Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Wild Hearts Review - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Andy and Bless give their review on the new EA Original Wild Hearts and Tim reviews the super wholesome Blanc. Time Stamps - 00:00:00 - Start 00:01:20 - Housekeeping 00:04:20 - Wild Hearts Review 00:27:20 - Ads 00:43:43 - Blanc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up and welcome back to the kind of funny games cast. Of course, I'm Tim Gettys, and I'm joined by the new face of video games blessing at EOye Jr. Good afternoon, Tim. Good afternoon to you, bless. And rounding out the crew for today, we have the Nitro Rifle. Texas Street, Latino Heat, clicking heads and ripping them to shreds the globe trotting, headshotting, rootin-tutin, three-point shooting. Nitro rifle from Twitch.com.

Andy Cortez. You haven't missed to beat this whole year, Tim. I love it. I love it. It's just so long. It's just so much fun. Like the moment I say root and tutin, I just can't wait to say three-point shoot. You know, it just gets so fun.

Well, that was Nick who had to the root and tud and it was just rooting to it. And I was like, what about him with three-point shooting? Yeah. But can you imagine that, me walking down the W.W.E. tunnel. I can't. And going to three-point. Because I'm the globe-trodden head shot and Nack-try. Everybody's like fucking doing all the hands.

It's the best thing about that. It's going to happen with it. I'll do an elbow drop on Nick or something. Oh, shit. Power bombers bitch. I want to see you do a frog splash. I think you got. one good frog splashing you and me for the rest of it but it'll take like 22 years off my life's

exactly but it's going to be super sweet very detrimental to me of course this is the kind of funny games cast each and every week we get together to talk about video games and all the things that we love about them and it's it's review that's not even a season anymore it's just life now you're y'all all year long all year long will next year be this again probably we're just going to be playing games they call that global reviewing that's what it is Mobile reviewing is what's occurring right now. Climate change. So yeah, stay tuned, honestly, to all of Kind of Funnies content.

I know that we do a lot, but please subscribe to YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny and YouTube. com slash Kind of Funny games. I don't think we do enough. And all... We can upload more videos. And all of the various podcast feeds. Like, honestly, Kind of Funny in Review, Kind of Funny Screencast, Kind of Funny Podcast, Games Daily.

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live on Twitch or YouTube.com. slash Kind of Funny games. Tomorrow, big day, Thursday. My birthday, I'm playing Returnal on PC with Lessing. It's your birthday Eve right now. I can't believe it's your 25th birthday. Birthday Eve.

26, actually. Come on. I love that. So that'll be fun. I'll be young enough to stink. The day you're seeing this, that'll be happening. So come hang out with Andy on his birthday there.

Of course, you can also get this show ad free by going to patreon.com slash kind of funny. We'd appreciate it if you did that. just like our Patreon producer, Delaney You are the best of us. Thank you. That is a fact. But if you don't have a dollar to toss our way,

that is cool. You can use our epic creator code kind of funny on all Epic Store and Epic Ingame purchases like Rocket League and Fortnite to help support kind of funny. Returnal is on Epic Game Store, I think. Who knows?

Probably. And if it is, if you're buying it, yeah, go for it. Have you played yet? Can you talk about it? Yeah, I can talk about it. I mean, it feels great on keyboard mouse. This is like the game,

a perfect game was made even more perfect there. well there you go Perfect dirt Get it using our code Is it? How about that? There it is. How about that?

Use our code. Kind of funny. Thank you very much for that. I'll tell you about that later. Just a little housekeeping I want to give

another shout out to Barrett's hour long breakdown of the Tears of the Kingdom trailer that you can check out in all the places you'd expect to see it. And what else do you want to shout out here, Bless?

Just KFCD in general. I got KFD's been killing it. So go check out KFD every single day every morning. Twitch.TV, YouTube.com slash kind of funny games. It'll be great.

And also check out out the last episode of the Blessing Show, the non-game of the year awards for 2022. Don't watch Greg's one. Don't watch Greg's episode. Please don't.

Please don't. We're going to talk about something today. One more thing I want to shout out because I believe this comes out later in the day tomorrow. After it, let me look up the calendar. Look at the calendar really quick. Yes.

Yes. We can talk about this. So PS I Love U XOXO should be up by now and that should be our PlayStation VR2 and Horizon Call on the Mountain reviews. So you want to check that out for sure. That is an excellent point. Yeah.

Again, just subscribe to all of our stuff and just be ready because we're going to deliver the goods. And it all starts a couple weeks ago, but it's going to continue forever. So have fun with that. But let's have the fun continue. Hopefully we're going to talk about some good stuff here. I actually don't know what the project.

I don't know shit about what we're getting into here. A game called Wild Hearts. Andy, you play a play. it. Bless, you've played it. Andy, your lead reviewer on this one. So I want to get your thoughts first on what you think of the game. But first off, what is this game? What's the top level pitch?

Wild Hearts is a game by Omega Force. This game was published by Coe Tecmo and EA Originals. It is just straight up a Monster Hunter game. It'd be tough to call it a Monster Hunter like game because it's just straight up Monster Hunter. If you kind of blur your eyes and look at it,

you're like, yeah, that seems like Monster Hunter. All the way down to the animations are very, very similar. You have a bunch of different weapons you can choose from and customize, fight awesome beasts that eventually transform in all their different phases. You are trying to rid the land of this sort of like weird kind of disease that's going on and all these monsters are affected by it and kind of ruining the region. So you're trying to take them out while like getting cool loot from them and then using that loot to upgrade your weapons. The biggest twist though,

The thing that sets it apart from a Monster Hunter game are these sort of magical crates that you have. And when we first saw this in the first couple trailers, I was like, that looks like a lame gimmick. Just give me the weapon. I'll just do that. I don't really care about these little abilities you get in the game.

