For all 0.25 of you who may be wondering whether the whole "skip a day, come back the next day with triple the power" thing is going to become routine for me, don't worry. I'm only doing it again this week because THUGS took me a little while to figure out. It's not that the game was too long or too hard to understand, it's just that it's not a game that lets you alt+tab out of it for a second without the whole thing breaking, so I needed to find a quiet hour or so where I could play the game without fear of anyone contacting me on the Facebook machine, which I didn't have yesterday. Yeah, I know I could have just signed out, but whatever. This is what we're going with this week.
So for a game that took as long as it did for me to be comfortable writing a review about it, THUGS has probably inspired the shortest review in me yet. All I can really say about it is: "It's Risk." Ever played Risk? You know, the board game? Well it's the same thing, cept this time with cute little graphics of street thugs beating the crap out of one another whenever there's a dispute for territory.
This is where I kind of have to take a step back and let you decide whether or not you want to play this game, because Risk is one of those games that everyone else seemed to love that I just couldn't stand. Since you guys all probably know about Risk, all I can really do to inform you is to point out the objectively worse choices THUGS made that Risk didn't. Really, there's only 1.
In Risk, it is always very clear how powerful your opponents are in any given area. You can tell which territories have how many soldiers and of which color. Here, anything you don't control is just colored black with a big question mark, so you have no idea which areas you need to defend and which areas are vulnerable for attack, meaning this game is even more of a damn dice roll than the combat mechanics that made me hate Risk so much.
As you have probably extrapolated from the titles of my posts by now, Titanium Snail didn't work for me. Sorry...
And that just leaves Toblo, one of the most charming games I've ever laid eyes on. DigiPen seems really good at making charming games, don't they? It's certainly a breath of fresh air from the industry standard, where every title must be hard boiled lest it suffer a commercial demise.
But the aesthetic isn't all that I liked about Toblo. The gameplay was pretty dang fun, too. It controls like a standard third person shooter CTF game, but instead of using guns to dispatch your enemies, you have to pick up blocks and throw them. You can hold up to 15 blocks at a time, and the world itself is made out of these blocks, so picking up ammo is a destructive action in and of itself. You start out in this beautiful LEGO utopia and then in the span of just a few minutes you tear it down with your bare adorable hands. Knocking out enemies with part of the environment conjures that glorious gravity gun feel that made HL2: Deathmatch so enjoyable, and holy hot damn when you get hit, you really feel it. Your character goes soaring and the impact is met with some of the punchiest sound effects I've ever heard.
The only real pitfalls this game falls into are ones that I've never seen a CTF game avoid. Eventually, especially in a singleplayer match where the AI is literally mathematically programmed to be equal in skill, you're going to reach this limbo where neither team makes any progress for a while, which sort of makes the whole game stale, so it would have been nice to see some alternate game modes than just CTF and Sandbox (which is utterly useless, by the way). Still, though, a game shouldn't really be criticized for what it doesn't have, so I'm still willing to give this one my seal of approval, if for no other reason than it was able to make me giggle like a child on an otherwise very gloomy day. Good Job on this one.
That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay happy
Links
Risk-ey business: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=552
Opps it dun werk: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=497
I gahtchu!: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=465
