Having a lot of fun throwing things around in Maraka. Simple arcade style roguelite, where you do a lot of flinging things at things and slamming things around. May look horde-survivor-ish from the walking in enemy hordes, but you’re very active playing, and there are some ranged enemies to watch out for. Bit barebones, but still just fun to play now and then. Easy recommend for that kind of thing.

Also working on the new character unlock for BlazBlue Entropy Effect. It’s unfortunately tied to the mainline story progress which I didn’t really care for and haven’t put much effort into since it was reset after early access ended. So I guess I have to straighten that out to play with the new character. Did get a very strong loadout option where I start with a seemingly pretty killer combination upgrade and one of its two prerequisites. In BBEE, when your run ends, your character gets added to a support pool along with a couple of the build upgrades you used, and when you start a run, you choose one main character and add two supports to get your initial loadout. So, if I setup another character to bring the other prerequisite as their support, I can combine the two to have that all going right from run start on any other character, which is pretty neat. Not the best player-driven metaprogression system I’ve seen, but player-driven metaprogression still a very unusual and rich idea that adds a lot to a game, even in this limited form. I hope some more games pick up on this kind of thing, so we can see the ideas grow and metaprogression become a more interesting thing. Characters play pretty interestingly and vary nicely, but the enemy side is pretty weak and the surrounding aspects are tedious to clunky, so only a mild recommend here :)

Hoping to see Greyskin in the NextFest this week. If you like a top-down shooter ARPG type thing, check that game out, because it’s got a lot of stuff in it, and they indicated before that this Nextfest was part of their release plan, so hopefully we’re getting closer to more than a demo.

Combat Complex

Twin-stick shooter against various bugs and robots with some ARPG gearing, and the action here is fantastically tight with probably three key factors:

• Enemies target you but hit each other, so you manage their attacks to help your fighting instead of just staying out of trouble.
• “Frenzy” orb pickups, which act a bit like combo meter fuel except instead of chaining hits you make frequent choices about whether an orb drop is worth chasing, keeping you close to danger.
• Instant gun switching with overheating instead of reloading, so you fight hard and switch constantly between your three guns to keep any one from overheating while getting the best out of their specific properties.

I play a lot of twin-stick and top-down shooters, and this does a great job mixing the arcade twin-stick feel of high intensity fending off a swarm with tactical top-down dungeon crawling elements, and it’s just really special feeling to play. The core action feels not just well designed but like it was made just for me, and I’m genuinely glad someone made it (or is making it, since it’s early access). Plus, it’s extraction style instead of being a roguelite, so you’re always right at the best action while still getting procedural levels, so each run is a little different.

I used to be very patientgamer, but my patience model changed after finding again and again that buying late meant devs had wholly moved on from a game by the time I got it, and would hardly ever do basic needed fixes, things that needed to have been talked about earlier in the project. I also noticed how some early access sales would take years for the price to go up and then back down again for what amounted to only a few dollars of savings. Savings that, as I watch games I’m interested in fail in obscurity over and over, I don’t feel quite right about strictly withholding from the few devs taking chances on such projects for me, on top of not being around to try and help the project deliver a better game to players.

So, now I do buy some games in early access or even newly released, where I can poke the dev while they are still around, and my patience includes waiting for games to get through those after-buying growing pains instead of just waiting for them to drop into the discount bins, mostly forgotten by their devs and players both.

I’m still generally more strictly price-patient on most anything larger scale, both by devs and by audience.

Jeez, the laziness of reviewing it based just on the store page. It’s been in early access for like five years, getting better every update, and not one person there can even bother to actually play the game they recommend to others?