What game are you wasting time on?

[Okagron]

Malkavian is the classic pick for a second playthrough.

Started a playthrough as a Malkavian and i already had a big laugh at the dialogue options with Smiling Jack. This is gonna be fun.

 

[Walden]

Going on with KCD. It's a technical mess, but is more polished than I thought initially, yet less ambitious. I do like the map and its topography, but there is little to no interaction, so few side quests, not many npcs and not many dialogues. Except the main quest, which I'm enjoying, hunting and chasing down some random cumans there's not much to do. Very linear, but I like the mood, despite being subdued by the game unsophisticated core.

/ so far.

 

[Gregz]

Might & Magic: X Legacy

Just finished 'act 1', not very impressed so far.

 

[wyes gull]

Finished Witcher 3 relatively recently and I was having trouble putting it to bed so I decided to take another stab at Witcher 2 however many years later, which I'd tried to get into but eventually dropped around the time you reach Flotsam. No siree, I was not going to put up with that horseshit combat. However, combat turned out to be much better than I remembered it. It is, dare I say, mediocre, even. Especially when you cheat engine yourself 10 extra levels and 30 talents and kill every bloke in two swings, shattering them into pieces of ice regardless that they're Igni'd. Toasty.

Fantasy is for fag- I mean, not really my thing, so my stance is that the setting is made the most of when Geralt is dealing with monsters, whether at a street level or a court level. I don't give much of a fuck about apocalyptic prophecies or parallel worlds or those wild cunts so it ended up surprising me how aggravating the plot turns that the game sends your way are when considering what the bigger picture is. Especially during the Henselt chapter, when a mess of a quest is dumped on your lap and you're made to give a shit about it when the sensible route would be to slip under the king's bed and wait for Ves to show up the assassin to make his move, frustrated in the knowledge that this moves you hardly any closer to getting Geralt his memories back and with it the sense of how menial all this shit really is in the face of the end of days. True, playing the games arse-backwards colours my feelings but it's not like they're hiding it throughout the game as you're given cutscenes illustrating what has happened as Geralt gets progressively un-amesiac'd. Frankly though, the plot is pretty good even if it lacks in memorable moments (exception made for when Geralt transforms into an unwitting schoolgirl in a tentacle porno; god damn that fight was shit. Yes I know about the Yrden you cunt, I heard you the first 50 fucking times) and the ending, while not as bad as 3's, is hogwash even after Letho spills the beans as he doesn't really know all that much. A conversation with Triss (which I would think to be of pivotal importance but seems to be optional considering you can choose to go save the temerian king's heir instead) ends with a supremely unsatisfying ("You remember?" "Now is not the time to discuss my memories") and never gets picked up so the player is left with not knowing both about whether Geralt got all of his memories back or not and about Yen and Ciri in any significant amount, especially from a trusted source. We're told he's told about the former between the prologue and the first chapter but the latter is mentioned only twice or so in the whole game. Considering the studio knew where the story was heading, this is bizarre in the least. And the disconnect between the end of this where you have a clear path (south) and the start of 3 is mildly jarring. All told, it shows how hard it is to get the player to care about a story with situations whose stakes are so disparate although it doesn't do the worst job of it, especially when you have the Mass Effects 2s of this world to contend with, with their "I know the galaxy is blowing up, but if we could go take care of my daddy issues that would be swell." "Oh wait, I have daddy issues too, can we go fix those?" "Oh and what about me and my (etc)".

S'alright I s'pose. It didn't erase 3 from my mind as I'd hoped, I'll likely have to exorcise that at some point, Durandal style. Although probably less coherently.
Also I still can't get this fucking song out of my head. Fuck you, fantasy Provence, you're not supposed to be that appealing.

 

[Big Wrangle]

Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood is the first stealth strategy I have ever played, and I'm really in love with it so far. One thing I do love is how the guards extensively search areas if you get spotted and run away, that alone is fun to witness.

 

[Humppaleka]

Ah, Robin Hood, childhood memories from when it came out. Playing that game too at the moment. Yeah the AI is fun when it actually tries to come for you. Or when they just run away at the sight of you. Or get completely bamboozled and do very silly things. This fits me as I can actually manage to beat the levels, I am so shit at these that the first Commandos seemed impossibly hard at times.

 

[Bigg Boss]

I've been wasting time on Fallout Tactics a lot recently. So much so I made this yesterday.

 

[Durandal]

Chances are you may have not heard of Aztez, an indie 2D beat 'em up/strategy hybrid which despite the positive buzz it gained during its development, turned out to be a commercial disaster, which itself may have been more newsworthy than the release of the game itself. 2012, when Aztez' development began, was almost a golden age for indie games, with a classic coming out almost every month. But in 2017, Steam was completely saturated with indie games, making it hard for a game like Aztez to even stand out despite all the coverage it gets. It's been on my list for some time after coming across a beta version of it on Saurian Dash' channel, and after trawling through the Aztez developer blog it sounded fairly promising. Tightly designed brawler combat, no unlock cancer, a striking monochromatic artstyle, and a promising strategy layer to mix up the core combat. Sounds like these guys know what they are doing.

Spoiler

Aztez is more in line with the combofests of Devil May Cry and Bayonetta than it is with classic highly crowd-control oriented beat 'em ups such as Street of Rage and Final Fight (as it also not a belt scroller, but scrolls along a single plane like The Ninja Warriors Again). You have more tools to stunlock and isolate enemies from crowds--the game is pretty damn heavy on launching enemies and juggling them in the air infinitely, and your character's moveset is pretty damn expansive. You get jumps, dashing, dash-jumps, blocking, parrying/countering, grabs/throws, two combo strings for each weapon, up/down command attacks, launchers, recoveries, sweeps, aerial attacks, dash attacks, dash-jump attacks, walljumping, et cetera. Only hold commands are conspicuously missing.

You get eight weapons to work with (of which you can carry four in a battle), and each weapon has their own unique properties that make them worth using. The Spear is well suited for maintaining aerial combos, whereas the Club has a dash attack which can launch one enemy forwards in a straight line and knock down all other enemies in its path like bowling pins. Your weapons also act as styles in that they also affect your core moveset, f.e. you can't dash through enemies with the sword, but you can with the Spear. And dashing with the Knife is replaced with teleporting. The Fists completely replace your shields and your ability to block and counter with a dodge move which lets you avoid any type of attack. Weapon switching is also possible and very fluid, which opens up even further combo possibilities as you can interrupt the combo of your current weapon and immediately utilize another weapon's combo string, depending on the situation. For example, the aerial A combo of the Club knocks an enemy straight down, but then you can switch to your Knife and use its Down+B command attack to throw your knife downwards and launch all enemies beneath you into the air, after which you can switch back to the Club and repeat the process. Attacks and other moves can be canceled with other moves, which allows you to cancel out of the recovery or wind-up frames in certain attack animations and immediately follow-up with other attacks instead which allows you more freedom in how you perform your combos and how to express yourself in bloody combat. While each weapon has certain weaknesses, switching the other weapons can make up for that. On top of that, you can absorb blood, which refills your health and fills up your Blood Vial. If your Blood Vial is full, you can perform a God Attack which varies depending on the god you chose. Broken enemies will temporarily enter a Dizzy state, where they can be grabbed and finished off with a Sacrifice before they die for real, which causes tons of blood to spurt out of them for you to absorb. Performing a Sacrifice attack also interrupts most enemies on screen, so successfully pulling one off also gives you some breathing space.

