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tanadrin · 5 years

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Map Editors I Have Known And Loved

Much as my favorite part of any RPG is the character creation screen, my favorite part of any RTS (and many other genres of video game) is the map editor, where it’s included. This is a brief review of different map editing experiences for different games based on the time I’ve spent with them.

Warcraft 2

One of the first, wayyy back in the dark days of the mid-90s. Good for little besides making melee maps, really, due to the absence of a trigger system (as I recall).I was too young to really be able to experiment with its mechanics, and mostly used it as a glorified version of a Paint program, because I liked Wc2′s distinctive art style.

Age of Empires 2

AoE2 is/was a freaking terrific game, but (and probably because the campaigns the game shipped with didn’t need more than it provided) the trigger system of its in-game editor is not super sophisticated. Third-party editors and utilities supplement the default modding tools, and modding AoE2 is easier than ever with the HD edition, but if you want to do something super elaborate you’re going to need to do a lot of quirky tricks and editing of database values. I still love the AoE2 map editor, because I love building huge elaborate isometric recreations of medieval European cities, and then wrecking them with a giant army of Elite Mangudai and trebuchets.

Deus Ex: GOTY Edition

An FPS, but it came with a variation on the Unreal engine level editor that was, despite requiring a fair bit of knowledge about the engine to make it really useful, was still great for a kind of conceptual Lego, building beautiful austere environments with careful lighting you could walk around in (and shoot up with a GEP gun). Again, I was a little too young and a little too impatient to master the subtler aspects of DX level design, like triggers and scripting and whatnot, and the tools provided, though powerful, didn’t hold your hand at all. Still, full marks for making the inner workings of the game robustly exposed to modders.

Starcraft

The original Starcraft and the BW expansion have a lot to recommend them: a great kind of redneck-punk scifi aesthetic, some seriously fun campaigns, and some seriously fun multiplayer (the panic instilled by “nuclear launch detected,” etc.); the map editor was great because it had pretty decent unit editing capabilities, and an extremely good trigger system--plus you could make your own voiced mission briefings, string missions together as campaigns, etc., etc. A lot of what you couldn’t do was supplemented by third-party editors, and playing around with SC’s trigger system trying to get all kinds of weird things to work laid a lot of the cognitive groundwork for learning how to think and clarify ideas when I started learning actual programming languages like Python. Rates very highly on both the “purity of form” and “purity of spirit” scales, but it’s nothing compared to

Warcraft 3

Hoooooooo boy

I have a sentimental attachment to wc3 map editing like nothing else. There were whole summers I spent playing custom games on battle.net, and probably thousands of ideas I played around with in the editor itself, but never quite finished, because let me tell you, this bad boy is as far as I’m concerned the gold standard for map editors. It was released in a somewhat limited form with RoC, but around the time TFT came out, they updated the editor to a much more full-featured version, and they eventually also released all the plugins necessary to make Wc3 models with third-party programs. Combined with the idiosyncratic-but-actually-kinda-useful form of custom game searching, the result was, as anyone with a passing familiarity with the wc3 modding scene probably knows, one of the greatest flowerings of modding creativity in video game history. Out of this crucible of innovation came among other things a deep vein of tower defense maps, elaborations on the Aeon of Strife custom games from SC, and out of those, eventually, the DotA maps--leading to DotA Allstars and thence DotA 2.

The Wc3 editor lets you fuck with literally every conceivable value in the game, comes with an exceedingly powerful trigger system, lets you make custom units and abilities and buildings, and where it can’t do what you want it to, also just lets you script shit directly. I love it so much. It is my happy place; the little “doot doo do do doot DOO” that sounds when you start it up gives me a jolt of delight every time, years later.

Homeworld 2/Homeworld Remastered

Honorable mention to the most fun I have ever had in a melee RTS with my pants on. The maps here are exceedingly simple: you edit them with a text editor. But true 3d space battles--true 3d gorgeous space battles with a 70s sci fi aesthetic--are impossible to underrate in my book, and it helps that the Homeworld series has genuinely delightful gameplay mechanics. It also has a pretty good modding scene, with the inevitable Star Trek and Star Wars and BSG mods, because while the game isn’t super easy to mod, and has nothing in the way of built-in modding tools, it isn’t actively hostile to modding the guts of it like some games I could mention (cough cough Paradox cough). Confession: I’ve never tried to mod HW2. I have played a shit ton of it, though, and I live in the vain hope that one day someone will be like, “You know what? Not only is it time to bring RTSes back, 3d space battles are actually the fuckin’ best,” and make another game like it.

Starcraft 2

I haven’t played around as much with the Sc2 editor, because while I played a lot of Sc2 melee during WoL and HotS days, the actual experience of finding custom games with SC2 blows. Rather than Wc3′s “here’s all the custom games currently going, knock yourself out bub” thing, with Sc2 they tried to start a curated game list thing and added rating games and all this other wacky stuff that means it’s actually kinda impossible to find things 1) that you like and 2) that people are actually playing. I haven’t touched Sc2 in years, though; maybe it’s gotten better? I doubt it. The editor itself is, based on my limited experience, just the natural iteration of the Wc3 editor: a little more robust, possibly a little more confusing at first as a result, but it’s got that same classic Blizzard polish that makes their modding tools such a joy to use. But between the fact that the scifi aesthetic doesn’t appeal to me as much when it comes to making custom games, and the sucky game finding interface, I think I’m mostly holding out for WC3: Reforged to scratch that RTS modding itch.

DotA 2

Valve did the community a huge solid and released its developer tools to let people mod its hat collecting/racial and homophobic slurs archiving engine, DotA 2, but the custom game search features suffer from the same problem that plagues SC2, only even worse. Just give me a fucking server browser!!!! FPSes had this solved in like 1994!!!

It doesn’t help that DotA is built in what is fundamentally, like, an FPS engine (ok, probably that’s not an accurate characterization, but it is the engine they devised for like Half-Life 2 and TF2), which means that the developer tools feel clunky and counterintuitive and wayyy too complicated if you’re thinking of them as RTS modding tools. Plus, since not everybody has the time and the professional pride Blizzard used to have to create powerful, polished, standalone modding tools, they’re not gonna hold your hand at all. And the fact that MOBAs/ARTSes have mostly colonized the space classic RTSes used to fill means that what you really have is, like, 5% of the assets you’d need to actually make an RTS mod for the DotA engine. It would probably be easier to make an FPS in the DotA engine than a true, Warcraft-style RTS. (Someone did once make an FPS in the Warcraft 3 engine. It was... actually kind of fun? But seriously goofy.)

If I were a smarter and more hardworking person, I could probably build an RTS-like thing in DotA’s modding tools, but I am not. Plus, there are elements of DotA level design that suffer from the same problems as

Later iterations of the Unreal engine

One thing I loved about the classic UT engine, which the original Deus Ex used, is that (though it was prone to frustrating geometry bugs) it let you tinker around with architecture directly in the space it provided. I played with the level editors of some later UT games (principally UT3, I think?), and with the push toward fancier graphics of later generations, there was also a push toward use of a lot more doodads and 3d assets in levels to provide what I would think of as basic architectural details. I’m sure there are solid graphical and programmatic reasons for this. I’m a dilettante at best at this sort of thing, and I can’t speak to those. But the downside of that was that unless you have some 3d modeling chops, and a measure of planning and patience, the sandboxy/creative appeal of dicking around in the level editor was much reduced. That’s not a criticism of the tools provided so much as it is a neutral observation and, perhaps, me mourning a little bit the fact that older, simpler games, by virtue of their simplicity, are often more amenable to modding. One thing we lose in an era of ever-more-elaborate triple-A titles is a fundamental transparency in how games are constructed; they become super complex, teetering programmatical edifices, and while that often allows for interesting new developments in gameplay (and shiny graphics!), for the person who wants to learn How Games Work by taking them apart and poking around, well, it’s harder. That’s one reason why I’ve never gotten into Skyrim modding, even though it looks awesome and super powerful.

(the U4 engine “map editor” equivalent is a suite of game dev tools, and sold as such, but I’m not really talking about standalone game dev tools that are meant to allow you to build a game from the ground up in this post, so that’s beyond the scope of what I’m interested in. Obviously the more general and powerful a modding tool is, the more it shades directly into that; and there’s something of an artificial distinction between a “total conversion mod” and “a new videogame,” like that between a musical and an opera, that mostly has to do with spirit and intent and marketing.)

EU4, CK2

I am including these because I love modding these games, even though the “modding tools” for them are Notepad++ and GIMP. It’s nothing but images and weirdly formatted text files (and little documentation), and it’s terrible and frustrating! But I love it! My big complaint is actually the lack of ability to alter fundamental game mechanics: everything you can change about the game easily is the accidence of it: its appearance, the map, what countries and characters you can control. The underlying mechanics--the spirit of the game--is frustratingly immutable, except via very clunky workarounds, and while I understand why you might not go out of your way to make these things easily manipulable (it’s a lot of extra work to uncertain benefit), and why Paradox games rely on an event-driven system that is both like and much unlike RTS trigger systems, it is a little disappointing. But EU4 and CK2 drive very different parts of my imagination (geography and politics and economics) than, say, Wc3 (strategy and fighting and tactical finesse), in the same way that Deus Ex drove yet another part (the architectural, the spatial, the atmospheric). One day, maybe, someone will invent a game that somehow captures everything I love about each, a kind of transcendental game of everything, with modding tools to match, but I doubt it, and I’m OK with it even if that never happens.

Honorable mention: the Civ series

4x games are moooostly outside my scope of interest here, but I do remember Civ2 having a terrific editor with lots of opportunities for modding buildings and techs, and the great thing was that units and cities and terrain were all just very simple images that you could edit with an in-game tool. SMAC/AX was also pretty moddable, had a built in scenario editor/cheat menu, and Civ 3/4/5 have fun map editing and scenario building tools. Turn based games appeal to me a little less inherently, because they lack the thing I love about RTSes, the “oh shit PANIC” moments where you reflexes and quick thinking become super important, but the Civ series does have great strategic and econ management elements.

Other games

There are whole genres of games--Sim City, Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, the building aspect of 4X games--that capture in small or large part what I love about map editors, with the same build-create-tweak-adjust cycle, though obviously on a distinct footing since they’re making them an actual game rather than a tool with which to create games. It scratches a similar itch, though: it’s all about combining aesthetic design with design of systems. I have a radical thesis which is that every game is improved with the inclusion of a map editor. The existence of a representational, navigable space is intrinsic to almost every genre of game (every game I can think of, though I don’t exclude the possibility that there are ones I haven’t thought of that don’t have that), and being able to use the same underlying rules--or to iterate on those rules--and apply them to a new space, especially a new space you can design for optimum fun rather than just relying on procedurally generated (inevitably samey) space, extends the life of games considerably.

