The AA Report: May 5th, 2020
It’s been a busy couple of weeks over here at the church of skinnedteen – I participated in a livestream with the developers of Sea of Thieves last week, a couple of weeks ago I backed my friend LulaBoo in a cooking competition on Foodbeast, and I’ve been diligently working, both on keeping up the house (indoors and out) as well as reviews and video edits for the YouTube channel. All worth it, but all consuming just the same.
This set of reviews is coming about a week late, and about 10 minutes before I start up another Try it Tuesday stream on my Twitch channel – these, however, are the games that I played last week: Lonely Mountains: Downhill, Dunrog, and Kill It With Fire. Enjoy!
Lonely Mountains: Downhill
Lonely Mountains: Downhill is a gorgeously presented minimalistic journey through a series of bike paths that go downhill, as the name suggests, and your entire motive is to beat challenges on each track. Sort of like the Trials series, but quite a bit more chill. Right off the bat, things in Lonely Mountains: Downhill just felt right – the peaceful sound of waterfalls and birds chirping, the audible satisfaction of tires meeting dirt paths, and of course, the crunch of your body as it plumetted into a rock face you miscalculated entirely. Yes, I definitely meant it when I suggested this was like the Trials series, and even when you were suffering brutal defeat, and I do mean brutal, it was still a satisfying and relaxing journey to undertake. This game even managed to utilize motion blur correctly, which often nauseates the viewers in my Twitch channel to the point at which I turn it off before I start any game – not this one though, we all agreed the subtlety of it worked perfectly for the subject matter. Each mountain requires players to at least play it once on a relaxed mode before then again taking it on in a challenge unlock session before moving on to the next course, and there seemed to be quite a few different courses, and mountains, to take on. Were I to complain about anything with Lonely Mountains: Downhill, it would be that at times the perspective camera controls became a bit of a challenge to navigate, but I think that was the entire point, so I simply cannot complain about a challenging game presenting… well, challenge. No, I simply have nothing but good things to say of Lonely Mountains: Downhill – if you’re into games with challenges and rewards for completing those challenges, as well as minimalist experiences in games with art and sound design, then I must simply recommend you pick up Lonely Mountains: Downhill today. Lonely Mountains: Downhill is available on PC, PS4, Xbox, and Switch.
Buy Lonely Mountains: Downhill today on Steam
Dunrog
I will always have a place in my heart for Minecraft, as I will always have a place in my heart for mods of Minecraft like Hexit, which added RPG elements to the classic sandbox game of our time. A lot of games have tried to duplicate the style of Minecraft, with blocky minimalism, while adding objective-based game mechanics to try and, not duplicate the model of Minecraft, but expand upon it with their own take on a video game. One of my favorite games to have done this is Delver, which is a roguelike dungeon crawler with blocky graphics that challenges players to continue to dive deeper into an underground chasm in search of… well, you know what? That isn’t entirely important. What I felt Delver did well was change the gameplay up enough to separate itself from merely being touted as “the Minecraft roguelike”, and though it’s hard to escape the shadow of something as monolithic as Minecraft‘s legacy, that’s impressive. Enter Dunrog, another block-style dungeon crawler with RNG, roguelike qualities, and a complex netting of D&D rules that govern your methods of attack. What I enjoyed about this game was its efforts to mix up combat, and how weapons would affect certain enemies more than others – trying to take out a skeleton with a bleed weapon? Maybe don’t do that. Going toe to toe with a fast wolf? Again, maybe don’t do that – try a ranged weapon instead. I also enjoyed the idea of progression hinging on your ability to kill enemies to gain souls, and souls were the currency that opened the gateways to the next level of the dungeon. These were good qualities. I felt the game didn’t stick out well enough graphically to keep me wanting to play longer, and I felt that the combat grew stale after a short time with it to add to those feelings. Furthermore, starting out in a dungeon, while I understand the need for it to be difficult, almost felt impossible at times, almost always starting out with no weapon, and having to comically run my way around in circles until I either threw enough barrels at an enemy to down it, or got lucky enough to find a weapon in a cupboard to defend myself with. Touting endless loot, procedural generation, and dynamics in fighting, I think the potential Dunrog has is definitely present. I appreciated the effort put into Dunrog, but I hope in some ways the rough edges that it presents can be smoothed out over time.
Kill It With Fire
Kill It With Fire is exactly the kind of game it needs to be – silly fun, with a simple premise. You’re a licensed exterminator working for the Kill It With Fire company, and your mission is simple: hunt down spiders, and eradicate them by any means necessary. Your arsenal seems endless: a clipboard, a bag of cheesy puffs, a can of hairspray and a lighter, a revolver, several packs of C4 – reasonable stuff, right? In Kill It With Fire, you are beset with challenges in each level beyond just the spiders: ones that usually include creative tasks like killing multiple spiders at one time, or killing a spider while taking out the television set at the same time. Perhaps you don’t care about books, and you should throw all of them at any spider you see – the possibilities are seemingly endless, especially if you hate spiders. For me, this game would be on point if the enemies were cockroaches, and perhaps they’ll expand this release to include those disgusting things – for the purposes of review, I played a demo version of this that is available for free on Steam called Kill It With Fire: Ignition. The demo includes two levels and a bevy of challenges to complete, and it was enough of a taste to know that this silly game is a meme-worthy title worth enough laughs and entertainment to justify the price, as well as a wishlist click from yours truly. The full release of the game is set for Summer of 2020, but currently you can play Kill It With Fire: Ignition on Steam for free today.