DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

The Short

Pros
- Well crafted murder mystery with just enough dark undertones
- Pacing is very well done; there's hardly a dull moment
- Doesn't fall into the trap of being overly wordy when it comes to inner monologues
- Cases rarely intentionally leave information out to make the ending more "surprising"
- That being said, there are plenty of red herrings, and most work very well
- Characters, despite being obvious caricatures, are genuinely entertaining
- Trial scenes are exhilarating and solving cases is satisfying
- Final scene is exactly what it should be for this story

Cons
- A few minor plot holes persist through to the end
- Some areas of the game could have been better streamlined
- It sucks when your character is like fifteen steps behind you during investigations
- Minigames in the trial start fun but get horribly obnoxious by the end (particularly NonStop Debate)
- Was released as a two pack in Japan for one price, split it up here for more dollahs. Second game is needed to fully understand the world and connections between the two stories.

Monokuma laying down some philosophical puns. 

The Long

I'm not the biggest fan of visual novels. There, I said it. While I was really into them in high school and early college, eventually the whole concept became somewhat taxing. While games like Persona 3/4 and Phoenix Wright managed to combine enough intrigue with their wordy stories, others like fan-favorite Katawa Shoujo, despite still being good stories, missed the mark. Often times these types of "games" boil down to one or two major "choices" over several dozen hours of reading through text, and often times the main character's over-abundant inner monologues completely kill the pacing for me. You can like them, I'm fine with that (and again, I think Katawa Shoujo in still an excellent story piece when it's boiled down), but the tediousness of these types of "game's" pacing often turn me away.

...so why did I even bother with DanganRonpa? Besides the fact that the "Vita has no games?" (it has plenty, by the way). Well, the promise of Phoenix Wright meets Battle Royale was too much for me to pass up, so I dove deep into this high school of despair and emerged...relatively unscathed? Let's take a look.

As a note: DanganRonpa is best played completely spoiler free. I take care in the review to not reveal anything that isn't said within the first 10-15 minutes of the game.

You know Leon? We gonna get along just fine. 

The plot of DanganRonpa is its main driving force, and it starts off with a bang. You play as Makoto, a regular-ass dude who just so happened to get invited to Hope's Peak Academy, a school where only "Ultimate" people get invited too. "Ultimate" in this context could be replaced with "World's Best." You have the Ultimate Baseball Star, Ultimate Programmer, and some other weirdos like the Ultimate Fancomic Drawer and Ultimate Fortune Teller. You and fourteen others all get invited to this school, but on your first day there something crazy happens and you pass out. You then awaken to find all of you have been transported to a hellish version of Hope's Peak, with all the windows and doors leading outside sealed.

While investigating, you come across a remote-controlled anamatronic bear named Monokuma (what is up with me playing games with evil anamatronics lately?). He then announces that he's taken over the school, and everybody is now trapped there forever. The only way they'll be allowed out is if they kill another student, and then get away with it. Once a student is murdered, a brief time for investigating will be allowed, and then a student trial will take place. If the murderer (called "blackened" by Monokuma) is correctly revealed, they are executed. If they aren't, they get set free and everybody else gets executed. So it's pretty freaking imperative that you figure out who killed who.

School's In. Prepare to have a bad time. 

The game's pacing is near perfect. While the intro sequence is a bit lagging, once it gets into the juicy character and plot moments the game blasts off and doesn't slow down. It's quite difficult to stop playing (as evidenced by the fact that I beat this game in under a week). The story takes some absolutely crazy turns along the way, with each of the murders escalating the stakes and being all the more shocking. The ending is a wallop of a reveal, made all the more satisfying by the fact that you use all the evidence you've gathered to break down most of it yourself. That being said, the large "twist" at the end is fairly difficult to predict, and the final ending scene (which has, not surprising to me, earned a lot of negative feedback) is actually perfect when it comes to closing out the story.

Before I go into the cases, it's important to make note of the characters. As stated there's fifteen students total and then Monokuma, the obnoxious bear that can not only show up at any time and in any place, but is also intentionally snarky and rude, trying to provoke you constantly. The rest of the cast cross a wide spectrum of characters, but they're all pretty nuts. I won't spoil it, but watching them interact is half the fun of enjoying the story as it unfolds, and despite being obvious caricatures of the "Ultimates" they're representing, several have surprisingly three-dimensional personalities. As the game goes on, people you first suspected to be scumbags you have second thoughts on, and people you felt were stable break down. Ultimately, the game's interesting premise lived or died on whether or not all these characters trapped in a school together had interesting chemistry, and I'd say it succeeded. Mostly.

Hiro may be dumb as a brick, but you can't say the guy isn't a bro. 

I won't dig into spoilers, but Kyoko is bland. There, I said it. They try to make her more interesting by tying her into more story bits, but she never really has that spark of life that the other characters do. Yeah, she isn't totally insane like the rest (which makes it easy to render opinions of them), but I really felt she didn't go anywhere.

The other big bland character is, oddly enough, the main character. Makoto is entirely uninteresting. While I understand he probably was meant to be a character one would project themselves into, the guy has no backbone outside of the courtroom, and is completely reactionary. Rarely is he proactive enough to investigate on his own (often times other people drag him along), and in general he just comes off as someone there for the ride. It's not gamebreaking, but being in his head means what he thinks is generally uninteresting and solely used for the plot (rather than developing and actual character out of him), and even by the end the guy felt totally empty.

Monokuma can say some outlandish and genuinely funny chunks of nonsense. 

But the meat of the game is obviously how it addresses the investigations and trials of the murders, and whether or not it knows how much information to dish out and why. In this regard, I feel the game is near perfect. In both the investigation and later trial instances, the game does very well in letting you connect pieces together and, if you are clever, figure it out before even going to trial. Unlike some other games (*coughPhoenixWrightcough*), DanganRonpa very rarely brings new evidence in during a trial sequence. This means you can usually get a grasp of who did it (or at least prime suspects) and form a full story in your head before going in, rather than having only part of the picture and relying on the game to decide when you get the whole story.

There is a plus and a minus to this. The plus is that DanganRonpa knows how to stay one step ahead of you. On the second case, I was certain I'd cracked it. I'd dug extremely deep into the clues, found several layers underneath that worked together, and all my assessments felt just far enough from the initial evidence that I had to have outsmarted the game. Turned out that, during the trial, there was a twist that was not blatantly revealed but totally could have been called had I looked a little harder at the evidence. I hadn't been wrong in my assertions, the game had just thrown a brilliant red herring to make me stop digging, but if I'd kept going I would have found the error and solved it. The game intentionally tricks you into thinking you're ahead of it, when actually there's another layer in. That's pretty good writing!

Though, once it humiliated me on the second case. I was ready for it in the later ones. I successfully predicted the next two even before the investigations happened, though I will admit the way they happened was different than I'd concocted. But I still guessed the killer right in them, but it wasn't an easy thing. The game respected my intelligence, and if I was smart enough to figure it out, it rewarded me. Or I rewarded me, with the smug satisfaction I felt after watching someone I knew was the killer try and lie their way out of their situation while I completely destroyed their claims.

And the case is solved!

Without pushing too much further into the story, I'll just leave it at that. The characters do well at making you love or hate them, or be situated in some area in-between (usually resulting in massive distrust). The game starts off straight up flying in the face of your expectations and knowing it's going to mess with you, and it delivers. While I'll admit the two most shocking instances happen both at the beginning and the end, there's more than enough crazy in the middle to keep you going.

