GamePlay Johnny
Member
Props to Playtonic for improving so many things with this patch and providing detailed patch notes. Makes you think though how the game could have been received had it launched now with those extra few months of polish.
I was waiting for the patch and the soundtrack update. Is that still happening? Orchestrated sound or something like that?
The Grotto is super nerfed now, you can just walk through 90% of it instead of having to roll. I tried the two Pagies for the Cashino arcade and it didn't seem all that different (the course and the high score were the same) but I didn't die, so I guess losing less points is what they tweaked. The signposting for the hub is a little ridiculous, though, but the QoL updates for the camera and dialogue speed are worth it.
I skimmed through the patch notes and didn't see anything about improved Kartos controls but I'd seen some complaints about them. Have they been modified and I just missed it in the notes?
.Minecart control improvements and new visual effects
Do we have an update on that ship in the final world that the robot would keep repeating "52% loaded" or something ?
Is the grotto part of a level or something else?
It's a challenge in the second world that takes you to a separate area where most of the obstacles used to cause Yooka to slide off to his death unless you were using the roll move. It was a relatively tough section considering you have to do it in one go and the rolling controls were a tad too sensitive, especially when you have to jump several times in a row. After the patch, all but one segment of the grotto have had their slippery properties removed.
EDIT: The cart controls feel pretty much the same, but they did add an overheating effect so you can tell whether or not shooting is disabled. I *think* they also tweaked the stages so that the timing for the moving obstacles is more consistent in every attempt, but it might just be a placebo effect.
Are the arcade games and mine cart stages less tedious and frustrating?
Nice patch notes, but they should've just waited until it was ready for consoles too and released them all at once. They said end of June and now they say "in the coming weeks". It's annoying.
All the grotto really needed was a checkpoint in the middle somewhere and it would have been fineThe grotto wasn't even that bad, they probably really only had to tweak it a bit to iron it out. The layout of the hub wasn't that confusing either, it's much simpler than Grunty's Castle was.
After the patch it says 75%.
Has anyone had the chance to look into whether the Cashino Pagie bug fix is retroactive? I'm guessing from the working of the patch notes that it's not
Switch version is close enough to taste!
I'm not expecting it this side of Mario.
I'll start this post by saying I have never played any Rare-games in the past, so I have no ties to Banjo, etc.
Platinumed the game on PS4, just in time before the patch was about to come, haha. Took roughly 22 hours, but I did resort to using guide for few last pagies, because I couldn't really be bothered to look everywhere with a tight comb.
The game was... not very good. The controls felt very janky, especially with Kartos and some of the transformations. But some of the moves Yooka had were pretty annoying to control too, rolling in particular. This made getting some of the quills far more difficult just because Yooka didn't roll or fly as I was trying to make him to, due to camera deciding to start spinning wildly all of a sudden.
I'll start this post by saying I have never played any Rare-games in the past, so I have no ties to Banjo, etc.
Platinumed the game on PS4, just in time before the patch was about to come, haha. Took roughly 22 hours, but I did resort to using guide for few last pagies, because I couldn't really be bothered to look everywhere with a tight comb.
The game was... not very good. The controls felt very janky, especially with Kartos and some of the transformations. But some of the moves Yooka had were pretty annoying to control too, rolling in particular. This made getting some of the quills far more difficult just because Yooka didn't roll or fly as I was trying to make him to, due to camera deciding to start spinning wildly all of a sudden.
So yeah, the camera was really, really bad, and the voices were very grating to listen to. The game was also prone on crashing, I platinumed the game in three days, yet the game was able to crash five times during that time. Not a very good outlook. The framerate was also inconsistent, and the game even had freezing moments in the casino level.
Still, the issues above might be (and some of them will be, seemingly) addressed in patches. But there were also some fundamental issues in the game, that I doubt no patch can change. Biggest issue for me was the level design, particularly in levels 2, 3 and 4. The Pagies were almost all put into their own separate minigame sections, leaving the actual levels themselves just extremely dull and bland to actually traverse. So what happened was me just trying to traverse this bland landscapes, trying to figure out which separate little area for pagies I hadn't been exploring yet. Same problem is even worse with Quills, which seemed to be positioned very randomly, so that finding them never felt very rewarding.
Another big issue was sadly the music. It was all very dull and repetitive to me. I actually put the music completely off from the options for the last 5 hours of my play or so, when the Casino-level music got too much on my nerves.
Still, it wasn't all bad, since I did have enough interest to keep on playing the game until I had collected everything. Over half of the missions leading to getting pagies were pretty fun platforming challanges, which is the meat of the game. Roughly third of them were pretty dull though (especially the arcade minigames). I actually liked the level design of Levels 1 and 5, with Level 1 having visually very pleasing aesthetic, and level 5 did not waste any space at all, but was very compactly designed. More of that in the possible sequels, please! The boss fights very quite fun too, except for the one where you had to use Kartos.
So yeah, not awful, but not very good, either. Roughly 5-6/10 game (and I mean on 1-10 scale, not the usual 7-10 )
The game was... not very good. So yeah, not awful, but not very good, either.
Having full manual control over it is so much better. It still has this weird tendency to zoom in/out quickly and do that stutter thing in some situations, but I think it's a great improvement over what it was like before.New camera mode impressions anyone? Looking to hear how it turned out.
I disagree, I had no problems with Grunty's Castle back when I was a kid. It had some secrets and hard to find parts, but for the most part the layout was pretty straight forward.The layout of the hub wasn't that confusing either, it's much simpler than Grunty's Castle was.
New camera mode impressions anyone? Looking to hear how it turned out.
My biggest complaint is the sound design. It almost feels like someone went out of their way to make the game's audio incredibly grating. I'm playing with the latest patch, so this isn't just about the gibberish speech. It's everything. From the background music looping to footprint sounds. It absolutely astonishingly bad. I don't understand how it was released in this state.
On top of this some of the game design decisions are equally baffling. To get to the top of the central parthenon like structure in that first world I had to navigate the exterior of the model in a way that felt like I was exploiting terrible model and bounding-box designs. I understand making a game not hand-holdy, but that's ridiculous. There were other situations of the same sort of thing. Where it felt like to get where I needed to go I had to traverse areas that appeared to not be viable. Even the textures at times in these spots gave that impression.
I'm stuck at a spot in this game. I've been using the IGN wiki guide doing the Frozen Caged Pagie and right after this room, I get stuck in a mystery room that doesn't appear in any of the guides or the youtube walkthrough I was watching. What do I do!?
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3SGWcT12aboVUtNX1UtekM2QVE
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3SGWcT12aboMGNNM0J3VVJEREk