Intermission: Overgrowth

Apparently, the Lugaru team are making Overgrowth, the sequel to Lugaru, the game that I'm forced to play in my own personal hell 24/7.

Having finished Lugaru only by cheating, I have to say that there are a few problems they should probably iron out. So let's go through them with the biggest problem first;

#1: For the love of god, make the wolves less powerful

I understand that I'm a rabbit and they're wolves, but it's just ridiculous. One smack from a wolf can take you down regardless of your health, and they always, always use that goddamn annoying trip up attack, so you spend 3/4ths of the combat with your face planted in the ground.

Their attacks are lightning fast, so half the time you won't be able to counter attack the insta-kill hit and you can't sneak up on them either to perform your backstab attack because A) your sneaking speed is about as fast as their walking, so good luck catching up to them and B) they can smell you, so you can't get behind them anyway.

I'd love to find out who playtested this game so I can hang the stupid bastard.

#2: Stop disarming me every time I pick a weapon up

It doesn't matter what weapon I pick up, it's going to get taken off me. The sword is the worst of all - it doesn't matter how many times I do it, every single attack I make with the stupid thing gets countered and taken off me. The funny thing is, I can usually counter the guy back, so it's like a backing and forthing of counters and weapon disarms until eventually I just drop the bloody thing so one of us can die.

The dagger has a chance to go flying off you whenever you trip up (so against wolves you can kiss it goodbye) and the Bo staff can easily be blocked and countered because it's the slowest weapon in the game, so you'd better get used to fighting with your bare fists.

But... but you can holster your weapon so it won't be disarmed.

Well you're not using it then, are you? Not even another computer is quick enough to attack, holster and attack again to make sure it isn't disarmed (especially not against wolves), so a human certainly won't be.

#3: Let me explore the world

Even though there's this big pretty world to explore with randomly generated terrain, you don't get to see any of it. It's tragic because the rolling hills or the arctic tundra or the sweltering desert has the potential to go on literally forever because of the clever way Lugaru handles the terrain.

So, would it not make sense to let me explore rather than fight all the time? You've got a great world here guys, but it might as well not be there. You might as well have the game take place in a series of boxes.

#4: Make multiple enemies easier to handle

In Lugaru, if you had multiple enemies on you at the same time, they attacked you all at the same time, which meant even if you managed to counter one, you couldn't counter the other. This means that if you want to get through the level, you've got to take only one at a time.

Games like Assassin's Creed and Batman: Arkham Asylum handle a lot of enemies well, by making them all crowd around you (but not too close) and having one, maybe a maximum of two come at you at any one time.

I don't know whether the Lugaru team even thought of that or whether they deemed that style of play "too easy", but Lugaru doesn't handle it's combat like that (as you can tell by reading the last few posts).

Well, there's a reason games like that handled the fighting that particular way. Imagine if you were playing Assassin's Creed and all the guards came at you at once, swinging their weapons against your robed assassin body at the same time. You'd be ribbonified before you could even say Rage Quit.

#5: Slow things the f*&% down

The Lugaru team must have played a lot of Sonic in their youth, because the protagonist (and everyone else) moves blindingly fast.

They also attack really fast (I should stop bringing this point up because it's starting to sound like a broken record) and countering them requires a hair trigger shift key and lightning reflexes.

The only thing they're allowed to speed up is your crouch speed. It takes forever to get in range of the enemy's jugular and there's a good chance you'll be outed before you get there.

#6: Give me a better ending

I'm going to give away a spoiler here, so if you desperately wanted to play the game than avoid all the text within the [SPOILER] tags.

[SPOILER]At the very end of Lugaru, main character goes back to the rabbit fortress (which you never get to see properly) and essentially says "I'll travel the world to find myself".[/SPOILER]

Awesome, I thought, I get to finally explore. But no, it just reset my map to the start of the game which infuriated me to no end.

So not only did you give me a stupid ending, but you didn't even give me the chance to go back and redo all the levels I wanted to do again, or give me the open world option. It's just an enormous middle finger to the player.

Come to think of it,

#7: Give me a better character

"Main character" (because I can't remember his name) came across as worryingly naive in the first part of the game. Later on, he lost all emotion because his wife and child and whole village was brutally slaughtered.