Oh, and the game is actually pretty funny. Despite adhering to it's dark premise really well (aka Hunger Games has nothing on this, especially after revealing what was really going on in the ending), the characters' play off each other enough to be genuinely entertaining (if some in more messed up ways than others), and the characters slowly becoming more and more mentally unhinged as the situation worsens makes them both funnier and scarier at the same time. Overall, solid stuff, and the story is addicting and certainly worth the read.

Hey, didn't they say this in Persona 3 too? What is up with Japan and sad rabbits? 

The actual "gameplay" of the game is divided into three main events. Aside from just general story stuff that happens whenever it feels like it, there are three distinct events you participate in: Free Time (read: social linking your friends), Investigations, and Trials. I'll break them down for ya (protip: Trials is longest).

People compared this game to Persona 4, probably because of both the game's bright, eye-popping style through its UI, and also because it had "social links" like the previous game. I'll just toss this out there right now: they aren't really as in depth as in Persona 4, so much so the comparison is hardly merited. While they do provide a good bit of humor and a little insight into the characters, next to nothing you find out during these events is valuable during an investigation or trial. In addition, the game straight up lets you skip Free Time if you want to just move the story along, so even it knows they're not that important.

All free time actually gives (besides a look into the character you are visiting with) is small passive power-ups that can be equipped during the trials (and a few other minor bonuses, I should point out). Some are better than others, but you could easily beat the game without any of them. Social links also require you to give the respective person presents they like in order to rank them up faster, which means either guessing or consulting a faq. As it stands, they're nice distractions (and there's some funny stuff hidden in there), but not as impactful as you might think.

There you go.

Investigations are very Phoenix Wright-esque, though they do a better job at helping you follow their rules. As mentioned before, you often have a babysitter as you move around, and the game won't let you leave a scene until you've found everything it's decided you should find. In this same vein, it's impossible to go into a trial missing information, so ultimately it's a limited-interaction Disneyland trip through a few crime scenes. Not that there's anything wrong with that; at least I'm not pixel hunting or totally lost (again, cough, Phoenix Wright's investigation scenes).

Now the Trials are where things get crazy. They're exhilarating, to say the least, mostly because of the sheer number of people. Again making the Phoenix Wright comparison, in that game it's essentially a throwdown of logic between two people. In DanganRonpa, you've got over a dozen (at least at the start...) tossing in arguments and opinions that you have to sift through. This is where the real "gameplay" emerges, for better and for worse.

OBJECTION!

There's four events that can happen in a trial, often multiple times: NonStop Debate, Hangman's Gambit, Bullet Time Battle, and Closing Argument. I'll go over the pros and cons of each in brief.

NonStop Debate is the most frequently repeated scene. In this, characters from around the group shout out opinions and speculations on the given topic at hand. As they're arguing, you load "Truth Bullets" (basically the evidence and facts you've found along the way) into your...truth gun? Gun of knowledge? Something? And take aim. When you find a statement that  your "bullet" contradicts, you fire it at the offending statement, obliterating it with Logic and Critical Thinking. Much like the entirety of graduate school.

The game mixes it up along the way, by adding both multiple options to choose from (and you have to cycle through to find the right one), "white nose" obscuring the topics (which you have to clear by tapping the back of the Vita or targeting it with the cursor before you can bullet it), and my favorite: you can take one person's statement and temporarily turn it into a bullet and then fire it against another statement. The latter of these is my favorite as it requires the most critical thinking (since often it just gives you the right truth bullet so you only have to find the offending statement; this requires you to find both the wrong statement and the one it contradicts), and so it's a pity it doesn't actually come up as often as you'd think. Most are simple and can be solved with basic logic.

That being said, this mode pissed me off to no end, mostly because near the end actually hitting the words becomes incredibly difficult. The location of the "white noise" blocking it is completely random, which means sometimes you don't have enough time to both clear the noise and fire the bullet before the statement moves on. There were times when I very clearly hit the statement, only to have the game decide it was "too late" and move on. Luckily the whole scene cycles if you fail to present an argument (and you can fast forward at any time to move things along quicker), but knowing the logical error only to be thwarted by bad shooting controls and the RNG white noise gods is straight up infuriating.

Editor's Note: I just now realized I never used the "slowdown" power given to you at the start of the game. Upon replaying it, even on the hardest difficulty, shooting the words down is a lot easier. So that last section was pretty much me being stupid, whoops. It's still challenging, but the ability to slow down time to line up your shots makes it much less painful. 

I swear purple text, if you get in the way one more time...

Hangman's Gambit is by far the easiest. Basically if someone asks a question that requires a word (or a combination of words) that you don't have evidence for, you jump into Makoto's head (which, apparently, is empty except for random floating letters, which makes sense now that I think about it) to figure it out. There is a random word spot (which gets a few letters filled in depending on your difficulty setting), and it's your job to fill in the remaining letters. They float randomly from the core of Makoto's thought processes, so you shoot 'em with your truth guns in the right order until the word is formed.

Again, not only is the game itself easy (just tap the right letters; a monkey could do it), but the words you have to find are extremely simple to decipher based on the context clues. I get they probably needed something else to do here, but it really is just kind of...there. And easy. Really easy. Did I mention it's easy?

Easy like your mom, HEYOOOHH

Bullet Time Battle is a...rhythm game? Yeah, it actually totally is. Which does an awful job of explaining how it works the first time (the only time I ever failed at a case was during the first two Bullet Time Battles), so I'll break it down easily here.

Basically when another character just won't shut up about something, you have to lock and load dem truth bullets to learn them how to be quiet. Essentially, a song with a beat plays, and a section on the bottom of the screen indicates when the beats hit. You can only press buttons on the beat (hey, it's like Crypt of the Necrodancer! ), and your goal is to shoot away the negative thoughts. Except they kind of suck at explaining exactly how to do it, so I'll tell you.

Pressing "X" on the beat locks onto a thought/word cloud. Once locked on, pressing Triangle to the beat shoots it. Later, when you have a limited number of bullets, pressing Square to the beat reloads. So once you figure that out, just press "X, Triangle, Square" to the beat, repeat, and you'll win. You can literally do it in your sleep.

The game tries to throw you off by making it so the enemy can block the visual indicator of beats, and also it increases/decreases the tempo depending on how you are doing, but if you have any musical inclinations whatsoever you can, again, do this in your sleep.

YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH, LEON!

The last segment is Closing Argument, which I won't find a screenshot for because they're all spoilers. Basically, your job is to fill in a manga-style set of pages that represent exactly what happened. Some are already filled in, but you have to figure out the empty spaces. These are generally ok, but the biggest problem is the parts you can choose from are very small circles on the bottom, with pictures that are both tiny when compared to the panels and also somewhat abstract representations of what happened. This means that I found myself more fighting the battle of "what the hell is this bubble trying to convey?" rather than actually piecing the murder together. It was fun when it worked (and when it plays out it's actually really well done visually), but it does lead to some unwanted confusion.

I think that, in a whole, sums up the gameplay aspects of DanganRonpa: it's fun, but has unwanted confusion. I'm glad the trial elements are there otherwise there would be no skill-based gameplay bits in the game, but as a whole they feel relatively unpolished and, frankly, tacked in just so the game could have something interactive. It's an interesting contrast to Phoenix Wright (which fully embraced it was a visual novel and you just straight up present facts without any nonsense), and I really like the visual styles during the different minigames, but when they started hindering me actually presenting what I knew was a counterargument I got annoyed.