There are no real chain combos in Aztez, where doing a particular combination of light and heavy attacks gives the final hit in the combo an unique property. This way you don't need to memorize a whole tl;dr list of combos, and instead you have all moves you could possibly need at your immediate disposal. Rather, each weapon has two preset combos called Assault Combos where the final hits deal exponentially more damage than the first hit, so you're encouraged to finish combos/mash attack to deal the most damage. Even though there's two main attack buttons, they're not 'A for Light and B for Heavy Attacks'. Instead, both attack buttons deal equal amounts of damage, their only difference being the influence they have on your and the enemy's position on hit. So an Assault Combo can be any random combination of A's and B's, where the type of attack for the last hit in the combo determines how the enemies get knocked down. The B attacks for some weapons will slightly move you and the enemies you hit upwards, some move you slightly forwards, and some let you move through enemies while attacking. While some A/B attacks have their specific uses in a combo, it largely depends on the weapon. But in most cases the difference between A and B attacks are negligible outside of finishers. While there's a specific use for the B attacks of some weapons, most A attacks do the job just fine. I don't believe each weapon needs a heavy attack (else the Club would be made useless), though a special attack wouldn't be out of place, like how B on the Rifle actually fires the thing at other enemies, with A being reserved for rifle-butts. Actually, it could make more sense to reserve B for ranged attacks over the whole, letting you throw knives, throw sand if you have your Fists equipped (the Chichimeca do the same, after all), throw your spear like a javelin, utilize your Claws as grappling hooks, that kind of thing. On the other hand, the directional command actions of each weapon for each button can vary greatly, so thankfully there's that.

You can grab all enemies in order to prevent them from doing anything, which allows you to lead up with some extra hits or to throw them into other enemies, though sadly it's not a real throw but more of a shove, which kind of takes away the visceral pleasure of slapping motherfuckers with a motherfucker like in most other beat 'em ups. Grab attack combos are usually faster than regular combos, and enemies need to be grabbed before being able to perform a Sacrifice. Grabs also have special weapon-specific command attacks, though you can't switch between weapons while grabbing. The drawback with grabbing being that you can't instantly cancel out of a grab. Trying to cancel out of a grab will instead play this animation of you releasing the enemy which you can't cancel out of, leaving you temporarily vulnerable, so you can't easily spam grabs. And grab A/B attacks can only hit one enemy at once, making grab attacks less suitable for crowd control, though the throws can make up for that by interrupting every enemy you shove your punching bag into.

However, grab attacks are not always faster than the main combo. The Club's aerial B-Combo is much faster than any of the ground combos or any of the grab combos, and actually one of the fastest way to break armor in the game. The guide never makes any mention of aerial combos for some weapons being faster (including the Sword and the Club) than other combo types, and this is a huge source of DPS if you realize how the Assault Combos work. The end result being that grab attacks veer towards being useless, depending on the weapon you're using. For some weapons like the Fist the difference in attack speed for ground combos and grab combos is completely negligible to begin with. Then you have other weird shit like the Rifle being able to reload faster if you do it in a grab than if you do it normally, though this makes some sense at least as it falls in line with being able to do things faster in a grab at the expense of having to commit more. But overall, grab combo attacks only have a niche application, as there's usually more efficient ways of dealing damage and CC'ing at the same time.

What's weird is that despite there not being a legit way to cancel out of grabs, you can perform a command attack in a grab and then immediately shield/absord cancel the animation, which is the fastest way to cancel out of a grab, save for using the Knife's Grab Up+A to teleport you and your punching bag immediately upwards. The former seems incredibly arbitrary to me. Most grab actions can not be canceled out of, but you can kind of cancel out of a grab by performing an Command attack first and then cancel? Then what's the point of most grab actions not being cancelable? That just seems like one of those hidden mechanics which aren't the result of mechanics intertwining, but one of those arbitrary exceptions you can only learn about through heavy experimentation or reading a guide. It's purely a matter of hidden knowledge, and they're small facts not even that hard to execute. And it comes over as more problematic because the game promotes animation canceling, then doesn't for grabs to emphasize the risk and reward for grab attacks, only to then allow canceling in a very roundabout way.

I don't think Sacrifice Kills or throws should be cancelable, but for grabs while attacking or in a neutral state it would be more intuitive to let you cancel out of a grab combo at any moment. The default grab cancel animation leaves you temporarily vulnerable while a command attack cancel is much faster. Given how you can already cancel a grab fairly quickly with command attacks, why not have the current normal grab cancel behave like normal shield/absorb cancels? The time delay between a regular cancel and performing a command attack and then canceling isn't that huge. It's kind of how like there's some animations which you can absorb cancel out of, but can't shield cancel out of, which again feels completely arbitrary because absorb and shield canceling are both near-exactly the same, with the exception for Fists where the function on the shield button is the dodge. This is made more insulting by the fact that as I stated above, grab attacks are not always that useful and rarely outweigh the risk of not being able to cancel out of a grab instantly.

There are grab command attacks for some weapons, such as the Knife, Claw and Spear, which actually launch you away from the enemy to quickly put some space between you and the enemy if another enemy decides to attack you while you are grabbing. These command attacks let you cancel out of a grab more safely and launch you away from incoming attacks. The only downside, you can't switch between weapons while grabbing. So if you grab with something like the Club, you'll have way less movement options to you available than with the Knife, most likely a consequence of not allowing cancels and by extent weapon switching when grabbing. Meaning if I want to launch myself away from an enemy I grabbed, I'm practically boned if I didn't have the Knife equipped before initiating the grab, which kind of goes against the mantra of canceling allowing you to express your own playstyle.

Balance-wise, all the weapons look good. Each weapon has special launches properties which have you constantly switching between them in order to keep up a mid-air combo. The Sword is the most versatile weapon in the game, though in terms of aerial capabilities and crowd control it's rather weak. The Spear is more useful for aerial combos as it has a mid-air launcher and gives you one free upwards dash with a mid-air Up+B, on top of giving you two airdashes instead of the usual one. It's B attacks can be used to propel an enemy upwards in a combo, which is very useful. On the ground it is rather weak, as it does not deal a lot of damage and it doesn't have that much range despite being a spear. On the ground, the Spear is used more to dash through enemies with the dash or Dash+A, whereas you can't dash through enemies with some other weapons. The Club is super STRONK, it's Dash+A can launch an enemy into others to knock them all down, and it's B Combo is the greatest DPS dealer in the whole game. The Knife has some actually very useful utilities, its aerial Down+B can be used to launch any unarmored enemy below you into the air and the long jump Down+B will throw your knife diagonally to launch enemies a horizontal distance away from you towards you. It also replaces dashing with teleporting, and you can even teleport upwards, which can even be chained with the Spear's Up+B to launch an enemy and yourself even higher. Its Bounce also bounces enemies both left and right, though offensively it's kind of weak.

The Rifle is pretty damn OP, but somewhat balanced out by the fact that you have to do a lengthy reload after each shot. Unfortunately it only has no B Counter where you rifle shot can be reloaded instantly to fire a shot straight forward which deals more damage than the regular shot, but to make up for it your A Counter affects almost every enemy on the screen. The Fists are special in that they have no parry/counter options, but only a dodge. This weapon also lets you constantly put up an offense using combos with minor knockdown and the aerial Up+Y being a versatile flurry attack. Though fists don't deal alot of damage, they're more or less a weapon for technical players. The Claws are interesting in that after an initial 5 hit combo, you'll initiate some sort of rage mode where you attack very quickly with six hits, and this rage mode can be preemptively activated with Dash+B. The Claws also yield much less blood on Sacrifices, though I suppose that's a trade-off for it having a faster Sacrifice animation (at least I THINK it's faster, I'm not sure). You can't block with the Claws, only parry-counter, which fits the whole berserker theme the Claws have going for them. The Gauntlets are incredibly powerful, but they also make you move very slow, as your dashes or long jumps can't really make up for it. Your basic A Combo has a huge melee range, and B lets you fire a darkness beam which can hit multiple enemies at once. It's the strongest weapon in the game, but you want to use this in conjunction with others to make up for its shortcomings.

You also get to choose between four God Attacks, which can be activated when your Blood Vial is full after absorbing enough blood. The default one knocks away all enemies on screen, there is the snakelady which I'm not sure how she exactly works (she damages everything in your immediate vicinity more strongly, but I've never really used her), and two other gods which let you restore health and temporarily slow down time while increasing your speed. I primarily used the timeslow god because it let me lay the absolute smackdown on all enemies while active. The health restore God is for scrubs, and the default and snakelady god just feel useless in comparison. Especially when you consider that the Blood Vial costs for all God Attacks are equal (I'm not 100% certain about this). At the very least, the default and snakelady god should have lower blood amount activation costs to make them more viable, or alternatively the cost for the timestop god should be increased.

Enemy designs are also greatly varied in behavior and their role on the battlefield. Eagle Warriors will use their spear to fly in a straight line through the air or diagonally downwards into you, Priests stay off-camera to spam you with telegraphed ranged attacks, Nobles have shields which prevent you from damaging them or any enemy behind them and need to be grabbed or sweeped off their feet first, Chichimeca like to hit 'n run and play dirty by throwing sand in your face, Underworlders attack relentlessly and dig underground to pop up at the other side, Jaguar Warriors like to throw attacks at you which cannot be blocked but only parried, and Conquistadores have their rifles which they can use to fire a well-telegraphed unblockable long-range attack which can only be avoided by staying in the air. Overall the enemy design is such that just presenting the player with different setups of different enemy types can create wildly different situations.

The sound design is definitely strong. Each attack has as a suitable amount of heft to it, with lighter attacks having more of a higher pitch and shorter duration and heavier attacks carrying a certain oomph because of the slowdown emphasizing certain impacts. Most enemy attacks have certain recognizable sound tics, but by the type of hit sound you can also tell whether an enemy is broken or not. Broken enemies will play a broken glass sound when hit, which is usually your sign to prepare them for Sacrifice, or to just keep going. The music, while fitting, is on the more forgettable side however. Most of it is tribal background music, but nothing really stood out.

There's basically three types of attacks, which are denoted by the color of the exclamation mark above an enemy's head when it's about to attack. Yellow attacks can be blocked or parried, orange attacks can only be parried, and red attacks cannot be blocked or parried at all and need to be avoided by getting away from the marked area. Red attacks are usually reserved for ranged attacks because of this and have clear telegraphing to tell you what to avoid. Since the entire game is monochromatic, having other colors only be reserved for enemy telegraphing helps it stand out greatly. You can then follow up a parry with a counter by pressing either A or B, whereas A performs a counter in front of you and B usually performs a counter attack on both sides. I don't know why you would use the A Counters, as B Counters tend to have more crowd control. Maybe the A Counter deals more damage, but I wouldn't be able to tell, nor does the guide say anything about it. Each weapon has different counter attacks, and you only have a brief window after attacking to execute a counter, but some counter attacks are more suitable to a current situation than others. A spear counter will rise spears from the ground to skewer both ground and airborne enemies into the air, whereas a Club counter knocks all enemies away from you. It'd be sucky if you were only limited to the counter of your current weapon if you parried, but thankfully you can execute the parry of any equipped weapon by pressing the weapon select button for that weapon instead of one of the two attack buttons. It's always the B Counters that get performed, as A Counters are comparatively useless anyways in my experience.

While you can turtle by holding down block, you can't attack while blocking, and every fight runs off a timer, so taking it too slow means you will lose. The window for parrying attacks is very small and precise timing is required, spamming block to parry has never worked for me without having a sword planted in my face. However, this means you probably want to practice parrying the attack timings of enemies first, as you don't have a dodge move available at all times, and orange attacks can not be blocked.

The length of the wind-up for the enemy attack formation can vary greatly, but because the parry animation for every attack is not the most intuitive, this can be rather frustrating to get right at first. Not all enemy attack animations involve a weapon or their body coming gradually closer to you, to which you can at least gauge when the attack is going to hit. Here enemies can attack right out of a wind-up state with next to no perceptible build-up, making attacks feel come out of nowhere. This gets especially frustrating with orange attacks, where you don't have the safety net of at least blocking the attack if you get the parry timing wrong. But because most parry timings in Aztez just comes down to memorization, I found myself more often than not just avoiding orange attacks entirely until I practiced the timings of Jaguar warriors to death. Now I can at least get them most of the time. I believe the animations for orange attacks should have been made more easy to predict and time than the animations for yellow ones, in order to compensate the fact for not being able to block them. Better yet, reserve it for certain ranged attacks if need be. There certainly should be shield-breaking attacks to prevent you from turtling forever, but red attacks can do the same just fine (matter of fact, Legendary Jaguars have red melee attacks whereas most red attacks tend to be ranged). I don't think other games of a similar style really had a problem with this, because they often featured a dodge move which worked against most attacks regardless if you dodged perfectly.

Now, the Fists are unique in that their block is replaced with a dodge ability which gives you a brief moment of invincibility against every attack (you don't get any Witch Time), including red and orange ones, at the expense of not being able to block of parry. For orange attacks the window for successfully dodging one is greater than parrying one with a shield, making it a more consistent tool for avoiding orange attacks. What I don't understand is why dodging isn't a basic ability. The default controller control set-up reserves both shoulder bumpers for dashing, whereas one could have been reserved for dashing and the other for dodging. There's plenty of room for both on the controller. This way you at least have a sort of option for dodging orange and brief red attacks when blocking or jumping away isn't an option. Given how the combat system focuses on options for player freedom (you can choose to quickly recover from a knockdown state, choose to roll away left and right to recover from a safer position, or lie down while your i-frames are still active), this seems like something that suits being more of a core ability.

While the game also highly encourages active weapon switching, locking certain defensive abilities behind certain weapons is where things get cumbersome. The time that needs to be spent switching to a weapon to activate the defensive ability most suitable to the current situation can be one that decides life or death. It is also unlikely that you will have your Fists available at all times, since you can only carry four out of eight weapons and in Campaign Mode will only be starting with one or two. It makes sense that certain weapons like the Claws do not possess certain abilities from the basic moveset (in this case, blocking) to further accentuate the berserker playstyle and role of the weapon, but vice versa it feels like forcing weapon diversity by giving them all parts of your core moveset, and it doesn't have the excuse of not having enough space on the controller for every ability, unlike some important functions in DMC being locked behind certain styles. Look at it this way, if you have time to switch to another weapon to dodge an incoming attack, you have enough time to anticipate for a parry. Whether you will do so successfully is another matter.

Annoyingly, some enemies have combination attacks, but only the very start of the combination is telegraphed and not every hit. This becomes a problem when some enemies can initiate their attacks off-camera. So you might see a Legendary Underworlder doing his spinning attack and you think you can close in after he lan- nope. He suddenly starts doing another spinning attack without an exclamation telegraph. With cases like these and multiple overlapping enemies on-screen it can be confusing to attribute who this exclamation telegraph belongs to, so I'd rather give their weapons a persistent glow of yellow/orange/red until they're done attacking.

Trying to parry multiple attacking enemies at once gets very hairy. While you can technically parry everything, you will sometimes face multiple incoming attacks of multiple types which are overlapping over eachother and over other enemies which might not be doing anything. Then add several unblockable red attacks to the mix, attacks where the time between the exclamation telegraph and actual attack is rather large, and flying overhead enemies which aren't even trying to hit you, and you have a situation on your hands which is near impossible to read in the middle of action. Parrying multiple incoming attacks on the fly is made hairier even further because of the slow-motion effect after each parry, which can throw off your timing greatly, as opposed to a hitstop on parry which is at least more consistent with the flow of the game. You don't have the same freedom of space as you do in most 3D games, so the potential amount of attacks on screen for a single-plane games like this are even more dense, there's so many things going on in each frame.

So you could land a parry and then immediately afterwards execute a counter move, but instead an enemy manages to interrupt you by attacking you in the middle of your counter attack animation (there is a sliiiight time window where if two enemies start attacking at the same position and almost the same time, you could parry one to stop his attack but as you are performing the counter attack the other enemy can hit you in the albeit short wind-up animation of the counter), which is a massive buzzkill and nicks you out of your hard-earned counter. If you continue to block subsequent enemy attacks after a parry, your counter opportunity will be lost, and if that subsequent attack is a red or orange, it also means damage if you can't escape or inflict an interrupt in time. Personally I'm in favor of having invincibility frames on counter attack animations to counteract feeling dicked over.

