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The simplest way to describe it is if you took Diablo, Destiny, and Starship Troopers, mashed it altogether and added 50% more awesome to the mix. I picked it up on release day and I've been playing every day ever since… The hook (or at least, one of the hooks) is that the game is super-lethal, but not in an annoying way-- in a way that makes the player more cautious, and that gives everything much more significance.

The game begins with touch controls, and I just don't think they suit this game at all… Touching the front screen moves a "light" fairy, and touching the rear screen moves a "dark" fairy. The main character will blindly follow the light fairy around, which is how you get her from place to place. At the same time, you frequently need to manipulate the way the light from the fairy falls in order to set up shadows so the dark fairy can travel in them and move around each room.

There's more to it than that, but getting to the point, I found the game to be incredibly difficult and annoying at the same time, and within the first 15 or 20 minutes I got quite stuck and frustrated with what was going on. There’s an achievement for dying ten times in an area, and I earned it in the second level, if that gives you an idea of how it goes.

It's worth noting that there are alternate controls games so apparently people can use standard controls which (I'm sure) makes it a better experience, but the level of difficulty and the obtuseness of the game didn't have anything to do with the controls. My first impressions were pretty negative, and I might give it another shot at some point in the future… But probably not.




Speaking of negative impressions, I've been putting a little time into Flame Over (Vita) from Laughing Jackal, which is a "Pyroguelike" which features a small, cartoonish fireman who goes into procedurally-generated levels to put out fires and rescue people. I like the concept and while I see a lot of good ideas happening here, it feels like it falls really short in the execution.

The game starts off with no tutorial whatsoever, so a lot of what's going on is totally not clear. What's the point of turning off electricity? How do you earn the coins to buy items? Why can I keep continuing to play when the Grim Reaper shows up? What was that item I just picked up?



The mechanics don't feel totally polished, either. Sometimes fires are obscured by the geometry of levels, and manipulating the camera is done with the same stick that also aims the water hose and fire extinguisher the fireman carries, so toggling back and forth between them feels unnatural and stutter-stoppy.

I lost track of how many times I've played it, but I haven’t even managed to finish the first level yet, and I’m rapidly losing patience. And just to be clear, I'm not the kind of player who’s easily scared off by roguelikes in general or games that offer difficult experiences -- it just doesn't feel like the parts of Flame Over are put together correctly. I wish I had more positive things to say about it, but overall it feels like a case of "almost, but not quite".




In other any games news, I'm still playing Monster Hunter 4: Ultimate, of course. I hit a bit of a stalling point a while ago, but I think I'm back on track. I’m currently working on making the Brute Tigrex armor and trying to finish off the end of the single player campaign.

If you play Monster Hunter yourself then you probably already know about the free DLC, but in case you haven't heard, Capcom will be releasing new bunches of DLC on the first Friday of every month for the foreseeable future. You can watch a detailed preview of what came in the first batch right here, the highlights being a clockwork Insect Glaive and a bunch of armor and weapons taken directly from The Legend of Zelda. Yes, really.