But I think these abilities make the game what it is and make it great. This is a four out of five great for me. So far, I'm not done with it, but I'm about like 35 hours in. I've been playing the shit out of it. I can't stop playing it. I really, really, really like this game.

I think it might be, I would have given it a higher score if it didn't look ugly sometimes. Because the game is pretty unoptimized in a lot of different places. The game has like a day-night cycle that can cause things to look really flat and kind of gross sometimes. I posted a picture on Twitter last night that was like especially egregious. But the game's also suffering from a lot of performance issues on PC as well, which is when we requested codes, I always like to request too because the state of PC ports these days has always been pretty

bad and unhealthy and whenever I start up a PC game I go, no, never mind. I'm going to play this on console because I don't want to wait for three patches to come through for this game to be ready to play. The game is a shitload of fun though, man. Blessing me and Joey played it

on Monday. I've been mostly soloing it this whole time except for the couple times that we did sort of squat up and take down couple monsters. Yeah, it's a monster hunt a game. If you are into Monster Hunter, you will really, really dig this. The thing that sets it apart is like what I was mentioned earlier, these abilities that you get that you continue to evolve as you keep leveling up. It starts off with just like a basic crate. Think of it as like a defensive sort of Fortnite putting

down walls thing when you're fighting these big enemies. And when you're fighting these big bosses, large, awesome, cool-looking creatures, you'll sometimes get a little in-game prompt that'll say, hey, put down, hold down the L1 button and hit square, square, square, or whatever button it is for you. I did a lot of key binding, remapping, or whatever. And you'll put down three crates of walls, and then the enemy charges you, boom, hits the crates, gets knocked down.

And you go, oh, shit, this is what these crates can be used for. You can also jump off the crates to do a jumping attack. We just saw something that looked, dope as shit. Whoever was playing in this video missed the final hit, but they like set down a zip line, ziplined up over this giant monster and then jumped down for a sword attack, which looks very cool and fun. And it just keeps on getting bigger and badder and better. Like all of the abilities you keep on unlocking, it starts up with just those basic crates that you can stack on top to also use for a traversal in case you're trying to get somewhere just while you're running around the world, not even necessarily during combat.

but oh, I want to get up there. I don't want to run around this whole route. I'll put up three crates. Then you sort of get a jumping boost off of it. Let me climb this little cliff and I'll be totally fun. It starts up with those crates and then it turns into there's a stake you could put down that has fire on it. When you run through it, your weapon now has fire damage that you just kind of use and destroy enemies with. There's also like a launch pad, right?

Bless, there's a little thing you can kind of spring off of, jump towards the enemy. There's an item you can use that can help you. scale down really, really high heights because there is a fall damage death. You can fall really far without dying, but there is a limit that they do put it at, which was kind of surprising. But you can sort of put down a little item that when you grab it, it becomes like a little propeller, and you can kind of just flow down. Like Mario, you know, when he's a little propeller block.

The game is so fucking fun, and it keeps on giving you newer things to unlock as you are progressing the story. You can summon a... You could put down a couple blocks with a certain button combination, and a big ass fucking hammer pops out, and boom, hits the enemy, big damage sort of hit. And there's walls that eventually transform and become gigantic, big fortified walls

that even tougher attacks can't get through. It just keeps on expanding and getting cooler and cooler, and I can't stop playing it. I'm having a blast. Bless, you've put in how many hours so far? So I've probably played a bit more than, like, 10 hours. I've been split between Wild Hearts, and then also doing PSVR review and other stuff.

And so I've not gotten to play as much as I've wanted to, but this has been the game where, out of all the games I've been playing the last month or so, this is the one that's been demanding most of my attention. When I'm not playing Wild Hearts, I want to play Wild Hearts, and that's the best compliment I can give to this game because I'm not, historically, I've not been a Monster Hunter person.

I've always wanted to be a Monster Hunter person, but Monster Hunter's always been either wrong place, wrong time for me for when Monster Hunter World came out. I didn't know what I was doing, right? Monster Hunter Rise came out. I was playing different games, right? RISE was the wrong place, wrong time for me. Now, a world I got really, really into.

Yeah, and RISE came out again last month, and again, it was another one of those things where I just wasn't feeling it in the moment, right? Like, there's nothing bad I can say about Monster Hunter games, right? This is all just a me thing in terms of where I'm at in terms of not being able to get into them. Wild Hearts was the one for me where booted it up, started playing it, and I think the thing that first captured me was the building,

where I'll describe it as a halfway point between Fortnite and Destraining where you are building in the moment, right, in the way that you would do in a Fortnite, in the action, right? You are, all right, I got to build a wall, tap square, boom, build. And like, with the building combinations, right, it's really cool because it is L1 square will build a crate. And then if you keep tapping, the crates will build in a way to where if you stack up six of them, it transforms and mechanizes into a bigger wall.

And so you have like these building combos that I think are really cool and really creative. But, yeah, the building is in the action, and they allow you to do the things like Andy mentioned where you build a wall, if a big monster runs into it, it'll stun them a little bit. Or you can climb the wall and jump off of it to get height to then maybe get like a better hit on the enemy, like an enhanced hit on the enemy. You have the attack combos are insane. The attack combos are incredible. You have like propellers, like Andy mentioned that you can build, like a bunch of different tools that you can build that are, again, really fun to use in the moment.

