You are welcome to look at the talkback but please consider that this article is over 6 months old before posting.
Forum - View topicGAME: Kirby Air Riders Game Review
|
Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | ||
|---|---|---|---|
DKL
 Posts: 1992 Location: California, USA |
|
||
|
Racing in this game is pretty interesting. Assuming I was doing daily races, I was able to win almost 100% of my matches because the game does seem to reward understanding the mechanics and how the stats work a lot.
Having raced a bunch, it seems like everything was biased towards heavyweights/top speed and something people didn't know how to do well was when to pop supers, which you normally want to do right before the special bar runs out and not on a rail where the speed benefits were nulled out. The game secretly has a sandbagging mechanic with its version of drafting, but it's not completely braindead like Sonic Crossworlds and requires quite a bit of finesse since you have to actually drive where the star trails are, which doesn't exactly have a large active area on its own. But it was actually quite a bit easy to lose people trying to benefit from this mechanic once you realize that you can dicate the paths and take jumps or whatever to make it more difficult for people to get the speed boost, which is quite a bit substantial and can lead to RNG during the end of a race if you're not able to establish a dominant lead. For example, I would actually drive away from items drops so that people in the back could not benefit from them (and if they did try to get the items, they lost substantial comeback speed). Also, some characters have fly supers and what you do is take an impossible path that people in the back can't follow. If you knew what you were doing, it was actually easy to create large non-interactive 1st place leads consistently. Also, the mechanic of hitting things to speed up is pretty appealing since getting bombarded by nonsense doesn't feel bad since you're still mostly driving uniterrupted. That said, the real game is City Trial (actually, I lied: story mode is pretty good too... there's a lot of variety in the scenarios they have you run). What surprised me the most was that, despite being an item collect-a-thon with random spawns, there wasn't really a lot of RNG when it came to placing first in the minigames at the end. I could probably win like 7 out of 10 runs I ran once I got going (though maybe it's a beginner player thing since it mostly feels like I was beating people with knowledge checks... it's not quite as bad as selecting a ground vehicle in a flight stage, but, having watched how some other people play, they'll sometimes outright pick minigames that are suboptimal for their build or not do a vehicle switch in the last minute when the stats are not lining up with what they're currently driving). If you knew how the stats worked, there would be certain thresholds that you cross where it was practically guaranteed that you would win at the end. 150-175 KM/H speed or 200 offense was normally the sweetspot for securing a win in racing or battle, assuming you don't land in a room with a legendary in it that was compatible with the minigame you got put in. They must have put a lot of thought into the design of the stat spawns because it never seemed like there was enough stats for multiple people to hit these thresholds. There was usually a very clear winner going into the minigames, though some minigames do require looking at the screen (button push, food rush, targets games). Game speed gets very ridiculous once you've accumulated enough stats in City Trial. Outside of Ninja Gaiden 4, I'm having a hard time remembering the last time it became so hard to react to things due to how fast everything was moving. Actually, a critique I would have about the game is that the default controls are actually kind of unintuitive. They hide it in the options menu, but it's actually possible to make it so that you only accelerate when you push a button, the opposite of how it works by default. A bad habit most players seem to have is that they'll clearly see an important top speed or offense stat, but then drive completely past it and not look back because they couldn't control the vehicle because they decided that coming to a complete stop and turning around is not in the range of all movement options... this is like driving to the next gas station 20 miles away just because you missed the first exit. This is important because the stats cap out at 19 or something, so any missed stat can have a huge impact on the final results. In my view, it becomes easier to grasp the concept of stopping your vehicle when you let go of the controller (you still need to jam back on the analog though). Also, I don't know how I feel about the ranking system. I was initially excited about it at first since it seemed like they would make the casual experience more friendly by grouping people accordingly, but the colors are really just numbers in disguise with Rainbow being at the end. So yeah, you're still just getting ran over by tryhards. Also, the lack of information about how stats work is kind of annoying. They show you speed and offense as a number at the end of a trial, but I have zero clue how air speed and acceleration works. I just mostly assume that more air speed, less weight and more acceleration (and smaller characters with a large lift stat) is good for flying, but it's not clear like the top speed and offense stats. I kind of understand the design of the lack of stats information since it will overwhelm the casual experience by bombarding you with a bunch of stuff, but it's still annoying, likely because I have a fighting game background, which have been very good in modern times at giving you information without you having to resort to google or random youtube videos. Sakurai was also actually very explicit about the lack of leaderboards, which I find interesting since it does change the vibe of the game. I cannot say that he is wrong to not have them since it's probably discouraging for most people to attach your performance too strongly to numbers and you should really be playing these games to have fun as opposed to just grinding a number. Anyway, TL;DR, really interesting fairly unique game and I'm pleased it exists. |
|||
|
|||
|
MFrontier
Posts: 20045 |
|
||
|
Sounds like a strong return for the Air Ride series!
|
|||
|
|||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group