Author Archives: Dan Stapleton

Clid the Snail, a bizarre twin-stick shooter by the appropriately named developer Weird Beluga, makes a promising first impression with its odd setting and anthropomorphic character design. But it doesn’t take long for it to fall woefully short of its potential. Repetitive level design, muddy graphics, and arduously boring enemy encounters make the choice of a snail as the main character a little bit on the nose when it comes to the pace of the action.

The eponymous Clid is an ornery, cynical snail who loves to drink and tinker with weapons. The latter gets him kicked out of his settlement and sent into a blasted, post-apocalyptic world full of mutants and monsters who’ve used the discarded scraps of the old human world to create a newer, smaller one. Conceptually, this micro post-human world is an interesting place. Villages and outposts use discarded computer parts as building materials and CD’s as furniture. Every so often you’ll pass a human skull in the wild and someone will remark about the old Giants that used to roam this world.

The visuals often hamper themselves, though. Lighting is dark, each of the handful of locations all look like they’re in the same range of colors regardless if it’s a snowy mountain or an arid desert. A bloom-like effect lingers over everything, too, further muddying all of the environments. The little details of the slapdash constructs in the world get lost in this unfortunate effect. It’s hard to appreciate any small ornamentation when your point of view looks like a snail crawled over your camera lens.

The story of this wandering rogue, the group of outcasts he meets, and their shared interest in saving their tiny world and making money doing so is predictable, but enjoyable. The writing is solid, with some clever quips here and there, but the Simlish-style gibberish voice acting doesn’t do the story justice. There is also a lot of expository monologuing to fill us in on past events that feel inessential to what’s happening in the present. Meanwhile, the characters in your ragtag group are all tropey yet enjoyable, well-written creatures that make all the other NPCs you meet feel shallow by comparison.

Besides sightseeing, you’ll spend a lot of time shooting your way through each stage in order to push back a plague that turned the local slug population into violent, berserk monsters. Clid’s arsenal is varied, with weapons like a flamethrower, lighting gun, and a shotgun at your disposal… but the problem is that aside from the shotgun and a few others, many of these weapons don’t feel very powerful. I almost never used anything but the main blaster’s charged shot because it often felt like the most efficient tool for nearly every job.

Enemies are very dumb, often just sprinting at you in a straight line, ripe for the shooting. Occasionally, an enemy arrives that forces you to think outside of the box, like big slug gladiators with tower shields that can’t be destroyed simply shooting at them, but that only pushed me as far as Clid’s secondary arsenal of grenades and mines. Outside of the more elaborate boss fights, the majority of the enemies in Clid the Snail are just various forms of melee goon that could never overcome the simple technique of being kited across the map and blasted one by one.

Level design and enemy encounters are largely repetitive over the five-hour journey. Most stages have a linear path to travel with the occasional branch to find weapon upgrades and the like, but they always culminate with Clid exterminating the slug menace in the local “lair,” a hive where waves of enemies spawn to stop you from destroying the core. These sections go on far too long, and there are no checkpoints during them, so if you die you have to start from the beginning. This horde-wave scenario finds its way into other non-lair portions as well, and it never feels fun or welcome.

King’s Bounty 2 is a tired sigh of a Euro-style tactical RPG. Not the kind you make when you’re frustrated or relieved, though; it’s more like when you sit down after walking up a long flight of stairs and feel sort of distantly content. For the most part, it’s fine. The tactical combat is actually pretty enjoyable, the music is great, and the world looks nice. But it feels janky and unpolished in a lot of technical aspects, and the mediocre storytelling rarely got me motivated to see how the next step of the adventure might unfold.

In a lot of ways, this long-overdue sequel is comparable to RPGs like ELEX or The Technomancer: a mid-budget contender that really wants to be something like a blockbuster BioWare game but doesn’t really have the resources or the expertise to get there. King’s Bounty 2 is a bit less ambitious than either of those other two, and probably the better for it – it doesn’t try to do anything wild and sticks to the fundamentals. But from the general glitchiness of the camera to the phoned-in story cutscenes, I still got the sense that the developers at 1C bit off more than they could chew.

