I was rather excited to learn of the existence of Ruiner, mostly because I have a bias for anything cyberpunk (I even liked the crappy Syndicate reboot), and because the gameplay trailers gave me the feeling that this was going to be a no-frills attached kino action adventure where the narrative was integral to the gameplay and the gameplay is as pure as it can be.
So after finishing the game twice on Hard, I'm rather confused at many things the game did end up doing. While I did have some joy when I was zipping around smashing enemies from behind their puny defenses in one single Chain Dash sequence, I couldn't read the intentions behind many of the game's design decisions.
I find always being able to respect your entire skill tree questionable. You can respec your entire skill tree at any time, the intention probably being to experiment around with abilities until you find something that suits you. I was surprised to find you can even unspec Dashing, even though it's absolutely central to the game. I can't imagine trying to play the game without being able to dash, so I gotta ask why such an essential ability is presented as an optional upgrade in the first place. The idea of being able to choose between upgrades kind of falls flat when not picking one puts you at a massive disadvantage, especially considering its low cost.
Being able to respec your entire skill tree at any time also leads to some meta strategies which I believe aren't entirely intended. For example, at any time in the game you can remove points from a skill you aren't currently using and put them in Supply Drop in order to get one weapon you really like or which is really powerful, only to unspec Supply Drop and put the points back into the skill you have before. Why even bother dedicating points into Supply Drop at all times?
It's incredibly obvious with the active abilities slotted to SPACE, Q and SHIFT. Only one ability can be bound to each of those buttons, yet there are multiple abilities slotted to one of the aforementioned buttons and you can only use one of the abilities in the given slot. You can switch the ability per slot using the radial menu, but a more efficient solution would be to simply unspec the ability you don't intend to use and put the free points into another ability you want to use in the same slot, or put it elsewhere. Basically, if you put points into two abilities occupying the same slot, you're wasting points. The points in the ability you aren't currently using aren't being utilized at all, so you're better off putting them in a passive ability like bonus health or durability. The only thing you really gain from speccing into more than one ability in the same hotkey slot is convenience while switching between them, but pausing, going to the upgrades screen and respeccing doesn't take all that much time either. Moreover, there's not a whole lot of reason why you shouldn't be able to use Barrier and Overload simultaneously, or Ghost Hack and the healing ability. They don't seem to conflict in any major way or create some massively OP combo besides sharing the same hotkey slot.
Since you can always respec into an entirely different build at any time, the idea of having to choose between abilities is weak since with a decent number of points you can already be anything at any time. You can't have everything unlocked at any time, but you don't really need every single upgrade the game gives you at any time either. It begs the question why you don't already have every ability available to you from the start, or at least gradually introduced to you in a (non-)linear fashion (it already kinda does, given that some upgrades are unlocked depending on your level). Just being able to switch between all abilities at any time would be more convenient. You can already unlock access to every ability to do the same, but like I said before that'd be just a waste of points. At least that way the radial menu would have more of a reason to justify itself. However, that wouldn't change having to unspec points to put them into additional upgrades for the abilities depending on which you intend to currently use.
I don't understand why the upgrades themselves need to exist and have the game not be balanced around what you're guaranteed to have and are expected to use. It's not like 'builds' are really a thing in the traditional sense here in Ruiner, the skill tree is way too limited for any kind of variety, being able to respec means you don't really need to plan ahead or stick to anything, and most people as guaranteed to put several points into the dash, stat, and weapon skill trees anyways which can constitute a good 60% of all allocated skill points. It'd be more interesting if each skill tree has branches of its own where you can only pick one ability out of the two branches, each one facilitating a different playstyle because you can't have both branches active at once.
I'm sure that the whole experimentation idea behind being able to respec your build at any time would work just fine if you 'found' the abilities over time. It worked just fine for older games where you could be over carrying ten weapons at a time without having to pause the game to upgrade some things every 10 minutes. You experimented with what you got, not with what you constantly need to disable and enable in the menu. Your energy is limited anyways, it's not like having access to all abilities at once will make you more OP than you can already make yourself.
I find the ranking system questionable. From what I experienced, the gist of it is to kill enemies ASAP and not die. The latter is a given, but it means you can't get an S+ rank if you restart a checkpoint through dying even once. Alright, I thought, the idea is to clear levels in one go without dying. So when I die, I only need to restart the whole level. Levels in Ruiner aren't particularly long, so I don't have any particular problem with that. 'I've S-ranked all of Metal Gear Rising Revengeance on Revengeance difficulty, so I've seen worse', I thought before trying to do the same in Ruiner. However, restarting the level means you have to go through everything again. And when I say everything, that includes:
- Dialogue sections you'll always find yourself mashing E through (holding E doesn't work)
- 40-second long unskippable Superloop sequences (I counted!)
- Skippable cutscenes
- 30-second long unskippable elevator rides where you do absolutely nothing but listen to dialogue delivered in real-time (instead of the usual text segments?)
- Target introduction cutscenes
- Unskippable in-game mini-cutscenes
- Hold E to unlock barrier using fat man (what happened to the hacking minigame?)
