Hey, remember yesterday when I said some games are designed such that skipping the tutorial is a death sentence? Well...Wake the Dragon. Playing this game is just one nightmare after another. The first thing I did was try to play without the tutorial. All I could figure out how to do was change the color of certain blocks...but that seemed to do nothing. So then the timer ran out, an enemy spawned, and it was game over.
Great.
So then I started up the tutorial, which was even more excessively wordy than some of my blog posts, and admittedly, that's saying something. Having neither the time nor the patience to sit through a tutorial that starts off explaining that the little green glowy orb floating around the corner is, in fact, green and glowy, I promptly nope'd out of the tutorial and clicked "how to play," where I was given an incredibly barebones and unhelpful summary of the mechanics...again, mirroring my blog in the worst possible ways. Press 2 to detonate...3 to disperse...4 to spawn boss...who? what? what does any of this mean?
So I started up the game again hoping that the mechanics would make sense and...no, they didn't. I pressed 2 to to the detonate shout to get rid of an enemy when it spawned, but then the shout never worked again. Does it only work once for some reason? Does it have a cooldown time that lasts longer than the one indicated by the little meter filling back up? Whatever. I didn't have the patience to stick around for the answer to those questions. This game gets a nope out of 10.
War of the Currents is jam-packed with stuff that interested me, both good and bad, so I'm bound to leave a lot of critical stuff out in a review that I have to push out in the span of like an hour. Therefore, allow me to give a quick mini-review before I attempt to go more in-depth. War of the Currents is a clever game with big ambitions and its head on straight, but it bit off a bit more than it could chew and the gameplay suffers a bit as a result. I recommend it overall.
The story is an interesting "alternative history" take on the Edison v. Tesla conflict, a really interesting thing for any who aren't familiar, so the game gets points right out of the gate for tickling my tangential learning spot. The opening cutscene does lose some favor with me just for existing, but for what it's worth, the 5 seconds I watched were very well done. It had a professional look to it and started out with a very thought provoking phrase that summed up a critique I have of modern thinkers much more eloquently than I was ever able to.
Now let's talk gameplay. Overall, it's very well executed but slightly unpolished. The game is very combat-oriented, and you have a varied set of moves to keep you entertained. You can mash the attack key, you can shoryuken, you can stunlock your enemies and you can use some well-timed shields to avoid tanking too much damage. The major downside to all of this is that it's all optional. It's like if your teacher offered to give you an extra point on a quiz if you watch a 15 minute long YouTube video. Yeah, it's nice to get rewarded, and watching the video isn't exactly boring, but if it's all auxiliary, then it can be kind of tough to motivate yourself to do it. Other than that, there are minor issues. The framerate occasionally chugs (and come on, I know my laptop has heating issues, but it's a game made of 2D sprites. It should run pretty smoothly), some platforms blend in with the background, making jumping across them kind of a pain, and the "overcharge mode" throws any challenge the game might have had right out the window.
So yeah. One of these games is definitely worth your time. That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay electrical
Links
Don't Wake Dragon-daddy: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26021
Zappity do da: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26712
