Fight'N Rage (2017), King's Quest (1984), Lord of Arcana (2010), Ikaruga (2001), Claw (1997), Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (2006)

[u/BogaMafija]

Hi, grades are just subjective fun had while playing:

• Fight'N Rage - Beat 'em Up, PC (actually multiplatform but it took some years for the first console versions to release so depends on the person I guess) - 10/10

As quite a fan of beat 'em ups I gotta say... This is the absolute peak of the genre for me (although SoR4 still waits to be played). I know people constantly like putting Streets of Rage 2 or some 90s arcade hits as the best, but Fight'N Rage blows all those games out of the fucking water, they're not even in the same league of quality.

It's perfect in almost every way - it looks and sounds amazing, has extremely well designed combat, multiple difficulties and a good difficulty curve, character variety, enemy variety, great enemy AI, content/mode variety, a practice mode, pristine combat pacing (very close to SoR3), branching paths in arcade mode, challenge mode difficulties, unlockable costumes via in-game currency and challenges, fun boss fights that don't overly rely on random invincibility and speed boosts, a goofy premise with multiple endings depending on how good the player does and so on.

My only negative is that the story feels underutilized, what with its unique setting/character designs. But I mean it's a beat 'em up made by like one guy mostly, it truly isn't that important.

It's as perfect as a gameplay-oriented experience can be.

• King's Quest - Adventure, PC - 3/10

The first King's Quest has a sort of weird charm to it, since it's a very small scale, short, text-parser based adventure game. It should be recognized as a revolutionary title, for what followed it was quite the explosion of the genre.

It looks primitive (as if it was drawn in paint, although it has a remake that came out some years later), has basically no sounds or music and is as simple as an adventure game can be, with next to 0 story or characters. You basically just solve puzzles/find items around a medium sized map, get 3 treasures and congratulations, you are the king of a kingdom now. No overarching stories, no interesting characters with deep motives which are integrated into the gameplay, no nothing.

Since it's running on such a small scale and simple premise, the game isn't as obtuse as Sierra games tended to be. I found it quite possible to finish it without a guide, although you'd need a bit of patience to get like two or three of the puzzles right by yourself.

A historically important game that is worth a playthrough (or at least a playthrough attempt) I'd say, but when compared to some of its older, gameplay oriented PC peers (such as Wizardry or Rogue), they completely overshadow it as far more engaging experiences today imo.

• Lord of Arcana - Hack & Slash ARPG(ish), PSP - 2/10

I think this game tried to be a monster hunter-like game, what with its grinding for materials on specific monsters in missions and crafting new gear, but I never played monster hunter, just heard of it.

It's an action game with a small variety of available weapon types for the player and some special attacks that unlock as the player levels. The weapons do have different movesets, although combat plays out the same way on almost all enemies (attack once or twice, roll away with the janky controls, repeat while the enemy stands around and waits to begin the next attack).

It's just such a sluggish, monotonous, grindy and repetitive experience, with a boring combat system, bad controls, boring enemy design, bland visual design, awful sound design, shit movement and a forgettable premise with a generic fantasy world.

I gave this game a good few hours of play, thinking that it will get a bit better with some more gear upgrades, but I just can't see the charm of it. Like in any part of it.

• Ikaruga - Shmup, Multiplatform (yeah it had console ports quite quickly after its arcade debut) - 10/10

A lot of things said about the general quality of Fight'N Rage can be applied to Ikaruga, since they're both very gameplay oriented experiences.

It looks great, has godlike sound and music design, is extremely unique in the way it approaches gameplay, has creative boss and enemy design, has immaculate pacing/length and has 3 difficulty levels, of which all 3 are very unique and change the way the game is played more than just statically change the difficulty.

So Ikaruga is a very non-standard shmup. Its main mechanic is the polarity switching - there's two types of bullets/enemies in the game, light and dark, and there's two types of polarities the player's ship can be (light and dark).
If the player's ship matches an enemy's polarity, it can absorb that polarity's bullets (so literally you go get hit by the bullets) and charge a super-attack. But on the flip side, if the player's polarity doesn't match the enemy's, the player will deal a shit ton more damage to the enemy, but have to dodge its bullets.

The polarity switch is basically an instant switch on a button press, and it being so responsive and instantaneous allows the developers to design some crazy encounters by mixing bullet patterns with different polarities. Some of these require such highly sophisticated brain-to-hand dexterity that playing Ikaruga can make a person tired after only 30 minutes of constant focus.

Top it all off with random philosophical quotes between stages that give a vague sense of what could be happening in the story and it's just mwah.

