Author’s Note:Between various things, this week has been long and not entirely productive. As such, this writeup for Peggle is somewhat phoned in. With that said, Peggle and the two games I mentioned yesterday are worth playing, but this writeup is somewhat content light.
I have a hard time writing a “review” of Peggle for the same reason I’d have a hard time writing a review of a jar of Peanut Butter. There’s a lot similarities between the two, mostly the fact that if you place either of them in front of me, leave, and then return several hours you will discover that I have consumed the entire thing, and upon asking for my opinion, I will respond with “It was pretty good,” and “Do you have any more?”
The point is, like peanut butter, I like Peggle, and I enjoy it, but I can’t quite tell you why. That won’t stop me from trying.
Some brief history: Peggle was published by PopCap games, back before they acquired by EA. I mention this not because “Ah, yes, the good old days” but more to give a sense of time, since that was back in 2007 when you could do exciting things like eat in restaurants. And also because the maximum resolution supported is not high.
This image of the menu is maybe 80% to scale.
So, if you expect things like “adjustable resolution” and “performance sliders” you may be about to have a bad time. Otherwise, let’s continue.
You might notice that this review has two games in the title, Peggle Deluxe, and Peggle Nights. And you might wonder why I feel confident in reviewing two games at once, and the answer is simple: Peggle Nights is effectively just an addon pack for Peggle Deluxe. Peggle Nights has new levels to play, and one new character. And that’s it.
The game has a variety of modes, including Adventure, which has you play through a series of levels as a character, duels, where you take turns with another player or a computer trying to get a high score, various challenges, and just a freeplay mode.
Outside of the challenge mode, though, the various levels play somewhat similarly. You click to launch balls, and they bounce around hitting pegs.
Green pegs give you a boost based on the character you’re playing, blue pegs give points, and the goal is to get rid of all the orange pegs. If you score above a certain amount of points, you get an extra ball, and if you get the ball to land in the pot at the bottom, you also get an extra ball.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’m just gonna post this GIF and call it a day, since that has to be worth at least several thousand more pictures.
Peggle is simple, enjoyable, and it’s incredibly compelling to going for a high score in a level, or to just try to beat it for the first time in adventure mode. It’s the same sort of pleasure as things like pinball, where it feels like a combination of skill and also just being at the mercy of the board, and as such you just keep playing.
Peggle is something like 15 years old at this point, but you can still find it on Steam and various EA stores if you’re interested, and I am out of effort to continue writing about it, so I’m just gonna end this post here.
I’m going to be honest. I chose to play through HuniePop purely to flex on a friend who thought that the game was “Too hard” and that “Most people couldn’t beat the first level.” For reference, this friend has beaten all three Dark Souls games, so my first impression was that they just really, really sucked at puzzle games.
Having now actually finished the game, I have to admit it was not as easy as I was expecting. But I still beat it, so suck it Kyle. Anyway, HuniePop!
HuniePop is sort of combination of dating simulator and match 3 puzzle game. I have some issues with the game’s implementation of both of these mechanics. But credit where it’s due, it did make me realize that I was about to forget a girlfriend’s birthday for the second year in a row. More on that in a moment.
Anyway, after a brief tutorial and introduction to the game’s mechanics by a sex fairy, you’re given a magic phone that that will let you locate girls you encounter and also show you information about how much they like you.
Hmmm… when you put it that way, it’s kinda creepy. Like, it’ll show you if they’re asleep, but you can’t go visit them or talk to them if they’re not already in a somewhat public place? I dunno. Anyway, that brings us to the first of the two main gameplay loops.
While HuniePop advertises itself as a match 3 game, there’s also a large portion of it that functions as a sort of memory game. Here’s how it works. After the tutorial, you’ll start off the first day, and you’ll go around talking to girls. There are four time blocks in a day, and the game progresses to the next time block when you choose to go talk to a different girl. These blocks are Morning, Noon, Evening and Night, and with some small difference for Evening and Night, they all function pretty much the same.