There are a few other minor niggles I have, too. To get presents you put coins into a capsule machine, but there's no option to just dump them all in there and get a hundred presents at once. You have to do them one at a time (putting in more coins just increases your chance of not getting a duplicate), which is absurdly tedious. Burning though a hundred tokens can take 10-15 minutes of your time just cranking the knob, which is no fun. Last minor thing is the map. It does let you teleport (hooray!) but the cursor isn't free flowing (boo!) which means sometimes it would move or go somewhere I didn't want it to. Not a biggie, but this (and a handful of other things I just won't mention) are little gameplay issues that probably wouldn't have taken long to address.

I'm glad you can actually walk around the school, even if there isn't much to see. 

 Graphically DanganRonpa looks great. It's an up-rezed version of a PSP game, but you wouldn't be able to tell playing it on the Vita. The game has a distinct sense of style, from its menus to its character art. Even the school itself, with its bold colors lighting the hallways and odd colored doors, is like something out of a strange nightmare. Special note must also be made of the trial sequences (especially NonStop Debate), where the camera spins around the circle of students and the visual style becomes heavily stylized. It looks really good!

Characters and objects in the 3D environments intentionally look like 2D cutouts being propped up. It's a style choice so I get it (since they're 2D drawings they decided to just not bother rendering them in 3D), and while at first I didn't like it, it grew on me and fit the game. What I really didn't like was the poor draw distance for objects, meaning people (and lights, which are the most noticeable as you move) pop in only when you get close. It makes looking for people to social link with a pain.

The few animated scenes (usually the executions) are delightfully done in a pseudo 2D/3D style. And I just realized I used "delightful" to describe executions. I'm probably on a list now.

The music is solid. It isn't exactly...I dunno...memorable like Phoenix Wright was, but most provide proper ambiance and all fit a neat style. It's mostly standard visual novel fair (again, just there as background noise), so it's all good.

The voice acting is decent. Almost all lines are spoken during the trials, which I appreciate. Out in the world, only a few key ones are ever said. Most are simply prefaced with a "reaction" audio clip (such as "Oh!" or "What?") to match the tone of the text. It's fine, save the few characters who just have them cussing as part of their clips. There's only so many "You son of a bitch!" you can get totally out of context before you get bored of it.

Oh yeah, I didn't mention it before, but there's plenty of f-bombs in this game to earn it is M rating. Just tossing that out there if you thought this game was for kids for some reason.

Living cutouts. How...nice?

So after all this jibber-jabber, what do I actually think about DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc? Well...I liked it. Really liked it. Liked it so much I stayed up late almost every night last week because I had to see what happened (hurting both my sleep schedule and my productivity at work...). The game is actually fairly long (think ~20 hours), but it certainly didn't feel it. The story is so well paced and the characters so entertaining, you can't help but get engrossed. They do well on their bizarre premise (and equally bizarre characters), and the trials are exhilarating and nailing the culprit satisfying.

Since people probably want a Phoenix Wright comparison, I'll toss this out there: I liked it better than the Phoenix Wright games I've beaten (which is just the first two, mind you). The pacing is brisker and the investigation and trial portions faster and funner. It's got a black sense of humor (unlike Phoenix, which thrives on it's charming goofiness) that works well with the story, and has quite a few "adult" jokes that caught me off guard. I still think the Phoenix Wright games are phenomenal, mind you, but DanganRonpa takes those ideas and streamlines them in all the right ways.

If you like a good, bleak story and enjoy deciphering mysteries, DanganRonpa is quite a good time. The somewhat lackluster minigames and overall strangeness may turn a few people off, but you came for the ride, and it's absolutely a ride worth taking.

Oh yeah, and just because I had to say it: no duh DanganRonpa is a game. Why is that even being brought into question? It's a game. QED.

Four out of five stars. 

It's the trial of the century. 

Five Nights at Freddy's

The Short

Pros
- This is technically a spiritual successor of Night Trap. Just...think about that for a moment
- Evokes a certain sense of uneasiness throughout, which then becomes genuine stress
- Does well at using it's limited controls to make you feel powerless, increasing the spooks
- Animatronic anything just gives me the jibbilies
- The jump scares are surprisingly decent
- Despite it's simple graphics, the ghetto feel actually works to the game's creepy benefit
- It's short length is a plus; it doesn't wear out it's welcome too badly

Cons
- Game usually ends up relying on jump scares after the first or second night
- Doesn't do as much as one would hope to mix up the formula
- Gameplay mechanics themselves are fairly simplistic
- Why would the guy come back after the first night?
- Seems a little too much "Made for YouTubers"

Nothing seems wrong, everything is fine. 

The Long

What a weird gaming world we live in. With the rise of YouTube Let's Players like PewDiePie, Game Grumps, and others, indie devs now have an outlet to reach millions of people should they be lucky enough to be chosen by one of these crazy game-playing behemoths. Whether you love them, hate them, or find them obnoxious and wonder what the big deal is, it's pretty certain the face of gaming exposure has changed, for better or for worse.

One of the things that made these Let's Players so prominent early on was their reactions to horror games. Played in the dark, eyes wide and headests on, people apparently got a kick out of watching other gamers totally freak out on camera in ways that were absolutely not made up or overexaggurated in any way. Games like Amnesia and Slender went from niche horror titles to cultural megahits, and other games that were easy for these YouTubers to react to (Surgeon Simulator, Happy Wheels, Flappy Bird) began to emerge to embrace this new market.

Now we have the latest in this low-budget, high on jump scares endeavor, Five Nights at Freddy's. While I don't want to say the developer went out of his way to make a game that YouTubers would play and promote (which is exactly what happened with this game), I will say that there wouldn't even be a market for this kind of game if the floodgates hadn't already been opened. Because, you see, this game is basically the Sega CD disasterpiece, Night Trap. Yeah. Really. That alone makes me want to love it.

But is it actually a good game? A bad game? And, more importantly, is it 2spooky4me? Well, fill out your job applications and stay away from Chuckie Cheese, because we're gonna find out.

This seems fine. Everything here is fine. 

The plot of the game is relatively simple. Starved for work, you take a five-day gig at Freddy's, a sort of Chuckie Cheese style pizza place for kids. The job seems simple enough: sit in a room as a night security guard from the hours of ten to six, and at the end of the week collect your $120. It's apparently in like 1987 or something because the cameras are all garbage and everything looks...well, like it's from 1987, which explains the $120 being actually worth it for this job. Only not really.

The first night out you get a phonecall that goes straight to your voicemail from someone who claims to have been the previous person working there. Apparently at night the animatronic creatures (there are four total, one being the titular "Freddy") are allowed to wander around on their own. No biggie, but if they manage to find you their screwed up programming will read you as an exoskeleton missing it's suit, and then stuff you into one of the spares they have lying around. Which wouldn't be a problem except bones and vital organs don't really mesh will with the complex machinery inside these things. So basically they'll kill you. What kind of freaking job is this?

THINGS ARE VERY QUICKLY BECOMING LESS FINE.

The way to prevent yourself from being brutally murdered by these straight up freakin' creepy animatronics is to either keep an eye on them (as they are aware when you are watching them over the cameras) and, in case of an emergency, close one of two doors leading to your office. The big trick is that doing anything (even just sitting with the light on) drains your very limited supply of power. Pulling up the cameras, switching cameras, and even having the light that flickers on and off in the dark hallway outside the open door drains the power just a bit. Closing the doors in particular is a massive power hog, which means you have to keep them open as long as possible unless you want to be out of power at 5 AM and at the mercy of these things.

