Category: Player Number

Deadlock Preview

This isn’t a review.

Deadlock isn’t out yet. You can’t even play it without a closed beta invite.

They’re not hard to get, but still.

By the time Deadlock is out, it’s likely that it will have morphed into something completely different from what it currently is.

That said, even in its current state, I’ve already played 80 hours. So I do want to talk about why, and why you might enjoy this game enough to try to play it now.

Why You Might Like Deadlock

Deadlock is Valve’s most current semi-public project. It’s a MOBA/FPS hybrid, taking elements from both genres, and adding a few new elements of its own.

And that’s the first reason to try it. Most of the folks I’ve been playing with are Dota 2 and League players. If you really enjoy those games, and generally like FPS games, Deadlock might be for you.

The other big reason is if you have an appetite for novelty. There hasn’t been a game like this in a long time. Monday Night Combat and Super Monday Night Combat servers went down ages ago, and Deadlock offers a much greater depth from its MOBA elements than those games ever did. There’s also tons of weird interactions to discover, tricks to find, and just general space to play and explore the game’s systems.

This is a game where (at least at my skill level) it’s possible to win a fight with expert positioning and the ability to click heads. It’s equally possible to just have a good enough sense of the map to farm everything out, and show up to the fight with flush with items and wipe everyone out with abilities while being unable to shoot anything.

These are the things that make me love it. But they might not work for you.

…and Why You Might Want to Wait

Deadlock is unfinished. It is probably not quite balanced yet. And it can be kind of buggy. And has a bit of a learning curve.

Most of these (outside of the bugs) are positives for me. But if you’re the sort of person who gets really annoyed when someone on the enemy team shows up and kills you in two seconds, you may have a bad time. If you’re the sort of person who gets annoyed when a creep wave bugs, and doesn’t push properly, you are going to suffer.

And there is a big learning curve. Just like Dota, this game has dozens of items to learn, many of which have activated abilities. It also has one of the densest maps I’ve seen in a MOBA, and even after the 80 hours I’ve played, I only have a general sense of where everything is.

Also, the art, while quite good, is not up to the Valve standard just yet.

Overall, Though

Deadlock is likely to be my most played new game of the year. It’s entirely possible it actually replaces Dota 2 as my “lifestyle” game, a slot that Dota 2 has occupied for almost 10 years.

There’s no reason to rush to play Deadlock just yet. It’s likely that it will be a much more complete game by the time it reaches a full release. But while there isn’t any reason to rush in, I really cannot overstate just how fun I’ve found Deadlock to be.

Tactical Breach Wizards

I accidentally locked myself in my bedroom this morning, a problem I dealt with by climbing out of a window. This is an actual thing that happened, because I am an idiot.

It does however, provide a useful segue. After managing to get back into the parts of my apartment that aren’t where I sleep, I sat down to play more Tactical Breach Wizards, a game where problems can also be solved via windows.

Most of the time that solution is to shove someone through them.

Tactical Breach Wizards is a tactics/puzzle game by Suspicious Developments. If you’ve ever played a tactics game before, you’ve seen at least the bones of what’s on offer here: Given a small set of elite units, you’re forced to fight your way through a series of mooks in a linear campaign, played in turns on a grid map.

Except in Tactical Breach Wizards, where the enemy has assault rifles, chain guns, grenades, and automated turrets, you have a skull named Gary, a wand with a scope on it, chain lightning, the ability to raise the dead, rewind time, and illegal narcotics.

The end result is that there’s a lot less laying down strategic overwatch, and a lot more trying to figure out how to shove someone into a bullet you will fire in the future to get enough mana to make a body double of yourself to hack a turret.

Image taken several seconds before throwing myself out a window. Just like in real life!

And while the game starts out simple, it builds up to be far more complex. Fortunately, the you also get a much wider variety of tools to use as additional characters join the party, and as you use the perk system to boost those characters.

The characters are quite well rounded, and tend to have both a personal consistent theme, and a synergistic gimmick. As an example, let’s look at Jen.

Pondering the orb.

