Nope, I just did that mission/quest/whatever yesterday, and didn’t experience that at all.
Gameplay is interesting so far, though I’m not sure I like the “x + direction to reverse directions” when grinding; there’s enough other stuff going on when fighting (finding targets + spatial sense to know where my next move should be) that I keep forgetting I need to press X and getting twisted up.
The beginning of the game is not well paced, which is surprising given that this is an experienced dev. I’m on the propeller mission (or rather, the mission to go get bottled water to so I can get some random to make a propeller or whatever) and it feels like I’ve been in cutscenes as much as I’ve played. Granted, I haven’t just free-explored the city that much but Ratchet & Clank never did it to this degree. It’s horribly obnoxious.
I’m surprised this thread isn’t generating more comments. I thought more folks were eager to play this game. Maybe $60 is too steep? I played it all afternoon yesterday and had fun with it for the most part. I agree that the cutscenes and narrator handholding can be a bit overbearing, but traversing the colorful city is quite addictive and the combat is generally enjoyable.
I’m not sure about the defense missions where you lay traps and try to protect your barricades. It reminded me of both Orcs Must Die and Brutal Legend. I won both times I tried but it felt a bit too chaotic and haphazard. The character screen is way overloaded with amps and weapons and traps and badges in every corner. Lots of customization there and with the outfits and hairstyles, etc. but maybe too much. Sometimes the comedy hits a funny Saints Row kind of flavor but it’s hit and miss. One thing I love is all the different resurrection animations.
So where is everybody? I’m pretty hooked so it must be doing something right.
I’m enjoying myself with it. The humor hits for me, so I don’t mind the cutscenes and narrator (and I actively seek out the weapon tutorial videos). I’m just glad that it doesn’t really punish you for being awful at it, so it’s never really frustrating. The defense missions are the closest to being frustrating though, and I can’t say that I’m overly fond of them. They’re too chaotic and I don’t feel like I have weapons to handle them. The TNT Teddy weapon is good, but not enough ammo since I need them to take out the special OD.
I haven’t really had the chance to take in the scenery yet, but it does look like there are some nice sight gags littered about the town.
Xbox One exclusive.
Hah! Maybe so.
I came in here thinking this was about a racing game.
I’m playing it, but I’m on the fence about it. Because the game wants you to be in motion constantly, grinding or bouncing but mainly grinding if you want any time to actually shoot anything, I feel like I’m out of control. It’s pretty common that I’ll be focused on trying to shoot something and I’ll run off the end of a rail, an end I couldn’t see coming.
I got to Buck Nation’s challenge, in which you’re supposed to score 50,000 points or more, and stopped after I scored maybe 35,000 before time ran out. Way, way too frantic for me. This might have been my kind of game when I was 20 and still hitting the arcades.
I’ll probably pick it up again tomorrow, but I’m really not enjoying it that much, mainly because of the pacing.
Yeah, that Buck Nation challenge was daunting. It took me four or five tries to get bronze. I really have no idea how you could hit the 250,000 gold score. That must take a full style meter plus combo multipliers and high level weapons.
I’m working on not relying too much on the left trigger to slow down and aim. I’ve gotten more comfortable grinding and bouncing and evading until I have a few clear shots on a dense group of OD. I prefer the single shot weapons like Dirty Harry and the testicle shotgun so I gave those both enhanced damage and I’m liking the results. The game is seriously customizable about how you want to approach it. It’s also very forgiving with the checkpoints, even during boss battles.
I’m currently playing a series of missions about a boy scout pack that has me convinced some of the guys at Insomniac are fans of Moonrise Kingdom.
It can be a bit hectic, especially during those fortress defense missions, but when you manage to combine grinding, air dashes, wall running and bouncing around while killing ODs with teddy bears it’s freaking amazing.
“Air dashes?”
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the game. If I’m just moving from point A to B, the weird-ass movement system can be pretty great, somewhat like Crackdown. It’s a fairly free-form city with lots of stuff to pick up, and the sense that you can really reach just about any point if you do it right. Some really require wall-run + leap up + wall run, which I tend to flub fairly often and fall down, but it generally can be done. I can often keep a chain going so my combo meter is up to 20+.
Where I don’t do so well is when I have to combine that with combat. If I do anything more complicated that grinding, I get disoriented. After a couple of jumps and wall runs I have no idea where I am or where the enemies are. If it’s one of the enemies that throws things at you, like Herkers, by the time I’ve figured out where they are again, I have to dodge an incoming object and the cycle starts over. This gets worse in some environments, like the dog park, where there aren’t many safe grinding options and the camera is often blocked by a tree. I had a story-required mission there against a Herker and a 3 or so freeze-ODs, and I almost never spent any time shooting.