My earliest and biggest interest is in RTSes with map editors, though, because I have a fervent, unquenchable love for the genre. Alas, as noted, it’s a genre that has never been super popular and is currently pretty marginal. THe challenges of making a good RTS engine--nevermind a fun-to-play RTS--are considerable, especially if you care about things like multiplayer (which is my favorite part of RTSes). A lot of entries in that genre now are in some sense hybrid. MOBAs, of course; but games like EU4 have RTSlike elements (and, being pausable, are in some ways the best of both worlds with regard to RTSes and turn-based games). I live in hope that the RTS genre will experience a minor renaissance one of these days, and we’ll get something worthy of being the successor to WC3 or AoE2. If you’re working on that--please, please, I’m begging you, release it with a map editor.

#video games #rtses #modding

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britesparc · 3 years

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Weekend Top Ten #492

Top Ten Team 17 Games

I’d already been thinking a lot about old Amiga games this week, because news came out of the blue that some kind of Zool update was on its way. Now, I really liked Zool back in the day, and I thought that it was fondly remembered, but if the comment section on that Eurogamer article is anything to go by, I seem to be in the minority. I don’t care; Zool rocked and I’m glad he’s on his way back, with his sticky hands and feet and gloriously sugar-coated levels. Frankly, in a world that seems mostly populated by people who spent the entire 1990s playing Metroid or Zelda, I could do with an Amiga renaissance.

This was exacerbated when I discovered that Team 17, beloved purveyor of 16-bit computer classics, has an office in Media City. Quite how this passed me by I do not know (I, er, guess I just didn’t see the Tweets), but all the same it’s very good news; perhaps I’ll stop some of them in the piazza and bore them about the good old days. Especially if they’re, like, 25 or something.

Anyway! All this is a boring preamble to me listing my ten favourite Team 17 games. If you don’t remember, T17 was a major player on the Amiga: tons of classic games, phenomenal graphics, and – something I didn’t quite appreciate properly at the time – a nice Northern sense of humour. I don’t want to do much more preamble, because really I wanna let the games do the talking. One thing I will say, however, is I’ve taken advantage of their more recent moves as a publisher to include some games that they didn’t develop too – because I do feel like they’re really good at picking publishing projects that reflect the core tenets of their “brand”, such as it is (as opposed to Core tenets, which is probably something to do with Chuck Rock).

So here we go: my ten favourite Team 17 games. Enjoy! And bring them all out on the Xbox.

Alien Breed: Tower Assault (1994): the Alien Breed games were almost platform-defining, atmospheric blastathons that evoked the tension and exhilaration of Aliens, with superb (and difficult!) twitchy gameplay. Tower Assault, with its less linear, more explorative gameplay, was the best of the bunch. Back in the day, this was the equivalent of a Mass Effect or BioShock to me: an intense action game coupled with an enjoyable amount of back-and-forth. One thing I’ve always been a bit sad about is never having played the 3D Alien Breed games; I graduated to PC just as they were coming out, and I’m not even certain if they ran on an ordinary A1200. I wonder what they’d be like to play nowadays…?

Worms World Party (2001): how do you differentiate between the Worms games? I mean, I’m old enough to remember the “Total Wormage” demo that marked the first appearance of the little critters. But there was a point there when the gimmicks were still new, but they’d had a couple of releases under their belt, and there was a short run of games that were utterly hilarious, gameplay out the yazoo, and still a slight air of rough-edged weirdness. Can you still get the Yorkshire “Tykes” voice set in new Worms games? I mean, the formula is still unbeatable, but the Golden Age of Worms will be the World Party era for me, when my brother and I played it all the blinkin’ time. Get under that.

Assassin (1992): if Zool was the Amiga’s Sonic, then arguably Assassin was the platform’s equivalent to Strider or Shinobi (er, despite those games actually being released on the Amiga; never mind, just go with me on this). I remember the game mostly for its acrobatic movement, allowing you to climb walls (hey, shades of Zool again!); also, you had a boomerang, which is really cool, apart from when they re-released the game after two years and got rid of the boomerang. Basically, I really dug it for a lot of reasons. I also think it’s the Team 17 game which had an hilarious spoof of the “Reg” ads for Regal cigarettes, a joke I thought was incredibly clever thirty years ago but which I can find no evidence of on the internet.

Body Blows (1993): back when Street Fighter II ruled the world, and everyone was going gaga over the Super Nintendo, the Amiga suffered in comparison; it couldn’t do the multiple parallax layers of animated backgrounds, and most common joysticks didn’t have the button configurations to do the special moves justice. Step up Body Blows, a gorgeous, chunky, responsive fighter that’s still probably my favourite beat-em-up (I’m not the biggest fan of the genre, to be honest). One of the few games I remember really trying really hard to complete it, but I’m pretty sure I never saw the final opponent (some kind of Terminator-style robot, if I remember right). I always wanted the sequel, but never played it.

Yooka-Laylee (2017): feels a bit of a cheat, as this is really a Playtonic game, but they published the physical release, so it counts! And in many ways the cheeky British sensibility of the game fits right into the T17 ethos. I remember getting so excited for this game – I backed it on Kickstarter, in fact – and it didn’t disappoint: a colourful, meaty-looking platformer with a nice line in terrible dad jokes and a slowly-unfolding roster of abilities. It might not quite coalesce the way the old Rare platformers did in the late nineties, but it’s still fun; and it was a very popular game in our house with my wife and daughters.

Superfrog (1993): would probably be higher, as it’s thought of as one of the classics, but it didn’t quite hook me the way it seemed to everyone else. But even back then I could see everything about it that worked even if I didn’t fall in love; a beautiful, colourful world, with a tremendously designed lead character who looked like he’d leaped from a Cosgrove Hall cartoon. It also had a pretty naughty sense of humour. All in all, a good game, and one I’d love to revisit with a more refined palate.

Overcooked (2016): I think I first started to fall in love with this game when I saw it on Go 8-Bit; an anarchic and crazy-looking multiplayer fun-fest. And, sure enough, it’s a delightfully chaotic experience, really funny, with colourful and nicely-designed characters. However, it loses points for being one of those games that give you an odd-numbered Achievement. Multiples of five, people! Multiples of five!

Arcade Pool (1994): this one feels a bit niche, but I loved this back in the day. After the full-3D polygon wonderment of the Archer McClean pool and snooker games, going back to a simplified top-down aesthetic might have felt like a step back, but for me it was an excellent and really, really fun pool game. It’s the sort of experience I’ve chased in years since – a totally hassle-free arcade pool game – but nothing’s quite scratched the same itch (or, at least, the itch I remember, if that makes sense).

Golf With Your Friends (2020): the most recent game on the list, and another one that’s just damn fun. A wild and rather weird crazy golf game, with a succession of increasingly-bonkers courses, but one that’s easy to get into and – yes – persistently entertaining. I started playing it due it being available for cloud streaming on Game Pass, and it’s a pretty good phone game, even if the touch controls don’t give quite the nuance needed for some of the trickier shots. Also it’s worth saying that I am just terrible at the game. Really, the worst.

Project-X (1992): a bit like Superfrog, this is a game I respected rather than adored, hence it being a bit lower on the list. I think the big problem is just that I was utterly shit at it; I mean, I was flat-out rubbish at all these side-scrolling shooters, even if I really wanted to be good. But this game was a stunner way back when, and I think one of the ones that really cemented Team 17’s reputation as a graphical powerhouse of a studio. It also had a tremendous score from Allister Brimble, T17’s resident maestro. It’s funny, because I remember this as being heralded as “the new masterpiece from Team 17” upon its release, but it was actually one of their first titles; so either they hit the ground running or this is one of the games that secured their reputation. Either way, it’s still a classic of its type. And apparently there was a sequel on the PlayStation. You learn something new each day.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip down Commodore Memory Lane. Yes, I know, some of the games are a lot newer than that, but I’m afraid I’ll always think of Team 17 as “an Amiga studio”. They did sterling work back in the day, they really helped define the Amiga and give the platform its own identity, distinct from consoles (even though a lot of their games were, obviously, ported to other systems). And thanks to the success of Worms, they’ve endured, even as most of their contemporaries have fallen by the wayside. And now they’re in Salford! A Yorkshire invasion of Lancashire. What could go wrong?!

#top ten #games #gaming #team 17 #alien breed #worms #amiga #salford #media city

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lonesomealley · 4 years

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Risk of Rain 2 Early Access Review and Discussion

Writer’s Note: This review was written after the December update was released. Any opinions and problems with the game are subject to change over time as the game reaches its full release. This review also contains some spoilers? Risk of Rain isn’t really a game that you can spoil, you’re not ultimately losing anything from reading ahead for this type of game.

-=REVIEW=-

Risk of Rain 2 is a game that I’ve played over 200 hours of since I initially bought it on June 5th of 2019. This is important to say outright because it needs to be expressed that Risk of Rain 2 is super into the arcade-y, repetitive, RNG roguelike style that many games before it have fallen into. These games are not for everyone, and if you’re someone who’s expecting runs to be bursting at the seams with new content, you’re going to be left in pure disappointment. At best this game will throw new content at you for the first couple of hours you play, but after that there is a sharp decrease in this content.

However, I have to preface that this review is a positive review, and that Risk of Rain 2 has created a gameplay loop that is very addictive to get into for many (including me). This game can be easily summarized down to the following: You pick a character, kill enemies, get items, kill the boss, go to the next level, kill enemies, get items, kill the boss, etc. There is technically an “end game” to Risk of Rain however it basically involves becoming so powerful that you’re capable of constantly obliterating all enemies instantaneously. And while this system is fun, this review is going to explain why the end game is currently broken and that the game suffers from a bunch of small yet consistent issues that actively bring down the experience of the game.

First let’s talk about all the things that the game does right. All of the characters, while some flawed, are exceptionally different from each other and are fun to play in their own ways. All of the characters are also well balanced in that there is no character that is obviously the best character in the game, and no character is so bad that it is beyond difficult if not impossible to reach the end game with. The vast majority of items are well balanced in the scheme of the game, with only a couple items being overwhelmingly awful to acquire (primarily the lunar items) and one item being a direct detriment to pickup. We’ll come back to these later in the discussion part. The game’s art style is great, and the stages are beautiful albeit some poorly designed. The enemy types are somewhat varied yet become boring to look at with time, and the AI of the game is pretty mediocre but otherwise serviceable for a hoard shooter. And finally the multiplayer is an alright system of peer to peer, however many players have complained about the lack of host migration, meaning that if the host leaves the lobby, the entire lobby will close.