Jen’s basic ability is a “non-damaging” lightning blast. The non-damaging is in quotes because while the shot does not do damage, being shoved into a wall, exposed electrical cables, or another enemy still hurts! Her primary spell is a bit like a boosted version of the shot: a set of chain lightning that can link multiple enemies together and shove them around. Finally, she has a broom that can be used to jump out any window and then enter via another, and a grenade that knocks everyone back.

In addition to all of this, many of her upgrades focus around giving her additional movement phases. The the end result is a character that can move themselves and others. And while on the surface, Jen doesn’t have any direct damage, the ability to throw yourself out a window, jump to the other side of the map, and throw a grenade that tosses 3 battle priests out of a fancy stained glass window is incredibly effective.

At the same time, her kit is also very synergistic with other characters’ abilities. One party member has an ability that allows him to shoot into the future by picking a space with no enemies in it, and shooting if one enters. Another throws speedballs at enemies that increase their knockback taken. Jen can push enemies into the space locked down by the first, and blast enemies debuffed by the second much further.

And pretty much everyone who ends up in the party is designed this way: highly synergistic while also fulfilling a valuable roll on their own.

The enemy of all law abiding-ish citizens: the traffic cop.

I don’t really have any complaints about Tactical Breach Wizards, but I do have some observations. I found the game quite difficult, probably because I played on hard. But there were still several levels that felt a bit too puzzle-y for my liking. I enjoyed Tactical Breach Wizards the most when it felt like there were multiple solutions and paths to complete a level, and much less I was trying find the single right solution.

Now, the game absolutely gives you the tools to find those solutions. 99% of enemy actions are deterministic, there’s no penalty to restarting a level. Every single action on a turn can be rewound and replayed. At the end of each turn you can foresee the future, and see how enemies will act. It’s just that I enjoyed the game more when I felt like I was trying to punch my way out of a gunfight, instead of repeatedly restarting because I moved one square to the left incorrectly five minutes ago.

I don’t think it’s spoilers if it’s the start of the second level of the game.

There’s one sort of last big thing about the game I want to call out, but not really discuss: the writing and story. It’s very good. I’ve heard some people compare it to Terry Pratchett.

Pratchett is actually my favorite author, and I’m hesitant to say that that the game as a whole reminds me of Pratchett, or at least Discworld. There are are humorous moments that feel like Pratchett, but the game has a tone much closer to his work that he did with other authors, like All The Long Earth, or Good Omens.

The longer scope means games can do a lot more things than books or movies, and Tactical Breach Wizards jumps around tonally. It’s a buddy cop flick, then it’s an action thriller, and then it’s a war story. There’s a certain level of harshness and melancholy to the later parts of game that feels appropriate. But it’s not a level of harshness I would associate with Pratchett.

The best compliment I can give the writing is this: My investment in the story served to pull me back to the game each time I quit to take a break after finding myself struggling with a level.

More Like Tactical Beach Wizar- wait, they make that joke in the credits.

Overall, I enjoyed Tactical Breach Wizards. It took me around 14 hours and that was on hard while ignoring many of the bonus objectives and extra modes, so if I’d loved it 100% there would still be more to play. It was $20 well spent.

That said, I’m not super interested in playing more because I’m about to start playing through everything else Suspicious Developments have made, including Heat Signature, Gunpoint, and Morphblade. So let’s find out if they’re just as good as Tactical Breach Wizards absolutely is.

Stalcraft

Ed Note: Most of this writeup was written earlier in the year, around Christmas, as was my time in the game. Some of this info may be out of date. Still, Stalcraft is weird enough for me to want to talk about, even if I don’t plan on playing anymore in the near future.

Stalcraft is strange. If you want to know why and don’t care about context, you can skip ahead to the section titled “The Weird Bit.” If not, let’s lay some groundwork, and do a normal review before everything goes off the rails.

Stalcraft is a F2P pseudo-extraction shooter that takes place in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. It’s inspired by the short story “A Roadside Picnic,” using much of the book’s language and terminology. The game’s title is a portmanteau, that thing where you combine two different words into one word. The words in question here are “Stalker” and “Craft”.

If you’re going “Wait, isn’t there another game that does this?” don’t worry. We’ll come back to that.