While you’re interacting with one of the girls, there are five actions you can take. You can buy her food, which increases the food meter, you can offer her a drink, which she generally won’t actually take you up on unless it’s already much later in the day, you can give her a present, or you can just chat with her. Food, alcohol, and gifts all cost Munie, one of the game’s two currencies, that you get by successfully completing dates (Editor’s note: just like in real life). Chatting with a girl gives you a small amount of Hunie, the game’s other currency, but lowers her food meter. Chatting is actually a fairly large portion of the gameplay loop, and she’ll either tell you something about herself, such as birthday, favorite season, etc., or she’ll ask you to remember something she’s told you previously. Getting these questions correct rewards you with extra Hunie, which is used to upgrade your stats, and increase the value of various tokens in the match 3 portion of the game.
It’s worth noting that none of these things actually make her like you any more.
In order to get her to like you more, you have to go on a successful date, and this is the match 3 part of HuniePop.
This is where HuniePop has some differences in genre from most other match 3 games. There are 5 different types of symbols, which each have a different mechanical effect:
Talent/Flirtation/Romance/Sexuality – These are the four symbols that build your affection meter. You need to fill this meter before you run out of turns to successfully complete the date. They’re the circular symbols in the image above. Each girl has a like, and a dislike. Matching the symbols they like will net you more affection, matching the symbols they dislike generally net you less. The other two types will just give a base amount.
Passion – The heart shaped symbols. Matching passion symbols boosts your passion level. Higher passion level gives you a multiple on the amount of affection earned from the four symbols mentioned above.
Sentiment – Sentiment tokens are the small teardrop cyan tokens. They give you energy in order to use your “Date Gifts” which are activated abilities. Abilities can range from permanently increasing the spawn rate of certain tokens for the rest of the date, to removing all tokens of one type from the board, to just replacing all tokens of one type with another.
The Bells I Can’t Remember The Name Of – They’re the bell shaped ones. You match these to get an extra turn.
Broken Hearts – If you match broken hearts, you will lose a large portion of your affection meter. You don’t want to do this.
I think this single gif is responsible for 90% of the bandwidth usage on this site…
While these mechanics are interesting, I have two big problems with them. The first one is how Broken Hearts feel to play with. Because you’ll try to avoid matching them, you’ll find yourself often with a very clogged board state, and it can be easy to have new tokens fall into the board, and set off broken heart chains. It’s frustrating, and it takes away some of the fun I’ve always had with match 3 games: trying to set up ridiculously long combos.
My second problem is a design decision that was made regarding how matches work. If you make a match that includes a set of 3 orbs going up, and 3 orbs over, in a sort of a L shape, with one shared orb in the corner, the game does not count this as a match of 5 orbs. In fact, it won’t count two of the orbs at all. It will just remove the highest match of three and remove the other two. It makes it much harder to set up certain combos. I just don’t understand why they made this choice.
So why do I think that this is a design decision? Well, if you successfully date a girl enough to get her to want to come home and fuck you, there’s a secondary mini-game version of the match 3 puzzle where you have unlimited moves and in that part of the game the L pattern does count as a full match.
Speaking of which, I think it’s time to briefly cover the “Adult Content” that’s present in HuniePop. There is… surprisingly little of it honestly. It’s there, but outside of some bare breasts, and six or so images, nothing ever reaches past the level of “Hot Babe Calendar.” It’s suggestive, but except for the aforementioned, not really explicit.
Overall, HuniePop is decent. It’s not amazing in any sense, but I did find myself continuing to play it, and trying to to beat it. The difficultly curve is a bit weird, with some unusual spikes, and there were a few challenging points. It’s better than I was expecting, and if it wasn’t for the pattern mechanics and Broken Hearts, I think I would have had a fair amount of fun with it.
HuniePop is available on Steam, and also GoG (You’ll need to be logged on Steam to see it though, because ADULT CONTENT). If you want to hit on anime girls and see breasts while also playing a weirdly difficult match 3, this might be the game for you. If you’ve got no interest in the game’s erotic theming, though, you’d likely be better off with another puzzle game. (I would personally suggested Beglitched!)