Like I said, Night Trap. You can't leave the office; the only controls you have are deciding when to look through the cameras (which have pretty crappy, usually black-and-white picture, and one room doesn't even have visual just sound) and when to shut the doors. As part of the trick, there are blind spots between the rooms closest to you and your actual room, which means you'd best be putting the camera interface away (which takes up the full screen) and checking the space just outside your doors (which is just a flickering light in the pitch darkness) unless some freaking robot duck sneaks in when you aren't looking and turns you into a mobile Mickey Mouse.

I REGRET EVERYTHING!

The various characters have a variety of nuances that you have to learn quickly. Most will only move when you aren't looking, but there isn't enough power to keep an eye on them at all times. One just sort of wanders, heading for you then giving up and moving around a bit. The other can teleport (yeah, not fair), though the game gives a faint audio cue when it's about to happen. Freddy...I don't know what he does, just kind of lumbers about and makes me upset. The worst is the creepy wolf guy (see above) who is normally hiding behind a stage curtain. But if you don't look at the curtain (or, inversely, look at it too much) he'll suddenly burst free and make a beeline straight for you (the only character you can see moving on camera). He'll pound on the door for a while (or murder you, again, see above) before retreating and the process cycles again. Having it trigger on both "too much" and "too little" was a clever idea, meaning you are constantly stressed out.

And hoo boy, this game is super stressful. The limited vision, the constant worrying about power, the characters that move erratically and then stand perfectly still when caught on camera (or in your field of vision, standing outside the door before they come in to get you) all compiles to a massive, stressful bundle of fun. With so much stuff to manage and the constant fear of getting jumped or missing someone, the game thrives on making things miserable. The worst is having to, on occasion, switch off the cameras because you know you're draining too much power, meaning you are sitting there for one, two, three painful seconds wondering if they're coming for you. And when you do run out of power? Well, they don't come straight for you, but you bet when you hear that little musical jingle, Freddy is coming. He's coming to getcha.

You stay there, rabbit. No tricks! Tricks are for kids!

So the big question is this: is this game actually, genuinely scary? I'll preface my answer with the usual that comes with spooky stuff: your mileage may vary. The game doesn't rely on blood or gore to provide it's scares, and I commend it for it. The creepy atmosphere, voicemails, and dead silence save the hum of your fan and the click of switching cameras are more than enough to unsettle. However, after a while (usually around day three), it stopped being scary and was just stressful (but in a good way).

The main reason for this is twofold. The first is the game is extremely reliant on jump scares. Now, it's jump scares are actually pretty dang good, especially when you are playing the game the first time. There's a massive beginner's trap on day two that I won't spoil, but needless to say if you don't listen to the voice mail very intently, you are gonna have a bad time. Nothing is worse than the long pause when the power is out and you see Freddy's eyes glowing, and it's 5 AM which means it just might, might roll over and you'll win. The screen grows dark and...

Well, either a massive scream of horror as Freddy encompasses the screen taking you, or the 6 AM rolls over. Either way, you're gonna jump.

You really are a prima donna, aren't you?

There are other jump scare tricks. The fox, as mentioned, can make it from his stage to you in just a few seconds, often resulting in a frantic button press for the door (or a screaming yell as he bursts in to murder you). Other characters can sneak into the room while you are looking at the cameras, and the game is evil in that they will wait for you to lower the interface at your own discretion before attacking. It's a clever trick that makes you scared to to just about anything.

But at it's core, all these things are just what I said before: jump scares. That's the main crux. They are very obviously jump scares too, because the sounds they make are horrifically loud compared to the rest of the game and sound worse than Nazgul screams. Like the rest of the game, they evoke overwhelming stress, and usually cause a pretty good jump and a cuss word.

The issue is that eventually jump scares get old. After the fifth or sixth time of getting jumped, getting caught off guard is less frightening and more just stressful and annoying. Once you learn the audio cues that they're in the room when your camera is up, you can expect the "scare" before raising the camera. Is it still startling to have a sudden burst of noise pierce the silence? Yeah, but that's startling, not scary.

As a self-proclaimed expert on ducks, I can say with a 98% certainty that they don't have teeth.

The second issue is the lack of variety. The game basically plays all it's cards on the third day: you are introduced to all the characters, and you can start learning their patterns. Beyond that it's just the difficulty ramping up: the AI gets smarter, and...well, that's it actually. There isn't really any dramatic changes to formula. It would have been cool if after a few days they started cutting the wires on certain cameras, or using decoys to distract you. Maybe mix up their movement patterns a bit, or introduce a few more animatronics into the mix (or even put you in a different building). The game's brevity is it's strength in this regard (only five days and a bonus, extra hard sixth day if you hate yourself) seeing as I'd say it still maintains it's spooky atmosphere up until the end of day three, but then it stops being really scary and more of a game you are playing, and in that regard it's about as exciting as playing Night Trap. Which is not very exciting at all.

So, in a way, this game is a perfect fit for this generation of "horror" fans. People who like quick jumps and rapid fire scares, that aren't really satisfied with slow burns unless they quickly result in ramped up jump scares (or gore splatter). It's less "horror" and more "thriller" (or "suspenseful"), as the slow burn followed by the sudden, rapid release, then followed by the slow burn again is pretty much a staple of how to create smart tension within horror games (see P.T. or Silent Hill 2 for good examples of this). But I will commend it in that it starts as a spooky slow burn: the first two days are genuinely unsettling, even if you do manage to not get jump scared. It's just too bad it couldn't keep that momentum going.

Nothing to see here. That's good, right? Please? I want my mommie...

Graphically the game does wonders with it's obvious low budget. The entire game is pretty much a still shot with a camera fuzzy VHS filter put over it, with random layers of when the beasties are there put on top of it to spook you out. What really works is their details in lighting; they're really good at taking a dark scene (like the one above) and then slyly sneaking a dark shadow that wasn't there before, or some glowing eyes peeking out of a corner. Some are more obvious (as you can see from the screenshots earlier in the review), but considering this isn't even as complex as, say, the FMV filled Night Trap, I have to hand it to them: they did a whole lot with next to nothing.

The only real animations are when you are assaulted and the freaking nightmare-fuel running fox (who runs like Crash Bandacoot, which if you think of that makes him way less scary). Their animations are really janky and the models fairly low-budget up close, but it fits both the theme of the animatronics and the fact that this game looks like a game from the late 90s/early 2000s. It has that "3D is just getting started on PCs so we're gonna pre-render everything" look like from the Fallout games, and I actually kind of love it for it. It's a throwback to a graphical style that nobody ever throws back to (thank goodness they didn't make this game with pixel art), and one I have a lot of nostalgia for. I'd like to see it done more (famous last words here...).

Crash Bandacoot is coming for your babies. 

Not gonna lie: I went into this game fully expecting to be an elitest reviewing jerkbag and give it a low score because I thought it was just pandering YouTube bait. Hey, at least I'm being honest here.

But after playing through it, my opinion changed to one of genuine reverence to this developer. Is this game scary like a Hitchcock movie or other classic horror games? Maybe at the beginning, but not really. The gameplay is intentionally overly difficult (what is this place powered on, double-a's?) as well as extremely simplistic, the graphics are mostly static images, and it's riddled with jump scares. But despite all that, they managed to create a fun, genuinely unsettling horror game, that takes a relatively untapped formula and uses it very effectively to do exactly what it sets out to do. 

It isn't too long, and doesn't really outstay it's welcome (any longer and I'd have griped about how the gameplay gets stressfully tedious). It's scares early on are genuine and downright unnerving, and the style is one I really enjoyed.

