Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (Vita)

The second in the Sonic racing series and was ported to the Vita with pretty much all content intact. It is a kart racer, but Sonic theme. The controls are easy to pick up, although there are small tutorials when you first start playing. The right shoulder button accelerates, while the left shoulder button drifts. Then the X button uses the current power up that you have. The game plays similarly to Mario Kart and other kart racers. You race along a race with other racers, picking up powerups from containers along the way. Then you use this to wreck havoc on the other racers to get ahead. Drifting around corners is a must, as this is linked to a speed boost that’s dependent on how long you drifted for.

The unique gimmick here is the “Transformed” theme, where both the kart and the tracks will change. The karts transforming from vehicle to boat to plane is interesting, but not too mind-blowing (although the plane suddenly gains another degree of motion). The tracks changing after each lap are much more impressive, especially when some of the changes are substantial, and make it feel completely different.

There is a decent single player mode with initially only three difficulties, but a fourth one will eventually unlock. It forgoes any attempts at a story and instead provides you with events that have a variety of objectives. This is a good decision, and it gives the game a bite-sized play experience that ends up becoming addictive. You will easily get into the mindset of playing just one more stage to progress just that little bit further.

While there are only 20 or so tracks, the single player modes give it variety by having different objectives for each of those tracks. In this mode, the player plays each event to gain stars to unlock new characters and new stages. These differing objectives include racing, drifting events, attacking enemies, ring challenges, boosts and more. This variety keeps it from being too boring. While not all these objectives are stellar as something can be annoying, it doesn’t get to become too repetitive for this mode at least.

The events are spread across six “worlds” and after completing the first five, you will see the credits. The sixth world is a bonus, and it is one where you will need to go back to previous events to play the hardest modes to get enough stars to unlock everything. The gating of events by the number of stars you gain isn’t a big problem for the first five worlds, and it takes around three to five hours to complete it the first time around.

To be fair, the medium difficulty is a good difficulty for people who are not amazing at kart racing. It’s not too hard and not too easy. You must put in some effort to try and secure third place or higher to complete that event. It can get annoying but persist and you will proceed even though it can be luck based. Although that’s nothing new for this genre.

There are five stats to each character, such as top speed, acceleration and handling. Each character trades off one area for strength in another, and you unlock more characters as you play. There is a slight RPG element where every time you complete a race or event with a character; they will gain XP. Level up and it unlocks a slightly different stat distribution profile, like Sonic is focused on speed, but he can unlock a profile that gives up some speed to boost his handling. It’s a neat way to be able to keep using your favorite character but in a way that suits your playstyle, without making all the characters feel the same.

The graphics are good for a Vita game, especially one that was released this early on in its life. Of course, it cannot compare to the console versions but it’s good enough. The design of the tracks is generally good, but some can be annoying with its sharp turns and gaps on the track. While novel at first, the transformed aspect of the vehicles can be annoying as the boat and plane controls are naturally more floaty and harder to control. Also, it can feel like they slow down the race in certain sections.

The World Tour mode with all the events represents the bulk of the single player content. You can then play other modes such as Grand Prix, Time Trials and Single Race as supplements. You will need to play Grand Prix to unlock all the tracks, given that mode provides all the mirror tracks. Mirror tracks can feel so different even though it’s the same tracks you’ve been racing… just mirrored, so it can work contrary to your muscle memory.

Overall, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed is a surprisingly good kart racer. There is a sense of chaos and speed at its best, and it is extremely additive and fun to play. The difficulty is nicely balanced, since no one weapon feels totally unfair, and all of them can be avoided or blocked in some way. Yes, it can still be luck based but it feels less so than some other kart racers. The Vita version may not be the prettiest or the most polished, given that there are still bugs after all the patches, but it is a great portable version.

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Mary Skelter: Nightmares (Vita)

Mary Skelter: Nightmares is a dungeon crawler JRPG for the PlayStation Vita. In it, you take control of Jack, who is in a world that has been taken over by living dungeons. Jack and his friend Alice managed to escape from jail. During the process, Alice discovers that she is a Blood Maiden, someone with the power to kill the monsters of the dungeon, known as Marchens. Jack isn’t completely useless either, as he has abilities unique only to him that can assist other Blood Maidens.