You wouldn’t know that I basically covered all of what you can really talk about from a basic review standpoint of Risk of Rain 2, if I wasn’t so generous as to tell you. So instead of providing a long form critique/review like the one I just did for Borderlands 3, I’m instead going to give you a brief review with the review score ahead of time, before I go into just deconstructing the game. So, here it goes:

Risk of Rain 2 feels exactly what a sequel should strive to do in the face of a game franchise. It takes the original concept of the first game and puts all of it into three dimensions. The way that this is pulled off is almost so flawlessly done that it is legitimately difficult to attempt to go back to the original game’s mechanics. This new focus on 3D gameplay has come with the freedom of movement that was noticeably absent in the first game (shooting while moving, sprinting, faster movement, and versatile movement skills). In some ways certain elements of the game have become dramatically less important or dumbed down, such as drones being next to useless, homing rockets being seen as passive damage rather than a massive game changer, and the introduction of death pits that correspond well enough with certain items or abilities to completely change the tide of a fight.

In many more ways, however, the game has become a much more flexible and skill based game that allows the player to play in a much more expressive manner. Gameplay is a smooth, fast paced, hoard based experience that will push you to cleverly use the resources that you’ve been given to turn the tides of a fight. Initially this game is going to seem very difficult for people who begin playing on the, “Rainstorm,” A.K.A normal difficulty, because what this game doesn’t tell you is that there are a ton of nuances that will completely change how you play the game as you learn them. During your first playthroughs you’re going to find that Stone Titans are a very annoying enemy, and that the laser is a powerful attack that will melt your health very quickly. Then later on you’ll find that Stone Titans are pretty much push overs in small numbers or individually, because you can stand at the feet of the Titan which stops it from ever trying to laser you. There are many little quirks like this in the game that will ultimately change how you handle the hoard based combat, and eventually you’ll come to the resolution that Lesser Wisps, supposedly the weakest enemy in the game, are actually the strongest.

By the time you reach that point though, you may become frustrated with the RNG systems of the game. RNG dictates a couple things in Risk of Rain 2, but most importantly it dictates what items you get and in what order you get them (randomly). On some of your runs you may find a legendary, or two, or three on the first level that essentially renders the difficulty of that run nullified. On other runs you’re going to get a bunch of trash items 3-4 levels in and eventually find yourself fighting a game of attrition until your inevitable demise. Of course, you can theoretically skill your way through the game, and the further into the game you get, the more possibilities you have to find items that will turn the tides of your run around.

The character you choose is also a massive influence on how you learn to play the game. If you’re anything like me or my friends, you’re going to immediately gravitate towards the Huntress, as she’s easy to unlock and has considerably more survivability than the other survivors that you unlock early on. The biggest problem that the Huntress posses to the player’s attitude towards the game is that she provides players with the tools to never properly learn how to position or prioritize enemies. What happens when you begin playing the Huntress is that you find it very difficult to play other characters such as the Commando, Mult, or Artificer. This may result from what pieces of information that Risk of Rain provides about the other characters simply not being clear enough as to how versatile they really are. This was somewhat addressed with the introduction of, “Mastery,” challenges that unlock cool skins for each of the characters (minus engineer :c). However, I don’t believe that players will be driven to try out these new characters or even play the, “Monsoon,” difficulty of the game before they’ve put anywhere from 20-40 hours into Rainstorm/Drizzle.

Given this, Risk of Rain isn’t ultimately a game about becoming the best at its systems. It feels much like a “for fun” kind of game where you just sit down for a couple of hours and have a blast killing enemies. This isn’t how I approached the game, however if you ultimately decide that the game is too difficult, the Drizzle difficulty is going to be just the thing for you. You will be, more or less, consistently overpowered on this difficulty if you have even the most basic understanding of how to play the game. You can totally just play a Drizzle run for 2 hours straight and ultimately understand the purpose of Risk of Rain: Get overpowered and screen wipe enemies consistently. And even though I personally don’t play the game like this, I wouldn’t blame you if this is how you prefer to play it.

This game isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you like arcady, roguelike, third person action this game will probably be right up your alley. I give this game a review score of 7/10. It is well worth the $20 asking price, and is definitely made much more fun with friends (who can manage to get good at the game). When this game receives more content and is completed I imagine that this review score will go up, but for now this game may be lacking in content for many people.

-=DISCUSSION=-

That’s where the review portion of this post ends. If you really only wanted an overview of what the game is and what it does well, then that’s what I have to offer you. The rest of this post is going to be going into a long discussion about why certain systems of Risk of Rain 2 are bland and overall degrade elements of the game. So let’s dive into those core issues, why don’t we?

Items

Firstly let’s hit on the core mechanic of this game: randomized item drops. The method in which Risk of Rain 2 hands out items isn’t heavily biased into giving a player a certain set of items or outright trying to discriminate against items (except of course that item tiers become more rare as they go up). However the problem with this system is the aforementioned frustration that comes along with a game that's far too dependent on RNG. In some runs you will be given just the right combo that will turn your run into a god run, whereas others are doomed from the start. I don’t consider the option of “skilling” your way through the first 7 stages to really be an option, since without damage and effect procing (chance on hit) items, the later levels become an absolute chore to play through. Of course, this is detrimental to the game in the way that it may just be outright impossible to obliterate or reach god run every run.

Now this is going to be a hard change to swallow, but I think this game could benefit from having biases in its RNG distribution of items which, according to Ghor (developer of Risk of Rain 2), has been confirmed to be entirely random.

This system doesn’t have to be a drastic overhaul that makes every item has its own custom probability for drop, but it should focus on making each playthrough feel a little more balanced. My proposal for this is to make a system that attempts to balance out how many damage, healing, and utility items the player gathers throughout their playthrough. Basically, if you have too many damage and utility items, the game should start pushing towards giving you some healing items and etc. But there’s some new problems introduced with the change.

Firstly, how do 3D printers affect this? Well, I think there’s two options for this. One, have 3D printed items have a special tag on them that stops them from affecting the RNG calculations of items drops. Or two, just doing nothing about it. That latter fix doesn’t seem all too appetising, but I think it could lead to some interesting developments and meta games around 3D printing items.

The other major gripe I have with the item system is that items are hitting this level of power creep that has made certain elements of the game almost meaningless. And when I say meaningless, I do literally mean meaningless. For the most part, Risk of Rain’s item balancing is fantastic with most items feeling like they belong in that tier, while others are either way too overpowered or provide next to no benefit. And this is the type of subject that I think is difficult for ROR2 to get right because the ultimate goal of this game is to become overpowered, so it would make sense for overpowered stuff to just exist, right? Well no. While it is important for the game to have kinda meh items and kinda alright items, the extent to which the game has pushed its power creep is really stupid.

Most predictably I will bring up Shaped Glass. This item has been in hot heat from most of the game’s community for making the gameplay really dull and having little to no actual risk in using it, despite being a lunar item which is supposed to be a risk and reward item. For those uninformed, Shaped Glass cuts your health capacity in half while doubling your damage multiplicatively. All is well so far, until you factor in how healing and one shot protection works in the game. When your health is over 90%, you cannot die to a single hit of damage excluding over time effects like burning or sticky bombs. The basic gist is that by cutting the maximum health you have with Shaped Glass, healing items will retain their default stats and hence actually be improved each time a Shaped Glass is acquired. Given that this item works multiplicatively, (2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x damage and health debuff) a run will quickly spiral into a god run with no penalty to the player long term.

But at least that takes some effort to achieve, where as Old Guillotine has outright destroyed the balance of elite monsters. Stack a couple of these bad boys, and elite enemies are now a complete joke. Originally introduced in the Scorched Acres update as a direct counter to malachite enemies (as far as I can tell that’s the only reason this item was added), this item allows the player to kill elites at a percentage of their health instead of just getting their health to zero. So if you collect 1 guillotine, the elite monster will die at 20% of its health instead of 0%. This item is generally an okay item, balance wise, if it wasn’t already piss easy to instantly screenwipe enemies during a god run. But oh god, the flat percentage rates compared with how high these percentage rates are per stack are ungodly. According to the Risk of Rain Wiki, collecting just 10 of these bad boys will allow you to kill elites at a whopping 90% health. Meaning, if you manage to find an Old Guillotine printer in your mid game, elite enemies are no longer a problem. But let’s be real, no one needs that many guillotines when only 3 of these nets you roughly 50% (This piece of information has become outdated, now it's about 40% for 3 stacks and 70% for 10 stacks). This is the stack count that I usually strive for because it's the best blend of economy and effectiveness. As you can imagine, even with 3 of these, elite enemies essentially become pushovers. Seriously, having 50% of elite enemies’ health gone is just that good, I don’t know how else to explain this pretty simple concept, but yes it’s true.

And I haven’t seen many people in the ROR community saying this item is a bad game item (please email me) so I will now explain why this hurts the game. Nothing in this game, especially in the later stages or god run, will be difficult if you are on the right track. Elite enemies could’ve and should’ve been the one turning point that kept any resemblance of the game's difficulty outside of the bosses (unless you’re already insta killing them). I can really only qualify this claim by making the point that “elite enemies” are called elite for a reason, right? The following screenshot is Google’s definition for the word “elite.”

However, when I think of the elite enemies in ROR2, I think, “Oh hey more money.” Not, “Uh oh this is bad,” or, “I really need to focus this thing.” To be fair, malachites do manage to pull this off even in the late game due to their (rather bullshit) debuff applied on getting hit by their normal attacks or dispersed spikes (we’ll touch on this later). But this mentality is, most likely, not what the developers intended players to think about their marketed “difficult” enemies. This isn’t to say that elite enemies aren’t dangerous, but even that only comes from the fact that flaming and overloading elites can outright kill you from landing one attack on you in late game. But this isn’t a danger that I’m actively worried about when the elites die in mere seconds at this point anyways.

There are also several items that just outright break bosses. Willow the Wisp turns the Grovetender boss into a free teleporter item. The Halcyon Seed is an item so strong, accompanied by a boss so easy to defeat, that it’s worth getting every time. Previously this item was a pretty meh item because the Aurelionite simply didn’t do much damage or assist you in any meaningful fashion. At some point, though, his laser beam attack was added to his friendly AI via an update, and it just melts bosses. Unstable Tesla Coil makes horde boss fights beyond easy (this item generally makes the game a cake walk). And of course, Chronobauble will transform you into an invincible chad ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

I’m sure there are some items that I’ve missed in this list, I could go into some depth about how 57 Leaf Clover is the best item available, or that some items are useless in comparison and were outright terrible for some time because of the developers’ oversights (H3AD-ST-v2 breaking Artificer’s float and Aegis being worse than the Topaz Brooch.) But you should get the point. Overall the item balancing isn’t awful, the game is still overall playable without an overwhelming amount of this power creep, and to be fair instantly melting the bosses in this game is enjoyable even if I don’t, at all, deserve it.

