Wrath: Aeon of Ruin

Wrath is good, but it’s not finished. You should wait to buy it for now.

Editorial Note: The images in this article I grabbed from the Steam Page. Usually I take my own screenshots, because independence and other stuff, but I had some difficultly with that, and honestly, the screenshots are accurate. But I don’t want to give the impression that I got all these photos myself.

I really like Wrath: Aeon of Ruin. It gives me a wonderful sense of nostalgia for an era of games that I never actually played, that of the old Doom/Quake/Duke Nukem Era. It might be because you will spend most of the game strafing around gothic corridors with a bunch of weapons. It might be because you will use those weapons against monsters that look like they were pulled from a fire sale at low-poly Lovecraft R Us.

The screaming head dudes with multiple faces are legit fucking terrifying.

And it might be because it was actually built on the old Quake engine. I had a ton of fun playing it, which makes me feel a bit bad about what I’m going to say: Even if this is a genre you love, I don’t think you should buy Wrath yet.

My recommendation doesn’t actually have anything to do with the gameplay itself (despite the fact that I definitely have a few gripes with some of the game’s systems), but instead with the fact that the game simply isn’t finished. There are only four levels, and while they’re good and polished, they only took me about 8 hours to play through on the medium difficulty. I actually delayed this write-up a bit because another update was supposed to come out a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, it just got pushed back to this month… so yeah. While I’m sure they intend to do their best to keep their promise, it may be a while before the game ends up in its final state, and as such, I think you can wait on this one. If you’re reading this article after the summer of 2021, you should probably check to see if it’s fully out, as that’s the current estimate for its release date.

Okay, so with that whole thing out of the way, let’s talk about the other simple truth of the game: I had a lot of fun with Wrath. It’s well polished, and very smoothly executed. It’s just fun to run around shotgunning demons and pulping zombies with a stake cannon. I played Wrath because the gameplay was fun. There was no point where I found myself pushing through a boring bit to get back to the story (there really isn’t one right now) or grinding for numbers. Wrath has more or less zero filler.

This doesn’t mean Wrath is perfect by any means. I have some problems, so let’s talk about them.

First of all, while the game is really fun, if you want to actually replay a level, you need to make a brand new save file. There’s no option to just reload a given level, or to skip to a certain point with weapons unlocked. This is annoying. The second part, that wasn’t super frustrating for me mostly because I was playing on the medium difficulty, is the save system. Wrath lets you save by either reaching a checkpoint, or by using an item called a Soul Tether, which you find and pick up as you play through the game. You have a limited number of these, and while this limit caused me zero problems on the medium difficulty, I can see it becoming frustrating super fast on the harder difficulties. Wrath is in some ways a puzzle game of “Connect The Bullets With The Enemies” and it’s entirely possible to get through a section of the game you’ve already solved, only to die over and over again in a specific area. This means you end up replaying the same parts a lot, and if you’re trying to conserve soul tethers, it can take like five minutes to get back to the point you were at previously, just to get another try at something.

Walking in a winter murder landdddddddd

These were my two main problems with the game. Wrath is fun, the levels are well made, and outside of a slight overreliance on “You touched a button, now we’re gonna spawn in 10 enemies in your blindspot” the game doesn’t really have any patterns that are frustrating. I honestly expected to be seeing the same levels over and over again, but the actual layout and design is quite varied.

So yeah. Wrath is fun, but currently it’s not finished, and it’s rather short. I have some gripes with the save system, and how you can’t replay levels, but outside of that, I’m excited to see what the full game looks like. If it maintains the level of polish and creativity that I’ve seen so far, it will easily be worth the $20-30 price tag I expect to see on it.

2020 Wrap Up, and Future Plans For Gametrodon

As we approach the end of the year, it seems like a good time to look back at what Gametrodon has been so far, and give a few thoughts on its future.

I don’t think 2020 has turned out to be anything like what any of us were expecting. When I started this blog, it was after returning from my first planned convention visit of the year, PAX East, which would end up being my only convention of the year, and one of the very few conventions to not be canceled.

Both of my reasons for starting Gametrodon were related to PAX, and the current culture of how gaming news gets processed.

Reason 1 is pretty simple: I want a press pass. I’m tired of paying full price to attend a convention, wait in line, go to the expo floor, only to be told “Oh, press booth only” and then watch as not a single god damn soul walks by that area for twenty minutes. Like, for fucks sake. Let me use that computer. Let me see your game. As long as this culture of the “Content Creator” continues to favor anyone who can shit out a 10 minute video of themselves making faces at the camera interspersed with still frames, I intend to ride its coattails as far as I feasibly can. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

Reason 2 is also pretty simple: Finding cool games to play has become far too difficult, and I want to help try to solve that. Where I once learned about new games from my friends, these days they seem to just be talking about games I already know.