But perhaps the biggest catch? It released at only $5. That's insane. Truly, I find it hard to believe. 

Ok, I'm done, that's enough heart attacks for today. 

Will I play this game again? Probably not. Not because it spooked me (which it did, at least at first), but mostly because this game is so damned stressful I can feel myself losing my hair. But will I recommend it to a friend so they'll have a hellish 2-3 hours for the low low price of $5? Abso-freaking-loutly. 

Nice work, Scott Cawthorn. Eat up all that free YouTube marketing. You totally deserve it.

Four out of five nights at Freddy's. 

Now excuse me while I never, ever play this damn game again. 

Dynowarz: The Destruction of Spondylus

The Short

Pros
- You can ride a dinosaur
- You can ride a dinosaur
- YOU CAN RIDE A DINOSAUR
- IN SPACE

Cons
- Sometimes you are not riding the dinosaur

AAAH YSSSSSS

The Long

"Something was terribly wrong in the distant man-made Spondylus Solar System. One by one the planet's central life support computers had been infected with a life threatening virus while the planet surfaces had been overrun with computerized dinosaurs known as Robosaurs. Under attack in his laboratory on Alpha Planet, Professor Proteus, the mastermind of the Spondylus System and the founder of the Robosaur project suddenly realized that this deadly sabotage could only be the work of his former partner, the deranged Dr. Brainius. 
Years earlier, the doctor had fled Alpha Planet after Professor Proteus had exposed him for performing forbidden robotic experiments on human subjects. At last, he has returned to seek his revenge using the Professor's own creations! But little did he realize that Proteus had been hard at work for the past few years perfecting the ultimate Robosaur, Cyborasaurus. 
There was only one hope to save the Spondylus System!"

That one hope? DINOSAURS. Or...Dynosaurs? Um...

Dynowarz is basically Blaster Master except replace the car Sophia with a giant killer T-Rex in space. There, review over.

Wait, no, there's more to say here, because that previous statement wasn't entirely factual. Yes, Dynowarz is split into two distinct parts: playing as a human with a gun in smaller, enclosed levels that require backtracking, and playing as a killer orange Dynosaur out to cause Space Dynosaur Extinction across the known galaxy. The difference here is that while Blaster Master is mostly about exploration, Dynowarz is a linear platforming game that does little to mix up the formula. Plus Blaster Master had those top-down shooter bits. Those were pretty good, actually. And rad music. Why am I not playing Blaster Master? 

Oh right, because Blaster Master is impossible. 

At any rate, Dynowarz, despite having the raddest name, cover art, and premise of any video game ever made, is really just a somewhat mediocre 2D beat-em-up. It's split into two sections (as mentioned previously): ones where you get out of the Dyno (usually to go inside a building), and one where you are driving the giant Dyno robot.

The sections where you are a person are fairly poor. You have a gun and you jump like you are on the moon, but the game is determined to make the platforming as difficult as possible by having tiny moving platforms as well as spikes everywhere to punish you for even the slightest screw-up. The first few aren't too difficult (actually, they all aren't that bad), but they come off as more stressful than actually fun.

It should also be pointed out that you usually get out of the Dyno to walk into buildings to destroy the Mother Brains inside of them which then destroy the buildings, when the Dyno is clearly bigger than the building and could probably just go Godzilla on its ass. Oh well, video game logic. I give the person segments a Not Dynosaur / 10.

This is boring. Go away. 

But the other half of the game involves the DYNOSAUR!!! (*sick guitar riff!!*) ON THE...MOON?! Or some sort of planet? Come to think of it, the title does say "The Destruction of Spondylus." Am I on Spondylus? Is this the wreckage of a former civilization? Maybe it's a crazy reversal, where I'm the last man alive, and only dynosaurs survived the apocalypse? Plz Namco-Bandai, release a reboot of Dynowarz with an intricate plot and cookie-cutter main characters to explain the massive backstory potential available with this series. I mean, if they can freaking reboot Strider and reboot Duck Tales and reboot Blaster Master and reboot Killer Instinct and reboot Mortal Kombat and reboot that one fighting game nobody knows about on the Xbox but is for some reason coming to Xbox One, then this is totally fair game!

Oh right, the DYNOSAUR part. It's a fairly linear 2d beat-em-up. You have to murder a whole variety of dynos, ranging from triceratops to stegosaurus to other t-rexes. The kind of weird thing is that your default attack is a really short-ranged punch, when I'm pretty sure T-Rexes were famous for having tiny, crappy front arms. It's like a cultural meme now. I have a pin with a T-Rex holding one of those grip extender things, with the text "I AM UNSTOPPABLE!" under it for the laughs. So clearly, we know T-Rex had garbage arms. Fact check next time, game designers, like go to a natural history museum or something I swear.

Upgrades range from a arm gun, an arm that circles around you like a deranged boomerang, and a better punch. Overall, the gun is the most useful but also the weakest, and some enemies that are low to the ground you can't even hit with certain weapons. Also, if you pick up more of the same powerup it'll upgrade it, but if you mess up and pick up a different power-up, you get that one instead and all your upgrades go away. It's a little obnoxious. And by a little I mean a lot.

Welcome to Jurassic Park. Planet. Jurassic Planet. Isn't that the name of the fourth movie?

While the Dynosaur bits should have been the most badass parts, they're actually a hunk of hot garbage. Attacks, as mentioned before, feel weak and have horrible range. It's hard to even attack enemies without getting hit back. But what's even worse is the pits and jumping. Right off the bat there's a pit with a mine on the other side. If you jump across like a normal platformer, you'll hit the mine and it'll explode, knocking you into the pit for an instant death. You try to overshoot and it does the same thing. Only if you pull an Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and take a leap of faith into the abyss will you hopefully land on that one pixel just to the left of the mine but isn't in the pit, and then be able to hop the mine and continue on your way. I'm going off memory here, but I'm pretty sure that's the first pit jump in the game. Maybe the second. I dunno, it's a little hazy, all I can think of right now is Jurassic Park dubstep for some reason .

It is mandatory to listen to this while playing. 

Aside from the mediocre gameplay, Dynowarz also looks pretty trashy. The cutscenses when you get into your Dyno and at the end are straight up awesome, but the rest of the game is kind of a blurry, pixelated mess. Nearly every planet's background is just a black starry sky, no mountains or hills or background of any kind. It's kind of cool in like a "the bleakness of a destroyed world" way, but I mean...why is every planet like this? Was Spondylus like the entire solar system or something? Why is everything so flat? Is this the Iowa Midwest of galaxies?

Music is also subpar around the board. Tunes are tinny and entirely unmemorable, though not offensive. Sound effect are bland and sound bitcrunched to death, perfectly complimenting the bland blobs of pixels that are supposed to be dinosaurs on the screen. Sorry, dynosaurs. Dunno why I keep doing that.

Beating the bosses relies entirely on having the right weapon by sheer luck. 

Ok, real talk: I secretly kind of love Dynowarz. Real talk part two: it's crap. It seriously is straight up garbage. It's not broken (which, considering this is the NES, is actually a pretty big positive), but it most certainly isn't a good game. It's tedious, not hard enough to be challenging but not easy enough to be a fun cakewalk, and most of it's difficulty stems from awful design and, mostly, the bad controls. 

But still, it's a game where you freaking drive a robot dinosaur to punch other robot dinosaurs in space.  And all of a sudden all my problems with it dissolve into blissful, peaceful, dynophoria. 

Two out of five stars. 

Also, more games should end like this. "Congratulations! You've finished another great game from Phil Fish!"

