Category: Uncategorized

SIGIL

I like bubblegum. I like cereal. I like a hearty stew.

That doesn’t mean I want to mix all of them together and eat the result. I have a similar problem with SIGIL.

Sigil (full name SIGIL – Magical GPS Action RPG), is a single player alternate reality game. Players walk around in the real world to move in-game. Combat is real time, and takes place on a large grid, involving casting spells, and trying to avoid the enemies spells. There’s a tone of whimsy in the design and theming of the enemies, which is a nice change from every mobile game being themed around nude anime girls.

All of which is to say, I’d really like to recommend it. But I’m just not having enough fun with it, and there are some real pain points.

First up, exploration. You can only interact with items in an 150m radius of your player character, and there are a fairly limited amount of things to do. In theory, that’s when you get up and walk around. But unlike Pokemon Go, or Orna, SIGIL doesn’t let you see far away from you, or a map.

This makes it hard to set goals, or to target specific items or enemies to fight. If there’s some sort of system for how enemies and harvestable items are spawned, the game does not explain it, and I have not been able to figure it out just by looking. The game also doesn’t have an in-game map that underlays the interactable objects. This means that the only way to get more stuff is to just go out, and walk around.

This brings us to the second big mechanic: Combat.

Sigil has a grid based real time combat system that feels really interesting. The game starts you out with a single long range attack and block, but there are unlockable spells to summon minions, walls to block to block projectiles, and spells that require you to charge. You do all this while moving around, trying to stand in specific locations on the grid to get buffs, and pick up “Mana” that boosts your resource pool for the fight you’re in.

I have a few problems with the combat, but none of them are directly with the combat mechanics. Instead they’re all parallel problems. First off, you can’t play combat passively at all. You have to be actively engaged, moving around, attacking and blocking at all times.

Which is fine. That’s how video games are supposed to work. The problem is that with most video games, I’m not playing them while also trying to avoid walking directly into the path of an oncoming semi-truck.

The other issue with combat is the performance. I have a relatively new iPhone, and on the lowest settings, the game just sort of chugs along, occasionally lagging, and in one instance straight crashing.

My last painpoint is with the resources themselves. There is no easy way of figuring out how to get most things. One critical resource that’s used in every single hex craft, or hex upgrade, I straight up never found.

Instead, I went and bought it from the game premium currency shop, because of course it has a premium currency shop. It also has ads you can watch after combat to double your rewards bonus. This to me is almost more egregious, because, remember, this is an augmented reality game. You seriously want me to spend data streaming and watching an ad while I’m walking around outside?

You know what screams victory to me? Being told that if I watch an ad of someone screeching at a slot machine, I could get double rewards!

SIGIL is somehow less than the sum of its parts. It has a beautiful weird Tim Burton-esque world I actually would like to know more about, instead of being the typical mobile “Wow, you’re in a world where you need to collect girls who are an anthropomorphic personification of rocks/trains/boats/the subconscious desire to be loved.” It has a strong and unique combat system.

But the combat doesn’t work with the augmented reality, the crafting feels incredibly grindy, and typical mobile garbage rears its ugly head early, and doesn’t put it down.

Buying Lottery Tickets is a Stupid Business Model

or Why Do You All Keep Making Live Service Games?

A Fritz Rant

Imagine that I come to you with an incredible idea for a business: buying lottery tickets. You are skeptical at first, but I make the following argument. We’ll only do it for a little bit. If it doesn’t turn out to be profitable, we’ll stop doing it, after a few months.

Oh, except instead of just going to a convenience store and buying Mega-Millions, I’m going to need you to get me a team of artists, programmers, a full QA team, and a publisher, because we’re not going to be buying lottery tickets, we’re going to be making live service games. So I guess in this metaphor, our lottery tickets take likely several hundred thousand dollars, and maybe a year or two to buy.

Let’s look at a few of those tickets shall we?

GUNDAM EVOLUTION just announced its end of service. Also, a bit ago, MultiVersus ended its beta, with a promise to return in 2024. These aren’t the only games, but they’re recent examples. CrimeSight was a paid game, and it was a brilliant deduction game with incredibly clever mechanics that never found a playerbase, and it shut its servers down. Oh, and The Cycle: Frontier, while it sucked, was a good example of this thing we’re talking about, so I guess I’ll include anyway.

As an outside observer, I don’t have perfect insight into what’s going on here, but I can make a guess. If I was in games purely for the money, I get why everyone would want a League of Legends, or an FGO, or a Genshin Impact. It’s tempting! And perhaps even the math makes sense. Maybe if you buy enough tickets, this all works out in the end.