Stage Imbalance

What is awful then, is the stage imbalance present in the game. Stage imbalance is probably one of the biggest things turning me off from the game right now. Nothing frustrates me more than getting Scorched Acres or Siren’s Call on a shitty run, and basically having to accept my death because I’m unable to grab the Preon Accumulator or kill the AWU with my pitiful damage and healing.

For some unknown, dumb shit reason, Hopoo has stated that this is the way they want to continue developing the game. So this is an issue that isn’t getting fixed, and might get worse over the next three updates. I really hope it doesn’t, because the idea of having the game be more luck based than it currently is might just make me pull my hair out. These tiny, rather inconsequential things in the moment, will eventually build up into a sort of “power creep” among the levels. I’m unsure if this is the right term for this imbalance between the levels, but right now it certainly feels like exactly that. Now, to be fair, there are only 2 levels per stage, however I will now argue that this only furthers the point that this design style is harmful to the gameplay.

Right now, it feels like the most optimal stage path is Distant Roost, Abandoned Aqueduct, Rallypoint Delta, and then Abysmal Depths. While some of these maps have their own issues, the others have issues that pull the maps to be less favorable than the ones described.

Titanic Plains, firstly, is way too big and spacious in comparison to Distant Roost. When you spawn into Distant Roost, you can very quickly identify where the teleporter has spawned due to the compact nature of the map and where the teleporter can spawn. This compactivity also gives you the benefits of an RNG chance at a large supply of items spawning in the center of the map. Titanic Plains is giant, and lacks anything interesting to look at or venture into. It’s an okay map, but has a huge issue with pacing and seems to come from a completely different design philosophy than Distant Roost. Far too many times on Titanic Plains I will get confused on where the teleporter is because it’s out in the open plains area on a bright blue backdrop. And of course, the particles that the teleporter gives off are not prominent enough to stand out from this backdrop.

Other times it’s tucked way too far into a back corner, or obscured by a structure.

The items on this map are also very hit or miss, sometimes I favor Titanic Plains over Distant Roost for how many items this map can really provide, other times I leave the map with the bare minimum for my tastes. This is, however, a problem with the general generation of chests and not strictly an issue with Titanic Plains, but I feel the issue is exacerbated on Titanic due to its size.

I also largely favor Abandoned Aqueduct over Wetland Aspect because of its readability and predictable chest placements. Wetland Aspect has way too many branching pathways with tons of stuff in the way. This is the one map I’ll often ask myself, “Did I miss checking somewhere?” or, “Did I miss it when I was looking through an area?” The teleporter, more often than not, seems to always be tucked away into some obscure corner that I have to go way out of my way to go for. Although I will say this map’s chest distribution is far better than TItanic Plains.

A map that is terrible in almost every aspect however is Scorched Acres. I truly despise this map, and seeing it come up on 50% of my playthroughs makes me want to turn the game off and leave it for good. This map is god awful, where Rallypoint Delta has a circular pathing structure so you can walk all the way around the map and get almost all of the chests (for players who are into that), Scorched Acres is a slow slog up some water geysers and into a park and down some giant structures, ugh. The best place to spawn on this map is at the highest point it generates, because having to look up to find the teleporter’s red specs on an orange background is comparable to making color blind people take color blind tests just so you can laugh at them. And having to get to a specific point on the map in order to jump up a water geyser, for a game about time management, is outright awful design. This map also lacks basic functionality that others ones have like the special TC-280 Prototype (who cares honestly) and the timed chest which contains a free Preon Accumulator (I care). And when I say lacks, I mean it doesn’t have anything else to compensate. Generally how you’d play this map, is you’d locate the teleporter or establish a general area for where the teleporter is, and linearly work your way towards it. If you see an area with a bunch of chests, you sit there and grind up enough money to collect those chests before heading on your way.

Now that final bit might have you scratching your head, “Don’t all of the maps play that way?” Well yes and no, you can play it that way if you want, but most maps are going to have the connectivity to allow you to skip on those chests until after you’ve found some other chests or defeated the teleporter event. You basically cannot do that on this map unless you want to waste minutes of your time or you have so many jumps and so much speed that you can jump from the center of the map to the upper areas with ease. Some characters also have an easier time on this map than others like the Huntress, but that’s generally just amplified because of the shitty map design and not a specific issue for Scorched Acres.

Finally, we come to Abysmal Depths versus Siren’s Call, and. . . Abysmal Depths wins, no big surprise. Siren’s call isn’t really a bad map per se, it’s compact, somewhat easy to navigate, and isn’t a hassle to get the things you need. However there’s one massive imbalance with this map, and that’s the Alloy Worship Unit. The AWU is Siren’s Call’s way of getting a guaranteed red item, and this boss fight is pretty damn tough even after its nerf. This boss scales faster than other enemies, so if you don’t get to him quickly in your early game you’ll be suffering in this boss fight, hell you’ll be suffering anyways. But beyond the boss being a pain to defeat, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with placing a red item behind a boss. Except when you take into account the fact that it is menially easy to get the golden chest on Abysmal Depths. The golden chest on Abysmal Depths always spawns in the same location, and costs a whopping 16 times the cost of a normal chest for the stage. There’s no hooks, no catches, it just requires a decent time investment to get the item because you’ll be grinding out normal enemies. That time investment is the only real contending downside for going for the golden chest on Abysmal Depths, but that also applies to fighting the AWU. If you have a terrible build and you’re gambling for a good red item from the AWU, you could find yourself spending just as long (longer even) fighting this boss. Plus you have the possibility of dying, meaning your run is over. At least now you'd have another chance to get Abysmal Depths.

And sure, as of the December update the AWU has been nerfed pretty drastically. A huge 75% decrease in damage scaling and 20% less scaling in the health department means that this boss is now overall easier to kill. But these changes haven’t ultimately made the boss any more enjoyable to kill when the run just isn’t getting started. Sure, now you can kill it faster, and you now have a more adaptable playstyle where either stage can be more viable than the other depending on your loadout but I still feel myself gravitating towards Abysmal Depths more often than not. This update also added “map variants,” but for the sake of just calling them what they are, they’re basically just additional maps. I’m honestly okay with having more than 2 maps per stage, I think that can lead to a pretty satisfying experience. My only real gripe with these maps is that you can tell these were made by another company and not Hopoo. These maps, especially the Distant Roost variant, incorporate a lot of vertical space into their game play and map flow that at times can be confusing to work around for new players. However I would not be opposed to having essentially 4 different maps for the game to choose from, granted that they’re all balanced well enough.

If Hopoo doesn’t wish to balance the stages with each other, the much simpler system I’d recommend is to have the game force the player to eventually play that stage they missed out on later. So instead of being able to get Scorched Acres 2 times in one run, if the game makes me play on that map for my 3rd stage, then I should know for a fact that I’ll get Rallypoint Delta for my 7th. And of course for Rallypoint Delta I would also recommend putting a second timer on the Preon Accumulator chest just so that it’s an option for players who don’t get it on their first loop. This would scath a good amount of my frustration towards the system because at least then I’d know my run would balance out towards the end.

The stage progression system in this game is currently very awkward. As of writing, you have to run through 7 stages before you can enter a “celestial” portal and obliterate yourself at an obelisk. It seems the way that Hopoo wants to take the game is to have 4 entirely unique stages, and then from there you’d either go to the boss or you may be forced through another loop of the game until stage 7 where the celestial portal will be replaced with the portal to the final boss area. I wish this system was more transparent with where it’s going, and if it is going to do a double looping system I’d honestly appreciate just having 7 unique stages rather than this current system. Again, this problem would be fixed if the game forced you to play the alternative stages on concurrent loops.

Feedback

Feedback was something that was somewhat addressed in this recent December update. The screen now gets dark around the edges when you’re hit and at low health your screen will start graying out. These are absolutely great steps towards integrating more feedback into the game, but it’s still missing the mark with a lot of elements.

Namely, elites have been one of the leading factors in me dedicating a part of this discussion to the feedback of the game, and this is due to the shift towards developing more powerful, end game elites. A lot of the time in Risk of Rain 2, especially end game, you’ll find yourself in situations where you just die seemingly instantly. This isn’t a problem specific to the end game but more a general problem with the lack of feedback that the game gives you when you’re being hurt or have, say, a sticky grenade stuck to you. This recent update has since added some incredible feedback additions to the game, but this system is still lacking. In an ideal universe, I should be able to tell how I’ve been hit and what’s happening to me without having to specifically focus on that. To an extent this game does that well, red lasers appear from Lesser Wisps and shoot very quickly, Golem laser blasts are pretty distinguishable, and so on. But other elements, namely elemental elements, are an area of the game that lack any specific feedback currently.

It would be cool if there were different effects that showed on screen when I was hit by different elements. Such as flames around the edges of the screen when I’m on fire, vines or whatever for the malachite, and some ice for freezing. In the case of the sticky grenades (whatever you wanna call them) it would be cool if they had a Halo-esque sound effect where it would beep for a bit before exploding to give you a very clear indication that, “You’re about to die.” Currently the game lacks this. At best the fire ticking away at your health always means that the screen is darkened, but this is an annoying effect to have on your screen for more than a mere moment. I’d say feedback is the primary reason why malachites are such a massive problem in this game, because more often than not I’ll get the malachite debuff without realizing it and then die shortly after because I wasn’t regenerating health.

More auditory feedback would also be greatly appreciated. Something as simple as a crashing sound (like the Loader’s gauntlet punch) to indicate something like, “You’ve just been melee attacked!” would go a long way to improving the crowd fighting aspect of the game. I would also like to see some more ambient sounds for enemies to emit simply from existing on the map like the high pitched hum of the Lesser Wisps or the burrowing of the Magma Worm. Again, for the most part, the audio is done well, but some enemies are just lacking in any auditory presence. Bosses like the Grovetender and Titan don’t have just a passive sound effect, you’re really only alerted to their presence when you’re close enough to see them or to initiate their attacks. Being able to hear the distant chattering of rocks or the clanking of chains in the distance to signify bosses being around the corner would add a lot to the ambience of this game. It already seems that Hopoo wants to do something great with the game’s audio because of the already existing ambience, enemy sounds, and even the music that all feed into Risk of Rain’s atmosphere. Right now it’s just lacking.

