Game Curmudgeons

I admit, as much as I love my Wii, I don’t get a lot of time on it. It’s always one of those things where the potential is so much greater than the actual results, especially with third party offerings. Combined with a ton of shovelware for the expected “kids have no taste, grandmothers don’t know better” market I’m always wary.

Sin and Punishment:Star Successor completely bucks the trend.

The name, of course, screams “weird Japanese RPG”, and while it’s definitely got the first two parts covered, the last couldn’t be further from reality. S&P:SS is apparently the sequel to Sin and Punishment. I know, shocking. It was a Nintendo 64 title released only in Japan, and recently enough via WiiWare in the US, and that’s all I know about it. That’s all that matters for backstory. What the game tells you is that you’re in the future, you’re under attack, and some bad people are after the girl who looks, but naturally isn’t, human. So you shoot them.

S&P:SS is a rare new entry into the behind the back shooter, one that never saw a lot of games even in its arcade heyday. All I can think of right now would be Cabal, Nam-1975, Dynamite Duke, and Blood Bros, maybe the Space Harrier games can count. The genre was and is obscure, partially due to being at home brutally punishing players, demanding quarters from them regularly, and this new entry is no exception.

Sin and Punishment demands a split focus of players, making it a demanding exercise to begin with. The player avatar is always on screen and under attack, making step one protecting yourself from damage. Step two, kill everything. Traditionally the cursor and player avatar have been linked on a joystick, but the Wii has either the option of playing a dual stick style, or the more natural analog+wiimote style. It’s the same core gameplay as before, with a spectacularly streamlined control mechanism. It lets players dodge and aim in different directions for once, something that always pulled the genre down.

But the developers, Treasure, love to kill their players, and they take advantage of the new options. Whereas old games of the genre only had movement left or right, this one eschews the Galaga slide for four axes of movement, each one essential to survival. There’s a helpful inclusion of a lockon mechanism, which keeps shots true to the target but lowers their power, allowing players to worry about surviving the assaults first and foremost. Melee attacks have been added in too, which both are powerful and essential to survival in many cases, and have the bonus of reflecting projectiles. Missiles and grenades can be reflected, Jedi style, wherever the player is aiming or to their locked on target for massive damage, but managing the maneuver is always a challenge when energy blasts are overwhelming the screen.

The game’s intro level is a gentle enough affair, intended to teach players the basics, and it does so effectively, only getting a little more difficult at the boss fight. As soon as that level ends, things get cranked up to “ridiculous” even on easy, with what feels like an absolute wall of enemies, gunfire from all angles, and constant danger. Even as a genre veteran, the end boss to level one took me a solid 20 minutes to beat. There are always patterns and weaknesses to bosses, particularly level end bosses, but figuring them out and exploiting them is a real challenge. The same tends to go for mid-bosses as well, of which there are plenty, and they reappear as normal enemies later as is the traditional way of the shooter.

Sin and Punishment:Star Successor is a rare on-rails run and gun affair, and it’s absolutely brilliant. The action is non-stop, the pace is undeniably frantic, and the challenge is massive. This is a game that truly takes advantage of the Wii’s mechanics. The only real problem I had with the game is setting up a good control scheme because there’s so much going on at once, and because the default zapper setup is geared toward a wiimote and nunchuck. Once that barrier is overcome it all becomes smooth, natural, and a ton of fun. Break out the PerfectShot, Zapper, or Clone Blaster, stand way too close to the TV, and feel time melt away as you end up back in a 90s arcade.

It’s a Wiio-Geo game, and I couldn’t be happier to have found it.

9/10

Reckless Squad was recklessly released.

The first release from D2P games takes a chance, eschewing the very concept of being a triple-A title from the start, opting for a simpler, fun experience. In some ways it succeeds, but it’s not without issues, some great, some small.

Reckless Squad is a convoy based RTS. Yes, a game built entirely on escort missions, traditionally the worst, or at least most difficult, part of any game. It’s a concept that makes RTS fans hesitate, and Wing Commander veterans cry out in terror. Surprisingly enough, it’s been done here in a way that makes it enjoyable. At first.

