Sunday, June 8, 2014

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition

They were not joking. You will die. A lot. Many, many, many times. It will be gruesome.

Not only that, you will swing your sword like it weights a ton. You will button mash as you see yourself slowly miss, and the enemy's weapon flying true to your face.

You will hear bones crack and crunch as you attempt to dodge attacks while wearing 50 lbs of metal armor.

You will perfectly hit the brick wall right next to you with your sword, while your enemy stabs you directly in the chest with a spear.

You will fight, the same enemies, over, and over again. They will respawn every time you rest at a bonfire, for better or worse.

If you elect to become human in the game, you will be invaded and ganked by the rest of the loving internet world. There is a way to avoid this by joining the Brotherhood of the Sun, but until you do, you will get ganked.

On the plus side...

There are all sorts of weapons, all with their own style of striking.

There are shields and parrying swords you can actually parry with. You can riposte after your parry and do some insane damage. You can kick enemies to stagger them, then hit them while they're defenses are down.

You can attack anyone and anything (watch out for this).

You get a relatively true experience of how sword fighting and weapon mechanics work.

Most bosses are hard, but readable and understandable. A few times I had to just put on more armor and stack poise, and trade hits until I won. It was kinda neat that this worked.

I finally beat this game with tons of help from my friend Luke. A few helpful paths to items and a boss direction will help a ton, as the game is not hand-holdingly linear.

I did not kill all bosses, but I did stray from the crit path quite a bit. It was overall very enjoyable.

I sank 50+ hours into this game, and the only reason I'm not instantly buying the sequel is because I'm debating going straight to the third (out soon) or giving myself a break!

Risk of Rain

So this game is amazing, and a complete jerk at the same time. I would equate this to Spelunky if I had to equate it to anything, except it's harder. It's also less hard than Binding of Isaac. Probably because there are no negative items in this game that make you feel like you screwed up when you get them.

The controls are simple for keyboard or gamepad, but I prefer gamepad. My friend used the keyboard, and his pinky finger got a bit tired holding down Z for the entire game. Maybe allowing for toggling primary shoot button in keyboard settings?

The graphics are reminiscent of Sword and Sworcery, or Out of This World. The character/enemy animations worked great for when the swarming happens, and it will happen...

The gameplay is basically a survival game, with upgrades you purchase or get from boss drops. The tactics you have to employ to survive are all unique to the various characters you can pick.

I really didn't like how items and characters were unlocked, as it really slowed progress in the game. I actually gave up on trying to progress past the 3rd character and just hacked my prefs.ini file to give me all characters and items. It was much more enjoyable after that. Don't get me wrong, I like the point of progressing, and how this is handled as a game mechanic. I just felt like progress was at a stand-still for a while, and I would have quit playing if I didn't hack the save file to give me more options.

They let you play solo, multiplayer on the same screen, or multiplayer over IP (also works for LAN). We played multiplayer over IP in a LAN setting.

The unfortunate part of playing in a LAN setting is that if you die, you have to wait for the next level before you get to play. Sometimes that can take several minutes. There should be some way to revive or respawn after some time to keep the pace of the game up. It was basically a really good time for me to get another drink, take the dog out, read up on some blogs, and check on items for the people that were alive.

Now on to images!


You start by choosing a character. You'll only have one at first, but more can be unlocked by achieving various things during the game (or by hacking your save ini file)




When you die, you'll see a results screen. This will happen. A lot.




To give a more concrete example, I made it to the second level, and stacked banners so I could quickly kill the boss. Yay!




And then on the next level I bought all of these extra items with the money I made. Woo hoo!






And then I died shortly thereafter, with all my wonderful items... Boo...





Here is another playthrough with a friend at a LAN party. I'm doing really well, we're beating the crap out of the mobs and taking names. I was Acrid and he was Bandit. Ranged/Tank seems to work really well. Ok, ranged is just awesome, but I like to be in the thick of things.




For some reason, I completely ignored the fact that I could continue to the last level, and I just keep pressing X and cycling through the game. We did this for a while until we ultimately died... due to server de-sync. Note to others, do not let 100+ mobs stack up and take too long to kill them. It makes the game extremely sad in multiplayer.




We finally beat the game with a team of Hunter (friend) and Miner (me). We owned so many faces it was ridiculous. Stacking tons of damage/leech/AoE is the way to go for the tank, while my friend did the ranged damage/AoE. I sadly didn't get pictures of our progress because we were too busy kicking ass, or running for our lives.




And here is proof that it can be done, and that we did it. Woot!



I would highly recommend picking this up to play at a LAN setting or even just to play solo in your free time. Fantastic game.