Lunar Bazaar / Lunar Coins

This system, you can tell, is disliked by most people who play this game. Streamers are always talking about how they’re out of lunar coins and a fair amount of the playerbase have just cheated themselves to a couple million so they’ll never run out. In a lot of different ways, I don’t like this system. It encourages players to grind the game instead of playing it for fun. It requires stocking up on coins in down time runs so that players can experience god runs. The system is easily made meaningless by just a simple value change and people who do this are having more fun with the game than those who don’t. And there’s a couple more issues but let’s just begin listing out these problems and going in depth from there.

First, let’s talk about how many lunar coins you can expect to earn from a single round of playing just going from stage 1 to stage 7 and obliterating. On average, I was earning about 6-7 lunar coins on each run, 1 or 2 from random drops and 5 from obliterating which always rewards the same amount. This isn’t factoring in the new secret boss that has the capacity to drop 10 lunar coins, plus the 5 you’d earn from obliterating. So in the best ideal scenario you could earn a profit of 16 lunar coins (Beads of Fealty cost 1, 10 from the secret boss, 5 from obliterating, and assuming you get 2 from world drops). But you probably won’t be able to fight the secret boss consistently from run to run without losing lunar coins in the process, so for the sake of argument I’ll be leaving this new boss out of the equation. All of this math speak demonstrates the upcoming point: You aren’t paid enough lunar coins on a per run basis. Let’s assume that you start off a run with 5 lunar coins from a previous obliteration, and that you’re going to earn 2 more as random drops throughout your progression. The cheapest that you can acquire a lunar item, far less likely one that you actually want, is 1 lunar coin spent towards a lunar pod. The next possibility is that a free blue portal appears and then you find an item you want and can spend 2 lunar coins on it. The scenario after that is that you purchase a blue portal for 1 lunar coin, go in and find the item you want and buy it for 2 to make a total of 3 spent. From here the total amount of lunar coins spent can increase exponentially because, given the rng nature of the game, it’s totally possible to never find the lunar that you want. And that’s a big problem, because ROR2’s rng systems are essentially locking away the player’s potential for success at almost every turn.

And the reason for that is the absolutely abysmal balancing of the lunar items. See, the regular items can get away with a decent amount of imbalance because one, these items don’t negatively affect the player in most instances (Personal Shield Generator cough cough) and two, you’re given the opportunity to 3D print these items away for potentially better items. At best, you can spend more lunar coins at a cleansing pool to have the potential to remove a lunar item that you dislike, but again that’s just more rng on top of the rng and costs lunar coins to use. It’s incredibly easy to lose all 7 of your lunar coins because the game just refuses to give you the item you want, which is most likely going to be Shaped Glass or Gesture of the Drowned. So I suppose I’ll begin with why you’ll most likely want these items over other ones.

Shaped Glass, as mentioned before, doesn’t really have a downside to using it as it’s pretty easy to abuse the game’s mechanics with it. Firstly, if you’re killing more things faster, those things most likely won't even have an opportunity to damage you. This is an okay example of a risk versus reward mechanic, but I’m going to have to lean on this item being more rewarding than risky. That’s because, as also stated before, healing doesn’t scale with this item, hence the lower amount of health you have the faster you can recover back to full. And recovering back to full is important because you restore one shot protection which allows risky players to continually survive even in the most drastic situations by abuse of the mechanic. This item is the foundation for building a god run.

Gesture of the Drowned, on the other hand, has a downside that’s very easy to bypass by simply picking up the right items and equipment. If you pick up something like Preon Accumulator, sure it shoots off 50% more often but now you have to be constantly thinking of what you’re going to be shooting it at and at what time it’s going to happen. Where as if you pick up a Deployable Missile launcher, you don’t have to worry about aiming at all because those rockets are homing and rarely go after the target you’re trying to aim at anyways. Gesture + Deployable Missiles also synergizes incredibly well with Soulbound Catalyst which decreases your equipment cooldown by 4 seconds every time you kill and enemy. So in this scenario, as long as you’re able to continually chain kills with your abilities and the missiles, you will be spewing out missiles constantly with no stopping. So there’s not really a downside to picking this item unless you really want to use something like the Preon Accumulator which, most of the time, isn’t a necessary item for the late game. There are a plentiful amount of other equipment that synergize decently well with Gesture as well such as the Gnarled Woodsprite, Royal Capacitor (due to its short cooldown time), the Back Up, Blast Shower, etc. So odds are that you’ll already be carrying an equipment that synergizes well with Gesture.

Examples of lunar items that are bad would be Brittle Crown, Corpse Bloom, and Effigy of Grief. These items are ones that no rational player would ever consider picking up in their runs (maybe Effigy if you got it from a lunar pod). Corpse Bloom is an item that you’d really only take if you were desperate enough to just get through the rest of the run, but even then it may be detrimental to your healing capabilities. The only situation I can see Corpse Bloom being useful would be in situations where the player has no active healing items and has had to rely on passive healing for the entire duration of the run. Otherwise, in the long run, the item will only restrict the player’s ability to be successful because they’re going to be hard limited to that 10% healing per second. This means that for the player to reach the one shot protection threshold from less than 10% health, they’ll be waiting a whopping 9 seconds and cannot take damage during that time otherwise the player is dead in late game. These kinds of items are embarrassing to see in the lunar item pool and are essentially scams.

Another item that’s entirely a scam is the Brittle Crown. On paper this item seems like a blast. You’ll have about a third of a chance to acquire additional gold simply from dealing damage to an enemy that scales over time, and the only downside is that the player will lose gold equal to the amount of percentile damage taken. What percentile damage means is that if you lose 90% of your health, you lose 90% of your gold. It’s another example of a risk versus reward item, but during the entirety of the run you’re bound to take a lot of damage simply because of the hoard combat. There are a lot of factors to take in when fighting a hoard and not taking damage on just one stage is incredibly difficult. So that means that you’ll be losing gold quite often, and losing this gold (especially while farming) can be devastating to the flow of your run. Especially in the late game where you can lose millions of gold all because you simply got hit once. There is no chance of losing gold either, it’s 100%. So if that isn’t enough to dissuade you from this item, then the fact that this item costs lunar coins to acquire absolutely should.

I’ll skip talking about the Effigy of Grief so I can get back to the point that lunar coins are a limited resource. So how do you stock up on these? Well, since lunar coins are kept between runs, that means the best way to experience the game is to grind out a couple obliterate runs until the player has stocked up over 10 to 20 lunar coins. This will give the player a decent amount of wiggle room for spending and dealing with the RNG of the lunar bazaar. Here’s the issue with this: The player will most likely grind them out over a long period on Monsoon or speedrun Drizzle to maximize how many coins can be acquired in a short amount of time. Grinding, as a game mechanic, is very polarizing for many different players. It has its place in games because why else do we have the massive game titan World of Warcraft, or Borderlands, or Destiny, or just about any mmorpg to hit the market? But introducing grinding to your small, indie roguelike is questionable.

The grinding system of lunar coins in Risk of Rain just feels like Hopoo wanted to have a more premium currency for adding depth to the game, but had no clever ideas as to what they wanted to achieve with it. Right now, the system is bland, uninspired, and cumbersome to play with for many legit players. The first thing to get out of the way is that I have the actual data collected in Hopoo’s discord server to back up what I’m saying here. This poll was posted by a moderator from the aforementioned discord server to collect feedback for the developers to work with.

Most players here are saying that they’d like to be paid out more lunar coins because they’re shredding through them too quickly. Personally, I tried to avoid spending lunar coins except in situations where I really wanted to win a run or was trying to shoot for a god run. Before my save file corrupted I had about 180 lunar coins which is absolutely more than enough to keep up consistent runs for a while, but that’s assuming I’d want to be working at a deficit. This is because, for the lunar bazaar, the chance of the item you’re specifically looking for spawning is around 30% according to this video and it's even less for the lunar pods (This piece of information has become outdated with time as more lunar items have been added to the game, dropping the percentage even lower). Using this logic and the knowledge that I’ll be spending at least 2 lunar coins on a bazaar item it’s pretty easy to deduce that i can easily play my runs at a lunar coin loss if I am actively trying to get that one item. All of this, again, creates a down time period where players either won’t be spending any lunar coins or are actively trying to build them up. I do not believe, however, that simply increasing the amount of lunar coins paid out will entirely fix this problem.

I would recommend entirely revamping the lunar system to be way different or just outright deleting the lunar system altogether and allowing lunar items to spawn as world drops. There are a couple ideas that come to mind: Randomized challenges on each run that reward lunar items, making lunar items world drops, or creating more world events like the Void Fields, mountain shrines, or maybe even being able to fight the lunar bazaar shop keeper so that he’ll drop a lunar item. These randomized challenges don’t need to be anything specific, but I do believe they should incorporate a good amount of the environment and gameplay to make each run unique in its own ventures. Something like tasking players to kill Runald and Kjaro (ideally only as the engineer or in multiplayer games), activating a newt alter on a specific stage, reaching a stage within a specific time, etc. These challenges would reward specific lunar items and be cycled out for new challenges upon completion so that the player isn’t limited to their capabilities in late game. A system like this probably doesn’t solve the rng factor of obtaining the lunar items and is contrary to the goal of lunar items (to be risk and reward items) while probably creating a list of its own issues, but at least now players won’t feel limited by simply how many lunar coins are on them.

Hoppo could completely remove the RNG aspect of obtaining lunar items while still keeping lunar coins a viable option in the game by allowing the player to purchase a specific amount of certain lunar items at the very beginning of the game or even in the character select menu. A system like this would completely kill off the rng aspect of the game, while encouraging players to levy their odds of just how far they want to go with their run. A player can purchase 4 Shaped Glasses right at the beginning of the game, but the player is going to have to be able to carry those throughout the entirety of the game if they want to achieve a god run and should they die, they lose whatever they invested into the run. Although I’d have to wager that there would be a limit to how many lunar items a player can buy each run so that the player doesn’t just stock up on lunar coins and Shaped Glasses for easy runs. Of course the issue of down time still isn’t resolved, but given an increase in the amount of lunar coins paid out would ensure the player could somewhat consistently engage with this system on a run by run basis.

Having lunar items drop as extremely rare world drops would also be an interesting spin on the mechanic but is probably far less desirable than the other options. While it would make gathering lunar items more consistent, I imagine the rng chance of obtaining lunar coins would be comparable if not less than red items. Although I imagine having the occasional lunar drop would allow players to quickly restructure their runs assuming they got a worthwhile item. Aside from this minor bonus, this suggestion wouldn’t be capable of replacing the current lunar system that’s in place.

While the lunar system is simple and intuitive, it’s overall harmful to the game and draws many players towards just cheating in millions of lunar coins so that they never have to micromanage this currency. Please understand that the above suggestions are merely suggestions and not tried and true methods for replacing this system. However given that Hopoo doesn’t even seem interested in nerfing Shaped Glass, I suspect that the lunar system won’t be changing any time before release.