In the game, you’ve suffered a hallucination, and woken up in the Zone—the game’s shorthand for the Chernobyl exclusion zone. You pick one of two starter factions, then you slowly work your way up through the ranks of various bases, completing quests, and traveling across the map deeper and deeper to try to understand what caused you to end up in the Zone.

Gameplay Loop

After creating a character with one of the game’s two starting factions and being given a brief tutorial, you’re dropped into the Zone with a location for the main story quest, a base to return to, and about 5 bullets.

Most of Stalcraft’s gameplay loop takes place across the game’s various zones. Zones are permanently PVP-enabled between factions, and full of enemies

There are two primary parts to Stalcraft’s gameplay loop. Both parts have the player adventuring out into the zone. One is quests, and the other is just general looting and gathering.

A Hunting We Shall Go

Looting and gathering in Stalcraft is fairly simple. Load up your inventory full of bullets, go into the world, travel to various areas, and shoot everything that moves. Since this is an extraction shooter, if you die, you will drop your stuff. Well, not all of it. Some items, like your weapons and armor stay, as do a few quest items. But ammo, snacks, and med-packs are goners.

Stalcraft equipment follows a pretty standard F2P game sort of model, with each piece of being upgraded from older equipment. Doing so requires gathering various zone based resources. For PVP protection, when you’re killed the resources drop, but other players can’t use them.

Instead, they drop in a backpack, a container that can only be opened by the person who gathered the resources in the first place. The result is that it’s not really possible to progress your gear by PKing, but it is possible to PK for a profit by killing other players. Then ransoming their items back to them.

It’s a very slick piece of design. It forces players to engage with the primary system/loop, while still rewarding player killing, and preventing it from becoming a primary method of progression.

A Noble Quest

Quests, on the other hand, involve the same general “running around trying not to die,” but with a more story directed focus. And for every quest that asks you to kill 10 boars, you’ll get one that’s a bit stranger.

Crawl into a dog kennel, and solve a jumping puzzle.

Solve a mildly frustrating riddle.

Deliver these items.
Into an active volcanic area.

They’re some of the strangest and often incredibly hard things I’ve ever had to do in a video game. Sometimes that’s because they’re janky, and sometimes that’s because… well, you have to cross an entire map of enemy players to get to the place to actually do the damn thing.

The Weird Bit

If you’ve been paying attention, or looking at the screenshots, you might have started to put something together. Or maybe you also play a lot of games.

See, while Stalcraft now is a fully standalone game, that’s not what it started as.

You ready?

Stalcraft is/was a mod/private server for Minecraft, with the majority of the game, setting and world taken from the open world game STALKER, and its sequels.

The end result is that Stalcraft is a sort of weird chimera of design. Why are there so many (awful) jumping puzzles and riddles? Because those are comparatively easy to design and implement in Minecraft. Why do all the characters look the way they do? Same thing. Why are the characters and story so weirdly detailed and thought out? Because the whole thing was almost just ported over from another entire game.

To be clear: at no point did StalCraft team, as far as I’m aware, give a penny to anyone above. They just kind of… built someone else’s game inside their own game, and turned it into a generally fun, if aggravating extraction shooter.

It’s incredibly novel, and I’ve just never seen anyone do something quite like this.

That’s all very nice, but should you actually play it?

I played about 70 hours of Stalcraft before I burned out. Ultimately, this is a F2P game, with F2p monetization. Unless you have a huge amount of time or money to burn, you’re not getting to endgame.

That said, it’s an incredibly unique experience in the F2P genre. It can be tense, funny, and aggravating. I got killed and had my corpse camped, only to run back and die over and over again.

There was also a time I killed someone in an enemy faction sort of out of panic, looked at them, realized I didn’t really care if I killed them, rezed them, and then we just looked at each other and ran off.

I think what makes Stalcraft worth playing is how different, weird and janky it is. It’s not the same as something being good, but compared to so many other games, it’s interesting.

In many ways, the general experience reminds me a lot of Sea of Thieves, though slightly more dangerous. You’re dropped into a playground, full of glass, bits of irradiated metal, and told to go play with the other kids, some of whom will beat you up. And sure, the whole thing is cobbled together: those monkey bars are rusting, and some car somewhere is blasting Russian Christmas carols.

