The First Play Thread of First Plays

[Deuteros]

It seems they got the controls right though the PS1-era textures rub the wrong way.

[Lebowski]

Tren via dreams ps+

media molecules wooden train based puzzle game is lovely but not perfect. each level gives you a time to aim for to complete the track with gold Bronze and silver awards, and it keeps things fresh by adding new pieces and mechanics every level. it really is a sweet game with some fantastic levels design and some really fun mechanics.

The camera is rubbish though, on multiple occasions i found myself fighting to see what was coming up on the track ahead as you need constant adjustments, they could of bypassed this issue by zooming out a bit more to give you a better overview of the level your playing on but thats not an option sadly.

overall it dosent spoil it to much and it’s still a great little puzzler it feels like it could be a stand alone release, its a shame you have to go through the intro (which ive played multiple times now) to get to the games that MM have made in dreams as i could see people just not bothering.

[Tobal]

Quake 2 (HD?) - recently out on GP and like the previous game, 4k, redone animation and models without looking out of place with the rest of the game, easier access to MP, and all the official expansions plus 1 new one and the N64 one. MP has this insane 8 player split screen which i've not done only having 2 pads, but that sounds awesome.

I like Q2 more that Q1, the campaign with it's light metriodvania progression allows for alot of adventuring even outside of hunting for small secret rooms, this time becoming full hidden levels with addition objectives (often getting a new weapon much earlier). Worth the 2gb download.

[Dogg Thang]

It’s great that it was a free upgrade for existing digital owners. A lovely gift. It looks and plays beautifully.

[briareos_kerensky]

Yesterday I completed Pikmin 4, including all side quests and side missions, with the exception of those you have to report after completing the last boss. It could have taken 5 minutes at most to report those in, but nah.
I like Pikmin but I don't go crazy about it, I must say I've left the second and third games unfinished, so me going for a 100% completion rate is a bit strange. I think it's thanks to the improved companion AI (Oatchi and Pikmins) , the somewhat lower tempo in fights, more streamlined structures, and probably because Pikmin 4's overall low difficulty was a nice counterbalance to Armored Core VI. Also the fact I could just pick the Switch up and play without changing monitor & amplifier input, adjust audio levels, and all that stuff I need to do when switching from PC to any console, made playing effortless. One point for the Switch concept, I guess.

Anyway, I've found Pikmin 4 a pleasant experience, with the right amount of action, management, and puzzles. The game often remixes enemies and puzzles, and after you've gathered all Pikmin types there's nothing reall new to see (and even before that, it's not all that different from previous Pikmins), but the game realizes that and it doesn't overstay its welcome, I've clocked in 20 or so hours and probable the hardest to go through, in terms of repetition and strain of game mechanics, is

->Open Spoiler<-

the final cave. It's 20 floors long and you fight all bosses you've faced before in harsher environments, and you'd wish there were half the floors, because it's the old same bosses, nothing new.

The game is surpringly friendly in some occasions, like with the final boss: without spoiling what that is, quitting the fight will not make it restart from the beginning but only from the latest phase you're reached before. The non-respawning enemies, items that remain where dropped, the lack of grinding (with the exception of one Pikmin type if you don't go through a side mission and only if you want to 100% everything), make Pikmin 4 a very straightforward game in which you don't waste a single play session.

There are a couple of things I didn't like. Well, one in fact, and it was more of an annoiance: dialog speed. I'd wish Nintendo would have made text come up much faster and allow you to mash through it without skipping the whole dialog, and getting in and out of shops is a bit of a pain as after every line there's a split-second wait; probably made for children, but as an adult, it's a bit annoying.

Environments take quite some time to load, but on the other hand Pikmin 4 looks lush, one of the best-looking games on the platform, and runs at a constant 30fps. Yeah, it'd be better at 60 but Pikmin 4 isn't exactly an action-packed game, so 30fps are enough. There might be drops here and there, but I've never noticed them, and I played the majority of the game in handheld mode.

[briareos_kerensky]

Completed Bayonetta Origins: Cereza And The Lost Demon yesterday, so here are my thoughts.

Let's start with the art direction, which is the best thing in the game. The story is presented as a fable, with cutscenes portrayed as watercolour illustrations with text around them. The in-game world is a kaleidoscope of colours and twisted elements that give it an unique feeling, and there isn't one location that looks bad. Some are a bit overdetailed, and you don't have control of the camera, which sometimes results in Cereza and Cheshire, the eponimous lost demon, to end up behind the scenery or outside the camera's field of view; this isn't really a big problem, as for the former occasion you have outlines to show where the two are, and the latter is a very rare occasion that happens near the world's borders.
The Japanese voice cast does a good job in conveying the story, with Miyuki Sawashiro being a convincing young Cereza.