People might have complained about the walking segments in Furi, but in Speedrun Mode all the fat was cut out so you never had to bother with it again. You'd think that during playtesting of Ruiner that having to suffer through all the story stuff over and over in the pursuit of a full S+ rank clear would be considered incredibly annoying and obtrusive, if the game was ever tested for full S+ rank clears to begin with. Is the lack of focus for rank hunting intentional or something? On one hand there's not even an achievement for trying to get an S+ rank (I don't particularly care about cheevos, but them existing is usually a sign by the developers that you have something to achieve in the game), on the other hand the time requirements for an S+ rank is tight enough that it's quite likely to just get a S rank instead of a S+ even if you put in some effort. That, and the penalties that dying has on your rank varies depending on the section of the level, with dying in harder sections not having as much of a serious effect on your ranking. The death penalties and time requirements are clearly tailored for each fight, but the act of trying to get the highest ranking is combined with tons of unnecessary fluff that's just frustrating to sit through and gives off the impression that the game is not designed around being intensively replayed.
For all I know, the ranking system could be partially cosmetic, as if to grade your peformance but making it ridiculously convoluted to actually reach the highest level. The level select screen doesn't even track the highest rankings you have achieved for each level and the inbetween arenas. Speaking of cosmetic, does the combo meter serve a gameplay purpose? Does it affect your ranking? Because I've found it doesn't really do anything, nor is the game really built around killing all enemies in an area in one continuous 18x sweep. For starters, there is often too much dead time between enemies spawning in the arena, so even if you already decimated an entire enemy wave, it frequently takes too long for the next wave to spawn, during which your combo meter has already reset. On top of that, enemies tend to lean more on the spongier side, so you can't really keep up your combo when it can take too long to kill a single enemy reliably. Just increasing the time limit after which the combo meter resets wouldn't be a completely efficient solutions, a better solution would be to spawn in enemies faster, or make the animations which plays when they enter the arena shorter. The final Overload upgrade does increase damage depending on your combo meter, but because of the aforementioned spawning rhythm (and the upgrade being unlockable only lategame at which point enemies tend to have more HP and dash/teleport around the whole place) I don't find that it really sees a lot of use.
If you were seriously meant to chase ranks, then I believe that the rigorous process of restarting the entire level after many deaths would be made much less frustrating to replay by smoothing it out of any narrative interruptions. I'm not necessarily asking for a speedrun mode, but being able to just move from arena to arena without any interruptions while most of the dialogue is delivered through some chatbox on the upper right of your HUD without pausing the game would do a lot to not break the flow of the game. And having enemies jump into the arena faster, and doing away with the unnecessary elevator rides and superloop sequences. It's cool for your first time, but after your nth retry it will start to grate on you. It'd be interesting if your maximum combo chain would also be factored into post-arena ranking, if it was actually maintainable.
I find the ability balance questionable. For starters there's the obvious Shield Ram Stun which can stun enemies for a good three seconds during which you can do anything to them, while doing so tends to be cheaper than using stun nades. There's a significant energy cost when you actually ram an enemy with a shield so this strategy can't be abused in longer arenas, but bosses can get entirely trivialized with this strategy given that they tend to drop health and energy every time you deal a certain amount of damage, while energy is also frequently dropped through incoming drones or Vampires. The intricacies involved beyond learning the ins and outs of a boss are completely nullified when you've got an ability that prevents them from doing anything. Ram them, whack them three times with the Armor Breaker, maybe quickly respec into Overload and Charge Attack to deal massive damage. Works on anything with two legs. I believe the base energy drain upkeep cost (not talking about shield ram costs here) for the shield was balanced enough that it didn't require another upgrade reducing the energy cost, let alone two. Random karma drops for killing enemies with shield ram seems like such a weird little bonus to add given that the resulting karma drops are minimal and would make you waste a lot of energy just trying to pull it off. Somehow you can also stun enemies by ramming into them even if you ram right into their active shield? Kind of defeats the point of enemies having shields...
The deployable barrier is alright, it keeps out ranged enemies and slows down melee enemies. I don't have really a lot to say about this one, though I never felt like using it often because I liked the other powers better. The slow effect on deployment is certainly useful for preventing enemies to even aim at you. I do like that slowdown is activated when your barrier is destroyed to give you time to properly respond. Ghost Hack is definitely on the OP side. Enemies being hacked stop moving for some reason and also briefly stop shooting, I don't really know why that is. However, what makes this ability OP is not having a buddy on your side. It's that whenever you have a puppet on your side,
all the enemies in the arena will prioritize your puppet first instead of you. What this means is that you can freely go around killing enemies without them even noticing or even bothering to aim at you, even though you can get caught in the crossfire. Forget Shield ramming, having enemies not shoot at you at all is an even more overpowered defense. Coupled with the upgrades which increase puppet health and life duration, it's like a smartbomb going off for way too long. I'm surprised people aren't abusing this more often for the arenas, given that Ghost Hack does not work on bosses.
