1. Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers (PC)
2. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (PC)
3. Thor: God of Thunder (DS)
Chip 'n Dale Rescue RangersPlayed via the
Disney Afternoon Collection for Together Retro. Pretty much just ran through this on tourist mode, as I used the rewind feature to
fair obscene degree. It would have taken a good bit longer to actually practice and learn levels enough to actually run through it as originally intended...but I didn't really feel like doing that. Seemed nice enough for the era though.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
Hellblade is a narrative-heavy game following Senua through a journey into Helheim to try and reclaim the soul of her lover, Dillion, from Hela. That'd be the back-of-the-box type description, anyway, if the game had a box. Which, it doesn't, since it's the product of Ninja Theory taking an independent turn. They self-published
Hellblade digitally (though also at a lower MSRP).
More accurately, Senua is not entirely well, and the game is heavily centered on her psychosis - both in terms of her story, and the player experience. Headphones are recommended, as the binaural recordings for the voices in her head sound best through them. Many of the puzzles are also based on seeing things from just the right angle, or on taking a specific path in order to open the way. It's here that the game really shines. Exploration and puzzles, which do make up most of the game, are varied and creative, if not exactly difficult.
Combat, however, is merely serviceable. One-on-one, things are okay, but difficulty tends to get ramped up by having several enemies spawned in at once - and further by having several waves (or more) of enemies to dispatch. Annoying with how closed-in the combat areas tend to be, and eventually,just kind of tiresome. It does seem to be tuned more around creating tension than a real challenge - there's no HUD, and (at least on the Auto default setting) health seems to regenerate or simply give a lot of ability to get back up. It's certainly possible to fail, but it didn't feel particularly strict. The bosses are more interesting, but there are only a handful of them.
Really, the main thing that stressed me with
Hellblade was that, after the first play session, it started crashing after a few minutes. No troubleshooting steps I tried worked, and it effectively made it unplayable. That was back in December though, and the new GeForce driver seems to have fixed whatever issue it was having.
When it's working, however,
Hellblade is a generally great looking game. Though, the need to focus efforts at the budget the game was made on is apparent - Senua herself is exceptionally well depicted (
award-winningly so, in fact). Environments are well done. The enemies you face are decent, but - outside of the few bosses - a bit copy/paste, and very limited in what they need to do. Supporting characters? Literally superimposed FMV. It works, but I suspect if there was more money to be thrown at it things would have been done differently.
I'd highly recommend
Hellblade for those that appreciate story-base, character-centric games. There's plenty here to like in that regard. It fits on the shelf next to stuff like
Spec Ops: The Line. Those looking for
Heavenly Sword or
Enslaved but with Vikings this time...will likely be very disappointed.
Thor: God of ThunderI guess in continuing the Norse theme, I played this for Together Retro, so, just copy/pasting what I wrote in that thread here:
In still-relatively-recent 2011, the first Thor movie came out, and was followed by licensed games that all shared the same name - Liquid Entertainment made the one for PS3/360 (which is apparently crap), Red Fly Studios Wii/DS (apparently okay), and Sega tasked Wayforward with the DS version, which got middling to good reviews. It ended up coming out within weeks of their also-notable
Aliens Infestation, and shares the same sort of pixel art aesthetic. So, it might be a little new, but it's squarely in a 16-bit kind of style.
Unlike that game, but like Wayforward's
Contra 4 from a few years prior,
Thor: God of Thunder uses both DS screens as effectively one tall frame:
The visuals are a highlight, as everything is nicely drawn (for the size) and well animated. While I don't think any of the games actually followed the movie's plot, about all this has to do with it is the box art. Character portraits, based on the Brooke/Oback displayed in the gallery, are via Mark Brooks and Sonia Oback (artist/colorist, respectively). So it's really more based on the comics.
There's platforming of a sort, but no pits to fall to your doom in. Really more of a brawler, but doesn't have multiple planes...so hybrid I'd say. Boss fights do end up with more what you'd expect from a platformer though, and are the highlight here. The basic combat is solid, but gets quite repetitive over the 4 hours or so that the game takes to beat (there are some challenge modes and things unlocked if you want to get more out of it, but I didn't mess with them). Meanwhile, the bosses have some simple patterns and strategies to figure out. The game does occasionally have some extra twist in a level, but usually it's just needing to clear enemies before the map will scroll further.
Anyway, it's a decent game with a nice aesthetic, and well worth the $2.50 I paid for it (Gamestop had one of those four for $10 on used games $4.99 and under deals going). Really the big strike against it is how repetitive it gets, otherwise, it's much better than you'd expect.
