Category: Nintendo News

Agent Alyssa L’Salle is the kind of peppy, grown up, consummately capable protagonist we so rarely seem to get in JRPGs these days. She’s not the type to wallow in melancholy or self-doubt, or even to stick around in one place for too long. In fact, she’s the perfect front for Cosmic Star Heroine – a game that pays a sizeable tribute to JRPGs of the past without getting bogged down in the grind and repetition.

At its best, Cosmic Star Heroine plays like how you remember your favourite 16-bit JRPG to be, rather than how it actually plays. All of that boring drudgery and dull scene-setting has been excised to produce a pacy highlights package of a role-playing game. This brisk hyperactivity is also where the game may ultimately come unstuck for fans of the source material, however, as it can feel a little lightweight and shallow.

Aiding Cosmic Star Heroine’s sense of freshness no end is its futuristic setting. Developer Zeboyd Games has bypassed the usual fantasy trappings in favour of a bright sci-fi universe filled with stomping mechs, alien cats and laser blasters. There are shades of Phantasy Star and Chrono Trigger in here, which is a very good thing indeed.

L’Salle leads a crack team of special agents working for the Agency for Peace and Intelligence – an elite police force bound to secure the galaxy against a pervasive rebel threat. It’s not long until you start to question whether the API is truly the force for good that it purports to be. Fortunately, this is all just an excuse to send you on a streamlined interplanetary romp. The writing here is suitably bright and breezy given the classic period it’s trying to evoke. It’s one long breathless rush towards the next encounter, with an emphasis on grand gestures and general bonhomie over emotional nuance.

This briskness pervades the game, resulting in an experience that we suspect will hold a lot of appeal to the lapsed JRPG fans among you. It’s full of design decisions that serve to lessen the perceived annoyances of the genre. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the game’s battle system. There are no random encounters here, with the enemies you face presented clearly within the world. When you do engage by stepping into their territory, there’s no lengthy cut away to a distinct battle screen – all of the combatants simply shuffle into formation and the fight starts. And once you finish that fight, your team will be fully healed up for the next encounter.

The fights themselves, whilst fairly traditional in their turn-based nature, are relatively brief affairs. They can generally be polished off in a minute or two – at least on the low-to-medium difficulty settings (which can be adjusted at any time). It also helps that each character in your four-person party has a wide range of completely unique moves to choose from, covering elemental attacks, computer hacks, defensive and healing moves and the like. 

Each of these seems to fit in with the character’s unique personality and role within the team, and you’ll soon find yourself experimenting with powerful combination attacks. Having such a plan of attack is especially important as most moves can only be used once in a fight, unless you opt to sacrifice a move to recharge. This forces you to explore each character’s full repertoire rather than spamming the same preferred attacks.

Hardened JRPG fans may find Cosmic Star Heroine’s prescribed character roles a little too restrictive and hand-holdy, but it is at least possible to customise each character’s move-set with fresh equipment. You’ll find new items by exploring the world and though spending credits in shops. The game isn’t scared to chop and change your team line-up on your behalf, which again is something that hardcore RPG fans might take issue with. Indeed, there’s a general sense of linearity to Cosmic Star Heroine. You’re essentially being funnelled from one set piece encounter to the next with little scope to control the pace, which detracts a little from the sense of exploration and of truly inhabiting a role.

The look of the game is spot-on in its evocation of the golden era of JRPGs, mind you, with distinctive sprite work and a deft willingness to play with scale. The view zooms out when you’re exploring a seedy neighbourhood, for example, or to show a titanic face-off between a mech and a monster. Cosmic Star Heroine’s sparing use of animated cutscenes is also well handled, lending flavour to the game without dragging on unnecessarily. Even better is the synth-driven soundtrack, which moves between quirky little ditties to something that approaches the airy wonder of Vangelis’s Blade Runner work.

It’s another in a long list of reference points that Cosmic Star Heroine skims through at a rate of knots. This is a game that doesn’t so much copy the classics as sample the best bits and assemble them into a joyous collage. The result is a colourful, pacy and enjoyable – if slightly abrupt and insubstantial – homage to some of the more out-there ’90s JRPGs.

Conclusion

This is a homage to the classic sci-fi RPGs of the ’90s that successfully takes out many of the annoying bits but boasts a fair amount of the depth and consistency. Cosmic Star Heroine is a JRPG for those who long ago grew bored of JRPGs, but committed fans might find it just a little too slight an offering.

The first Guns, Gore & Cannoli blasted its way onto the Nintendo Switch in December of last year, and although the run ‘n’ gun, zombie apocalyptic title was met with a mostly fair reception by fans and critics alike, there was inarguably room for improvement. Now, Crazy Monkey Studios brings the second iteration to Nintendo’s hybrid console, but has the developer done enough to get fans new and old to dive in once again?

