Hello! Welcome to the first in a series of "Busting the Backlog". Every year around this time games go on sale cheap, but I end up buying some that I don't play. In order to combat that I decided to bust through the backlog and blog about it.
While there are some AAA/popular games, I'm going to focus on more eclectic/smaller ones. Up first is Dolmen:
As a big Dark Souls fan, I was hopeful for a sci-fi take on it - and hoping to find something close to the original Phantasy Star Online/Phantasy Star Universe. The Surge scratched a bit of that itch, but didn't quite get it. Dolmen seemed interesting enough - Sci Fi Dark Souls with melee and gun based combat. Neat right?
Sitting at a middling critic score with a wide range, I wasn't expecting too much, maybe a solid AA title, good for a quick playthrough, snag some trophies, etc. I don't think my expectations were too high, but wow, there's a lot to unpack with it. I gave it a solid hour or two, but what a waste overall.
Story wise, Dolmen is some time distortion crystal, you're going back to a space station to find out what happened when people mined it - I skipped the cutscenes, they were kind of hard to follow and the voice acting was bad. From what I got, it feels a bit like the plot of Dead Space, but less spooky. Starting from the entry point, it wasn't long before I hit the Main Path. No seriously, that's the name of an area. How uninspired is that?
At this point my optimism started to wane.
Pressing on, I ended up back on the home spaceship from the equivalent of the bonfire. There's weapon and armor crafting available, but there's no inventory screen that I saw to let you know how many of the item components you have - if you want to check you have to trek back, then find the crafting table to view what's missing.
Plowing through more enemies, I ended up at the first boss - Dementula, a big spider. I stopped my playthrough shortly after due to how inconsistent the gameplay systems are.
The starter pistol had a burst fire ability which would trigger somewhat randomly. The first time it happened, I thought it was a bug, perhaps shooting was tied to the frame rate. Accepting this as a random event, I moved on and tried to make the best of it, playing it as a third person shooter. Elevators also used different buttons for up and down:
Which, seems fine when there's options for both, but when it's only one, it felt as though I was going crazy - did the button to interact with this just change because I went up? Yes, yes it did. Only upon seeing the elevator in the middle floor did that click.
After the first boss, I crafted a cool shotgun/grenade launcher - which I was excited about! Even if the abilities are buggy, it's basically infinite ammo as long as you have energy - shooting was only a temporary reduction, not a permanent use of it. Or so I thought, from what I learned so far the game pulled a 180 and changed the energy/ammo mechanic to be permanently used on strong ranged attacks with that shotgun.
That's when I uninstalled the game. I can tolerate mediocre graphics and a boring story, but when the gameplay is inconsistent and the systems are confusing, I'm out. I've played my fair share of janky games, but this was infuriating and made me question if the game was broken or not.
Continuing on my backlog list, I'll open it up to suggestions as to what's next from the following (or anything else on PS+):
- Inside
- Okami
- Chorus
- World to the West
- Tokyo Xandu +
Also, any pointers towards a PSO/PSU style game on modern consoles are much appreciated!