![]() ![]() And it doesn’t help that the environmental lighting’s so spotty and we’re doing the Ori and the Blind Forest thing where all the pickups, projectiles and half the random meaningless background details all speak the universal language of nondescript glowing blob. Your character’s so tiny-winy on screen she could be swinging around a pair of hairy goat testicles on the end of a serving spoon for all I know. Well, the game says that’s what they are. It’s got more weapons than a Palestinian car boot sale – sword, knife, hammer, pool cues, boxing gloves. Our second Roguelike is Dreamscaper, and this one does remember to have variety in its primary loop. Jupiter Hell just isn’t that engaging and the turn-based physics weirds me out every time an enemy mysteriously dies a moment before my rocket hits him, possibly because of vitamin deficiency. Maybe the first run spawns me a 9mm pistol and a shotgun but then in the second maybe I have to get by with a hedge trimmer and a pair of magic shoes that spawns really interesting magazines everywhere I go and it’s a completely fresh experience. ![]() Who fucking cares if your levels are randomly laid out if the primary gameplay loop is always the same? That’s where the fun lies in procedural design. This is the mistake roguelites always make. What normally happens in a Jupiter Hell run is that I’ll get enough levels deep for the enemy to finally graduate beyond fun-sized health bars, eventually get overwhelmed by one ambush too many, die, and then feel terribly discouraged because now I have to trudge through all the boring easy early levels again and randomly rearranging the specific layout of samey corridors doesn’t add enough variety to be more worth my time than quitting the game and rearranging my desktop icons. What does Doom have left without the violent in-your-face ballsack distressing catharsis? It’s not exactly survival focussed because I leave most levels fucking ankle deep in the ammo and guns all the enemies dropped that I couldn’t squeeze into the child sized fanny pack my dude brought along. So translating Doom to top down grid based action certainly loses in exciting violent spectacle what it gains in – what the fuck does it gain, actually. It also can’t be controlled with anything but keyboard, but for me that’s the point where “deliberate retro homage” crosses the line into “just couldn’t be arsed to add controller support.” The experience of Jupiter Hell is creeping your way through dingy hallways until an enemy shows up, then you endeavour to inch your way into cover before they can eat your health away, then you sit there pressing the fire key until they and the nineteen friends they have arranged behind them in single file are all dead. Jupiter Hell is, in brief, a love letter to retro PC gaming of that era, which should be obvious from the way it does its entire GUI ASCII-style with a big chunky font that looks like it’s trying to beat my eyeballs to death with pixels. But it’s played in a top down grid-based format that it refers to as turn-based but in the sense of those old Ultima games where the monsters were properly raised good little boys who politely waited for you to do something before they all simultaneously did their next thing. See, you play as a burly space marine who comes to a tech base deep in the Solar system’s flyover country to find it taken over by demons and zombies and must battle their way through the depths of Hell one fricasseed demonic ballsack at a time. Stop tiktokking your amazed reaction and I will explain how. Now, as I’m sure I’ve said before, I’m tragically decrepit enough to remember that period in the 90s when we called every first person shooter a “Doom clone.” And Jupiter Hell made me very nostalgic because it’s a Doom clone, but here’s the twist, you procrastinating twat: it’s not a first person shooter. But let’s see out another droughty summer with one last indie double bill, focusing on that one special genre that is to indie games what intestinal parasites are to inexpensive Mexican food. Hooray! Drought season’s almost over! Woo! We got through another one without self-harming or playing too much weeb shit, but I repeat myself – yay! Now there’s only disease, poverty, climate disaster and political disenfranchisement to sort out and we can start focussing on the real issues, like developing a controller for a Nintendo console that doesn’t give me old man wrist. ![]() We have a merch store as well! Visit the store for brand new ZP merch. Want to watch Zero Punctuation ad-free? Sign-up for The Escapist + today and support your favorite content creators! This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Dreamscaper and Jupiter Hell.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |