Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Hades 2 & FIVE New Game Reviews!- Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

We give our thoughts on the Hades 2 Technical Test and review Final Fantasy 16 Rising Tide, Another Crab's Treasure, Tales of Kenzera ZAU, Top Spin, and Sandland. Time Stamps - 00:00:00 - Start 00:01:45 - Housekeeping 00:02:51 - Hades II 00:23:33 - Final Fantasy XVI Rising Tide DLC 00:32:30 - Another Crab’s Treasure 00:54:04 - Tales of Kenzera ZAU 01:08:54 - Top Spin 01:23:18 - Sand Land Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up and welcome back to the Kind of Funny Games cast. A star-studded games cast today. We're talking about so many different video games because it's that season, everybody. Of course, I am Tim Getty's. I am joined by the new face of video games blessing at Ae OeA Jr. Good day, Tim. The Big Daddy himself, Greg Miller. Good evening, Tim.

We got some of that, the stinky smoke today. Oh, do we? Take it in. It's a review season and the stinky smoke. Mike and I got Andy's cold, so we can't smell. Yeah, I can't smell it at all, Tim. Wow. Wow.

I got the microphone that Greg was using right before this when we're recording a different show. Yeah. He was coughing the entire time. You're well beyond me being contagious. But I can smell the microphone. You'll be sick next week. There's a lot of things to smell everybody. Isn't that right?

Master of hype. Snowbike, Mike. Yo, what up, Tim. Thanks for having me. How are you doing, Mike? I'm good. Thank you so much for playing Pokemon over on the live streams and having a ton of fun. And yeah, it's all positive over my world.

I enjoy your little fleece situation we got going on? Thank you. You know, maybe it's for the review today. You know what I mean? Got to keep a catch. You got to keep it a little nice, you know. He's 100%. He's not feeling any sickness whatsoever.

100%. How are you feeling nitro rifle, Andy Cortez? I'm feeling great. Good. It reminds me of, you know what? Dumb and Dumber Lloyd Christmas when he's at the Winter Lodge. Yeah, sure.

I love it. It could be us. Together. Whatever. It could be us, everybody. It could also be us, everybody. It could also be you with the kind of funny membership. It would get you this show ad free.

You can watch live as we record it unless there's an embargo like there is today. And you get a daily exclusive Greg way, a multimedia experience, unlike any other, some would say. You could be a Patreon producer like Carl Jacobs, Kieran Hobosapian, and Delaney Twining.

We appreciate all of you so very much. But if you don't have a buck to toss our way, that's totally cool. Thank you so much for watching or listening. However you would like to, whether it's on YouTube or podcast services, around the globe. A little bit of housekeeping for you.

Like I said, it is review season part 10. I don't know what just fell. It's like a marble. You got your, you got your, I don't know. I'm losing my marvelous. Your favorite shooter over there? But it's review season.

You're trying to get a whole bunch of mini reviews in this episode of the games cast. But we didn't have enough room for everything. Stellar Blade has been reviewed on PlayStation on PSI Love You, XOXO. It's out now. You can watch on YouTube or search your favorite podcast feed for PSI Love You. And it'll be right there for you. Who played through that one? That was me.

That was blessed. Yeah. I haven't waited for it for a long time. Yeah. Stellar Blades finally here. We finally found it. Is it stellar? It's stellar. Good. Go listen to Bless, give way more thoughts over on PSLWX-O-X-O.

But you're not there now. You're here. The kind of funny games cast. And we have a lot to talk about. But I want to start with something I am absolutely obsessed with right now. And that is Hades 2. Hades 2, everybody. Andy, I want to start with you on this one. Because I know you've been playing the Hades 2 technical test, as have I, as has Bless. Greg and Mike, have you played this at all yet? No, I've been playing other games they'll be talking about. No, Blessing played on my account, so I'm down one boss run. But, you know, I still get four. I still get four more.

So, Andy, top level, what's going on with this technical test? The technical test is, I guess, a way to kind of test out the game before early access actually begins. And I, it's kind of weird because it's like, well, they're not, usually this happens with multiplayer games. You know, so I don't know exactly what they're trying to get the feel of. Maybe it is, like, downloads. I'm not exactly sure what they're testing out right now. But who gives a shit? That just gives us a reason to play Hades too.

And it kicks so much ass to him. Now, you can still sign up, and they're kind of dripped-beat in, like, the releases to people who have signed up. Because there's some people who weren't in on the first or second waves, but, you know, slowly, but surely, they're allowing more and more people in and sending them little download codes.

So sign up if you can, because you never know. Odds may be in your favor. Yeah. What are you thinking about it, though? It's awesome. Like it just brought me back to that feeling of when Hades 1 was out. And I think it's designed just superbly. The music is incredible.

Gameplay field is exactly where it needs to be. Like for this being a technical test, I expected to have a lot more. I wish this was different. I wish that you know, you got to assume that after a whole lot of early access with Hades 1, that they kind of have a decent idea of what, they're going for direction-wise.

Game feels amazing. It looks fantastic. There's still a couple of art assets missing, and they mentioned that in their live stream when they kind of made the game go live initially for anybody who had signed up for the technical test. So there's a couple of assets missing whenever you talk to certain NPCs. You just see like a little placeholder art every once in a while. But it's super interesting, and I'm loving the new gods that you get to meet.

I think there's some really interesting. stuff. Is it Hephaestis? The guy with the, he's like a blacksmith. His whatever he does to your shit, like he gives you an ability that a lot like when you attack somebody, he'll attack multiple times.

And the sound effects sounds so good. Like the game, they, Super Giant just knows look and feel. And whenever there's a new ability, how are we going to like visually or sonically make the user feel good about what they're doing in this

moment, you know, when we were watching Blessing Play in that first sort of stream we did, setting down that big AOE, getting, using, who's a horny lady with her boobs her boobs are kind of out a little bit, got her hair covering the nips, blinking on the...

Oh, uh, wifey. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. There's so many of them. There's so many wife. Everybody's hot in this game. But I love one of her little abilities where you know, whenever you attack somebody, they get kind of brought towards a center point.

to, you know, Aphrodite. Aphrodite. Great job, great job. The game's fantastic, Tim. I did all the five runs. Ran great on my Steam deck as well, which is very, very good news. The fact that this game is still so early on

and performed great and looked and sounded great on the Steam Deck. Tim, I heard you had a weekend with this on your Steam Deck OLED. I did. My Steam Deck OLED and my Super Ultra Wide monitor that I have. And it's scaled. 32 by 9. Oh, it scaled beautifully. Whoa.

Danny Pena posted a picture of him playing with a similar monitor to the one I have and it's what gave me the idea of like, oh, I should I should give this a shot. And oh my gosh, you guys, it's so good. And I just can't believe how great it plays in that aspect ratio. Easily, best game I played in that aspect ratio so far. And I think it's because it doesn't get in the way of the gameplay. It's kind of just like more just field of view for you to kind of see what's going on in the battlefield. Does the UI go all the way to the edges? It does.

And so far, there's no way. to change that in the options. I imagine when the full game comes out, you will be able to. Didn't really bother me too much. Yeah, we have to hear this picture here. It's just amazing. The art of Hades is just enhanced so much

when you get to just see more of it on a single screen. I also did the five runs like Andy. For people that don't know, the technical test, limits you to beating the boss five times. There's one boss that you get to, the boss of the first area. I don't know why they do that. It's kind of interesting where it's like there's a lot

to do besides the just getting to the boss like upgrading all the different weapons you get two different weapons in this test and a whole bunch of different abilities and like different collectibles and things you can like craft essentially in the little cauldron and all that and I was surprised by the amount of new stuff

I was experiencing and runs three, four and five I didn't expect a whole lot of that and I think maybe why they limited it was so that they didn't have to reuse dialogue and kind of make like get repetitive and not want to show you new experience is. Because yeah, once you, once you beat it

the first time, it's like, hey, like, you can do this four more times and like that's it. This is just a test, whatever. And I like that even in the test, they kind of like framed it as like part of the game of like, this test is, the test complete, but whatever. I was like, ah, it's cool. Like with the narrator and all that.

Super Giant just does not miss. They continue to thrive here. And I just, I didn't expect them to do a sequel to Hades. We've talked about this a lot. And Super Giant, this is their first sequel. What does that mean? What does a Hades two look like and so far it's just more Hades which is all I could ever ask for

it but I feel like the tweaks to the game are just so impressive to me where I played through the five runs I'm probably five hours into Hades 2 combined between the Steam Deck and just playing on my desktop and I was just having so much fun that I was like I don't want to stop so I went

back to Hades 1 just to do a couple runs and I was shocked at how different they feel because playing Hades 2 I was like oh it's just Hades 1 again and it's like oh no there's just Hades 1 again and it's like oh no is a lot more going on. I feel like it's just a little bit tighter. It's just, it's nothing game changing. It's not night and day, but I do feel like it's just refined to the point of near

perfection. And I already thought Hades 1 was like damn near perfect, if not perfect. So I'm just really impressed with the feel of it, the look of it, the sound of it. It is just tight. It is just exactly what it needs to be. The familiarity of the old gods coming back and just what they're up to now. I was a little worried. I was going to be like lost because it's been a while since I played Hades. He's like, I could not name a single one of these people, even though I just played 80s 2 now. But getting their vibes, understanding their characters, I think they're doing a great job of you can just jump into 80s 2.

You don't need to know all the stuff from Hades 1. If you did play it, they'll catch you up. The characters are just so well defined and the differences between how they treat the main character. I feel like it's so clear. And it really motivates me to want to do another run to get another piece of dialogue with every single character because I just want to know what they're up to.

I want to know what's going on. And I want to upgrade every single thing they're allowing me to upgrade. And that to me is a sign of, oh, this is a Tim Getty's game. When I immediately am like, I want 100% every single thing this lets me even think about doing. And so I've just been having an absolute blast with it. And the magic system is something that I, on first glance, was like, I don't think I'm going to like this. Because Hades 1 didn't have this, but Hades 2's main character has, she's a witch. So it's like there's a lot more like witchy magic stuff going on.