Lumines: Electronic Symphony

The Short

Pros
- Pretty, HD Lumines action
- Addition of "character powers" adds a bit more control and variation to the game
- Powerups seem to drop more frequently. I'm ok with this.
- Probably the best soundtrack out of all the Lumines games
- Is on PSVita, a portable system, which is where it plays best

Cons
- It's...just more Lumines.
- They still haven't found out a way to make any crazy modes or something with this puzzle concept
- Oh wait, there's touch screen controls. Don't use them.

Shapes and a beat line, huh? Must be Chime! Wait...

The Long

I'm gonna save you some time and link you to where I already reviewed Lumines on the PSP. And I just now realized that in that review I sort of semi-promised to review Lumines 2 and never did. Oops.

Anyway, it's another Sony handheld, which means ya gotta have Lumines. After a brief diversion onto Xbox Live, Lumines is back where it started, and upgraded for the Vita. What new tricks does Lumines have? Is it mixing up the beat (hur hur) in some wacky ways? Is this the Lumines gritty reboot?

Well...no, not really. But it's still a blast to play. So I guess it's still ok.

For some reason, my brain can't process these circles. I always do worse on this theme. 

I'll be brief on how Lumines works since I already went over it before. There's 2x2 squares full of two-colored...more squares (or sometimes circles, see above). When you get at last four of the same color in a big square together, it connects and can be deleted. Until it is deleted by the moving beat line (which moves with the tempo of the song), you can attach any more 2 colors to that chain, which means latching as many squares (or circles) to your cluster before the beat line eats it for dinner is imperative. You can chain these together for Mad Points, or just play really badly like I do and frantically scramble to not completely fail before the next song happens. Up to you.

What sets the game apart is not only its simplicity, but its reliance on soundtrack (it seems to be a theme this week, me reviewing musical-type games. Weird). Since the bar moves with the beat, your time to expand on your clusters varies depending on the song. The game also moves through songs at a pretty decent rate (each song is usually around 2-4 minutes), which causes both a style change (still a nice touch) and a tempo change. So basically you try to survive for as many songs as possible in the "Bon Voyage" mode, and when too many squares/circles reach the top you lose.

Gotta keep with the beat.

There are two key powerups you can get. One makes it so every piece touching it of the same color becomes deleteable. This is a great powerup if you play like me: badly. I somehow play this game like Magical Beat or Puyo Puyo, where I think attaching tons of the same color together in a snake-like line is a good way to play. It isn't. It's a good way to lose. But luckily this power up let me eliminate whole chains of these things, leaving only the other color behind to become a Massive Awesome Combo which I totally planned and it was my strategy all along.

The other powerup does something. I don't know what. I know, I should probably research this, but I can't be bothered. Sometimes it makes clusters where there weren't any, so I'm thankful to this powerup. But not as thankful as the chain one. It's my favorite.

A big change to the Vita version is the ability to have an Avatar ability. Basically you can pick from five "characters" to go into the game with, and each has a rechargeable power. The one I use most is the one that gives you a free snake-chain-powerup thing, as you can imagine based on my playstyle above, but they do a large variety of different things to mix up your game. These powerups recharge as you play (they recharge pretty dang slowly, though), so they're mostly used if you get in a tight spot.

It's a block party, ha ha ha. 

The other major Vita change is touch screen controls. I am going to cop-out and just say: don't play with touch screen controls. It's a nice novelty early on, but the later levels get crazy frantic fast, and it's just not possible to use a touch screen for it. I imagine Sony made them put this in so it could be a bullet point on the box, but it adds nothing to the game.

It also has it's usual multiplayer, which in turn has these power-up avatars, which gives you a bit more flavor to your matches. But in the end, it's basically just the same multiplayer as all over versions.

...which is the only real complaint I have with Lumines: Electronic Symphony: touch screen controls and avatars aside, this is the exact same game as Lumines. Well, I guess power-ups do seem to drop more frequently, but that's hardly anything to write home about. There's no new modes, no variations or a "puzzle mode" (which I think this game could use), and as a bonus you have to navigate the menus with touch controls (...why?). They literally sold me the same game I've bought four times already on PSP and Xbox.

They've got my number. 

And yet, for some reason, I'm totally ok with this. Why? Well, the game is like $10 on Amazon, and it is still probably the best handheld puzzle game since Tetris made the Game Boy cool. The new graphical style is really slick on the Vita's screen, with the cubes exhuming just the right about of weird bright glow and rapid changing style to keep you interested. It's a really pretty game, and really really addicting, the kind you feel you're never quite good enough at but just good enough to have fun. You know. That kind.

The soundtrack is probably my favorite out of all the Lumines games. Rumor has it this was originally going to be a "reboot" of Lumines (yes, a reboot of a puzzle game) called Daft Punk: Lumines. I swear I'm not making this up. They enlisted Daft Punk to write all the songs, but they ended up being too busy with both the Tron: Legacy soundtrack and the album Random Access Memories.

Regardless, the soundtrack consists of mostly licensed electronic music, and I like pretty much all of it. There's no real duds that I can think of, though a few certainly stand out more than others. I'd tell you which one, but I have no idea what any of the song names are, even with the robot girl voice speaking their names before each level. I'm too busy looking at colored squares, man!

All these screenshots are starting to look really similar. 

In the end, those looking for some sort of huge mix-up to the Lumines series aren't going to find it here. But they will find is a rad puzzle game ported to their new handheld, waiting to suck up hours and hours of their time on the bus. It's still fun, easy to pick up but hard to master, with great music and vibrant colors and a real slick style that makes it memorable. While Avatar Powers are a step in the right direction (and touch screen controls are not), I still feel a bit miffed at the lack of modes here. But hey, again, it was like $10, and I've probably sunk a good dozen hours into it already just commuting. So I think I'm ok with it.

If you have a PSVita, let me know because none of my friends seem to own one. But seriously, if you have a PSVita, this game is pretty much mandatory if you have any affinity for puzzle games. Get it, and be iLUMINESinated. Illuminated. Ilum...you know what? I quit.

Four out of five stars. 

And here's a photo of a guy playing it. Isn't he having FUN? Can't you tell from his hands how much FUN HE IS HAVING?!

Magical Beat

The Short

Pros
- Fast, easy-to-pick-up puzzle game
- Rewards aggressive play and encourages fast, frantic matches
- Having to move pieces to the "beat" adds a new layer of spice
- Seventeen songs initially, with songs from Blazblue and Guilty Gear available for unlock
- Lots of DLC songs and characters available for cheap
- Quite addicting

Cons
- A veritable dearth of modes
- With no online play, the Vita version is essentially single player only (you can Ad-Hoc and that's it)
- Computer is incredibly challenging and the difficulty ranks up too hard too quickly
- Seriously, on normal stage 10 it moves like a superhuman
- Characters are cute and different, but don't actually change the gameplay at all

It's time to get yo beat on.

The Long

I'm gonna admit: I downloaded the demo to this game because I thought it was Magical DROP. Reading comprehension, you've failed me yet again. 

Magical Beat, on the other hand, isn't a bubble-busting blaster like the game I confused it with. Oddly enough, this small puzzle game was created by none other than Arc System Works, the guys who mostly stick to hardcore anime fighting games (Guilty Gear, Blazblue, Persona 4 Arena). Apparently this game creeped out on Japan's PSN a while ago, and nobody expected it to make it stateside. Well...it did, and here it is. So is this puzzle game made by fighting game guys any good?

