At this point I've put ~7 hours into the release game. There's a lot of good and bad to talk about, so that's how I will divide it up. Right now the devs aren't saying much of anything, I think they're just focused on the post launch clean up.
The Good:
Lots of love in the environment. Every screen has a little something going on. From pun-y business names to backer graffiti to the odd character or reference, each screen just really pops. Lots of little details to fill out a world, and I'm constantly noticing new things.
A great soundtrack. There's not a single track I've heard that I don't like or that annoys me. The game soundtrack fits it perfectly, capturing the energetic, upbeat style of old NES Japanese games.
Flowing, nuanced combat. Some may disagree with me here. But for me, I love the combat. When you know what you're doing, it flows. In many fighting games it feels like there are arbitrary limitations on what you're capable of doing with your character; locked animations, internal secret cooldowns, lots of "nope" moments when you try to chain moves or attacks together....In RCR:U it feels like the only limitation is me (other than purchasing moves.) The faster I play, the more ass I kick. The tighter I combo, the more ass I kick. Every time I think I found the ceiling of how much ass I can kick, I find a ceiling hatch and a ladder toward new levels of asskickery. At first blush your options seem limited, because we're trained to expect games to lay out most of the basic move set and ease us in to learning its nuances. In RCR:U though, you're told only the minimum you need and the rest is on you to discover. For example, being able to jump one direction and execute a kick facing the opposite direction. Or the fact you can actually roll out of being on your back. Spacing, timing, all of these things you might miss if you're just button mashing. I wouldn't call the game easy to learn, hard to master, because in the beginning it does feel kind of awkward and the AI makes it more difficult. But for me, as I grew more comfortable with how the game ticks I found I was surprising myself constantly with what I could do. How one special attack that seemed cut and dry could actually open up into a world of combos once I acted with a plan instead of by rote. How juggling is actually really easy if you plan to juggle from the outset of your attack. The timing on things is fairly tight in this game, but not so tight it's inaccessible.
A steady paced RPG. I know a lot of players would disagree with me here, but I like the pace of RCR:U's progression. It's slow. You start with almost nothing, and have to buy pretty much all your more advanced moves which let you do special attacks and longer combos, which are locked behind levels and significant amounts of cash. Levels accrue slowly it feels like compared to how most other games are paced, and govern how fast you can increase your stats. For some it's obviously too slow. But for me it a) makes me appreciate the basics of the combat system which flashy moves generally overshadow and b) actually makes me play through the game rather than try and circumvent its challenge by doing the usual gamer optimization thing. It feels like a game to settle in to rather than blitz through. I've always been a slower and methodical player and it feels like RCR:U is deved toward that mentality. In the original RCR, it was an open world and it was up to the player to decide how they wanted to get through it. RCR:U tries to put the brakes on trivializing the game by beating up the same group of guys for two hours, and I kind of appreciate that. But not everyone will. It's a big game too. I think I read a terrible Destructoid article that said it was an 8 to 10 hour game but I think it'd be at least 20 if you want to do and see everything.
Stupid amounts of variety. 10 playable characters. 30 moves per character. Like 300 screens or something. More stuff to buy than you actually need. Pointless, flavorful bits. There's a reason these guys were behind: it's because they didn't do what so many devs do. Devs generally make a system and stick to putting content into that system. It's efficient but it often feels soulless in the final estimation, because systems are easy to "get", predict and manipulate. When you know you're going to buy a +1 Sword, then a +2 Sword, as a gamer you can easily infer that you're going to buy a +3, +4 and maybe +5 Sword, and eventually a sword that does something interesting and unique. RCR:U isn't really like that. It's not a highly systemized game. A lot of it, for better or worse, feels unique and original. Like, there's one screen that has a line of moving traffic through it. You can jump on the cars, ride them, fight on them, get stuck in them, and they generally get in your way. The dev time it probably took to make that work well probably far outstrips the value it has to players. And yet, they did it. There's a place to adopt cats that apparently just has them beep bopping around one of your hideouts, and fills the cat box with stinky poop. It actually crashed my game when I started adopting cats. Again, dev time vs. player value? It's way off. Most would see that as a bad thing and in a lot of ways it is. But it lends a genuineness to what they're doing. They did it because they wanted to, not because it ticks some check boxes on a white board about a list of features people expect with X entries in it. Nowhere is this more clear than in the characters. Most games would have been like "Have 4 playable characters and two secret unlockable ones." They committed to 10, AND all the enemies are playable in arena mode. They've got characters that most people feel flat out suck. Why do they exist? Because they wanted them to. This overall commitment to everything but the kitchen sink clearly hurt the game in some ways, but RCR:U is probably one of the first Kickstarter games I've ever gotten that I didn't immediately feel where the axe had been taken to the original idea and plan. And that's really refreshing.