But I can’t help but look at all of this and be mildly depressed. Thousands of man-hours, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and tons of effort is being spent on creating games that sometimes don’t even last a year.

And many of these games are good, when you peel back the endless daily quests, in app purchases, and optional addons that cost $30 a piece. They have their own communities and player base, but because they don’t become a massive hit, they get shut down.

It’s depressing to me that video games feel like they’re switching from something like a book, where you can have a cult classic that gets discovered years later, to something more akin to software as a service, where when it’s gone, it’s just gone.

Anyway, rant over. More games to come.

Pour One Out 2022 – Dead Games Recap

Another year gone, another set of live service games consigned to dust. Last time we had one of these posts was 2020. Probably should have done one for 2021, but eh.

There’s no hard and fast rule to be included/not included on this list, but generally speaking, being a “Dead gaem” with low player base is not enough. There has to have been some form of termination of service, be it eternal life support, or just yanking the plug.

Anyway, in memorium.

Dragalia Lost

Published by Nintendo and developed by CyGames, Dragalia Lost was a mobile game for iOS and Android. It was released in 2018, and now, just four years later, it’s been shut down/being shut down. Look, I expect this post to go up at the end of the year, but I’m writing this specific summary in March. So chronology is a bit difficult. Regardless, I played for a bit a while back, and I’d say it was a pretty good game all things considered. It’s certainly better then a lot of mobile trash.

Tera

Tera was an MMO, developed by Bluehole Studios. It’s got a bit of a better track record, lasting just about 10 years since release, but it’s still going/gone as of the 30th of June, 2022. I never played it, but I saw folks play it and praise it for it’s combat systems. Don’t know too much else about it though.

Spellbreak

I never played Spellbreak, or saw anyone play it. It was a battle royale in an already crowded genre, that apparently never really took off. However, the Spellbreak team has moved onto working for Actiblizz, so… I guess they have that?

Sort of.

Look, being employed > being unemployed, but ActiBlizz is a shithole company that can burn for all I care.

Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD

I’d like to congratulate Ubisoft on somehow finding a way to sunset a singleplayer, offline, game.

Babylon’s Fall

What do you get when you have a developer primarily known for making games based around stylish combat and weird stories develop a multiplayer looter grinder? A game that doesn’t even last a full year. It released in February, and Square Enix announced they’re pulling the plug. It might actually be the shortest lived game on this list.

Killer Queen Black

FUCKKKKKKKK WHY.

I’m going to be honest. Like many of my rants, I write lists like this to dunk on trends and design patterns I don’t like in games. Haha, lets make fun of the short lifespan of mobile gacha! Lets mock live service games that are dead on arrival! Lets point out how pointless it is to trend chase when you’re already late to market.

I like Killer Queen Black though. I bought Killer Queen Black. But no amount of those two things will stop Amazon GameSparks from being sunset, and taking Killer Queen Black with it.

So… yeah. I guess the lesson here is “If you build on any level of proprietary technical infrastructure for your online components, it might just break, and you’ll be hosed.”

Doesn’t really fit on a bumper sticker does it?

Crowfall

Crowfall isn’t dead! They’re just taking the game off temporarily. And making everything free in the cash shop. And “evaluating the current state of Crowfall“. But don’t worry! Just like all those animals you saw on the side of the road as a child, Crowfall is “Just taking a little nap.”

I did a writeup on Crowfall. Honestly, I’m not suprised by this turn of events.

In conclusion

I was going to say that there’s no moral or lesson here, but that’s not actually true: the lesson is that if you make a game with heavy online multiplayer as a component, and the tools to host servers/multiplayer aren’t distributed/available to your player base, that game will die.

Here’s your moral then: Every live service game is in a race with the reaper, and the reaper always wins. It’s just a question of how long that race takes to finish.

Dome Keeper

Dome Keeper is a small and solid game, but didn’t offer enough variety in runs to keep me hooked.

Author’s Note: Not big on reading writeups? Why not just watch me play the game here?

Dome Keeper is a score-attack mashup of Motherload and Space Invaders. I think it’s a good game. I don’t really recommend it, for reasons I’ll get into in a moment. I know it sounds weird to call a game good, and then not recommend it, but I promise it will make sense in a bit.

Anyway, back to Dome Keeper. You have a Dome, which functions as your little base. You venture out from it into the earth to mine minerals. And this dome needs to be Kept. Specifically it needs to be kept from being shattered into a million pieces by various spooky shadow monsters that show up in waves on timed intervals. This is the game’s core tension: mine resources, drag them back to your dome, and try not to get caught at the bottom of the mineshaft right as the next wave comes in to smash it.