World Events

The new optional events included in this December update are absolutely fantastic. The Void Fields are a fun way to break up the monotony of the game, and having a new optional boss to kill is always a joy. Even though I may trash on bosses like the Aurelionite, having these bonus areas to play through does make the game feel more substantial, and I think Hopoo should incorporate more of these deliberate world events and even some procedurally generated ones.

I personally enjoy the small secrets and additions like Kjaro and Runald’s cave, shrine of N'kuhana, etc. But I find these additions too small in scope to really be worth the effort to achieve every run. The Void Fields on the other hand is a substantial enough challenge and provides a large enough scope that I want to see more of in upcoming content updates. It would be cool to have the world be an almost mmorpg-esque world, with multiple side objectives to do along the way to a main objective. The unfortunate thing here is that not all of these side things are worth doing. N’kuhana’s shrine in fact offers nothing to the player outside of the initial unlock of the item, N’kuhana’s opinion. And the cave of Runald and Kjaro isn’t worth visiting for the measly two green items, on top of the caves only being accessible in multiplayer, or as the Engineer, or managing to glitch your way through the door with character abilities like the Huntress’ blink. I believe the Void Fields did it right in this regard by having a decent reward for players to contend for in the form of 8 white/green items and a red item. Perhaps having items that were more easily accessible or simply rewarding more items and incentives to partake in these optional areas (3D printers, boss items, particular shops, etc.) would drive more players to use them in their common routing. Blend these generated areas with the suggested stage progression of playing each stage once throughout a run, and a player would be able to make a reasonable path of execution that they could somewhat reliably depend on as long as rng was on their side.

To keep the more randomized spin on a player’s run, the use of randomly generated events could be used to allow the player to participate in potentially unique events to acquire a little bit more power for a little bit of their time. A system that immediately comes to mind is a hit list: You load into a new map and the game will tell you to kill a specific enemy on the map for a reward. In of itself, having something like this wouldn’t do much to bolster the game for people who can already kill bosses consistently, so instead there would need to be some type of modifier system. Simple modifiers could be used like 2x damage, health, enemy leeches health on hit, etc. But simple modifiers cause a game to lack depth, so I propose different challenges and modifiers: Time limits, hydra bosses (duplicate on death), health gated bosses (to somewhat halt OP players), and maybe even specialized boss elements that are separate from the usual elite elements. That isn’t to say that these randomly generated events even have to be bosses, it could be something to defend, a flag to capture, a delivery drop to conquer, etc. I believe this would be the best way to keep a game like this fresh while maintaining a lot of what the game wants to do.

Randomized events could also be a risk versus reward endeavor through the use of limiting what abilities and items the player has access to. Let’s say in the latter parts of the game, the player can stumble upon an event that will restrict them down to 20 randomized items (while they possibly have over 100 to be chosen from). Although I’d wager that players in this position would just opt to not even do the event as it could possibly end their run, what better way to reward these players for being risky than giving them more of the lunar items they want or even lunar coins? If players are able to be more productive in their runs by taking these additional challenges, I believe it’ll drive those players to accept these events in their late games. Plus these events give the game that feeling of a larger scope without altering all that much about the levels or the gameplay. And really, you only need to put like 2-3 on each stage to make the events system feel substantial enough.

Overall, I think if Hopoo were capable of designing a system like this, and designing it well, it could draw players back into playing the game for hours upon hours on top of what they’ve already invested. For me personally, the game has gotten pretty bland to play with time because each run just feels like it runs through the same loop: Hope for good beginning items, hope for good stages, farm for a red item on stage 4, and then if I’m doing alright I’ll try to get my way to the celestial portal, if I’m doing really good I’ll try to go for a god run. As much as the game tries to hide this gameplay format by having a wide range of RNG systems at play, the overall experience after a couple hundred hours can become apparent and stale as time progresses forwards. That isn’t to say that I think the current game is bad, but I think it could be so much more than what it is currently.

Challenges?

Another thing that would go a long way to making the game feel more expansive and player-progression focused would be the implementation of some good ol’ challenges. Hopoo seemingly doesn’t know how to develop a challenge that doesn’t have something locked behind it, or outright refuses to make challenges without a reward. Like seriously, some of the hardest challenges in the game reward alternative abilities for characters. Some of those being direct upgrades from the character’s normal ability. You really mean to tell me that I have to beat stage 20 without picking up any lunar items just to get a frag grenade for Commando? Alright, I guess. Hopoo has even realized that not all players want stuff to be locked behind challenges, and has added a decent amount of immediately accessible content to the game to appeal to those who aren’t into the challenges system. However they have also stated that they’re proud that players aren't immediately able to unlock the new abilities from the Skills 2.0 update and I just have to wonder, why?

Limiting the players to the degree that Risk of Rain 2 does seems overall harmful to a player’s experience with the game. You don’t unlock the best red item in the game, 57 leaf clover, until you’ve managed to clear 20 stages in a single run, which will probably be a player’s first time getting a god run. When you start up a new save file, you’re severely limited on the items that you can get your hands on because stuff like tougher times, armor piercing rounds, berserker's pauldron, preon accumulator, etc. are just locked away from access completely. That is disappointing because many of these items are staples in developing a good build, and it’s now more difficult for players to understand what items do what and which items are worth the time and effort when they have to unlock the item first and then have a random chance of acquiring it in a future run with a random amount of stacks to be accumulated. It’s even more disappointing that players have to fight a hill of challenges that get progressively more and more steep with its requirements and begin requiring players to either master elements of the game or the characters present.

I understand having hard challenges in your roguelike, but having items and content locked behind those challenges can turn a lot of players away from your game. The only saving grace here is that these challenges don’t have difficulty requirements outside of a couple select challenges, but most of these only offer cosmetic rewards that come from the monsoon obliteration challenges. It seems inexcusable to me that there wouldn’t just be challenges that players could attempt for fun. Instead we have challenges that players are being forcefully drawn to if they want new toys and gadgets to play around with in their future runs. Some of the challenges are understandable to skip, like if you don’t like the Engineer, you probably don’t have to worry about doing his challenges. However I wouldn’t skip any of the item and equipment challenges because items and equipment are the core of the game experience. Being limited in the items available means you’re only experiencing a limited amount of the game, and that’s a big no no.

The change that I’d propose here is just to nerf a lot of the more difficult challenges that have gameplay impacting items locked behind them, and then put those challenges in their own categories that players can try out on their own time for their own enjoyment. With these changes the unlock system would appear less like a grind and more like something for completionists and avid players to use in order to test their skills at the game. Something else that I’d recommend is a little stamp or indicator that tells people what difficulty the challenges were completed on, just as a little extra something for players to work towards. This part of the discussion is relatively simple because, come on, it’s challenges. But hopefully Hopoo changes the way that they handle the inclusion of challenges in the future.

Collectibles

Oh boy the collectibles. The collectibles aren’t terrible and before my save corrupted I was very close to have 100%’d the unlocks and collectibles, but 200 hours in and I still hadn’t unlocked everything. And the reason for that is because the unlocks take way too long to unlock and are way too frustrating to actively chase after. The environment logs became a chore to try and collect, when after spending about 100 hours after the Scorched Acres update I was still completely unable to obtain its environment log. It took me 90+ Grovetender kills to finally get his monster log, and to this date I’ve only had the little disciple item drop for me twice (one was in a multiplayer match). I ultimately gave up on trying to even go for the Aurelionite’s monster log when it once took me 4 hours to get a single gold portal to show up in a god run.

This section of the discussion is going to be short because I have a very simple message here: Increase the god damn drop rates of some of this stuff, seriously. It’s not satisfying to spend 200 hours and still see that there’s some little lore tidbits that I’m missing from my log book. It’s not satisfying to have to stop my flow of gameplay every time I get Scorched Acres just to have a tiny tiny tiny chance that the environment log radio might have somewhere on the map and then having to go hunt for it. And then when I don’t find it after being way more thorough than one should be on any given stage, I then have to question if I simply missed it or it actually didn’t spawn. It’s not satisfying to finally get that environment log or that one item from that one boss that has a random chance to spawn in the 50% chance stage that also has his own fucking chances on whether or not he’s going to drop the monster log and/or the boss item. Stuff like this is absolutely ridiculous and tedious and is making me work way too hard and having me dedicate too many resources just to get some god damn lore text. Little disciple isn’t even that good of an item, so why is it so rare? Just increase the spawns of stuff like the gold portals, monster logs (for bosses), and environment logs. Come on Hopoo, I just want to read your game’s lore.

-=CLOSING=-

So that’s my super long and in depth explanation and critique of many of the systems that Risk of Rain 2 has. I still love this game, and can’t wait for more content updates on it (primarily a fix to the corrupting save files). Please understand that these are just my opinions and whether or not you disagree with me doesn’t mean either of us are wrong or right, it just means I want a different game than you do.

To summarize my review from the beginning of this post: Risk of Rain 2 does it’s predecessor justice and so much more. The jump from 2D to 3D just feels so right that one has to question if this was Hopoo’s original intent before realizing they didn’t have the resources for it. The gameplay loop and gameflow are excellent and you really do feel like you’re overcoming insurmountable odds at certain points to become invincible by the end. It has issues and probably always will be given Hopoo’s unmoved demeanor in even the most balance breaking items in their game. I just hope that they will reconsider some of their design philosophy for the sake of making a much more entertaining video game. As stated before, I overall give this game a 7/10 and depending on the person you may play a few or a few hundred hours in Risk of Rain 2. It’s a fun game to just sit down and play, and you’re given a decent amount of freedom in how you go about playing. And at the end of the day, just having a fun game to play is all that should matter, right?

-Count_

#review #discussion #risk of rain 2 #risk of rain #lonesome alley

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postgamecontent · 7 years

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Phil's Epic Fill-a-Pix Adventure (Nintendo 3DS) Review

Publisher/Developer: Lightwood Games

Price: $7.99

As regular readers know, I'm a big fan of Picross games. But my interest in puzzles extends beyond Picross, of course. I like Picross puzzles because they scratch my itch for solving logic puzzles, and do so in a way that doesn't necessarily demand deep concentration. There are many variations of logic puzzles that I find similar satisfaction in, and like probably many of you, one of the ones I spent the most time with was Minesweeper. In that game, you're presented with a grid filled out with numbers and unrevealed spaces. The numbers indicate how many adjacent squares contain mines. Using this information, you have to logically deduce which squares contain mines and which are safe.