In the game you control Cereza and Cheshire at the sime time; the left part of the controller (left stick, d-pad, L and ZL) is for Cereza, the right part of the controller for Cheshire. Luckily you can call Cheshire to Cereza and just move her around during exploration, and puzzles that require to move the two indipendently are designed with ample time overhead, and more often than not simultaneous movement isn't strictly required: you move Cereza to the next location, then you move Cheshire, and so on.
Puzzle elements are introduced progressively and ramp up in difficulty nicely, but never become hard to figure out, even for optional parts. There's some backtracking involved if you want to 100% the game, and all collectibles are clearly marked on the map; fast travel unlocks around halfway through the game, and the path forward is clearly marked. The in-game world isn't particularly large and well proportioned to Cereza's stride, though I do wish her running speed would be a tad faster and jump/climb animations were more fluid...they perfectly convey how clumsy Cereza is, but they make retreading old ground a bit too cumbersome, just like combat.

Of course there's combat, this is a Platinum game after all, but it's the worst part of the game. Cereza can only bind enemies with ZL and Cheshire can only attack with ZR. You can combine binds and Cheshire's attacks into a more powerful strike, but that's the gist of it. Some enemies have elemental barriers that Cheshire has to break with the correct elemental power, and that's the biggest variation you'll get. Enemies tend to be on the spongy side for a combat system this simple, and thankfully you can lower their health in the options at any time. In fact, there are multiple options to make your life easier, like switching between hold & release or simple tap for Cheshire's finish move, and I strongly suggest to make your life as easy as possible, not because the game is hard, but because the game tends to stretch things a bit too much. Never to the breaking point, but when it comes to combat I truly wished there was an "off" switch for encounters in the overworld, and some battle gauntlets have too many rounds...again, not because of difficulty, but because of the monotonous system.
Consider this a minor spoiler, but for the final confrontation the game switches gears and combat becomes more of Platinum's typical bread and butter; it's still simple, but there are two attacks and four modifiers that can actually be comboed together, and a staple of the Bayonetta series makes its comeback. Or gets introduced, in in-game timeline's terms. I don't particularly like this switch because so far the game had taught you very different things, but at least the battle itself is visually impressive, in perfect Platinum style.

Completing the game opens up a short story for Jeanne, which I haven't played, gallery, costumes, and NG+.
Bayonetta Origins: Cereza And The Lost Demon is an OK game; for Bayonetta fans it will be nice to see that some of her traits started this early, while other will have a competent (despite its downfalls) adventure game with top-notch art direction on their hands.

[Tobal]

Tried giving My Hero Rumble ago on PC (tiny 4gb download), a new 3-man team battle royal game based on the My Hero franchise... it's not much different from any anime arena fighter, so expect a mess of visuals and zero depth to the gameplay which always ends up 1 team that stick together ganks 1 member wins the fight, unless there Bakugo, those players just run/fly off at the first bit of damage and no-one can catch up to them. Had a look at the grind/gacha.. 6 open characters of about 20 to unlock, there are at least 3 season passes, and so many currencies i don't have enough figures to count them... and it all quite terrible looking to boot, clearly built to run on 5 year old phones with how basic everything looks.

Avoid.

[Neon Ignition]

Disney Speedstorm
Such a shame that this is heavily fuelled by microtransactions, the groundwork is actually very solid for a Disney kart racer

[Adam]

Retro inspired RPG Moonring released for free (no catch!) on Steam a week or so ago and I've put in a couple hours already. It's great! If you're interested in retro gaming shenanigans, with modern QoL, then take a look. It's a beefy, in-depth game with a whole bunch of surprising mechanics involved.

[Tobal]

Played a hand full of the nextfest demos on steam, aside from the mass of vampire survivor clones, the few i downloaded that looked good from the short trailer mostly turned out trash, half finished solo/small team projects with mis of serious control issues, no weight to anything or ran poorly. The highlights..

Europa - a very anime looking journey clone is the best way to describe it, very, very pretty, i've not been this impressed with art style/graphical detail since CP2077. Control a robot boy on what i think is a terraformed moon Europa, a you have sci-fi jetpack in the demo which mostly allows for big jumps and gliding. Build up enough speed and you can surf the ground and water (or tip toe on water if going slowly). once you power it up a bit, you can enable double jumps on a energy metre.