And while the weapons might be similar to what our boy Zag had in the first game, there's now like a second bar that is your MP essentially that allows you to use powered up magic moves. It's magic, but it's spelled a case. That's how you know. So it's way cool. Absolutely. And I usually don't like the type of stuff because I'm the type of gamer that gets really like freaked out when you put a limit on a move I can do. Like when I'm playing Metroid, I have limited missiles.

So I'm like, I'm not trying to use those missiles unless I'm like in a boss fight. I'm just like, spam, spam, spam, like, just to try to get that health out. Like, I usually default to the more like, I'm going to hide in the back, get some slashes in, get some shots in whatever it is, and chill. So having a limited amount of resources to use the moves kind of made me not want to do it, because especially in the game like Hades that you're going room to room and like your life is going down as you go. And like, you're not necessarily going to get to a room that refills your HP or in this case, your MP. I was kind of like, I don't know.

if I'm going to like that system in this type of game. And I mean, lo and behold, three runs in, whatever it is. I'm like, oh, these magic moves are where it's at, man. Like the way that they kind of just change up the regular gameplay of it all, like just the little enhancements that they make. And then once you get the God power-ups for your normal attacks and your magic attacks, it's just a whole new layer of strategy of like, what is the right load out for a run?

What are the things that feel great to me? And in classic Hades fashion, pretty much any level, load out, I can see why somebody it would be somebody's favorite. Like there's so much versatility. Although Poseidon's always my least favorite. Yeah. In the first game, which one's his? Water dude. Oh, I love dude.

To push him back, man. In the first game, he was my least favorite. And in this one, I'm already like, eh, just give me somebody else. I'll go for whatever other option there is. But no, I totally feel you. I it's one of those weird things that's kind of tough to explain because you'd get several questions

in the Twitch chat. Is this better? Is it worse? What's it like? Is it just like Hades 1? It's like, yes. And it's kind of, it's super similar in a lot of different ways. And it's, you know, you get the, you feel like you're being reductive in that sense. You feel like you're being negative and like, ah, it's just the first game again. But it's, it's more of one of the best games of all time.

So absolutely, you should definitely play this whenever it comes out. I mean, you know, I often relate things to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. And I'm going to do that right here. It's like Tony Hoss Pro Skater, one, to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. one, to Tonya House Pro Skater, too. They're very similar games, but two had the manual. And it's like, that's all it really needed to be like, oh, it's everything I loved,

but just refined, and now there's just like even more potential for this to go places. You got Darth Mall in that game? Which one had Dark Mall? That was three. Two at Spidey. Ooh. Yeah, I'm talking. And Officer Dick. Wow.

Her web connects them all. It's true. It's true. Bless you also played. His Dick connects the ball. You also played 80s, too. Yeah. What was your experience with it? No, I mean, same as you guys, right?

I really enjoyed it. I think, you know, the manual thing, I think, puts it into, like, really good perspective because I found that for me, the difference between Hades II and Hades 1 have been more minor tweaks in, like, a lot of, like, you know, characters, story stuff, environments, how all that stuff is shifted and moved and, like, you know, brought into a new setting and all that. But those tweaks, for me, really make it. Like, Hades 1, I've been playing a lot recently just because I had never gotten around

to actually beating the game. And so now I've been playing a lot of Hades 1 on my Steam deck. And jumping into Hades 2, immediately I was like, okay, this is more. But as I played, I am like,

okay, but like, I like that the added a run feature, right? Like you do the dash and you hold the dash, and now you're running around. And that then led into,

in my first run that I played on Max's account on the stream, my build, by the time I got to that end of that run, I think is indicative of, oh shit, y'all are cooking with this.

Deflecting projectiles. Yeah, it was like, okay, if I hold the run, And as long as I'm running, I am projecting most of the projectiles are being thrown at me. I had that. Plus, I had an ability that would refill my, I kept calling it the Omega meter, but I think it's

the magic meter that you're talking about, right? The blue meter that we have right there. If I stood still, the meter would automatically fill up, which allows me to use, like, my power to magic moves. So that was pretty cool, right? That's when we talked to a little spider lady, because she gives you a new outfit. Yeah, she gives you, like, an outfit that, like, oh, and it changes your appearance as well.

And so some of the perks there are gain two hearts when you enter a new room. or when you stand still, you regenerate magic, and that's the build that Bless had in that moment. But then they also switched up the cast in this one where in the Hades one you would have like a little cast that you do that was a projectile that you throw in an enemy

and then it would be caught in the enemy until you take them out and you get it back in and based on the power ups of the boons that you get through your run, that'll switch up the cast or added different effects to it. Here it's more of an AEOE thing and in my run, the first one I did

where I got to the boss, I got an upgrade where I could like throw it long distance. So now it is a, all right, I'm throwing my cast on an enemy that creates the area of effect, but now I am using that to like get them caught in it and I'm using my magic to then get the long range move. But then on top of that, find another boon. That is when your area of effect, it like goes away. If you charge it up fully, now it does like a final attack that does a bunch of damage.

And doing all that in conjunction was so fucking fun. And pretty much all of that was based off of the new stuff they've added into Haiti, too, right? Like those weren't boons that were based off of stuff that came from the original game. So even though it plays and moves and feels like Hades 1, I think they've done such a good job of looking at Hades and figuring out, all right, what are the things we need to do to work with this framework that we have? Because the framework of Hades is Hades is so good already. I love that it is. Hey, don't fix what isn't broken. How do we add on to this?

How do we improve this? How do we like, you know, make this the game that this is even meant to be even more? And I think they're fighting a lot of those things. One of my complaints with Hades 1, probably like one of my bigger complaints with Hades one, that is very much a me thing because I don't see it as many people mention it. But one of the things that always bugged me was there are these dash attacks that you do in Hades where if you dash and then press the attack button, you do like a different kind of attack and you can upgrade that and do all that stuff.

I found that as I'll get further into the game, I would straight up just do that because that felt like for me that was always the best move in the game. I could find really good upgrades for that dash attack. And so as I'm going, I am like dashing attacking, dashing attacking, dashing attacking. And it led to this like button mashy type of play for me where it is like as soon as I enter a room. All right, cool. A, B, A, or I guess AX, X, yeah, AX, AX, X. Just like tapping that over and over again.

Here, it seems like they remove the dash attack. Like, I tried doing it. I'm like, this isn't there. There is an ability for it. I'm not sure if it's like you get it right off the rip. I think it is something you have to acquire. It seems like this game focuses. a lot more on the sprint being a thing that hurts people

as opposed to like the burst of the dash itself because it's like there were a couple of the upgrades that like made your actual the dash itself hurt people but I'd say more of them that I found were like oh as you're sprinting and you run into someone it leaves them with burn or it freezes them or whatever and it's improved like I noticed it pretty immediately where as soon as I clock that the dash tag isn't there

I was like oh yeah I am not budmashing really in this game like I am playing this game the way it feels like it's more so meant to be played. And I think that's just one example of like, I think they're just cleaning it up, right? Like they are looking at the things that all the things that worked about Hades one, which is so many things. But then even those few things where it is, okay, we can dial this in more, we can tweak this more. We can like turn this more into what it's meant to be. I think they're absolutely nailing it. And then also I just got to shout out the art. They've somehow like made the art even more impressive. Like now when the gods show up, they have like a background with them too

and you can kind of see them. It's like, it's like a phone call versus like a Skype. like a Zoom where it's like oh I can see where you're at and it's like it looks really pretty the the updated um like art yeah the key arts like a lot more uh animated now like a instead of being as static as they were you see a lot of little particles the metal on their suits kind of will have like a metal sort of sheen go through it uh and it looks really good looks great and i love the new characters they've added like the um boss character at the end of the run really cool there's another character i forget her nemesis is fucking sick yeah Yeah, Salini or Salini was kind of like the one who gives you a frozen, almost like Kamea-Mea wave type power.

I love the emphasis on crowd control, you know, because your main cast, which is, again, in Hades one, it was like throwing out that arrow bless he was mentioning. But now cast is this kind of aOE circle that you put on the ground. And the main thing there is like crowd control, whenever you do that when there's enemies around, you see hands come out of the ground. It's called grasp. and the grasp move is these hands kind of sticking these enemies in place and they can't move until that little ability goes away. And kind of basing the whole combat around that premise, get enemies trapped in here and go to town on them. It is just so freaking satisfying. And upgrading it into like my favorite one is freeze where it just freezes a bunch of them and then damages them over and over again and then freezes of them.

It's like a little frozen tornado. So fucking satisfying. Yeah, man. It's so satisfying as a word. I feel like we keep using it. It's very apt for both Hades one and I think especially too. But going back to what I was talking about, I thought the Tim Getty's type shit

where I'm just like, oh, man, I want to keep playing because there's so many things I want to collect and get. I think one of Haiti's biggest strengths was how surprising it was for me where here I am seven runs back to back at every single run. Not just the gameplay is fresh and different, but like the story bits, the things people are saying to me, who shows up in a room?

Like it felt like there was just endless things happening and it felt kind of impossible to be so designed, but then also so just like open for like, it feels like something that was tailor made for me, but everyone else is getting the same experience, but they're getting a different version of it and it just felt endless for that to be working. And I feel like this, what we've had, the very small sliver of this game for Hades 2 is continuing that trend, but even giving me more things to want to do another run for. I love the, in addition to the two weapons you get, there's the,

these like three or five, um, little like extra, um, not weapons, but like tools to be able to like go and a shovel to dig some things or like a little hammer thing, like a pickax to like be able to get the silver or whatever. And there's just all these different economies. And I'm just like, oh, oh, baby. Yeah. Like I'm going to want to just keep going back and I'm going to focus on getting the silver this time. Or I'm focusing on getting coins this time. I focus on whatever. And it's like I just feel like earlier on in Hades 2, it seems they're giving you more things to start building to make every run feel like you're making some progress even if you're not like getting further.

That was always my thing with Colts of the Lamb. Like I, it's so easy to compare to Hades and really any road glide. It was like, I think Hades did just did it so right the first time. Not that Hades is the first rogulyad by any means, but it's like the first one that kind of really hit on that level. Sure. Along with, I'm thinking on the side scroller, dead cells, yeah. But I just loved how any time you started running with Hades,

the first God would talk to you and you'd be like, oh, it's going to be one of these runs now. Cool. Let me get my mindset ready for what this is. And I just love that mentality kind of resurfacing several years later, being like, God, I love this experience so much. And starting a new run is going to be a new adventure. And now I got a, it's going to be an Aphrodite run or it's going to be a Hermes run. Having Hermes make her, or not Hermes, I'm sorry.

