Oh you mean DANK MESSIAH OF KICK AND KICKING?
Your simple boot regularly upstages magic, stealth, archery, and combat, all of which are represented in the basic skill tree. No matter which “class” you choose, it will behoove you to play a Kicklord.
Still one of the finest things @tomchick has ever written
There was more than the kicking…
But yes.
Your mention of D:OS reminds me, the magic system from Magica is pretty inventive.
Ship to ship combat, yes. But boarding actions? Only game I know that has that is Pirates, but this one has you controlling your party while the rest of the crew gets into the act. Could you mention another title that does the same, much less better? :) I missed it, and been looking for such a game for a bit :)
Shadow of Mordor / Shadow of War , both have the pretty amazing Nemesis System in place. Wish more games found a way to implement it.
Everything about that post and review is legit legendary.
“The Adventures of Sir Kicksalot Deathboot in the Land of the Conspicuously Placed Spike Racks”
For me, “trying something new” is too broad. I think that I ache less for newness than the average person, maybe because daily life brought so much “new” that actually made things worse for people.
But I am totally onboard with re-working brain dead conventions which get copied in game after game. Just as an example: leveling up based upon fighting and killing hundreds, even thousands, of generic enemies, who exist for no other purpose than dying and providing experience points. After which, the player character can choose to pick locks or craft things better, or perhaps become more intelligent. So it is refreshing when a game comes along where the player characters often emerge from such experiences damaged rather than enhanced.
Every genre of gaming I have experienced is saturated with such conceits, and yeah, I like a game to come out which avoids such hackneyed conventions. But it does not bother me that the game is still basically a 4X or a faux-medieval RPG or whatever.
I find that IF pretty consistently pushes the boundaries for what games can be/do, fully exploring the gamespace provided by its form and mechanics. With Those We Love Alive is pretty avant-garde–it asks players to write symbols on their bodies. Gun Mute is a wholly innovative text-based rail shooter. Horse Master is, well, I don’t know. IF is notable because it’s lo-fi, thus the barrier for entry into design is low. That, coupled with a hobbyist culture around it creates plenty of space for weird, wonderful, horrifying, uncomfortable, imaginative stuff that you just don’t get with big games built by teams of people for a conventional gaming audience.
But oh man, there’s so much IF out there these days! Do we have a thread for IF recommendations? Because if we don’t we could really use one.
This is actually why I still have a fondness for Japanese games - there’s entirely new genres and genre-mashups that I feel is much more common in the Japanese school of game development than in the US.
The Phoenix Wright games , Danganronpa, Parappa the Rapper , etc. are all examples of games that I can’t imagine being executed well in the west at a high level.
If we’re talking everything but JRPGs then you’ve got my axe dude. Well ok, I make an exception for Dragon Quest, but that’s it.
Was going to say exactly this. The dual controls were different which gave the puzzling a twist but I was concerned early on that that was all it was (with some cracking world building and visuals on the side). However, later on it was like… hooo boy. I’ve never experienced what Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons did and it was really powerful and something unique to gaming. Seriously impressive.
Yup, I’m in total agreement. I have a lot of issues with RTS (lengthy games, optimal meta build orders, map memorisation, over reliance on micro and twitch play, one-off single-player campaigns) but OTC just effortlessly sidesteps most of them. It’s a remarkable game.
Splatoon is one of my favourite online shooters because of the ink and how it fundamentally affects play. It’s a territorial marker and (in Turf War) a means of winning the game. It’s a reload mechanism that fills yours ink tanks up when you’re submerged in it. It’s a conduit through which you can swim fast as a squid while simultaneously being a barrier to your opponents, dramatically reducing their mobility. It’s a place in which to hide when you’re stationary. It’s family-friendly.
I think Magicka’s magic system with its elemental combinations mixed with friendly-fire coop play is ingenious. Being able to actually screw up spells and hurt your buddies is pure slapstick perfection.
Miasmata’s blank map, compass and triangulation mapping system coupled with the intentionally unwieldy momentum and inertia of the main character. Getting lost because you couldn’t triangulate your position due to dense vegetation or being low down was one thing, but getting lost because you tumbled down a steep hill and off a bank was something else. Every step was a careful one, and running – especially downhill – was dangerous. Little mistakes could put you in really tough situations and being lost in the dark when something was hunting you was terrifying… Those two things were bold and I really admired them.
Evolve’s 4v1 hunting.
I really love Infested Planet’s economy of being able to just sell and buy without penalty so you can adapt to your mutating foe and experiment with different approaches, weapons and tech combos.
Edit: oh, Affordable Space Adventures was a really special coop puzzler that made great use of the Wii U controller’s separate screen and unique capabilities (I heard Zombi U’s multiplayer was unique too). One player controlled the ship’s internal systems through a really cool interface while the others controlled different elements of the ship itself.
Snipperclips on the Switch. Not underrated exactly but not praised enough for its new and clever mechanics.
The thing that comes immediately to mind, because it’s a recent release, is Cultist Simulator. I don’t know anything that really resembles its card-based parser system and fragmented storytelling.
Gorogoa is a puzzle game whose closest relative is maybe one of those gridded picture sliding puzzles, but that doesn’t even remotely capture what it accomplishes.
One Finger Death Punch used dead-simple controls, perfect pacing, and whip-smart effects and animation design to create a wholly unique experience that feels like it was hiding under everyone’s noses for decades.
Boarding is just like any other combat in the game. There is nothing special about being on a ship.
Yeah, it’s unlike anything else I’ve played.
For you, and I’ll even concede this might even be true for most people, but I have actually asked here before if there are any games out there that had boarding actions (and ideally controlling a squad) as part of the mechanic/mini game. Ala Pirates. Its the key reason why I backed the failed The Mandate kickstarter.
Its maybe not an area that is important to large swathes of gamers…but I certainly was tickled pink to see it (and again a dearth of other games that include it).
Well the Assassins Creed Pirate games did have boarding, but that was in the context of a third person action game, obviously.
There was also this janky and busted Bethesda game nobody remembers that I played on Xbox that did as well. Pirates of the Carribean. Yes, it was a licensed game. But it had only the loosest of connections, basically some zombie pirates, to the movie. It was busted and buggy, but I played a ton of it. That you could also capture ships, though I don’t really remember the mechanics of boarding.
Thanks, I missed those! I lost interest after the first Assassins Creed and never played Pirates of the Caribbean based on the reviews, so completely missed that! Thanks!!!
I don’t remember if Skies of Arcadia had an explicit boarding mechanic or not, but it was a delightful sky pirate steampunk JRPG that had ship to ship battles complete with moddable ship components, spell cannons, etc, and that also definitely featured ship deck man to monster combat. It was amazing!
No ship-to-ship boarding to speak of. Ship combat was entirely separate from individual unit combat.
It was great though!