What’s your take on Absolver? It’s an online brawler with big emphasis on customization, reminds me of God Hand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmqfIbR7Q4Y
It’s interesting, and manages to make single and multiplayer combat work fairly well in the same system by taking a lot of the lessons from dark souls and increasing the pace slightly. It’s just kinda simple because you don’t have access to that many attacks at any given time, and can’t switch stances very quickly. Continue reading
What do you think of Icons: Combat Arena?
Literally everything about this game looks bad.
The name is bad, coming off as generic or misleading. The characters aren’t iconic, they’re unknown. The name doesn’t sell the unique premise of the game or stand out in any way.
The character designs are bad, looking like bargain bin MOBA characters. The only one that stands out as being distinctive or identifiable to me is The Kidd and I dislike the way he looks. They lack personality and a big part of making a fighting game appealing to people is giving the characters personality.
The sound effects are weak, sounding like someone punched a pillow while wearing mittens. The particle effects are lacking, using the same hitspark for practically everything. Attacks don’t seem to have any hitstop, especially not smash style hitstop where the character will vibrate for a bit before being sent outwards.
The animations are especially bad. They have extremely weak or non-existent anticipation phases, and almost no followthrough. The biggest problem is just that the posing is weak and not exaggerated nearly enough. The lack of hitstop doesn’t help. Most motions just go straight from A to B with no breakdown or anticipation, sort of just popping into place. People tend to underestimate the amount of exaggeration you actually need to make an animation look impactful.
As for the moveset design, I’m seeing Fox, Captain Falcon, Ganondorf, Marth, and an original character. If the game is just going to be practically a carbon copy of melee but worse, why the hell would anyone play it?
This is the problem with Smash Clones. Smash Bros is an extremely detailed game, in every facet of it. It has detailed models, animations, mechanics, sound effects, and more. Smash Clones don’t put in the work to recreate all of that. They don’t put in the work to develop new systems that have as much detail as smash’s systems. There’s a ton of traditional fighting games out there, and they all have very different plays on what you can do with that control scheme and game mode. We have a few smash clones, a few platform fighters, and they all have very samey plays on smash mechanics, with a little extra. Rivals is smash except without grabs, with parries, and no ledge, plus ridiculously broken recovery. Brawlout is smash with no blocking of any kind. PSASBR is smash except no DI, and only supers kill.
If Smash Bros is Street Fighter, then we’re not seeing KoF, we’re not seeing Guilty Gear, we’re not seeing Marvel 3, we’re not seeing Samurai Shodown. Smash Clones aren’t very good at copying smash and they aren’t very good at making their own appeal. Project M got all this stuff right, but it also inherited a lot of its backbone from Brawl.
What do you think of consistency in fighting games? If fighting game players are consistent/not consistent with their results in tournaments, is it necessarily a bad thing?
It’s tough. Consistency is a mixed blessing is about all I can say after some deliberation on the topic.
We have two case examples, SFV where players are allegedly really inconsistent, and Melee where players are super consistent. Continue reading
Is it possible for a game you consider easy to be good?
To some degree, yes. I’d like to cite Kirby here. Being challenging is one of the primary factors I consider in rating a game, and I have certainly penalized games for not being hard enough before.
https://critpoints.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/my-standard-of-quality-for-games/ Continue reading
Is depth possible for big colossal games like destiny, beyond good and evil 2 ( https://youtu.be/M8IguhQqhAg ), and star citizen. Or depth can be only be done in small focused games like thief or DMC 4?
Alright, I’m sorry because I’m gonna be a bit pedantic here, because people keep asking me questions like this. I define depth as literally having states. The depth of a game is the number of states a game has that are not redundant, or irrelevant to play. A coin flip has a depth of 2 states. A coin flip is not deep, but it has depth, the smallest amount of depth possible in a game. Deep means that a game has a relatively high amount of depth compared to other games.
Big colossal games focus a lot of their attention on creating content. This means that level design typically takes a back-seat and you end up playing through very similar encounters. Another trend with these types of games is that the combat systems, which are the primary systems of interaction, tend to be below average. Continue reading
What do you think of Fox and Falco’s shines? How do they differ? Some say the ability is overpowered. Is it?
Fox’s is a lot bigger. Falco’s is much smaller. Fox’s hits at a horizontal angle. Falco’s hits straight up. Fox’s has fixed knockback. Falco’s has knockback growth.
Both come out frame one. Both are invincible frame 1. Both have the reflection hitbox come out frame 3. Both slow down the character’s fall speed in the air. Both can be jump canceled on frame 4. Both allow the character to turn around during them.
Basically, Fox’s is way better. It allows him to shinespike people, and its fixed knockback means it always combos regardless of percentage. Plus, he has a 3 frame jumpsquat, so his pressure with shine can be a lot tighter than falco’s 5 frame jumpsquat. And waveshine combos into up smash. Continue reading
Celia Wagar's CritPoints 