Artemis. Artemis, yeah, the critical one pop up. is like similarly to when you would fight against a homeboy, when you would have to like kill more enemies than the other, the other hot dude. Oh, yeah, I know, yeah. Similar. Now Artemis is here doing a similar sort of thing,

but she's trying to help you kill a bunch of enemies. And it's just really, really neat to meet her and just have those random meetups. Yeah, and it's like, oh, cool, this is, now I can add crit to whatever out it is I'm doing. And you see the purple boon pop up amongst all the different. The colors are kind of in. It's like, oh, man.

So exciting. Any final thoughts on the Hades 2 technical test? No. I'm conflicted between playing more or just like leaving it and like waiting for it to come out later. I don't know if I'm in for the early access yet or not either. That's my problem. Am I going to play early access or do I just wait for it to come out? It just seems so developed already.

Do we think it comes this year? Because playing this test is the first time I'm like, oh, we were getting this this year. It feels so good. Yeah. That's, I mean, a lot of it comes down to, you know, I mean, it really just comes down to Super Giant being like, oh, well, you know, the final boss fight is like not finalized or whatever. And that's what you know, this is going to need some more time to cook. But this tiny glimpse is so, like, so convincing that the game is very, in a very good spot.

Yeah. Moving on to the next game, Final Fantasy 16, the Rising Tide DLC, the final DLC for Final Fantasy 16. So far, we'll see if they change. that, but I think they might be ending in here. I played through this, just like I played through the first part a couple months ago when it Shadow dropped after Game Awards. Similar length to the first round of DLC, so it's about

four to five hours to do everything in it, but this one does kind of have like a battle tower type thing you can do on top of that that gives endless gameplay for everybody out there that just really loves the combat system of 16. And if you played Fallen Fast C-16, you probably love the combat system. It's a lot of fun.

There's a lot of versatility for the different weapons you can use and shifting out the different icons and all of that. And I had a really great time with this DLC. I am a little conflicted on it because from a story perspective, this takes place before the ending of the game. And it's a little hard for me to reconcile the events of this happening in the story. And it's like, it makes sense. I don't, from my memory, it doesn't really get in the way or, like, contradict anything.

It's just a little bit of like, so you're telling me. That this happened And they went to do this thing But they never referenced this Yeah And it's a little weird You know for I'll stay away from

Spoilers on stuff But like There is another icon here That you're getting Leviathan And it's just a little bit weird Storywise for that to be happening Based on what happens in the game But that doesn't make it

Any goddamn less cool Because this icon fight is as cool As any of the icon fights In Falmouth SD16 And that's all I need to say To anybody To convince them to play the damn game, man.

It's so damn cool. To get to it, there's a couple side quests and their Final Fantasy 16 side quests, probably on the lower end of a Final Fantasy 16 side quest. Very, hey, go there, do a thing, and you go there, and you do the thing, talk to somebody. Animation super base.

And they're just like, cool, go back and do it. They did add a function now that once you go from person A to person B, you can just hit start, and it'll just bring you back to person A, so you don't need to lock back. So I was like, hey, quality of life stuff. They added that to all the game as well.

There was a patch that came out with this DLC that just kind of adds a lot of little tweaks to the core game. So I don't think there's been a better time to play 16 from the beginning. I really would recommend people play through this, though. Like just for the fun of it and the hype of the Leviathan fight itself. It is so cool, so satisfying. It also comes with this DLC has two different sets of new icon powers. So two whole new types of combat for you to play. play with. I didn't love either one. I ended up switching back to some just the more tried and true

ones that I'm used to. I enjoyed them enough to give them a shot and play through for a little bit, but I was just like, at some point, I was just getting my ass kicked by this Leviathan guy. Words the Wise. I almost guarantee they're going to patch this fight because there's in like the final phase, there's just this moment that's essentially a fucking insta kill. And it's like, as far as I know and I've been looking online a lot, there's only one way to actually like, make sure that you get past it in time. And it's like, that's annoying. And that shouldn't be.

It's one of those timed things where it's just like, you've got to get this much damage and this much time. And you pretty much... It's a DPS race. Yeah, exactly. And you're unable to do that unless you specifically start with a certain move. And it's like, guys, come on. So, yeah, getting a game over screen like six times was not fun for that.

Never fun. But then, once I beat him, I was like, this is so goddamn cool. Very cool. The music goes off. It really felt like Soken was like, all right, this is my last chance to be in the... the world of Final Fantasy 16, we're going for it, everybody.

And it was awesome. And I think one of the coolest things about it besides the boss fight, besides the music, besides the new moves and everything, was story-wise, they're like, hey, we're going somewhere a little bit different than the areas we've been in. And that means the sky could be blue again. So it's not all just that purple, gray fog

that like the majority of the game takes place in, which was so refreshing. Like I've played so much of Final Fantasy 16, and you just get used to it kind of just being, being this like constant San Francisco fog-esque world that you're in, which I don't think does a game that's as beautiful as this many favors. There are some shots in the Leviathan DLC that I'm just like, wow, this shit is stunning. Like one of the bigger areas you go into we see in the trailer is this like frozen title wave.

And you're like walking on to a frozen tidal wave. And I'm like, this is the coolest shit ever, man. And the grass is just so green. and the colors of everything as you're getting to and the music swelling, I was like, y'all knew what you were doing. This was awesome. So definitely if you love Final Fantasy 16,

I'd recommend playing both the DLCs just for the boss fights. Not too much time. And I do feel like you can skip a lot of the side quests if you want to. And like the core quest stuff is good just to like re-familiarize yourself with the buttons and like the, which icons you actually like the best. But yeah, I'm sad that Final Fantasy 16 is over because I really enjoy how the game plays

and all the things that it's delivered. But good way to go out. I just kind of wish that it didn't take place where it does in the game. But I also understand why it does. Any of you guys interested in giving it a shot? I'm very interested. You're talking about the blue skies

reminds me of me and Mike in Rebirth Warzone when they made that map. Beautiful again. Beautiful. You know what I mean? It's a nice sunny afternoon, dropping into Alcatraz, shooting up. Hey, Tom.

Shooting up. I am a little bit. disappointed that this one, the rising title, only got me two points on our fantasy draft critic. I really thought that was going to be a little bit higher than 72, so that one hurt me. I'm shocked. Especially with how hype you brought that, Tim. I'm surprised.

Yeah. Hype moments for sure, but I think overall the package. You know, again, without getting into spoilers, I feel a little bit let down by some of the character work. I think that some of the promise of this DLC was maybe a focus on some characters that we wanted to get more from the first game

and even kind of hinted pre-release. That's they were going to do. And they just don't. They just don't. And there's some other characters they introduced that some of them are cool. But I do feel like it's a little hard to look at it and not be like, well, if you didn't add them, you've got to focused on them. But, you know, that's, it's the type

of nitpicking that you only do when you actually care, but I care and a lot other people do too. I'm excited to experience those boss fights. Yeah. I mean, with how exciting all of the core ones were in 16 and how it just felt like they kept on one-uping themselves, I mean, even if it's like,

half of the experience of any of those, I feel like I'm still going to be pretty satisfied with it. And it is, Andy. It is. Hell yeah. We're going to keep time on some other games. After a quick word from our sponsors. Kind of Funny turns nine years old today. We could have made it nine days without your support. That's why 2024 is all about doubling down on our shows and making it simpler than ever for you to get the most out of our content. Our revamped Kind of Funny membership is your one-stop shop for all our amazing content, which now includes on a weekly basis. The Kind of Funny Podcast. In Review.

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Who's played it? Greg Miller. Andy Snowbike Mike and Andy Cortez. Have all three of you beat this game? Fuck, no. Yes. No. Andy Cortez is the only person to beat the game.

Andy Cortez, what are your thoughts and what would you give it on the kind of funny scale? I would give another crab's treasure a four out of five great. I did kind of, I did kind of wonder about halfway through whether this was like a three out of five or not. Oh. I think the game, and that like that sounds like a lot. more negative. I don't want you to feel like, oh, it takes me that long for the game to get good. I think the game just like continually gets more and more impressive as it goes on. And it starts off with some pretty neat boss fights. But what another crab's treasure is,

it's a, it's a small indie studio named Agro Crab. And they set out to make a Soulslike, like just a straight up Souls game. It's adorable. It's very cartoony looking visually. but it can be pretty brutal in its approach to trying to emulate the Souls feel. I think it's a little friendlier in ways that, you know, that Souls games definitely weren't early on because we've just learned from quality of life changes, what the player prefers and, you know, in certain moments. There's not going to be any enemies that are, like,

backstabbing you from around the wall or, like, dropping on you and kind of surprising you out of nowhere. There's no fall damage, so your little crap can just kind of, float in the water and fall from great heights and not worry about dropping from that big ledge that you were kind of adventuring on. Boss fights are super challenging. I already mentioned that it's a, it's gentler than most Souls games. You can run away from a lot of enemies as well and kind of just float away if you're kind of, you know, worried about certain enemies and maybe you're low on health and you don't want to lose your microplastics. And the microplastics in this game are

your souls, essentially. You collect a bunch of just microplastics. because this game's all about an ocean that it just filled the trash and garbage. And I enjoyed the sort of takes that the game has story-wise, and then it kind of evolves a bit more. And I was really impressed and had a great time with what it was doing with characters and stories. And there's some pretty captivating conversations that I really enjoyed with these very cartoony-looking crabs. I'd say it's voiced maybe 10 to 15% of the time

a lot of the rest of it is just a little dialogue between these characters that are not voiced the final boss I thought I fought the final boss about five different times in this game it's got a lot of those moments was that good

yes and no because any time that would happen I'd be hit with that sort of initial like, oh, we're still going, huh? Like, really thought this was going to end. And then I'd immediately kind of be interested in what was next. And I think the game does some really cool stuff later on that was really surprising and unexpected that I don't want to get to spoilers about.