As Jack and Alice find themselves in the city, they are joined by other Blood Maidens. They eventually explore the dungeons and clear them. In the first few chapters, there is a lot of worldbuilding where we learn about the powers of the Blood Maidens. While they can kill Marchens, their blood will eventually send them crazy, into Blood Skelter mode. This is where Jack comes in, as he can somehow prevent the Blood Maidens from losing themselves this way.

The gameplay is a typical dungeon crawler, taking place in first person as you explore the dungeons. Given it is a Vita game, the graphics are not the greatest, but still decent. There are random encounters, as well as dungeon traps, which can be quite annoying. Given the first-person view where you are limited to four directions, it can be difficult to see more of the surroundings than what is right in front of you. It doesn’t help that the map only maps the current square that you’re on, rather than what you can see.

As you explore, there are things you can find such as treasure chests and levers that will open doors. A gimmick here are that Nightmares will appear. Upon which the map disappears, and you need to run away from them. If the Nightmares catch up, you can still try and run away or battle them, but that will only stall them as you cannot kill them unless certain requirements are met. It’s not as tense and urgent as it sounds, but it is also still somewhat annoying. They end up disrupting the flow of exploration, so it sounds like a good unique concept but ends up grating on your patience.

The battle system is a lot more normal though, given it is a turn-based system. You can have up to four characters, plus Jack, in your team. Jack only plays a support role, such as using items, guarding a character and some other special abilities. The Blood Maidens on the other hand are the offensive ones, able to attack and other special abilities. There is a simple weakness system, and constantly dealing damage will fill a gauge where the characters can go into Massacre mode, temporarily upping all their stats. The battle system at the end of the day isn’t innovative but it is serviceable.

The difficulty at first seems manageable, and the game allows you to save anywhere, at most times. The caveat being that you need to remember to save because if you die, you will have to reload your save. This can be very annoying and frustrating when you play long sessions and are just exploring and exploring, then you accidentally find yourself in a bad spot and lose hours of progress. This is especially true when there are massive difficulty spikes with the bosses. You can easily be defeating the enemies within the dungeon only to be annihilated by the dungeon boss. Once again, this can feel unfair, even for a dungeon crawler.

Due to the first-person view and fog effects, you cannot see that far ahead of you, and stuff to the left and right. Sometimes you cannot even tell if there is an event or another icon until you’re upon it. There are some annoying gimmicks and features of the dungeons, such as when the Nightmares randomly appear, and you cannot open the menu and thus cannot heal outside of battle. You may be forced into a loss situation which can be very frustrating to lose hours of progress. Other times there may be levers or environmental objects that you need to interact with to weaken the boss, but the game does not explain this well.

The story, despite having a decent start and a good concept, ends up being quite boring. The story to gameplay ratio is not great as the game is heavily geared towards exploration. You will be enjoying the exploration but then the story cutscenes ruin your flow. On the flipside, you tend to explore for too long without progressing the story, this is a hard thing to balance, and the game doesn’t do it well. It takes all the way to the end for real progression, and there is supposedly a big revelation but it kind of comes out of nowhere. It’s supposed to be a twist, but it falls flat.

Despite the developer and the design of the characters, this game isn’t as ecchi as you would expect. There’s an optional minigame that plays on this aspect, but it is easily ignored, and everything else doesn’t suggest it much. Despite the predictable gameplay loop of exploring the dungeon, defeating the boss, and progressing to the next chapter, it is still fun to play. The story takes around 30 hours to complete depending on how much of each dungeon you explore. The dungeons can be huge and take hours each. It can be upwards of 40 to 50 hours if you take your time. There are two endings, a good ending and a bad ending, with the postgame content being a humungous dungeon, with a tiny, tiny bit of plot.

Overall, Mary Skelter: Nightmares is a decent dungeon crawler. It can be brutally difficult in the beginning but once you get more characters to put into your party, get access to more skills, and have a general idea of how the battle system works, you can easily wreck the normal enemies. Bosses are still tough and the unique aspect of bosses randomly appearing while you’re exploring with no way out can be annoying and pointless towards the end of the game. It’s still a fun enough game to play.

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Sine Mora EX (PS4)

Sine Mora EX is a shoot ‘em up game that was originally released in the generation prior. This release included some touch ups to the graphics, English voiceovers and additional content. Given the genre, it is not for everyone, but there’s just something simply satisfying with shooting everything up on the screen. It’s a sidescrolling shoot ‘em up, where enemies come in from the sides, and your ship can generally move in any direction while the level is automatically scrolling.

