Endgame Viable

We’re back in our old habits of writing posts and then failing to publish them. This is from last week.

Mortal Shell 2

I tried out Mortal Shell 2, a Souls-like that had some pretty good Steam reviews.

While it looked nice, I didn’t like the first game very much. The “shell” gimmick just didn’t work for me.

This new game is nothing like the first game, though. The shell thing has morphed into a generic “ultimate” ability that depends on which shell you’re using. And it’s a lot more of an open world sort of map design.

But the worst thing is the combat. The combat is pure chaos because you’re usually facing multiple enemies at a time. If you’re familiar with the Souls-like combat formula, that should cause you to sigh and groan, because it’s exactly as annoying as it sounds.

Souls-like combat is usually defined as being designed for 1-on-1 duels with one enemy at a time. You literally “lock on” to one target at a time. There’s supposed to be a feeling of control as you work through each combat encounter. It’s kind of like a fighting game, except in 3D space.

In a “standard” Souls-like game, facing multiple enemies at once is usually considered a failure condition. You’ve approached a combat encounter wrong, pulled too many enemies, and now you have to scramble to survive.

In Mortal Shell 2, facing multiple enemies at once is the norm. But being a Souls-like, you don’t really have many tools for fighting multiple enemies at once. So it’s just a chaotic scramble to survive all the time, and it’s not very fun. They give you a gun but it, too, can only shoot one enemy at a time.

The game looks very nice, though. But, like the first game, it doesn’t “feel” very good. It has that AA “Unreal Engine demo project” sort of feel to it, where the character models don’t really seem to fit into the world very well. The feet are always clipping through the ground, you get stuck on the terrain every ten steps, etc.

There isn’t much in the way of loot, and the character progression is a bit mundane. Basically, it does not meet the minimum requirements for an adequate Souls-like for me.

AION 2

I tried out AION 2, which is a free download on Steam. It starts out exactly the same as every Asian MMORPG that has ever been made, complete with the virtual girlfriend simulator character creation.

I haven’t gotten very far. It’s just not very appealing on the surface, so it doesn’t make me want to dig deeper to see what’s there. At the beginning, there’s absolutely nothing to distinguish this game from any number of other Asian MMORPGs I’ve seen in the past. Revelation Online and Astellia Online both come to mind. The characters look the same, the classes look the same, the world looks the same, the combat looks the same, the lore sounds the same.

The story is unmemorable and poorly translated. Loot is pretty disposable.

The combat is trivial: Click the left mouse button repeatedly. For variety, you can click the right mouse button. There is exactly zero chance you will lose a fight in the beginning. It even drinks health potions automatically for you. It’s almost an idle clicker game.

The combat difficulty ramps up eventually, or should I say the difficulty spikes up out of nowhere, but since you didn’t need to learn anything to get to that point, it feels like arbitrary punishment.

It’s good for one and only one type of gaming experience: The kind where you don’t have to use a single brain cell and sit passively letting the lights and sounds wash over you for however long you’re willing to endure it. Which, to be fair, is perfectly fine now and then, but I typically don’t get very far in those types of games anymore.

Oh, and you can look forward to Barrens-style general chat the entire time, as the number of free-player trolls is rather high.

So in short, it’s not likely to replace Final Fantasy XIV as the only MMORPG I still like to play.