Laika: aged through blood - Trials meets metroidvania with a coating of warcrimes. First i though it was set in the same world as that furry tank game where children kill themselves piloting it, but its not.. just looks very similar. Plays well enough, usual trials like controls with added buttons for reflecting bullets and shooting a gun which both need reloading after use with back and forward flips. Your bike can tank bullets if you tilt it at the incoming fire but you'll need to shoot or reflect to stop the next reloaded shot killing you when you land.

Did enough to get to the village after beating a boss, this goes through all the crafting and upgrades you can expect, then sends you out into the open world for a few village quests which is where i just gave up. A fast moving Metroid game need a mini map on screen which it doesn't have and with no quest markers on screen you'll be opening the menu and moving to map screen constantly, a bad oversight.

[fishbowlhead]

Europa needs a console release, looks stunning.

Laika definitely needs some qol already by the sounds of it, but the art style looks nice and the gameplay certainly looked fun.

[Asura]

Disney Speedstorm
Such a shame that this is heavily fuelled by microtransactions, the groundwork is actually very solid for a Disney kart racer

Square-Enix made the same mistake with that Final Fantasy one a while back.

They keep doing this because of GKART, i.e. one of the biggest games in the world that no-one in the west has heard of. Free-to-play Kart racing and MMORPG-lite, has had >700m players, and made more money than god. All these publishers want a slice of that in the west.

[Tobal]

Went back into Nextfest and looked at the top 10 things people are downloading to try and came away with 5 games, the other 5 are Rust like pve or pvpve survival games i have no time for. Played 3 of the quicker games to get into.

Robocop: Rogue City - you get a sizeable chunk, first mission, the mini hub police station, an open world'ish hub for down town (like Dues EX prequels) and 2nd mission. Looks pretty outside the RTX shimmer problems in the distance puddles of water, runs quite smooth, it looks and sound like you would expect, optional green targeting hood, whomp-whomp of Murphy walking, the theme music is all over it, all the side character mostly look like the film counterpart, nothing is missing.

Play wise it is a little different to standard FPS fare, treats Robocop like tank, expect to take damage while lots of criminal scum shoot at you, the gunplay is good enough, the hits on baddies are incredible, real pop to them eating bullets and you can even grab them by the neck as shield and throw them with force at each other or through a skyscraper window (for instance). You get the Auto9 with infinite ammo and you can pick up the criminal weapons which do more damage than the starting Auto9, they come with 1 or 2 clip before you chuck them on the floor for the next weapon. Thinking about it, it almost like on-rails lightgun game.

The hub/open world stuff has you doing the main story and little sidequest for exp, one of which i did some front desk police work where it showed of the moral system of Public Trust or Law'n'Order, didn't mean much to me outside of choosing some fun answers. The rest of it is upgrading the Auto9 and leveling Robocops core skills.



Japanese Drift Master - Initial D for the PC basically, you get given the panda to drive/drift all over a open world map where you can pick up challenges (TT/score/race). I couldn't figure out how to drift correctly and the drifting school offered no tutorials just a car park to drift around... looks nice but RTX DLSS balance/performance has some serious ghosting problems.



Pecker - classic 3D platformer controlling a Bird with a strong beak. Use the beak to lodge yourself in to wood and catapulting yourself around the level, done by pulling back on controller away from where you want to go and letting go. Not much else to it, no enemies, you have a couple of switches to hit or rotate but it's very simple compared to modern AA/AAA platformers, it's probably on par or below early Psone games in features. Doesn't run all that well for what it is either.

[briareos_kerensky]