And then I bring in distracting with it because they are built with purpose. You're not just building walls. You can build towers that will help you find and detect the kimono, which are the names of the monsters in the game. You can build campfires and like you can set up shop pretty much anywhere on these big open maps to like be your fast travel locations or be the locations you come back to to cook food or set up camp or do whatever. And so like I really like that aspect as well. And then yeah, the combat is really fun. The assortment of weapons that you can choose from, even from the beginning of the game, I believe you have like five different weapons that. that you can choose from being like a samurai sword, this like umbrella sword.

What I use is the bow and arrow, which I was expecting the bow and arrow to be garbage, just because most of the weapons you can choose from are these melee weapons, right? And so I'm like, all right, like let's see if the bow and arrow gets much love. And I fucking love the bow and arrow. I think it's a bit of an acquired taste. You know, I talked, or Andy was telling me that Mike when he was playing, wasn't digging it. And I think that's mainly because the bone. He wasn't hitting a shot.

Dude sucks. Yeah, he's fucking garbage. We know this about. but also it's the bow and arrow is weirdly close range like it's not really a long range weapon in the game and so you have to get up in your enemy's face and then also you have to like charge it and then also you have different like the button scheme for the bow and arrow is different than what you'd expect but i found it really fun to where you have two modes you can essentially be in right you can hold it upright or you can hold it sideways right and get crazy with it uh but if you hold it upright yeah it was one moment we're fighting a boss of us like all right like it was almost like the lean forward gamer chair movement or he's like, all right, I'm putting the bow side. Yeah, I'm putting the bow side of it. Yeah, I felt like holding Uzi sideways. Yeah, I felt like I was in San Andreas.

But you do that. And then if you press, and that's to press square to go back and forth between sideways and upright. If you press triangle once with the bow and arrow, it does like a, like a charge where your arrow or your bow starts glowing a little bit. And then a second triangle is like a second charge. And that, both of those charges unlock basically like new forms of attacks to where, you know, if you're holding it upright, you press one charge, it does like a power

hit. press it twice, it does like a super power hit that takes a long time to actually let go of. If you're holding it sideways, charge once and it does like a like a scatter, like repeat attack where you're like, where you're letting go that thing fast. And then when you press triangle twice, so you get the double charge and you're holding sideways, it does like a rain. Yeah, like a volley. So you're raining from above.

And all these attacks I have so much fun with doing, especially when you're playing multiplayer. And it is Andy getting in the monstrous face, building the big hammers to get down and doing all the melee attacks. and then me from far away, charging, waiting for the right moment, and then like getting the perfect attack off where it is, you know, instead of doing 50, 30 damage, now I'm getting off like 300, 400 damage. It is so satisfying. It is so fun. And then the monsters or the quote unquote kimono themselves are really cool. I really like their design. I'm with 80 though that the game doesn't always look pretty. And I think that is one of the bigger downfalls of it is with these monsters that I'd say are well designed and look really cool, especially when they transform and get all these

different qualities to them. The resolution and the fidelity of like even their fur and like the textures themselves, I think you're playing on performance mode, right? I am playing on performance mode on PS5. And I don't know if you had that same thing with like the how they actually look. Because it's weird, I like how they look, but I also don't like how they look at the same time. And this is like an art direction versus art quality thing. No, yeah.

A lot of it comes down to just rendering power. This game is, again, like I mentioned, pretty unoptimized in a lot of spots. later in the game I saw a friend of R. Skillup tweeting about certain areas where you can there's a certain area later on in the game. I wouldn't even say late game because I feel like I'm maybe halfway through, but you hit an area

where there's snow and the snow particles look god-awful and it also just kind of tanks performance. Even on performance mode, you're dipping probably around like 40 frames per second every once in a while. Yeah, I think that's legitimately the only thing that I'm holding it back from being like a five

out of five. Damn. That's really cool. Bless you haven't beat it or aren't even close, but like what would you air towards on the review scale? I'll probably, I agree with everything Andy said, right? Like I can see it being a four out of five.

Again, I'm very far from being, I guess that far in the game. And so I wouldn't give an official review, but I do co-sign everything Andy said. Like, I think that sounds spot on. So Andy, you were saying that you played a lot with people and a lot solo. Do you think that the experience is greatly enhanced with others, or do you still think that it could be a four out of five for you even just alone? If I, I was playing alone and still really, really loving it. When you're playing solo, similar to in Monster Honor,

where you have your little palico cat help friender guy, your little dude, you're a little monstey or whatever the fuck they call. I didn't play rides, so I don't have a whole lot of background there. In this world, you have an equivalent to that. They're like these little, they remind you of the, yeah, ha ha, ha, in Breath of the Wild? The crocs. They're little wooden orbs that are kind of like nature,

but also tech-looking, and they help you out, and you level those guys up as well. So when you're running around the world, if you get stunned by a monster or whatever, your thing will, like, do something to get the attention of the monster, and then you'll see on the left,

your Sukamo took the attention away from the monster. So the monster's going to go attack that now, then you can get out of the stun and kind of save yourself. Whenever you're low on health, if you level it up enough, it'll put up a healing mist for you. Whenever you are maybe low on materials that you use materials to essentially build these items, and you can find the materials kind of scatter all around you. But if you're in a pinch and you need some,

every once in a while your little Sukomo, little friend guy, will throw out little building materials. He can go collect and then continue in building to either defend yourself or attack the enemy. I will say a couple of recommendations for people One of those like you know Imagine an article like here's five things you should know before blah blah I would say that I'm always kind of the person that mains one weapon I don't really want to mess around once I find something I'll stick with it