A unique Co-op First Person Shooter with Roguelite Deck Building for progression, with modernized Left 4 Dead-esque gameplay, and Counter-Strike-esque Item Shop by Turtle Rock Studios (TRS).
Author Note: I’ve played a lot of zombie shooters, including World War Z, Call of Duty Zombies, Zombie Army 4, State of Decay 2, and of course Left 4 Dead 1 and 2. As you might guess, I kinda like the genre.
If you’ve never played a zombie shooter before, the general gameplay loop is something like the following: you and several of your friends are dropped into the start of the level. You’re given guns, a few medkits, and “Good Luck!” and tossed out into the apocalypse. You start in some form of safe area, and your goal is to get to another safe area. Along the way, you’ll be attacked by wave after wave of zombies who want to get their hands on your delicious face meat. Different entries in the genre handle things like when waves of zombies spawn, special super zombies, ammo, and importance of individual performance vs teamwork differently. Groundwork set, so lets talk about Back 4 Blood.
Back 4 Blood is the most polarizing zombie shooter I’ve played. I can attest that you will either love it or hate it. At launch it had a lot of problems with bugs and difficulty scaling; however the current patch fixed most issues. As such, I will be judging the game in its current form as of the Dec. 17th update.
Technically, Back 4 Blood offers two different game modes. There are co-op campaigns through 4 different acts, as well as a PVP mode called Swarm Mode. I think Swarm Mode is an awful experience. If you’re looking for PVP look elsewhere. This game ain’t it. The rest of this paragraph is going to be a short list of why it sucks, but then we’re gonna just ignore it for the rest of the article. Swarm mode suffers from too much downtime between rounds, small map size, and frequent disconnects from either side due to just not being fun.
The PvE experience however is great. It offers high replayability with enormous build diversity and almost infinite skill ceiling in that you can always learn a new thing or two every time you play.
The game offers three difficulties: Recruit, Veteran, and Nightmare. Compared to other games’ difficulties these are comparable to Normal, Hard, and Insane. Nightmare is substantially harder than Veteran. The general progression path for all players is that you complete all missions through Recruit, then grind Veteran until you have enough progression unlocked to handle Nightmare difficulty. The main differences between the modes are the typical numeric difficulty scaling. Enemies hit harder, have more health, and more of them. The only big difference between them though is corruption card system.
Corruption cards add modifiers to change up attack patterns or defenses of the zombies. This can include the zombies getting armored plating to negate bullets, having no weak points, or auras to buff allies around them. This adds a lot of variety to the missions. You can go through the same mission, but have a vastly different experience based on what the AI director through against you with this Corruption card system. It could be common zombies explode on headshot for acid damage, which would incentivize more area of effect weapons like Molotov’s or barbed wire to slow them. Of couse, the AI isn’t the only one who gets neat cards. Back 4 Bloods biggest twist on the genre is its Deck System.
To build a deck, a player selects up to 15 cards to put into one, names it, then selects it and a character at the start of a level when joining a game. Order of cards matters in your deck. Your first card you will always have, but the order you pick from then on is somewhat flexible. For example on the first mission of act 1, you start with your first card but then you get a choice from one of your cards in order of 2 through 6.
This allows you to build the deck in such a way where you can put cards in to counter certain corruption card modifiers on your current run. For example, there are quite a few corruption cards that reduce line of sight via fog, toxic gas, or lack of lights; you can counter this with the card “Marked for Death” which allows you to highlight a red outline of special ridden while multiplying the damage your team does to them by 10%. No one player however can cover all contingencies; but a team can. There are lots of different strategies to deck-building because you can try to create a jack of all trades that can react well to everything, or you can go hyper specialized. The Deck System is complex because most games don’t offer this level of choice in customizing your character in a co-op shooter. You can make hyper specialized character roles, like melee, healer, reviver, sniper, loot find builds, grenadier, etc. or a hybrid between them. Each of the characters has a unique card (see above) which generally provides a unique buff to them as well as a buff to the team such as move speed or extra lives, etc. All characters are viable and usually have unique roles they best excel at. Depending on the campaign you start with a different amount of cards(see below), but you always gain 1 card per level from your deck.