You control an airplane, and your primary weapon shoots bullets with unlimited ammo. You can either mash the button or hold it down for rapid fire (for advanced players, mashing it is faster). Perhaps a unique part of this is that it is rendered in 3D, so it gives it a unique look. There is a secondary weapon that differs depending on the plane / character you’re playing as, and it is usually much stronger and useful to clear out enemies or wipe out a section of the boss’s health. You’ll have limited ammo for this.

As you are destroying enemies, they might drop pickups. These include time extensions, weapon upgrades, ammo for the secondary weapon, shields, or the ability to slow down time. Yes, you can slow down time which can help beginners dodge the crazy bullet hell scenarios. The plane doesn’t really have a health bar, rather it is tied to the timer. Each level has the timer counting down which you primarily extend via defeating enemies and sometimes getting a pickup. Taking damage will decrease the timer.

The game looks and feels great, and the controls feel natural. Each of the stages are structured in a similar way where you defeat normal enemies, before facing against a boss. The bosses have fantastic designs and are a highlight of the game. The difficulty in Normal mode is manageable for beginners but there are some cheap sections. Instant kill sections are extremely frustrating, and you don’t know it is instant death until you hit it. Sometimes there are so many things happening onscreen that you don’t even know what happened. Each section has a checkpoint, and depending on the difficulty you selected, you can retry the checkpoint several times before you must restart the level. Dying during a boss battle will send you right back at the beginning though.

On Normal, the timer isn’t too bad, and you get to carry your weapon upgrades, which will either increase the rate of fire or the spread of the bullets, from stage to stage… until you run out of continues. Then you’re out of luck and must start the stage from the lowest weapon level, which can be a challenge to manage both the timer and to level up the weapons again; this can depend on your luck. At the end of each stage, you’ll get a score based on your performance.

Most of the bosses are cool to play against, although definitely a few where they are designed with frustration and deaths in mind. You’ll have to retry those a lot, and it’s annoying when they fire away a ton of weapons and you’ll have to rely on trial and error. That said, when you try and practice enough times, and get through it, there is a sense of satisfaction there. That’s the thing, this game is designed for repeated plays, so while there’s not that much content, you can still get a lot out of it.

The unique thing is that this is a shoot ‘em up with a story. The story is told via a combination of text, and some light visuals. It sets up the scene with a father trying to take revenge on the one who killed his son in the war, and an alternate viewpoint taking place at the same time where the last survivors of the Enkie race is fighting to destroy the Empire. It’s serves more as an excuse to connect the stages together, but it can be quite interesting… if it was told in a better and more coherent way. There are a lot of good concepts but ultimately can be confusing to digest. The story isn’t long, since it’s comprised of seven stages, and on Normal difficulty, it will take around two to three hours to complete.

That’s only the start though since the game has a few other modes for you to explore. The first is playing through the story again in Challenge difficulty will unlock an alternate ending. Then there are Arcade, Score and Boss modes, which are all self-explanatory. There are achievements within the game itself, where completing them will raise your rank, although the only benefit from that is unlocking a Trophy.

Overall, Sine Mora EX is a good shoot ‘em up and is not a bad entry to the genre for beginnings. Its presentation is beautiful, and it plays well. The stages are fun, although the content is low if you’re looking for some meatier, as the game is designed more for repeated playthroughs to improve your skills, rather than present something new all the time. For its low price though, that’s fine.

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Biomutant (PS5)

Biomutant is an open world action game from a small developer, which makes the game all the more impressive when you first boot it up. The graphics are fantastic, making the world vibrant and colorful. Upon closer inspection, yes, there are imperfections and blurry bits, but it manages to keep up the illusion throughout most of the game. The game takes place in the future, where the world has been polluted to the point of no return. Remnants of the human world are still scattered about, and the Tree of Life is the only thing sustaining the world, but even that is slowly being poisoned, and it is up to the protagonist to solve that problem.

The game can be overwhelming at first. In the start, you set up your character, picking from a class which affects the stats, and a bunch of other stuff. Then over the course of the first few hours, the rest of the game’s systems are introduced. However, these mechanics can feel like they are not explained well, and that they do not all gel together properly. There’s just something off about the whole package, which drags the game down.

