Sorry to take so long getting around to these, I've been a bit under the weather. Previously, I reviewed the card and board games I played at the gaming marathon for SpecialEffect. There were Poo, Tsuro and Ricochet Robots and Love Letter, Forbidden Island, King of Tokyo and Dobble. Now we're onto the video games. Since I moved onto the video games later in the day, I was increasingly exhausted, but nonetheless, I had a really great time at many of them.
Towerfall
Towerfall deserves a place among the greatest 4-player versus games. It combines the headstomping dexterity of Joust or Mario Bros with the artful ballistics of Worms and the dancing wall-jumps and swift deaths of Super Meat Boy. Each player controls their own archer and has a limited number of arrows with which to defeat their opponents on the single screen arena. If you run out of arrows you can pick up those embedded in the walls and floors, perform a risky maneuver to pluck your opponent's arrows out of the air, or just try to stomp on their head instead. Rounds are swift and deadly. The pixel art is beautiful, the characters charming. The controls are easy enough to pick up but surprisingly deep, with wall-jumps, dodges, slides and a variety of advanced dodge-cancelling techniques available. The game is great at making you feel like your victories are works of art and skill while your losses are just passing moments of bad luck, even when you're losing.
Monaco
Monaco is a 4-player co-op heist game. Screenshots don't really do it justice - every screenshot looks chaotic and inscrutable, and it's only when you start playing that it begins to fuse together in your head. Each player assumes a different role with different special abilities: the locksmith with a talent for picking locks; the lookout who can sense the presence of guards behind walls; the cleaner who can knock out unsuspecting guards with his bare hands; and the pickpocket, whose pet monkey can snaffle coins undetected. You generally have to get in, steal some treasure and then get out. Everything begins with careful planning, stealth and coordination. But it's the most fun when everything is in chaos and everyone is desperately trying to run and hide. Even if some players are shot and killed, so long as at least one player survives, they can resurrect their friends. Assuming of course they can reach their bodies without dying themselves.
I love this game. Especially once you unlock the advanced characters: the gentleman, the master of disguise; the mole, an expert at tunnelling; the hacker, able to subvert cameras and security systems with no more than access to a power socket; and the redhead, able to seduce any one guard. The co-op play is rich and rewarding, and feels very different depending on which combination of abilities your team has available. Depending on how well your team is doing you can just worry about completing the levels at all, or try to get trophies for getting every coin or having nobody die. The single player mode is also great, but the co-op game is really where it shines.
Nidhogg
Ah, Nidhogg. How to describe Nidhogg? A surreal and brutal duel. It's a bit like if you took the sword-fighting and smooth rotoscoped animation from the original Prince of Persia, added some depth and dirty tricks, and endlessly respawned the two contestants to die over and over, at least until one gains enough ground to... uhhh... get eaten by a giant flying worm? It's fun for a while, but tends to get quite one-sided. Did you ever play the original Street Fighter 2 and your friend would spam hundred leg kicks or fireballs and even if you can figure out a way to hurt them it feels like you have to do a lot more work than they do? Nidhogg feels a bit like that when you're losing. There probably is a whole lot of strategy and finesse involved, but it tends to feel like fast-paced rock-paper-scissors.
Next time: Rock Band, Nintendoland and Sports Friends.