The characters look like they took inspiration from Cave Story. I'm ok with this. 

Magical Beat is a fairly standard action puzzle game with a few minor twists. The game itself plays a lot like Puyo Puyo. Your goal is to get combinations of three or more blocks (or Puyos) of the same color next to each other. By positioning blocks specifically, you can set up chains, which will clear your board faster and drop obnoxious black blocks (or Puyos) on the enemy screen. If your opponent's screen crosses the top before yours, you are the winner.

The trick to Magical Beat vs a regular Puyo Puyo type game is the second part of the title: the beat. The game draws a bit of inspiration from that other music puzzler I'm hopelessly addicted to, Lumines. Rather than have the pieces fall automatically like in most top to bottom puzzlers, Magical Beat has you holding the three square L piece at the top of the screen, allowing you to position and flip it until you are ready to drop it down. The catch is that next to every player's side is a line moving up and down with the beat of the song. You have to drop the piece with the beat (or within a small range of error), or else instead of falling where you want it, the piece will explode and the squares fall wherever they feel like it. 

It's a simple idea but quickly becomes addicting, mostly because of the range of BPMs across songs. Some are very slow, which means both you and your opponent have more time to think, and makes specifically placing pieces all the more important. Others are balls to the walls fast (like...seriously. So fast a normal person couldn't wisely drop a piece on every beat hit), which makes the competition absurdly frantic. Note that you aren't required to drop a piece every beat, but the computer probably will, which means you'd better be thinking quick on those hard songs.

Blazblue characters and songs are available as DLC, which is a fun nod to the designer's other games

When combining pieces into clusters, they don't disappear immediately (like Puyo Puyo), instead waiting a few beats before disappearing. This gives you time to build up the cluster, or make other clusters, as all current clusters will be removed at the same time, regardless of when they were made. This is similar to the line that crosses the screen in Lumines, erasing finished clusters in that game too, except in Magical Beat there is no such indicator. You do get a sort of "intuition" about when your clusters will be removed after a few games (and if a cluster would have caused you to lose, it is removed immediately to free up screen space), but some sort of visual hint wouldn't have hurt.

Modes are, unfortunately, this game's biggest problem. In that, there aren't many of them. At all. You have three arcade style modes, a beginner round that's 5 matches, a "normal" round that's 10, and a "Hardcore Hell" one which is also ten but the robots are Skynet, Deep Blue, and Hal rolled into one. Aside from that, you can play a single song vs a computer at the difficulty level of your choosing, and...that's it. Not a whole lot here.

This game screams to have multiplayer. The frantic, manic games would make for some hilarious online play with friends. Unfortunately, there is no online multiplayer in the game. In the PS3 version you have the option of local two player puzzle-battling (which I would imagine is fun; I got the Vita version), but for the Vita owners you're pretty much boned: Ad-Hoc is the only way to play, and both of you have to be in the same room and have a copy of the game. The fact that a game was released in 2014 without online play at all completely baffles me, and actually makes me really sad because I wanted to play this game with a friend (or two).

At least I'll always have the computer...right? Maybe?

If you have a PS3 and a significant other, this game is a blast. If you like games like Puyo Puyo or Tetris Attack, this will provide a good deal of competitive, frantic fun. Single player, however, it's a much harder sell, especially considering what you see is basically what you get. If you download the demo, it literally is just the Beginner mode pulled from the game and put on PSN (the 5 stages on an easier difficulty), with the only difference between that and the main game being 12 more songs (vs 5 in the demo) and the 10 person arcade and hell mode. 

The computer, also, is a bit of a problem. True to Arc System's past games (I'm looking at you, Blazblue), your enemy AI goes from "Good" to "Really good" to "Impossibly fantastic" over a matter of just a few rounds. I kid you not that I just sat back and watched it on Arcade Round 8 (not even on Hell mode) and it was moving blocks at a speed literally impossible to do if you have to physically push a button. I guess it means the game will last longer since you'll be butting your head against a cheating computer for a while, but it feels like a cheap way to lengthen the game.

Gotta stay in tempo!

The graphics are fairly simple, using a pixel-art motif that seems to be all the rage these days. The blocks reminded me a lot of the blocks in Tetris Attack (for better or for worse), including visually changing when you have two next to each other and need only one more to finish a chain. The game plays a satisfying "SHISSH!" sound if you manage to drop a piece exactly with the beat (which I assume means more points), and the characters are all over the place in terms of awesomeness. Regular anime style characters meet up with a ghost called G-host, a potted flower, an alphcha with an eyepatch, and a blob of pixels. Yeah, just a blob of pixels. His song is nuts. 

The music is also a lot of fun, a mix of techno and vocaloid that is never grating and reminded me a bit of DDR style music...if it had been bitcrunched a bit. Fans of Hatsune Miku may noticed some of the vocaloid software used is the same kind used in her voice, though it's never similar enough to be distracting. You can also unlock a handful of heavier techno songs from Blazblue and Guilty Gear, or just buy them on the market for a couple of bucks. 

"Egg shaped chicken in a frying pan" is obviously my main. 

When I first played the demo of Magical Beat, I was set to recommend it to everybody. The game is exactly the kind of puzzle game I like: absurdly fast, rewarding those who are aggressive (when I play fast in Tetris I just lose earlier...), has very fast and crazy matches, and looks and sounds great. After getting the game, however, I couldn't help but feel disappointed. Sure, the core gameplay hadn't changed, but the unfortunate lack of variety and modes coupled with the massive oversight of not including online play is genuinely disheartening. It's especially worse for a Vita player, as the game isn't cross-buy, so if I want to play it with my wife on the PS3 I'll have to shell out another ten bucks. Which makes me even sadder, because this game is a perfect fit for handhelds and playing on the bus, if only it had more content (or the computer weren't so impossibly good) to keep it floating.

As it stands, I still think Magical Beat is an awesome puzzle game. I'm crossing my fingers that it sold well enough to merit either a sequel or some free DLC in the future to include more modes and an online option, but considering almost nobody knows this game exists that probably won't happen. Still, if you have a PS3 and love competitive puzzle games, this one is an absolute treat. It's got fun music, cute characters, exciting gameplay, and an unfortunate lack of content on Vita. Ah well, maybe next time.

Oh, and you can buy Blazblue characters. That's pretty good.

Three out of five stars. 

These guys know how to party. 

Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta

The Short

Pros
- For a game made on the Unity engine, it actually looks ok
- For a phone/android game, it also looks ok
- Shooting is somehow more precise than the Uncharted series
- The dialogue is so bad it borders on genius
- Has multiplayer...for some reason
- Only five bucks for "Episode 1"

Cons
- Everything else
- Also, it's only an hour long.

For a phone game, this isn't half bad. 

The Long

Have you heard of Asylum Films? I'm actually a pretty big fan. They basically look at what is popular (like Transformers) and quickly ham out a direct-to-dvd garbagefest that exists solely to confuse grandma when birthdays roll around (Transmorphers). They also made the Sharknado films. Despite their China-level disregard for copyright laws, I kind of find Asylum endearing, as their films have kind of a hilarious badness to them, and when put alongside the original films they're genuinely funny.

This, unfortunately, does not translate into games.

I could say a lot about Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta. I could say how it uses both a Tomb Raider and Uncharted joke in the first cutscene. I could point out that the main character is a direct ripoff of Nathan Drake, down to the facial structure, except his "witty" one-liners are so atrocious they make Nathan look like a linguist. I could point out that the hour-long "episode 1" has more different types of guns then it has enemy types. I could shed a single tear at the 5 minute "walk slowly around town listening to expository dialogue" scene, and the absolutely incredible "drive through a looping cityscape avoiding randomly spawning cop cars for five to ten minutes until the game decides you've done it for long enough."