Fill-a-Pix is quite similar to Minesweeper. Instead of seeking out and flagging mines, however, you need to use the numbers to determine which squares on the grid should be colored in. As in Picross, correctly filling in the grid will create a picture of some sort. Grid sizes can be scaled up or down to adjust the difficulty, with larger boards requiring a massive amount of time to untangle. While I don't recall seeing Fill-a-Pix puzzles in any physical puzzle books before (I haven’t picked any of those up in years), I've certainly seen them around online, playable in PC web browsers. I'd venture to say that anyone who enjoys Picross puzzles should enjoy Fill-a-Pix as well.

Phil's Epic Fill-a-Pix Adventure is Lightwood Games's entry in the category. I believe it's the only Fill-a-Pix game available on the Nintendo 3DS, so if nothing else, it has that going for it. The framing device is that Phil has just returned from traveling around the world. He took pictures in various places using his special camera, and he needs your help to develop them. There are ten real-world locations represented in the game, each with ten or more puzzles to solve that show off sights and items found in that place. The puzzles vary in size and complexity, with the largest of the bunch coming in at 100 squares wide. With that many squares in play, the pictures can sometimes be extremely detailed. For example, one of the puzzles in Japan is a hot cup of instant noodles. It's such a large picture that squares are used to shade the cup and make the steam look extra-realistic.

Clear times will obviously vary depending on your skill, but I measured my time spent on each of the larger puzzles in hours, not minutes. In total, you're looking at a length comparable to a full-length RPG, if not longer. The opening set of puzzles alone took me several hours of playtime. It's hard to argue with the value for your money here. You'll likely get your fill of Fill-a-Pix by the time you reach the end of it all. Like many collections of logic puzzles, however, it can be very difficult to stop playing. You can hardly leave a puzzle partly finished, and it's all too easy to start up the next one as soon as you've finished the last.

My main criticism of Phil's Epic Fill-a-Pix Adventure is somewhat related to the size of the puzzles, actually. While the blank pictures vary in size on the menu screen, that doesn't seem to have any direct connection to the actual size of the puzzle. Perhaps you're looking for a shorter puzzle and choose the smallest frame from the menu. Well, you might have picked the simplest one, but you may have also signed up for a behemoth. Until you hop in, you can't know. There's no penalty for quitting after you've picked a puzzle, so it's as easy as pausing and hitting a button to go back out, but I would have preferred a little more information about this on the puzzle select screen. I also would have liked it if there were more quick puzzles, as I found the balance of the included puzzles heavily tilted towards the multi-hour ones.

One neat thing that Lightwood Games did is to allow the player to use a larger brush and an auto-fill button if they wish. Basically, if you use this tool, solving the puzzle is just a matter of sniffing out the right spots on the map and hitting the button to automatically fill in the only logical squares. Should that prove too arduous a task, you can also hit the shoulder buttons for a clue as to where the next solvable location on the grid can be found. I don't recommend using any of these tools unless you're truly looking for something mindless, however. It sucks the challenge out of the game entirely. I greatly appreciate the developer providing these kinds of options for the player, though. It's always nice when you can choose your level of challenge without losing access to any content.

The game is played in its entirety with buttons. It works well enough, but I would have liked the option to use touch controls. It feels strange to play a puzzle game like this without that sort of option available. I also would have appreciated it if there were a couple more pieces of background music to choose from. The one piece that is in the game is quite nice, but as mentioned, this is a bit of a long haul. A little musical variety would have been nice. While I'm picking nits, I also would have liked it if there were a little more fanfare upon finishing a puzzle. The music doesn't even stop, and you more or less just get dumped back to the menu after a simple overlay appears telling you what the image is and how long you took to finish it.

At any rate, the puzzles are the important thing here, and they're quite good. The theme works nicely, and I was happy to see that the subjects didn't just consist of the usual suspects for each location. There's a ton of content here for the price, and the basic concept behind Fill-a-Pix is more than strong enough to keep your attention for hours on end. While it's missing a few options and features that I feel would have made for a more solid overall experience, little of that matters when you're in the thick of uncovering an amazingly-detailed monochrome image, piece by piece. If you like logic puzzles, this one should certainly be up your alley. You can find Phil’s Epic Fill-a-Pix Adventure on the Nintendo 3DS eShop for $7.99.

Disclosure: Lightwood Games provided me with a free digital copy of this game for review purposes.

#reviews #nintendo 3ds #gaming #puzzle #fill-a-pix #phil's epic fill-a-pix adventure #lightwood games #eshop

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mrhotmaster · 4 years

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Samsung Galaxy S20+ Detailed Review: Here All You Need

Samsung Galaxy S20+ Detailed Review

Are ' Space Zoom ' and 8K recording appropriate for justifying an unbelievably high price?

Samsung's bundle of premium Android cell phones this year looks encouraging. We have the S20 arrangement for photography lovers, and the Galaxy Z Flip for those searching for the front line of cell phone innovation. We haven't checked the following Galaxy Note cell phone, which should come later in the year, and will no uncertainty have interesting highlights to gloat about as well. The huge concentration for the new Galaxy S20 arrangement this year are the cameras. Samsung is making a ton of commotion about its new 'Space Zoom' include and the way that the S20 models are the first to offer 8K video recording at a valuable framerate. The telephones looked very amazing when we initially observed them at Samsung's Unpacked occasion a month ago, and now it's a great opportunity to take a closer and more top to bottom look, beginning with the Galaxy S20+. This is the immediate successor to the Galaxy S10+【₹ 69,900】and like with each cycle, we ought to anticipate a sleeker structure, better battery life, improved camera execution, and obviously, an all the more remarkable processor. Valued at Rs. 73,999 in India for the sole 128GB form, is the Galaxy S20+【₹ 73,999】 justified, despite all the trouble? How about we see.

Samsung Galaxy S20+ Plan

The Samsung Galaxy S20+ is right away conspicuous as a Samsung cell phone. Contrasted with the Galaxy S10+, Samsung has refined the plan. The upper and lower bezels of the showcase are smaller, and the glass back has a more extensive bend along the edges, covering a greater amount of the aluminum outline. This telephone is still truly agreeable to hold however the gleaming completion makes it very elusive. It's not excessively thick at 7.8mm, however it's somewhat heavier than its ancestor at 186g. The thin showcase outskirts and marginally taller body have permitted Samsung to utilize an a lot bigger presentation. The Galaxy S20+ highlights a 6.7-inch QHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X board, with help for HDR 10+ and, just because, a 120Hz revive rate. You can set the showcase to run at 60Hz at its full goals, or 120Hz at or a lower, full-HD+ goals (which is the default setting) on the off chance that you like. Be that as it may, you can't have the 120Hz revive rate at the full goals, in any event not yet. There have been gossipy tidbits about Samsung anticipating permitting this with a product update later on.

The Galaxy S20+ loses the auxiliary selfie camera that the Galaxy S10+ had, and rather there's a solitary, focus mounted opening punch pattern.The pattern doesn't combine menus or other UI components from full-screen applications, so apps are mostly shut off this field. The volume and force catches are on the right, and Samsung has discarded the devoted Bixby button. Rather, you can tweak the long-press capacity of the force catch to either wake Bixby or dispatch the force menu. A twofold press activity can likewise be set to dispatch the camera, open Bixby, or some other application.

The SIM plate is on the highest point of the telephone and can either house two Nano-SIMs or a solitary SIM and a microSD card. At the base of the telephone, Samsung has disposed of the earphone attachment for its leads since the Galaxy Note 10【₹ 69,999】, thus here, we simply have the amplifier, USB Type-C port, and a speaker. There is an earpiece simply over the camera opening, shrewdly covered between the external casing and show, making it for all intents and purposes difficult to see. We have the Galaxy S20 +'s Cosmic Grey shading option, but in Could blue and Cosmic Black trims in India it is available at the same time. On the back is a rectangular camera knock, containing four camera sensors, an amplifier and the LED line. The structure of the camera group helps us a ton to remember a portion of the ongoing Galaxy An arrangement contributions we've seen, which we feel weakens the Galaxy S20 arrangement's road nearness a bit. We would have enjoyed a progressively particular structure for the back of this telephone, much like what Apple did with the iPhone 11【₹ 62,899】 arrangement, just to give its leads better display esteem. Nevertheless, when you really carry the Galaxy S20+, it feels much better than any Samsung middle-range telephone. It's incredibly all around fabricated, has a higher screen-to-body proportion, is still genuinely light. In the case, you can hope to locate a 25W quick charger, a Type-C to Type-C charging link, an AKG-marked headset, a silicone case, and the standard pamphlets. The Samsung Galaxy S20+ ships with a screen monitor which for once is very much applied and not nosy when performing motions.

Samsung Galaxy S20+ Particulars And Programming

All inclusive, Samsung is advertising the S20 arrangement as 5G cell phones, anyway in India, the whole S20 arrangement will just help 4G. The 5G rendition of the Galaxy S20+ comes in numerous capacity variations however the LTE-just form, which we have, is sold in only one arrangement with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of capacity. The last is expandable, which is something we don't see over and over again nowadays on lead telephones. Samsung has likewise utilized LPDDR5 memory here, which guarantees higher information rates and lower power utilization. Like all past Galaxy S leaders sold in India, the Galaxy S20+ is controlled by an Exynos chip as opposed to a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, and the one utilized here is the Exynos 990. You can peruse progressively about it here, yet basically it's a 7nm octa-center SoC with two custom Samsung centers for uncompromising undertakings, two Cortex-A76 centers and four Cortex-A55 centers for lighter remaining tasks at hand. Illustrations is taken care of by the Mali-G77 GPU, which professes to offer a 20 percent support in execution over the past age. By and large, we ought to expect execution along the lines of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865 SoC.

You likewise get the various lead network highlights you would expect, for example, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5, sound system speakers tuned by AKG, Hi-Res sound help for wired earphones, IP68 residue and water obstruction, quick remote charging, NFC, and MST support for Samsung Pay. One UI 2.1 that is based on Android 10 is running by the Galaxy S20+, and our unit initially dispatched with the February security fix. In any case, we got a product update, during our survey with the March security fix. The most recent rendition of Samsung's Android skin feels incredibly refined, and despite the fact that there are a huge amount of highlights to investigate, it doesn't feel jumbled or overpowering. Highlights, for example, Samsung Dex and Link to Windows are available, and you likewise get the standard Samsung staples, for example, an inherent screen recorder, a screen capture manager, Edge screen, and an exceptionally customisable consistently in plain view. Enlarged reality (AR) highlights are completely gathered in an application called AR Zone, so you don't need to dispatch the camera application just to utilize highlights, for example, AR Doodle. One UI will show you limited time messages as warnings however this can be fixed by essentially incapacitating a couple of switches in the Privacy menu of the Settings application.