Mind you, all this is only really an issue on higher-level encounters populated with several Priests, a Legendary, and some Jaguars. Most of the time in Campaign Mode you have fights where enemies show only mild signs of aggression. On the other hand, in Arena Mode, even though it's a very endgame challenge-type fight, The Crucible will feel like a giant clusterfuck of all attacks types everywhere and overlapping telegraph lines and signs, to which the only solution seems to be to long jump the fuck out of there and take out each enemy one by one. The degree to which every enemy just does its own thing reminds me of this GDC Talk about attack cooldowns in DOOM (2016) (a game I didn't even like that much) where the attack frequency of an enemy group is regulated by 'attack tokens', and how silly the game looked when every single enemy attacked at once. The attack frequency in Aztez is largely determined by enemy type, which does make sense. However, when you're facing a group of eight Common Warriors (a common fight setup in Campaign Mode), it takes forever for them to do anything. If you get this setup and also get the optional objective to inflict two counters, the time it takes for one to actually initiate an attack is downright stupid (Blood Absorb could have doubled as a Taunt to make them more aggressive). And when you are facing a large group of multiple Distinguished/Legendary enemy types, things may get overwhelming because of the anarchical enemy AI, relentless attack cooldowns with no regard for the larger picture, and overlapping visual telegraphing. Especially when two identical enemies perform two different attacks of the same type, it just fucks with the brain.

There are some very rare situations where you might end up being completely surrounded with red/orange attacks, with escape becoming almost impossible. You can usually rely on the i-frames on rolling out of a knockdown state to get you out of harm's way, but not always. The fact that this can happen is even possible is telling for how attacks are regulated. Ideally there should be a limit to the amount of melee attacks being executed against the player depending on the attack color, with red/orange attacks taking up more tokens in the attack token pool than yellow attacks. Other enemies not attacking should find something else to do, like assuming a defensive position with a shield or performing aerial attacks to deny you from going in the air in the first place. The severity of Priest attacks also ought to take into consideration the degree to which the player is being pelted by melee attacks. The amount of attacks would depend on the difficulty settings, but for some reason difficulty settings are largely absent here.

This should also mean that even Common Warriors ought to be more aggressive when nobody is attacking. They should not shuffle around for six fucking seconds until someone decides to attack. If they can't attack, they should at least do something useful, like trying to grab you or poke you from behind, as most grunts will try to do in beat 'em ups. Enemies being unable to grab you in a beat 'em up (despite you being able to do so) seems like a completely wasted opportunity. As it stands, Common Warriors just stand there waiting until their timer goes down so they can finally attack. They don't even try to move/teleport/run around to reposition themselves like other enemy types can. There's nothing wrong with cannon fodder being cannon fodder, but when you pit me against eight of these guys, they should provide at least some challenge.

Once Conquistadores come along, the most efficient solution to avoid getting constantly shot at seems to be to long jump out of their range. The actual arena in every fight is just one very long flat plane which extends beyond the camera, so there's plenty of space to escape and take on enemies one by one. I don't know why the freedom you have over moving across the arena is never messed with, like having a much more narrow arena where you're forced to go airborne because of all the shit happening below, or one with a ceiling where your ability to air juggle enemies infinitely beyond the reach of every other enemy is limited. I'm not asking for platforms or bottomless pits or other stage hazards (honestly, Priests do a good job at that already), only an alteration in the size of the arena so you can't really cheese by long jumping away and taking every enemy out one by one, or by launching an enemy all the way up in the sky beyond the reach of every enemy.

The 2D plane makes it much easier to combo several enemies at once than in a 3D game, as enemies only come from two sides. Enemies also overlap, whereas in a 3D brawler your hits would only cover 90 degrees of your field of movement, giving enemies more space to flank you and interrupt your combos. Of course, you cannot always keep up a combo indefinitely because of enemies trying to attack you, nor is there any dodge offset or anything of the sort to let you continue a combo after blocking. However, you can continue your combo in the air (indefinitely if you know what you are doing) beyond the reach of most enemies. Just a basic combo where you switch back and forth between two weapons right before striking the last hit in their respective combos lets you juggle enemies for as long as you want. Enemies can take an infinite amount of hits even after they are broken, only until they land on the ground and stand up in a staggered state will they die for good on their own or after taking one hit. It's way too easy to keep up an air combo because of this. Even in The Crucible, if you launch an enemy into the air and keep them in a perpetual combo, the rest will do absolutely nothing.

The problem isn't even so much that the enemies are under-equipped (most of them are, but more on that later), the Legendary Priest can create huge pillars of darkness which reach all the way up to hit me, but he doesn't. The Legendary Eagle is a nota bene aerial attack enemy, capable of summoning three eagles who travel in straight horizontal lines above the ground, but he won't even do that when you're hanging out in the air. Conquistadores and Legendary Priests can fire projectiles, but they can only do so in a straight horizontal line. While having a lower ceiling could fix the problem of being out of reach for the enemy AI, the other uncomfortable truth is that most enemies are very lacking in ranged attack options, especially for when you are in the air.

The Priest could throw his knives at you when you are high up, or even better, perform one of his darkness bursts on your position so you're forced to move yourself, alongside the target you are juggling. Common Warriors are mostly cannon fodder, but they could at least throw rocks at you or something to harass you if you are mid-air for too long, which you'd need to block or dodge in time. Nobles on the other hand will prioritize doing an uppercut if you are mid-air, but they won't bother uppercutting if you're too high up. Conquistadores (or at least Distinguished ones) could make an aimed shot where they angle their shot to aim at you even if you are off the ground. Mid-air juggling gives you way too much superiority, but your air superiority could be broken if enemies had more threatening ranged attacks. I'd also like to take this moment to complain that the existing off-screen ranged attacks are only telegraphed with straight black lines, rather than a colored indicator appearing at the edge of the screen where the attack is coming from, as it really ought to be. Another way the game tries to limit your infinite juggling potential is through the Armor mechanic and Breakout Attacks.

Conquistadores and some Legendary enemies have something called Armor, which when active means they won't take any hitstun or respond to your attacks at all. They will take damage, but they can't be stunned, interrupted, or grabbed in this state (only a Counter will interrupt them). So the idea is to inflict enough damage to break their armor, after which they can be juggled again. But after taking enough damage (and this only applies to Legendary enemies and bosses), they will perform a Breakout Attack so they can break free out of your combo, and doing so also has them regain their Armor. However, this Breakout Attack can be parried and countered for huge damage (in the case of Legendary Priests, their armor will be broken after a single counter, whereas a Legendary Eagle needs at least two), so with the right timing you can keep up your combo. It sure feels more deserved and less cheesy if your infinite juggle combo has some actual threat to being broken. It would at least make more sense if Legendary Jaguars/Nobles/Chichimeca also have a breakout moves despite having no Armor to balance out the fact that they are already carrying a shield, Chichimeca aside. Their health pool is large enough to allow for some breakout attacks after taking certain amounts of damage in a short timeframe.

I honestly don't like the kind of mechanics where you need to break an enemy's shield of sorts with the most damaging combos until they can actually get juggled by your attacks. It limits your entire moveset entirely to the attacks with the highest DPS and largely eliminates the decision-making involved for using the right combos for the right situation or stringing combos together as you see fit, but in this case the right combo is always the most damaging one (in this case the Club's aerial B-Combo). Yet at the same time such a mechanic becomes almost necessary to counteract the ease with which you can lay down a combo on most enemies, as a result of several other factors mentioned above.

What's more frustrating is the amount of arbitrary exceptions and restrictions some enemies have. For example, if you perform a Sacrifice Kill, all enemies on-screen will be interrupted. This is to give you some breathing room after trying to perform a risky move you cannot cancel out of. However, some enemies won't get interrupted at all, and can hit you right after you do successfully perform a Sacrifice. Not just armored enemies won't be interrupted by a Sacrifice, but also enemies like Nobles and Jaguars are temporarily armored when they're attacking (and can only be interrupted with a Sweep). Meanwhile Priests and Eagles and Underworlders get interrupted like normal when a Sacrifice is performed even when they are attacking, so the actual effectiveness of a Sacrifice as a tool of interrupting feels very unpredictable. If a Jaguar/Noble initiates an attack while you're in the middle of a Sacrifice, then you're also just as boned. This isn't helped by the fact that the camera zooms in when you are or about to perform a Sacrifice, placing some essential enemy telegraphing outside the camera's view. The same goes for grab throws, normally all enemies you throw some poor sucker into will get interrupted, but the aforementioned exceptions still persist, so sometimes your throws won't have any effect, nor would you be able to respond to incoming attacks because you can't cancel out of the throw animation.