I’ve had several serious bugs. In that dog-park mission, I ran out of the park to get health and ammo. I came back and the targets were all gone, and wouldn’t respawn. I had to force-quit the game and reload the save before they’d show up. In the AI Core side mission, I got trapped inside a Fizzie Fortune booth and could not move. Later, in the dragon-killing mission, I respawned after a strike inside the road. I couldn’t move, couldn’t shoot, and I was soon surrounded by OD that mostly couldn’t hit me. Mostly. Eventually I took enough hits to die and the mission restarted properly.
I can get to level 2 on the Style meter pretty easily, but can’t reach 3 regularly to save my life. Literally, there was a mission where I had to be style level 3 to avoid being shot by rocket turrets, and I couldn’t do it. I managed to finish, but I had to accept that the turrets were going to bombard me continously while I finished it.
The resurrection animations are really something else. I’ve seen duplicates, but there are so many of them. I’ve completely lost count of how many I’ve seen, and I get the impression that despite dozens of deaths I haven’t seen all of them.
I’m just past the glider mission where you shoot down the big blimp and then Bill - or whatever the fuck his name is but honestly anyone who played Left4Dead probably just named the dude Bill and moved on - sacrificed himself to save me at the end. I’ve done a few side missions but it’s not something I’ve been doing really hard core. I just got the harpoon gun thingy, which was very helpful when I did a mission to deal with scav turrets (I maybe did that after the glider? Robots are showing up now, that’s after the glider too right?). I haven’t played in a few days because I’ve got so much going on right now (both in life outside of gaming and with gaming, between Isaac: Rebirth, Borderlands Pre Sequel, several SMAX games).
I think it’s a pretty good game that gets in it’s own way a lot. The weapons feel very Ratchet & Clanky (as one might expect) but I’m not sure they quite nailed the traversal. I think I’d prefer to be able to switch directions on a straight path without hitting X (there’s already way too much else going on to make me want to have to remember a button push). I occasionally find myself wondering why I’m not flubber-bouncing off of things (e.g. big trucks). The traversal is kind of fun but the combat is really hectic. It feels like we’re supposed to use some weapons in combo but it’s not really well set up for that.
The humor is uneven. I agree that it’s sometimes quite funny (and even clever; I quite liked it when the tutorial voice guy started yelling at me to do stuff in game e.g.) but it can be really flat as well. Especially in the cutscenes, which are largley unwelcome (you, sir, are no Saints Row) and often screw up the pacing.
I don’t regret getting the game at all and will be returning to it.
I had the same problem on that mission. I couldn’t budge past a certain point on the meter no matter what. And then I just won the mission.
I’m pretty sure the way the mechanic works is that you get a small number of style points for doing some move, and a lot for killing something while your combo meter is high. The problem was that I’d do a series of moves, get my meter up, and then I had no idea where the scabs were. By the time I located one, my meter had reset to 1.
RB while in the air to boost forward, which really helps continue grinding while leaping between objects.
Another thing is that I don’t care for the base defense missions. I generally like this sort of thing, since I really enjoyed Orcs Must Die / Orcs Must Die 2, but they don’t give you enough traps, and every mission ends with OD swarming in mass quantities over my vats. They count as “wins” as long as it doesn’t drop to zero, but it feels like a failure every time because I’m not keeping OD out of the Rift, I mean off the vats.
I do like that you can buy maps to the collectibles. I’m not good at spotting them, and it’s great that they show up in my local radar once I’ve purchased the appropriate map.
As a note, the air dash doesn’t unlock until after you reach the troops of scouts.
I have a hard time getting the meter up to Level 3 as well. I just can’t seem to keep a combo going while in combat (plus I suck at the combat).
I finished it. It took about 20 hours all told. I did all the side quests except the “defend the beached pirate ship against wingers” quest, which I found too frustrating. Plus, the reward was only clothing.
I did almost none of the challenges. I tried an example of each type, and didn’t find any of them interesting. Since the rewards vary from meaningless (money for clothing) to nearly trivial (a small amount of Overcharge for gold), I didn’t bother.
I found the final boss fight really frustrating, but that’s pretty par for final boss fights. Arguably it’s just a series of not terribly hard jumps, but “many easy jumps in a row” can easily become frequent failures if there are enough of them, particularly with the electrified rings at the end. I’m just not a huge fan of long jumping sequences where you have to start over if you fail any of them.
You get dumped back into the game after that, but there’s really nothing else to do. Unless you just like running around at random, or finishing the collecting aspect. There are a lot of amps that I never unlocked because my tolerance for collecting that stuff is somewhat low, even after I bought the maps to show where it was. I was really hoping for a Newgame+ mode, which has been a feature of the Ratchet & Clank series for a long time now. I gather they’re planning expansions, though it’s not clear what those would look like.
Free 24-hour trial of Sunset Overdrive starting on Nov 22nd for Gold members.
Weapons pack DLC. $4.99 or included with the Season Pass.
Yawn.
In a fit of madness, I got the Deluxe edition when I bought it, since it included the Season Pass. Which I imagined would be like the Borderlands season pass, including several expansions with new areas and new missions.
A weapons pack is not what I wanted, since I don’t have any real incentive to return to the game without new missions.