This week your intrepid heroes compile shaders, absorb robots, and discuss game design? Mighty No. 9 faces the CHAIRQUISITION!
Game: Mighty No. 9 Nope (?) Why not.
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/314710/Mighty_No_9/
Devel: Comcept, Inti Creates
Engine: Unreal Engine 3
Price: £15.99 / US$19.99 / CDN$21.99
Wazzat: Mighty No. 9 is a 2D Side-scrolling Action game that takes the best elements from 8 and 16-bit classics that you know and love and transforms them with modern tech, fresh mechanics, and fan input into something fresh and amazing!
Mandatory Disclosure: N/A
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Makes with the working
V-
- Could have told you it was UE3.X by the initial load time alone.
- Holds a solid 60 @ 1080 for the most part with everything on 11 minus a few drops into the 30’s in certain areas.
J-
- NVME doesn’t help with UE3 shader compile times. No sir
P-
- It took almost a full minute doing the initial shader compile.
- Steam needs to get around and start shipping those pre-compiled shaders already.
Total-
Shiny / Sounds
V-
- I’m surprised somebody didn’t get sued because several of the baddies seem to cross the “inspired by” line.
- That aside, the graphics look passable for an indie title.
- However, they look like absolute dogshite for a 4 mil indie title.
- Lifeless.
- I kinda feel like the voice actors did the best they could with what they had.
- None of this matters since you will nope the volume after the 3rd or 4th time No. 9 says the exact, same, thing after doing a thing.
- I wish I could be more detailed but were dealing with repressed memories at this point.
J-
- It took me a few listens to figure out that the characters aren’t all voiced by the same actor
- Seriously, playing this game reminds me of that seinfeld episode where they keep talking about pretzels
- The graphics are okay. Nothing particularly stunning to write home about.
- At the end of the day, it’s 2.5d megaman
P-
- Given our precarious position in time, since we’re on the edge of the robot revolution, I probably shouldn’t say this but fuck it.
- I want to punch Call in its stupid robot mouth! Who the hell thought it was a good idea to make the single most annoying and personality-less lolibot character shout every single one of her moves in a mandatory stealth section of the game?
- Everything about that section is bad, but the fucking repetitive shouting “Jump” “Jump” “barrier” “barrier” in that monotone voice made me genuinely angry.
- I found myself screaming “Shut up! Shut the fuck up” right back, then I realized the futility of my actions and muted the “voices” audio.
- Pro-tip: You will find yourself having a much better time when you’re not listening to shit voice-acting coming from a game which got 4 million dollars off of Kickstarter.
- The graphics look good, for a late PS2 to early PS3 era game.
Total-
Control
V-
- Controls are tight.
- It’s nice to play something that when you cock up it’s your fault.
- If I had to pick at something it would be the amount of friction Mr. not Mega Man has with the floor.
J-
- Ditto on the friction issue
- By the way, don’t try and play this game with a DS4 controller paired with BPM. It’s pretty spray and pray
- You can at least rebind everything
P-
- There are many issues with this game but controls are not one of them.
- Not once did I feel like I hit a key and it didn’t respond adequately.
- Though, there are some stupid design decisions which directly conflict with the controls or at least with how you think controls should work. But that… that’s something for the Fun!
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FUN
V-
- Any yall bitches beat a boss yet?
- Checkpoints are hella far apart.
- Lots of deliberate FK boxes.
- Character blindness can be a real issue.
- Not because of to much going on, nay.
- It falls squarely on everything having a similar colour palette.
- Dash / absorb mechanic replacing the tried and true blowing the sh*t out of your enemies took a bit of getting use to.
- If you’ve played MegaMan you have played this hollow attempt at it’s recreation.
J-
- I never played megaman growing up, so whatever nostalgia that drives this game doesn’t really appeal to me
- This also means that I never really developed the muscle memory associated with mega man games.
- Maybe that’s just my excuse for not being particularly good at it, but still
- This game just doesn’t appeal to me. Maybe if I were 7 years old and had the time and patience to trial and error all these screens until I could do them reliably, I’d be singing a different tune
- But these days, the trial and error thing doesn’t really do it for me in these styles of games
- Even with demons peak, once I found my stride I actually started sorta kinda not really enjoying the experience. It didn’t displease me
- This game displeases me
P-
- Playing Mighty No. 9 is getting a crash course in everything that’s wrong with game design.
- It’s actually amazing how many things wrong it gets on a mechanical level.
- Let’s start from the top:
- The game has 0 original ideas in it, I’ve ranted on this many times but here we are.
- Nostalgia culture gave these people $4 million to make another Megaman game, because over 130 games in a series isn’t enough.
- I know some of those are remakes and collections, but there are still almost 50 “unique” Mega Man games.
- Tutorials are supposed to explain game mechanics and, often, put them into context with the narrative and just generally help them make sense in context.
- The tutorial level in Mighty No. 9 is the kind of level a 9 year old Mega Man fan would have built with a pirated level editor back in 1999, with key prompts slapped on the screen.
- And, perhaps the most egregious of this game’s shortcomings, it’s not fun.
- For an action platformer like this to be enjoyable, it needs to straddle the line between boredom-inducing easy and frustratingly hard.
- And this game can’t do that. It’s 90% controller snapping frustration and 10% boring.
- I found the 3 boss fights I could be assed to get to and finish to be piss easy, compared to the rest of the levels to get to the bosses.
- And do you know how in Mega Man some boss weapons are more effective against others? Here the starting pea shooter has better damage throughput all around, since it shoots about as fast as you can hit the button. It’s pointless to use any other boss weapon other than the sword.
- And the sword makes mincemeat out of most of everything.
- Everything is unbalanced, levels are filled to brim with insta-death stuff, there are recurring unavoidable damage situations, enemies have the exact same colors as the backdrops of the stages they spawned in, the entire sense of progression is non existent.
- Making progress, depends solely on your ability to memorize everything that happens. There is no other skill involved.
- And make no mistake, everything in Mighty No.9 feels like trial and error, not just your progress. Half-assed mechanics which see use once and get forgotten about, an entire alternate fire mode which is laughable in how bad and useless it is.
- Bad and useless, there’s as apt a description of this game as I could ever hope to find.
Total-
Final –
