Tackling the Backlog Vol. 2 — February ‘23

Tackling the Backlog, Issue 2 — February ‘23

A Hunter, A Pilot, and a Fox

Hello and welcome to the second issue of Tackling the Backlog! It’s February, which means it’s the shortest month of the year, and the hardest to get games done. The tail end of this month was a race to finish at least two games before it was over, so the fact that I managed to sneak three in was a nice stroke of luck. Midnight Suns was a fun tactical RPG with an okay story, My Sims: Sky Heroes was an extremely nostalgic throwback to the Wii era, and Freeride’s first act might be my favorite form of personality test to date.

“A Shining Light”

My experience with Midnight Suns was met with mixed feelings. On the one hand, Firaxis Games put out another stellar addition to the tactical RPG genre. The combat in this game is fun and strategic, relying on building multiple decks for each Marvel hero with a handful of diverse archetypes that change the flow and pace of the game. Some characters work better by being offensive support and providing your team of Marvel Heroes with buffs. Others utilize the environment to their advantage, and some get to use RNG abilities that can sway the flow of a timed battle with ease. The Hunter, the player’s character for this game, has an option of building a deck constructed to be offensive support that focuses on high damage, card draw, and healing, or an offensive debuff deck that can inflict status conditions and deal even higher damage. The difference between these two styles, respectively titled Light and Dark, show up again in the game’s smaller detail of The Hunter’s balance meter. This meter unlocks certain abilities, perks, cosmetics, and can also be influenced by most of the game’s dialogue options. I opted for a maximum Light score in my playthrough seeing as I enjoy playing White decks in Magic: The Gathering, and these abilities allowed me to heal and still be a major player in my team composition. Each level allows for a team of three heroes, giving the player 24 different cards and abilities to shuffle through per battle. Each character also has their own passives that get unlocked through increasing your friendship with them, so there are a lot of moving parts that go into picking a team. The general difficulty of the game was actually much higher than anticipated. Starting on “Normal”, the game unlocks higher difficulties after certain milestones are reached, and even on “Heroic I,” the level above Normal, I was forced to be much more strategic than I had been before. I look forward to playing this game’s NG+ because of that.

The character relationships are nice and well written, with The Hunter able to form a bond with any of the heroes present in the game and leading to some very heartfelt moments in my Light playthrough. The game also has club activities that serve as more character building with the heroes, like a book club headed by Blade in order to get closer to Captain Marvel, a shop class that Ghost Rider and Spider-Man work together in, and the E.M.O K.I.D.S., where the Midnight Suns try to use magic and learn how to defeat Lilith, the main antagonist, by going through The Hunter’s memories.

The gameplay, relationships, and difficulty of Midnight Suns are where the game shines in a pool of somewhat dull areas. The Abbey acts as a hub world for the player to explore to find collectibles and cosmetics, with a small narrative touch. This would be a fun way to pass the time if the map wasn’t as big and convoluted as it is. The Abbey is large and full of twists and turns, so exploring was more of a pain than anything without the use of waypoints to revisit the same chests that respawn a few in-game days after opening. The writing, while sometimes nice, suffers from what feels like the same issue that modern Marvel movies have had over the past year or so. The jokes aren’t funny, some of the conversations with The Hunter reference other characters that exist in the Marvel universe (which feels out of context considering The Hunter doesn’t know those heroes personally), and some heroes just don’t develop as characters as the game goes on. Take Dr. Strange and Iron Man for example, the two heroes the game starts you out with. Dr. Strange is consistently seen as someone who has to learn to deal with pain and loss; he loses the Sanctum Sanctorum, as well as Scarlet Witch, who plays the role of his fallen apprentice in this story after Lilith. These notes are touched on repeatedly and hammer away at Strange’s growth. On the other hand, Tony Stark persisted that magic is something he can solve with science and ignores the countless warnings that he’s in over his head. This lack of development plays a role in the story, and while I understand the arrogance of Tony Stark being a necessary part of the character, I can’t help but be frustrated at the character (maybe that’s the whole point?). Other characters don’t develop at all because they aren’t heavily involved in the plot and resulting in a handful of two-dimensional characters. To make matters worse, Bruce Banner is added in the literal last hour of the game and is basically a throwaway character unless the player feels like grinding and getting him on par with the other heroes that have been present for at least half the game. It’s such an odd choice, and while I can sort of understand it if he’s available in NG+ from the start, why make me use a whole new character in the last mission?

