So this game, I gather is made by some of the ex-Criterion dudes who made Burnout and Black partially as sort of a R&D/funding mechanism for their future racing game’s Crash Technology. It is Burnout 3’s Crash mode except you steer a little flaming golf ball around various environments to cause as much destruction as possible. Like if Red Faction Guerilla is a cake, this is just all icing. I literally have no idea how my tastes map to anyone else’s so I can’t really recommend video games but I do find this uniquely meditative.
So it’s is divided up into “world tours” of various destructible rooms. Tons of stuff in these rooms: microwaves, suits of armor, cakes, statues, toilets, paint, chandlers, neon signs etc. Very lovely looking shards and particles and explosions and liquids flying about. Their aim to have made the most state of the art version of this kind of simulation is a success as far as I can tell.
There are various game changing elements such as
A laser sight which lets you precision aim your shots
Bucket and Trolleys which you can ride and knock over bigger things
Glue to stick to walls
Smart bombs which you stick to the wall. After the level is done they all blow up one by one in a really fantastic Michael Bay style montage scene.
Hazard challenges which are either specific objects you can’t hit or “the floor is lava” kind of sections.
Other Things
Anyway the cycle of puzzling out the perfect shots to make high scores and do the most entertaining damage is very effective and addictive for me and this will definitely be some eight year olds favorite game of all time. I loved Burnout 3’s Crash Mode and the level of detail and agency you have compared to that is exponential. Each mission, you initially hit the ball and let it do it’s damage, and then you do a legally distinct Burnout 3 Crashbreaker called a Smashbreaker. And then you get to aim your ball with aftertouch while it’s on fire to do the most destruction possible. This is where a lot of the control nuance goes in. The ball does not just let you move it directly. You face the camera in the direction you want it to go and you have to use the triggers to feather the momentum or bounce of the ball to make it go slower or faster. This can be challenging and I still haven’t really mastered exact landings in water buckets and things like that, but it does feel deliberate and learnable and extremely satisfying to me…that is as long as it’s in slow motion. You have infinite bullet time but I really wish it had just been a toggle to always be on instead of it’s awkward controller placement. HOWEVER there are also timed missions which don’t slow the countdown even when you use bullet time so sometimes you have to play the proper way which is kind of a shame.
There is one level that is just a little storeroom/freezer in the back of a restaurant and it’s filled with cans and cartons and fruit and all kinds of food and it’s just a tiny square room and whenever I get a mission there I just go into Danger Time and slow it down and go hogwild slowly destroying things while watching everything slowly and deliberately fall through the air like a commercial from hell and liquids splattering and mixing and combining and milk cartons busting open and there the same kind of beautiful ethereal audio soundscape from Burnout 3 aftertouch and it’s just extraordinarily therapeutic for me i tell you what
After you run out of explosion “juice” you want to make sure you’re in a place to be able to putt for the hole. Putting is weird and a puzzle in and of itself. So if you are close enough to the hole and vaguely in it’s direction it will almost always go in. You can aim at the wall or the camera itself at it will do pool style trick shots which might give you extra points. A sometimes difficult thing to judge can be exactly if your ball will be close enough to “the zone” to just go in automatically or if you will physics slightly too hard or what. It’s mostly okay, but can be a pain in the ass sometimes. There are also “money flags” which are additional holes which add your score. In an ideal run, you want to do as much damage as possible, then land yourself in a perfect position to hit the bronze, silver, gold, platinum money holes followed by the final hole. I have never done this shit, but I am close?
So this game is missing two major things and so it’s completely worthless
I guess because of the high level of simulation maybe but you cannot replay your level at all. There is nothing I want to do more after beating a stage, than to see my destruction again from a more cinematic angle. What a waste! You get a nice flyby of your aftermath but that’s it.
But the thing that really kills it, unless I just haven’t unlocked it yet, is it doesn’t have an incredible machine style mode where I can create a level. There is a lot of variety in level setups (not so much in levels themselves but eh) but nothing would be more satisfying than letting me set up my own elaborate dominoes in a Rube Goldberg nightmare. I mean ideally it would just be like Mario Maker but I’d be satisfied with Tony Hawk. This game is BEGGING FOR THIS FEATURE. It needs it more than anything and the fact that I can’t do this means that it will always feel like an itch i can’t scratch
The style of the menus and various in game ephemera is corny british dad core but not like at the level of Rare or something so you can ignore all that if it bothers you. You can only play with an xbox controller right now (they are patching in mouse/keyboard). There is like an in game how-to-play which U NEED TO READ CUZ IT WILL NOT TUTORIAL YOU PROPERLY
The specs are pretty high but the engine seems pretty scaleable since it runs okay on my four year old midrange gaming laptop?
Anyway to sum up this the perfect replacement for Peggle as Something To Listen To Podcasts To