I’m uncertain what is “optimal” but I can confirm that most cards are viable in some build up to veteran difficulty. Once you get to nightmare difficulty I’d say it is reduced to around 20% of the cards.
You get more cards for your deck by unlocking supply lines with supply points. You get supply points from completing missions. The top supply line is mostly damage cards, middle supply line is mostly support cards, while the bottom supply line is melee/utility/copper find cards. All supply lines are mixed with cosmetics to unlock as you play.
That is not necessarily to say that you can’t win without cards, just that it’s significantly easier with using the “best” cards. Still, all the cards in the world are nothing in comparison to having a good coordinated squad. I recommend joining a discord group because this game truly shines with a four man squad on voice comms. I’ve beat nightmare using exclusively in-game matchmaking on nightmare but prepare for lots of failed runs if you choose to do so.
For solo queue meta, the best decks I run with use the same 2 or so damage cards (Glass Cannon 25%damage/ Hyper Focused for 50% Weakspot Damage), 2 or 3 mobility (Run Like Hell for 12% move speed is auto include for all builds) cards and the rest goes to your role. The only role that deviates from this rule is melee, they will be a little weak early game but they are the kingpin to a group. Without melee to handle the common ridden you won’t have ammo to kill the specials or bosses. Pure economy builds based on copper gain or loot find are too slow to come online to be viable as Nightmare runs are reduced from checkpoint to checkpoint and rarely completing a full act in one sitting.
Here below are the decks I’ve used for my nightmare runs. Even though you lay out the cards you pick up 1-15, you don’t have to choose that way, for some runs you’ll react to what the corruption card is for that mission and prioritize getting different cards first. Generally speaking though I will prioritize 2 damage cards always, if the team is doing poorly I’ll get cards that aid the team such as Needs of the Many for extra lives, otherwise I’ll focus immediately on more selfish cards.
In the most recent December update they added a new type of one-use-per-level card called “Burn” Cards which apply a buff for one mission in any act campaign you are playing in. They cost on average 50 supply points, which is steep for beginning players. If you are a new player just ignore the burn card supply line and focus on unlocking all the other cards first. This feature is good because it allows you to take out some randomness in the game, for example if you are a LMG build, you can use a burn card to guarantee a LMG for your character at the start of your mission.
I was iffy on burn cards and this following statement is speculation; I am concerned at how easy it would be for TRS to turn Burn Cards into microtransactions where you buy supply points with real cash, so you can apply those buffs every mission for a campaign. The same could be said of regular cards as well. If such a thing happens though I feel like most players would drop this game. TRS are definitely treading a fine line with the introduction of burn cards. In its current state however it is an amazing addition to the game. Here below are some of the burn cards.
Core Game Flaws in summary:
Supply Point Acquisition is ergo the rate at which you unlock stuff is too slow, also no points gained from losses is unnecessarily punishing.
Not being able to see allied players’ decks to strategize accordingly.
New Player experience is mediocre for 6 hours at least which is intolerable for any game. For any casual player that is at least a week before the game gets “good”.
Swarm PVP sounds good conceptually as contests to who can hold out longest, but all the downtime between rounds and in practice feels awful to play with random Battle Royale Circle of gas closing in. Left 4 Dead definitely had the formula right with PVP through the regular campaign.
For Back 4 Blood the ratio between common zombies and mutants is around 75:25 where most zombie shooters are closer to 95:5 so the game feels more special hunting than massive hordes of zombies like most other games in the genre.
Lots of bosses with Big Health bars appear in the different missions, more than half the time the proper thing to do is just ignore them and run. The UI does a disservice in that all gamers have been trained for generations to see a big HP bar and kill it, not run. It’s a tough call though and I understand it’s useful for a player to know at a glance how close a boss is to being dead.
