Playlist (March 2020) (Patreon)

Hey everybody. Time for this month's Playlist - that's three mini reviews of games I've been playing recently. You can watch it as a video, above, or read it as an article, below. Up to you! 

Ori and the Will of the Wisps

So this month saw the release of Ori and the Will of the Wisps: the long-time-coming sequel to the gorgeous and memorable Ori and the Blind Forest. Much like the first game, it’s a painterly semi-Metroidvania, with really fluid movement and a cute, heartfelt story.

For the sequel, there’s a bunch of changes. For one, Wisps is a bit more aggressively a Metroidvania. The world is more open to exploration, and you can take on tasks out of order, and revisit old areas with new powers to find treasures. It’s been a while since I played the first Ori so I can’t be sure, but it definitely felt like that game was less interested in the whole lock-and-key structure than this sequel.

Also, the combat system has been completely re-vamped: and for the better. Ori 1 had a pretty weird button-bashing homing attack that didn’t feel great to use. Ori 2 has a whole arsenal of different weapons to unlock - from a basic sword attack to down-smashes and area-of-effect blasts and so on. You can map three things to the X, Y, and B buttons to create your own combat set-up on the fly.

And there are other changes too: there are actual boss battles this time, which go alongside chases sequences like Ori 1’s Ginso tree. There are way more collectibles, and a raft of sidequests to get involved with. And the “make your own checkpoint” system is gone - which, is a bit of a shame but I didn’t end up missing it much.

But at the same time, despite all these changes, Will of the Wisps did feel a bit familiar to me. It didn’t feel like a huge step beyond the original game.

For example, the game’s best move is still Bash - the stand-out move from Ori 1 where you can leap into enemies or projectiles and then catapult yourself off in a new direction. Though, if you didn’t play the Definitive Edition of Ori 1, then the light sphere - a ball that you can throw out and then bash off that - will feel new. 

Still, this is a really well made game. Moon Studios made two smart hires: Chris McEntee was level designer on Rayman Legends and came up with a raft of clever platformer mechanics that escalate nicely through the game’s zones. And Milton Guasti was the maker of Metroid fan remake AM2R, and brings his Metroidvania sensibilities to the world of Wisps.

So overall, this is still a wonderful game: but maybe doesn’t hit quite as hard as the first game, and is not the essential play that Blind Forest was. 

DOOM Eternal

Also out this month is DOOM Eternal: another game that will feel very familiar to those who played its predecessor a few years back. So this is more DOOM 2016: fast, frantic, eye-watering firefights against demons. A knockabout pinball battle of lightning-quick decision making and endless weapon switching.

So what’s new? Well in DOOM 2016, the innovative Glory Kill system turned every enemy into a potential piñata for health pick-ups. And the chainsaw could top up your ammo if you were running low. Eternal takes this idea of enemies being loot crates on legs to the next dimension by one: massively limiting your max ammo pool so you’ll be sawing up enemies every 20 seconds. And two: also making monsters drop armour if you set them on fire first.

This aggressive resource management kinda works, but boy does it take a while to get into. At the start of the game you’ll be constantly running out of ammo. Your shotgun can only hold 16 shells tops, after all. Eventually, once you start to hone the muscle memory of chainsawing a zombie every now and again, it feels okay - but it’s a big change from 2016’s game.

Perhaps the game is trying to make you swap weapons more often. You can’t rely on one gun if you’ve never got the bullets for it, after all. And there are other ways they encourage this too. Every gun now has a very clearly defined role: even the plasma cannon, which was a bit unfavourable in 2016, now has a starring role whenever an enemy with a blue shield appears. 

And classic enemies, like the Cacodemon and Revenant, are given “weak spots” that correlate to specific weapons. Like tunking a sticky bomb in the Cacodemon’s mouth, or sniping off the Revenant’s missile launchers with the machine gun’s aim mode. 

It’s a slightly odd change, really. Something I loved about 2016 was that there were no right answers to the combat puzzle. There was only ever a grand spectrum of options - some more sensible than others. But now, whenever you see a Cacodemon, it’s time to pull out the shotgun.

Then again, these are only weak spots - and are never the only way to down a monster. You can still take out a Cacodemon with a rocket launcher, the ballista, or even a frag grenade in the mouth. But Eternal is rife with pop-ups that tell you what to do: and for a lot of players, that’s going to sound more like “here’s what you must do” rather than “hey, this is a good strategy” - which flattens the combat possibilities down to one. 

Anyway. I’ve spoken before about how DOOM 2016 lost me because it struggled to find a way to keep up the pace. Relentless firefight after firefight got boring after a while. I should say: I did, in the end, go back and finish the game. Eternal tries hard to fill in the gaps with interesting downtime, but few things are successful. 

The platforming bits are probably the best attempt. Doom Guy can now swing on bars like the Prince of Persia, clamber up walls like Knuckles, and dash in mid-air. Twice. This makes for some aggressive, push-forward platforming that fits the fast pace of the game but also provides a bit of downtime.

Other ideas are less successful. There are bits with annoying whack-a-mole tentacle monsters. Areas with toxic sludge. Swimming bits that feel like Tomb Raider 1. Puzzles that are too simple to really be called puzzles. And way more story than anyone wanted from a game called DOOM. 

Okay, that all sounded really quite negative, didn’t it? And I didn’t even talk about the annoying Marauder enemy. I still really liked the game, but it just didn’t hit the highs of DOOM 2016 for me.

Luigi’s Mansion 3

Luigi’s Mansion 3 is just a delight. Every single room is packed with jokes, surprising ideas, clever puzzles, and playful physics interactions. It’s a game that’s hard to put down because you just want to see what’s next.

So if you’ve never played one, the Luigi’s Mansion games are games about Mario’s cowardly brother Luigi, who traipses through mansions and hotels with a vacuum cleaner strapped to his back. He then uses this to suck up ghosts, and solve puzzles. 

Mansion 3 starts out in a hotel, but the higher up the building you go, the more you realise that this is no normal hotel. One floor is a medieval castle. Another is a movie studio. Another is a pirate cove. Each level introduces new ideas and clever twists on the formula.

Just going through the game is fun enough, but a lot of the joy comes from hunting down a whole bunch of hidden gems. Each one requires ingenuity and puzzle solving smarts to find, and - especially if you play in co-op, with one player being the jelly-like Gooigi - they’re just so satisfying to find. 

There’s really only one negative to this game, for me. And that’s a regular enforcement to revisit old levels. Every few floors, you’ll be forced to take the elevator back down to an earlier area and trek back through those finished floors to do something tedious like chase a ghostly cat or find a hidden toad. These bits always sucked the fun out of the game, and absolutely killed the forward progression.

And the worst thing is: the game didn’t need to do this! With 15-odd floors, and each taking - on average - an hour to finish, that’s a really meaty 15 hour game, packed with endless new ideas and sights. But for some reason, Nintendo and Next Level saw fit to artificially inflate that to about 20. What a shame - I look forward to replaying this game one day, but I’ll grumble even more when I get to those bits.

Still: this is a wonderful game. I wish I played it in 2019, as it would have definitely made my Game of the Year list.

There we have it. Okay, I’ll leave you to it now. Stay safe, stay indoors if you can, and I’ll speak to you soon.