As a result of these resistances, the success rate of Sacrifices/throws feels very uncertain. At least the interrupt from a Sacrifice should apply to every enemy type. It makes sense for a game like this to have enemies of different classes with different resistances to hit reactions in certain state, like how enemies in a game like Transformers: Devastation can't be interrupted while they are attacking, to discourage button mashing from being too effective. But in Aztez, interrupting a Jaguar/Noble's attack can be only done with a sweep, or in some cases a grab. Not even a Rifle bullet can interrupt them when they're attacking. Sweeping isn't particularly difficult to pull off, essentially you can mash forever, but you have to press Down+A to first sweep a shielded enemy off its legs before you can continue your combo. The only problem is that Sweeps can only be initated from the ground (unless there's another aerial Down+A for some specific weapon which has the property of a Sweep I don't know about), and Nobles/Jaguars have some aerial attacks which cannot be reached by most Sweeps, meaning you're still often going to be on the receiving end of your interrupts not working.

As it is now, Jaguar/Nobles having armor in attacking states, even when they're mid-air, doesn't feel very deserved. They already have shields which prevents you from mashing attack to face them head on, so their shield needs to be first disabled using a sweep. I suppose this is done to preserve their characteristic of being able to block attacks with their shields while in an attacking state, but it just comes off as arbitrary and inconsistent, and makes tools for interrupting much less reliable. The fact that you have to sweep to deal with shield enemies doesn't make the combat deeper-er, in practice it's very straightforward and mundane to pull off as there's no drawback or commitment to performing a Sweep. You can grab shield enemies (in a neutral state) to supersede their shields, but if a sweep does the same thing without putting you in a more limited state and puts the enemy in a hitstun state, why even bother with grabs? What's even weirder is that the Knife's Down+B is capable of interrupting attacking Nobles and Jaguars on the ground, despite being a Bounce and not a Sweep attack. There's just no rhyme or reason to any of this.

It's rather inconsistent that Basic Nobles are the only shield enemies who can be grabbed in an attacking state. The rest of the shield enemies won't let you for some reason. Given how risky it is to keep someone in a grab combo, it would pose a more interesting situation that the only way to deal with shield enemies is to grab them/throw another enemy into a shield enemy, as a grab (throw) cannot be easily as canceled out of and requires more commitment than something like a sweep. Blocks are susceptible to grabs/throws, common knowledge. This also ought to apply when shield enemies are in an attacking state. Shield enemies could then have longer stagger times than most enemies, to further emphasize that they need to be staggered before you can get a hit off of them. I think it's fine that shield enemies won't be interrupted by melee attacks in an attacking state (as you can still follow up with a parry and counter), but moves useful for crowd control and interrupting which require more commitment (Sacrifice/throws) should supersede their armor. Sweeps then shouldn't be the end-all-be-all solution to shield enemies. Normally most beat 'em ups feature i-frames on throws, but those games also have enemies which can throw out an attack instantly whereas in Aztez all attacks have significant wind-up, so the i-frames aren't as necessary, but it is balanced out by the fact that it's easier to grab enemies in Aztez with only the Priest auto-attacking when you try to get in grabbing range, whereas normally trying to move in for a grab in beat 'em ups wouldn't be that straightforward because of enemies punishing careless invasions of personal space.

Another serious problem is the lack of i-frames or being able to recover from enemy attacks mid-air. This might sound like casual whining, but an unfortunate reality of letting every enemy just do his own thing is that one guy can knock you right into the attack of the other, and so on and so on until you hit the ground. Because I sincerely doubt the AI can actually synchronize attacks between enemies to pull off this kind of shit, the amount of damage you might end up receiving from an attack after being constantly knocked around might very well be left up to chance. One melee strike might deal 10& damage, but if you're launched into a darkness blast of a Priest then the damage might end up to around 50%. If you're stunned, there's no way to recover until you hit the ground, meaning the degree of punishment you take up until then is very much up to coincidence. This could have been circumvented by letting you parry attacks even from a mid-air stunned state and providing an instant recovery once you successfully parry, but this poses the problem of not being able to parry red attacks. The other solution would be to make you completely invincible after being launched, until you hit the ground again. At least this way damage won't stack in a way beyond the player's control, and the punishment for taking damage would feel a lot more reasonable. The weirdest part is that you do get i-frames when hit, but only if the damage taken doesn't launch you. So why the double standards here?

It's almost too easy to keep a combo going in Aztez. For the Sword, doing the basic AAAAA combo will knock the enemy backwards at the final hit, but then you can link it to another A combo with a Dash+B which dashes you into an enemy and cancels their momentum by making them spin in one place so you can immediately follow up with a new combo. Most combo finishers tend to knock enemies away from you, the gist is figuring out how to link them together. But for most medium encounters it can get very simple after you figure out the A combo -> Dash+B -> A combo etc. technique which lets you stunlock and kill most regular enemies, only shield enemies need to be sweeped off their feet first, which can be easily incorporated in your combo anyways. You can't quite do the same for mid-air combos because you can only airdash in the air once (twice with the Spear, not including other jump extensions using attacks) until you hit the ground, though the aforementioned Club A-Combo -> Knife Down+B does wonders here.

Though that's only if you want something basic that works, the combat system allows you to pull off some pretty cool shit. The scoring system further encourages this by giving you points for constantly hitting enemies without getting hit, without the combo timer running out, or without missing a hit. Else your combo resets. Special events such as Parries, weapon switches, and killing or breaking enemies adds additional multipliers on top of the amounts of hit you can have in a combo. You get points for these actions and for every time you hit an enemy, and finishing off an enemy with a Sacrifice Kill when your combo is high earns you tons of points. The scoring system is also completely pointless.

For one, there is no letter ranking or trophy system to grade your performance with. It's hard to tell whether you are doing good by the game's standards or not. There is no in-game benefit to having a high score, all that's required of you is that you kill all enemies within the time limit. And the leaderboards don't even work at the time of writing, but the core issue the scoring system has is this. If you want to get the highest possible score, you'd have to juggle as many enemies as possible while switching weapons (preferably weapons which can land a large amount of hits in a short amount of time, such as the Claws), continue doing this for up to two minutes as the timer is about to tick down, and then Sacrifice every enemy before they die, occasionally shoving enemies to reset the Dizzy timers and prevent them from dying prematurely until you can Sacrifice them. Consider the ease with which you can juggle enemies in this game indefinitely and every single battle in Campaign Mode would involve you gathering up all the defenseless enemies and whacking them over and over for over two minutes while mashing A and rhythmically switching between two weapons. The most suitable mission for this would be the one with sixteen zombies, because then you get sixteen enemies to hit at once. You're not expected to do cool combo shit or to look SSStylish, it's getting as many hits as possible which matters the most. Thankfully you don't have to do this for every fight, because only the highest score you achieved in a fight is tallied to the final score of your campaign. But the amount of variables involved in trying to get a high score in Aztez are so heavily determined by RNG that it's not really worth bothering with at all, which just has to do with how the Campaign Mode works as a whole.

The strategy layer is probably the most stand-out feature of this game compared to its contemporaries. In Aztez you play as a cabal of Aztec warriors, seeking to conquer the valley of Mexico in order to fortify it in preparation against a foreseen invasion of the Spanish Conquistadores. Which you do by capturing other territories by sending in one of your dudes to fight 3-8 or so guys, or just sending in a noble pride. The structure of Aztez' campaigns are also different from normal character action games, in that they share more similarities with the length and randomization in the playthroughs of roguelites. Each campaign will last you from one to one and a half hour provided you don't die too early. Each campaign also promises high replayability through its randomness. But unlike most roguelites, the traditional unlock cancer in Aztez is purely relegated to cosmetic sets for your warrior and unlocking new weapons from which you can choose one of each time you start a new campaign. There's thankfully no grinding involved, and the outcome in fights is not dependent on your gear and upgrades, but rather pure skill.