They need a better dialog writer, too. He, and every other character he meets, comes across as wooden, like they're all marionettes.

Oh my god. That's it. They are all marionettes, aren't they? That's why they get ragdoll'd so easily - because whenever a wolf trips me up my manipulator accidentally slips up due to sweaty hands.

#8: Make it more of an RPG

In the first level of the game you can talk to people. All they need to do is implement a quest system and they're away laughing.

Also, give me stats and use challanges to let the player improve not only his style but also his stats.

For example, smacking people around will increase strength, meaning more damage dealt. Getting hit a lot increases stamina, making the character more resiliant to damage. Running a lot improves speed. Countering a lot improves countering speed. Throwing your dagger a lot increases dagger speed and at the max level the dagger will curve to find their enemies, although you might want to make it so it won't act like a homing missile.

It sounds like a bit of a grind but players will still do it, because they'll want to give themselves the best possible advantage over their enemies.


In conclusion Lugaru, while a bad game (in my eyes anyway), has the potential to be a good game. Indeed, fixing all the issues won't make it the perfect game an there are a few more to take into account, but it will be a definate step in the right direction.

But if Overgrowth is just another Lugaru I'm going to be dissapointed. Angry, yes, but that'll pass in time; the dissapointment probably won't.

Because Lugaru had - and still has - potential as an open world RPG or even just an exploring game, but it made exploring the world a waste of time and doesn't have any RPG elements. It's just an extremely hard third person fighting game.

Intermission: Lugaru

I have a serious problem with this game.

It's built soley around combat, but this has to be the worse combat I've ever seen in a game of it's type.

If you've ever played Assassin's Creed, you'll know the guards are very slow. They make it quite obvious when they're about to attack, so you have just enough time to hit the counterattack button before they hit you. Another thing the guards in Assassin's Creed do is they attack you one at a time.

In Lugaru, those rules are inverted. The bastards attacking you have lightning fast attacks, and in order to counter them you have to have a hair trigger keyboard.
And the enemies in this game have no problem ganging up on you, making the fiht impossible. if three or more enemies have latched onto you.

For example, you eventually come across a pack of anthropomorphic wolves. These guys are nearly impossible to kill - they can smell you from a mile away and move faster than you, and their attacks are terrifingly strong.

And since they're faster than you, they can make it to your ragdollized corpse much faster than you take to get up, and the second - the very f&%#ing second - you get up, the smack you right back down again.

There's one wolf that you can't kill.
I'm serious - he has impossible to counter attacks and those attacks are a damn near instant kill.

This wolf also loves to kick your legs out from under you, and will do that three times in a row before hitting you with a insta-kill claw attack.

Oh, I would love to be able to actually hit this wolf, but he automatically counters any attack I make, so it's pointless.

In short, Lugaru handles it's fighting mechanic like a toddler handles a chainsaw with it's handle covered with barbed wire.

Intermission: Humble Indie Bundle

Humble Indie Bundle is an interesting concept.

Essentially, you get a selection of indie games, and you get to choose how much you pay for it.

A friend sent me a Humble Indie Bundle gift... thing [I'm hesitant to call it a 'bundle'] which gave me access to all the games available.

So I did what any rational human being would do - thanked said friend and downloaded all of them.
Wait, except one. But I downloaded the rest.

So, lets go through the games the site has to offer;


Gish
Gish is a platformer where you control a 12 pound ball of sentient tar.

Gish was taking a stroll through the park with his lady friend before said lady friend was kidnapped and taken by this big... thing. It might have been an enormous blob.
Anyway, our titular hero jumps down into the sewers after his lady friend.

Story out of the way, it's onto the platforming, and I have to say the gameplay is really quite cool.

Gish can cling to walls, make himself extra slippery (to slide down small tunnels) and, through sheer willpower, make himself heavier to smash through walls. Because you can cling to most surfaces, though, it makes the platforming kind of interesting. They introduce spikes early on, and as Gish walks over them he takes damage. In order to get over the spikes, he has to cling to the ceiling.

Further on, Gish comes to a set of suspended blocks. If he's careful, he can make the blocks swing, cling under them and grab the coins that are below.