The core of the gameplay loop is exploration to get loot, so that you can get stronger and keep on going. Combat is simple, and a combination of melee and ranged attacks. The protagonist has guns which you shoot and then can also get up close to slash. There are special moves you can unlock as well as a few weapon types. Yet combat doesn’t feel deep at all, and hits lack impact, so you don’t feel like you’re properly doing damage. The camera in battles is also a bit awkward, especially when you’re trying to lock onto a specific enemy.

The loot being the biggest thing feeds into the crafting system, which is easily one of the most addictive parts of the game. You gain parts that you can use to strengthen existing weapons, or to craft completely new, stronger ones. That’s the main way to get stronger, quicker. There’s also a leveling system, where each level provides you with points to put into specific stats so you can get a character build that fits your playstyle. This gameplay loop should be the thing that keeps you going but unfortunately the bland combat doesn’t make it that satisfying.

The story is very weak. There is a permanent narrator who is providing the exposition. It is constantly talking, providing commentary when it may be unwanted, and you just wanted to explore in silence. The worst part is that all the characters in the game speak gibberish, so for dialogue, you get them speaking gibberish and then the narrator then translates. It’s a very slow and annoying way to converse. The game uses a quest system, so you go around finding new quests to complete. The main quest is simple int that you are tasked with defeating four strong enemies and is quick.

Unfortunately, the game falls into the trap of having repetitive missions in an open world. These start to become too repetitive from the middle of the game. You’re tasked with facing four major bosses, and the approach to each boss is always you doing fetch quests to find parts to get some sort of special vehicle or mount. Once you acquire the vehicle or mount, you have to use it against the bosses. This is the other big flaw of the game; these major bosses change up the gameplay to not use the battle system… rather you are forced to use the new vehicle or mount you had just acquired. Some boss battles also have a terrible design, which makes it frustrating.

While exploration is always fun, especially just searching around the place for items to pick up, for some reason, you end up having good enough equipment very soon. This is to the point that the new stuff that you find is often not better, and you end up having to scrap them. Similarly for the crafting system, it might take you a while to get enough good parts to craft a better weapon. Sidequests are plenty and you’ll be constantly unlocking them. They’re also fetch and hunt quests, but some have amazing rewards so it can be worthwhile to do.

The meat of the game is not the story, but all the other stuff. The story itself is a straightforward story with no twists, despite the semi-interesting post-apocalyptic world that has remnants of human civilization, but everything is not human. Fighting the four bosses, and conquering all the areas is repetitive and bland, and it’s short. The game takes around 10 to 15 hours to complete, if you do a healthy-ish dose of the side content. After which you can go back before the final boss and just keep on exploring, although it'll be the same stuff that you’ve already seen.

Overall, Biomutant, considering its small development team, is an impressive game. Unfortunately, it’s not an amazing or even a solid game. There are a lot of flaws, mainly concerning the mission structure and the poor story. Both are too repetitive and simple. The combat is off, feeling too floaty. However, there are pockets of potential where it can be addictive and fun, such as the exploration and crafting mechanics. If you have time, it’s worth a dabble, going in fully knowing and expecting these flaws.

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Fahrenheit (PS4)

Fahrenheit, known as Indigo Prophecy in North America, is a game by Quantic Dream. It is one of their first games in the style that they are later well known for. Despite the fact that it is remastered for modern systems, there are a lot of rough edges, and it is still very clearly a game from the 2000s. Booting up the game and you can immediately see this, with the PlayStation 2 logo popping up, muddy blurry textures, and giant text sizes that are all reminiscent of games from that era.  It's basically an upscale of the PS2 version with very little being done to improve it.

Upon starting up the story, it immediately captures your attention with its plot. Lucas Kane is in the toilet at a diner, and we see something disturbing. He seems to be possessed, against his will, and murders a fellow patron. What follows is him trying to cover up and escape. Once the body is found, two detectives, Carla and Tyler, come to investigate this murder and try to track Lucas down. Being able to play as both Lucas, the murderer, and the two policeman Carla and Tyler, who are trying to track down the murderer, gives the story an interesting perspective. Playing both sides, you’d want both sides to succeed and achieve in what they want to do.

