teryl_tries

Big Helmet Heroes is a Steam game my wife and I tried over the summer and I think we're giving up on going back to it, so I'll post this partial review. Initially it was quirky, silly, kind of adorable fun, but after a dozen levels or so, it became repetitive and frustrating. We probably put a good 3 hours into it and I wanna say we stopped around level 18, so we were almost done with the first pass. Then we just... never played it again. I mentioned it once or twice and she was "meh" about it, as was I, so it's probably a bust for us.

The premise is you take your heroes through increasingly complex, extremely linear stages that can take anywhere from 2-20 minutes in a beat 'em up action game. I can't even remember if there was a plot. If so, it was blink and you miss it. I must have blinked. In theory you can play this game infinitely and keep leveling up your heroes with dozens or hundreds of runs. We'll never get that far.

At the start of the run you choose your hero, and unfortunately, you never know which ones are the best fit for the levels until you play the level the first time. And take notes. There's homework if you want to min/max this game and 100% it. I didn't particularly want to replay ANY of the levels. You'll barrel through stages and every third or fourth will culminate in a proper boss fight. None of the enemies or bosses are particularly challenging so there wasn't any real sense of accomplishment. Except that kraken boss, but that was camera frustrations, not real difficulty.

The heroes are unlocked by finding cages that your friends, I guess friends? have been captured in and break them free. These are often very hard to see to know they're there, or you have to interact randomly with the environment to suddenly make one available. That got more frustrating as we realized a lot of these were often the same hero we had already unlocked, it was just giving us a chance to swap to a different hero mid-run. And many of them were slight reskins of others, making it more difficult to look through our options at the start of each level. And more difficult to tell who was who if we selected similar characters.

Weapons and skills came standard on each hero, but enemies dropped specialty weapons and items with limited ammo, and they seem to disproportionately target your teammate.... So while yes, a few of these were hella cool and fun, after 10 or so levels, we mostly ignored them in favor of avoiding friendly fire. Each hero has a specialty skill that charges and can be unleashed for maximum damage or crowd control. Initially these were also fantastic and usually pretty funny, but as we unlocked more heroes, we noticed yet again, the skills are also reskinned. Electric beam, poison beam, fire beam... all the same animation but a different color.

Overall, it's good mindless fun with a partner, maybe even better as a party game so people can swap in and out and not play for extended periods to realize how repetitive it is and how many reused assets of different colors there are. It's a great use of assets to help an indie game stick to a budget, but it feels just like that: a budget game. If you can get it on deep sale for $5-7 and you like lightweight brawlers, or you plan to play it in under 1hr chunks over a period of time, it's probably worth picking up. If you want a co-op game with anything resembling a plot or character development, or something to binge for a few hours at once, pass on this.

1 week ago | [YT] | 0

teryl_tries

I completely forgot to post about this in the whirlwind that was post-vacation, but on my flights to and from Scotland, I played and beat LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures. I 100% this with my wife on the Wii a decade ago, but this was the first time I've played a handheld version (not a port) of a game that was originally designed for a more powerful system.

They changed a ton of the level design to reduce the file size and the loading times, and it was inferior in all ways to the other. Apparently a completely different studio built the handheld versions and while the story of the movies remains the same, and a lot of the character animations and cut scenes were shared between the two, the levels and collectables were completely different, a well as having fewer characters in general. It was also built as a side scroller with some 2D-3D segments, but even in these you have no control over the camera, so it feels static (another limitation of the hardware). It was still a lot of fun, even though visually and gameplay it was a downgrade. It was also mostly new content, so that was a perk as well.

The story follows the movies, so nothing new or groundbreaking there, and the shooting and whip action was much the same, all the major characters appear, and the overall feel of the movies is retained in many of the set pieces, if a bit overly pixelated and minimal details (again, expected). All told, I was very happy with this version for what it was. I didn't have enough time on flights to 100% it, but I did beat the main story. If you want a simple little handheld game with that oldschool LEGO vibe, pick this one up and enjoy it.

1 week ago | [YT] | 0

teryl_tries

With Control Resonant out for almost two weeks now, some of you might be wondering where this all started. Allow me to introduce you to Control, my favorite game of the year so far.

