I’ve been playing Modern Warfare 2 so much that it’s started to mess with my dreams, so I went out and rented Bayonetta, and Fairy Tale Fights.
Both games are similar hack’n’slash platformers. In fact, there’s a lot of similarities between the two. They’re both rated M17, they were both released around the same time. In terms of game play, in both you walk around a sort of a rail, where it’s not immediately clear what objects you can interact with, or what obstacles are unscalable. You pick up weapons and coins/halos as you kills enemies, and you have auto-aim. Both games are bat-shit insane.
Putting Bayonetta into the tray and starting it up, you’re immediately flung into a battle with angels and some crazy-ass double-headed winged dragon thing with a giant, upside-down cherub statue face for a body on top of a falling clock tower. The plot does not get any clearer as the game progresses. You’re a witch who dresses in S&M outfits and shoots bullets out her high heels as you do cartwheels. Your hair turns into a killer dragon head that eats enemies and drags them through a portal. For some reason, you have to be naked to do this. You can apparently play with one-button controls on easy. One imagines this is so you can masturbate while you’re playing, although the game isn’t that sexy. There’s a lot of cheesy characters. One’s a Danny Devito type with too many rings on his fingers. Another is some kind of jazzy black-guy/demon who serves drinks in very tiny glasses. Bayonetta is basically Wolverine, meaning she has amnesia and is trying to reclaim her past after being locked up in an underwater coffin. It’s taken her twenty years before she’s bothered to investigate the matter. For some reason: she hate the shit out of angels. Maybe because they’re constantly trying to kill her. She’s a witch in skin-tight clothes killing angels. No one has boycotted the game, or spoken out against it. Remember Mortal Kombat and how people went ape-shit over that? No one cares anymore. You play the game by mashing buttons to perform combos and unleash more powerful attacks. You don’t have to remember any of the more advanced combos to beat enemies. Simply tapping B or Y in any order will produce the results you want. It’s kind of fun, but then kind of confusing at the same time. There’s one battle where you’re literally fighting on the ceiling, trying to fight an enemy. It’s difficult to track your opponent as you’re running around a barrel-roll style, and more difficult to block her attacks as it’s hard to see her tells.
Combat in Fairy Tale Fights is far more frustrating. The game’s basically a rip-off of Castle Crashers, only not as fun. You have the same ability to play with four other people. The actual fighting in the game is pretty retarded. Instead of pushing buttons, you have to use your right joystick. It took me like five minutes to figure that out. It also took me that long to figure out where to go to start quests. You have your choice of four characters to play as. I of course picked the naked Emperor, because why wouldn’t I? You fight by picking up weapons. You have two weapon slots you can toggle through. You can’t pick up a new weapon until you’ve thrown out your old one. So to be clear: you can’t just automatically pick up a new weapon. You have to throw the old one, then pick the new one up. This causes confusion during play, as you accidentally can throw the weapon you want to keep. Off of a cliff. You also lose whatever weapon you’re holding upon dying, and a lot of gold coins. The maps suck shit. You can fall into a pit of lava about ten times in a row because the other side of the ledge doesn’t line up the way it looks like it does. Everything has this too-colourful aspect to it, so it’s hard to see in general. Plus whenever you fight, you’re swarmed by enemies. As you chop them to bits, some remain on their feet after they’ve died. So you could be attacking a dead enemy while a live one is hitting you from behind. Plus, when you cut them in half, half the screen is taken up by a close-up of you doing so in bright, red colours. I don’t know how this would play out in a four person game, but if you’re the person fighting behind that screen, I bet it’s pretty annoying, as it blinds your path. Plus it’s pretty seizure inducing in general.
Most of the weapons are useless. The gold coins seem useless as well. You could have a veritable fortune halfway through a level, but each time you die you lose more and more. The boss battle will kill you about thirty times, minimum, as you can’t instantly predict when or where to dodge. Plus in a couple boss battles, when you knock the boss onto a series of spinning saw blades that cut through his back and he drops a bunch of gold coins HE GETS BACK UP AND KEEPS FIGHTING. You’ve clearly won, but you have to keep fighting. So going into the battle, you have about 30,000 coins, and going out you have 300. There’s no bonus for winning. The bonus comes halfway through the fight, and then you lose that by dying more. Plus the only thing you have to spend your coins on is a statue back in the city, a city where you can’t even talk or interact with the other NPCs. So why go back? It’s basically just a menu screen, trolled up. Dying has no consequence other than losing coins. You respawn almost automatically, usually in the path of a fireball. The whole game feels like they took a use made level from Little Big Planet. Plus you can kill children. For no reason. Bullshit.
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