Samsung Galaxy S20+ Execution And Battery Life

The Galaxy S20+ conveyed unshakable execution in the time we utilized it, and we didn't anticipate anything less. One UI has truly developed on us, and today it's effectively one of our preferred Android skins. The 120Hz showcase causes looking through menus to feel smart and gives the general use experience a progressively liquid feel. Be that as it may, we favored utilizing the Galaxy S20+ at the QHD+ goals only for that additional piece of sharpness in the UI, however that is simply us. It's a touch of amazing that 120Hz isn't empowered as a matter of course (which ought to have been the situation), as we presume numerous clients probably won't find that this alternative even exists. The Exynos 990 is a strong entertainer, and the benchmarks harden our experience. We have 5,17,291 focus points in AnTuTu and 6,721 targets in the 3D Mark designs of Slingshot Extreme. Sometimes the number was lower than the number obtained in the Realme X50 Pro 5G (5,69,618 AnTuTu, 7,202 in 3DMark). Regardless, you'd be unable to see any distinction in genuine execution and even games. The standard overwhelming hitters, for example, PUBG Mobile, Asphalt 9: Legends, and Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade ran completely easily at the most elevated settings. The Galaxy S20+ got very hot after around 20 minutes of gaming, yet it was nothing we was unable to deal with. The showcase is effectively extraordinary compared to other we've run over. Hues are rich with awesome immersion, and brilliance is more than satisfactory. The encompassing light sensor can be somewhat slow on occasion, with regards to altering brilliance to coordinate surrounding light, yet this is anything but a major protest. HDR content looks generally excellent, and gratitude to the slimmer bezels, watching recordings felt exceptionally vivid. Sound quality from the sound system speakers was very amazing as well. The earpiece and the base terminating speaker sounded even, and with Dolby Atmos empowered, the spatial detachment was perceptibly better. Bass is still somewhat powerless however there's sufficient warmth in the sound to keep it from appearing to be tinny. The packaged AKG gives similarly great sound just as aloof segregation from encompassing commotion.

We should address the telephone's biometric validation frameworks. There's the ultrasonic in-show unique mark sensor, which is quick and didn't bomb us during the audit time frame. Face acknowledgment is likewise an alternative, and it functions admirably however isn't as quick as we would have preferred. It additionally will in general battle in exceptionally low light, in which case, we needed to fall back on our unique mark for confirmation. The entirety of this takes a cost for battery life, which is the reason Samsung has knock up the ability to 4,500mAh for the Samsung Galaxy S20+. It's protected to state that battery life is really strong, however not extraordinary. We had the option to get a 24-hour runtime on most days, when our use wasn't substantial. Nonetheless, on days when we utilized the camera a ton or messed around for quite a while, we had to charge the telephone a little sooner. Fortunately, it doesn't take long to charge the Galaxy S20+. With the packaged 25W connector, we figured out how to energize the battery to 55 percent in thirty minutes and up to 93 percent in 60 minutes. It additionally bolsters Fast Wireless Charging 2.0, in the event that you have a good 10W or higher remote charger. Like previously, the Galaxy S20+ additionally bolsters Wireless PowerShare or switch remote charging, which can be utilized to charge extras, for example, the Galaxy Buds+.

Samsung Galaxy S20+ Cameras

The Samsung Galaxy S20+ has a shiny new camera arrangement with two of the feature highlights being 8K video recording and up to 30x cross breed zoom. The essential sensor despite everything has a 12-megapixel goals with Dual Pixel self-adjust, a f/1.8 opening, and OIS, yet the pixel size is presently 1.8 microns contrasted with 1.4 microns on the past model. The ultra wide-edge camera additionally utilizes a 12-megapixel sensor, however with littler 1.4 micron pixels, a smaller f/2.2 gap, and no self-adjust. The fax camera gets the greatest change, with a 64-megapixel sensor however no optical adjustment. The 'In addition to' model that we have has a profundity vision camera which is missing in the standard Galaxy S20. Another change, which you've most likely seen, is that Samsung has dumped its variable opening framework with the Galaxy S20 arrangement, regardless.

The camera interface feels commonplace in the event that you've utilized any ongoing Samsung telephone. We have a customisable line of shooting modes simply over the screen button, while the remainder of the settings, for example, the viewpoint proportion, clock and switch for 'Movement photograph' sit on the most distant side of the viewfinder. The application offers switches to empower the Scene Optimiser, which identifies objects or a scene in the edge. Shot Suggestion will offer tips to better your surrounding, and there are exploratory highlights, for example, HDR 10+ video, which can be empowered. Introductory surveys of the Galaxy S20 Ultra【₹ 92,999】featured some large issues with the self-adjust framework, which Samsung has vowed to fix. While we didn't confront any such issues with the Galaxy S20+ while we were trying it, we got a product update which guaranteed upgrades for the cameras. We re-tried the cameras and didn't discover anything new or diverse about the use understanding, yet we noted that low light selfies appeared to have shown signs of improvement. When shooting with the primary camera under great light, the Galaxy S20+ caught excellent subtleties with satisfying hues and no noticeable clamor in the shadow zones. HDR is dealt with well indeed, in any event, when shooting subjects legitimately against the light. With the wide-point camera, there's much more of any scene to catch, yet you do get some barrel mutilation. Close-up shots likewise ended up incredible, with brilliant detail, sharpness and great common bokeh. The extremely fun part is the telephone's new zoom framework. The fax camera offers 2x optical zoom, and past that, it utilizes a blend of AI-helped half and half zoom and advanced zoom. You can legitimately hop to certain zoom levels with devoted catches that show up once you tap the fax symbol in the viewfinder. You can physically zoom in to an exact point also, utilizing the customary squeeze signal.

Photographs taken with the fax camera were acceptable, given plentiful light. During our underlying testing, we discovered picture quality conflicting, yet following the product update, things appear to have shown signs of improvement. After the 10x zoom level, surfaces on objects look noticeably smoothened as grain and commotion are evacuated. The Galaxy S20+ will address a more thorough measure than normal in the full 30x zoom. Contrasted with editing a local 64-megapixel test, a similar picture with a 30x zoom offers better lucidity. Past 20x, you get a little see window in the upper left corner of the viewfinder to assist you with surrounding your shot. In low light, utilizing significant levels of zoom doesn't yield entirely great outcomes. Nonetheless, utilizing Night mode with 10x zoom can offer boundlessly preferable outcomes over a standard shot with a similar zoom level. Talking about Night mode, this works over every one of the three principle sensors and disposes of grain and improves exposures. Low-light execution as a rule is excellent as well. We figured out how to get some great subtleties and hues with the essential camera, and commotion was taken care of well as well. Live Focus mode functions admirably, and we had a decent achievement rate with individuals, however questions were somewhat of an all in or all out. The foundation profundity impact can be balanced previously or after you make a go, and you can even apply distinctive bokeh impacts. Edge discovery was additionally dealt with well. Single Take is another style of shooting for the Galaxy S20 +. With this, the camera catches a 10-second video alongside stills at different interims, and dependent on what's being shot, it will naturally apply channels to a portion of the shots. This is best when you're catching a movement, instead of a still scene.

Sample taken at 4X by Samsung Galaxy S20+

The Samsung Galaxy S20+ is an entirely able cell phone for video as well. The feature obviously is 8K video, which functions admirably, yet you'll require a 8K show or TV to truly exploit such film. It's incredible that we have a telephone that can record at this goals, yet since the casing rate is restricted to 24fps, we thought that it was smarter to just stay with 4K video. Picture quality is awesome in sunshine, with astounding adjustment and subtleties. In low light, the adjustment causes somewhat of a wobble impact in video, however other than this, the quality is acceptable. When shooting up to 4K peaks at 30fps, you can toggle between all cameras, including the focus. Video quality justifiably isn't awesome when shooting with the wide-point or fax cameras in low light. There's the Super Steady video mode as well, which should offer gimbal-level smoothness. While it accomplishes work to a degree, we favored the quality when utilizing the essential camera for a few reasons. In Super Steady mode, just the wide-edge or fax cameras (contingent upon the point of view you select) are utilized, and the goals is confined to 1080p.

Other shooting modes incorporate Live Focus for recordings, and there's even a manual video mode now, much the same as you have for stills. Overly moderate movement mode is available as well, however at 960fps, you're despite everything constrained to a 720p goals. We have a 10 megapixel Dual Pixel AF sensor and a F/2.2 focal opening when we get to the Selfie camera. During the day, the beautification channel that is on of course smoothens skin surfaces vigorously, making photographs look unnatural. Turning it off improves results extensively. Live Focus is likewise somewhat of an all in or all out, with mistaken edge location. Before the product update, we had horrendous outcomes with the selfie camera in low light, yet things have improved a piece post the update.

Decision

The Galaxy S20+ may appear to be over the top expensive, yet Samsung has really estimated it equivalent to the Galaxy S10+, when it propelled a year back. From that point of view, the Galaxy S20+ offers improved plan and execution no matter how you look at it, which makes it a commendable redesign. A portion of its stand-apart highlights incorporate the new zoom framework for the back cameras, the superb showcase, strong battery life, and a sleeker plan. Different things, for example, switch remote charging, the sound system speakers, and the lean programming make this an excellent bundle to consider. Anyway this telephone has a lot of shortcoming, for example, the way that it gets very warm when playing overwhelming games for expanded timeframes, and face acknowledgment doesn't work very well in low light. The structure of the back is likewise somewhat dull for a lead telephone in 2020. Battery life, while great, could have been something more, and quick charging isn't as snappy as a portion of the arrangements we've seen from different producers. Another irritated point for certain purchasers may be the absence of 5G support in the Indian models. While it is anything but a major misfortune in case you're just going to utilize your telephone in India, it could be a major issue for individuals who travel a ton or who expect to clutch their costly buys for quite a long while. Both Realme and iQoo have propelled 5G gadgets in India for significantly less, making the Indian Galaxy S20+ appear to be less future-verification. In general, the Galaxy S20+ is as yet an extraordinary lead that offers brilliant all-round execution, first class includes, and obviously, brand esteem.

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REVIEWS

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☞ Premium Looks & Design

☞ Lean, Full Featured UI

☞ Great Cameras

☞ Nice Show/ Performance

☞ Long Battery Life

☞ Nice Display Quality

☞ Heats Up Fast

KEY SPECIFICATIONS

DISPLAY

6.70Inch

AndroiD 10

RESOLUTION

1440x2300P

REAR CAMERA

12MP+64MP+

12MP

FRONT CAMERA

10MP

STORAGE

128GB

RAM

8GB

BATTERY

4500mAh

PROCESSOR

Exynos 990

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