Supply Drone is such a weird duck because of the always-respec skill tree like I mentioned before. There's all this dangerous stuff on the floor I can use to kill people, but after a brief trip to the skill tree I can call in a drone which contains any weapon I prefer to use the most. The cooldown makes it unspammable during combat, but outside combat you don't really have to worry getting killed before you can even get your hands on your favourite weapon. Then you can put the points you put into Supply Drone into weapon durability upgrades, so your new Armor Breaker will last longer. Again, it makes you wonder why it isn't a permanent ability, since you unlock Supply Drone fairly early on and only need to put two spare points in to have any weapon you could ever need.
Curiously enough, there's also a random chance for weapons dropped by Supply Drones to have a purple/orange outline which gives them more ammo/durability, much like what you create using Weapon Grinders. RNG has its uses to make things feel less static, but I don't see the point of this. Supply Drone can also be upgraded to come down faster and deal more damage on impact, after which it can kill anything beneath it (including you). Even heavy Exosuit guys died to a full-on supply drone strike. It sounds OP, but as it is on a separate cooldown it can't really be spammed, and despite the 'instant delivery' upgrade it still takes a second or two to come down, and it's hard to get enemies to stay on top of the supply drone marker, so it's not really all that useful. Another curiosity is that the Fox Blade isn't available for selection in the Supply Drone weapon menu. The Fox Blade isn't particularly rare or OP or anything, so it seems rather strange that it's not available for selection at all. I don't mean that the weapon icon for the Fox Blade is there in the menu but greyed out like other weapons you haven't picked up yet, I mean the icon isn't there at all.
Overload I'm fairly okay with and is the one I stuck with the most because it wasn't blatantly overpowered like the rest and was more of an augmentation of the base dash 'n strike gameplay by just making you move faster and having you deal more damage, which I felt was only fair to use given the bulletspongy nature of the bosses, especially in the initial version. More importantly it lets me kill things quickly instead of just safely, which in turn nets me a higher ranking. Overload + full Momentum + Armor Breaker would oneshot most enemies on Hard, whereas Overload + Charge Attack + Armor Breaker deals so much damage against enemies and bosses if you can land one right, it's borderline ridiculous. After the update it would shred over half the healthbar of minibosses when pulled off correctly. I
suppose that's overpowered in a sense, though I'd rather attribute that to Charge Attack rather than Overload. More on that later.
I don't have much of a problem with Grid Converter. It restores health at the cost of energy and vice versa if you upgrade it. The conversion rates seem fairly balanced to me, and the passive health regen upgrade is nice if you don't know what else to spend it on without the regeneration being ridiculous. Though I felt like I got by on health and energy drops just fine and didn't really need to use this ability.
Stun nades did get nerfed with Update #1 by having their energy cost doubled, which I do believe was a step in the right direction. The stun duration of stun nades on bosses is also halved (maybe even less), so it's a complete waste of energy stun nade bosses. Shield ramming will stun bosses for a slightly longer time at a cheaper cost, but in any case stun nades are more suitable for stunning groups whereas shield ramming is good for stunning single targets if you compare the energy costs. That said I'm not too fond of an ability which lets you temporarily nullify all challenge the enemies around you can pose. It doesn't really make you better at the game when you can just rely on it to give you a safety window with the press of a button. It's just a crutch. Enemies got all these cool attack and unique challenges to pose, but here's this ability which just says LOLNO. For example, even though Overload boosts your offensive power, you can't just blindly whack everything in one hit without getting hit. Also, the description lists the energy reduction upgrade for the Stun Grenade to reduce its energy cost -50%, when in reality it only reduces -12.5 per use, meaning it reduces Stun Grenade cost only by 25%.
Frag Grenades feel kind of useless unless you spam them excessively together with Overload, but at that point you're just wasting energy. The damage on them is laughable, especially on Hard later on in the game, even if upgraded. Dashing behind enemies to whack 'em instead of repeatedly blasting someone with an AoE fireball seems to be a more efficient tactic. Raw damage output seems like a boring thing for an ability when there's plenty of other more efficient means of dealing damage. I feel like this could see more use if it knocked back enemies or sucked them in towards the point of impact like a gravity grenade. Just throwing some things out there. In any case I didn't find any cool strategies to use with this one.
While you can always slow down time by holding down RMB, you can't attack while doing so, so Slow Motion is the solution to that conundrum. Now you can always react to everything. Though the low energy drain when upgraded is a bit silly. When I activate SlowMo and aim with some hard-to-land-a-shot-with weapon like the Raijin or Lancer, I can deal some ridiculous constant damage while always being able to react to incoming shots. The drain is not too massive and energy drops are usally not too far away, so here's another
winning strategy.
Charge Attack is also one I'm not too sure what to think about. Like I said before, Overload + Armor Breaker + Charge Attack can wipe out squads coming in through dropships in no time, including heavy exomercs. The damage between a Whirlwind and a normal hit is also ridiculous. It takes about twelve hits with an Armor Breaker to open up an Angel, but with a single Whirlwind without Overload, that Angel will open up within two seconds at a miniscule fraction of the durability cost. A Whirlwind connecting to an enemy will only drain one durability point from your melee weapon while doing tenfold the damage. The message seems clear, use Whirlwinds whenever you can if you are wielding a two-handed weapon, else you're being inefficient. Thankfully, using Charge Attacks drains 25 energy, so you can't constantly spam it. I do like using it, but when it takes only two Whirlwinds together with Overload and Armor Breaker to kill a boss, I get the feeling I'm just breaking the game, which is the same feeling I got when stunlocking a boss to death with shield ram. I honestly wouldn't mind a damage nerf or increased durability cost here.