15 years have passed since the foul-mouthed gangsta Vinnie Cannoli survived the Thugtown Massacre. For those who played through the first game, you’ll be happy to know that Guns, Gore & Cannoli 2 sheds light on what really happened during the very end of the first title. New to the ‘Cannoli franchise? Don’t fret, there are some informative splash screens to catch you up. Helped by some beautifully animated cut scenes, you’re quickly thrown into the action and are instantly dismembering the first couple of foes with a rusty chainsaw, which not only sets the gruesome scene for what’s to come in the next four-or-so hours, but also swiftly highlights that the vast improvements have indeed been implemented and every single one of them works a treat.

Not too dissimilar to the likes of 2D run ‘n’ gun platformers such as Metal Slug and Robocop – those fond memories of being at the arcade really do die hard – it’s a case of moving Vinnie with the left stick, aiming with the right, while the right trigger is mapped for firing your weapon of choice. While on the topic of firearms, there’s a beefy number of guns to choose from. Blast the enemy into smithereens and the bad guys drop their weapon for you to swipe, and with each having noticeable characteristics that can change the course of play, we found ourselves quickly becoming accustomed to switching from dual pistols to rocket launchers.

You see, on the surface, this video game can easily be passed off as a mindless, violent, blood-drenched 2D platformer. Dig a little deeper, however, and you’re greeted with a game that constantly requires a surprising amount of strategy and platforming finesse. One section has us sprinting through a D-Day-esque beach while homing missiles are honing in towards little Vinnie, coupled with a horde of Nazis that cleverly duck, jump and navigate atop and below cover to send to us to an early grave.

Carefully utilising our full inventory of weapons – that can now be selected via a nifty pop-up wheel – and quickly taking advantage of the many obstacles in our path (while admittedly exercising an element of luck) we soon turned the bad guys to dust. It’s a satisfying affair and something that rarely grows tiresome. Unlike the first game, you finally now have the ability to aim in a full 360 radius; a feature undoubtedly greeted with open arms by fans.

Navigating Vinnie around the intricately detailed, comic/cartoon style stages is now made easier all thanks to double jumps, mid-air somersaults and dodge rolls being included. Having these new moves doesn’t necessarily make the game easier, but it does help to make things feel more fluid and it’s immediately noticeable from the start; it’s a good idea to use them effectively in order to survive.

Stopping things from getting over-familiar too quickly is the combat and level design. Don’t expect complex puzzles that require ample amounts of brainpower, but do expect a well-balanced and tasteful amount of straightforward platforming – albeit not much of it. We would like to see more of the end-game platforming sections as these impressed us far more than any of the previous three hours did. This isn’t to say that we don’t appreciate the rest of the content on offer – there are some fantastic set pieces to traverse – but more of the really good stuff next time, please.

The artistic team have done a stellar job of creating a deeper, richer and more vibrant world that’s bursting with charm and noir pizzazz that becomes undeniably memorable. From the crisp forefront greenery to the dingy (and creepy) underground network of tunnels that are filled with the groaning undead, giant acid-spitting rats and all other manner of zany characters makes for some truly impressive visuals. Having the ability to blow up huge walls, theatre screens and other large scaling buildings is a real pleasure and, if triggered at the right time, gives you the upper hand when facing large groups of the opposition.

Guns, Gore & Cannoli 2 succeeds at creating an unanticipated atmospheric experience that, strangely, becomes more believable as you progress. Although dialogue between characters is short-lived, the small but witty cast leaves us wanting more screen time for each and every one of them. The mixed bag of bad guys you encounter throughout changes up at just the right times – the different factions battling it out is brilliantly executed – and with the A.I. choosing to try and end Vinnie in multiple ways, things are kept fresh and engaging until the very end.

If you’re like us and are a fan of having a trusty friend to join in on the fun, there’s a local hop-in, hop-out feature allowing for up to four players to battle through the campaign. What sounds workable in theory, doesn’t translate too well in practice, unfortunately. Sure, it’s entertaining enough to fill the screen to the brim with body parts, bullets and tasty Cannoli, but the action gets dazzlingly hectic. We find having two gangster’s trawling through the stages to be more than enough (and it works great in tabletop mode, too) with one player effectively holding back and firing at the enemies from afar – or grabbing shared health – and the other going in all guns blazing resulting in play-throughs becoming far more tactical.

A pleasant and equally surprising addition is the online co-op play; it works a treat with very little in the way of performance dips. The main, crucial point that sets it aside from the couch co-op feature, however, is that players don’t share the same screen; you’re free to wander off and gather more bullets, guns, and headshots as you see fit without getting automatically yanked back to your gangsta allies. With up to four players running and gunning through the same campaign, grabbing your mates (or random players in the same continent) and facing hordes of bloodthirsty walkers as a unit is a genuine riot and thoroughly enjoyable. Having a voice chat room running at the same time helps too – Discord came to the rescue here – and with the enemy count seeing a hike with every additional player, the level of difficulty is comfortable to get to grips with.