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 0

teryl_tries

I've been looking at more Steam demos lately and I'm trying to catch up on playing some that have been on my backlog for a year or more. These are just a handful of games I've been wanting to find time to sit down and check out. Of these options, which of these demos are you the most interested in?

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 0

teryl_tries

If I only have time for one, which game would you rather see a 1-3 minute trailer overlay review for instead of just a community post?

1 month ago | [YT] | 2

teryl_tries

I have (I think) three more indie review shorts that the videos were already made so I didn't want to remake them all. I'm not going to be posting shorts any longer going into next year, though. I don't like the format, and even if they get mega views (for me 1k is a TON), those views never translate into subs or comments or actual interactions that will help me build a community.

Over the fall you'll see me start to transition into more "trailer" review blurb type content for the small indie games with 1-2min overviews. It means substantially less footage to transfer, sort, and edit for me, which lets me focus on the mid-length, full game reviews more. Scrubbing through hours of footage over and over to find just the right moment takes about an hour per minute of video if anyone was curious. I love covering indies because I want people to know about them, but it eats up a lot of time just to get set up to make the things when I'm using my own footage. This is a good compromise for me to keep you informed and cut prep/edit time for me.

Just a heads up. The late summer suddenly got busier than the spring with a coworker quitting and the new hire prep (I'm a trainer). Then the PS3 broke and I couldn't play Van Helsing on time. I'm way behind now so bear with me, some longer indies and shorter AA's might just get a quick text post here and then move along instead of the planned video. We'll see.

1 month ago | [YT] | 2

teryl_tries

I thought Endling Extinction is Forever was going to be a heartfelt story game where I had to guide my fox kits through various regions of a forest/mountain/city and solve environment puzzles to get them through certain terrain. NOPE! This is trauma with a side of time-based survival mechanics. I think I played through the third day and after watching half my babies disappear, and not finding any food, and barely making it back to the den... I have absolutely no desire to keep stressing myself out. Zero reviews mentioned any TIMERS, but okay, maybe I just watched poorly designed reviews. Yeah, if you like survival games, and you like foxes, go for it. I will not be finishing it.

2 months ago | [YT] | 1

teryl_tries

With the sudden stop in purchasing new games I'll be undergoing in 2028, I'm going to have time for those longer, turn-based, time-wasting sort of games sooner than I thought. I've been curious about both the Trails in the Sky and the Atelier series. I have the first PS2 Atelier game, so I might dig that out and give it a start to see how it feels. Any of you play those and suggest I jump on them? I hear the stories are great, but the turn-based combat always has me wary. Not a deal-breaker by any means, but it's not often done in ways that actually keep me engaged these days.

3 months ago | [YT] | 2

teryl_tries

I struggled to even play ABZU because the controller mechanics are so unintuitive, even when I swapped between inverted and regular. I tried to put myself back in the headspace when I managed dual stick 3D navigation in Maneater, but this is not the same control structure. I couldn’t find any way to make the controls make sense in my brain. The worst was if I held forward constantly (intuitive to move) it made me do backflips. Move and direction are so far removed in terms of controls I couldn’t get the hang of it. This gave me some serious motion sickness because my character was not doing the things my brain told them to do. I was able to travel along the bottom okay, or navigate moving extremely slowly, but that wasn’t going to make for an enjoyable experience for a game that’s supposed to give me 3D movements. The art was probably great for 2016, but so many indie games overuse this art style today that it didn’t grip me. I felt it was a boring and unimaginative graphics choice. Unfortunately, the motion sickness got so bad I couldn’t keep playing this more than about 20 minutes. There were a few fish I discovered and I got some little robot guys, but overall there was no clear plot or motivation. Given the other issues, particularly the motion sickness, I opted to bail.

4 months ago | [YT] | 0

teryl_tries

I signed up for both non-controller versions of the Steam Machine (GabeCube woooo!). Are you trying to get one too? Are you surprised by the prices? I'm not remotely surprised and saved up for pretty much exactly this outcome.

Steam instructions for signing up: Join the list any time before June 25th at 10 a.m. PT. On that date, the list will be closed and randomized, and you will receive an email with your results shortly after.
t.co/37d7W21LsR

4 months ago | [YT] | 0