My time away from Assassin's Creed Odyssey continues and I accidentally landed on something that is right in my wheelhouse. A game where you can just pick up and play, eases you into more difficult combat, and combines elements of several different genres in a way that simply works.
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If you have a PS-Plus Extra or Premium pass, you already have access to this game as of a few days ago. I watched the trailer like I always do and thought they did a brilliant job with that but you can tell straight away that this is not a graphically intensive game and this made me happy because if you read my stuff you already know that I cannot stand long loading times. This game has practically none of those.
I nearly shied away from this game because I hate it when game manufacturers tend to show cinematics or a "movie version" of what the game would look like if it was made in a totally different way than it was. This is deceptive advertising when companies do that and if they do it too much, I write off the company altogether. However, in this one, they switch over to gameplay footage after 40 seconds or so.
When you are playing the game it feels almost like your typical hack n slash game in a top-down way that is easy to understand and easy to play, at first. But don't let yourself get scared away of if the whimsical nature of the trailer makes you think this game is easy. It is NOT and even at around 20% of the way into the game I am already finding myself in some pretty tricky situations that will result in my death.
In this game you are the last of a certain type of creature left on whatever planet you are on, but you are spared by some sort of other-worldly creature and given eternal life if you promise to fulfil one wish of the god-like creature: You must return to your earth and form a cult to worship it. Before the religious types out there shy away because of this seemingly blasphemous approach and the fact that a pentagram is heavily featured in gameplay just know this: At no point does the game reference any actual religion nor are they poking fun at religion in general. The reason for the need to raise a cult introduces the part of the game that I think is actually the most fun you will have in the game: The city building aspect of it.
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After you do one "dungeon run" you are introduced to the bread and butter of the game which is establishing your commune to house all of the followers that you convert during your time in the fighting stages. You need to build housing, logging and mining camps, farms, and various places of worship that you need to manage to keep all of your cultists alive. You need to micromanage the new recruits to some degree and keep them fed and hilariously, pick up their poo lest they get sick because their doo doo is just all over the place. I have already unlocked the skill, but have not yet built, the outhouse and I am looking forward to the point where that is something I have.
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You also need to give daily sermons in order to keep your flock devoted to the religion you have converted them to and by keeping this way they provide you with various types of currency that will enable you to evolve your skills both in city building as well as acquire powerups for your dungeon runs.
Something I haven't yet figured out is how to prevent the loss of faith that you occurs when you die while in the dungeon. It has been manageable thus far in the 2 times that I have died while out in the field, but when you return to your town after a dungeon defeat, the villagers normally lose around half of their faith in you and this can lead to other problems such as civil unrest and village sabotage. I haven't gotten to most of that but I can see that this is going to be more and more of the game as I go along seeing as how I have uncovered the need for a prison as well as a burial pit. It will be exciting to figure out that I will have to execute some of my flock at later points in the game.
Something that kind of irritated me at first is that as far as combat is concerned, there is some element of "rogue-like" that is built into the game. I am reminded of Hades in that at the start of each run you are given a choice of weapons both ranged and melee and well, that is what you are going to be stuck with during the run. This seems really annoying at first but then I started to realize that the randomized dungeons at least appear to be built around a playstyle that this sort of weapon is conducive towards using. There are other various buffs that you will acquire along the way and much like Hades, the more run you do, the more powerful you base starting attack is going to be. Again, just like Hades this choice of what weapons you are going to have as well as the other buffs you will encounter along the way seem to be completely randomized and while I would prefer if this was a straight adventure game, it just kind of works like this and mixing up of weapons during a run sort of forces you to try them all and you get excited if you end up with a weapon at the start that is one of your faves.
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The bosses you encounter at the end of each of these runs are quite funny and some of them are so big it feels like they didn't leave you enough space to actually attack but I have discovered that if you just spend the first part of each fight dodging and not even attempting to dish out any damage at all until you understand their quite basic attack combinations, these fights will almost always result in victory. You can change the game's difficulty at any time if you are going to be a little bitch boy and bail on a retry after losing just once. I have already decided that I am going to play it all the way through on the Med setting, as the devs recommended at startup.
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It is difficult to tell if you are in fact the bad guys in this or not. The enemies that you kill are more gruesome looking than you and your rather cutesy villagers, but when you start bleeding from your eyes and ascend/descend into a pentagram in the floor on a regular basis, it kind of feels like a preview that you might not be what is best for this world and if this is heading towards a twist ending, that would be absolutely wonderful.
This is a 1-player game although I have been told that there is local co-op available but I don't know anyone that actually does that anymore. For the most part this game is very easy to pick up and you get introduced to the commands in a tutorial that isn't really a tutorial. They did this part of the game magnificently. The story is easy to follow and well, it is cute as hell as well. I think most people wont have much difficulty wrapping their heads around this game but the choices that you can make with your city seem to be rather endless since it is entirely up to you what it is that you are going to build. I see me getting many playthroughs of this game under the belt as I go along.
I don't think I will be jumping to another game anytime soon and if you follow my writings, you already know that this is quite rare for me.