Map objectives are sometimes unclear, lots of levels have parts to them where they spawn endless hordes of zombies until you reach some area. An objective indicator stating such would be nice.
Back 4 Blood failed the silhouette test which is how easily can one spot the difference between the mutant ridden variants based on shape outline alone. In Left 4 Dead you can tell at a glance between Boomer, Smoker, Hunter, but in Back 4 Blood that only applies between the first level special mutant ridden. You can tell the difference between “Tall Boys”, “Stingers”, and “Reekers” however most of the variants of each are subtly different which in the heat of battle are harder to distinguish. For example the visual difference between a tall boy and bruiser is that a bruiser is spikier on the arm, but a bruiser has substantially more HP. Generally speaking when you play enough you learn anyways but I feel more could have been done to differentiate between them all to uphold the silhouette test more clearly.
Core Game Pros in summary:
Corruption System/Deck Card Roguelite system feels amazing
Makes every run feel different and promotes experimentation with different strategies accordingly.
Enables players to feel powerful towards the end of runs in ways no other in the genre successfully captures.
Allows players to finetune decks to cater to a specific playstyle that they enjoy rather than forcing each player to play only one way. There probably is an “optimal” deck for each campaign section and each role but most cards are competitively viable for a given role and feel impactful.
Highly replayable level design is great in that it’s still linear so you don’t get lost but complex enough where there are a lot of little things to learn even when you’ve played the level twenty times.
Cosmetics are all unlockable via in-game progression, and not with microtransactions aside from launch edition bundles of 4 skins. This will probably change, but on the whole is a sight for sore eyes in a world where everything is like 10 dollars a skin in the rest of the world in AAA gaming.
Monthly Patching keeps things fresh and exciting. The november update killed this game with heavy nerfs and ridiculous special spawn rate bugs, but they redeemed most of the problems with the december update with burn card system, and buffs to cards, while nerfing speedrun strategies. When speedrunning was exclusively the only way to play the game, it was just not fun and warranted nerfs. It’s still viable in coordinated group play but no longer required.
The corruption system that randomly buffs them throughout your campaign playthrough is a nice touch to keep you on your toes to change how you proceed through a level. This helps a ton with replayability, as you might gravitate to more bullet stumble type weapons to stagger armored ridden, or you could go for lighter faster firing weapons when they are all fast packing acid or fire heads.
The item shop between missions in an act feels amazing. You are constantly torn between pooling enough coins together to buy a team upgrade for long term power, or biting the bullet and buying up max equipment like frag grenades to shred bosses, or other items. Adding economy as a facet of the game is a huge win for enabling a pause to strategize with the team, as well as extreme flexibility to different strategies for any level. While other games have economy mechanics, none are quite like this for the zombie shooter genre.
At the end of the day I think if you like roguelites, and Left 4 Dead you will love Back 4 Blood. However, Back 4 Blood surprisingly isn’t a zombie shooter, like that’s the story flavor but gameplay wise it’s truly too different from everyone else. World War Z, Zombie Army 4, Call of Duty Zombies, Left 4 Dead are all games which nail the aesthetic of there are millions of these guys and you need to mow them down and get to that next safe room as soon as possible.
Back 4 Blood and State of Decay 2 play more into a slow proactive playstyle with few bursts of action and a focus on efficient resource use. The spice in Back 4 Blood is experimenting constantly with different card builds seeing what works and doesn’t work for you. Tailoring decks specific to each act ultimately. The power curve where you start weak, but over time become a god at your role is addicting in a way no other in the genre captures.
It’s possible you’re not sold on the game, which is understandable. I personally recommend playing Back 4 Blood on something like Xbox Game Pass first just to try it because the game is very polarizing. Some people love it, some people hate it, but no one comes out of it with a neutral opinion.
An incredibly interesting deckbuilder that takes the 4th wall and uses it as cardstock.
Let me save you a lot of time. Go play Inscryption. Here’s the game’s homepage. It is very good. That’s not to say I don’t have problems with it. I actually have one very large problem, but I’ll get to that later. Once you’ve played the game, obviously.