While this runs the risk of me becoming the gaming equivalent of the friend who won’t drink white wine with fish, and thinks that “Electro swing was better before it got popular,” that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

So, if these were the two aims of Gametrodon, how did we do on them in 2020?

In terms of the whole “Cosplaying as a game journalist” thing, I think I did pretty well. I interviewed Max from Resonym on the costs of Kickstarter, and we talked to Jeremy Choo from Ammobox about how their publisher tried to steal their game. I played the shit out of the demos from PAX East, and found a few things worth keeping an eye on.

That part went great! Let’s talk about the other part: Serving as a source of finding neat, undiscovered stuff that might not show up in other channels.

This one I think I can do better on. Let me explain why.

Right now, Gametrodon is set up like a traditional blog. This is great for my rambling rants on various games, but not great for discovery. I’ve also noticed a few other things about how I write my articles that I want to try to change.

The main problem is that the blog doesn’t necessarily structure itself in a way that leads to discovery of the neat things I found. It’s also much harder and takes longer for me to write about games I like, rather than ones I dislike.

As an example, the Didn’t Make The Cut articles require me to play each game for about an hour. After an hour of any specific thing, I feel like I know if I want to play more. Longer form articles about game I actually enjoy lead to me either wanting to complete the game before evaluating it, or “win” based on the structure of the game.

My plan in the short term to try to deal with this is to switch over to writing three types of articles:

  1. Games I play and like. These get their own full article with nice glossy screenshots, and me ranting about their systems, links to their Steam pages, tweets, parades, public executions. The full nine yards. I think I may have switched events somewhere in that, but whatever.
    Ed Thought: Why is the phrase the full 9 yards, when it’s 10 yards for a first down?
    Ed Note: Okay, so after looking up the phrase, it looks like it has nothing to do with American Football. The more you know.
  2. Games I play and don’t like. No more full articles doing what Vonnegut once called “Putting on full armor to attack a fudge Sundae.” instead I’m gonna try to switch over to a maximum of one “Didn’t Make The Cut” per week, with everything I’ve played and dropped since the last week. Just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean its bad, but it also means I’d rather spend that time on things I like. I’m gonna try to put these up on Mondays.
  3. Weekly Wrap-ups/What we’re playing. These are gonna consist of the most traditional bloggy sorts of posts, in which I’ll write about whatever I please. This will most likely be whatever I’ve been playing, what my friends have been playing, and what we’re planning to play. These will go up on Fridays.

I don’t think that this will be enough on it’s own, so I’m still brainstorming some ways to make it easier to find the links to the games I do like, and do recommend, like a “Random Good Game” button or something, but that will be coming in the future.

So yeah. That’s the plan for 2020. To all of the friends who I roped into writing articles, thanks for contributing. And to all my reader, here’s to hoping that when I write this article next year, I can confidently write that as readers.

Who knows, by the end of 2021, I may even have as many as three people who read this garbage.

Pour One Out – 2020 Edition

I was browsing through my Steam library today trying to find a game to play with a parent, when something caught my eye. It was a notice that a game was closing down. So I’ve decided to collect a few games that didn’t make it through the year, and just note them here.

I also want to stress that to anyone reading this in the future, I don’t want you to think that I somehow believe the loss of these games is equivalent or comparable to the loss of human life involved in 2020. Frankly, I was debating even putting this post up. But anyway…

MisBits

After releasing earlier this year, and after I played it at PAX East, Misbits shut down on August 14th. The final dev posts note that it never hit the population needed to sustain it, and as such, it had to be removed. Still, it’s sad to see how quickly some projects close down.

Duelyst

It was fun, interesting, and different. And it survived a few years. Ironically, both Duelyst and Gigantic, games that Penny Arcade seemed to like a bunch both are dead at this point. I’d say it’s a shame. Duelyst was different.

I’m sure there are other things that ended this year, but I haven’t found any that I played or cared about a ton. In any case, it’s a bitter reminder that all live-service games will eventually shut down, and if game doesn’t support player-hosted servers, the game most likely with never be seen again.

Happy 2020.


Didn’t Make The Cut – 12.25.2020

I spent part of this weekend in what I have come to think of as a public service, pruning and hacking my way through through the massive glut of games that is itch.io Racial Justice Bundle. While some might devote this time of year to giving to the needy, feeding the hungry, and other such charitable pursuits, I stayed home and played video games.