Another inconsistency is being unable to Chain Dash
while charging up a Charge Attack. Since markers are placed with LMB and performing a Charge Attack is done by releasing LMB once charged, trying to do so will initiate the Charge Attack before you've initiated your dash. I don't know whether this is intentional or not, since it just seems like an input conflict to me. You're still able to dash manually while having a charge attack charged up, and I don't really get the thought process behind not being able to long dash around while readying your charge attack.
The Dash skill tree contains the interesting skill Momentum, which increases damage depending on your dash length. Which is a cool thing, you gotta use dashing in combination with melee for higher damage output. Unfortunately your Momentum isn't maintained during a chaindash, only the distance of your current dash is factored in for Momentum. I think that's kind of a shame because Momentum could also encourage Chain Dashing more since I feel like I'm just dashing once behind enemies to hit them all the time. The damage scaling with Momentum would have to be decreased if chain dashing were to be factored in though.
I do have to note that the limited dash points don't really matter beyond preventing chain dashing from being abused in Slow Motion only and to add a slight delay between manual dashes once you're overheating for having used too many dashes. It cools down way too fast, even without the reduced dash cooldown upgrade, so there's nothing really stopping you from performing continuous single aimed long dashes. It's not like you need to Chain Dash all the time either. On top of that, Overload can be upgraded to not take up dash charges at all! You can always dash somewhere and you're never really punished for spamming dash as overheating only takes less than half a second. That said, if you spam manual dash and want to Chain Dash you'll most likely have to do with less markers for your Chain Dash, so that is one thing to keep in mind, though I don't really find myself using more than three markers at once. It being spammable isn't all that of a big deal since you aren't truly invincible while dashing and will only take 60% reduced damage with the upgrade (I can tolerate dashing with no i-frames).
It begs the question why dash charges even need to be a limited resource beyond constituting the upper limit of placable dash markers. It doesn't really make me think 'I better not dash too often or I won't be able to dash later on' because the dash charges will regenerate quickly anyways. A more sensible solution would be to let you allow dash around manually for an unlimited amount of time (you'll have to stop to attack every now and then and it doesn't make you completely invulnerable either) while keeping the dash limit for the Chain Dash only. Because that's what it practically amounts to. Another would be to reduce dash charge regeneration speed to a noticeable extent and award the player a free dash charge whenever he kills an enemy so he can keep a combo going, and punishing gleeful dash spamming by having to wait until all your dash charges are regenerated if you manage to overheat.
Your weapons can be upgraded to last longer and to have more ammo. Which I don't think was really necessary. Part of the fun in Hotline Miami for example was having to improvise with the weapons at your disposal instead of sticking to your favourite weapon throughout the whole game through the use of Supply Drone. Setting the Supply Drone aside, I think having ammo/durability upgrades demeans the weapons already placed in the levels in favor of sticking to which guns you love most and forcing you to experiment. As it stood I wrecked my way throughout the game with the Armor Breaker because I loved that thing so much. The Supply Drone already kind of nullifies the need for weapon durability upgrades anyways, since you can always call in a new one at the cost of your weapon breaking somewhat faster. Melee weapons tend to last long enough without any upgrades and the ammo upgrades for firearm is not all that noticeable anyways.
There's way too many conflicting upgrades in the skill tree, and not all abilities are equally worth using. I think the whole push for always-respec skill trees and an 'experiment how you see fit' mentality has produced something incoherent where the game is not really balanced around each ability, making some upgrades and abilities feel comparatively useless. Especially when shield and stuns reign supreme. If your abilities were treated as a core part of your moveset and the game expected you to use all of them in order to survive or rank high, then they'd have to be balanced by necessity. As it stands it feels like some random abilities were thought up and added into the game if they sounded cool enough, with no real concern for balance beyond some cool synergies.
Enemy waves and arenas need to be more diverse. Alright, you've got mines, you've got kamikaze bombers, you've got heavy weapon guys, you've got Vampires, you've got melee enemies and you've got molotov bombers.
So why, with all these enemy types, are enemy waves so homogenous? You don't need to pad out the game with crappy elevator rides and Superloop sequences when there's still untapped potential present in the game. You could have waves with two Vampires and heavy weapons guys spawning in at once. You could be fighting off a normal enemy waves with constantly spawning mines. The exomerc squad was a great idea. When they were introduced, you had to fight a melee enemy, the Heavy from TF2, and some agile guy with a gun. This line-up forced you to prioritize your targets if you wanted to last longer, and got you a bit more involved in the combat. Then the waves after that sent for some reason less diverse waves after you. What's up with that?
