Opening the door I was presented with a fuse box puzzle that effectively was going to control the way you get into various doors by powering up some systems instead of others.
I lost all interest. I think these things work best when you have immediate and visceral feedback, like the "Boxes" game, or at least incentive to play outside of the puzzle existing in the universe.
The ability to turn to stone at any point, made it very friendly to a Dark Souls player -- I didn't have to learn any of the boss fights really. After I learned to use mechanic well, almost every boss cycle became jump attack, stone, run to safety until recharge despite any abilities they had. I fought the first boss ten times, every other boss was one or two shot at most.
Where it probably suffered from most is level design - I'm prone to getting lost, and I've also experienced amazing dungeon level designs. I like doors that lead back to hub rooms, I like ladders you can kick down, I like opening shortcuts along the way -- the prospect of going through an area carefully and killing everything is fun once, then I want to run past the grunts on the way to something more interesting. These were long and linear, perhaps intentionally so because you had to replay them in hard mode in order to escape once you killed the baddies in each of the towers and ... extracted their gland.
This is a great game for a small developer.
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Dead Island franchise needs to figure out what they're trying to be -- it feels like they are going for a Saint's Row vibe, but putting in a C- effort. Shamblers .. lead to Brutes ... lead to Fatties ... lead to Screamers ... lead to Bloated Exploders ... lead to Hunter Seekers ... lead to Cronenberg gigantibeast. I was being spoonfed zombie baby formula.
Respawning was just stupidly fast too -- they weren't a problem to deal with, but it was annoying to clear the top floor of a house and have the bottom floor respawn. Let me clear a zone!
The end of the game came abruptly right as I was saying I was going stay behind and look for Nikki who is "the key to it all". ... a DLC ending? Are we really setting up for a fricking DLC ending!?
/uninstall
#HATS ARE COOL
Lots of people start wearing hats, and the story evolves.
It's an interesting idea, and I would LOVE to see this explored in a way that can stretch things out - but as it stands the game is quite linear, progressing you towards chaos and destruction and therefore rests as an art project.
If you've read this blog, you'd know I'm a huge Star Wars nerd, I love the (original) canonical universe and therefore I hold it to a high standard. I was distracted by a few other pursuits when I first tried this and it did not grab me ... but when I went to go write this, I realized I hadn't really given it a fair chance.
Now I have. It was great, not too embarrassed to say I might have shed a tear even in the drama, there was a "Micah-sized" double-cross that caught me completely unaware, I had chills when Darth Vader stepped around the corner when I was trying to flee the archives. Well done.
I guess the one complaint I have is with Darth Vader -- and in general all games like this that rely on you struggling hard with combat. First, it's Darth Frikkin' Vader, the most powerful dark lord next to the Emperor Palpatine -- he should cleave me ruthlessly and dispassionately. I should fight to barely survive and be thankful if I do. The terror I felt when seeing Vader was something of my own manufacture -- I parried his shit, I was on the offensive and as I took him down in 25% increments I was given a cutscene were it showed I was really struggling. I wasn't. He wins in the end, but in that Bushido 'one second oops your dead' way after I made him a clown.
If you are going to have a boss kick my ass, you should do it in a more cheaty way where it soaks damage or reacts quicker and has a moveset that make me seethe with frustration. Respect your big bads or you will develop a Superman problem (constantly needing to outdo yourself with the next bigger/tougher thing).
It was well done, there wasn't anything that left me too lost with what to do -- my only complaint would be that I didn't do the math myself. There were a few puzzles where (for example) pulling one of 4 levers would move one to four different things by varying amounts, and I just felt my way through all those puzzles instead of writing down and planning X number of lever pulls. Kind of like doing a Rubik's cube, I can solve it when it's close -- and I do a bunch of random stuff in patterns that sort of reliably get me to that "close enough to solve logically" state, like trying to isolate one correct answer and then get a second answer in place while the one answer is isolated, then using those two to figure out where the third needs to be set so that the other two are right.
This is the first of three that this company has made so far -- and if this is proof-of-concept, I think I am looking forward to the next two.
