Here's another quicky-review, this time about the new Penny Arcade RPG
Supershort Take-
How much do you like Penny Arcade? How much do you like Turn-Based Retro-style RPGs? If the answer to both questions is "I bark like a trained seal every time anything even resembling X is mentioned," congratulations- you should buy Penny Arcade 3: Electric Boogaloo. Otherwise, it's a "comedy" game with very limited humor potential, a million annoying little features (or missing features, to be precise) , and music that I'm sure was developed to torture detainees at Gitmo (BAM, political commentary). It is almost saved by a pretty neat combat system, but it pulls shitty from the jaws of "ok for ten bucks" by having too many same-y fights which you can (and should) play through on autopilot.
Slightly Longer Take-
Penny Arcade 3: The Secret of Curly's Gold is the third in a series of games that attempt to leverage the PA fanbase to make a buck. The first two were done with Tell-Tale (the guys who did the Sam and Max reboot), and weren't terrible. They were action-y rpgs, in that they had standard turn-based combat but you had to play a little mini-game to activate some special moves. The second one didn't do so well (I assume), and/as the 3rd game was scrapped.
Then some bright spark got an idea- we can make the 3rd game as some sort of 16-bit-esque homage, and simultaneously save on dev costs while tapping into the rich vein of nerd nostalgia. The problem is, while the game attempts to parody a lot of the conventions of those old NES/SNES games while at the same time referencing anything (and everything) that was an any time mentioned in a PA comic, it really is just another sub-par NES/SNES rpg, without the saving grace of any sort of originality.
The story is incredibly linear, with the only side-questy-thing being fights at a Colosseum. Every dungeon consists of two screens of twisting passageways which have side-rooms leading to treasure. Also, while there are no random encounters, the number of placed battles is sufficiently large to make dungeons feel like a slog, though fighting is a relief from the characters talking. The dialogue alternates between long-winded plot dumps and the laziest banter that you and your high school buddies would have come up with if you were trying to write "fun" exchanges. All the enemies are "fun" references from PA as well. Did you want to fight a Deep Crow? How about a Broodox? At first, it was mildly amusing, but after the 20th time fighting some monster, whatever amusement was present in the name is gone. It just seems completely lazy and unoriginal to have every dungeon populated by 4-5 enemy types when you're going to be fighting about 10-15 packs of them.
In fact, quite a lot of this game screams laziness (or, at the very least, a "Fuck it, it'll do" approach). To take a specific example, consider the music. It's very chip-tuney, with lots of appropriate bleeps and bloops. The only problem is that the track isn't very long, while the combats can last quite a while so, combat after combat, you hear the same goddamn bleeps and bloops. Over and over again.
The combat itself is pretty fun, with turn-based battles livened up by an active time track that characters move along at a speed related to their "speed" statistic. Moreover, there's a gap between when you enter a command and when it's executed, giving you some tense moments as you wonder if you'll get a heal off in time. There are a lot of abilities which "interrupt", knocking a person back along the track. These abilities are more effective the farther the opponent is along the track, so hitting someone with one just before their action executes requires a good sense of timing.
Enemies increase in power every turn they take, meaning that wars of attrition are vary rare, as your healing won't be able to outpace damage for long, though I found the scaling to be very rapid, meaning that the best strategy by miles was to kill as rapidly as possible, rather than trying to buff up before attacking. The way that magic points work is quite interesting, with characters starting at zero MP, and gaining one per turn they take. This gives an interesting trade-off between using your best abilities and your ordinary ones.
The classes your characters can use are generally flavorful, but vary enormously in utility, with many being complete wastes of time, mostly due to the aforementioned damage scaling and due to the fact that stacking a single attribute is usually worlds better than trying to balance things out. Another small problem with the class system is the rate at which abilities are gained- there are a lot of periods when I hadn't gotten any class-based stat-boosts or powers in several levels, making the enemies much harder, while at other times, I was inundated with new abilities.
Speaking of being inundated with abilities, one of the main features of this game that killed it for me is the number of obnoxious little missing features or other annoyances. For example, let's say you want to look at a new ability you unlocked for a class. Well, the class needs to be equipped to a character to view its abilities. Do you remember which class got the ability? If you don't, too bad, there's no way to see a class' abilities on the equip screen (incredibly annoying if you don't remember which classes give which stat boosts- was the cordwinder + speed AND + magic, or was that the gentleman? Does the Masochist class give a bonus to HP, or was that the dinosorcerer? etc.). Then you need to go back to the view screen, look at the character's abilities for the class that you just equiped.
Ok, let's say that you went through all of that, the ability says it says it does a medium attack. What ability is that attack based on? Strength, probably? What about a Medium Fire attack - got to be Magic! How about healing abilities, what stat do they come from? What about a weak physical fire attack.... lolwut? Moreover, is physical fire a different "type" than regular fire? I've had some encounters where enemies that resisted physical and fire were vulnerable to a physical fire attack. Some things show buff/debuff icons when they're applied- like defense down. Some things don't. Do things that don't have an icon stack? Can I sit there and bootstrap until I have like a million speed and kill everything before it can act? Did I bootstrap already in this fight?
In the end, these minor annoyances were the final blow to my enjoyment of the game. I was willing to put up with shitty plot-stuff to get to the meat of the game (and it's fairly juicy meat, if you're in to turn-based RPG combat), but not when the meat is hidden inside the packaging to the point where getting the goddamn thing out is a struggle. It's possible to build a game with a lot of flaws and UI issues which somehow manages to hold together, as is the case with Dominions 3 (which I totally need to do a post about), but this is not that game.