But you find it so much joy out of Kind of in your hub world you eventually get like a little training dummy And you can test out these weapons on it and when you go test them out, it'll tell you hit R1 three times for this basic combo. Hit R1 twice, then heavy for this combo. When you're jumping in the air, hit R1 whole triangle

and it kind of like teaches you the nuances of the combat and it opens up in such a cool way where you're like, oh shit, I want to use us now because this weapon is going to be cool as shit. I had that same exact thing happened to me with the katana that you start off with where I switched to bow and arrow pretty early on and I learned all the bone arrow stuff

just by messing with it. And it took me a while because that shit was complicated. It doesn't straight up just tell you these things unless you go to the training dummy. And so I went to the training dummy when I was like, you know, let me test out some of these other weapons

and got to the part where it's like, all right, press square, all right, press triangle. And then I got to a part where I was like, all right, now press, I forget the button combination, but it was like R2 and triangle or something for when your meters all the way up to them pull out your whip. And I'm like, wait, I had a whip.

Like, this is a thing that I could do. Yeah. And from there on, I was like, oh, this weapon is dope. as fuck. I got to find more opportunities to bust this thing out. I need to see Sunhi Legend do awesome gifts with it because

there's a weapon called... You started with the katana and I like the guitar a lot. Very, very fast action, super fast, kind of get in, get out. You can get like four to five slashes off and then back away. Game's got a really good dodge roll and a slide away when you're... I love it.

It's got a good dodge roll for timing and eye frames and stuff but also just the sprint and slide away. Really good for getting out of danger. Or if you want to get even more out of danger, you can hold down the build tool, put down the little platform, and boom, you can bounce away and get even further away. So there's like really, really cool methods of transportation and just kind of maneuverability. But one of the weapons that I, the weapon that I moved on from after the katana was the big ass sword, right? Whenever I play Souls games, I always just have the big heavy sword that's like, it's going to be really lumbering.

and if you hit one too many times, you're definitely going to be vulnerable for an attack from the monster. I moved to that weapon, which has really cool combos and really cool charge-up abilities, much like Souls games, and I believe Monster Hunter games as well,

there's different types of damage. You don't need to pay attention to it a whole lot. I wouldn't say, like, don't over-complicated if you don't want to, but the hammer, big-ass fucking hammer, will be like a strike damage. There's enemies in this game. This boss is kind of made of rocks.

They're going to be more vulnerable to a hammer hitting them as opposed to a sword slashing them. So the swords have slash damage. The arrows have like pierced damage or whatever. So the hammer's got a lot of really cool combos as well. There's a sort of staff that transforms. The staff transforms to a big-ass shuriken that you can throw.

And if you get it back, you can start timing on these combos where whenever you're, whenever you see like your character kind of blink, that means that you want to switch to the next weapon because that's going to build your kind of ultimate power. Go ahead, Tim. Forget my ignorance on this because I haven't really played Monster Hunter games. When you say switch weapons, are you talking about just switching modes like you saw him about bone arrow? No, that. Or can you actually like switch between from the katana to the hammer to the- The staff is a transforming weapon. Okay. So the staff transforms into the, so the katana is his own weapon. You have to equip weapons before. before you go out.

Okay, before you start a hunt. So once you're out in the field and you're hunting monsters, you are stuck with that weapon. Yeah, but go back and then switch. But similar to,

like a bloodborn where you have your sawblade that transforms, this staff switches into like five different weapons, yeah, forms. And in order to do that, you see like your character blink

and if you time it right, you'll throw the shirk in. When it arrives, your character blinks, you hit triangle again. Then it becomes this attack. Staff hit down, blink again.

It's two daggers. and it keeps on building and building up until a point where when you get the bar filled up enough, you don't have to do any of this shit. You can keep it simple if you like, but it just makes it that much cooler. It becomes a gigantic sword like this size of a fucking 18-wheeler.

It's really, really cool. But the weapon, I think you'll vibe with, Bless. Baird, if we can find footage for this, it's called the claw blade. It's something you probably have, you're able to unlock it probably already, but it's a weapon that I saw. I was like, I don't really know, that doesn't really mean anything to me.

but it's a kind of like claw with a rope attached to it right and you can like just melee people and when you build up your special enough you throw it and you pierce it into the enemy and then you like zip towards them do a bunch of fucking moves you fly on the other side of them

you zip towards back to them do a bunch of fucking moves and you just keep on like kind of flying back and forth to them and it becomes so insanely cool and just visually awesome looking where I it makes me want to use it just to be that dude in battle that's like oh that guy's

main in a claw blade this guy's fucking badass you know what I mean so here we go here's that sort of move where you can like dodge in midair but the attack on Titan and then if then you can zip right back to them um right here and like move and then you'll fly on the other side of them and this little circle

bar is running out and that's the amount of times that you can eventually go back to them it is so that's dope as hell it's so badass dude so again a weapon that I never thought I would use because I'm like, all right, I'm probably going to use the staff the chance forms. I'll use the big ass sword and I'll use the hammer

for certain enemies. Here comes a fourth weapon and I'm like, oh shit, there's also an umbrella weapon that like has blades on the end of it. Don't know what that's about. This game is just endlessly badass, man. I'm having so much fun with it. And there's so much depth to it too where I feel like I'm barely

again, I've played around 10 hours or so and I feel like I barely scratched the surface. When you open up the skill tree for like, I guess for your character, right? If you go down, it just feels like it goes down forever. And there's also skill trees for weapons, right? You can like transform weapons into other weapons, essentially. Or like upgrade them to different versions of that same weapon.

There's so much going on there. There's so much of the map that I don't have uncovered yet, right? Like, I feel like they went in their duffy in terms of, hey, let's pack as much stuff in here as possible. And it brings you back to listening to up to my friends talk about Monster Hunter and talk about the amount of hours that they get out of Monster Hunter and even just a few weeks ago when Greg was in office playing Monster Under Rise. We were talking about it, right?

It was both of us kind of playing it for review, and Greg's playing more of it because he's more of a Monster Hunter person. And he's like, man, Monster Hunter's just fun, man. Like, Monster Hunter is just a fun game. It's a great loop. Yeah. And when he was saying it, I didn't understand it because I hadn't gotten to that loop yet. Like, I was trying to play Monster Hunter Rise and I was like, oh, man, I'm getting

lost. Like, I mean, these guys don't have health bars. I don't know when they're going to die. Like, I'm chasing these guys around. Where is the fun at? That's a, to be fair to you, blessed. Monster Hunter is a tough game to just hop into and play at work with no context to anything. For sure.

It's a deep game that requires a lot more attention. But once you get into it, it becomes the perfect podcast game. And that's the thing is now I totally understand. It kind of took Wild Hearts for you to be like, oh, I totally understand what Monster Under fans are talking about now because it is, like, it's just a pure game. It is just like, hey, man, just go out, grind, get the materials, fight these big monsters, have fun, chase after them, and just like, and it is the perfect podcast. game where I started listening to podcast while playing and time was just flying.

Like, time was gone. After a while, I was like, I need to go to sleep because it is 1130 and I'm usually I'm in bed by 11 because I'm an old person. Andy, you having your experience with Monster Hunter World specifically, do you think that Wild Hearts is more approachable to new players to Monster Hunter or is it a similar type of grind? I think it'd be more approachable for new players only because I feel like this is kind of the ground floor for a lot of new players.

I don't think just Monster Hunter fans are going to play this. I think this kind of opens it up to a lot of a big new audience. So everybody's kind of getting in on the ground floor, even though a lot of the basic principles of what makes a monster hunter game, a monster hunter game are all present. I think it's like definitely give it a shot. Like there's some stuff that's going to confuse you a bit at the beginning. Don't let it, don't get discouraged.

Like you will eventually learn with it. If I can learn, anybody can learn. I have like the worst ADHD possible. I get distracted and the next thing you know I missed like a big tutorial, whatever. I want to get back real quick to the death stranding aspect of it, which is, again,

when you're building in battle, you're building either defensive or offensive things to help you up in battle. Andy, I want to hear you get back to the Death Stranding stuff. But first, I want to hear a word from our sponsors. Shout out to Shady Ray's for sponsoring this episode. Look how cool

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If you don't already have honey, you could be straight up missing out. You can get PayPal honey for free at joinhoney.com slash kind of funny. That's joinhoney.com slash kind of funny. Go for it. Death Stranding. So, yeah, when you're in battle, you're using, your building to kind of help you out either defend or get offensive against these animals. But when you're just kind of exploring the world and looking for new kind of items to unlock

or looking for crafting materials, you also use that same construction to set up big-ass zip lines. You essentially are creating your own fast travel, which is really, really cool. You find spots where Blessie was mentioning. I kind of like putting a campsite you always start up with your home base campside but then you want to explore and then place a new campsite down further

in the island in case you die it doesn't become a pain in the has to run back to battle you can die three times up in a battle which is also really neat and doing that there's a mechanic called these dragon pits so these dragon pits are kind of laid all around the world

and you have to put elements and resources into them in order to allow you to build more around them. So the game just isn't going to willy-nilly be like, hey, you can put up 17 zip lines here. It's not going to let you just cheese it that way. One of my tiny complaints is that I wish the world were a bit more... It's almost like a driving city trying to become a city with a lot of walking and pedestrians

where it's like you are encouraged to use a lot of these tools, but I don't think the world lends itself to really use these tools as much as you'd like. There are some areas that I would love to just set up ziplines to where it's like, I'd rather do that than fast travel because ziplining is cool shit.

It feels great. I mean, it reminds me a little bit of desktes, like setting up a zipline and death training but like the coolest thing ever. And it feels great. Yeah, in this game it feels pretty good. And, you know, I think during the stream I was talking about how I would have liked

a mount or something to get around faster. And, you know, you brought up the point of like, they're trying to make you use the tools, but I think there's a balance. there that they can hit even better where it is maybe either teaching the tools a little bit better or making the world feel a bit more supportive of hey

like you this is the perfect place for a zipline wink like you want to put up a zip line over here and then over here and make you feel badass in terms of really making the world your own to explore yeah there are some areas where it's like I'd love to just be able to zip line to that middle of the map but there's a big ass mountain kind of structure in the way and I just wish it was a bit friendlier for these options

because once you kind of get used to it and find the right spots to start using either zip lines or there are like these big ass kind of propellers you can put on the ground that like launch you up and get you up really, really high, there's a lot of like different methods of kind of getting around the world. And when you find these new spots and you can put down campsites. So now in each world I have like around four campsites that I can fast travel to or just have a really close spot to in case I die. I can just spawn from this place and I'm right there back into the battle.