The voice acting, for one thing, is very inconsistent. The sorceress Katherine, one of the three playable characters and the one I spent the most time with over 40 hours of adventuring, has a pleasing timbre with a haughty, aristocratic delivery. But some of the random NPCs scattered throughout the world sound more like they’d just grabbed someone who hadn’t been in front of a mic before and handed them a script, if the distractingly bad performances are anything to go by. And those moments detract from the worldbuilding.

Characters are introduced very abruptly, just like everything else in the story, and you’re sent ping-ponging from one clue to the next with little room for anybody to develop relationships with others, much less as individuals. There were a couple of surprises that felt worth the wait, but in general the motives of the various leaders and factions were always presented with so little nuance that nothing that happened left much of an emotional impact. It feels very by-the-numbers, like all of the heart went into building out the setting and very little into the cast and story.

That’s a bit of a shame, because the fantasy world 1C has put together is pretty slick for a project this size. The graphics are a bit dated-looking, especially with the lighting, creature animations, and some of the faces. Compared to even a six-year-old game like The Witcher 3, it comes up short. However, they’ve gone with an art direction that’s just stylized enough it didn’t bother me all that often. Zooming in on individual units reveals a lot of depth and detail, especially on some of the bigger monsters, and I particularly liked how increasing a squad’s veterancy would spiff up their equipment visually as well. While large portions of the map can feel a bit samey – a lot of it is just hilly green woodland – it’s also packed with little lore tidbits like discarded notes and history tomes that were entertaining to paw through.

If only getting around weren’t such a huge pain. Your default run speed is just slow enough to be thoroughly irritating from the first moment to the last, and for some reason there’s a walk button but no sprint. Why anyone would want to move through this sprawling country even slower than you move by default sure beats me. You do get a horse fairly early on, but it has clunky controls, it’s restricted to walking speed in larger towns, and it has a lengthy animation to get on and off that freezes you in place. That never ceased to be frustrating.

What saves King’s Bounty 2’s bacon is the turn-based tactical battles. Granted, there are some unpleasant difficulty spikes, especially if you’re playing a magic build in the early game. But they’re actually pretty good fights once you get into the swing of things. You take an army of up to five units into each one, with dozens of choices from human knights, to gruesome undead, to deadly mythical beasts that result in practically endless interesting compositions. They’re divided into four factions of Order, Anarchy, Power, and Finesse, and normally you’ll want to stick to one to get the best synergies – but there are ways to build your character to be more faction-agnostic, at the cost of not being able to focus on beefing up one faction to their max potential.

The talent tree has an interesting twist to it as well, in that higher-level talents are tied to ethical decisions you’ll make in both the main story and side quests. To unlock the most powerful magic spells, for instance, you’ll have to choose Finesse over Power when given multiple ways to complete a mission. It turns out, though, that this is a better idea in theory than in practice. Finesse options tend to be the better choice in almost all cases unless you really want to put yourself in unnecessary danger for the sake of a challenge, and Anarchy vs Order typically ends up boiling down to moustache-twirling bad guy versus righteous hero. I would have liked to see a bit more complexity and nuance that could have led to more difficult decisions.

Where this got a bit awkward is when I realized that there are only a finite number of battles, and a finite amount of treasure, throughout the entire world. That means you can’t grind out weaker enemies for experience and better gear if you’re stuck, so some sections felt like I was running around from side quest to side quest looking for a fight that I could actually win with my current power. It also means you can technically get a “game over” by losing all of your units and not having the money to replace them. King’s Bounty 2 lets you save anywhere at any time, so this is more of a theoretical issue. But it’s also kind of a poster child for the handful of awkward design decisions that just don’t seem well thought-out.