But overall, I was just very, very impressed by this game. And I've thought about it quite a bit since. I will say that the variety and creativity and the level design gets more and more impressive as you go on. I think it starts off pretty simplistic and like here's an open world and later on in the game it gets a bit more like take all these different winding paths and now you're finding more treasures over here, more secrets. I think that the game is pretty buggy. The game is broken in a lot of different spots where I even had a full boss fight break on me and the and it essentially skipped the boss fight.

I've had a lot of moments where you just fall through a wall when you get hit by somebody or you fall through the floor and you're just kind of it's an endless thing in the options there's an option to die instantly

which is usually like in a lot of early access games you'll see like a get unstuck button to get maybe you're stuck in geometry so I got stuck in geometry quite a bit I was knocked through the world in a lot of different moments yeah one of the boss fights I was looking forward to

that came out during the demo was completely skipped past for me because I got hit by the boss and I got knocked through the ground and I was like oh I'm not supposed to see this how funny that happens in a lot of games or you're just kind of seeing underneath the world and then as I respawned it said

pollution scoured or whatever it is it says whenever you kill a boss and I was like oh weird and then I suddenly got a bunch of like rewards for it and when I got back there the boat that the boss is sitting on the boat's gone so the boat seemed to have like despawned and the boss I guess just fell to its death

it might be a metal your solid three type thing you know what I mean you go down there it but I did beat it during the demo which it was just fascinating um so that kind of stuck there was a decent amount of moments in that that I don't think is like easy to just kind of brush past um because it did feel like this game could have had a lot more time in the oven cooking with QA and and focusing on these bugs um combat I would say is like better than most cheap attempts at like making a souls game but still not quite on the level of like Eliza P or Stellar Blade is what we were mentioning today when we reviewed that. I think that the Perry timing is kind of weird. The Perry feels weird in general. It's played

opposite to what most Souls games are where you normally tap the button to throw out your shield. In this case, you're a little crab who's going around and picking up pollution and trash the ground and you make those pieces of trash your shell and i think it's really creative in that sense where a lot of the different shells come with different passive abilities and different weights uh to them you can get like a small medium a large shell and they all have different categories some have more shield than others but when you have that shell on you can hold the lb button which is like your block and you're going to be wanting to be blocking a lot in this game um it's going to serve you uh greatly because in a lot of these bots fights they have a lot of just

shells lying around. So you want to be blocking as much as you can. And then when that shell breaks, you can go grab another shell. Do I want to not be targeting them? Do I want to be like free of the target so I can run away quicker? That's what I was using on my boss encounter. I mean, I target quite a bit in this game, but I did run into several moments where I'm getting stuck in the target. First boss man. Like, you know what I mean? It would be that thing. He breaks the shell. I'm like, I know I need to get it one, but I just couldn't get away from him fast enough. I think the, one difficult thing is the camera. I was having a lot of issues with the camera

where I'm used to locking on in Souls games and if an enemy does a weird thing, it doesn't feel too unnatural how the camera's going to react to the enemy moving. There's a lot of moments in here where my shit's just spinning. I'm like, where am I right now, you know?

I did run into quite of like, I felt like those moments were pretty annoying, you know, to get kind of caught in an area or like, oh, I'm dying because of this. I died in a couple of the boss fights just due to random bugs too where I'd get hit in a certain spot and it would just like insta kill me

and where it shouldn't have happened in the whole screen like there's no UI anymore. Yeah, I think the Perry's kind of weird but once you kind of get used to hitting it right beforehand, you go into the shell, then you burst out and the bursting out is what repels the enemy

back in that moment. Fast travel's great. I think it's pretty helpful in a lot of those situations. where you just want to go back to the main story hub and, you know, level up things, talk to the blacksmith. I wish that the character's main weapon was, like, a bit more important, in a sense. You find, like, a fork on the ground.

And that becomes your melee weapon. And that'd be fine, like, for me, story-wise or lore-wise, if you were just picking up a bunch of pieces of trash on the ground and using them as weapons, like maybe a popsicle stick or like a spork which is higher damage but there's none of that you you essentially have just this fork this whole way and you can upgrade it at the blacksmith who like makes it stronger if you find certain items and like in hollow night you do that where you have your needle is your main weapon and you can upgrade the needle and it may change visually or aesthetically in some certain ways but the fork here just kind of always stayed the fork which i'm fine with but i'd be a lot more okay with that if i was able to pick up other melee items on the ground. So I was kind of led down by like the lack of lore there. I think that's like I understand that games have budgets and you can't just make a bunch of, you know, items equipable on the ground. I'm just scrolling through my notes. I'm trying to see what else I got.

We made all these shells, the shells. Yeah. There's so many, so many damn shells on the ground that you can equip, which are really cool. And you can tell that's where a lot of the time was put into development-wise. And I really appreciate it and enjoyed those aspects from it. I know I've been sounding way more negative than positive, but I still enjoyed a lot of the boss fights. I enjoyed the music quite a bit. And yeah, when you're, I wasn't expecting the story. I think

the game may have been like more of a three out of five for me if those story and character moments weren't there. It's funny. It's funny and it's got a great sense of humor. Krill's a cool character. I liked who he was or they are. And like, you know, launching off into the world and the comedy and the

lone shark is a shark on a stick, you know, talking head and stuff. Like, there's a lot to love about the world and the characters in there. Yeah. I think lots of, like for me, you know, if you remember from way back in the day, right, AgroCab made going under that roguelike that was the internship roguelike that I loved so much back in the day we'd talk about on gamescast.

So I'd been watching this one forever and to jump in and be playing it in like, you know, I think every game I'll talk about today is not a traditional Greg game. This was one that drew me in obviously because I already knew their humor and I knew this world. And like I always talk about with Souls games. right like it's not so much the challenging nature of them that I don't like it's more the world I don't want to exist in and this is a world I want to exist in I loved getting off the beaten

path finding the chest finding the new pieces of whatever it is uh get you know jumping like you're talking about falling figure out how to get over there what do I do get oh all right cool well there's three crabs there and there's that other swordfish thing that shoots at me so like how am I going to manage this battle like I enjoyed that a lot and a lot of opportunities like if you're there's a lot of like great accessibility settings as well. There's the normal mode is like the hard default difficulty. Then there's... If I can jump in here,

because I think this is where I'll really shine. Yeah, I liked everything I saw. I'm going up against the crabs. I'm having a good time. Again, I'm like, I got this.

I fucking beat Bloodborn. I know what's up. You were impressed back in the day when I did the father gas coin thing and almost beat him on my first try. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not like a nobody. I know what I'm doing.

Didn't Tim get someone into your game? That was at the end when I was like, I hate this game. Can I please stop playing? Then it was the idea, though, of like, all right, cool, like, you know, it's endless Dodge, right? Like, I can get out, I can do it. Yeah, there's no stamina. This is playing the way I want to play. This is where I want to play. And then

I got to that first boss. And it was such a fucking, like, okay, like, it is rubbing my nose and shit. I still don't think I understand the Perry system. Like, you're talking about popping out and exploding them back. Like, I haven't figured that out yet or whatever. Well, the first boss, there is no Perry. You have no Perry yet. So that's the thing is I'm,

I was just getting my head kicked in by this fucking lobster guy. And the problem I had with it was, again, not the difficulty of it, but then the setup of it where I was playing. This is during my sick leave. I'm playing. I'm tired. I'm enjoying the experience. And now I've grown to a halt.

And as accessible as they've made it and done all these different things with it is, all right, cool, you've died. Which means I now come back and I lower it down. I hit the button. I get the shell. I walk two steps to the right. Hey, whatever the guy says to start the cut scene

skip the cut scene, fight him a little bit, okay I died, come back down get the shell two steps out and after like the like seventh time I was like all right let's go into accessibility I go in accessibility and it was like I could give myself more health

I could lower their health I could Yeah I got you right here There's story mode and there's easy mode and then there's hard mode Or you can do an amalgamation Malve them and then it'll turn to custom mode where story mode gives you the highest shell durability reduction and damage taken.

Very, very low enemy health. You have extra invincibility frames when you dodge. The highest peri window. You don't lose money or the microplastics. So there's no loss in currency whenever you die and you have to go recover it. None of that happens. There's no pitfall damage, so you won't just fall into random holes. When I say there's no fall damage, I mean you can drop from a big tower and land on the ocean floor.

Because you're in the water. You're coming out slowly. But there's still like pitfalls that are like a death if you fall into that random hole or whatever. easy mode changes some things and you don't, it gives enemies a bit more health than you would have been story mode and then hard mode is the default. So I went in and I tweaked all

this stuff and I was like, all right, cool, like let's go. I didn't do the easy stuff. I was doing the custom stuff or whatever. And it was like I did two more and died. It finally went back into accessibility. I'm like, fine. The final one is give krill a gun. And it's the little, it's the tiny ass fucking hermit crab

with a Glock on his back, like a full size Glock. And you just put down and shoot one shot and the boss dies. And I was like, all right. Again, I cheated myself with the experience. I'm the screenshot of it or whatever,

you know what I mean? But for getting through it tonight to continue to not to enjoy the game and not hate myself, that was great. And so then I went back, dialed everything back to the normal difficulty and played from there. I even remember playing it at Summer Game Fest

and them telling me, you want to be blocking a lot. And that's the reason why they're putting a lot of different shells that you can change into whenever your shells break during the actual boss fight. So, like, that's, you're going to be tempted to dodge.

You're going to be tempted to parry. By the end of it, I'm parry and everything, because everything felt awesome. And, like, I got a hang of the timing pretty well. But, like, in those intro moments, if you do find yourself playing this game, if you do happen to, you wake up in a fog, and you happen to be playing this game.

What am I doing? If you do buy this game, I would say, and you're not super into, Souls games and like the whole Dodge and reading telegraphed attacks, block as much as possible. It's going to help you out in the early game quite a bit. And that's what all those extra shells are meant for. Like that's, they were put there by the designers to say like, hey, you switch these out whenever yours break and you're going to take a lot less damage when you're blocking than when you aren't and you have like a massive hit if you didn't time your Dodge right.

How long does it take you to be? A little under 20. I'd say like 19 and a half. It says 20.8, but I leave the controller, you know, lying there sometimes. And I'm eating my little drumstick ice cream. Oh, God, you got to. Delicious. Get that little core. Mike, you've been playing as well. What are your thoughts on this one?

