Thursday, March 10, 2011

Demo Dayz

With so many unfinished games in my backlog, on my day off I did the only logical thing I could think of....Play demos of more games!! Yes I am a tard, thanks for asking. Anyway the 2 demos I played were Beyond Good and Evil HD and Torchlight on XBLA.

Beyond Good and Evil HD

I guess everyone pretty much knows the story behind this one by now. Ubisoft makes a good game for the previous console generation, it gets lots of praise but sells like deep fried AIDS. It dies, goes away and is never heard from again. Until thousands of whiney nerds write internet petitions or whatever it is they do, and here we are.

I never played it the first time around, so I was going into this blind yet cautiously optimistic. The game starts you at the very beginning, and lets you play a good 20 minutes or so into the story. It's enough to get a good taste of what the game has to offer.

And what it has to offer is pretty fun. It throws you into combat almost immediately, which maybe wasn't a good choice. The combat is decent, but not mind-blowing. God of War this is not. It gets the job done but I wasn't hungry for more. After that you get introduced to all the characters and the story starts to build. This is what I really enjoyed. It's certainly not without it's problems. The voice acting is kinda bad at times and the animation can be stiff, but it gets the point across just fine.

So what makes this game stand out? Honestly I can't really explain it. It just feels...like a video game. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It doesn't try to be something it's not. The characters and the world they inhabit is interesting enough that I really wanted to see what would happen next. There are no jarring transitions or awkward gameplay shifts. Everything flows very smoothly, and it left me wanting more.

Torchlight

I guess the only thing you need to ask yourself about this game is "Do I like Diablo?" If you answered yes then you will probably like this game. If you've never played Diablo but like collecting awesome loot and killing hordes of monsters with little or no story to tie it all together, then this might be for you.

I like all those things, but as you may remember what I liked best about Diablo was the story and the atmosphere. Torchlight seems pretty lacking in both respects. The music and sounds seem almost ripped straight from Diablo, as do the gameplay and classes. But it just looks and feels a little too cartoony for my taste.

I really enjoyed playing through the first dungeon in the demo. It's another demo that gives you a really good feel for what the full game will bring. So props for that I guess. But by the end I wasn't really sure I wanted to play any more. With some kind of co-op or online play this would be a must-buy, but as a single-player experience I don't think I could justify paying full price. I will likely pick it up if it goes on sale though.

2 comments:

  1. Quite enjoying Beyond Good & Evil (HD). I did start playing it yonks ago on the PC but a flood of other games washed it away. Glad that I have a second chance at it.

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  2. Torch light..oh my. There is ONE big flaw. One so big it made me not finish it. When you are doing your last dungeon, lets say level 37 out of 50. And it took you 20 plus hrs to get to that point. If you die in the dungeon, NEVER, NEVER say, respawn me back in town.

    Instead just say respawn at entrance of dungeon and then use a portal to go to town. If you say respawn in town. It sends you back there but without a portal to get back. So in order to get back to where you left off at level 37, you have go through all the previous levels again.

    Unlike Diablo where everything you killed in previous dungeons are dead, all the previous dungeons have all the enemies and sub bosses back again.

    I tried to just run through the dungeons without killing anything, just to try and make it back. But after a hr or getting swarmed constantly and losing XP with each death, I made it to level 3...it was this point I said, F you game..and its sits in shame as never being finished.

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