The pixel art. It's, to me, the correct fusion of the old NES look of RCR and new, modern sensibilities. For the most part I like the sprite artist's style, although some of it is a little weird to me (particularly their faces. When they do "cartoony" something about it strikes me as ugly.) But the attention to detail is there, in every screen, on every character.
The references. Every indie game these days riding the nostalgia train has to have them, right? Well, RCR:U has them in spades. What it does differently though is it actually uses a little tact and subtlety. Most games can't fucking wait to just throw references at you bald faced, begging you to acknowledge them. RCR:U is slyer about it. For example, in the Dojos in game where you buy moves are various sprites of indie darlings like Castle Crashers, Hyperlight Drifter, couple of guys from Hotline Miami (I think), and others. In other games these things would talk to you, stop you with an uninterrupable scripted moment so they can go "SEE THIS GAME YOU LIKE? WE LIKE IT TOO! WEEEEEEEEEE!" In RCR:U, they just stand behind the ring inside the Dojo, doing a little looped animation. Not in your face. Not demanding acknowledgment. I appreciate that. The business names on the various shops around town, the background details of scenes that are references, they're all handled smoothly, unobtrusively, the way you remember older PC games from the 90s doing it. I'm not going to say they're all perfect, but most are handled an entire level above what most indie devs seem capable of.
The writing. I'm not going to stand by all the writing (more on that in a minute) but the little vignettes or flavor text just strike me as good. Especially all the one liners each piece of food or thing you consume has. They're all sensible chuckle, at least, rather than face palm-inducing attempts at try hard humor. Ultimately the game does not take itself very seriously and that comes out in the writing. While it tends to bother me a little when games go too far down that rabbit hole, RCR:U so far seems to know how to be fun and cheeky without just going pants on the head stupid in the name of humor. That said, there's one part in the story where they break the 4th wall and it just falls flat like a pile of mud. So like most things it's not perfect.
All the fixin's. Local coop. Check. Online multiplayer. Check (ish. I'll get to that.) Vs. Mode. Check. New Game+. Check. Multiple difficulty modes. Check. They could have jettisoned a lot of this stuff when they were crunched for time but they didn't.
Genuine. Everything about the game and the effort behind it feels genuine. Not to devalue anyone who has made an indie game before, but often times it feels phoned in. What calls itself retro can often just be minimal effort wrapped up in a pixel skin. Or what's genuine about it is an evocative art style laid over a basic ass platformer. Nothing in RCR:U feels that way to me. Nothing feels mass produced, churned out, lazily copied and pasted, basic or artlessly done so far. Some parts might not be especially strong, but you can really see that someone sweated the details on it regardless.
The So-so
The Story. I dunno what I expected out of it. It's not like RCR had a great, in-depth story. That said, it all feels very arbitrary. "Hey the old bad gang has shown up. Let's go find them one by one while they're alone and listen to them reference the old days before we kick the shit out of them." The kidnapping of Merv's daughter as the pretext for all this, the involvement of one of your friends in it, tracking down old characters to get leads on where to find the next gang member...feels all pretty forced. Maybe even a little awkward. (Hell they play up half of these moments as awkward.) Overall it isn't a serious complaint but it does play in to what I'm going to say next.
