Sxynix Posted March 15, 2021 Posted March 15, 2021 Platforms:Stadia Developers:Q-Games Publishers:Q-Games Release Date:March 1, 2021 In an era when Hades can win IGN’s Game of The Year award for reinventing the roguelike wheel, and more straightforward games like Dead Cells remain fun after countless runs, PixelJunk Raiders is a major disappointment. Despite a distinct visual style reminiscent of trippy synthwave albums or Moebius paintings, PixelJunk Raiders (perhaps the final Google Stadia exclusive) fails to distinguish itself from the competition in any meaningful way. It does put forth some inventive ideas, but at the same time stumbles over the basics too much for them to matter. As a fresh-faced bounty hunter, it’s your job to rescue a bunch of desert-dwelling aliens from squid-faced baddies. But beaming down there in the flesh would be stupid, so you’ve got a limited number of digital avatars to complete your mission. It’s a thin setup, but certainly a familiar one. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really go anywhere, and you’ll often hear the same lines from your swarthy mentor congratulating you on nabbing some treasure. At first glance, PixelJunk Raiders (which bears no meaningful connection to the long-running PixelJunk franchise other than that it’s from the same development team) makes a great first impression. The randomly generated alien worlds you beam down to are awash in a mix of brightly colored, clearly defined landscapes that practically pop off the screen when bathed in moon or sunlight. Massive deserts give way to lush forests and strange alien architecture, and I was intrigued when I first discovered an underground bunker buried among the sand. A solid synth soundtrack helps keep things feeling “alien.” Giant stone pillars draw your attention skyward, where the faint outlines of other planets and moons remind you of just how small you are. Though each map is pretty massive, giant space cubes and plumes of smoke above each major location help to keep you from getting too lost. Once you get a bit closer to the action, things fall apart. Each town you come across looks almost identical, save for the layout of the buildings. Raiders wants to give you the impression these kind aliens had a somewhat bustling community, but the drab exteriors and cookie-cutter market stalls, pottery, and interiors do anything but. It doesn’t help that the rooftops of most towns – where a lot of powerups and other important items end up – are just barely out of reach of your triple-jump, requiring you to either find a small ladder on the side of a wall or use the wildly inaccurate super jump while ducking and weaving around enemies. Finding enough survivors to rescue can be a chore unto itself. Though Raiders makes it clear how many survivors are in each location and highlights survivors you’ve already seen while being busy fighting aliens, I often found myself having to circle settlements multiple times and dig through various identical buildings to find the last one I was missing. And if you were expecting the act of rescuing these kindly folks to be interesting, witnessing the same animation of grateful relief each time makes it feel like you’re rescuing a bunch of Chuck E Cheese animatronic characters. That’s if you can even rescue them in the first place, since having even one enemy nearby will block you from completing the interaction, and you’ll be forced to search around for that little jerk in the same laborious way. The same sense of repetition applies to all of PixelJunk Raiders’ other locations, including forests and alien cities that climb a hundred yards into the sky. From afar, they’re initially tantalizing, but once you get deeper in and realize how repetitious the scenery is (and how enemies might get stuck between trees or within a force field, making them harder to find and kill), it quickly loses its luster. The same goes for underground bunkers that follow a painfully similar layout and offer relatively meager rewards. The only bright spot of exploration was when a plume of smoke occasionally led not to another flat, dull town but what appeared to be the deadly aftermath of a battle between a few other bounty hunters like myself and three giant humanoid enemies. While the prospect of a mysterious encounter fueled my imagination, and stumbling upon it felt like a truly one-of-a-kind chance, it ultimately never led to anything meaningful. Combat misses the mark as well: your battles with enemy aliens big and small feel a mile wide and an inch deep, and it’s where most of PixelJunk Raiders’ issues rear their ugly heads. Given its roguelike nature, I was willing to forgive Raiders for being remarkably punishing right out of the gate. At the start of a mission your bounty hunter is equipped with little more than their fists, three lives, and a health bar that gets wiped out in about as many hits. In theory, this encourages you to explore the desert wastes and open up ancient vases or loot enemy bodies for swords, daggers, hammers, or shields. In practice, you're more often just collecting gems that don’t immediately serve any purpose. Actual weapons are notably harder to find, and unless you select a specific perk, you end up losing everything upon your painfully sudden death. The weapons themselves are hardly distinguishable from one another. All swords, no matter how fancy, result in the same flurry of strikes, and two-handed hammers seem to stun enemies a little better but aren’t much more useful. When you add in the fact that they’re so fragile that they lose 1% durability for every strike, it’s even worse. If you weren’t into weapons breaking in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you’re going to absolutely hate it here. space rescue adventure from Kyoto’s inimitable Q-Games, PixelJunk Raiders has the bones of a great action game. Its mix of planetary exploration, scavenging and alien-killing is unusual enough to make an impression; the art style, which lands somewhere between a 90s anime and the cover of an old science-fiction novel, is glorious; its planets are beautiful; the retro-futuristic vibe