Phrased like that, it seems slightly less heroic doesn’t it? Hmm. In any case, here are 3 of the things I played this weekend, and links to the incredibly high quality stream in which I played them. These are all games that didn’t grab me enough for me to really want to continue playing them past around an hour, and I also don’t have enough to say about them to write a full article. So here we gooooo.

Catlateral Damage

In Catlateral Damage, you are a cat, and you must destroy as much stuff as possible within the time limit. You can jump, and you can bat things left and right. And that’s it. That’s the entire game. It’s a cute concept, but it doesn’t feel super well executed. The controls are fairly floaty, and the things you whack around don’t feel like they have much weight to them. Personally, I also really dislike the art. I think these cats are incredibly ugly… and yeah. The game just didn’t feel great, or look good, so I did a single run playthrough and then called it a day for this one. It’s short and chaotic, but I didn’t find it particularly satisfying or fun to play.

From Orbit

If you told me that From Orbit was an early access game, I would believe you. In fact, after writing that sentence, I went and checked to see if it was on Steam, and it is, but it isn’t early access. Where Catlateral Damage has an interesting premise, From Orbit feels like it got to the next stage of making a good game, which was having interesting mechanics. But it kind of falls apart there because then they didn’t really make anymore game. For example, the idea of having your workers being able to shift form based on what you want to use them for is cool! But then it sorta falls apart.

My biggest gripe, though, has to be that you can only have 4 units (5 if you count the spaceship which you can’t actually control), which is strange for a game that bills itself as an RTS. By this standard, playing as Meepo is an RTS.

My other big gripe is that the resources you gather on a given planet are also the resources you use to buy upgrades to improve your dudes, ship, and unlock abilities. So yeah, you could build a auto-miner, if you’re willing to lose 60% of the haul from a planet, or you could just do the whole thing manually. Oh, and the enemies you face are dumb as bricks. (I do like the flashing red outline you get for your units letting you know they’ve pulled agro.)

Everything else I can gripe about with the game is pretty small. The game doesn’t follow standard RTS controls schemes, you can’t queue commands, you can’t make control groups, attempting to select a unit automatically centers the camera on it, even if what you wanted to do was move it where you were looking BEFORE you selected it.

The stream is here, and the itch.io page is here.

Quiet As A Stone

I have a link to the stream of playing Quiet As A Stone here. I say “Playing” but honestly, “interacting with” might be a more accurate summary. My notes for the game have the following:

  • Experimental Photography Simulator
  • Rather Pretty
  • More like playing with actual rocks thana game

Here are some screenshots of Cragthor the Mountain Titan, the only thing I really did in the game before getting bored and quitting it.

Behold his majesty.

I have a few more games I’d like to do writeups for before the end of the year, so keep an eye out for those. One of them might be Depth of Extinction, which is this neat procedural XCOM/FTL style thing.

I’ve linked the names of the games up above, so if one of these looks like your cup of tea, you should go take a look. At the time of writing, I think From Orbit is actually free.

News of the Week

Another week closer to the end of this hellish year, and it’s actually been a pretty interesting one. I’m not really sure where to start with this quick recap, but I suppose Cyberpunk, being one of the biggest releases of the year, is a good enough place.

So yeah, Cyberpunk is finally out, and apparently it’s pretty shit. The two or three people I know who have been playing it have called it “Fine,” which isn’t really what you want to be hearing. Playstation has just straight up pulled it from sale, which is a bit of a “Holy fucking shit” moment, but given that I’ve heard the framerate described as “Less than cinematic,” makes sense. Oh, and in the time I started writing this, Microsoft has now expanded their refund policy for the game. And Best Buy is just letting you return opened copies.

Just in case CD Projekt Red didn’t have enough bad publicity, a re-release of Devotion was going to open on GOG, only for them to bend over backwards to big daddy Xi Jinping. I really love how other articles are calling the game “Controversial” when the only controversy is making a joke about him looking like Winnie the Pooh.

Also in the incredible fight against dangerous things like thought, Twitch has banned the words simp, virgin, and incel. Incredible. It reminds me of when we won WW2 by banning the term Nazi from being printed in newspapers, and saved the free world. I think they’d be better off banning some of the shitfuckers on their site who constantly flout their policies, but whatever.

So what did I do aside from work?

I played a decent amount of Wrath: Aeon of Ruin, and I was planning to do a writeup on that, but it looks like another level might come out next week on the 22nd, so I’m gonna hold off for a bit. Late night existential stream of that is here.

I’ve been too worn out to play more Amazing Cultivation Simulator, but I’m planning to stream some more. Last weekend’s stream of that is here. And I tried Sea of Thieves, but after playing an hour, it really looks like you need multiple people to really play it, so I’m holding out for some more folks to get it.

Until next time.