Slavish adherence to form. For RCR:U this manifests in a couple ways, some of them problematic. RCR:U is cleaving so hard to RCR that it's guided many development decisions. The way the stories play out is just like RCR (with the occasional brief animated cutscene.) Which makes the story feel like a cheap 1990s story regardless of whether you like it or not. The obtuseness and opaqueness of RCR's mechanics and information to the player is something they've embraced too and it causes real problems. On the one hand, it makes the game a true love letter to the original and is what makes up the core of its vibe. It takes the best parts of that kind of design and makes it their own. But on the other, nostalgia often gets in the way of a good, functional game because it feels like the baggage is part of the package, or was fundamental to the fun or enjoyment of the original. In the case of RCR:U, I'm not very convinced of that. There's some things they could have done in a modern, sensible way and it wouldn't have hurt the game.
The AI. This is certainly to taste, and I'm probably channeling my beta experiences here, but there is something.....overtuned about the AI even its release state. You experience it as you steadily level up and the AI improves. It feels like....like a GM who builds a monster specifically to kill their party. The way the AI was written to know how to exploit player vulnerabilities. It's not convincingly stupid, only obviously so, when you have 10 guys on the screen, and 9 of them are waiting in a pack behind the 1 guy that is attacking you, and as soon as he goes down, the next guy in queue steps up. But let those fuckers get on either side of you and the true bullshit begins. The point blank running attacks. The changing kick direction mid air in time to where you're moving. The grabs. The "attrition damage" single punch or kick they always seem to slip in there. The attacking you as soon as you begin comboing on another guy. It's like the AI is trying too hard to make it hard on you. It makes for a lot of intensity, don't get me wrong, but unlike a game like Dark Souls, it feels slightly dishonest. When a monster in Dark Souls does some crazy fucking attack twice in a row at the least opportune time, you generally feel like it was randomness. In RCR:U, it feels somewhat deliberate. When you add "Boring Move Detection" on top of that.....I dunno. In beta it was clear the AI was written to be an asshole, and in their mind all they did was "make it dumber." But you can see that asshole coding coming up more and more frequently as the game progresses until, I assume, the AI reaches full asshole status again.
Difficulty. I'm not still totally decided on this one. While the gangs of 8+ guys can be challenging because they'll surround you and make your life hell, the bosses are still not very tough. Boring Move Detection "works" while not actually doing its job in this regard. Several bosses I've cheesed either with a move that can be infinitely chained (Ryan's attack on grounded opponents where he picks them up and machine gun kicks them. I just kept picking him up again before he could stand up) or with just a crowbar. You see Boring Move Detection go off repeated times, block one attack, then he catches another in the face right afterward. This is "Story" difficulty so maybe I can't try hard until I beat the game. But the challenge is mixed. Enough to keep you on your toes and improving to deal with an ever better AI, but there are some big gaps still that even the best AI probably can't deal with, and bosses are still kind of a let down. If you play defensively and cautiously, they'll probably have a chance to bust out their crazy moves. But if you get that first attack and stay aggressive, they're not all that tough.
The question of how many dudes to kill. There's very few people you "have" to fight in RCR:U. You can sprint through pretty much all screens and only making bosses spawn and the bosses themselves require you to fight. And since you might be 9 or 10 screens between you and your destination, fighting or not fighting can make that trip take 20 minutes or 2 minutes. Ideally you fight everywhere you go because you need that XP to level up, so you can raise your stats and buy better moves. But I think a lot of people, me included, just tend to sprint where we want to go and grind when we need cash. I've actually been fighting that urge. I learned it in Beta when leveling up didn't really mean anything and stats didn't increase, ergo, killing guys didn't really mean anything. There's also plenty of reasons to run instead of fight (like having no health and needing sushi literally being a matter of life or death.) Still. I suspect that's why leveling feels so slow to some people, because no one honestly fights through every screen, or it'd take you 40 hours to finish this game. It's the same fundamental issue posed by RCR's design and RCR:U has it the same.