Despite the hook, and the story has huge potential, there are some odd writing moments, even early in the game. Lucas keeps getting these weird visions, and the story hints at something supernatural. Although this can be explained away (at first) because of Lucas’ failing mental state, and in fact, that would have been a great direction for the game to go into. The story is broken up into chapters, where it moves from setting to setting, scene to scene, and you control the different characters as the murder investigation unravels.

As it is basically an interactive movie, you wouldn’t expect the gameplay to be amazing. It’s effectively filled with quick time events (QTE), and unfortunately even those are not implemented well, and the controls are frustratingly horrid. The camera controls are terrible and unintuitive, like an early 3D game from the 1990s. It’s basically fixed camera angles that you can cycle through and move it around a little bit. The worst part is that when you’re moving a character, the camera angle will shift, and you lose all sense of direction. Often, you feel like the character isn’t going in the direction you don’t want them to go in and you’re wrestling with the controls.

Next are the QTEs, which make up the bulk of the “action scenes”. Interacting with anything, such as talking to people, opening doors, picking up objects etc requires a short QTE, basically a flick of the analogue stick. The decision to map all the QTEs to the analogue sticks rather than the face button is horrible, as there are times when it doesn’t properly register the direction, you’re flicking the analogue stick in. And when some of them have such tight time limits, then it is very awkward to do it quickly.

The game also doesn’t like to give you much direction in what to do and where to go. You will easily miss things. It wants you to spend time methodically going through everything but that significantly slows down the pace and makes it very boring. Not helped that it loves to drag scenes out longer than they should. On top of that, adding time limits to certain scenes to give you pressure, while not giving you any direction, is an unfair move by the developers. You can retry scenes, but in others, you are limited by lives. The QTEs may be novel and fun at first, but when each one of those keeps dragging on and on and on to extend the length of the game, they quickly outstay their welcome.

The game has annoying gimmicks such as a character being claustrophobic, so you need to mash some buttons to keep her breathing and panic under control. The problem with this is that you are constantly doing this while trying to figure out what you must do in that scene to progress. It’s not fun juggling the two together. The QTEs also don’t feel like they connect properly to what’s happening on screen, they are there just so you aren’t watching a movie. Representing the QTEs as two colored circles is not a great idea either as they aren’t especially intuitive, especially when sometimes they flash by so quickly.

And then there are the forced stealth sections, complete with the universally loved instant fail requirements. The game was not designed for any type of gameplay, let alone stealth. It gives you a poor map and very little ability, so you must blindly use trial and error to get through. It’s frustrating and annoying, and frankly, an extremely poor design. Being forced to repeat sections again and again is horrendous.

The graphics are not great. They are clearly still early PS2 levels with barely any effort made to improve them. Basically, the game just got its resolution increased so that it doesn’t look like a blurry mess in HD, but nothing was done to improve the textures or character models. This, combined with the clunky controls (as that hasn’t changed either), and you have this time relic of a game that will put a lot of people off.

Despite the serious and grounded beginning, the story will take a turn for the fantastic from the midway point. It had so much potential but then the writers just threw whatever could stick. As a result, there are jumps in the story that cause inconsistencies and plot holes. Lucas does impossible things and basically the game uses the same weak excuse to explain all these impossible things, where it feels like a giant coincidence. It is a disappointing direction that the plot eventually goes for, and the reveal the villains felt like it was out of nowhere. It was as if it was too hard to write the ending, so the writers gave up and gave us some fan fiction quality material.

Further denting the quality of the game is how slowly it dragged the beginning out, which wasn’t bad even though there was some pointless filler material. By comparison, the second half felt very rushed as it went from place to place. A few drawn out battles which end up making the final battle, which was extremely short by comparison, severely underwhelming. Despite the many apparent choices and variations, you could take, the different endings are only determined by how well do you in the final battle. The story takes around eight hours to complete, longer if you are lost. You can replay using chapter select to try out different things but there really isn’t much to pull you back.

Overall, Fahrenheit had a lot of potential. It started off so strongly, presenting an engaging mystery that sucks you in. Playing from both the perspective of the murderer as well as the investigator, provided some interesting conflicts of interests whenever you played their section, as you want them both to do well and not do so well. Unfortunately, the plot soon degrades into something that isn’t nearly so thoughtful, with a rushed development and ending that leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.

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The physical release comes with a cardboard sleeve, a message from the developers, and a small artbook.

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