I echo a lot of what Andy says on that one. I'd be more on the three side, but I am early. I left the first open area, which is about three bosses, is what you'll encounter. And, yeah, with Andy, what he's saying about the shells is I love what they do in all the boss arenas where they encourage you to grab new shelves, use up that durability and let it break. but I like the abilities that they add onto the shell. So each shell has its own unique ability that you can call upon and it will do different things, right?

I love the soda pop that has the fizzy bubbles that will add damage onto an opponent when it comes near that area, kind of like a landmine situation. I like the saracha bottle where I spin and I can get out of things or I can go into someone and add a little extra damage. I really like the touch of what that is. There was something for me missing in kind of the player feedback.

You can tell it's like an indie game, right? It's not that Dark Souls. We put thousands of hours of polish. There feels something off whenever I hit an enemy or I get hit or there's that moment where it's like, and I think I wasn't there and it hit me and it killed me. And then you lead to the frustration cycle of, I've now done this boss fight a thousand times. I've watched the same cut scene. But the world drew me in.

I like the comedy. I like the fun. I like the commentary of the microplastics polluting the seafloor and what that leads to with all these characters. It's a good time. but it just missed something in that gameplay feedback that I wanted to see out of a souls-like game. Yeah, like Michael's just mentioning that, and Greg was mentioning earlier as well,

the dialogue and the writing is so funny, and there's so many random NPCs that have funny shit to say. It was like at one point two random, like, seed-dwelling creatures with a little piece of treasure in between them, and I walked up and I just took the treasure in front of them, and then I don't,

I don't know if I triggered the dialogue, but one of them was like, Hey, Brett, you see this guy he just took our treasure? Wow, what are we going to do about that? I don't know, man, like, such is life. I forget exactly what happens. But there's, like, so many hilarious moments like that that are totally inconsequential to the greater story. But, again, just like, I really enjoyed the commentary of the story initially.

One of the first crabs you meet is, like, oh, yeah, our queen fucking sucks. I hate her so much. and you're like, oh yeah, there's a queen here, right? The Duchess, man, I got to pay my taxes. Hopefully I can get them erased or whatever. And the guy's like, oh, you're trying to get your taxes erased? Man, you must be like a little fucking leech, huh?

You're just trying to like get us all to pay for your taxes. Just a freeloader. You're just like kill a dude and take his look. You're trying to take a show. Were you just talking shit about the queen and how this all isn't like, yeah, he was like, wait, you were just talking shit about it. It's awesome. There's so many awesome moments like that.

And yeah, I think like the, the story really goes places and I don't think getting to those moments like I don't think you're suffering through bad gameplay to get to these awesome story marks I still really enjoyed a lot of the the experience I enjoyed most of the experience for sure and if it was less buggy

I'd probably feel a lot higher about it but I still yeah it's still a great game for me and I have been thinking about it a lot ever since platforming and movement is fun too Oh platform is fantastic like the floating and he does a little swim to get away. Like Greg, I'm more of a dodge and like runaway type of guy instead of a Perry. And yeah, the Perry's a little odd, but you'll get, you'll get used to it. But the 3D

platforming of the world and then having the grappling hook to grapple on to things. And now he's moving even faster than you can float around. They do a great job of that. And it makes me want to explore the world. There's some hidden items that you can go find it. It's fun to go over there and be like, oh, I'll spend an extra 10 seconds to go get that. It's worth my time. Yeah, I also, yeah, I have here as well, like you talking about the platforming. From whatever happened in the demo, there may have been no change or improvement to it, but for whatever reason in the demo, I just didn't feel like I had a grasp on it necessarily. I felt like I kept on like shorting my jumps in a way, and it just didn't feel awesome.

I remember that from our GDC demo, yeah, where I felt that was the same way for me, the platform was difficult. I felt it was great for them what I fled. I fucking loved it. And it gets even more complex, and there's going to be a lot of moments that the platforming gets you to secret spots to find a really, really awesome treasure that, um, you can exchange for more microplastics. There's a lot of opportunities to just really, really overlevel and feel powerful.

There's tons of shit and junk that you could just sell. That's going to be in your inventory. And there's also, when we talk about a lot of these action-adventure games, when we were talking about Cellar Blade earlier Blessing, and like the augment system, there are three little augments that you can have in this game that you'll find a lot of in the world, and you can equip to give you 60% higher charge damage,

or one of them just is an extra life. So if you die, you come back to life, whatever. There's a lot of different abilities like that. But those also give you a lot of extra microplastics. So I adventure for about 30, 45 minutes, come back and be like, oh, shit, I can level up three times with all the stuff I've collected. And that just lends yourself to feeling more and more powerful.

Yeah, there's tons of opportunities like that if you feel like maybe it's really hard to grind in a sense. I did kind of fuck up where the game definitely told me, hey, you can't go, you can't go back here. Like, if you hit forward, you are, it was like a big red dialogue box, and I was reaching for my jumpstick ice cream, and I dropped my controller, and it took me past. So I could have probably leveled up like four times or whatever, and I just couldn't,

and I was really bummed out about it, and I just suffered through the final boss fights, which were pretty tough, and once I kind of figured out the rhythms and stuff, it got a little bit more, a little bit easier to digest, but it could be brutal. Like this game is not You know If you're trying to just go for the hard difficulty It is no push over I know it looks cute as hell

It's gonna treat you like shit sometimes And you're just gonna have to kind of like Find the right way around it There you go everybody Another Crabbs treasure Moving on though Tales of Kanzara Zao

A game I'm very very excited to play Have not yet got to play Besides the demo But both Blessing and Greg Miller Have both played Who wants to keep this one off? I can. Go for a bless.

Yeah. Tales Gonzara Zal is a game that I would say enjoyed for the story and the themes of it and the setting of it. But it was a bit let down on the gameplay side. If I'm giving it a score on the kind of funny scale, I'll ultimately give it a three out of five. But it's one where if you're somebody who has seen the trailer or you saw the reveal at Game Awards and you're reviving with what was being talked about, you're reviving with the idea of playing a Metroidvania about grief, I'll say for sure pick it up. go for it, play through it, because I think what it brings to the table in that regard did work for me. I'm very curious to talk to Greg about

this. But yeah, like, you know, playing through it, I think the things I was looking forward to the most were seeing, all right, like, it looks cool as Metrovania, let's see how that goes. It seems like it's trying to tell a very interesting story here and tackle very interesting themes here. Let's see how that goes. And it's taking place

in like an African mythological setting. I'm very excited about that. For me, it's somebody who like, one, I'm Nigerian, but then also like I feel like we don't get many games We have very, very few games actually, like in this type of setting. And I think on the setting side, I was very enthused. I was very, I'm happy with where we got to in it. Like I like a lot of the inspirations they take in terms of the kind of story they're telling,

the characters that we're working with. You are playing as like a shaman that like has sort of a spirit that is, that you're talking to. You know, and you're going through the story of like having to deal with this loss of your father. And that is sort of haunting you the entire. game, right? It's him going back and forth with this man he's talking to in his head that is like, yeah, dude, like, he, like, it's him getting into arguments and it's him having to deal with, like, the sorrow of it. It's him having to deal with, like, feeling sad, but then also sort of going through these tales that are around him that are dealing with sort of similar themes. I enjoy it all

that stuff. The, on the Metroidvania side of it, it's not that it's like bad in any way. It's more so of it is very standard. And if you know me, my gaming taste, I'm somebody who just the label or like the feature of Metroidvania on the box does little for me, right? Like I love Metroid Prime playing that through last year because it is such a fucking good video game. I really enjoy Metro Metroid dread for like, oh man, I really enjoy playing this as a video game. But like usually if I'm picking up something that's Metroidvania, I'll often get more annoyed than not where it is. All right, cool. I'm backtracking.

All right, cool. Like I'm doing this. Like that's not my type of gameplay style. And this as a Metroidvania for me is. been very standard, right? It is, all right, I'm getting the new ability. Cool. I can, you know, jump further now. I can do this thing or I can do that thing to get past the thing that was blocked by earlier, right? Like, it is that kind of gameplay with combat that I would say, again, it's very standard. Like, I like the two different kind of combat modes that you have

in the game. You can, like, you can attack with, like, sort of the spirit of the sun or the spirit of the moon. And, like, your moon abilities are ranged where, yeah, sun abilities are more melee based. And I like that back and forth. You have health bars on enemies that also are color coded red or color coded blue based on what type of attacks they're going to do more damage on them. I think stuff like that works. The feeling of it doesn't feel as crunchy or as satisfying when you're actually in the combat. Like I found that there's a stiffness and when you're like hitting things that doesn't feel as great as I'd like it to. And I think the way I'll describe it from the gameplay perspective is, I think you can tell that it is in, I think you can tell

that it is indie, right? And I think the way that we got this game, like announced, right, at a game awards, the way that it is, like, an EA Originals thing, you know, I think I was going into it thinking, all right, like, this is going to be, this is going to be like a UiSaw. this is going to be like Prince of Persia of the Lost Crown, where it is, has the backing of UBisoft and all these things. Once you get into it, immediately I was like, okay, no, like, this is an indie game from an indie studio.

First game from a first studio. Yeah, like you can tell that this doesn't have like the budget of the entire world behind it, which is very okay, right? But, like, you know, jumping into it, I think those things were also apparent in ways where I had to immediately kind of readjust those expectations from it on the gameplay level. And as I kind of got past those things, it was the thing of, okay, like, this is cool. Like the, again, the exploration, I think is fine. The feeling of it can feel stiff at points. And then also there are bugs that I encountered in terms of like my character would just stop running.

