Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (PS5) Extended Gameplay Demo

Ratchet & Clank, as it stands, is my favorite PlayStation franchise around, so you can bet I was excited to see even more gameplay footage of the latest installment, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, showcased during today's Gamescom Opening Night Live presentation. Insomniac Games and the PlayStation brand shared a full extended demo of the game, revealing this latest adventure to look and run better than ever--and it already looked marvelous during its debut this past June at the PlayStation 5 showcase. No firm release date has been announced, but a time frame was: sometime within the PS5's launch period. Between Rift Apart and the new Miles Morales-led Spider-Man game, Insomniac Games is really going into overdrive at the forefront for the PS5 launch!

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (PS5, PS4, XBX, XB1, NSW) Gameplay Trailer

Experience the full Star Wars experience--all nine mainline films in interactive video game form--with LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. From The Phantom Menace all the way through The Rise of Skywalker, the entire saga will be yours (and mine) to play through. Check out this gameplay trailer for the latest in the LEGO video game series. Perhaps the only downside to these adventures from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away is that the game itself is a little "far, far away", delayed to Spring 2021. Fortunately, it seems like the wait for LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga will most certainly be worth it.

Golf Story (NSW) Review

Following the announcement last week of Sidebar Games' Sports Story and the following disappointment from fans from that announcement, I wanted to finally check out the developer's first game, Golf Story, and see just what all the aforementioned disappointment was about and what I've been missing all of this time. Now that I've played the game... darn it, now I'm disappointed about the delay of Sports Story, too! See why with my review of Golf Story for the Nintendo Switch. 

A solid time on the links

As a famous Rolling Stones song goes, "You can't always get what you want." And boy, do many Mario fans know that. Between the lack of traditional Mario RPGs nowadays and the lack of Mario sports RPGs in the vein of the Game Boy Mario Golf and Mario Tennis games, Nintendo has left a massive hole in many fans' hearts. Thankfully, Sidebar Games is more than happy to provide a solution to the latter with its own original take on Mario Golf-style sports-themed RPGs with Golf Story. I'm pleased to say that the developer mostly succeeds here, nailing its first shot off the tie with fantastic results.

Golf Story's... story sees you playing as a golfer who wishes to make it to the pros, but first he must find a coach to teach him the ropes and get his game in working order. From there, the golfing adventures takes players across a world map filled with unique courses, characters, and quests to take on and complete. In all, the campaign of Golf Story lasted me just over ten hours to complete, and most of it kept me entertained from beginning to end. The story itself is humorous more often than not, taking you through a colorful world of kooky characters where your golfer pretty much plays the straight man to the insanity of their world. That said, the game does have a nasty habit of being a bit verbose to the point of annoyance at times, occasionally trying a bit too hard to make the player laugh and becoming long in the tooth in the process.

The world map in Golf Story connects all of the game's courses together.

A major piece to Golf Story's Story Mode is exploring the many courses that open up one by one in your golfer's adventure. Along the way, you'll encounter numerous NPCs which task you with completing various quests that mostly have to deal with golf-related objectives that instill the fundamentals of the game to you. Whether it's learning how to hit fairways, make difficult chip shots, play out of bunkers, practice proficient putting, or a myriad other important concepts, you'll need to take on a heavy number of challenges if you want to make pro. Many of these occur on the links themselves, while others bring some more creativity into the mix, such as having you need to hit bait into specially marked areas of water for fish to consume, which helps teach you precision driving and chipping.

Use Precision Mode to more accurately aim your shots in this chipping-intensive quest.
Just mind the slope and the wind!

Then there are other types of golf like Disc Golf and Mini Golf introduced to keep the fun coming. Other quests remove golf entirely from the equation, having you take on fetch quests, engage in foot races, and even control certain machinery to complete the quest offered. The point here is that the variety is strong in Golf Story, giving players enough to keep the experience fresh enough to remain enjoyable. Additionally, the bonus of being able to tee off anywhere in a given area to complete certain challenges and further progress makes for a gameplay mechanic that is oftentimes cleverly used throughout the Story Mode.

Completing quests not only progresses the game, allowing you to compete in more significant challenges like Match Play events against characters and full-fledged nine-hole rounds on courses, but it also gives your golfer experience points as well. Like a traditional RPG, once you earn enough experience points, your golfer levels up, granting you points to use to increase various stats, such as power, accuracy, control, and spin. 