Each campaign is divided into turns, and in each turn a random set and amount of missions will be generated. These missions can include opportunities to conquer territories or earn more resources (which can be used to make use of your four agents, more on that later), or emergencies which when not dealt with at the end of the turn can cause negative consequences, such as cities starting to dissent, cities being wiped out by plagues, or gods being angered which causes drought or darkness. There's also festivals where you need to kill/sacrifice/fill up your blood vial as much as possible in two minutes against a wave of non-stop spawning enemies, which earns you more resources or extra population. At the start of each turn you gain resources equal to the amount of total population in all of your conquered cities, with a maximum possible population per city of six. Your population can be increased with festival, at the start of each turn (usually after it has been rainy), or by using certain items. Items are gained by calling on your Conjurer, where you spend some resources to get two random item cards of which you can pick one. However, the cost of using each agent increases each time you call upon them, so you can't spam them late game. Alternatively, items are also gained by fulfilling optional objectives, which each mission has. These objectives can say stuff like 'perform three god attacks', 'perform two counters', 'win in 50 seconds', 'get at least a 100,000 points', 'don't get hit more than four times', that kind of thing. You usually get some bonus resources or an item for your troubles. Harder missions provide rarer items as a reward for completing the optional objectives, though all rewards draw from the same pool, 'rarer' items in this case mean you have a better shot at getting the good shit, but you can still get something useful like an extra Aztez even when the reward item is 'common'.

How many missions you can perform per turn depend on how many Aztez you have. These guys are essentially your lives, and each time you lose combat you lose one as well, with profound consequences for the remainder of the campaign as you cannot perform as many missions per turn anymore. You only start out with one, and you always get another if you own at least five cities (you start off with three), but how many you will end up having is very much up to chance. You primarily get them through either lootbox drops from completing side objectives or from the Conjurer. There are also special missions where you gain an extra Aztez if you win it, but the likelihood of this type of mission appearing is also very much up to chance. In the early-game, getting new Aztez is vital. Usually three missions get spawned per turn, but with only one Aztez you can only do one mission. Early-game missions tend to be on the more benevolent side, but if you use the Smoking Mirror item you always start with to raise the difficulty of the game (to medium, it says), you'll more than always get a bunch of emergencies on your plate which you are simply not equipped to deal with, leaving you with negative aftereffects which just further pile on to your already bad luck. At this point you might as well restart and try again to get lucky. You can try and continue despite only having one Aztez at your disposal, but the chance of success is very uncertain, whereas you can at least make things work out with just two Aztez. For this reason I believe you should always get two Aztez at the start, not one, as there's usually about three or four missions generated per turn.

Aztez wants to use the randomness aspect of roguelites to create different playthroughs every time, but in practice this couldn't be farther from the truth, because the randomness fails the most important aspect of the game: the combat. While the whole strategy layer is filled to the brim with randomness, the combat itself plays out the same in every playthrough. Same enemy types, same groups of enemies. There's no mutators to your weapons or enemies, or even the layout of the arenas. While I do appreciate the fact that combat remains 'pure' as opposed to shoving in itemization and RNG at the expense of balance and player skill, the end result is that you'll be fighting the same encounters over and over, and it's not rare to see the same encounter used more than once in the same campaign. And as you get better at the game, many of these encounters become absolutely trivial once you realize the ins and outs of the combat system (AAAAA -> Dash+B -> AAAAA etc), making the first half a boring slog.

Alternatively the game could have embraced its roguelite roots more strongly and take the ARPG mutator route to level and enemy generation. Enemies with different mutators which give them unique and more threatening attributes (enemies get armor, enemies attack faster, enemies can breakout constantly), handicaps placed on the player (such as no jumping, no blocking, no dashing), or stage hazards (striking thunder when it's rainy, sandstorms when there's drought, blindness when there's darkness) could do a lot to spice things up by making the circumstances within and around combat more randomized without taking away from player skill or ruining the balance with infinite enemy power creep.

Smoking Mirror can partially alleviate this by giving you harder encounters earlier on, but in my personal experience I got good enough at the game already (read: could infinitely juggle most of the enemies with not too much effort) that I was practically aching to fight the Legendary enemies already because they could at least partially resist my Infinite Juggle. Distinguished and Basic enemies stopped becoming a credible threat, and existing encounters with Legendary enemies didn't have enough supporting enemies to put up any challenge. I think that this could have been solved with actual difficulty settings.

All Smoking Mirror does is give you the harder missions earlier on and and present more emergencies instead of opportunities, which means the combat encounters become slightly less boring and the strategy layer becomes more random against you. I think that with actual difficulty settings, which make ALL enemies more aggressive (but regulated so you don't have five enemies attacking at once) so even groups of Common Warriors can pose a threat and perhaps give more enemy types breakout moves or armor. But I'd especially like to see more encounters which utilize Legendaries much more heavily, with some having at least two Legendaries at once. Only Arena Mode can really come close.

Though I make it out to be easy as at the time of writing I can push through even the hardest encounters just fine now, the difficulty curve is actually quite terrible. If you were to visualize it on a spreadsheet, it would spell out L_O_L. The tutorial is one of those where it goes through every single mechanic, asks that you perform it once, and then immediately moves on to the next move to learn before there's time for you to seep in the information or test out these new moves. At the end of the tutorial you've probably forgotten half of it. There is an in-game PDF guide which goes into more detail with all the basic moves in the game, which is a more helpful source of information to consult. If you're starting out on Aztez, don't start Campaign Mode. Instead, go play Arena Mode first and play through as many fights as you can. Trying to learn from your mistakes in Campaign Mode is frustrating. For example: you're having a swell time being a newb and just mashing away at Common Warriors, then a group of Jaguars step in, and you have no idea how to deal with them at first, so you fuck up your parries and fuck up your life. -1 Aztez. Now you have to deal with the campaign with one less Aztez, and chances are you won't see Jaguars again soon. The drawback of randomizing the campaign structure this poorly means that enemies never really get properly introduced, so you often get curveballs thrown at you which you aren't even given the chance or opportunity to properly learn how to deal with, and failure here translates to fucking up the rest of your run.

Of course, system knowledge is something you slowly accrue in a roguelite, even in a roguelite-lite like Aztez. Thing is, in most roguelites deaths are one of a thousand cuts. Most encounters are short enough that you won't lose more than half of your healthbar in a fight provided you have some grip of the basics. In Aztez, death at first is often the cause of being overwhelmed, not being able to tell what the fuck is going on, and having a comparatively small HP pool (on top of enemies being able to coincidentally juggle you for randomly increased damage) with blood absorbing only healing small amounts. Going for parries isn't something you can't learn, but really have to practice the timings thereof, yet Campaign Mode isn't that lenient to allow you to practice enemies at your own leisure. Encountering new and dangerous enemies becomes frustrating when you don't know how to deal with them, and have a small margin of error to deal with them on top of severe lasting consequences when you fuck up. This wouldn't have been such a problem either if the early game in Campaign Mode didn't feel like such a grind because of how easy the early-game encounters are, yet doesn't give you much of a reason to do those early encounters better since the score system is wank and the more interesting optional objectives only have a chance at being chosen. If AAAAA->Dash+B can get me through just fine most of the time, it only feels like I'm grinding my way through, nor does the randomization do anything to spice up the early stages. Thankfully Practice Mode exists, and Smoking Mirror can alleviate the early game being unchallenging for a time... until you get better at the game again.

I don't play strategy games. Not because I don't like them, but I just haven't really ever given them the time. I don't really have any preconceived notions of what makes a strategy game to judge Aztez by, though I can say this: at no point did I feel like I was executing a strategy. Most campaigns I could get away doing the same strategy over and over, and nothing really forced to change my hand. Here's how it usually goes.