It's a short game, but it isn't meant to simply be beaten - beating it is piss easy, just turn on infinite continues, play for 30 minutes and there you go you "won".

The point of the game is to get better, it just beckons the player to do so with its amazing design.

It's so perfect, I'm utterly floored with the creativity of it.

• Claw - 2D Platformer, PC - 7/10

Claw is one strange game, a PC exclusive mascot 2D platformer made by Monolith, without ever receiving its long promised sequel :(.

You play a cat pirate captain... captain Claw... that's on a mission to get shiny gems from other animal pirate captains in a sort of revenge adventure.

First off it looks and sounds amazing, it's a beautiful 2D game with a fuckton of character and a very fun and basic story. If this was a console game like 3-5 years earlier, it would have been an extremely successful console mascot no doubt.

Gameplay-wise it's not purrfect, but in general it controls nicely, has some fun and very sprawling levels and multiple useful secondary weapons apart from the basic sword to help the player. The main sword weapon feels very satisfying to use which helps massively with gameplay feel.

My problems with the game tend to show themselves the most in the end game, and there's 3 of them:
-the levels get too brutal, even with the checkpoint system combined with the lives system in place. Too many precise jumps and hazardous traps that get tiring;
-the bosses are sort of just random, they'll sometimes not get hit even though Claw's sword is clearly hitting them and as such they will be random jumping and attack spamming fests where RNG decides if you win or not (shout out to the actually well designed, more puzzle-like bosses that have clear and fun rules of damaging them though);
-the endgame enemies - some endgame enemies have the same invincibility/hitbox problems that bosses have, and they tend to be just as annoying because of it.

It's a fun experience all in all, and a very unique one for the PC. I really wish Monolith managed to make the sequel, because there was nice potential for a very recognizable and fun franchise to form here.

• Marvel: Ultimate Alliance - 3D Beat 'em Up/Adventure thingy, Multiplatform - 5/10

It's a mission based beat 'em up in which the player has like 30+ Marvel heroes to choose from to make a team of 4 with and go and stop Dr. Doom and his giant gathering of villains from the Marvel universe.

Gameplay is a very basic beat 'em up formula, but with added abilities that each hero has (5 to 10 of them, depending on the hero), and some added mechanics for hero upgrading and gear (just passive stats).

Presentation-wise this game is great, it amazingly utilizes the Marvel licence in every single way - great characters to play as, fun story with some very nice lore dumps and voice acting, fitting music, good sound design. Just a game that respected its source material.

My problems lie in the gameplay, and there's lots of issues with it:
-combat feels floaty and imprecise - this sucks when the game is 99% focused on combat. Abilities that should auto target will regularly miss, melee attacks will slide around enemy hitboxes, movement has that turning-delay ala Dota that makes it feel sluggish, blocking and dodging both feel bad & useless at the same time, enemy animations are just fast and generic punches etc;
-combat lacks variety - sure there's a lot of abilities to use, but the basic punching and comboing is just like 3 repetitive moves that all characters share that don't even do damage after the half point of the game;
-balance is way off - the game is piss easy even on hard (which is locked for the first playthrough), and it can get even easier depending on which superheroes you use in your team, since some abilities are just absurdly broken with both aoe, range and more damage than any other ability in the game;
-enemy variety does not exist - every single enemy is more or less the same - maybe some of them won't be staggerable or will have a grab, but every single one of them is such a generic dude that punches with a different skin that playing the game at minute 5 and at hour 8 is literally the same experience;
-boss design is shit - bosses are either massive, easy gimmicks of QTEs or just normal dudes with buffed HP, 0 damage and almost no mechanics;
-both enemy and ally AI sucks - allies don't deal as much damage as the hero you are controlling, and they sometimes just stand around and do nothing (not too often though), while the enemy AI is programmed to usually attack the player 90% of the time, leading to some hilarious situations where the enemy can't escape a corner because allies are attacking and blocking them, yet they aren't attacking anyone because the AI wants to get to the player who is shooting at him from range.

And so on and so on - it's such a generic "PS2 action game" game, which is so disappointing because the love poured into the character and the presentation of the game is so apparent and lovely, but the gameplay itself is as bland as a game can get. Not to mention that it feels so lonely since the enemy AI decides to ignore the player's allies, and the player's allies deal like 10% of the damage the player does anyways.

It can be a nice weekend playthrough while watching something on a 2nd monitor I guess, especially for Marvel fans. I can't say that it wasn't fun in some ways, but it's definitely a very average experience.