When the game sends waves of suiciders after you, it only does so separately from all other enemies, meaning you almost never fight a suicider and another enemy type at the same time save for the first wave when you encounter the Harpies for the first time.
That's a waste. Take a look at Serious Sam and the impact of a Headless Kamikaze in your line of thinking when you're holding off a massive wave of enemies. Vampires are also not used nearly as much as they should be. They're a great concept and a great fit for Ruiner, but they are so rarely used, and sometimes rather poorly, like the two Vampires at the start of the wave right after the elevator ride in the (second?) Hanza level where you wait 5 seconds for one Vampire to spawn, which you can kill immediately with three whacks of Nerve, and 5 seconds more for the second Vampire to spawn which you can also kill in three whacks, and only THEN do the Triads start spawning. To put things in perspective, imagine dying frequently and having to restart the wave, and having to sit through the initial Vampire spawns of the wave over and over which anyone can do in their sleep. It's poor wave design. These 15 seconds of filler can be just cut out.
Some enemies are capable of throwing grenades which set the ground on fire and prevent you from walking through it without taking damage. But as it stands the enemies that do barely make any real use of it. I barely even notice grenades being thrown because I'm usually standing on the other side of the arena when they do. If you ask me, enemies capable of throwing grenades should do so more often and in greater quantity like minibosses who are able to throw three grenades at once. If I have to deal with an enemy type who is constantly throwing grenades everywhere and limiting my free space, then that enemy becomes an immediate threat.
A threat I can prioritize. And an unique enemy type to boot! While the only special thing about straw hat Creeps is that they throw Molotovs, their Molotovs are barely noticeable. So if you want to make them stand out as a separate enemy type, make sure that their role on the battlefield has an actual impact on your playstyle and decision-making process.
Sometimes cannon fodder can be a great addition to a fight. You don't need to build up each wave with a bunch of weak guys and a bunch of strong guys, why not mix together a whole bunch of weak guys with some strong guys more often? Especially during the Triad fights I feel better use can be made of this. The Angel fights are an excellent example of this and some of my favourite parts of the game. You have a high HP target you need to whack so three out of seven cores are ejected each time its HP reaches zero, each of which you need to destroy within a time span before they get recalled to the Angel. Not only do you have to be constantly on the move to destroy the cores, but enemies are also constantly spawning in, making life hard for you to destroy the cores and to deal damage to the Angel. There's multiple layers involved to these fights, from target prioritization, to movement, and to the constantly spawning enemies posing a persistent threat and encouraging you to speedkill. Just more Angel fights are something I wouldn't mind seeing at all, I'd love seeing an arena where you need to destroy two Angels at once actually.
A lot of the enemies use abilities you can use and use weapons you can use. But not all of them do, which I think is a shame because it would have allowed for some interesting gameplay opportunities. We never see an enemy which can put up a deployable barrier to protect his own allies. We never see enemies with shields trying to ram YOU. We never see enemies using Overload against YOU. We never see enemies charging up a Focused Slash in order to slow down YOU. We never see enemies trying to hack YOU (being hacked doesn't need to result in death). We don't see enemies using the Grid Converter to heal themselves or their allies. It's a shame that some more interesting opportunities are only relegated to mini-bosses, such as only mini-bosses being able to use Whirlwind attacks and only one mini-bosses using the Raijin against you even though I think it's a fun weapon to dodge from and would have been more interesting if normal enemies were able to wield it. Same goes for the Predator rifle as well.
Some arenas actually provide an unique environmental challenge, like the turret rooms where you need to dodge bullets for a limited amount of time or the one arena where the walls damage you if you run into them. Yet they only feel like one-off concepts that are never built upon, which I feel is a damn shame. An arena where you need to kill enemies while a turret is constantly aiming towards you would be interesting, and I would have loved seeing arenas with laser walls that move WITH enemies you have to kill aside from mines and suiciders. Another thing to note are helicopter spotlights which move over the arena in fixed directions and constantly shoot at you if you get in the spotlight (though the area when they start shooting you is bigger than the spotlight suggests), forcing you to move around. Yet they mostly come up when there are no enemies in the arena, while they would have been much better executed if you had to keep helicopter spotlights in mind WHILE going around killing enemies as usual. Instead of spotlights moving in predetermined times and directions, they could actually try to slowly follow you and force you to move around the arena. You could have more than one spotlight at once as has already been done in the game, as they both limit your playing field until you kill the current wave. Arenas having more to them than enemies spawning in waves does A LOT to make arenas feel fresh and exciting, you only need to build on these concepts more.
There's a lot more that can be done by mixing different enemy types together in different amounts, and to reuse some environmental hazards unique to some arenas more often in more interesting ways. One of my biggest gripes with Doom 4, a game with a similar arena fighting structure, is that the arenas themselves tend to not pose any danger to you. It's only the enemies that ever pose a threat to you, but without the enemies all the arenas are just all the same with different layouts. Ruiner also tends to suffer from it, but it does show some signs of being capable to do more than that, and I wish it would expand on those ideas. Furthermore too many of the enemy waves are a bit too homogenous, and I would really appreciate it if the enemy line-up was a bit more diverse.
