Category Archives: Action

Bayonetta 2: Saving Me a Trip to Wikipedia

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Bayonetta pointing a large gun very close to the camera with the caption "Let's Dance, Boys"For most games, as soon as I see the credits roll, I immediately grab my phone and go to Wikipedia to read the summary of the game’s plot. I’ve got to be honest here, I’m always somewhere on the confusion spectrum. Occasionally I have no idea what happened – I’m looking at you Final Fantasy XV – but usually it’s a point or two that I may have missed.

I just wrapped up Bayonetta 2, and I was pleasantly surprised to see they at least tried to save me the trip. In Bayonetta 2 you gather up lore books as you progress through the levels, written from the POV of a journalist. Upon completing the story, you get one more entry automatically added for you that contains a recap of the game’s plot.

Partial journal entry in Bayonetta 2 displaying a summary of the game's plotOf course, I didn’t notice this until after I returned from Wikipedia, but in any case I appreciate the developers being realistic about gamers like myself who may have lost track of what’s going on in the story along the way!

Elite: Dangerous: Can I Change My Name?

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I picked up Elite: Dangerous recently in a Steam sale, as it’s a game I’ve threatened to get excited about for a while now. Upon booting it up the first time, I found one of the most difficult decisions facing me: what to name my character. And Elite: Dangerous leaves out some pertinent information that would help inform that decision.

Commander Tad Cooper, I believe in you.

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Dota 2: Die Less with a Hero Build

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I think it’s fair to say that Valve’s Dota 2 is an intimidating game for new players. There are a lot of choices to be made at every turn – over 100 heroes to pick from, each with their own set of abilities, and lots of different items to purchase to fit a variety of strategies. Plus, it’s a team-based player-vs-player game, so you need to have a good deal of teamwork to be successful.

Thankfully, Dota 2 has gained a number of features that are designed help new users get their feet wet in this deep pool of gaming goodness. I’d like to take a minute here to point out one of my favorite features, Hero Builds. A Hero Build is an in-game, user-contributed strategy of how to build out your hero. And they are awesome.

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Rogue Legacy: It’s Hard to Quit (No, Literally)

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Rogue Legacy from Cellar Door Games (Steam link) is a rogue-like platformer that is difficult to quit for two reasons. One, because it does a good job at activating my “just one more turn” syndrome. And two, because it’s not immediately apparent how you actually quit the game.

After booting up your game, there’s only one thing you can be sure that players will actually do – that’s leave. Like death and taxes, it’s inevitable. So, you might as well make it easy to find. Let’s look at how Rogue Legacy handles it.

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Hotline Miami: Meaningful Backtracking

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Cover of Hotline MiamiGiant Bomb defines “backtracking”, in part, as the following:

“Backtracking is often a derogatory term used to describe a situation in a game where the player must return to previously encountered locations in order to continue advancing the game”

Most of the time, backtracking is annoying, even when realism-wise it’s a little dubious how the game’s hero is able to make it all the way out of perilous situation X while off camera. But as is usually the case, the real answer on backtracking is “it depends”. Sometimes, in small doses, it can be very effective.

Hotline Miami (Steam link) is a super-violent action game that has earned a lot of attention as an indie PC title released in October 2012. It uses backtracking in a brilliant fashion – to really hammer home the game’s own meta-commentary on violence in games.

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