Words to live by for this old man perhaps, but not for THIS golfer!

When it concerns the actual golf in Golf Story, what you get is a simple yet engaging three-click system (or I guess in this case, a "three-press" system). Pressing the button once starts the gauge, a second press will set the power and distance of your shot, and the final press of the button will set the accuracy. It's nothing that players of modern arcade golf games like Mario Golf and Everybody's Golf won't feel accustomed to or familiar with right from the beginning. Making Golf Story's system an easier time is the ability to utilize Precision Mode, which grants you the ability to adjust the distance of your shot in order to visualize where it will land by manually sliding the distance marker of your shot. While this does help set up your shots more easily, it's definitely not an "instant win" feature, as you still need to factor in other variables such as wind velocity, hazards like trees, rocks and bunkers, and when it concerns the green, its slope direction and surface speed. 

Everything in Golf Story is done in this top-down perspective--putting, driving, chipping, etc.

The courses of Golf Story run the gamut of both locales and challenge. You have the starting Wellworn Greens, featuring wide open fairways, minimal hazards, and easy-to-reach greens; and then you have more fantastical courses such as the prehistoric Lurker Valley with tar pits to lose one's ball in, the high cliffs and steep chasms of Cheekybeak Peak (also featuring the titular birds which will scoop up your ball and transport it to a usually less than stellar lie if your ball stops near them), and the winter wonderland of Coldwind Wastes, complete with slippery ice and snow that will stop a ball dead in its tracks if it lands inside. 

Golf Story is a gorgeous game with splendidly done sprites and colorful environments. While the music didn't impress me at first, with its flatulating brass and uneventful tunes, as the game progressed, I became a fan as tunes became catchier and had better sounding instrumentation. The game's music simply didn't leave me with a good first impression, but by the end, I was in love. Another part of the presentation that I loved is something I don't go into much with regard to Nintendo Switch games, and that's the HD Rumble. If you can, play Golf Story with the Joy-Cons, and specifically with them detached. The way the rumble accents text bubbles, whether they're expanding or contracting based on the way a character speaks and the emotion they exude is impressive, but more so is how the controller vibrates with an ebb and flow as you sink a putt into the cup or make strong contact with the ball. It's amazing and one of the best uses of HD Rumble I've experienced with the Nintendo Switch--obviously so for me to mention it in one of my reviews.

Even without its Story Mode attached, I believe there would be enough here with Golf Story to make for a good game of top-down golf. Thankfully, however, there's no need to be concerned with that, as not only do you get a good game of golf with Golf Story, but you also get an overall well done Mario-style golf RPG as well (though not without its issues, of course)! With its strong mix of rewarding exploration, creative scenarios, and solid golf mechanics, Golf Story, for the most part, comes off of the golf course and into the clubhouse a champion.

[SPC Says: B+]

Shinsekai: Into the Depths (NSW) Review

SuperPhillip Central's next review for August arrives from deep beneath the ocean blue. It's a former Apple Arcade-exclusive game that recently arrived on the Nintendo Switch. It's Shinsekai: Into the Depths, and if you haven't yet tried this game out, "water" you waiting for?

Not unfathomably great, but still a game worthy to take the plunge on

Originally released as an Apple Arcade exclusive, Capcom's Shinsekai: Into the Depths puts players in the role of one of the last submariners in an iced-over world. As the ice has utterly decimated the world, humans retreated to the briny deep below, but even there, the ice has started to penetrate into the waters. This is where Shinsekai's story begins, with the submariner being forced out of their underwater safe house due to encroaching ice. Now, they must journey through the dangerous and mysterious waters of the world to find a new place to call home.

The story of Shinsekai: Into the Depths is an understated one, featuring a total lack of dialogue. Instead, the game prefers a show and not tell approach, offering myriad pictograms and slides to view, leaving it up to the player to decipher them and the story as a whole themselves. Still, even if you wish to shut off your brain completely when it regards to the game's tale, you'll still get an enjoyable underwater adventure. It's just that Shinsekai: Into the Depths' experience is heightened through better understanding the overall narrative... I imagine. I'm dumb as a box of rocks, so the hell if I know what was going on most of the time. That's okay, though, because I bet you, reading a review of mine, probably care more about the gameplay of Shinsekai: Into the Depths than my boasting about my eighth grade level of media literacy anyway.