The boss fights are questionable. When I can simply walk up (or dash up) to the boss and constantly whack him with my pipe into a constant stunlock until he either dashes away (after which I dash towards him again) or decides to shoot me, during which he somehow tends to miss me when I'm right up his face, 'questionable' is the most suitable word to describe them indeed. This is only really the case for the first few bosses like Matayama, Jurek and Donvius, and also some of the later mini-bosses. This doesn't work on melee bosses and some of the more 'special' ones, obviously. I shouldn't be able to mash attack and keep the boss in a perpetual stunlock loop, that's just silly and robs them of any challenge they would have normally posed me.
But as for the others, asides from the mini-bosses there are only three 'big' bosses: Nerve, TrafficKing, and Mother Heart. Nerve is fairly challenging because you're required to bait him into attacking and and attack him when he's unlikely to attack you again, while his Whirlwind attack is neatly telegraphed and needs to be avoided. However I'm not a huge fan of his molotov rain attack because you can't do anything but dash around incoming molotovs and wait it out. Once you know how to avoid damage here, you can always do it, after which this attack becomes a waste of time because you can't attack Nerve during the molotov rain. If you're going to have an attack where the boss flat out disappears and you can only avoid the incoming attacks while doing nothing else, make it short. Sadly no boss has different phases where each phase changes the boss' attack pattern. It's not a huge deal if the boss fight only lasts about 20-40 seconds, but often you want to change things up so that it feels like you're making progress.
TrafficKing is more of a puzzle boss, and I loathe puzzle bosses on principle. Puzzle bosses are more about figuring out the specific quirk of the boss, like how to deal damage to it, and not really about testing the skills you have learned throughout the game. This is partially through for TrafficKing's first phase where you're running away from him and have to dash around properly if you don't want to die, but beyond that it's figuring out that shooting the four pylons will stun TrafficKing and disable his shield, after which you can deal some actual damage to him. Strangely enough he seems to be unable to hit you if you stand right beneath him (which might be the result of the pylon stunning him, IDK), which turns the whole fight into a piece of cake, and that is rather silly. It would have been more interesting if TrafficKing had more means to prevent you from shooting the pylons such as grenades, but instead he only has his mounted minigun he can't aim jack with.
The Mother Heart is actually one of the better fights in the game. Even though it is at its core the same as the Mother fights (which involve long-dashing through giant lasers like you were skipping rope as you shoot at the core while she isn't shooting the laser, which was kind of easy once you realised how to deal with it) with an actually even less threatening laser because its turning speed is lower, but it made the brilliant addition of having Hosts constantly spawn in the arena trying to whack you, while they could be wiped out in one blow using Mother Heart's laser. So not only are you trying to stand in front trying to get a good angle to shoot at Mother Heart given that there's a rotating barrier around the core you need to shoot around, you also need to take in account the swarms of Hosts encroaching on your position. The laser tracks you. and you also want the laser to wipe out all the Hosts behind you so you can shoot Mother Heart more safely. The only weird part about this boss is that Hosts spawn in through Angels which are indestructible even if they flash red when you shoot them. Some of us will spend some time trying to destroy those Angels until we figure out we're better off just shooting Mother. It'd be more clear if the Angels wouldn't flash at all or if they were out of reach.
Later on, you also encounter the Heavy Cyborgs. By god, the Heavy Cyborgs. You need balls the size of Jupiter to recycle the same boss five times
in a row and then another two times (on top of the Mother fight being recycled twice, thrice if you count Mother Heart). Whatever changes their reappearences bring are too minimal to be even felt. The first time you encounter the Heavy Cyborg he has a basic moveset where he does some leaping groundpounds and powerful melee swipes, so no biggy. The second time his moveset is upgraded with a double fireball projectile attack and a kind of charge attack, depending on what weapon you have equipped. But that just seems silly, because he will charge if you are holding a one-handed weapon, but if you hold a two-handed weapon (or a firearm) he will throw fireballs. Where's the logic in that? Wouldn't it make more sense to attack depending on your proximity to him? Why would wielding a 1H or 2H weapon have to make such a huge difference for this boss?
The fireball attack is some bull, because its hitbox is way bigger than the visuals suggest. Even though I was dashing away from the fireballs I was still somehow incurring damage, and I don't think it's the camera perspective screwing me over either. The charge attack is more easily avoidable for that matter since you can long-dash out of the way. For boss fights (or mini-bosses, who the hell knows), these guys do have a ridiculous amount of HP, and their ferocity in close quarters makes firearm a more suitable option, yet the firearms tend to take a rather long time to kill him.
The King Cyborg fight is pretty much three Heavy Cyborg fights in a row, even though it is the same guy whose health bar gets refilled twice once you drain it to 0. His attacks don't change with his second or third phase, it really is as if you were fighting three Heavy Cyborgs in a row, and I can't underline how
cheap that feels. The only thing that changes from the first phase to the second and third is that in the first he will drop health and energy if you deal a certain amount of damage, whereas for later phases you just have to make do with drones dropping two energy drops. I remember being out of ammo and low on health while constantly circlestrafing the guy, doing peanut damage with the Ruiner during his second phase. Eventually he gives in, but then it turned out he had ANOTHER phase which is just the same thing over
again. The worst part is that the game ends with this arena fight against every single enemy type in the game over waves, but the last thing you fight is yet another Heavy Cyborg with no strings attached. No special final boss, but just this guy again. Super anti-climax. All this KILL BOSS flashing on your screen and BOSS is KILL in a cutscene? We don't even get to hear Paranesian Circle playing to the end either.