Did you have a dead stick every time you came out of the map? Every single time I came out of the map, you can't move. It's so funny because I was describing it to, like, Barrett and Roger I felt like a crazy person because I was like, yeah, if you press pause and you unpress pause and you move, it's like, yeah, you don't move. Just stands there. And it felt like I was crazy describing it because they're like, oh, but

doesn't that happen only every once in a while? I'm like, no, you don't understand. So you're running, you open the map. Yeah, and so like, there's plenty of things like that where I'm like, okay, yeah, maybe this could have taken more time or maybe this could have been one that like, maybe where I am coming down on it in terms of how it's hitting on the gameplay level, it is

the thing of, okay, this isn't like a, it takes two we can tell they have a or this isn't like you know in a way out like this is a studio's first game it is a game coming in a lower budget but it's getting that push from EA it's getting that you know that stage

at game awards and all the stuff that is propping it up and I love that for them and I like by the time I finish this game I think for me I am excited to see more like I am curious to see what else they bring to the table but yeah like for me ultimately I came out of this being like all right this is okay but I really did enjoy what they did with like story and setting

stuff. How long did it take you? Ten hours. Awesome. That's great. Greg, you also beat this game. Yeah, 10 hours for me as well. I want to like this game so badly and I don't. I think that's where I come down on it with it, right? You know, blessings going around and talking about the gameplay right being standard. I would go as far as to say bland. And so I think it's easier to jump out and say the things that I think work really well in the game, right? Like, I think it's gorgeous as you just saw. I think the performances are great. Like the VO is awesome for the characters that are in there. right. I love the setting. I'm with you of like, I would love to see what the next game looks like. Because I feel like there's just so many missed. There's so many things that are so close here, but aren't there.

And what I struggle with is that I want to like it. I want to tell people, and this is another one. It's interesting, right? I talked earlier at the top of it, right? Like, the games I want to talk about today are not Greg games. But Metroidvania is another great game. It was the pitch of, oh, this is a game about grief. I was like, you got me. you're going to make me cry let's go and so i it's weird for me to sit here and like i don't want to like give it a pass as a metro idna because i'm not a metrovania guy and so i don't feel like i have as much uh history there but like when i finished it i was like i'm not crazy right and i booted prince of persia and i played for an hour and i was like no this game's awesome i want to actually keep playing this game and that's my biggest complaint i think about tales of kinsera

is that at no point when i was reviewing it did i put it down and was like like, I can't wait to get back. I'm so excited to get back. I can't wait to find. That never happened. I would sit down and have a fine time with it. I wasn't like, this isn't like pulling nails or something like that or oh my God, I'm falling through the world or I hate this thing.

It just never delivered on any of the promises for it for me. And that includes the story where the story is a miss for me. Like I wanted more of the grief. I wanted to go through. I think it has a strong opening cut scene that is like the introduction of, of course, and this is no spoilers. you, everyone I think knows this from what it is. You know, your father has died.

He was writing the story. You start reading the story. We play the game from there, right? And it's that thing of like doing that. It's like, oh, okay. But then I felt like the conversations with the spirit you're with, the characters you're to, it's all too few and far between. Like, I think there could have been a stronger narrative thread throughout that to

remind me of it, to drive me home. Who is my baba? Like, I didn't really feel like I got a lot of like who he is, why he, what I was to him. Like, it just, it's trying, I think it, it relies a little bit too much, you know, you're supposed to show, not tell, right? I think it tells us a lot without showing a lot. And I think that hampers the experience from a narrative perspective in the end.

That when I got to the end, I'm like, okay, like I wanted to love this. I wanted to cry. I wanted to do all these things, and I didn't get that. And then the gameplay is the same thing like, Blessings talking about, where it's just like, it's all serviceable. It's all Metroidvania. It looks fine, but like, I was never excited to play. I was never.

a couple of boss fights in there I did enjoy. I like, yeah. I like, yeah. Where I was like, okay, this is a cool take on this. But overall, like, when I'm talking about a score on it, I was like, I want to give it a three, I think it's a two, just to base the way our scales are. Because, and I like that because then we get to talk and discuss them, right? But it's like, a three we've talked about before and I like it where it can be, oh, it's okay or it's okay. And it's like, I guess I can make a case with being okay, but at no point what somebody say, should I play this game and I'd say yes. Well, are you a fan of this? Then yes.

Are you grieving or do you want to know about grief? Yeah. Like I just would say no to both those people. Like there's nothing about it that's for me really grabbed me. But it's a weird one of like, I still want the next game. I still want to see what they learn. I still think there's so many things, right? Like I'm like, they have a fast travel system, but there's not a lot of points of it.

Like to the point that I was like, oh, before a review today, like the game is actually out, which is rare for us. So it's like, oh, I'll get back in. I'll go trophy hunt a bit because I just have to get the collectibles at this point, right? and I started into it. It was just like, I don't want to do this. I got to run all the way

over there to get, and then I can fast track and then I can fast track and I don't want to do that. You know what I mean? Like that's not a ringing endorsement of a video game I spent 10 hours with.

What did you all play on? PlayStation 5. PlayStation. Come on now, Andy. Well, because I'm playing on Steam Deck. Did you have dead stick when you came out of the Met? No,

I'm only like a, like, I don't know, not even passed where the demo went. I just wanted to kind of boot it up. But, you know, Steam Deck is in 1280 by 800 resolution. it's not just 720. So they do a little letterboxing.

And it's like a graphic letterbox where like it feels like in-world graphics. Like they had a designer be like, oh, we should make just a colorful kind of looking letterbox that feels like it exists in this world. And you have the option to turn that off. But when you turn it off, it also turns off all the UI. And so immediately it was like,

it was really late at night, but I was kind of bummed out about that bug because I was being told what to do. I was like, I'm supposed to be talking to somebody, but I don't see any little character key art. I was like, oh, it's because I turned the letterbox. I was very, very bummed out about that.

Anyway, sorry, sorry, Greg. No, you're great. That was invaluable input. Thank you very much for the Steam Deck folks. Yeah, so it's sadly a miss for something I was really excited about. And again, like, excited enough that it got me, I think outside my comfort zone, right? Where it's like outside of a Guacamile or an Axi verge of Verge, like, what Metroidvania am I really playing? Now, I do want to go back to Prince of Persia based on what I play.

That's great. But, like, you know what I mean? It's a rough year to come out the same year as Prince of Prins of Prisier. It is. in my small time with it, I really enjoyed the gameplay feel and the sound and the feedback and the sound effects of doing the dash

and kind of comboing the moves together. I'm definitely not deep enough to have formed any sort of like educated opinion on it, but I immediately I'm like, oof, with Prince of Persia coming out this year and feeling as amazing as that did, like it's just bad luck of the draw

to try to do something similar-ish. And I'm still somewhat impressed by it, but it's just like really, really rough to have that immediate comparison. Yeah, and that's definitely where I'm at too. Having said all that, it's like, I am still excited to play this. Me too.

Because like, I loved Prince so much and I love Ori and like looking at this. I know we get a lot of Metroidvania's, but we don't get many that have this look to it. And like playing the demo, I did enjoy how it feels. I get what you guys are saying, even from the limited bit I've played of like, oh yeah, I can see it being a little bit more rough.

And I do think it's really so close to Lost Crown is difficult to get over. but still excited to play through this. Oh, sorry. Oh, I was going to say, like, I think it does work as another Metroidvania, right? Like, if you hear somebody that's super into the genre, like I would say, I think it does some worthwhile things.

Like, I like the abilities that you get by the time you get further into it. And it's interesting, we were talking, we recorded our Stellar Blade review, our Stellar Blade review earlier today on PS I Love You. And one of the things I talked about with Stellar Blade was that I think that's a game that didn't feel as, like, inspired, right?

Like it didn't really go outside the box in anything, but what it did, it, with what Solar Blade does, it feels so refined. Like, it is a super refined as game that has taken a lot of inspirations. Whereas I think Tales of Kinzerazal is almost a flip for me where, like, it doesn't feel necessarily as refined as a video game, but for the things that it did, that it does that are fresh, like really work for me. Like, for me, it was moments where the character is talking about Baba and, like, it's, like, kind of crying out and, like, having those emotional moments talking about that. where I'm like, damn, it's crazy for me to play a video game that, one, like, he is calling his father Baba, which is, like, very, like, culturally non-American. They're plenty of countries that call their father's Baba, but, like, very African, but also, yeah, like, culturally based there, but then also have it be something that is going

for something that is trying to tell a story that is kind of bigger than itself. And playing in Metroidvania that is, again, telling a story that's bigger than itself, right? Like, I've very rarely played a Metrovania that feels like it's trying to do something. something like this, right, tell a story of grief. And yeah, like, for me, the stuff works. For me, it's like, I think that is what can be going all the way through. I could have dropped it at any second, but because of that,

I was like, no, I kind of want to see where this goes. Like, I want to keep going with this because I feel like I'm playing something that it has something to say that is going, that is trying to do something here. So I think there's something worthwhile there. But I'm also like, you know, I hear everything Greg saying in terms of it's not, I think the show, the, it doing more telling than showing is accurate. And then also, yeah, like gameplay, gameplay wise, not much jump.

out, but I do think it's, like, I'll almost use the word competent. Like, as a, and that's a great. Yeah, yeah, serviceable. Yeah, serviceable competent, blind, or whatever. Like, I think that's all part of it. And what I sent bear was the trailer. It reminds me so much of Outland. Remember this game? This is the Housemark game that was forgotten. When they stopped doing, uh, Hey, we're doing all these House, uh, Housemark games that are exclusive to PlayStation. They seemed up with Ubisoft and did a game called Outland, which wasn't bad, but it's the Houseland game. Everybody fucking forgot. And it's very similar in the color palette of

blues and oranges or whatever. But it was cool. It was fine. It was whatever. But it didn't set the world on fire. And it was like, all right. Well, that was something they made. This looks pretty cool. Yeah, this kind of looks rad. Okay. Then, well, moving on from Tales of Cunera to Mikey.

Let's play a little tennis, Tim. Let's talk about top spin returning after a decade plus. No way, really? Yeah, for real. You know that? That's crazy. I don't know it was all gone that long. Yeah. Yeah, man. I played a lot of Tennessee's past a couple of days. And I'll tell you I'm raising up the ranks. I'm going up the leaderboards.