Orna is an interesting augmented reality game, with an focus on the “Game” bit.
Orna is an augmented reality game in the general vein of Pokemon Go. Where Pokemon Go is heavy on the augmented reality and sometimes forgets to be a game, Orna remembers that AR games are supposed to actually be… well, games. In general, it functions as a semi-procedural RPG. There are monsters to fight, dungeons to explore, quest givers, inns, and shops.
You can filter what shows up on your map by what you’re looking for, including only showing enemies, or only showing larger bosses.
Like Pokemon Go, you have a sphere around you that dictates what you can interact with, and if you want your character to move, you need to move around in real life. The game world is overlaid on top of a world map, and you tap nearby things to interact with them.
Perhaps the biggest difference between Orna and most other augmented reality games I’ve seen is that Orna is focused on being a game. While combat starts out as a fairly simple affair, leveling up gives you the ability to unlock and switch between additional classes. The higher tier classes give access to additional skills, abilities, and skill slots, letting you bring more moves into battle.
For example, earlier in the game I had a thief who turned into a magic wielding wizard. I would buff myself up to be able to dodge attacks, then just stab people a bunch. After a while, I found that not having access to elemental abilities was making it harder to defeat certain enemies. So I switched over being more of caster.
Before I stopped playing, I’d rebuilt again into using physical damage, but casting low-mana cost spells to apply elemental damage of various types to my attacks, while trying to lock the enemy down with sleep and other status effects. This only worked because I’d unlocked a high enough tier class to bring in about 8 spells to battle, and ran a pet that had a chance to heal me each round, so I could just focus on damage and status effects. So there was quite a lot of build variety available to me.
You start out with just two skill slots, but you get more as you unlock higher tier classes.
The end result of all of this is a reasonably in depth system that, oddly enough, illustrates something to me that I hadn’t thought about too much before. Why do so many Augmented Reality games lack in-depth mechanics? The answer, I realized, is because outside of all this combat, you are at least in theory supposed to be playing this game while wandering around outside. In games with in-depth combat mechanics, combat actually requires attention and planning. Trying to play Orna and not walk into people/traffic/road signs is actually pretty tricky.
Instead, I often found myself pausing my walk in order to finish combat encounters or larger boss fights. Orna includes an auto-attack system to get through fights while not paying attention, but using it tended to result in me getting my ass handed to me. A level of attention and focus was necessary to actually win.
Most of the game’s secondary systems also run into a similar problem. There are dungeons, which are a longer gauntlet of battles, and you can’t pause or anything between. There’s the arena, where you face off against other players’ builds controlled by the AI. Both of these can be a bit tricky, and require you to actually be careful with your moves.
On the flip side, there are some systems that encourage moving around, at least a little bit. You get quests through daily random quests, from quest givers, or from other sources. Some quests just ask you to “explore” and walk a certain distance. In addition, there’s a territory capturing system that gives you bonuses for a time period for beating the mini-boss controlling an area.
No, the blue currency isn’t premium, it’s Orns, used to create various buildings and unlock new classes. But you can’t buy it with real money.
You can also construct various different types of shops and buildings to provide additional passive income, and other boosts and benefits. Some of these buildings can be seen and used by other players, while some can’t. But if you want you can choose to make the public ones private. In theory, this would let you wander around and discover other players’ structures, but in practice, I mostly just built everything in one place, and never left that area.
There are a bunch of other systems, including upgrading items, socketing gems into items, fishing, and various multiplayer raids, but I haven’t played around with them enough to really know what to say.
Look, this photo of my gear is just here to pad out the article.
And that’s a general overview of Orna. An interesting augmented reality game without excessive microtransaction bullshit, but which is sometimes a bit hard to play because of how many mechanics and systems work. Or at least, difficult to play while not getting hit by a truck.
If Orna sounds cool, or you want to play something that requires you to walk around a bit and isn’t Pokémon Go, you can find Orna on the Apple App Store and Google Play store if you just search the name. If you’re not sure, there’s more info on the game’s webpage here.