But the human-sized bosses do suffer from the aforementioned problem of stunlocking (through shield ramming). Any challenge they were supposed to pose are completely nullified by the fact that you can completely prevent them from shooting to begin with. Reducing stun duration on bosses with Stun Grenades and Shield Ramming is one step, but the game actually had the solution for the stunlocking problem all along. What makes the Matayama and Mother Heart fights so different from the rest? There you're not only fighting the boss, but also the constantly spawning grunts.
The beat 'em ups of yore also had a similar problem. Often you'd encounter boss enemies with special movesets you had to learn to avoid and best, but you could stunlock most of them once you learned how their AI worked. In that case boss fights were nothing more but having to do one thing over and over to keep the boss stunlocked. So what did the developers do? They added constantly respawning grunts during boss fights, who would jab you from behind and swarm you if you tried to stunlock the boss. After all, it's not a beat HIM up, but a beat THEM up. Not to mention, crowd control is an essential skill for beat 'em ups, so of course bosses would have to test you on that as well.
That's part of what made the Matayama fight so intense, on top of the blaring intense music and the time limit (seriously, why is it only used here and at the very end? I would have loved seeing this being used more often). Of course the grunts can be downed in one or two whacks and Matayama himself can be whacked to death given that you only need to dash up his face and spam attack as he shoots OVER you, but for the first boss he set a great example of what to expect. Unfortunately not a lot in the game did live up to that moment.
But really,
having constantly spawning grunts during boss fights (wherever applicable) would do a lot to increase the tension and to prevent stunlocking, on top of bosses having different phases. It'd make you use chain dashing more often so you can kill grunts alongside dealing damage to the boss, stunlocking would be hard to execute consistently, and speedkilling is encouraged even further as killing the boss will end the fight.
What's up with some of the later enemies in the game? The way the game progresses is that you fight Creeps in the first act, who are unable to dash and will just run at you or shoot you from a distance, no big deal there. In the Hanza act, you will have Hanza dogs dashing around a little, so you need to take in account where they are going to dash if you are going to attack them, which makes the fights a bit more dynamic. Later on we get Triads whose cannon fodder will always dash twice if they get near you, and some of the stronger ones are able to
teleport. Not dash, but teleport. Why? Why not just have them dash longer distances over the screen? It wouldn't be a big deal if they tried to teleport behind me or towards any of my flanks, but their preferred destination is to teleport
off-screen, not necessarily behind me. The sound design isn't good enough to tell what direction they just teleported towards, making me look all over the damn place to see where they even teleported.
As if to rub it in, a silhouette is left behind when they teleport which slowly disappears while the teleportation itself occurs almost instantaneously. My strategy against these guys was to just force them to teleport first, after which I could dash up to them and whack them dead because it seems their teleport has a cooldown unless by some stroke of luck I kill them dead on my first strike. But otherwise all I'm doing is waiting for them to get 'over it' so I can finally kill them. I don't know why Triad assassins can't just do a long dash with a visible tracer effect making it clear where they dashed towards. Their teleport is too disorienting to keep track of. It also makes Chain Dashing moot, because when you're holding RMB you can see the direction an enemy is going to dash towards and plan accordingly, whereas this is not the case at all with teleport, and then they're usually out of range for you to Chain Dash towards.
Something new the Triads introduce are these enemies with an orange-like wave around them which acts as a regenerating shield. The game never explains to you what it is (why can't the journal list attack patterns and charisteristics for enemies instead of only lore?), but I've found it to be a rechargeable shield similar to Halo which you need to punch your way through first. Apparently it also nullifies stun grenades, but I've never tested that. After that we get the Exomercs which I liked, when they actually appeared in squads of a gunman, meleeman, and Heavy. Unfortunately they also inherited the Triad's teleport. Then we get the Harpies, which... I don't know what makes them different from the rest aside from the fact that their damage output is comparatively ridiculous, especially when you compare it to the Creeps. Even if you upgraded your health to 200, they can remove it within a second. I guess they're just a narrative excuse so suiciders can be featured again after you made the Creeps your friends, but I don't know what the special role of these guys is. There's also the hosts, but I don't count them.
The way enemies use Shield feels rather cheap. Instead of telegraphing that they're going to pull up their shield or putting up a shield in preparation when you're aiming at them, there's what feels like a random chance for an enemy to raise his shield (if he has one) and reflect your shots back at you. It's not a huge deal when you're circlestrafing and your bullets are only whizzing past you, but trying to load a shotgun blast directly into an enemy's face only to be met with a shield and be filled with your own shotgun pellets yourself feels like bullshit because there's no clear method of being able to predict whether an enemy will put up a shield aside from teleporting behind him.