You defend the dome with its weapon systems. There are two dome weapon base sets, the Laser Dome, and the Sword Dome. The Laser dome plays somewhat like a turret defense game. You have a big laser, you can rotate it alongside the outside of your dome, and you press another button to fire. The laser moves slower when fired, so it’s faster to move it into position, and then fire the beam. It has various upgrades, including moving the laser head faster, having the laser deal more damage, etc. Honestly, outside of a double laser upgrade, there’s nothing very exciting.

The Sword Dome is unlocked later. Instead of having a projectile weapon, it has a large sword that can be swung back and forth across the dome. It can also be launched like a harpoon to skewer long ranged projectile using enemies, or even to just tap melee enemies a bit before they reach the dome.

Personally, I very much think the game was designed with the sword dome in mind instead of the laser dome. Certain enemy behaviors and patterns interact in a much more interesting way with the sword than with the laser. As an example, one of the earlier enemies is a small bat-like creature. It flies onto the screen cloaked and unable to be hit, flies to an area on either the left or right of the screen, uncloaks, shoots a few projectiles, then recloaks and flies to the other side. Rinse repeat.

With the Sword Dome, there’s an element of skill to this. It takes the same amount of time to uncloak every time, and you can one shot it once you get a damage upgrade. There’s a sort of elegance to predicting where it’s going to be, pre-launching the sword, and steering it into the bat right as it uncloaks.

Another good example can be seen in the later game enemy, the launcher. It’s a large blobby snake that swarms out of the ground, waits for a moment, and then launches a large shadow projectile through the air. With the laser, there’s no real option other than to just blast it down. But hitting it with the sword before it launches the projectile will stagger it and force it back down into the ground.

However, both of these have the same problem. Despite having multiple options for upgrades and changes, there’s no real reason to experiment during a run. Enemies just show up randomly over time, so instead of building for a certain encounter or fight, it felt better to just do the same build each game, and play through. The end result? The fights kind of just feel all the same. Ramping intensity and difficulty, sure, but not changing how things feel mechanically between runs, unless you choose to take a risk and force it.

That’s only half the game, though. The other entire half is mining and digging for resources from under the dome. If you’ve ever played Motherload, this will feel familiar. If you haven’t, it works like this. The keeper is controlled with cardinal directions and will automatically mine walls and blocks if you walk the keeper into them. Different dirt has different strengths, but as you get deeper, the strength just increases overall. This means that it can be easier to mine deeper into weak dirt than to try to dig out stone at your current level. But generally you’ll need to get upgrades to go much further.

The goal of all of this digging is to get resources, of which there are three. Sulphur, Water, and Iron. Sulphur is the rarest, and is used to repair your dome’s health, and buy a single set of special resistance upgrades. Water is used in small amounts for most non-primary upgrades, i.e., anything that isn’t your shield, weapon, or keeper suit. Iron is used for pretty much everything else.

One thing I haven’t talked about yet is the win condition of Dome Keeper. There are two modes: the primary mode is Relic Hunt, and the secondary is Prestige. Relic Hunt is just a standard “Dig deep, find a special relic, and bring it to the surface to win.” Prestige is the primary mode, and is a score attack mode.

I’m personally of the opinion that Relic Hunt is an extended tutorial. Relic Hunt is relaxed, where Prestige is intended to be the primary game. Which is a bit unfortunate, because I’m personally not interested in Prestige very much. High scores are not particularly motivating to me as a factor, unless the entire game is designed around that as a core component, ala Hazelnut Hex.

In Prestige mode, you get points based on spending resources to increase a score multiplier. Then you get points after each survived wave. So it’s beneficial to spend resources early on increasing the score, at the risk of not spending those resources on upgrades. It is a interesting tension, but it’s not one that I’m very compelled by.

There are a few systems I’ve not covered here, like the semi-random relics and the upgrades they offer, but I think I’ve covered enough of Dome Keeper’s system to explain my problem with it.

Dome Keeper is a good game, but any single run can feel indistinguishable from each other run. There’s only a single unique relic that modifies combat, with every other relic modifying resource acquisition. The end result is a game that felt the same each time I played it. It was interesting, but it wasn’t fascinating, or ever really felt like it scratched the itch of something like Inscryption or Spelunky. It never really forced me into a situation where I had to really rely on an understanding of game mechanics or systems to pilot my way out. Instead, it was just more about “Oh, I should have just done X instead of Y.” There was no adapting, just learning, and some small improvements.

This is why I don’t really feel like recommending it. It’s good! It’s well made, it’s polished, and it has some clever mechanics. But I don’t get that vibe of it being a unique or super rich experience that stuck with me.

