Escape Goat 2 – Alpha Impressions

Preorder for $8 http://www.magicaltimebean.com/escape-goat-2/

After a bit of a steam key related mix-up (check your humble store for a new one if you couldn’t access the alpha earlier) Escape Goat 2 is back with a short taste of what is to come.

The first thing you’ll notice as you start up the handful of levels, is how much of a graphical leap there is over the original Escape Goat. Everything in the game has received a significant upgrade from the menus to the main sprites and especially the environments.

From that base, things proceed in much the same way as the first game. Mechanics such as jumping, throwing switches and using your mouse companion are introduced progressively. While this is great for new players, be aware that veterans will not find anything too taxing in what is on offer. If you have played the original you’ll know exactly how to get through each of the challenges without reading the hints, with only the final levels of each path representing any sort of difficulty.

Controls are still extremely tight, the levels logical and the sense of always making progress seems intact. My only slight quibble is the art change has meant the charm of the original goat has been lost in the translation. It isn’t that the new goat isn’t without charm, it is just that it is a different sort of look. Given that, an optional pixel Goat would be a welcome addition.

The main new feature introduced is a branching structure care of a mini-map. While it doesn’t play too big a part in this demonstration (the choice is simply binary at one point) you could imagine that the idea is expanded upon in the full game. Just how well it works and how many options it provides remains to be seen. Ultimately you will probably want to visit every area anyway so it might not play too big a factor beyond the simple gate system of the first game.

On the other hand, it would have been nice to try the “other path” out without starting from scratch. Hopefully the full game does let you go back and try an alternate path at will but it isn’t a big problem here. In total, you will only need to replay around 5 minutes of the 20 minutes or so of content.

Overall there isn’t much to complain about here. Escape Goat is back, it looks amazing and the quality of the music is still excellent. This alpha is more of a tease at this stage for veteran players, but if you had any doubt about the quality of the final experience and the promised ten areas, getting your hands on this will more than settle those concerns.

X-Rebirth Review Update

Sometimes the best way to say it all is to get somebody to say it for you. So here you go in youtube form:

As the French would say… when speaking English, “damn”.

Now while that sums up the state of things nicely, I’d have to say I disagree with one of the main points of the video. That point is that the game is fundamentally changed and dumbed down for the worse. Where a lot of things have been changed seemingly to remove depth, I think the jury is still out on those change for a lot of players. After all, you can’t really say something works or not until the game…well actually works.

Are things dumbed down from the previous X series games? Yes they are. Is this a bad thing? Well that depends. A lot of what I’m hearing for fans is a return to the largely menu driven and non-immersive functions of the previous games. Instead of getting out of your ship and walking around a station people want a menu to just appear when you fly close. This is perfectly valid for fans, but still ultimately boils down to flying spreadsheets in space. It is fun for some people and I respect what they want, but a lot of the excitement around Rebirth was exactly that it would be a more inviting game with more diversity in the mechanics and a greater sense of actually exploring a living universe.

Basically I don’t think the problem is with the design, I think the problem is with the execution and luckily execution can to some extent be fixed.

To this end, here are the current problems that I see:

1. The interface to do what you need to do, is clumsy almost to the point of being broken.
2. The universe is small and filled with copy pasted details, especially inside the space stations.
3. Technical issues are abundant and a lot of the processes need to be fleshed out and adjusted such as simple tasks like docking a ship.

Now I don’t believe any of these issues can’t be fixed in a relatively small timeframe. There has been some acknowledgement of the problems and while the dev is talking about things like Oculus Rift integration which is somewhat discouraging (walk before you try to run please) I do actually have faith we can get there. Perhaps things might be decent even before modders do all the work. I could easily see interesting NPCs being added once things are more stable or the community gets to sink their teeth into it (assuming one is left). Walking around seems pointless now, but I don’t think it would take much to get people keen to stretch their legs.

Players should also note that a lot of limitations are by design. As you play more, you will unlock system upgrades and drones which take care of a lot of the tasks that people are missing out on. Here too they don’t work quite as well as you would like and the interface for drones also needs work (a common theme). But just as above, these are issues that can be fixed… at least in theory.

Which is of course the big problem. This is still a $50 game with all sorts of regional specific bullshit placed on it by Egosoft. If you are going to produce a game like this, why not use Steam Early Access? It is there, it makes sense for a title like this and you wouldn’t have people like myself shaking their head and warning people not to buy this game. I suppose people could virtually place the logo on it themselves and consider the game “alpha”, but this comes with no promise from the other side that things will ever be resolved.

If you don’t spend your money, at least keep an eye on progress. To their credit, Egososft have released buggy near completely broken crap before and mostly delivered. I’ll certainly be keeping a close eye on things and hoping for the best because as a great philosopher once said, “I gotta have faith-a-faith-a-faith”. The same guy could probably have designed some better character models too…just saying.

Betrayer – Steam early access

Every now and then a game jumps up and grabs your attention by being a little bit different. FPS survival type horror? Plenty of those. Games that go for a really different black and white asthetic? Well we have some of those too.

But all of that combined? Well it has probably been done at some stage. But it has been done again with Betrayer and the result is looking darn good.

Check it out on Steam early access: http://store.steampowered.com/app/243120/

To give you an idea of what it is? Here are some really well put together impressions from Grief.exe care of NeoGAF. He takes us through the early sections and demonstrates some of the mechanics and combat situations available:

There seems to be a long way to go, but the journey the game is on seems to be heading somewhere interesting. One to keep an eye on.