And what's up with the Virtuality Farms? The parking garage had this excellent sense of pacing as you moved from fight to fight with minimal downtime, the Hanza Compound constantly introduced new things even if the narrative segments drew it out a little. But then you get to the Virtuality Farms, and you get the feeling that the game is trying to pad itself out as much as possible. First off you need to perform these unskippable Superloop sequences where you hold E for about twenty seconds, and wait ANOTHER twenty seconds to see yourself going really fast. This cannot be skipped, and it is repeated an additional three times later on. It gets old even faster than you go on the Superloop, and it is completely unnecessary. I don't get why so many barriers need to be put up that only TrafficKing can unlock, solely to justify his existence for hovering around me. The Hold E to torture shtick gets old rather fast. At least you could get fast over the hacking minigame, but here it's just pointless because it doesn't add anything to the gameplay.
And then you also get 40-second long elevator rides where for once people talk to you in real-time instead of through dialogue screens, but all you do is
stand there and listen. It's incredibly dissonant compared to the previous acts where you were always moving forwards (mostly) and you weren't 30 seconds away from killing things, but here you get the feeling that the running time was being padded out as much as possible so people feel less swindled for having spent money on a short game, especially when you have to suffer through an identical elevator ride later on AGAIN. Good thing that you're planning some extra free story DLC to lengthen the campaign, so in the future you won't need all this padding anymore.
Then for some reason the game turns into your run-of-the-mill zombie slaughter simulator where you're given dozens of flamethrowers to mindlessly burn your way through waves of braindead Hosts who only walk up towards you and slash you.
What?
No really, what? At first the game built itself around quick thinking, nimble enemies, and dashing around everywhere, and all of a sudden the gameplay becomes a matter of holding LMB to burn zombies and Angels? How does that make any sense from a pacing standpoint? I
get that you need some kind of downtime where you can take it bit easy in levels, like what those Suicider-only waves are supposed to be, but pitting you against enemies you can even kill if you have your brain turned off isn't the way to go. It'd be interesting if these Hosts
were mixed together with other enemies like Harpies, like I mentioned before, that way they would pose an interesting threat, but on their own there's no challenge to them. You know when Hosts do become an actual threat to the player?
When your attention is focused on other enemies besides Hosts like in the Mother Heart fight.
The Virtuality Farm levels are a case of narrative taking precedence over gameplay, and there the decline becomes palpable. Playing through it once is kinda iffy, but repeatedly replaying it becomes a nightmare. One aspect of good action games is that they have decent replay value because the action isn't always too far away, diluting that with narrative interruptions everywhere breaks the flow and pulls you out of the zone.
So if I had to sum it all up:
- Always-respec skill tree could be replaced by obtaining all abilities over the course of the campaign, whereas all upgrades can go out of the window in favor of properly balancing the game around the particular quirks of the abilities, or providing multiple upgrade trees for each ability
- Ranking requirements should be listed (how well do I need to perform to get an A or S-rank?)
- Descriptions for difficulty settings should list what they actually change
- Crap like superloop rides and elevator rides needs to be cleaned up from the levels
- Unimportant dialogue screen dialogue can be relegated to real-time text pop-ups
- Anything that pauses the game to play a cutscene should be skippable
- Enemy waves can be diversified a lot more with more enemy types being used at once
- Arena hazards can be utilized to a greater extent and even be combined
- More bosses should feature grunts constantly spawning in to prevent stunlocking
- Hacked enemies shouldn't attract the attention of every enemy from you
- Enemies should get in the arena faster
- The base energy costs for abilities are fine as they are without upgrades
- Whirlwind could use a nerf
- Bosses could use more attack phases
- There could be more enemy types who use more of the abilities you have
- Dashing charges could recharge more slowly
- Recycled bosses should be noticeably different compared to their previous reincarnations
- Enemies should telegraph raising up their shield or do so in anticipation rather than reaction
- Karma pick-ups from boxes should be sucked up directly by you instead of having to wait for them to bounce on the ground
- Time limit should be used more often, preferably with less time awarded per kill
- Triads and derivatives should teleport within your field of view instead of outside the screen, or more preferably long dash instead of teleport
- Harpies should have more to them compared to previous enemies than dealing more damage
- Virtuality Farm levels need a complete overhaul
- 'dash up to a boss and repeatedly whack him as he's unable to do anything' shouldn't be a viable strategy
- Heavy Cyborg fireball attack has a bigger hitbox than the visuals do suggest
- Add a REAL final boss
- Camera perspective makes it hard to judge enemy hitboxes, hovering your crosshair over enemies doesn't always mean your bullets will hit them even if the enemy in question is standing still
I absolutely adore the presentation and soundtrack, but I feel the gameplay is a diamond in the rough buried ten feet underground. Basically, more like Matayama and Mother Heart, less like King Cyborg and TrafficKing. More like Hanza and Parking Garage, less like Virtuality Farms. And less unskippable crap getting in the way of gameplay. Nobody likes unskippable cutscenes, even if you have to hold down a single button for a period of time.