I'm having some fun. But top spin 2K25 is going to get a three out of five for me. Leaning towards a two out of five. It is a bare bone straight to the point tennis game, which is great if you want a good, competent tennis game, but it's lacking the fun. It is lacking that extra pizzazz that I think all sports games should have in 2025. And there's also this factor of it is not welcoming to the pickup in play

that all sports games should. you to have. When I think of a sports game, I think of any talent level should be able to see that sport, go, yeah, I can play that. Let's grab the controller and jump on. Now, of course, it has great skills, right? You're going to learn, you're going to get better. And there's a good skill curve and a skill gap that you will experience. But this tennis game is all about timing, and it is not welcoming to, hey, is this your first time seeing it? Grab a controller. You're not going to have a fun time playing against me, which I was very let down and disappointed in. It's got a lot going on in it, but it is bare bones to the minimum.

So let's talk about a couple of things that it offers, Gregi. 25 pros, 48 courts, and that's where it shines is the presentation. The courts are gorgeous and beautiful. It has the daytime, the nighttime, the afternoon, different effects on certain courses or courts that really elevate the look when it comes to shadows or beating up on the dust clay courts, sliding across the clay courts really feel good and look good. The red clay of Roland Garros. Oh,

I could forget. It's fantastic, Andy. But it also has a single player mode. It's got local play. It's got the Top Spin Academy, which is voiced by Johnny McEnroe, which is fun. But I'll tell you what,

he only voices half of it. And of course, it's a lot of just sold in lines of like, you're doing great. Hey, why fuck you, man. He told me what he told me I was doing good. I'm like, thanks John.

It's doing it. Hey, you got it back out of the kitchen. You know, like, it's fun. I love you that episode of Curve. It's fun, but it's all. in the no-man zone.

Get back. I want to be, oh, I got a little it's odd because then you go into the actual meaty part

of the Topspin Academy and it just becomes the AI-generated Nintendo direct voice lady and it's like, okay, we couldn't keep Johnny for the second half of this. All right, I get it.

But Topspin Academy is where you need to be to learn the game and actually get competent and good at Topspin 2K-25. After that, they have online play which has a world tournament and 2K Pro player ranked.

Was online up during this period? It was. I immediately got blasted with You have bad connection This isn't going to go well And I could tell my other Opponent was not feeling it Because he was all over the map

Missing Balls So yeah it's gonna be a 2K vibe Like we have with 2K basketball And so that's We'll be unfortunate because it's all about timing On the bar It's not about tapping It's a thing

That you gotta release when it's in the green And so that's what you get from this The positives for me Presentation The courts look great I love the time of day With the shadow and what it looks like.

The player animations are dope. There are some great moments where you hit it behind your head, hit it underneath your legs when you're going to chase down a lob. Like, that's cool looking, right? But gosh, darned, 2K. What are we doing?

I mean, we got to stop focusing only on the pros and we got to give a little love to the NPCs in the distance, right? Because it's not the crowd, but there's a 2K lady that's going to hand you a trophy after every single tournament.

And it's like, oh, man, we gave no love to this lady. And she's on every single game. her from the Unity store stock. We gotta be mindful of some of this stuff of like, I get we're putting it into Serena Williams and we're putting in into Johnny McAmill, but like there are moments in this where you look around and you go,

man, we just missed out on the idea of this kind of touching up a little bit here. And it's the post game animations are the exact same every single time. The walk-ins are cool with the presentation, but it's the exact same every time. It's just going to get samey every single time you play. I think the career is a lot of, fun. The career is very interesting of how

they broke that down and put rest at the forefront, which I haven't seen in the sports game yet, which is very interesting. It breaks it down into a year. You get 12 months to play three different game modes in each month, so you'll have training, a nice special event, and then the tournament. And it's

interesting of when you go throughout the year, you'll start wearing down on your energy, which then will lead to, hey, if you're past 50%, you might get a minor injury. Or if you're past 30%, you'll get a major injury, which will make you kind of sit out maybe a month to two months. And that will affect where you're going to be put at the end of the year. You're seating and your rankings and your ability to grow as a superstar from rookie.

Money down the drain right there. And I really like the idea of being mindful of your energy and am I going to risk this at 50% where my stats might be down. I might get injured. But I'll get one more tournament in the books for the year and be able to elevate that much more. Or will I sit this month out, go to the next month and play? And it's cool of like the My Career does all of that.

Plus you can hire a team who can be your medical staff, be your energy team, be your merchandising team. And each one of these players that or characters that you select in can grow with and level up all will affect your stats and kind of like all of that, which I really, really enjoy and dig. Man, I just customization on your on your dude.

Oh, man. Let me tell you. Greg Miller's looking good out there. Oh, yeah? I got the rainbow shades, blue, polo, blue shorts, white shoes. I'm fucking garbage, but I'm looking good. Okay, that's all it matters. It's

the ultimate 2K fantasy of here's your VC go buy at the store. We have certain brands like Adidas, Nike, Puma, all the tennis brands that you can imagine, they're going to be there for sure. You want that Puma visor. You're going to have to pay us $18 real dollars. So you talk about learning and I'm

obviously right there with you. I think my benefit to this is what's so interesting in terms of coming into this after not having played a tennis game other than Hot Shots tennis in forever, right? You know, at WrestleMania got to play Legion for a bit.

Him and I did a thing and I beat his ass. No big deal. But it was... We did Mario Tennis with us on a party mode. Don't remember that. It doesn't matter. Don't remember that. Don't remember anything about Mario Tennis. But it's more the fact that we both didn't know what we were doing, so we were able to keep it going, right? Now as I'm in here, as I'm in the thing trying

to grind, I'm like, oh man, I'm trashed this. I don't fully understand when it wants me to release. I've done the Mac andro part of the academy but I haven't gone all the way deep into it and stuff are you at the point

where you're having a blast with it would you like to be having head to head competitions that are superheated or like do you think it did a disservice by doing this like

you know meter that you have to release in the specific window? I wish you could turn it off in the setting so I could have moments where I can invite him onto the couch and he can just play

and tap it when it comes near his player and we can at least get a volley going I now am excited to play higher rank AIs to real life players because I have figured out the mechanics of the power shot compared to a nice

um... Lobb. No, not the lob. The other opportunity is a controlled shot. So the power you hold down the button and release on the timer. The control shot is you let the ball come to you and then you will tap it when the timer gets into the green, right? And so it is much more of a play, what kind of play style you like? Are you up on the front

looking for the volley or are you in the background? playing more defensive. And I like that Johnny McRoe does a great job at explaining tennis to you. And you become a good tennis player. But there are certain features that it's just missing that fun aspect. And I think first off it is the learning curve. And it should be just simple as pick up and play. Second is it gives poor feedback. You know, you're going to That is one of my, that would be if I can jump in. Sorry. That would be my big thing is like, I get it and I, to a degree. But after just coming off of WW2K where we had Roger sit down and jump in, it's his first wrestling game in forever, right?

And we've done party modes or whatever where people jump on stream and grab it. Like, blessing who understandably is great at games and great at fighting games, was able to jump in and understand what's going on in that, right? Jumping into tennis and knowing the basic rules, I was more hopeful that like, okay, cool, knowing a lob and a drop shot and whatever,

like I'll be able to get in here and then figure it out more, whereas this was like, no, there's a lot of heavy lifting early on of what is going on and why it's happening and what strategy is. And I was like, fuck, I wish I had more guidance on this to tell me what was happening. It's missing that, like, player coach to give you the feedback. You get dropped into the exact same training sessions that you will see throughout your career, right?

It just goes from bronze, silver, gold, to platinum of, like, certain points you have to get. But the training will always be the same. And it's like this weird, delicate balance of a controlled shot versus a power shot. And are you doing that correctly into the areas to do that? and if you're not, you're going to have a bad time. And it doesn't tell you, hey, you're doing it wrong. This is what you need to be doing. And it misses that.

And there should be some sort of safety net to say, hey, this is where you're messing up. You need to be over in this area. And so. And that's the thing where it's for me, like, again, I know, I've got to go back to the academy. You got to go back to the academy. But it's the idea of, like, having done the initial academy thing

going through, like, okay, cool, I'm holding and letting go in the green. But why is this shot crazier than that shot? Like, at one point I'm playing, I'm like, oh, okay. It's when it contacts with the club. play. That's when I, like, no, that just worked on that one volley for some reason. It never worked again. I'm like, what the fuck? What do you want me to do? Yeah, it's missing that handholding experience. And so there's a lot of things on that side

where it's just like, man, this isn't fun. This is for the diehard tennis fan. This isn't the Mario tennis pickup and play with your friends and have fun. This is a, I want to get good at a tennis game and I want to battle someone online or my friend who was good and we're going to climb up the leaderboards. That's what this is. This game was made. in a room full of suits and they said, how do we make a true-to-life tennis sim? They're missing the fun part of it. They have a great soundtrack, an awesome. Like, Madden, NBA, FIFA always hits you with these fun yearly soundtracks.

And every single time you load into something, it cuts the soundtrack. You go into a dead quiet training facility. No soundtrack, just their theme. It's like, you got a great soundtrack. Just keep playing it. You go into matches, and I get it. Tennis is very buttoned up. Tennis is supposed to be quiet.

But man, oh man, after you play on, hundred tennis matches, you are dying for some sort of sound, some sort of commentary. This is why for Gregi Miller, I went in there, I'm like, make him grunt on everything. You know, if a player, I'm like grunt, grunt on everything. If you fart, they put you in an electric chair. It's crazy that it's just missing out on some of the

fun factor, I think is the big one for me. Johnny Ace, playable? You can make Johnny Ace if you want to. He's not playable, unfortunately. He didn't license out his shit then. Not big enough. I appreciate the podcast. We've gotten to the world sports games where they always have a podcast. This young rookie is an upstarted.

He's looking great. Oh, what a terrific month he had. He won the Wimbledon Cup. I love that. And I hope that we can build. You didn't sound like you like that at all. It sounds like the can't be like FIFA commentary. Well,

this is what I'm going to say is I hope that one day we get to a point where we can use AI technology or something to better these in the future. I know people don't like hearing the word AI, but like there's got to be somewhere where we can build off for that. Or on top of that a rivalry system. There should be no reason why I'm jumping into a game. and I see Rudy Kudy over there and we're just not rivals yet.

It's like every time, make something, use these technologies for good, and that's where it should be used. Like, I should have a rivalry system in this where I know I'm playing that guy. Nemesis. Yeah, I was going to set on us too. I was circling it.