Star Ocean The Second Story R

Remake of the PS1/PSP game, by Gemdrop Game Studios for Square Enix. SOTSSR follows Square Enix's recent trend of making/remaking games with polygonal, realistic backgrounds, and 16bit-like sprites. The results are mixed, sprites reacts to lighting and I think they have a few more animation frames than the originals, but they stride with the background, more than Triangle Strategy and the like.
The game appears to be the same as the original, so you get a lot of PS1-era dialogue based on ellipsis and somewhat disjointed storytelling. You can switch between Japanese and English voices, but for whatever reason, if you change to English you're stuck with it and cannot change it. You can use the new character portraits redrawn for this remake, or go with the original PS1 portraits, or portraits based on the OAV (I think, they could be from the PSP edition played neither of those).
I was surprised than a good amount of care was put into the remake, despite this being a somewhat "hidden" release...it surely didn't get as much noise as Tactics Ogre or past retro-looking Square Enix titles. I particularly like the auto-equip option, which brings up a menu highlighting equipment that can be replaced and the bonus you'd get.
The game progresses like a typical JRPG of old, though you are given more freedom to explore the overworld than most games of the era. The real-time combat system is interesting, but a lot of enemies die in a few hits, with plenty of battles lasting less than 30 seconds. Battles against bosses are more interesting as you can use the system to its fullest, and it normal mode there isn't much of a challenge unless you target enemies way above your level (neatly represented by red blobs).

ICEY

An action game from China. This came out a few years ago on PC but I played the Switch version, and probably completed it. I say "probably" because I unlocked all throphies and reached the end, but I'm probably missing something...not that I'm particularly interested in finding out, ICEY is decent enough but has some pitfalls.
The game's most unique feature is the narrator, which comments on ICEY's actions and tells her/the player what to do...and you can ignore him. Ignoring him leads to areas otherwise you wouldn't explore, and some of those areas have some nice surprises.
The game doesn't last long and it's not that prICEY (sorry), I won't spoil anything if you want to try it out.
The action part is decent enough, but a shallow. You have light and heavy attacks, dash, and jump, typical fare for sidescrollers. ICEY only has one weapon and you can upgrade her stats and unlock new moves with the money you get by killing enemies. Only that enemies drop a rather pitiful amount of money, you need to explore the map (the game takes place on a single, large map) and destroy cash crates if you want to get the more expensive options.
There aren't that many enemy types, and some bosses are recycled as mid-tier enemies. Heavy attacks are rather slow and move ICEY around, making them ill-suited for a lot of encounters. Bosses don't have that many patterns and some of them have deadzone that require minimal or no dodging.
yet ICEY controls well, attacks are responsive and have a good weight to them, and there's enough nuance to get you through the game's short lenght.

Genjitsu no Yohane

A search-action game from Inti Creates, based on the omonimous anime series that aired one or two seasons ago, which in turn is a spin-off to Love Live. I don't care about Love Live to the point didn't realize the whole spinoff thing until after I read it on a website. If I knew it beforehand I wouldn't have ordered the game.
Oh well.
Anyway, Inti Creates have been on a downward spiral as of late, and Genjitsu no Yohane continues it. Graphics are nice, nicer than Grim Guardians, and remind me of Dragon Marked For Death. Unfortunately the game is boring, more boring that both the aforementioned games.
Genjitsu no Yohane is slow-paced and not challenging at all: you basic attack (Yohane's dog Lailaps) destroys most enemy bullets and hits everything in Yohane's front and top arc, but has an incredibl long cooldown type (1-2 seconds) and does risible damage to everything; damage is also variable, Lailaps can do anything from 15 to 30 points of damage to standard enemies (double taht for random criticals) and almost every standard enemy takes at least two hits to go down. You can craft weapons and equipment with drops, but those too have long cooldown times and they consume darkness points (energy; I don't know why but Yohane has a thing of yelling and citing darkness a whole lot).
Enemies do not respawn until you hit a savepoint or return to Yohane's room, and even the largest rooms have two or three enemies, making exploration uneventful. It seems that by design all enemies are placed in such a way you can attack them well outide of their hitboxes, and combined with the slow attack speed and damage output, makes every encounter a painful necessity.
Enemies do not drop any kind of restorative item, only money and crafting items. You need to buy potions at Yohane's house, and so far I've only bought healing potions and attack talismans.
I face a good amount of bosses but so far the tactic has been to pop an attack talisman, equip the most powerful crafted weapon (right now a little something called "Buster Sword") and mash the attack button; heal when required, boss defeated, Yohane's friend rescued to open new paths in the labyrinth.
Not bad, but boring, like most recent Inti Creates sidescrollers.

[Neon Ignition]

I'm around 2/3's of the way through Spider-Man 2 now and Insomniac are masters are creating a set piece.

But - it's the definition of an 8/10 game. They've added a lot of moves to your movement but it doesn't feel like they add anything, the game is still largely comprised of mashing Square and QTE's. The core loop is fun but there's a been there done that sense to it as well and I'm at a point where I don't think there's time left for it to just be a game that offers 'more' of what the series has already. Definitely not a problem if they rest for a good few years after this one.