Polish. It'd put it at the 70 to 80% level. It's not perfect by any means. You've got the usual release day culprits like driver issues and people with shit computers. I got at least one crash bug. But the game plays smoothly, I haven't run into any crippling broken scene or game logic (yet.) All the ones I found in beta seem to be cleaned up. There's some typos, some mislabeled abilities, a couple screwed up menus, some inactive abilities that were mistakenly left in. Nothing major enough to upset me but the unpolished points do stick out. And when you start taking all the missing polish points together with the bugs and everything else, it informs something I'll note below.
The Bad:
Opacity, obscurity and vagueness. This game is slathered in it. Just like the original. What do stats do? Good luck finding that out except through observation. You have 4 bars on your screen representing things but it's not going to tell you what they mean, and only one is immediately obvious what it does for quite a while. What does this attack I just bought do? I'll get to that in a bit. Oh, you can shake the control stick or hold a direction and press jump to either break out of stuns faster or roll out of the prone position? Shit, be nice if someone had told me that. The game's got a tutorial but it's your basic "Tell me which button to press to jump" kind, so all the vagaries and nuance of combat is 100% on you to discover. This sort of thinking even extends to the story as far as how you get through it. They've done a better job since beta of making some parts less obscure but still: the procedure for getting a boss to spawn is stated in the tutorial and many people still find it difficult to figure out what screen they're supposed to beat up all the guys to make them show up. The map tends to just show you which district a boss is in, it doesn't explicitly show you which screen. So you have to wander around and pay attention to the screen details to figure it out. Maybe it's the wrong time of day. This whole love of obscurity goes all the way back to the first year or so the forums were up. Other than character attack animations we had to beg to see or know anything about the game itself. Getting concrete statements from the devs about what leveling up was going to be like, or how we'd get new moves, or x, y, and z, was always met with either silence or "we don't want to spoil too much for you." This went on pretty much up until beta, right through all the backer previews we got. The dev even posted a map of all the screens tied together, to give us an idea how big the game was, before he took it down because he "didn't want people to keep it with them up until release to use with the full game." I mean, I get it. I love mysteries in games, I love discovery. But there's a point at which that mentality because maladaptive. And RCR:U hit it on several fronts. There is so much stuff we could have warned them about how it would have been received if they simply had talked to us about it....
Some characters. There's three tiers of characters to me in this game: the fun ones, the specialist ones and the dumb ones. In a broad sense you can just combine the last two. This cuts back to what I was saying about "Stupid amounts of variety and some stuff existing simply because they want it to." Some characters are straightforward to play. They're between reasonably quick and quick, which in a game like this matters a lot. Their combos are simple to use and understand. The application of their moves is clear. They don't take an especial amount of skill to have fun with. They make up half the characters I have unlocked so far. And then you have more or less everyone else, who run the gamut from "has dozens of specific moves meant to be used together in elaborate combos" to "I don't know how the fuck you make anything with this guy work." I'm talking specifically about the wrestler-esqe characters in this game and the "fat guy" character. Their moves are weird, idiosyncratic, specialized. Two of the characters are dramatically slower than most. One has almost entirely grapples. Walking blind into this game, who you pick can dramatically impact what you think of the overall game. Pick Glen, think it's pretty alright. Pick Rudy, and question the sanity of the people who made the game. The differences are that stark. The "good luck!" attitude of the devs just further exacerbates things. And THEN you add the bugs on top of that....it's bad. Don't get me wrong; the characters I like, I like a lot. They have cool moves, feel good to play and most of their moves feel useful and like they have a point. But some of the others, you honestly wonder "Who was this made for? Who would want to play this?" And again, I think the simplest answer is, it's there because the dev wanted a slow-ass wrestler with short range grapples, or a guy who takes one dude and sails halfway across the screen with him instead of beating down a crowd. And while I appreciate the variety, the gamer in me cannot help but see some as usable and some as just plain useless, or intentionally inefficient for the sake of style.