Conclusion

What fans of the first game ultimately hankered for has made its way into this sequel, and quite rightly so, with this new title overcoming some of those baffling design decisions. Make no mistake, though, newcomers to the franchise will find it easy to get sucked into the small but impressionable world of Guns, Gore & Cannoli 2. The option to draft in extra players online and offline adds longevity to the relatively short lifespan of the campaign mode and, for the most part, performs without a hitch. From its violent yet contrasting and beautiful appearance to the fine-tuned and comical combat – thanks to the well-balanced selection of weaponry – this title is well worth a space in your Switch’s indie game library.

Author Bruce Stirling one defined cyberpunk as being a combination of “low-life and high-tech”. 2064: Read Only Memories INTEGRAL certainly earns that description, but it also shoots for something a little loftier and more idealistic. This retrofuturistic point-and-click adventure game tackles weighty (and familiar) themes like what it means to be human and social inequality, but it does so with a great deal of warmth, humour, and positive progressive energy.

The Neo-San Francisco of MidBoss’s cyberpunk adventure is one marked by the usual disparity between rich and poor, with mega-corporations commandeering law enforcement and health care. This is a future where humans have begun to augment themselves, leading to emerging social rifts between those who choose to modify their appearance, those who don’t, and those who actively oppose the practice as being impure.

Alongside all of this civil upheaval, technology has reached a point where advanced robot assistants – or ROMs – are filling the role of low wage labourers. Humanity justifies this exploitation due to the fact that these robots aren’t truly sentient – yet.

Into this powder keg situation, and into your freelance hack’s care, drops Turing, a cute prototype ROM that claims to be the world’s first sapient machine. Turing’s genius creator has been kidnapped, and it falls to you and your digital sidekick to ascertain why. This is the cue for a classic adventure experience that draws from the point-and-click games of old. The developers openly reference the likes of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers and Snatcher, but it will be familiar to any digital adventurers old enough to remember the late ’80s and early ’90s.

It’s essentially a series of static scenes (viewed through a retro-tastic letterbox), many of which you’ll revisit several times over, sifting for clues and engaging in branching conversations. Indeed, we should get the warning out right now that there’s an awful lot of dialogue in 2064: Read Only Memories INTEGRAL. For the most part, it streamlines and minimises the famously arcane point-and-click puzzles associated with the genre in favour of a focus on narrative.

You won’t find yourself stumped on elaborate fetch quests or tortuous item combination sequences here, nor will you be required to click on everything in a bid to progress the plot. Generally speaking, your progress through the game is logical and fairly seamless. This might be seen as a weakness by grizzled adventure fans, but is perfectly in keeping with the game’s inclusive tone.

There are various mini-game sections throughout the adventure, but these are highly simplistic and relatively brief. They certainly wouldn’t stand up to playing an extended part of proceedings, but in this form, they act as effective palate cleansers.

The meat of the experience here is undoubtedly the story, though. Fortunately, the writing and characterisations in 2064: Read Only Memories INTEGRAL are more than up to the task. Your companion, Turing, is a constant delight to spend time with – at once perilously vulnerable and plausibly capable. Their naivety and little idiosyncrasies (such as a fondness for botany) make them believably human – something that’s emphasised by an expressive emoji of a face.

The rest of the cast understandably gets less attention, but is still admirably fleshed out and atypically diverse in terms of race, gender identity and sexual orientation. The game’s world is rife with tension and discrimination, but the fact that the sources of this friction appear to have moved on from these basic areas feels oddly uplifting.

The entire cast is completely voice acted, and the performances are generally of a pretty high standard. This is accompanied by an evocative synth soundtrack, which nails that ‘retrofuturistic’ vibe nicely. Your interaction with the world arguably takes this approach a little too literally, though. Having to use the left Joy-Con stick to physically flick across all of the onscreen elements seems a little clunky, and it’s a shame there’s no direct touchscreen option available for handheld mode. In similar fashion, the four-strong interaction system of ‘Look’, ‘Touch’, ‘Speak’ and ‘Use item with’ seems a little crude and clunkily implemented; some kind of hold-and-release selection wheel, or maybe a direct mapping to the fascia buttons, would have been preferable.

Aside from these interaction issues, though, and a necessary warning over the game’s heavy focus on story over gameplay, 2064: Read Only Memories INTEGRAL is an easy recommendation to make for anyone after a new cyberpunk adventure. Or even a fairly old one.

Conclusion

2064: Read Only Memories INTEGRAL takes the classic point-and-click genre of old, strips out many of the annoyingly exacting puzzle systems, and injects a refreshingly positive and progressive outlook. A cast of memorable characters and some spot-on retro presentation should seal the deal for fans of a good story and snappy dialogue.