Anyway, if you think my opinion is stupid, or you really like games like Motherload, you can find Dome Keeper on Steam for $20.

Author Note 2: I played most of my 20 hours of Dome Keeper before the update that added a second playable character, with a different mining style. It’s a neat update, but I didn’t really like playing the Accessor. It’s also entirely possible that Dome Keeper becomes a much richer games with updates, but that’s not what was available when I bought the game on release day.

Knockout City

Knockout City is an interesting dodgeball brawler that feels hobbled by it’s secondary systems and menus.

The core gameplay of Knockout City is pretty good. I’m not an expert, or even anywhere past the bronze silver rank, but at least for me it feels straightforward and easy to enjoy. Unfortunately the same can’t be said about the non-gameplay elements.

Knockout City is an action-brawler, themed around dodgeball. The game itself is free, but it contains microtransactions. I’ll talk more about those later. The short version is they’re all cosmetic. There are no gameplay advantages you can buy. Anyway, back to the actual game.

There are multiple game modes, including 1v1 and 3v3. I’m going to focus on the 3v3 mode for this writeup, since it’s the gamemode played in ranked.

Core Gameplay

A game of Knockout City consists of two teams playing to best of 3 rounds. Each round is first to 10 points. You get a point whenever an opposing player is knocked out. This can be from them falling off a ledge, being hit by an obstacle, or running out of health from being smacked with dodgeballs.

Dodgeballs are the heart of Knockout City. It is, after all, a dodgeball game. They’re scattered around the arena. You can run over them to pick them up, and tossing them requires you to charge. They’re not really physics projectiles. Instead, they lock onto the target you’re focused at, and will head toward that target. There are three throw patterns, a straight shot, a lob, and shot that can be curved around walls. These throws are executed by tapping the input keys as part of a double jump.

On the flip side, if you’re having a dodgeball thrown at you, all you need to do is hit right click right before it impacts you while facing the ball to catch it. You can then throw it back immediately if you want.

While it might seem like this would lead to an infinite Zelda boss fight situation of launching projectiles back and fourth forever, let me introduce the intensity mechanic. Intensity is built on a ball by readying a throw, and also when balls are caught. Higher intensity balls travel faster. The ball will move quicker and quicker with each toss and catch, preventing you from getting stuck n a loop.

There are a bunch of other clever mechanics as well. You and your teammate can’t find a dodgeball? You can roll up and get passed the ball by your teammate. The inputs for choosing throw type also function as a double jump. KO City keeps things fresh by randomly selecting a special dodgeball each map. These range from balls like the moonball, which lets you jump extra high while carrying it, to the pinball style multi-ball, which lets you carry three balls at once. You can also fake throw, pass to teammates with a single button, and just generally the movement feels very good.

I think that gives a decent overview of the game’s general vibe, but really the best way to understand Knockout City is to play it.

The Not-Gameplay

While we’re here, let’s talk about monetization. There’s a lot of stuff for sale in Knockout City, but none of it impacts actual gameplay so I don’t care. Yes, there’s a battle-pass. Yes, there are multiple forms of currency. Yes, there’s daily quests, and normal quests, and I guess there’s a difference?

Frankly, while Knockout City does have an interesting sort of holographic projection 1920’s art design, I don’t like the art. There’s character customization. I ended up making my character look like this. I think it accurately conveys how much I care about the game’s aesthetics.

None of this relates to my primary issues with Knockout City though. My primary issue with Knockout City is… the menus and the clutter. That probably sounds stupid, but let me explain.

Knockout City just feels like it has a massive amount of downtime. Lots of your time is spent not playing Knockout City. After launching the game after an update, the game has to boot, update again (no, I don’t know why), close, and be relaunched. I decided to time how long it would take me to get into a game, and it takes just under a minute for the game to start up, click through the in-game announcements, and finally get into the hub.

Except you can’t play from the hub, instead you need to open the menu back up, select the “Play” option, pick your match type, and actually queue. After queuing, the match actually starting can take about 30 seconds. You want to quit the game? The menu option sort of shows up greyed out, but you can still click it.

There’s a lot of dead space, and dead time that splits up all the actual action, and makes it feel like a bit of a chore to keep playing. Even the matches have a one minute timer before they even start looking for another match, and this can’t be skipped. I’d understand if this was a COD style game with loadouts or a continual lobby, but neither of those exist here.

Overall I like Knockout City, but the game doesn’t do itself any favors with any of the small features. I feel like it’s best enjoyed as a game where you get a stack of friends, and all just goof off. That way you have folks to talk to or chat with during the downtime.

Knockout City is free on Steam, and also probably Epic, but I’m not going to check.