DeVuego

Everhood 2 is all over the place with changing art styles, a unique combat system and a plot that somehow makes more sense as it's getting weirder.

Everhood 2 is a game that's all over the place, with different stories, changing art styles, a unique combat system and a main plot that somehow makes more sense as it's getting weirder. While the central hook may be the combat system it shares equal time with everything surrounding it, even if the music-based combat and the weirdness of the story and settings feel like two separate games most of the time. It's also a game that demands patience, seeing as its plot can feel like a series of non-sequiturs until various story strands start connecting, but while it never makes perfect sense it's still fun to see which bits of the weirdness pay off and which bits of pretentiousness eventually have the wind taken out of their sails. The post-death world takes a bit of getting used to, but it's got an underlying almost-logic holding things together, and when that's not enough then dancing through the combat will see a wandering soul eventually find its way home.

Sonar Beat is a clever rhythm game with a pleasant soundtrack and a good visual style.  It also gets very hard very fast, with the early songs showing accessible note tracks before things get out of hand around level six.  As the sonar arm speeds up on the more difficult songs it makes for less and less time to read the notes before it’s time to tap them away, so even if you’ve got a good head for the rhythm it’s hard to know what the song is going to ask of you.  When the later songs got too brutal, though, I’d go back and play one of the earlier ones to get a sense of what Sonar Beat could be.  There’s a good design in here but to make it work the note tracks needed to work with sonar’s layout and be a little more in tune with human-standard reactions.  The first several songs are good fun to play but then the difficulty wall chunks itself into place and instead of playing the music you end up flailing away, hoping to clear away as many outer notes as possible while guarding the center ring against the advancing missed ones.  You can survive that way, but it’s not particularly musical, and that’s a problem for a music-rhythm game.

Immortal Redneck is an absolutely fantastic FPS-roguelike. There’s a lot of care in its room design, the enemies all have their own distinct style making it easy to identify the most threatening one in any situation, the action is fast and powerful and the whole game looks fantastic. The difficulty is tuned high but there’s plenty of room for growth, both from learning the enemies’ patterns and from buying upgrades for permanent character progression. Choosing a patron deity at the start of the run makes each round play a little differently than the previous one, and when coupled with the powerups found along the way you’ll have a unique character by the time you either get killed off or somehow survive the traps and creatures of the pyramid. It’s a long way to the top and each floor is more concentrated than the last, but there’s plenty of great shooting on the way to the boss fight at the apex. Then there are still two more pyramids to fight through, because if there’s one thing an immortal redneck loves, it’s when the shooting gets completely out of hand.

Kromaia Omega is by no means a perfect game, but the action at its heart has an excellent flow. I never found any practical use for the hookshot and backtracking to explore the level sometimes leaves you with nobody to shoot, but the combat runs hot when everything is working. A swarm of spinning stars hovers in the distance, waiting for an opening to charge while off to the side an enemy platform made of interconnected cubes you can shoot off one by one charges up a laser barrage and a pair of light-spear launchers are charging up to turn into a serious threat. Using the concentrated laser power of the red ship takes out the central joint in the cube-platform, scattering its pieces in a single sustained shot, and then boost takes you out of the line of fire of the spears and charging stars. Friendly fire is always on, so one of the stars explodes against a spear, and a few precise shots of the regular laser thins the rest of the star herd while the spear-shooters recharge. By then your secondary charge laser is ready to shoot again to take them both down, but more enemies are flying in to replace the ones you’ve dispatched. In the meantime, there’s another gate fragment in the distance and an interesting structure off to the side that might house a much-needed shield. It’s been under ten seconds since this encounter started and the next ten don’t look to be any simpler. Kromaia Omega is a giant hyper-saturated burst of color, speed and heavy firepower, as stylish as it can be difficult, and it’s impossible not to forgive a few questionable design elements when the enemies are swarming and the action takes off.

Kromaia is by no means a perfect game, but the action at its heart has an excellent flow.  The camera hates being near walls, I never found any practical use for the hookshot, one of the checkpoints is right under a swinging pendulum that will instantly knock off a shield if you don’t boost out of the way the second you respawn, and the penalty for grazing something (asteroid, enemy, random wall) is to get turned around in a random disorienting direction, but when everything is working, the combat runs hot.  A swarm of spinning stars hovers in the distance, waiting for an opening to charge while off to the side an enemy platform made of interconnected cubes you can shoot off one by one charges up a laser barrage and a pair of light-spear launchers are charging up to turn into a serious threat.  Using the concentrated laser power of the red ship takes out the central joint in the cube-platform, scattering its pieces in a single sustained shot, and then boost takes you out of the line of fire of the spears and charging stars.  Friendly fire is always on, so one of the stars explodes against a spear, and a few precise shots of the regular laser thins the rest of the star herd while the spear-shooters recharge.  By then your secondary charge laser is ready to shoot again to take them both down, but more enemies are flying in to replace the ones you’ve dispatched.  In the meantime there’s another gate fragment in the distance and an interesting structure off to the side that might house a much-needed shield.  It’s been under ten seconds since this encounter started, and the next ten don’t look to be any simpler.  Kromaia is a giant hyper-saturated burst of color, speed and heavy firepower, as stylish as it can be difficult, and it’s impossible not to forgive a few questionable design elements when the enemies are swarming and the action takes off.