But yeah, so far there are a couple of places that's like, oh man, I wish I could just set up three ziplines in this perfect way. But this fucking big ass mountains just in the way or this like tree just sometimes you shoot the zipline out and it gets caught on like polygons that aren't really there

but the collision is there. So that kind of can be a little pain in the ass sometimes. But it does make the world I think a lot more interesting where you are creating your own fast travel. You are getting around this world on your own accord. I think that's pretty cool. Yeah. Another thing that I think is cool is the devs kind of

embargo structure for this game is something that I've never seen before where they actually let us stream the game before the review embargo. Like we're doing a review now. It's going to hit the embargo for this game. But they let us actually stream the days leading into it for our review coverage, which I think is such a cool thing that I wish other devs would do. I know not everyone can or wants to or that wouldn't necessarily

make sense, but I do think that it shows confidence in them, but also a hey, let's just, it is what it is. This is a multiplayer focused game. Let's put it out there and actually see people in action doing it and letting the audience to see that. I think is a really, really cool thing, right? And it works

smooth as hell too. I'll say that. Like, I haven't, I'm so used to brand new games coming out and trying to hop in somebody's world and just having the worst time with either connecting or frame rate or big internet drops and stuff like that. There was a little bit of that. Like, not dropping.

I think we were having issues like getting into a party. I think that may be like Nat type stuff where like I could join Joey's party. Blessing couldn't join us. But then when it was me and Blessing, Joey couldn't join us. Like stuff like that that isn't necessarily the game. That's just Nat type stuff that, when are we going to figure out Nat type stuff? Come on. For the future, can we focus on two things?

things, male pattern baldness and nap type. That's it. Like, can we figure out? You know what I'm saying? Let's figure these things out, everybody. So there were some of those issues where we weren't always seeing each other available, and I feel like that happens, like, in a lot of games. So it's a three-player game, right?

And it's crossplay? Yes. And is it on Xbox and PlayStation? Yeah, and PC? Yeah. Cool. Okay. So then you're saying that, like, you got a little couple issues, but that it seems

simple enough and it works to be able to do the cross-play, join us. join up as a team and play. Yeah, 100%. There's also a really neat kind of feature that happens where you, when you're at your kind of home base, your hub world, and I shouldn't say hubborn, because it's not like you're watching a bunch of other players running around. It's not that type of thing.

But every once in a while, there'll be an NPC on top of, like, one of these structures that you just walk around when you go talk to NPCs to go buy stuff from the shop. And there might be an NPC there that is another player's character. Similar to like a Drive-Atar, is what I would compare it to in Forza, where it's like,

oh, that's blessing in this race, but it's not blessing actually playing. That's just like representative of him. And there'll be another player where it's like, here's fucking Lord Googly-Eye and here's his EA name and his PSN name. And it's like,

this person needs help with a hunt. And I'm not sure what the actual mechanic is there. I do know that it's an easy way to just go fight an animal and take it down and get good XP for it. Maybe that's the use case. I mean, my assumption was that is like, I don't know if it helps that person. I don't know if they are requesting this. Or maybe it pops up when they fail a hunt or something like that.

I'm not quite sure exactly how it works, but it was cool to just kind of see a random player. And I've seen like three of them so far where you just walk up and they're like, hey, I need help with this hunt. So you go to their world and then you go, you don't see them playing with you, but you go take down an animal and it like helps them out, I guess, in their game. Because when you get, because when you fight that animal and you go back to their world. it'll say, do you want to return to your own Minato? And Minato is like your main hump place, whatever the location is called. So I'm not sure exactly what that mechanic is doing, but I think it's pretty neat to be able to help somebody.

And if it helps them offline, that's pretty cool. I enjoy that aspect of it. One thing I like to are the cosmetics and the armors. As you get further in the game and as you fight more monsters, you unlock more armor sets. And they do have, I don't know if it's exactly transmog, but they have a system for you to where you can... What's happening here? You can wear an armor set.

I've got a little hat. Oh, it's a hat. You know, she was talking to like a head? I thought it was headless. I was like, what the hell's happening? Okay. Yeah. No, I'm stupid.

They have a system where you can put on a armor visually, but then have the qualities of other armor sets that you put on, which I always love because, you know, I love to be fashionable. I love to put on the, the armor that I want to wear, right? Well, also maintaining a lot of the qualities or properties that are in some of the more powerful armor that I, And that's going to be a question that a lot of people asked, I think, during our stream was, how is the armor system?

Is it similar to Monster Hunter? It is whenever you kill certain monsters, they will drop their, like, body part stuff that you will use to craft armor with. And they all have their own properties. So there's, like, a bird that has, has, like, poisonous sort of stuff that it, like, shoots out of you or whatever. And then if you then kill enough of them and get enough of those parts, you'll have a very, very good poison-resistant. suit or piece of armor. There's fire resistance. There's ice resistance. There's all that stuff that you just expect.

Character creator, fucking awesome. This is one of the best character creators, one of the most expansive characters I've ever seen. I'm talking a shitload of hairstyles. And in those shitload of hairstyles, you can extend the lengths on the hair. You can add, let's say, that dude's hairstyle that we saw a while ago

where it's like kind of a ponytail back, there might be a front piece of the hair that you can add where it's like, here's bangs or here's really, really long bangs or here's like spikes up in the front that you can add to an already existing one. And then with those hairstyles, you can add like a curl modifier

to where you can make the hair wavy at a certain point. Good shit. This is awesome. It is insanely cool. The amount of colors you can add on them where it's like adding a highlighted strip, make the roots darker, make the tips lighter, make the tips darker, whatever the hell you want, whatever colors you want.

