Author: Shmee

Hyper Light Drifter is the latest major Kickstarter game to come out, and after the disaster that was Mighty No. 9, it is exciting to see that good games can still come out of the crowd funding scene, but Hyper Light Drifter is more than just a good game, it is a great one.  I am very happy that I backed this title!

The game takes place in some sort of post apocalyptic future where there are still remnants of old advanced technology, but most of it no longer works, and the old buildings are now filled with monsters.  Your character has some sort of strange illness, but he doesn’t let it deter him from fighting evil.

It is fairly obvious that the folks over at Heart Machine love Zelda.  If you were to replace Hyper Light Drifter’s neon color pallet with Zelda’s signature earthy tones, you might be thinking you were playing a Zelda game from the Super Nintendo era.  One where Link learned to dash forward real fast.  The way they change things up is that they borrow the difficulty from games like Dark Souls.  Thankfully death isn’t as penalizing as in the Dark Souls games, you usually just start again at the beginning of the room.

To progress through the game you will have to build strategies on how to defeat the different monsters you will face.  Like should you hang back and use your gun?  Or should you dash in and out taking a few quick swings each time.  Hyper Light Drifter truly gets hard when it throws tons of different types of monsters at you, and it forces you to be able to use all those strategies at once.  Though it does a good job of making you feel like you are getting better each time you try again.  It is training you to get better.  Not to mention as you go along you will unlock new abilities and powers, so you will not be doing the same thing over and over.

I am on paragraph five and I am just now getting to Hyper Light Drifter’s best feature, the way it looks.  It is captivatingly gorgeous.  I said before that it looked like a neon SNES Zelda, but that doesn’t do it justice.  It might be the best looking game to come out this year.  Everything is well done.  The animations are top notch, they are fluid and smooth in a way that the old consoles that Hyper Light Drifter is paying homage to could never accomplish.  The character and stage designs are amazing.  The game is truly a work of art.

I am kind of gushing, but it is great to see a game come together like this.  If you have $20 to spare it would be hard to find a better way to spend it than on Hyper Light Drifter, and better yet it is out on every major platform (not counting the Wii U of course), so you should have no excuse not to play it.  I am having a blast with this game, and I think you will too.

It has been a while since I have played an old school deep turn based RPG, but the lure of Co-Op, the great reviews, and a decent sale, led me to try Divinity: Original Sin.  For the Co-Op, I dragged The Paladin along with me.  I bought him a copy of the game for his birthday, very self serving of me I know.  I am not very far in to it yet, but I have to say I am liking what I am seeing.

Divinity: Original Sin starts with your main characters off to Cyseal to investigate a murder of a high ranking official to see if the mysterious magic “Source” was involved.  You see you are playing as “Source Hunters”.  A group of people tasked with keeping track of this powerful and dangerous magic.  Things get all timely-wimey after that, but lets just say there are far greater things at stake than some official getting offed.

The gameplay for the most part is standard turn based fare.  Each character gets a set amount of action points, and on their turn they get to spend those points moving, attacking, defending, or helping teammates.  Where things get different is that Larian Studios loves its environmental effects.  Your characters are always wet, hot, oiled, or poisoned, so you get to try and plan your attacks based on what is going on around them.  Is it raining?  Maybe you should freeze everyone.  It will be super effective.  Your team on fire?  Cast a rain spell to douse the flames.  Obviously if you have a good wizard they can bend the environment to best suit your group’s attacks.

Another fun addition is that unlike most Co-Op games in Divinity: Original Sin you and your friends do not need to agree on the dialog.  You see him making a decision that you don’t agree with, you can try and override him.  If you can’t come to an agreement you literally play Paper, Rock, Scissors to come to a conclusion.  It is fun to screw with your teammate every now and then, and possibly destroy a quest tree.  The Paladin had us kill some drunk guards instead of just following them to some guy to prove who we were.  It was pretty funny.

Not everything is peachy keen however.  When playing with your friends you can’t see what they are doing, so there is a lot of down time while you are waiting for their turns in combat.  Movement is kind of slow, so it feels like it takes forever to get anywhere, and most unfortunate of all, there is no quest management system.  I understand that Larian wanted Divinity: Original Sin to be a throw back, so they mostly leave you to solve the quests as best you can, but there should be some way to organize or filter your journal so can try and stay on task instead of randomly milling around in the wilderness.  Also be sure to save.  The game doesn’t auto-save.

Divinity: Original Sin is a fun RPG, and it definitely has the ‘just one more thing’ hook.  Every time I have played with The Paladin three hours seemed to just disappear, and that is the mark of a good game.  Not to mention that I can count the number of good Co-Op RPGs on one hand (not including MMOs of course).  Larian Studios is working on a sequel, if they can speed up the game a little bit, and let folks manage their quests a bit better Divinity: Original Sin 2 will be worth looking out for.