For the first two turns, you want to get at least another Aztez from the Conjurer or the Plunder events, else you're better off restarting and trying again. Then you can focus on expanding your empire to get your third Aztez automatically. After that, you basically want to do every Conquer mission you see for a free city and increase in resource gain, and Plunder events for two items at once with increased rarity for one. Spare resources should be spent on princesses to capture more cities and increase your resource gain per turn, or on the Conjurer for free items. If you get a card to go to the Underworld, and if you're a bad enough dude to brave the Underworld, you're good to go. For Underworld runs you have to send a single Aztez to clear five missions in a row which give you some nice rewards, provided you survive all the way through. Eventually you might have enough items to remove missions, which you can then use on emergencies so you can focus your Aztez on more profitable missions and festivals. Alternatively if there aren't any missions, then you can usually use the (frequently dropped) item which spawns a Plunder event, or festivals which maximize the population of a city. Once you got five Aztez, you're basically good to go.

At the start of each turn, one neutral city (two if you used Smoking Mirror) can randomly decide to dissent, which renders them uncapturable, and dissent also spreads to neighboring cities. If dissent reaches the capital, it's game over. In practice dissent is a giant meme. For dissent you can call upon the Cutthroat agent to remove dissent from any city for some resources. And usually you have enough resources to stomp out the dissent at the start of each turn before it even has a chance to spread, provided you didn't get unlucky with your resource gain. There's also Generals which prevent any dissent from happening in a target city of your empire, preferably at the border cities of your empire, but these are useless since dissent only randomly occurs in neutral cities, not your cities. And even then you can always curb dissent before it spreads to yours. The General is only useful for removing emergencies which threaten to start dissent in one of your cities if you don't immediately deal with them. If the base cost (or increments of cost after use) of the Cutthroat was much higher and the General was much lower, then dissent could pose more of a serious threat if you couldn't wipe dissent out as soon as it appeared, and Generals could be more useful is dissent was more of a pressing threat and if the costs for the General were cheaper.

The idea is then to amass as many resources and cities as possible to protect yourself against the Spanish menace. And around turn 10 they'll come around to invade. Note that the amount of turns it takes for the Spanish to enter the field is also random, in one campaign they only came after 14 turns, giving me more time to prepare for no particular reason other than that RNGesus felt like it.

The Spanish act as the other player on the game board, and they will make a move in the turn they appear after every move you make (to do a mission). Usually they will capture one of your cities at first, and then continue to capture your cities after every move you make. Your cities being captured by the Spanish also gives you a mission for that city to drive the Spanish out. Do this twice in the same turn, and the Spanish will begin to retreat. You basically only need three Aztez on the turn when the Spanish appear, and if you don't lose they can't even invade your empire beyond one city. After that all other missions disappear, and there's only one mission left where you have to drive the Spanish out of the valley and end the campaign. There you fight a bunch of Spaniards and some traitors, and that's it. Campaign over. The Spanish go home and your people are safe. It's really about as anticlimactic as it gets. Finish the last mission only gives you your stats of the campaign, a shot of an Aztez looking over one of the empire cities, and a foreboding message saying that 'the Emperor can be dealt with later...'. Is that it?

Actually, no. There is an additional secret mission which you can unlock through several conditions, which the game never actually tells you about (I only garnered this from reading the Aztez Steam forums). If you capture all the available cities in the Valley, you'll receive an item which lets you start a Special Mission, one in which you fight the actual Emperor, and then move on to kill the leader of the Conqs, Hernan Cortez himself. This item can also be received at random when completing optional objectives for missions when you're fighting off the Conqs from your Empire, because we might as well anyways.

The objective to conquer every single city in order to see the true ending does turn things on its head. For example, this means the majority of your resources have to be spent on Princesses for capturing more cities, and focusing more on raising population to increase your resource gain. It becomes more important to succeed at optional objectives and Underworld runs to be able to capture all cities in the first place and preserve enough Aztez to do as many missions as possible. What I don't get is why this isn't presented as one of the main objectives of the game, rather than keeping it entirely secret. It gives novice players an actual goal to strive towards besides not losing all your Aztez and not fucking up keeping up your empire, whereas you can pretty much tumble your way through to the boring normal end regardless of how shitty your empire looks at the end, which a lot of people will confuse for the actual ending as they leave a negative review on Steam saying that the game is way too short and perhaps too easy. I'm not sure what the idea was behind hiding the conditions for the true ending, the devs only shot themselves in the foot with it.

But it effectively kills a lot of the strategy. Because of how luck-based your progression is because of the random item drops, random missions, and other random occurences, what you will be doing for every Campaign Mode is capturing each city, doing as many missions as possible, despawning negative events as soon as they appear using Cutthroat or items you got through chance. The entire strategy layer is one massive slot machine, and success largely depends on how well you perform in combat. In fact, the strategy layer becomes much more engaging with events going out of control if you actually suck at the combat and can't get as many items as you possibly can, making dissent and the Spanish and whatever actual threats to your empire because you weren't good enough to contain them as soon as they appeared. But even then it's still very much up to chance, and it's safe to say that if one part of the game only becomes interesting if you suck at the other, that these two parts don't mesh well together at all. What you have here is a reverse FPSRPG situation where instead of character skills making twitch skills less important, here the strategy is made less important due success being tied to twitch skill.

A more traditional campaign structure for the game would have been more appropriate than this weird attempt at trying to keep the structure of a roguelite without the randomization affecting parts of the game that actually matter (combat). It would have also given the game a more appropriate and less frustrating difficulty curve as new enemies and weapons could be introduced at an even pace, alongside the matter of combat arenas always being flat and repetitive being more noticeable in a campaign structure which should prompt a different direction for arena design. If you don't have the sheer amount of content or expansive randomization algorithm to truly make each playthrough feel unique, then you shouldn't make your game into a roguelite(lite). If you end up with a short game of under an hour regardless, then you're better off giving it the structure of an arcade game where death means going back to start while relying on the difficulty of the game to pad out the game's length through the sheer amounts of death involved. That way you at least wind up with a more tight game with little downtime.

Anyways, if you activate the item for the special mission, a mission will appear where you have to kill the Emperor, who is the first actual boss you fight in the game, if you don't count Legendaries. The Emperor has the Gauntlets, and can use it to fire long beams of darkness at range, capture you with darkness and then fire a darkness beam at you, and do one of those attacks where he fires a beam in six directions around him and the only safespot is beneath his feet. The Emperor has Armor, but unlike other Armored enemies his Armor is his entire lifebar, so when his Armor depletes he'll become Broken. This way he works more like a stage obstacle, but it then brings back the problem of the Club's aerial B-Combo being the best solution against him. The only way to knock him down is with a Counter. The Emperor also has a weird recovery attack (stronger enemies tend to attack after being knocked on the floor if you're standing right on top of them waiting for them to get up) whose telegraph is yellow, but is actually unblockable.

Thankfully, as with most encounters with Legendary enemies, weaker enemies will continuously spawn for the fight, as multiple enemies for boss fights should be a given for every good beat 'em up centering around crowd control. Not that Aztez really is, or that I'd consider the Emperor a good boss fight, but it at least doesn't make the element of damaging the Emperor completely straightforward. Unfortunately only two enemies ever respawn at once, this usually being a Basic Priest and Basic Eagle. Why only two for one of the last fights in the game? Why only Basic enemies for one of the last fights in the game? Meanwhile the fight against the Emperor in Arena Mode featured three Distinguished Priests and two Distinguished Jaguars at once (minus any respawning enemies), which made for a more interesting fight. Setting aside from the fact that the Emperor is SLOW and that you can long jump out of his range as you take out most of the adds one by one without him ever reaching you, which takes away from the tension. I don't know why the fucker can't teleport like those Priests.

I would have wished to see the Emperor's Armor being broken when damaging it enough like with normal Legendary enemies, so you at least have some moments of being able to exert your combos on the Emperor. What the game could have also done on top is spawn additional waves of enemies once the Emperor's Armor is broken to make it harder for you to combo indefinitely (even if you deal enough damage for the Emperor to breakout and regen his armor, you still have the enemies below you to deal with once he recovers but can't be carried along in a combo) and to give the fight more of a sense of progression. When the boss is virtually always vulnerable to damage, and you have one method out of several options which deal the most damage, it makes for a very straightforward fight which comes down to spamming one combo over and over, and defense comes down to parrying/holding down block or moving to the safe zones at the right time. The Basic enemies can be often easily dealt with on the side. With fights like these, there isn't a lot of room for player expression, and the boss attacks aren't that varied to make a fight like this work either. It's not the most engaging fight.