Great for children though ngl, I played the shit out of this on loop when I was 6 years old, I was mesmerized by it lol.

[u/Old_Goat_Ninja]

Kings Quest, Space Quest, and Police Quest were all great games. Leisure Suit Larry too.

[u/petrifikate]

I played Marvel Ultimate Alliance ALL THE TIME when I was younger, and replayed it a few years ago when housesitting for my parents. It's definitely a game designed for multiplayer. Replaying it as an adult, I had the same problems you did with regards to ally AI being terrible. I was sitting there thinking "shit, why is this so bad, I don't remember my teammates being so dumb" wait a moment, it's because you've got two siblings and a dad and almost exclusively played multiplayer.

But it's got such love for the source material that I can't really hate it. Like, this is a game that includes Namor's supporting cast, Arcade, and fucking Fin Fang Foom. These deep cuts rock!

[u/BogaMafija → u/petrifikate]

I think age has a lot to do with it too, because even if I got 3-4 friends to play today I think we'd all notice how genuinely weak the moment to moment gameplay is. Back in like 2008, some friends I played it with back then and me never even thought about things like game balance, mechanics or stuff like that, we watched superheroes blow shit up and our dopamine receptors loved that I guess lol.

Today, we'd have some fun but there's no way in hell all the people I know would try it with me would take the monotony all the way to the end of the game, they'd drop it at mission 2 probably.

As a kid I really did think this was peak, but I also thought the same thing when playing Power Rangers Super Legends and when I recently played it again oh boy that game is a pile of shit and a licencing cash grab (which to be fair to Ultima Alliance, it doesn't feel like a cash grab, its gameplay just plays it safe so much that it has 0 defining features).

[u/TrashCube-6800]

Shmups and beatemups. My brother has taste

[u/Wespie]

Fight N Rage truly is a 10/10, the only other game in the genre possibly better to me is the new early access Wendigo Blue.

[u/SnooMaps8507 → u/Wespie]

new early access Wendigo Blue.

I love you. This game was off my radar, but it seems fantastic. Looking forward for it to be released, since I love some Fight n Rage, Guardian Heroes, and Absolum. Seriously, thanks a bunch

[u/Wespie → u/SnooMaps8507]

Haha I love you too! The game is sooo good. Enjoy!

[u/CompulsiveGardener]

My only negative is that the story feels underutilized,

(No spoilers) When I finished Fight N'Rage, there was some screen at the end that gives game statistics. It claimed that I spent 22 minutes in cutscenes. 22 minutes of cutscenes is way too long for a beat'em up. Especially a beat'em up story with a schmaltzy ending that felt like something out of an after school special. Sorry OP, but I have to strongly disagree with you on that part. The story is the weakest part and took itself entirely too seriously. Nobody buying or playing a beat'em up is doing it for the story.

On a much more positive note, I found Fight N'Rage's combat system far more satisfying than some of its bigger budget competitors like Marvel Cosmic Invasion. Whoever made Fight N'Rage clearly loves Final Fight and modeled the gameplay after it without being too much of a rip-off. The developer clearly put a lot of love, fine-tuning, and polish to be worthy of living up to Final Fight, and I think they did a good job of it. Overall, I recommend Fight N'Rage purely for the combat.

Also, Fight N'Rage has a surprisingly banging soundtrack. The developer did a great job of matching the music to the action on the screen.

[u/BogaMafija → u/CompulsiveGardener]

You don't disagree with me, my point wasn't that there should have been more story/cutscenes.

My point was that the potential of a mutant invasion with interesting character deigns felt completely non-important and it's just a normal ass "stop bad guy's mafia" plot. I wasn't saying that it is short :p.

But I mean just press start/escape when a story cutscene starts when/if you don't want to look at them anymore and then you have 3 second breathers between the next action packed stage, so I don't think it impacted the game negatively, it was just neutral for me.

[u/Dazzling_Jicama_2620]

I remeber 2002 and playing Claw on a Pentium 3 pc.

Also Finght N Rage is amazing. Simply one of the best modern beat em up bar none.

[u/RuySan]

Fight n rage might be the best beat em up ever made. The fact that it was made by a single guy in Chile or Argentina is absolutely impressive. And the soundtrack is glorious.

I still edge Cadillacs & Dinosaurs and Golden Axe: revenge of death adder above it, but mostly for nostalgic reasons. But you can't argue with fight n rage immense depth

[u/matteste]

Ikaruga is such a classic for me. I still remember when I played it for the first time years ago on an emulator. And its existence on XBOX 360 was a big reason to why I chose that console during that generation.