Goemon

I did wonder if S3 sales were down so they planned to bleed the hardcore by having no season pass and just releasing characters individually. Releasing individually gets them an extra £5 per six characters. One thing I find disheartening is the feedback from people about changes to the game which are largely ignored. 4 years in and there’s still no defensive options, I’m still watching 95% of the cast being played exactly the same way, I still seeing people die in 10s of the round starting. I guess it’s having the acceptance that this is what they want the game to be. I just personally think the game is close and it needs a couple of tweaks to make it great. I was also thinking about what SF6 will bring. Has this change of easy combos, over the top offence and general “dumbing down” paid off for them? I suspect that the ads that have just been introduced are tests for their next game over this one. I don’t like it but I understand they’re a business and they’re trying to make money. I don’t my Kage either. People complain that it’s just a shoto clone but what does that even mean? He is his own character with his own set of moves. His VT of teleports looks hella fun! Will players of Ryu automatically be able to play him, not at all. I wondered if they changed who he was, people would accept him more. I have to say though, I don’t know what they were thinking with his teeth. /ends ramble

I’ve got a physical version coming from the US. I really wanted the game, but I’m not a fan of digital when I know there are physical versions out there. Can’t wait to give it a try, it looks great.

A YouTuber I follow posted a stylish S rank run of the demo. Really shows the potential in there!

I noticed at the end that Gunfire’s credits that they have no job title, it’s just a list of the team in alphabetical order. This is incredibly rare to see. I counted them too. 70 people, plus 26 in special thanks. This is a VERY small team by today’s standards. It’s easy to say it looks dated, it’s budget, it doesn’t compare to the likes of Spiderman or God of War. These are valid comments but at the same time is it fair to compare what a 70 person team can produce to a 500 person team? I guess in some respects, yes, as the games are the same price to buy, but at the same time of course a team of over 5 times the amount of people is going to produce something of higher “quality”. One thing that REALLY annoyed me about the Rock Paper Shotgun review was that the guy basically said to NOT buy the game and wait for it in the sale “death by 1000 budget cuts”. He then finishes saying he would love to see Gunfire finish the series. WTF is this!? You’re essentially killing Gunfire with these comments, but you want them to continue? This is what is heart breaking about the whole thing. These guys produced a good game but by today’s standards that’s not good enough and they will likely die for it. IMO we need teams like this to survive. We need to support then, not shoot them down.

I’ve had some shockers unfortunately. Worst one was a boss that wouldn’t spawn properly. It was like a 1:20 run to the boss from Vulgrim but he wouldn’t be there so I would have to spend another 40s quitting out and reloading back in. I’d fight him, die and then have to repeat the whole process again. It hasn’t stopped me playing, which says something about the game IMO, but it’s definitely detrimental. The game can be quite tough but I think it’s all plausible to learn. So much so that at one point I thought about starting again on apocalyptic. Going to ride it out in Balanced for now though but will be tempted at some point in the future. Actually I had a thought the other day but unfortunately you can’t do it and that was the ability to switch hollow type mid combat/combo. I think this would be really cool and would add a lot of potential to the system.

It’s a very small demo and everything seems limited. There’s no sign of Dante, unfortunately.

I think the game is between good and great. Unfortunately though it’s riddled with bugs, some serious, which knock down the experience. I’m amazed it was allowed to be released TBH, I would have thought Sony/MS would have shot it down. I watched the Rock Paper Shotgun review and one thing I think they got right is that they akinned it more to Metroid rather than Dark Souls, which I think is on the money. The world and progression is definitely more along the lines of something like Metroid Prime where you use upgrades to access new areas. Some of the later levels are really great too, much better than the early areas. I actually think they missed some opportunities with some of their later upgrades as outside of the areas where you get them I haven’t had much use for them. They are super cool abilities though. I think by the time the Game of the Year Edition lands and they’ve got rid of all the bugs it will be great. The damage has been done now though with the reviews, so I’m not sure there’s any way back. One thing that distressed me about the Rock Paper Shotgun review was they said it was only a 15 hour experience with little reason to replay it. Since when is a good 15 hour single player experience considered bad? I’d happily take a 15 hour experience of good stuff over 30 hours, of which half of it is chaff.

Kane & Lynch

No, this is different. There’s a move in the list called “scapegoat” which by the explanation sounds like you press B or you’re holding B as you’re hit and it somehow negates the attack. I don’t really understand it though as I’m still taking damage and I have the animation of the arm exploding so I don’t know what the benefit is...

Oh shit, just jumped back in for another go... It looks like you can parry an attack at the cost of an arm. Basically you just press B as you’re about to be hit. It deflects the attack but your arm blows Edit: need to investigate this more. Seems I’m still taking damage so I’m not sure why you would use it...

From what I can tell you don’t. You have up to 4 in your list, depending you what you want to use you have to blow the ones prior. This is another reason I’m not sure about the system. I guess if you could switch you would cycle and you’d never need to pick another up. Just reading about the “break away” which is a specific move to destroy the arm it mentions that you can use it to escape damage so I’m guessing it has invincibility frames to save you but at the cost of an arm.

Had a couple of goes of this earlier. It’s too much for my tiny mind to take. Multiple systems on the go, exceed, devil bringer, general combat, it was proper noobville. Not it sure about the Devil Bringer (arm) system. Different arms do different things but they’re...pick ups!? There’s arms scattered everywhere, which I find this totally bizarre. Certain moves basically blow the arm so you can pick up another, you can hold up to 4. I guess they like the idea of using the arm in different ways leads to different ways to tackle the next section. One liberal use game saw me fighting an entire set of enemies without an arm at all! In my mind though I saw the arm to be like the technique system where switching techniques allows you to do different things with the arm. Can’t tell how this will all play out as the demo is way too small. Biggest crime though, was that there’s a load mid-level. There’s no need for this, it just breaks the flow I can see already this game will suck time away learning combat, which makes me nervous because as mentioned it’s a busy period and I’m going to want to play everything. >< 1st world problems.

@JLM Interesting take from James Chen on the need for proximity normals, which I think will resonate with you. I wasn't sure at first but some of the examples he shows are sound, I think this could definitely help neutral.

Heartbreaking, really feel for the dev team. I’m having more fun playing this game than the new God of War.