But I'll just say this: Unearthed is such an incredible, glorious failure, I kind of love it. But not enough to ever, ever play it again.

Nathan Drake, meet Drathan Nrake, your long lost twin. 

When you first boot up Unearthed, you are rewarded with an opening movie that looks like it was made in Apple Movie Maker. Stock photos fly across the screen as text breaks down the backstory, screenshots from the game accompanied by character names zooming by until it cuts to the plageristic looking title screen. It's something you have to see to believe.

You are then introduced to our main character, Faris, and his obnoxious sister Dania. Well, to be fair, they're both obnoxious, but she comes off as particularly grating. Though if I had a brother like Faris, I might feel the same way.

Wait, somehow I forgot the actual opening scene. Which is important, because it constitutes roughly 1/4 of this entire games length.

You start out in some sort of military bunker. The game gives you a brief tutorial on how to shoot (read: it's a third person, cover based shooter) and oddly enough the guns are punchy and enemies aren't bullet sponges. You hear that, Uncharted? People actually go down without having to use two full clips in this game. Unearthed: 1, Uncharted: 0.

It then cuts to a "three weeks ago" flashback, starting the longest panorama alongside the pyramids I've ever seen, and finally resting on our two heroes, giving us a good five minutes of ungodly bad banter. My favorite line was when Faris, who has clearly been travelling for days to reach this location, asks his sister "What is here, exactly?" As if somehow when he was spending all the money, doing all the travel time, and driving up this mountain next to the pyramids, he never bothered to ask why he was doing it. I love expository dialogue without context.

Hope you like this temple, because is the only real place you get to explore in "Episode 1"

Anyway, you get into the temple, solve some puzzles, drive an RC car around, and get some treasure. Then, a rival gang of treasure hunters shows up. Now, I always bashed Uncharted because Nathan Drake was a murdering psychokiller, but Faris makes him look like Ghandi. You'll be gunning down these random guys who just showed up without remorse, until at last you make your way out. After that, Faris and his sister escape on an ATV, gunning down anybody who follows them and even shooting down a helicopter with a machine gun. Badass.

The rest of the game is considerably more boring. Some random guy calls up Faris and invites him to Morocoo. There he tells him of the Trail of Ibn Battuta (roll credits!) and how it's not at all like the Trail of Marco Polo from Uncharted, and how he should go find it. But oh no, the map is stolen from the dude's house! Luckily Faris can leap from roof to roof and grab the thief, but not before a sniper decides to shoot captured thief instead of just shooting Faris. Then it's a thrilling car chase around the city (more on that then) followed by an amazing FMV ending movie (yes, seriously. With Papyrus font explaining everything. I love this) and the game is over. Total playtime? 45 minutes.

Ocean's 11 got nothin on this

Let me say this: for how absolutely atrocious the story is, and how painfully awful the dialogue is (especially when it's trying to have "witty comebacks"), something about this whole thing is oddly charming. The broken English, awful sentence pacing, random pauses, and just straight up stupid things everybody says are cringe worthy but still worth laughing at. If the game had just been that for an hour, maybe I'd have liked it better. Unfortunately, you have to actually play Unearthed.

The game is all over the place in terms of stuff you do, but it's segmented very distinctly so that each section feels like an entirely different game. It starts out with just straight shooting in it's prologue, then moves you to more Uncharted/Tomb Raider style exploration. It's worth pointing out there aren't any actual puzzles; you just find the objects you need in the environment (either by climbing up to them or just...walking over to them) and move on. You do get to drive an RC car (which is pretty funny), but even that I wouldn't call a "puzzle" just like I wouldn't call the Legend of Zelda series "action games."

Following that you have to get out of the temple while gunning down dudes. This is fairly standard cover based third person shooting. I will point out that the shooting feels better than the Uncharted games. Yes, lynch me now, but Uncharted's gunplay is kind of garbage. Unearthed enemies at least go down when you shoot them in the head.

The driving segments are my "favorite" parts. 

Upon exiting the tomb, you're treated to what is essentially a turret scene, with you sitting on the back of an ATV shooting guys that try to chase you down. It's absurdly easy, but ends in you taking down a helicopter with a machine gun, so it ain't all bad.

Then you have my favorite part in the whole game: five minutes of you walking slow, following a guy and your sister, while he spots expository dialogue. The best part is you get to where you are going and hit a cutscene, and you think the game is going to kick up again, and it puts you into another slow walking expository dialogue scene. I love it.

Then you have a "rooftop chase," which is extremely simple and lasts less than a minute. I forgot the mention the game also has a "fistfighting" system, which is completely awful. Blocking is worthless, kicking is worthless, mashing buttons is all you need. After beating up the dude you're supposed to "dodge the cops," but in my playthrough I just accidentally fell off the side of the building and the game triggered that I'd escaped. So good.

Then you have the final scene, the best scene, the scene that will go down in history. You're supposed to dodge the cops in a car. Your sister points out that you have to "avoid them for some time." So what does that mean? It means you drive through a cycling city block over and over again, while police cars randomly spawn in (usually far out of the way so they have no hope of catching you), while you drive through this same area over and over and over until the game decides you've had enough. There's no indicator, no challenge, the car doesn't even go very fast, and even getting tagged by the cops just causes you to lose a tiny amount of life. It's so good.

Such lifelike posture. 

After that, the game is over. You get a final FMV scene and it tells you to wait for Episode 2. Which is not out. And I don't think will ever come out. For this whole freaking game you don't even start on the "Trail of Ibn Battuta." And I keep reading it as the "Trail of IGN Battuta." Maybe they were trying to suck up for a better review score. I have no clue.

What the crap else can I say about this game? It looks ok, at least the environments do. The characters look awful and move really janky, with tons of glitchy animations throughout. Controls are ok for the most part but not really polished (I can't imagine playing this on an touch screen phone) and the sound design ranges from "dull" to "grating." The voice acting is so, so bad that I have to actually rank it up for atrociousness, and paired with the abysmal script just makes things extra hamball.

Oh yeah, there's multiplayer. It's a wave based survival mode. Against zombies. Don't play it.

I see them rollin, I'm hatin...

Ok, let me just be straight with you here: yes, Unearthed is kind of garbage. YouTubers ripped into it fairly viciously, game websites that even bothered to review it shredded it, and the game became kind of a joke because of it. But if I'm being totally honest here...it isn't that bad. I'd more say it's misguided. The exploring portions aren't horrendous, the shooting is ok, and for being made by a small team the game looks good and has good setpieces. The endless driving and slow walking parts are a total miss, I'll give it that, but the awful dialogue is so charming I kind of want to forgive it's shortcomings and recommend it.

But then I remember it's 45 minutes long, which means I could have beaten the entire game in the time it took me to write this review. And they're charging $5. Eeehh...

Maybe if they actually finish the whole series and then sell that for $5, it might be worth a shot just for a laugh. But if I'm being totally honest here, this game is really pretty bad. I started off loving it (for the wrong reasons, but whatever), and then it wore me down until I just couldn't stand it anymore. If anything, the game is at least entertaining to just watch, so you can save yourself $5 and just head on over to YouTube in that case.

The fact this game made it on the PS3 is a laugh riot. Better luck next time, guys. I think you have promise, this just...falls flat.

One out of five stars. 

Or you could, you know, watch me play it. If you want. That could be fun.