It is so expansive. So, like, what we're seeing on screen right now, the character art phenomenal. Like, whenever you get into a cutscene and you're looking at a 3D character talking to you, the art is really, really damn good. Great eye rendering. It's a great visual. It's just kind of when you're in the gameplay where the game can look kind of duky. One thing I'll throw out there, too, is I think it might be a Koe Techmo thing in terms of the character

creator thing because I noticed, really? I noticed a similar level quality in Neo2 when I put it up in Neo2 late last year. I was like, what the fuck is going on here? Why is this character creator so good? Even talking about the hair options, like black hair options is the thing I harp on a lot,

especially when it comes to like from software games and stuff, right? And like a big excuse that gets thrown around is like, oh man, it's like it's Japanese game development. They don't have the same level of diversity and availability of black people on the art team, like all that stuff. And between this and Neo2, I'm like, yo, somebody's figuring it out. Because Neal 2 has a similar pretty quality selection of purely hair. Yeah.

And so yeah, kudos to that. And one thing I want to bring up in terms of is a smaller nitpick because I know story and narrative is not really a bigger part of these games. I think most people are here mainly for the gameplay. But the story is one thing that I'll say. I think the premise is interesting because it is the monsters or the kimono that you're hunting are essentially ruining the land. Like the more you hunt these things, the more you're kind of like, you know, you're helping the, you're, saving the land from devastation. But the English voice acting is not good.

I don't know if you've listened to the English. I switch over to the Japanese voice acting, yeah. Yeah. And like, I know usually people expect the VO, the English Vio, at least not be that great in these kind of games. But I feel like this time around, it's like noticeably, maybe you should have skipped this one if this is what you're bringing to it. I think maybe part of it is, uh, it does sound like Japanese voice actors speaking English and trying to,

it kind of, it's like the old. David Cage kind of thing happening where you had a bunch of Swedish people trying to sound American. Yeah. And they'd be like what are we going to do over here? You know? Like, and you can tell, like, just speak with an accent. It's okay. You don't have to like try

to sound like you're fucking Jonathan from New York. You know what I mean? Like, it's all right. But I did switch to the Japanese voice acting because this is kind of based on feudal Japan. All true stories. All these monsters are real. No, it's like meant to be in feudal Japan. It's very much that vibe. So I

switch over to the Japanese voice acting, much like I did when I played Sekido, and it fits great, and it works, and it's awesome. So I would recommend doing that if you're, if you're like, oh, this voice acting isn't too awesome. Just switch to the Japanese. It sounds way cooler. Any closing words on Wild Hearts? I plan to play more. Yeah. This is, I really, I really want to put in way more time into this game because I'm very surprised by how good of a time I'm having. And I'm hoping that, like, I'm hoping more people jump into it so that we have more people to play with, right? Like, I think that's my main thing is this seems like a perfect game to spend time with people

and the way that I look at Fortnite is one of those games of hey this is a way to hang out of my friends this seems like a perfect one of those but then also it seems like a perfect grind game if you want to put on a podcast or put on an album and really just like lose yourself to the game I think it's a really good one of those

yeah that perfect grind game of I just need one more of this monster's fucking finger toe yeah I need that I need that nail piece or that back piece or whatever the hell to then upgrade this weapon even further and you can upgrade your weapons to like be a fire version of it or the ice

version so all that stuff is just it's just got a great loop i i cannot recommend it anymore i think it's like a definite must play if you're into action RPGs you can play it by yourself and still have a great time that's how i played like 90% of it and i'm i'm having a blast hell yeah that's super awesome man go check it out yeah good win i'm like happy that it's like a game game. It was like it was a little lique. You're like, could maybe, maybe not.

Another one I want to say is like a good win for EA originals as well. Like, holy cow, they've had such a streak between you talk about it. We keep saying it. It takes to this.

Yeah, like I think they're choosing really good projects to Greenlight. And I think putting out a monster hunter competitor is something we've seen a lot

and something that I feel like never sticks. You know, I've seen Dantless come and go. I've seen other monster hunter style games come and go. This seems like one

that might stick. And at the very release it seems like one that is very quality. And so, yeah, good for them for finding a vision. And also, yeah, E-originals for having this game be a part of it. Because also for like an action RPG from Kaua Tecmo from Japan, that is especially something you don't see out of EA originals. Usually you see like, yeah, it takes two or the smaller Western games.

So good on them for diversifying and good on them for finding the right team to do this. Yeah, absolutely. I haven't been playing that, but I have been playing a game called Blanc that I want to review for you guys right now. Exactly. Benoit Blanc, baby. I talked a little bit about this on Kind of Funny Games Daily. If I were to give it a review on the kind of funny scale, I'd give it a three out of five, which is our okay.

But I don't think that that is a great representation of what makes this game actually good. And in some ways, amazing. I think the experience of this game is very special. And I think it's very personal to me because this is the first game that Gia has ever beaten. We did it together. played co-op through the entire thing. And that was such a special experience.

And I really want to credit the game for being the perfect five out of five type game for that experience. So somebody that is not a gamer at all that someone like me, a gamer, wants to introduce to the idea of games and could this be something that you enjoy? And she has been dabbling here and there on some stuff. She's been playing Marvel Snap a lot like I've talked about. She's been playing through Pokemon Fire Red, which is all. awesome. But this is different, right?

