Emblem Warriors - Nintendo Switch

Nine Parchments Review

Cornelius Crownsteed and the Victim of Friendly Fire

As those of you who read my "Demo Hotness" posts know, I love a good demo and there have been many occasions when getting to play a free sample has me sold on a game that otherwise didn't catch my attention (e.g. Doom, Puyo Puyo Tetris, Mercenaries Saga, etc). Nine Parchments' demo reeled my wife and me in and the full game managed to keep my family of gamers (ages 28 to 60) entertained for much of Christmas vacation; that's no small feat.

Nine Parchments is a co-op twin-stick shoot'em-up set in the same universe as the Trine series. Players travel through the game's fantasy worlds blasting enemies with magic spells on a quest to recover the titular set of mystical documents. Each character starts with three spells of different elements and gets to add more to their arsenal each time another parchment is collected. Since the choice of spells that are unlocked with each parchment are randomly generated from over 50 possible spells, no two playthroughs of the campaign are exactly alike.  Killing enemies and finding treasure provides XP that allows characters to be further customized with special perks and buffs.

While co-op shoot'em-ups are certainly nothing new, Nine Parchments' spell system is what sets it apart. Working with your teammates to select the right spells for a given situation is the name of the game since each enemy has its own weaknesses and each spell has different side effects (freezing, shock, poison, splash damage, etc).  The spells also vary in terms of how rapidly they consume mana and how long it takes for them to recharge. Thus, rotating through the arsenal of spells efficiently is key. Making matters even more complicated is the fact that friendly fire is always on, so players have to coordinate in order to avoid setting each other on fire with heat beams or getting caught in an ice grenade blast.

My family found that Nine Parchments' combination of mechanics made for some really fun, frantic, and brutally tough co-op sessions for two or three players. Increasing the team size to four players proved to be a bit too much as the on-screen chaos made it difficult to keep track of the action and seemed to throw off the game balance since the game scales the number of enemies spawned to the number of players. Some of the game's boss fights, in particular, provided a challenging but rewarding scenario in which to coordinate and maintain situational awareness. However, in a few cases, the game's camera struggled to keep all players on the screen which made some of these battles more difficult than they needed to be. There were a few other minor technical issues in the game's later levels that we had to work around (that are supposedly going to be patched out soon) but for the most part, none of these were significant enough to sour the overall experience.

From an artistic standpoint, I didn't expect much from a co-op shoot'em-up, but it was foolish of me to underestimate the studio that brought us the Trine series. Nine Parchments looks absolutely gorgeous. Each stage is colorful and highly detailed even though it's viewed from an overhead perspective and will often be obscured by waves of enemies and explosions. The game also features a quality orchestral score that helps give the campaign an appropriate magical adventure vibe. The game's story of wizards-in-training trying to recover lost magic scrolls comes off as a sort of Harry Potter-lite but is by no means the focus of the game. Even though the story takes back seat, the voice acting for the narrator and one-liners for the player characters are pretty good.

Overall, we found that Nine Parchment's combination of chaotic action, teamwork, spell mechanics, and character customization to be fun and highly addictive. These factors coupled with the strong visual and audio presentation easily outweighed some of the game's technical issues. If you have a group of friends or family members that are up for a challenge and work well together, I highly recommend checking out Nine Parchments.

Score: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Completion Time: About 10 hours

Demo Hotness: Spelunker Party

A great thing about Nintendo’s eShop is the proliferation of demos. On many occasions, demos have turned me to new franchises and genres that I would have never discovered otherwise. In other cases, they’ve shown me that a game that sounds like a good fit for me on paper just doesn’t work for me in practice. Square Enix’s new co-op 2D platformer, Spelunker Party, unfortunately fell into the latter of those two groups. Some thoughts on the experience my wife and I had with the demo:

• The game has a simple and cute visual style. However, the male spelunker, female spelunker, and their animal companions all look like they were drawn by different artists, giving the game a somewhat uneven look.
• In local co-op mode when playing with the Switch docked, the screen splits into small windows even though additional screen space is available when playing with two characters. This can be problematic as it makes many of the game’s already tiny obstacles, traps, and items even harder to see. For visibility’s sake, it would probably be best to play this game on two Switches.
• Spelunker Party is extremely unforgiving for a game with the word “Party” in its title. Touching any of the cave’s tiny obstacles is instant death as is missing a jump or even falling from minimal heights. These deaths are in fact so instantaneous that the game strangely doesn’t bother to animate your character falling, but instead just displays the death animation the moment his/her feet leaves the ground if your jump or fall trajectory would result in death. It also doesn’t help that two characters can’t grab the same rope at the same time,
• Spelunkers also have a finite amount of air in the cave (yet another way to die), but thankfully checkpoints with air refills are easy to find. However, once you’ve lost five lives, the whole level must be restarted. If there’s a disparity between skill levels of the players, it’s quite likely that one will be left staring at the game over screen while the other one continues with their remaining lives. Having to sit out the rest of the level like this significantly detracts from the party potential of Spelunker Party.
• The game’s music is simple, repetitive, and catchy. It reminds me a lot of the upbeat tunes you’d hear in Bomberman.

Based on my experience with this demo, Spelunker Party could potentially make for a decent 2D cave exploration game for those with the patience for its finicky nature. However, as a casual co-op or party game (which is what I would expect from a game with “Party” in its title), I think Spelunker Party would introduce more frustration than fun.

Note: At some point after playing the demo, it was brought to my attention that this game is a remake of an Atari game which helps to explain some of its quirks. Thus, it may have some additional appeal to retro gamers, but as somebody that lacks that nostalgia, I still can’t recommend Spelunker Party.