Too much to do, not enough people. You can argue that this is the root of any of the troubles the game has had. They've always been a small team making an ambitious game where they wouldn't compromise (that we know of) on what went in it. In life that tends to lead to everything being about 90% good in my experience. I can sympathize. I work at a small software company where what we should do vastly outsizes what we can do with our staff. So there's always problems or short comings in a lot of what we do. The game is a little rough in places it would be good if it wasn't. We reported a lot of minor bugs in beta that were still unresolved in places. I'm talking like, obvious polish points. Like there's still one screen where all the screen text (where you are, whose turf it is) still plays a sound effect as the letters type out. Everything in game used to do that but they got rid of it because it was annoying. Yet this one screen, which should be an easy fix, still does it. What that tells me, from personal experience, is that they had such bigger fish to fry they couldn't do a lot of the clean up and polish passes most games do. I know they were patching the beta client to us less than 24 hours before the game went live.
The Ugly:
Netcode. I haven't tried but first reports on Twitch about the performance of online multiplayer were...not good. Constant desynching so the action is all fucked up. I don't know what the status of it is right now. But I will be trying to play some online coop here soonish so I guess I'll find out.
A stupid lack of information. This one thing seriously encompasses a lot of my bad points. Vagueness, slavish adherence to form, lack of man power perhaps. See, you can't buy moves in this game until you've hit the right level. But the places you buy moves don't tell you what the right level is. They just go "Nope." So if you're eager to learn new moves, you have to run back and forth to these places constantly checking, and having the right amount of cash on you. It feels deliberate, in that, this is exactly how it would have worked in RCR if RCR had tied levels and buying moves together. It wouldn't have told you shit and required you waste hours going back and forth over the game, just checking shit. Just like an old school RPG. But who the hell thinks like that today? Who thinks that's a good idea, even for nostalgia's sake? The only way it makes logical sense is if you're deliberately padding your game time by depriving your players of information. Otherwise it's just kind of ridiculous. Are they just that committed to "discovery?" This one thing has infuriated people who have already played the game. Personally, I don't know whether to shake my fist or applaud their bravado. Because if it's like this simply because that's the form they think it should take.....that is a level of commitment to form you don't see that often. Devs often make shit that turns out to be a bad idea, but this one is so bad it feels intentional in some way. But there's more stupid omissions. Like I was saying about combos, it doesn't actually tell you where moves go in their respective combos. Again, it just says "P" or "K", and you're supposed figure out "Ok, is that P,P,K or K,P,K or K,K,K,P or....." Other moves only work in certain contexts and the game doesn't always tell you what those are, maybe because they're mislabeled or maybe because they're being "fuckin' mysterious." People are roundly frustrated by some of this because they don't know if they're doing it wrong or if the move is broken or what. Other than the assumption it's broken, it's kind of ironic how much like an old Nintendo game that is, how frustrated you would get not being able to figure out how to do move X. It's amazing in a bewildering way how they've managed to recreate that.
Release. The release was not smooth. It had all the indicators of an overtaxed dev team trying to do stuff at the last minute. (A poster on their forums angrily but correctly pointed out "Why didn't you send out keys a day early but keep the game locked on Steam?" Maybe they couldn't due to how the beta was deployed. Their key mailer broke, the game released later in the day than they thought and eager first players on Twitch were greeted by all the confusion and bugs I listed above. Not exactly a sterling example of preparedness.
