malvasia bianca

Three quick game notes, with the unifying theme being “games that I didn’t like as much as I hoped I would”. (Balatro is pretty good, though. Loop Hero might be, too, I just don’t have a feel for what I would have found if I’d spent more time with it.)

Balatro is pretty good and also pretty interesting, but I don’t quite understand why it’s grabbed so many people? It’s neat crafting your deck in response to where the jokers and other cards are leading you. It’s interesting how many different workable strategies there are for crafting your deck to build synergies. There’s a pleasant amount of risk management required, and tools for dealing with that. And there’s definitely room for building up your skills: you can keep on playing once you’ve won with a deck, and the targets ramp up very quickly once you’ve done that, so you can keep on challenging yourself for a while.

But it never made it beyond that for me? I enjoyed playing it for a few weeks, I’m glad I spent that time with it, but it didn’t get any sort of real hooks into me either.

I did enjoy the Eggplant Show interview with the game’s designer.

I didn’t play Loop Hero when it first came out because I had the idea that it would fit better on an iPad; so when I learned a few weeks back that it was out on the iPad, I decided to give it a try.

And, indeed, the iPad is a good platform for it; but it turns out that it’s not the game for me. I was hoping that Loop Hero would be more of an idle game than it is: but, even though you’re not controlling it directly, you probably do want to be evaluating equipment / tile drops pretty regularly, so you don’t want to take your attention off of it for very long. But the auto battling aspect also means that you don’t have much to do when you are paying attention. And that combo of characteristics just wasn’t very satisfying for me.

I’m a little curious what I would have found if I’d dug into the mechanics more, because I really did not get very far into that. (I got enough to beat the first two bosses, and maybe I unlocked a half dozen buildings in my town.) Somebody on a Slack that I’m on said it reminded him of Vampire Survivors in some ways; I was surprised to hear that but, after having played it some, the analogy makes rather more sense to me. But in Vampire Survivors you’ve got something to do all the time; and also maybe the mechanics are a little more readable?

I was really looking forward to Bomb Rush Cyberfunk: my impression was that it was made by people who cared a lot about Jet Set Radio, and they even got that game’s composer to work on the new game. And, while I really love Jet Set Radio, it’s also a game that certainly has its rough edges; I’m all for friction that gives character, but I’m not convinced that all of the friction in Jet Set Radio adds to the game, so if the new game sanded some of that off, I wouldn’t complain.

Unfortunately, Bomp Rush Cyberfunk was a pretty solid disappointment. There are hints of style, heck there are more than hints, but the new game fails to cross whatever threshold the magic happens at. Just to make sure I wasn’t being too swayed by nostalgia, I went back and played 30 minutes of Jet Set Radio: my basic takeaway there is that just the act of selecting Gum in the character selection screen shows more style than anything I saw in the first three or four levels or however long I played of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk.

And, adding insult to injury, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk doesn’t even sand off the rough edges! I’m not going to say that the combat in Jet Set Radio is any good; but the combat in Bomb Rush Cyberfunk isn’t either! It throws you right into an under-tutorialized boss flight with an enemy that is flying around in a jetpack, and you don’t have obvious tools to reliably hit her in midair. Eventually I made it through that battle; and then she showed up again in the second boss fight, and it wasn’t any better the second time.

I was wondering why I hadn’t heard much talk about Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, but I’d assumed that it was just a sign that there aren’t that many Jet Set Radio fans out there. And that might be true; but that’s definitely not the only reason…