This is a bit more of like a 3D walking around. There's puzzles to figure out. I'd say it's a bit more of like, it's a video game ass video game from just like a gameplay perspective. Is it like in the journey sort of area? It is. I'd say a little bit more puzzle based. Like it's a little bit more like screen to screen.

Every screen has a puzzle or some of the screens are more like momentum traversal base for fun. But the pitch of Blanc is it's a very, very, very small game made by a very, very small team. It's there, the first game that they ever put out. Published by Gearbox, but this is the first time, which is, again, interesting with the EA type conversation we just had, but it is a co-op game where you play as a little wolf cub and a baby deer, a fawn. A fawn.

And the fawn is white with black eyes and the little wolf cub is black with white eyes. And everything else in the world is this snow cover. landscape and it's all white and black and it is beautiful. Like it is such an amazing art piece and it's so well designed visually that like every, it's one of those every frame of painting type situations where

the entire game could be a wallpaper. Like it just looks so damn good. But that should in night mode though. It's too much. It's very bright. It is it's very bright. But it does not out say it's welcome. I think that is something that is a real good plus for me for this. This whole game less than three hours

and that is playing with somebody that doesn't know how to play games. So I do think that it could be even shorter for others. And you can even play by yourself where half the controller controls one of them and half controls the other using the two sticks and basic buttons where one of them is essentially interact

and another one is run. And it's this cute little game. Perry? What about Perry? There's no Perry. I'm waiting for it to come. But it's this cute little game that is so wholesome. Like I've never played a game this wholesome where like it's not about

like the darkness and sadness of humanity. It's like legitimately just two homies hanging out and like working together and the whole pitch of it like the point of the game the devs were saying is empathy and really working with what you have to help others and realizing what others have that you don't that can help you and going through. And it starts with just the two of them. But as you go through, you meet a lot of other little woodland creatures that kind of need help and like you help them out.

And it's great because there's no dialogue. There's no text. they just throw you in and it is the closest I've ever felt to playing a Pixar short, which is so cool, you know, and it really has those like emotional moments where I felt emotionally affected by this game less from the moments happening on screen and more from like what it was creating with me and G playing, which is very special and cool. And like, I think it's well designed for that reason where it's a very approachable game

for new gamers. It allowed me to in the beginning kind of give her the, initial this is how this works interact means this run with this like hold this down to whatever the basics and then pretty quickly she was the one giving me instructions she was the one like oh i think it's over here and like she solved a couple of the puzzles before i did um which i thought was like really cool and that's to the game's credit like it's designed in a way that anybody that's paying attention to it can kind of grasp what's going on and and have a lot of fun with it on a gameplay side it's pretty damn simple um it can be frustrating in some moments where

I'm like, I know exactly what I need to do here, but it's kind of the physics base. It fights against you a little bit. It fights against you, some of the controls, because it's so beautiful, and it's so well animated, the animations aren't as in line

with you moving the way you want to move. Us gamers, perfect example I can give. We've all played, Ocarina of Time. How do you get around an Ocarina of Time? You're just fucking rolling over and over and over, and you look like jackass. You know what I mean?

And it's like so annoying to watch or listen to, but it's like, we're trying to get somewhere fast. We know the mechanics of it. This game doesn't allow that. This game is very much like, no, it's beautiful and you're going to see it all. So it can get kind of frustrating in that way. Technically, there's a couple, there's a lot of like shuddery motions and like some weird pop-ins.

You can't control the camera at all. And that can get a little frustrating when one of you goes a little too far from the other and it just kind of like pulls in a weird way. Really quick in context. What platform are you two play on? I played on Switch. It's also available on PC. It's $15, small, small title as well.

I can't imagine it running much better anywhere. Like it just kind of, I don't think it's like the tech isn't there. I think it's just kind of like, because of how it's animated. It's kind of like gets in the way there. And some of the puzzles are physics based where there's like wind and like you're trying to help like little ducklings get across a bridge and you have to like block the wind. On the other side there's alligators in the water. I don't want you to that.

But it can get kind of hard where like you can, I see. see where the wind lines are going, but the hitbox is just a little off. So it can get kind of frustrating where it's like, I know exactly what I need to do, but it's not letting me do it. But honestly, those are the only criticisms I have. I think that it's a really cool experience that I would recommend to, you can look at this game and understand if it's worth your time or not. And I think that if you're like, oh, this looks kind of cool, you're going to think

it's really cool. And it's short enough that it's worth the time investment into it. I don't know if you're worth playing alone. I do think that this is a great, it's a great date game. came out on Valentine's Day and like that is freaking perfect but I could see me and G playing this next year you know maybe make it like a

Valentine's Day tradition or something but really cool little game shout to you guys for doing something cool and I can't wait to see what the what that team works on next. Two joycoms um or did you like we we both use pro controllers you know what I got them back paddles on my

my fancy 8 bit dough one uh yeah exactly um but yeah you know this has Ben kind of funny games guys. We're reviewing a ton of stuff. We're going to cut this one here because bless needs to go record. P.S. I love you. X OXO. XO. Which will be, can we say exactly what it is?

Yeah, we can. Okay, cool. It'll be the PSVR 2 review and the Horizon Call, the Mountain Review. Him, Janet and Paris, for that one. I think both the pieces of content, this that you're watching now, and that will be out within hours of each other. So just stay tuned again. Kind of funny popping off. By the time you listen to this, that is our. you up. Then boom. Good now. Right now. Cut this. Go there. Until next time. Love you all. Bye. All right, buddy.