Rather than eat this submariner whole, how about a spear to tide this overgrown creature over?

Regardless, moving around the underwater world of Shinsekai sees our intrepid submariner using the pack on their back to jettison through the water, and that involves having you, the player, keep an eye on their oxygen tanks. The more you propel the submariner through the water to gain height, the more oxygen is used. Hostile creatures and even things like falling from painful heights will damage your oxygen tanks, resulting in them becoming cracked and eventually unusable. Fortunately, there are extras aplenty throughout the game world to pick up, though you can only hold a small capacity of tanks at the start of the game. When all of the oxygen and air are used up, it's game over due to asphyxiation.

There is a plethora of spots to excavate minerals from,
so intrepid explorers will want to be on the lookout for them.

The major gameplay loop of Shinsekai has you slowly but surely being able to survive higher areas of pressure, aka reaching deeper and deeper levels of the mysterious ocean abyss. This is performed by acquiring the right amount of resources to build new suit upgrades on the fly, and that is done through finding materials in storage containers and mining points, both sprinkled throughout the game world. Smartly, while the resources required for you to level up your suit to reach deeper portions of the ocean change with each upgrade level, the resources you need to find never require you to backtrack; that is to say, they're always in the general area of where you need to go next. Excavated resources and materials found underwater can also be used to craft limited use weapons, helpful items, and permanent upgrades that increase your oxygen capacity and strengthen your suit's defense when it concerns extreme temperatures.

The red line on the mini-map in the corner of the screen (and this uninviting red water)
show depths that house too much pressure currently for our submariner friend's suit.

Thus, Shinsekai: Into the Depths is a clever Metroid-structured game, where the main method of progression isn't item or ability-based (though those are used here and now, of course), but instead, it's based on upgrading your suit to tolerate higher underwater pressures, thus allowing you to access and explore new areas of the game world. That's not to say this aforementioned "clever Metroid-structure" is perfect. The foundation certainly is there, but it can be frustrating to traverse underwater, having the submariner cling to walls when you don't want them to, stumbling around areas to find specific materials, and learning to come to terms that even the shortest of falls can result in damage to your character. The latter point is a bit annoying, especially early in the game where you lack a plentiful amount of oxygen tanks, resulting in one or two cracked tanks leaving with you with little health to work with.

Later in Shinsekai: Into the Depths, you come across your own submarine, which allows you to access to new areas completely, using its drill to serve as the "key" to power through the ice "gates" that separate major unique areas of the game. It's also used in combat, particularly well done in one boss battle. Speaking of those, encounters in Shinsekai can be intense to the uninitiated, but each have a method and weakness to defeating them. The part that can be difficult is figuring that out.

While some areas can be quite claustrophobic, others are wide open to explore. Great for one's submarine.

Shinsekai: Into the Depths isn't a terribly lengthy game. I completed it with most of the in-game achievements in tow in just over seven hours. However, a second run mode, the potential for players to miss certain collectibles, and the simple joy of replaying the game make an argument for some more longevity. That and the game being a general and genuine pleasure to play and being a poignant experience adds to that aforementioned argument as well.

As a game originating on iOS devices via the Apple Arcade initiative, it didn't take much housekeeping for Capcom's game to arrive on the Nintendo Switch in a positive manner, but Shinsekai: Into the Depths is a successful port of a sublime and creative take on the Metroidvania genre. Aquaphobics may feel some unease playing this particular title, but for everyone else, Shinsekai: Into the Depths delivers an engaging, if not short-lived underwater adventure worthy of diving in and enjoying.

[SPC Says: B]

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 (PS4, XB1, PC) Launch Trailer

A couple of weeks ahead of its launch on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC is the launch trailer for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2, an absolutely killer trailer if I do say so myself. It's all in-engine, showing the game in all of its skating glory. Familiar locations and skate spots have been re-imagined to great effect, and as a player of both THPS classics, this trailer does a fantastic job of hitting my nostalgia right where it needs to. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 manuals onto PS4, Xbox One, and PC on September 4th.