Supershort Take-
How much do you like Penny Arcade? How much do you like Turn-Based Retro-style RPGs? If the answer to both questions is "I bark like a trained seal every time anything even resembling X is mentioned," congratulations- you should buy Penny Arcade 3: Electric Boogaloo. Otherwise, it's a "comedy" game with very limited humor potential, a million annoying little features (or missing features, to be precise) , and music that I'm sure was developed to torture detainees at Gitmo (BAM, political commentary). It is almost saved by a pretty neat combat system, but it pulls shitty from the jaws of "ok for ten bucks" by having too many same-y fights which you can (and should) play through on autopilot.
Slightly Longer Take-
Penny Arcade 3: The Secret of Curly's Gold is the third in a series of games that attempt to leverage the PA fanbase to make a buck. The first two were done with Tell-Tale (the guys who did the Sam and Max reboot), and weren't terrible. They were action-y rpgs, in that they had standard turn-based combat but you had to play a little mini-game to activate some special moves. The second one didn't do so well (I assume), and/as the 3rd game was scrapped.
Then some bright spark got an idea- we can make the 3rd game as some sort of 16-bit-esque homage, and simultaneously save on dev costs while tapping into the rich vein of nerd nostalgia. The problem is, while the game attempts to parody a lot of the conventions of those old NES/SNES games while at the same time referencing anything (and everything) that was an any time mentioned in a PA comic, it really is just another sub-par NES/SNES rpg, without the saving grace of any sort of originality.
The story is incredibly linear, with the only side-questy-thing being fights at a Colosseum. Every dungeon consists of two screens of twisting passageways which have side-rooms leading to treasure. Also, while there are no random encounters, the number of placed battles is sufficiently large to make dungeons feel like a slog, though fighting is a relief from the characters talking. The dialogue alternates between long-winded plot dumps and the laziest banter that you and your high school buddies would have come up with if you were trying to write "fun" exchanges. All the enemies are "fun" references from PA as well. Did you want to fight a Deep Crow? How about a Broodox? At first, it was mildly amusing, but after the 20th time fighting some monster, whatever amusement was present in the name is gone. It just seems completely lazy and unoriginal to have every dungeon populated by 4-5 enemy types when you're going to be fighting about 10-15 packs of them.
In fact, quite a lot of this game screams laziness (or, at the very least, a "Fuck it, it'll do" approach). To take a specific example, consider the music. It's very chip-tuney, with lots of appropriate bleeps and bloops. The only problem is that the track isn't very long, while the combats can last quite a while so, combat after combat, you hear the same goddamn bleeps and bloops. Over and over again.
The combat itself is pretty fun, with turn-based battles livened up by an active time track that characters move along at a speed related to their "speed" statistic. Moreover, there's a gap between when you enter a command and when it's executed, giving you some tense moments as you wonder if you'll get a heal off in time. There are a lot of abilities which "interrupt", knocking a person back along the track. These abilities are more effective the farther the opponent is along the track, so hitting someone with one just before their action executes requires a good sense of timing.
Enemies increase in power every turn they take, meaning that wars of attrition are vary rare, as your healing won't be able to outpace damage for long, though I found the scaling to be very rapid, meaning that the best strategy by miles was to kill as rapidly as possible, rather than trying to buff up before attacking. The way that magic points work is quite interesting, with characters starting at zero MP, and gaining one per turn they take. This gives an interesting trade-off between using your best abilities and your ordinary ones.
The classes your characters can use are generally flavorful, but vary enormously in utility, with many being complete wastes of time, mostly due to the aforementioned damage scaling and due to the fact that stacking a single attribute is usually worlds better than trying to balance things out. Another small problem with the class system is the rate at which abilities are gained- there are a lot of periods when I hadn't gotten any class-based stat-boosts or powers in several levels, making the enemies much harder, while at other times, I was inundated with new abilities.
Speaking of being inundated with abilities, one of the main features of this game that killed it for me is the number of obnoxious little missing features or other annoyances. For example, let's say you want to look at a new ability you unlocked for a class. Well, the class needs to be equipped to a character to view its abilities. Do you remember which class got the ability? If you don't, too bad, there's no way to see a class' abilities on the equip screen (incredibly annoying if you don't remember which classes give which stat boosts- was the cordwinder + speed AND + magic, or was that the gentleman? Does the Masochist class give a bonus to HP, or was that the dinosorcerer? etc.). Then you need to go back to the view screen, look at the character's abilities for the class that you just equiped.
Ok, let's say that you went through all of that, the ability says it says it does a medium attack. What ability is that attack based on? Strength, probably? What about a Medium Fire attack - got to be Magic! How about healing abilities, what stat do they come from? What about a weak physical fire attack.... lolwut? Moreover, is physical fire a different "type" than regular fire? I've had some encounters where enemies that resisted physical and fire were vulnerable to a physical fire attack. Some things show buff/debuff icons when they're applied- like defense down. Some things don't. Do things that don't have an icon stack? Can I sit there and bootstrap until I have like a million speed and kill everything before it can act? Did I bootstrap already in this fight?
In the end, these minor annoyances were the final blow to my enjoyment of the game. I was willing to put up with shitty plot-stuff to get to the meat of the game (and it's fairly juicy meat, if you're in to turn-based RPG combat), but not when the meat is hidden inside the packaging to the point where getting the goddamn thing out is a struggle. It's possible to build a game with a lot of flaws and UI issues which somehow manages to hold together, as is the case with Dominions 3 (which I totally need to do a post about), but this is not that game.
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