So buy? Don't buy? Despite what seems like a lot of negative points, I generally think it's an overall solid game, the combat is fun and addictive, it's flavorful, goofy, challenging and crunchy. It's great coop fun. It's so very nerdy about RCR it almost hurts. It's playing at nostalgia in the strongest, most honest way possible. It's not there to just get your bucks because it says River City Ransom, the people who made this clearly loved and study that game under a microscope. Everything about it is so idiosyncratic to the people who made it, and to RCR, that it sometimes comes off less like a work of love and more like a work of obsession. I think that's maybe why some of its choices seem to rub people the wrong way, because so many things almost feel like they weren't designed with the player in mind. It's hard to imagine who characters like Bruno, Rudy and Mike were meant for. Anyways, despite any short comings, I'm enjoying the game and would be playing it right now were I not typing a novel out at you people. And I'm fairly confident that, after some sleep, they'll get the game cleaned up in good order. The rough parts of it may still be subject to change but I don't think it should be enough to inhibit someone from enjoying the game now, especially yon Bay12 folk wot are used to a little adversity. I've had tons of fun with it already, although that may be because I'm experienced with it.
Further Opinions
Pace of the game. Many players are already saying of the game "Oh it takes a shit load of grinding" and they're not wrong...if you choose to grind. Me, I just fight my way along as I explore the world, do the storyline, check for secrets and most importantly, constantly refine how I play. In the original game, you often just picked a spot with the most enemies/highest cash drops, grabbed a melee weapon and ground away forever to make enough money to buy the handful of special moves and consumables you needed to get stronger. Then you blitzed through the story and finished the game. In RCR:U that's all been subsumed by the leveling system. You can't just grind out all the money you need to buy x, y and z because it's all level locked. Your stat caps go up slowly as you level (and are different between characters) so you can't just farm $200, buy the best food and max out your stats. You actually have to play the game. And I think a lot of people just don't get that about it. Grinding is pointless because you will make far more money than levels in the time you're playing. You're supposed to gradually play your way through the story and level up at the same time. But despite how much some people say they hate grinding, they can't seem to stop doing it as their first reflex. There's complaints that not starting with any moves sucks and it takes too long to get new ones. For me, it's about 20 minutes to reach the dojo and get at least two new moves. From them on they come in more sporadically but I like the time to experiment and test a new move as I'm going off to do other stuff. I get familiar with it and work it into my repertoire. What also bugs people is that you don't get any "Special" moves for quite a while, so you're stuck working your punch/kick combos, your jump attacks, your running attacks, your grapples for quite a while. In part due to RCR:U's AI, I don't find that boring. I keep getting better, figuring out new things to try and the AI, even on normal story mode, keeps you on your toes. The pace does pick up a little bit near the end of "Act I" (there are no stated acts, beta testers just started calling the chunk of content we got to play Act I), so it's not the whole game. But it might leave a bad first impression on some who don't know otherwise.
This Game Was Made By Aliens. Like I said, I work in software. I often have to explain to customers what my devs were thinking when they made something. So I'm familiar with the "dev thought x, you thought y and we were all confused" reality. But occasionally, the simple logic of what you're expected to do in RCR:U, say in a menu or a story bit, escapes you. In regards to storyline gameplay, there's a couple bits in the game that use essentially adventure game logic. The way they expected people to figure out when they could buy new moves, or infer how to use moves they've bought from the cryptic move list...it can be a little baffling sometimes. Not quite "Gabriel Knight" bad, but head scratching none the less. If you're of a less even temperament (or less of a fanboi than me), you might be a little less charitable.
Nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. This game has kind of exposed the dark side of nostalgia for me. It's so devoted to the original in form, style and spirit that it's not without its problems because of it. Story delivery and player information are two kinda big ones.
Combat is still awesome though. I've been playing Ryan. I thought I'd start with Provie but decided I'm going to save her for another playthrough with friends. I was kinda down on Ryan in beta but now that I've played him more and with his fuller moveset, I approve. He still has a problem where stuff likes to move juuuusssttt outside the range of some combos unless he's practically hugging the guy. But his special Acro Festival more than makes up for it. It's cheap to use so you can spam it, is activated while you're airborne, and just turns you to into a wrecking ball that goes through crowds of enemies. You can use it to escape from attacks, open up attacks on a guy, finish your combos or just get across screens really fast. I cut down the time it takes to clear screens by half once I started using it all the time.
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Topic: River City Ransom Underground. New soundtrack is out (Read 13452 times)