After that, you can only do the mission where you infiltrate the Spanish Camp and burn down their ships so they can never come back. You gotta do two missions fighting against Conqs, and then you have to face off against big man Cortez himself. Cortez, much like the Emperor, works the same way in that he usually dishes out some red attacks, has loads of HP, and can't have his Armor be broken until he's actually broken. There's still only two respawning enemies here at most, which is absolute heresy considering this is supposed to be the true final boss of the game. Even more heretical is that he's easier than the Emperor. His attacks consist of an airstrike (which won't hit you if you're right up Cortez' face, but he will call it despite this fact), throwing a bomb (just jump over or use a different weapon to dash through him), firing his gun in a straight horizontal line like most Conqs, a yellow melee attack, and a stampede of horses which you need to jump over the absolute moment when he calls them in if you're in melee range for Cortez.

Yet, the easier degree to which you can avoid Cortez' attacks (save for the stampede attack) by dashing through him most of the time and the huge wind-up all of his attacks have. His airstrike attack would make more sense if he called one directly on your position while jumping all the way backwards, and his bombs functions identically to his rifle shot. Moreover, his recovery attack doesn't even have the same kind of range the Emperor had (Cortez shoots a straight diagonal line from a lying position whereas the Emperor teleports upwards to drop down at you with two huge energy blasts) or the same kind of threat at all. From a difficulty curve perspective, this guy isn't suitable at all to be the final boss. There's only two adds max, his attacks are even wimpier compared to the boss you fought before on top of his attacks not pushing you to use the full extent of your moveset, which ought to be a given for a final boss.

And if you beat this guy, that's basically it for this game. It may take you 5-8 hours to do so. The degree of randomization is simply not enough to make each run feel truly unique, there's barely any meta-progression to keep you hooked the dirty way, and the encounters and bosses presented to you do not push your skills to the max, with no real difficulty settings being present to keep things challenging either. Campaign runs have way too many trash encounters where you can spam the same combos over and over while rarely ever getting attacked. The score system when taken seriously would result in a very unfun and drawn out way of playing, and the scores for the entirety of Campaign mode are way too reliant on RNG to be competitively viable for a leaderboard (the leaderboards not even being functional at the time of writing). Only Arena Mode is really worth a damn, and quite frankly the whole game should have been a more polished and more expanded Arena Mode with a larger emphasis on being able to complete all 55 fights in one go.

The combat system and weapon designs themselves are very solid, though they could use some tweaking, and the enemy designs are also highly varied in functionality. However, infinite combos and lack of aimed ranged options for enemies bring this down, with the scoring system being near useless in trying to discourage cheesy or degenerate strategies. Again, could be solved with some tweaking and the scoring system being completely overhauled. But the absolute nail in the coffin is the Campaign Mode, which poorly utilizes all these enemies and the combat system itself. It just isn't very well thought out and doesn't make each run feel truly unique. It's just there to catch people's attention by being an unusual mix of genres. If Campaign Mode actually randomized the circumstances for combat, the enemies, and the weapons, then you might have had at least something fun and unique at the expense of balance. As it stands only Arena Mode is really worth playing, and even then it is very short, unless you are trying to 1lc the whole thing.

Unless you're some weirdo who likes to theoretically come up with all sorts of crazy combos in training mode to make cool combo videos but not apply those combos in practice, then I have a hard time recommending Aztez. There is a solid core underneath, the game just fails at utilizing it properly.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Wait...there was a third Fallout game?

 

[Kabas]

The legend of sherwood is indeed the shit
Finished Rites of war

What can i say? I like this type of deal - recruit your army of the space elves, level them up into aspect warriors/exarchs, find some artifacts and unlock new units step by step and save scum the shit out of the game so that your guardians will actually reach the exarch status.
I also like how the game looks. Maps are beatiful(autumn and tundra are probably my favourites) and WH40k units are charming.
Missions are a bit formulaic though. What you need to do most of the time in order to win is to immediately assume defensive positon and survive the initial onslaught of the imperial guards/space marines/tyraninds and then proceed to clean up the remains right after. The final mission was no different and i was somewhat tired by this point.
But still, i enjoyed it and have no regrets finishing it. Thanks Roxor.

 

[Raghar]

Durandal
Have you written it yourself or is it copied from something that's not indexed by google?

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Wait...there was a third Fallout game?

Yeah. Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel. Fun game. Had a nice multiplayer mode back in the day.

Could have used X-Com style base management that put you in control of the Brotherhood of Steel.

 

[sullynathan]

Beat God of War Ascension and startd playing F.E.A.R. again. I didn't beat F.E.A.R. before and it seems I might've misplaced my save file so I restarted the game, it's pretty good but I hope this time I don't get bored of it by the late game, there is still noticeable input lag or whatever when I press my mouse compared to when my gun starts shooting.

God of War Ascension was not that bad, lots of decline but it was far better than Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge.

 

[agentorange]

This way you don't need to memorize a whole tl;dr list of combos,

Oh well that's good, because I really hate unnecessarily long walls of text.

 

[laclongquan]

Wait...there was a third Fallout game?

Yeah. Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel. Fun game. Had a nice multiplayer mode back in the day.

Could have used X-Com style base management that put you in control of the Brotherhood of Steel.

It is before UFO afterlight and aftershock style of design your base for future fights.
It is also before Neverwinter Nights2 OC's crossroad keep so that is out, too.
Also you are a newbie while tehre's still a lot of oldsters in command so hardly believable to have your MC in total control.
Beside, the bases are changed throughout main campaign, so there's that limitation.

 

[PulsatingBrain]

startd playing F.E.A.R. again

People always talk about the shotgun from that game (which is indeed great), but wait til you get the fucking Penetrator. Probably my favourite FPS weapon

 

[ItsChon]

Replaying Underrail for some reason when I have like five other quality games I've yet to commit to. *shrug*

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Wait...there was a third Fallout game?

Yeah. Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel. Fun game. Had a nice multiplayer mode back in the day.

Could have used X-Com style base management that put you in control of the Brotherhood of Steel.

The joke was that Fallout 3 isn't a Fallout game. But it got ruined by my inability consider the spin off games. Technically Fallout 3 would be the 5th in the series, as you have that Brotherhood of Steel game released on xbox in 2004.

 

[octavius]

RTNP: Ultimate Edition

RTNP being Return to Na Pali.
I decided to play this UT remake of the Unreal expansion, and making it work properly was a bit of work.

You can use Direct3D9 or OpenGL. OpenGL looks much better with default settings, but it runs much too fast. Changing the Rendering settings for Direct3D9 would often result in crashes, but I found a solution: use OpenGL, but cap FPS at 80 and it looks good and runs in a normal tempo.

One thing that's really annoying with Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament is that the sound easily breaks. I need to restart my computer and have as little extra CPU usage as possible to be able to play a whole map without the sound bugging out.
Was not a problem back in the days when I had a proper sound card and speakers, but with USB headphones (uses it's own inbuilt sound card) it is a problem.

I just hope this remake is wort the problems...

 

[Infinitron]

What the fuck

If you like writing walls of texts so much Durandal I can think of a better place for them.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

What the fuck

If you like writing walls of texts so much Durandal I can think of a better place for them.

Leave it alone, men. For once conquer your goddamn OCD.

 

[Strange Fellow]

If you like writing walls of texts so much Durandal I can think of a better place for them.

Official codex review?

 

[Durandal]

What the fuck

If you like writing walls of texts so much Durandal I can think of a better place for them.

I don't play RPGs l0l

 

[Infinitron]

What the fuck

If you like writing walls of texts so much Durandal I can think of a better place for them.

I don't play RPGs l0l

We would have published the Styx: Master of Shadows review though.

But anyway, use spoiler tags or I'll ban you

 

[Durandal]

What the fuck

If you like writing walls of texts so much Durandal I can think of a better place for them.

I don't play RPGs l0l

We would have published the Styx: Master of Shadows review though.

But anyway, use spoiler tags or I'll ban you

I guess people have been complaining about broken mousewheels?