There's moments in this way it's like, oh, we're heading in the right direction in sports games. There's fun things, but we got to take it to that next level and they don't do that. Those are my favorite parts of like the old Mario tennis games back on... No, on Game Boy and stuff.

Like, having that right? having that RPG moment of there's fucking red or there's Gary here's this asshole from the other club who's here to talk shit to me. So it's not that you want more of like a little narrative experience. Have you tried sports story? Or golf story? Yeah, great game, fun game. But yeah, there is also in-game purchases.

Nothing dismissive any... Nothing crazy. There's a battle pass. They call it the center court pass. They'll update every 8 to 10 weeks. You're generic. Hey, you give us $10. We're going to give you a bunch of items that you probably never going to use in the game after 100 levels, right? You already buy it. I can't do it anymore.

And then, of course, they also have some interesting ones of, it is not like 2K basketball, which I appreciate, where you can just straight up buy your character up to a certain level. They don't have that, which is nice. But they do have, you can buy XP tokens, which will then help you grind. And so mind you, when you start at level zero, it's only 150 XP.

Or it's now at level 20 for me, 13 or 14,400. So it's never that big, but you're only getting like 40 points of XP a match, right? And like certain things will be different in tournaments and stuff. But like, it is a little bit of a grind. We're like, oh, man, like, I wish this was going a little bit faster. But I'm level 20 and I've played a fair amount of matches there. They do have an interesting players pack that just released today that wasn't during the review build of. If you pay them 12, they'll give you $1,700 VC and one of your my players up to level 12.

If you give them $20, they'll give you $3,400 VC and six of your players up to level 10. K's 2K and so it's very interesting of like I could tell when I jumped in online I was higher level than the other guy and he could compete with me but like you could tell like I was about to mop the floor with him if I really got it going early so there is a little bit of like when you go online and I'm 20 and you're 11 there you're going to be at a disadvantage here it's 2k all over again finding you know you spend 300 bucks or whatever to get a level 87 overall I don't know what the math is but it's like well they paid their way to get here and now they're here and I'm getting my ass whoops.

That sucks. Damn. If you want to chew a life tennis sim, this is for you. If you're looking for a fun tennis game, this isn't for you. Or play everybody's golf, which isn't tennis. You know what you, man. You know what you, man. He's going to go play tennis in real life. Exactly. Let's Toppsman, everybody. Closing out the show today, I do want

to talk just a little bit about Sandland. Who has played Sandland here? Greg Miller. In Barrett, Courtney, don't even about Big Barrett. I only pay the demo. You know when Barrett Courtney are talking about. about games. It's nerdy as shit. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. So, Sandland, of course, based on the manga, this one jumped out at SGF last year, summer game fest, where I took a Bandai Namco demo, and they were like, can you come see this game too? I was like, I guess. And I played, I was like, wait, this is actually, this is actually great? Like, I can't tell. Action RPG, open world, to a degree,

obviously, open area, I guess. Or would you call it open world, Barrett? I would say this is an open world. It's open world, yeah. It's just, we're so used to huge open worlds. Yeah, it's not a huge open world, but it's just to stretch to the imagination. You are Bels above, you know, Satan's son, they're the prince. You are living in Sandland where there's no water. This dude who's a sheriff shows up, says, and he knows about a mystical spring.

And you, Thief and him are off on a Rick Rowland adventure in Sandland's deserts, where you fucking have all sorts of crazy vehicles and you shoot shit and you find friends and you fight scorpions. And you open up a million different chests for some reason. In one of the first missions, thief dresses as Santa Claus to infiltrate enemy. And I'm like, yeah, okay. And Barrett nailed it. What did you say? Barrett, how did you describe this game?

Simple but charming. Very basic but charming. And yeah, there's like a beat where your buddy thief is going to go sneak into this town. And you're doing like a very simple stealth mission where you're just kind of walking around avoiding enemy eyesight to get to a certain spot in the town. And the entire time I'm like, the gameplay isn't super engaging. But I'm along for the ride. There's just something about the charm and the matter. of this game that I, and it might just be the strength of the IP, which I am unfamiliar with.

I'm unfamiliar with. Toriyama guy, but I know this is from Toriyama back in like 2002 or 2003. And there's just something about the writing, the characters, the way like conversations are paced out, which feels like funny yet dry that I really am digging. Yeah, I'd say I'm four hours in, Bear, where are you? I am roughly seven and a half hours in and looking, at Steam achievements. I think I'd say I'm a third through

the story. It's enjoyable but I agree with Bear. I think it is simple. It's charming and so it's one of those like weird comfort foods to go back to tails right. I wrapped tails and I moved on to this and I'd have that thing where I'm like doing these simple ass missions and it's like all right and then I put

it down and walk away and like I'm looking forward to playing more of that tonight. I'm like why though? Like you know what I mean? There's skill trees and there's this and there's all like it's just a fun little comfort food game to run through. I thought it was interesting, obviously for me as somebody who has no connection to the source material isn't a manga guy, that I was like, okay, cool, I'm enjoying this to a degree. I will not see it through for credits. I enjoyed what I played of it. I'll move on to the next review, but when I don't

have something else, I'll get in there because again, you got a tank, you got a jumping robot, they're fun to control, they're fun to fight things, you're leveling up, you're beating up giant scorpions. It's like, all right. Yeah, this is one that I would like, there are multiple moments last night in my playthrough that I was like, damn, in my heart, I feel like this is a four out of five, but my brain is telling me that this is more likely just a three out of five. Yeah, 100%. There were a lot of moments that clicked with me, and because I'm a fucking weirdo, I was the

one picking up the Mad Max video game the day that Metal Gear Solid 5 came out. You and Colin, that was it. And you know what? I liked that game. It's nothing special, but it was like, it was very simple, but it was really satisfying car combat. And like last night, I finally got into some, like, boss encounters and just like normal encounters in like your big tank or one of your like, you can nickname your vehicle. So I have like tanky as like his nickname is heavy. And like I got my jumper bot and his name is jumpy.

And I got porty and cool. There we go. And like encounters with them that are like really. interesting and, like, fun to play around with in combat encounters. And then there's, like, story beats that I got to where I was like, oh, shit, like, I'm doing a side quest, which doesn't really level up your character, but is good for kind of building up this town that you're associated with. And, like, it kind of started, it fell apart as nothing as this old rebel base, but then

you're trying to grow it and get new people to come there and slowly build it up over the course of the game. and you're kind of getting satisfaction in that, but then there's like a side quest that actually weirdly hit me a lot because it kind of came out of nowhere, again with this like a good reminder of like, oh yeah, this is kind of a, not post-apocalyptic,

but like the world's fucked up in this world. And yeah, like water is a very rare source and there's a lot of like heavy themes that aren't always the forefront, but you know, it creeps up every once in a while. It's a nice little surprise. I think if you look at it and you're like, you have any interest in it,

it's worth a look. I want to continue playing it. It's the weird one where it's like, oh man, I should probably pick up the anime, actually, because they've been, it's been releasing on Hulu

and Disney Plus or something. Yeah, Hulu's been really pushing it. But for some reason, I'm like, no, I like experiencing the story through the year. I don't know if the stories are one to one or whatnot, but I don't know. I'm treasuring my time with this. It's been a great, yes,

comfort food. if you just want like fun, simple car combat with a charming cast of characters in a interesting world and plot, which honestly, like, shout out to that. I thought the entire kind of story was going to be centered around this one thing. And it actually gets a bit more complicated than that in interesting themes that I was not expecting, but I'm really, really digging in terms of, you know, the power of a few and how they abused that and how it, you know, the, you know, the many who are not being served out there are, you know, kind of getting tired of it. I got really fed up with the amount of repeated barks, character barks.

Yeah. When you're out there in the old world, is that still pretty present? Yeah. Like, it felt like it was like, man, that's the fourth time you said that in the last six minutes. That's where I back to one bear, it's like, you know, maybe my heart's pull a four, but I know it's a three kind of thing. Like you play it. It's like, I feel like that's when it's like, it shines through of like, oh, this is what

that game is. for me it was running around getting the jump bot where I was infiltrating this built, not even infiltrating, just going through this, you know, giant almost like shell like structure for Middle Gear Solid 2 to get this thing. And I'm going and it's just like I started ignoring the treasure chest because I'm just

like, you open it when it's just like, bring all these things are popping. I'm like, but what does any of this shit mean? Upgrading your vehicles. It was like a lot of it. And because that was the confusion I was getting with like the side quests and like anything that was outside of the main quest or even just like fighting enemies outside in the world. Like your player

or Beals is XP to get to the next level. It's like 2000, but then any like enemy you fight is like one XP and I'm like what the fuck? And so like they definitely want you to level him up through the story but then all of the like any optional stuff, any open world stuff I feel like is geared toward like focusing on your vehicles because I went back to the garage. I was like oh shit I can level up my vehicle like eight times right now and I was not paying attention

to that, but I don't think they onboard you super well. This is also, I want to shout out, this is developed by ILCA. They're a newer developer. Interesting track record. They, uh, they were the ones who made Pokemon brilliant diamond and shine. I knew that sounded familiar, yeah. Um, and that was like their first big, uh, release. They did the Idol Master Starlit season before that.

And then they, I think were, um, uh, kind of a support, uh, developer for Pokemon home. but their other big game that they release after Pokemon Brilliant Diamond Shining Pearl, Mike, is One Piece Odyssey, which we really enjoyed, but very pretty. They know how to adapt, like, 2D animation into a 3D style

that feels right at home, really charming, like writing and characters, and like it fits into what the original manga or anime is, but they're still kind of getting their sea legs and figuring out, like, what a really interesting gripping game can be. And I think they've gotten a bit closer

to that here in Sandland. But I don't know. I'm excited to see what they can do in the future because again, this premise of just anime Mad Max 2015, the video game. I'm fuck yeah. Let's go. Well, yeah. Well, everybody, thank you for joining us to talk about video games. Thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments below. What games we've talked about today you're planning to pick up and play and also what you've been playing. And also, if you're watching Mad Max in review, it's a great time.

Wow. This week we're doing Beyond Thunderdome, Andy. I don't know if you've watched this one yet. No. Oh, strap in, baby. It is crazy, man. Crazy. It's going to be a fun time.

But until next time, I love you all. Goodbye.