is refreshing and colourful. Unfortunately I just haven’t had any fun playing it. Dropped on to a planet where you must rescue disappointingly static alien civilians from squid-like invaders who’ve taken over their citadels, the first thing to do is forage for weapons and blueprints for useful gadgets. Scanning the horizon for the telltale smoke-plume of a crashed ship, buildings or ruins leads to loot and currency – but if you die, as I often did, you lose it all. Several times I respawned on a planet stripped bare of resources; faced with the prospect of trying to pummel aliens to death with my bare fists to grind out enough currency to open a locked door, it was usually easier to just restart the whole mission. Raiders’ combat is fun and bouncy but a little imprecise, which would be excusable if the penalties for failure weren’t so harsh. It looks like an arcade game, and it’s structured that way, with randomly generated missions that give you a fresh challenge each time, but it is oddly sluggish in the hands. Getting around its planetary microcosms takes too long, despite a cool rocket-jump that propels you across the surface. Enemies respawn unpredictably. Everything is slowed down by having to trawl around looking for weapons or collecting gems that you need to open doors and chests. These ought to be snappy 10-minute rescue missions, not drawn-out ordeals. PixelJunk Raiders’ combat is not exactly a tower defense, and not quite aggressive Dark Souls swordplay, but a poor mishmash of the two that combines fairly standard melee fighting with setting traps for enemies. You can lock onto a target, although I found doing so to be stifling due to how it restricts your movement, and you’ll trade swings with them before their obvious wind up finishes and they slash you. One on one, it’s relatively mundane stuff, rushing to deplete their health bar before they can take a sizeable chunk of yours. When contending with groups it’s far more difficult, especially once long-range and bigger enemies get added to the mix. It’s a decent variety (my favorite being the Wild Wild West saw blades that pop up out of the sand and try to mow you down) but once you figure out their one or two tricks, combat rarely manages to surprise. A floaty sense of movement (which is only aggravated if your internet connection stutters) kept it from ever feeling like I was growing as a fighter. I found setting traps to be a slightly more effective, yet equally frustrating approach. Mines are effective at wiping out groups of smaller enemies, or putting a serious dent in larger ones, but kiting enemies into them is a dull and frustrating experience, made even worse by the fact that it’s hard to gauge how far away you need to be to avoid getting caught in your own blast. Also, once they’re gone, they’re gone, including a mistakenly placed mine you dropped in the heat of battle. Imprints – digital clones of various enemy types that fight for you – are similarly useless. They’re okay at distracting a few enemy grunts with physical or elemental damage, but it’s rarely enough to thin out the larger horde that’s constantly, relentlessly chasing you down. Other items let you jump high into the air or launch a giant area-of-effect attack after defeating enough enemies. It gives combat a little bit of an extra flair, letting you ground-pound downwards into an enemy’s skull or fully banish a giant back to its dimension, but only when it works as intended... which isn’t often enough. Traversing Pixeljunk Raiders without a weapon is teeth-clenchingly frustrating, not least because our nameless avatar has all the CQC talents of a dead goldfish. An enemy you can slice down in two whacks of a sword may require five or six punches from your bare fists, and those blows aren't easy to get in when there's five or six - often more - other foes all swarming to your position and hoping to take you down. Worse still, it's very possible that some worlds have no weapons in them whatsoever; after all, them's the breaks when you play roguelikes. This means that to complete a level and retain the gear and treasures you've gathered once your weapon has been destroyed, battles dissolve into slow, meandering rounds of strafe-punch-strafe-ouch-strafe-run-aways that don't feel challenging as much as they feel grossly unfair. To balance this, developer Q-Games employs Stadia's incredibly neat State Share feature. Players can snap a screenshot, share it, and invite other players to hop in and play it, too (well, providing they own the game, of course). The more generous souls may even take it a step further and drop down a load of weapons or Imprints - one-use special abilities that are like the Merc's Perks but can be carried around with you - about the place to help you out. And that's great, right? Community spirit and cooperation is baked right in. Only trouble is, there's no way of loading up one of these State Shares from within the game - I've only found them via a fantastic spreadsheet shared by the fine folks at Reddit - and beyond a cursory mention early on, the game does nothing to remind you, either. This means that in the opening hours when your inventory is sparse - or whenever there's a precipitous difficulty hike - players are going to struggle to get through each mission intact, possibly because the game needs you to collaborate with others in a way it hasn't clearly communicated to you nor implemented in-game. There's more; Alien DNA that can be spliced with your own. Unlockable skills and upgrades that let you permanently upgrade your life and stamina meters. It's all window-dressing, though, and adds little extra flavour to Raiders' bland bones. Yes, it's a game that demands you explore before you charge head-first into a fight, and yes, when you find your rhythm - not to mention build up a decent weapon cache - the gameplay loop can be curiously hypnotic. Right now, though, it's simply not enough to redress the repetitive gameplay and brutal learning curve. ---------------- There Is Not System For The Game She Work & Run Only in Nintendo Switch & Ps4 ---------------- Video :
Premium
Recommended Posts