And because he can stick to stuff, he can grab blocks to maneuver onto a button.
Music's good too, but that's not terribly shocking because it's an indie game - the music's almost always good.

Of course, Gish isn't perfect. It doesn't you tell what to do or where to go, and the enemies can be quite unforgiving. But that could be forgiven because the game is essentially linear.


World of Goo

...is out next game. I must confess, I downloaded WOG because it was there. I already have the actual game, but it isn't that big and I reasoned it wouldn't make that big a dent in our 50 gig a month broadband plan.

Anyway, in World of Goo your goal is to reach a pipe. To reach said pipe, you must (usually) construct a tower out of goo balls. At first, it seems very straight forward, but as it introduces different types of goo it starts getting interesting.

There's usually only one way to complete any given level, but it's still cool when you figure out how to do it. And it teaches an important lesson about structural integrity.

Third up, we have...


Samorost 2

Said game is one by a company called Amanita Design, the same guys who did the game Machinarium, which is my favourite point and click puzzle game to date.

Anyway, the first level introduces us to the story (at least, the story for the first level). Aliens, while collecting fruit, have stolen some kid's dog. Said kid is the protagonist, and he takes off in his "house rocket" after the dastardly aliens.

Point and click games all have this problem where it's not immediately obvious what's clickable and what isn't, and the very first couple of screens for Samorost 2 illustrate that, but from then on it's reasonably easy to decipher what they want you to do.

Figuring out the puzzles will make you feel all clever and smart, and most of them are somewhat easy, if a little easy. At the time of writing, I haven't got to the second half yet.

It's an interesting world this game takes place in - apparently, you can breathe quite happily in space, and asteroids can actually grow grass and plants without having any atmosphere.

But who gives a damn? It's supposed to convey a sense of fantasy.


Lugaru

Game number four is Lugaru. Jumping right in, I get a flash of red screen and a massive black eye staring at me.
Not the best way to start off, guys. I feel like the thing before me has been freshly killed.

The tutorial showed me the ropes, as tutorials do - you play a anthropomorphic rabbit, and in most of the tutorial you spend your time fighting a rabbit illusion made of smoke.

The gameplay seems to be built around the combat, which is a shame, because exploration would have been a good direction to go in for this sort of game.

Combat can get hectic and panic-y, and whenever you're hit with a particularly hard attack and sent flying ragdoll style (which happens very often), you loose your weapon and the enemy can pick it up, meaning you spend most of the fight punching the guy to death.

Whats worse is that combat in this game is extremely unforgiving. When the enemy send you tumbling, they often hang around your ragdoll'd body waiting for you to get up and do it again, and with two or more enemies it becomes insanely difficult.

Worse still is that Lugaru lacks a quest log, or indeed quests at all. The map you see every time you progress to a new part of the game is pretty lackluster, and there isn't much of a ultimate goal hovering overhead, apart from "kill the bastard who betrayed your village".


Last up is Penumbra. My laptop can't hack it when he steps off the boat, so I'm currently transferring the .exe to my other computer. Give it a sec.
...
...
Here we go.

Penumbra draws you in. There isn't much doubt about that. The most interesting aspect of Penumbra so far is you need to really use the mouse.

For example, you need to smash a piece of ice that's frozen up a wheel to an underground bunker. You need to do a little bit of exploring to find a bunch of rocks.

In any other game, it would do the smashing for you. But in Penumbra, you need to heft the rock up using the mouse and smash down using the mouse too. Turning the wheel needs the mouse as well - you actually need to turn the wheel as opposed to just clicking on it.
You want to do a melee attack? You have to swing that bastard.
There isn't any hud either, deepening the immersion.

Once you figure out how to open the big steel hatch that was closed for a damn good reason, your taught about stealth. This means turning your flashlight off, something your not going to want to do.

You know something is out there. You just... can't see it. Or hear it.
It's the whole psychological horror thing - it gets into your head and screws with you. It makes you fear the slightest noise, the faintest flicker.

Did I mention your totally alone? No audio logs (yet), no NPCs, not even any monsters that you can see (so far). You are totally, completely alone.

In short, Penumbra isn't for those who consider themselves "jumpy". And even of you aren't, this game will make your skin crawl.