But god, if it isn’t fascinating.

Cassette Beasts

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

I never actually played the multiplayer, since it wasn’t out during my play through.

Cassette Beasts is a monster collector RPG. After arriving on a mysterious island, you learn you’re trapped there. You also learn that the island is populated by monsters that can be captured in Cassette Tapes, and used to battle each other. There’s also a set of Gym Leaders Team Captains across the island, each of whom specializes in a different elemental type of monster. You get your own tape deck, and learn to use it to transform into the aforementioned monsters.

Then a hole opens up in the ground, and you fight a dying eldritch god in a subway station.

That’s not a spoiler, by the way. This happens just about 20-30 minutes into the game, but it’s the moment that Cassette Beasts sort of cues you into, that no, you do not in fact know what’s going on, and this isn’t a Pokemon clone.

Quick Notes

Two quick notes about Cassette Beasts.

First, I streamed my entire play-through of the game. If you’re curious about my experience, just watch that. (Especially if you think I’m being unfair about some of the bugs.)

Second, there’s a really good write-up by one of the developers of Cassette Beasts that you can read here. It contains spoilers, but it’s a really well written retrospective on the design choices they made, and why they made them, and I’m going to be referencing it a bit.

Cassette Beasts has two main game play states: overworld exploration/puzzle solving, and turn based combat.

Overworld

The overworld is pretty straight forward, and generally doesn’t have too many twists outside of the aforementioned eldritch god zones. You wander around, and over time you get a few traversal upgrades. You get a slowly descending hover, the ability to turn into a spiky ball to climb walls, and a dash to push through obstacles.

Outside of the weird zones, the Cassette Beasts overworld is by far the weaker of the two modes. It’s not the most inspiring thing to explore, and while it has cool moments, it also can be a bit buggy. There was a part where I just repeatedly clipped through the floor, which was bad, but not as bad as when the game just continually crashed.

Again, fun moments. But it’s mostly there to carry the meat and potatoes of the game, the turn-based combat:

Combat

Most combat in Cassette Beasts is 2v2, with some situations that change that. But in general, it’s your two monsters versus two opposing monsters. This is also where it starts to make significant shifts from Pokemon.

Here’s an example: thematically, you’re not actually capturing monsters, you’re just recording them to use their forms later. Since it’s a transformation, it breaks if you take enough damage. At which point any extra damage (either from multi-hit attacks, or other enemies) goes directly onto the player character. If it was Pokemon, it would be like saying that your trainer has a health bar. This means you can actually get knocked out mid battle, even while you still have monsters left to fight with.

Attacks use a fairly simple energy system, where each attack has a cost. At the start of each turn, each character gets a set amount of energy. As such, using big attacks means having to save up energy for a bit, or finding another way to generate it. But it does mean you can’t just spam your most powerful attacks out for free each turn.

There are a lot of other really interesting systems here, including the way type match-ups work (pretty much nothing like Pokémon), and the fact that all moves are effectively items that can be equipped and unequipped from your monsters. But the short version is that the combat is good, and I often found myself trying to break it, or experimenting with various setups, which is what I want in a game like this.

Fascinating and Frustrating

I like Cassette Beasts, but I also found it kind of difficult to play at times. The game is incredibly open-ended in letting you progress its story and quests, but that comes at the cost of occasionally feeling directionless.

There was one bit where I spent at least an hour and a half trying to solve a puzzle that it turned out didn’t really exist. The actual solution was to bring a specific character to that area that I hadn’t met yet.

There was another time late game where I pretty much just ended up grinding, because it didn’t feel like it was possible for me to beat a boss at my current power level.

At the same time, I pushed through those moments, because I wanted to see how the story would resolve. The boss designs were cool, and while the world is a bit barren, it’s still exciting to find the small secrets in it. For a two person project, it’s hard not to be impressed by the game.

It’s a very solid game, and I’d probably spend more time on it if there just weren’t so many other games available to play. As it is, though, it has just a bit too much friction for me to be interested in spending more time on it after beating the main story.

Shadows Over Loathing

Figuring out the genre for Shadows Over Loathing is a bit weird. On the one hand, you could call it a RPG. There’s turn based combat, lots of items to pick up and equip, and party and inventory management. A lot of the hallmarks of the genre.