As of right now, the game is still receiving updates with the release of DLC that adds other heroes with their own stories and missions to the game, but I haven’t played them yet. The game was also full of small graphical bugs, so here’s to hoping those are getting patched out as well.

“If you build it, you can play it.”

MySims:SkyHeroes was a last-minute pick to add to this month’s list of games. Initially I had been playing Alice: Madness Returns, a gift from my girlfriend that she wanted me to play. With the month’s end deadline approaching, I didn’t have enough progress made in Alice to get it done in time, so I decided to tackle this old Wii game that I remembered loving when I was a kid. I’m happy to say that the nostalgia from this game was still there and made this experience so enjoyable.

For those unaware, MySims was a spin-off series that focused on presenting a more cartoony appearance and abandoned the simulator aspect to branch out into different genres of gameplay. There were eight MySims games in total, with MySims Go! only being available in-universe in The Sims 4, and MySims:Sky Heroes being the last global release for the series.

The game is simple with a story that involves the player character crashing their ship and ending up at the island base of a resistance army fighting to liberate the skies from the evil Morcubus. These Funko Pop adjacent NPCs are designed in a way to be very distinct from one another, with dialogue from 2009 that still holds up. The story itself is actually more interesting than I expected or remembered and takes on a lot of tropes and delivers them in a satisfying way. Eventually it is revealed that the player character used to work for Morcubus before getting amnesia and deciding to fight for good, and the moments before the final battle are legitimately something that I think would still work in today’s media.

Using the classic Wiimote + Nunchuk controllers was much more satisfying than I had remembered. In a world where controller layouts are slowly getting more homogeneous, it’s nice to look back at the different things and still find them even more enjoyable than what we have now. Each level consists of either a dogfight or a race. The flight is very smooth and uses the motion controls from the Wiimote to do tricks like aileron rolls and back flips. The game allows you to customize multiple planes, and different parts to upgrade your speed and armor are unlocked with level completion milestones. While most of these are cosmetic to fill out the catalog before getting to the next level of upgrades, I had a lot of fun creating headcanons about each of the different planes I had made in accordance with when in the story they were built. This game makes me miss the era of game development where people were poking at different ideas to figure out what really makes a good game.

“The RPG that’s a personality test.”

Freeride is actually a game that I learned about through TikTok a few months ago before deleting the app. It was advertised as being both an RPG and a personality test, so my interest was immediately met. Only Act I is available at the moment, but it’s free and makes for a good hour or so of content you can always go back to.

The game measures the player’s decisions on metrics like interacting with items, talking to NPCs, and other various activities one can do in their time before completing the act. At the end these metrics are read back to the player by Seer, an omniscient entity that follows your progress and makes little comments on each action. I finished my first playthrough as a Pacifist and was labeled as “Curious-Open-Assertive-Kind-Unobservant”.

Each character in this game is uniquely distinct from one another in both design and personality, and the game has this great feeling of freshness to it. The general gameplay is about exploring and interacting with the environment, and it’s the kind of game that I would love to sit someone else down without them understanding that it’s a personality test just to see what they do.

I don’t want to spoil the more intimate aspects of this game and its story, so I greatly implore you to check it out on Steam if you have any interest in new games, or free things.

Here’s to another month and another batch of memories.

• After shooting down the final boss of MySims:SkyHeroes and watching him crash into the ocean, my Wii U crashed before it could save my file. Maybe this was because it’s old, or maybe because I had kept it on for 8+ hours without breaks when I was trying to finish the game in time. Regardless, this was funnier than it was tragic and made for a great end to a game I haven’t touched since I was in elementary school.
• In Freeride, the player character is referred to as “Fox” by Daikuri, a bunny-man detective. I just thought this was neat.
• Freeride Act I has a DDR style mini game in one of the shops. I asked the developer if they were going to include more of these and she told me they had already planned on having one in every act going forward.
• In Midnight Suns I spent a good portion of a day just building decks and managing resources. It took me back to the days of homebrew MtG decks when I would try to build White/Red decks, except this time the combos I built actually worked!
• The final boss in Midnight Suns does this really cool thing where they take the three NPCs you’re closest to and disables you from using them during the first stage. In the second stage, these are the only heroes that you’re allowed to use besides The Hunter.

I haven’t gotten a start on the games for this month yet with midterms coming up, but Spring Break is right after. I’ve had my eye on replaying a few games for a while now…