It also might be necessary. Reckless Squad takes a lot of pride in being procedurally generated, and when single-player procedural generation is mixed with no goal but “Kill ‘em all”, it can get boring, fast (for those wanting to experience this firsthand, see Soldier of Fortune 2). Procedural generation lends itself to games where the idea is to survive, not to thrive, and Reckless Squad understands that. The convoy, really just a covered wagon that fell off the Oregon Trail, chugs right along obliviously, only slowed occasionally by magic. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, because as long as it reaches the end of a map, it’s a success, on to the next level. It also forces players out of the old habits of clearing ahead, moving, stopping, clearing, moving, stopping, which is a recipe for tedium.

When it works, it’s fresh and exciting. There’s a thrill and a challenge to knowing that the units you have need to last for at least a few more levels, and a boss fight most likely. There’s tension in the decisions that have to be made on the fly. Clear a path ahead while there’s time? Leave troops near the caravan for a rear guard? Send a few into danger for a potentially critical treasure chest? Players have to think fast, because as said before, that caravan stops for nothing. Not you, not the enemy, and not to caulk the wagon and float across. Gaining and maintaining resources is critical, but it’s dictated by time and careful control of your units.

Maintaining that control is unfortunately where things tend to start to suffer. The player’s units just don’t listen. In a twist on the norm, where one complains about units that just sit around lazily, like goons in the basement, these units cause problems when they take the initiative. They run forward to enemies, they pick off what they see as easy targets, and they rain down fireballs anywhere that isn’t water. In most RTS games, that would be great, but in a game where the goal is to protect a convoy and units are limited, you need them to stick close and not draw extra attention. Even the mission modes fall victim to this where one actually is just tasked to kill everything. A careful pull honed by years of MMO experience turns into a horde of angry enemies, each one following its friend back to your carefully chosen “Take ‘em one at a time” point, and a quick slaughter of your forces often ensues.

Even more annoying is when a stealth unit runs ahead even as a battle rages around the caravan, picking a target in the middle of a group and ensuring its own demise. The newly alerted enemies just love run back to the caravan and overwhelm the surviving forces at that point, and the fun gives way to rapid annoyance. Once there, the lack of control over individual units combines in with a horrible lack of visibility and unit information. There’s no information per unit, only unit types, and the mass of green lifebars gives no feedback at all when a large group is engaged in a big ball of violence. Even worse is when the fragile units such as achers, mages, and rogues get in the mix. Archers haven’t ever heard of skirmishing it seems.

Another oddity of the game is that units seem to have a strong desire to only move in cardinal directions. Not always, but there’s an odd tendency toward moving only 8 ways. Occasionally a unit will pick a bit of an angle to get to an enemy, but that’s less common than one would expect, more common when intercepting an enemy (regardless of your desire for them to) than actually following a move order.

The annoyances continue to pile on, some major, some minor. The edgescroll is a pain in windowed mode, only reacting at the very, very far ends. There’s no option to switch whether or not the scroll is placed above the UI bar at the bottom, and the shift key is useless, instead relegating all functions of grouping and multiple unit selection to the crtl key. And for those who feel like avoiding the edgescroll, here’s hoping you’re left-handed. The game has a distinct lack of hotkeys, which would free WASD up for control, logically. It doesn’t. Instead, players are stuck with the arrow keys and numpad. Very inconvenient for a game controlled almost entirely by mouse.

When you get down to it, Reckless Squad just feels rushed. There’s typos everywhere, lots of dialogue and exposition that seem like awkward translations into English, despite the studio being Montreal based. There’s no real movement/aggression controls, units are in full aggro mode at almost all times. The controls are minimal, and the feedback virtually nonexistent. The AI is completely lacking, with no concept of retreat or point defense, the most important aspects of an escort. Selecting individual units is as much a challenge as any boss fight, and in the heat of battle, the non-standard controls are an absolute hindrance.

The good news is that most of the problems could be patched out, major as they are. Add some positioning control. Add an attack move, add a hold ground order, add a return fire only setting. Add a critical follow order. Enable the shift key, give better breakdowns with units so it’s not a challenge to rapidly assign each healer to its own squad while under attack as soon as a level starts.

The idea of Reckless Squad is great, but it’s a well formed idea without a well formed game around it. The novelty of the procedural generation wears off rapidly as the frustrations of the many shortcomings set in. It’s an unfinished proof of concept, more suited to Kongregate than GamersGate as is. If the developers take the time desperately needed to fix the critical flaws, it could be great. But for now, it’s just bad.

Final Score: 3/10