You could also play through the entire game without engaging with any of those systems, and instead just solving weird puzzles and picking the right dialogue options in conversation and interaction. Meaning that if you wanted to, you could just play it as an adventure game.

So, y’know. To each their own I guess?

A lot of Shadows Over Loathing’s strength is in its writing. Will you find it funny? Well, here’s a very simple test for whether. This is the company logo of Asymmetric, the folks who make the game:

Yes, that’s the joke.

If this made you laugh, or at least groan, you’ll probably enjoy yourself. Otherwise you may have a mixed experience.

There’s also one other test that will quickly filter out would-be players: how do you feel about a game that looks like this?

Yes, they’re very well-done stick figures drawings, but they’re still stick figure drawings.

Now that we’ve filtered out anyone who simply wouldn’t have a good time, let’s talk about the actual game.

Gameplay Loop

I don’t have game that I can easily map Shadows Over Loathing to in terms of its gameplay loop. Generally, you wander around looking for something to progress the current state of the main quest, while doing side quests and discovering esoteric bullshit along the way.

While this might just sound like stumbling along, it’s fun because of how much there is to see or do, and how weird it is. Fix a tiny lighthouse. Pull off a criminal heist with a bunch of elderly citizens. Do jobs for the mafia. Collect hats.

All of this is set against a backdrop of a main story that does a surprisingly good job of actually delivering on some of its loose 1920’s Lovecraft horror themes. One of the big issues with the pop-culturalization of cosmic horror is that Cthulhu has gone from the unwaking dreamer who will end the world to Godzilla with an octopus head.

Shadows Over Loathing is much more subtle, and given that it can’t really do horror with its art style, it aims for ‘discomforting’ instead. Sure, there are tentacles and shadow blobs, but there are also unwinding spaces that can’t exist and trees that call for a woodsman to deliver the axe. For every dozen fishmen, there’s one eternal baseball game that can never be called.

That said, Shadows Over Loathing was at its weakest and most frustrating for me when it got a bit too into the weeds of an adventure game. If there’s a single path through a situation, it can be quite frustrating if you’re unable to spot it. And because this game often runs on dream logic, especially during curse sequences, it can be easy to get stuck.

Running into Colonel Sanders as a vampire is funny the first time. But after the 5th time it’s just kind of annoying, especially when it’s the exact same dialogue tree.

In addition, while interesting, the overall narrative does feel a little rushed at the end. While the game is chock full of fun things to see and do, it felt like it was about 30% shorter than I was expecting in terms of the build up for the finale.

Combat

There’s one big system I haven’t talked about yet, and that’s the combat and leveling system. Shadows Over Loathing has a pretty unique take on character classes. They give you a sort of basic skill tree. But on top of that, you learn most combat abilities and a wide range of other perks from finding books. In addition, pretty much everything gives you experience points to spend.

Combat itself is a bit of a mishmash. It’s turn based, but you have action points to use for certain secondary actions, and you can use a given number per round in addition to that. Enemies can also be tabbed to see who and what they’re attacking, meaning the game is more of a puzzle to be solved than a DPS check or gear check.

Also, there are a lot of items, and switching them up is often necessary. How many items, you ask? Well, this is a screen of half of my hats.

And while we’re speaking about inventory, here’s a list of all my shoes.

I should note: shoes don’t appear to have a mechanical impact on the game, they just change your walk animation and play weird sound effects based on what you have equipped. But they’re still given an entire inventory slot. This fact is never noted or elaborated on in game once, and it’s a pretty good example of the tone of the humor in Shadows Over Loathing.

Final Verdict

I generally liked Shadows Over Loathing. I don’t strongly recommend it or dislike it. It’s weirdly novel, and I found it quite funny and clever, but it wasn’t earthshattering. It was a much better use of my time than Knuckle Sandwich to be sure. I do want to give it credit for a fantastic Steam Deck implementation.

If you want a funny and strange RPG/Adventure Game hybrid that will only require looking at a walkthrough 3-4 times, then I’d say Shadows Over Loathing might be right up your alley. It’s $23 on Steam and for the 15-20 hours I played, that feels about right.