The month of the month: Vampire Survivors, Sifu

There are a lot of games, and it is simply impossible to write in detail about everyone. In gambling, we try to pay attention to the best indie projects, but large releases, of course, give priority. As a result, it is not always possible to play all potentially interesting small games in time – and it happens to them a whole overview. Therefore, we decided to create a new section “Nakhodka of the month”, in which we will talk about small games in free form. First of all, we will try to highlight fresh and good releases, but we will periodically affect the older games that deserve attention, and also warn about the disappointing new products.

Vampire Survivors

Platforms : PC

Sergey Tsilyurik

In early February, Steam charts conquered a game from which it was difficult to expect. Vampire Survivors It looks like one of thousands of penny indie projects, which is customary to pass without looking around. Moreover, the secondaryness of her visual is noticeable at the first glance: both art and sprites are brazenly sketched from the series Castlevania. Here, even from lamps, fried chicken falls!

Yes, and the gameplay is simple: your hero walks along an endless flat field, and because of the boundaries of the screen, enemies constantly climb, who do not even attack, but simply a rod to hug, inflicting damage. It looks like Twin-Stick Shooter, only here they do not allow to shoot: all the hero’s weapons are automatically triggered by rollback. For example, the whip beats horizontally forward once in a couple of seconds-if you put the hero opposite the right enemy and unfolded in the right direction, he will receive damage. The dead opponents drop experience, which must be collected manually. Raising the level, you can give the hero a new weapon from the random list or pump the existing. The goal is to live as long as possible, simultaneously knocking out money for permanent upgrades from lamps and especially tenacious opponents and opening new characters. After all, after death, as in "cuckaps", it all starts from scratch. Here, in fact, is all.

What is the cause of explosive success? Well, first of all, of course, the price helped: the game costs mere pennies, so you don’t need to think here whether to try it or not. Secondly, without the need to aim Vampire Survivors, she lowered the entrance threshold, interested in those who on Twin-Stick shooters did not dig. It’s very easy to start playing it – but there is no longer to tear.

The passion of each gamer for pumping also works for fascination. A lot of enemies – it means a lot of experience in gathering. Every minute is a new level, a new portion of dopamine and a new weapon with which you can do something else cool. At the same time, you always see other options that you could choose when pumping, and this motivates after death immediately start another rink, try a new set of weapons and passive bonuses. Or a new character. Or I want to accumulate gold for constant improvements in order to go even further in the future.

But perhaps the most important thing is that the pumping in Vampire Survivors is really well thought out. The weapon receives new properties and evolves; Some types of weapons and passive bonuses are successfully combined with the characteristics of the chosen characters … Here, by trial and errors, you can feel many different viable builds-and then still find out on the Internet about others that he himself did not even suspect. Vampire Survivors pushes to experiment and generously rewards your experiments.

Of course, there were no flaws. The waves of enemies every time go according to the same scenario – you can predict exactly the second of up to a second exactly when you will be surrounded by particularly tenacious monsters. On the one hand, this is honest: to live longer just because of good luck will not work. On the other hand, for the "pants" such monotony is detrimental. And there are only three levels so far: an open field, a narrow corridor and a factory with traps. However, Vampire Survivors is still in early access, so we can hope that this drawback will be corrected over time.

Sifu

Platforms: PS4, PS5, PC

Denis Pavlushkin

Many video game studios do not immediately find their creative voice, but French SLOCLAP , It seems, without any philosophical searches, she perfectly understood what works she wanted to become famous. The debut project of the team was Absolver – an extremely curious (let and not quite successful) experiment in the Bitemap genre, which in practice turned out to be too ambitious. Any other studio would probably take a mixed result as a good reason to experience myself in a different direction, but SlockLap decided not to despair and tried again. The second attempt suddenly surpassed all the expectations: Sifu – Great action about eastern martial arts. Perhaps one of the best in the history of the gaming industry in principle … if you close your eyes to everything except an excellent combat system.

Sifu tells a rather uncomplicated story in the style of Hong Kong militants. The main character (or the heroine – of your choice) is growing in the family of the great master of martial arts, but a carefree childhood is interrupted by tragedy when a group of mysterious killers attacks the school on a school in an inconspicuous evening. The former protote of the master, expelled for the offense, gathered a circle of like -minded people and wants to get the secrets of the old mentor by force. Unfortunately, the traitor achieves his own: the school is defeated, and its founder dies at the hands of his own student. Only a protagonist remains alive, who, after eight years of daily training, goes to hunt for the ghosts of the past. After the events of that fatal night, small bandits became powerful figures in the criminal world of the city, but the hero is also not so simple. The magical talisman of his father allows him to rise to his feet even after mortal wounds, but the artifact every time physically old, taking away the years of his life. So by the final of Wendetta, the twenty -year -old young man is quite at risk of coming to a seventy -year -old old man.

However, the plot here only creates an occasion in order to lead the hero through the chain of independent stages inspired by the Golden Fund of militants: from "Raid" And " Oldboy " to "John Wick" , "Kill Bill" , "IP Mana" and many others. In this regard, Sifu is quite old -fashioned: she just offers to go through a series of battles and defeat the boss at the end of each level – as in the bitemaps of the era of arcade machines. But in fact, the task is not at all as trivial as it seems. The dynamics of the gaming process Sifu significantly resembles Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (up to some mechanic): battles always pass at high speeds and require maximum concentration. Opponents constantly surpass the hero in number and do not wait for their turn – you need to maneuver, fend off attacks, jump over the hooks, dodge powerful blows in time. SIFU categorically does not forgive errors and lifts the threshold of entry, but in return gives an amazingly cinema action. Each attack has weight, every acrobatic trick looks insanely stylish. At the same time, the choreography of the battles is still felt organic, as if real stuntmen work on the screen. The game so often generates cool scenes that I do not want to get out of photography at all: I made all the screenshots for the text exactly there.

Sifu suffers exactly from one problem: the authors made a truly impressive combat system, but besides it, there is nothing to propose to the game. In fairness, this is not a fatal drawback at all – the game is good in any case. It’s just very noticeable in places that the shortage of experience and/or resources prevented the studio from revealing the entire potential of the project. Book art director and chic visual metaphors work on absolutely flat (even by the standards of Hong Kong militants) plot. An interesting soundtrack, combining electronics and traditional Chinese instruments, is lost against the backdrop of sparkle sound effects due Blood Moon Casino to poor mixing. Cool staging situations are separated from each other with long run through desert locations. And the curious mechanics of aging ultimately forces the player to pass repeatedly literally the same contractions without any changes. One gets the impression that the developers seized an unusual idea, but did not realize how to build normal progression around it.

One way or another, if you love the militants about the eastern martial arts, Sifu is definitely worthy of attention. Personally, I am sorry that she repeated the fate of Absolver and froze almost a step away from the ideal, but what to do. Maybe for the third time SlockLap will still be able to create his own game of dreams-the studio at least moves in the right direction. I will not be surprised at all if Sony will take a command under his wing.

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• BEHOLDER 3 review – secondary, empty, broken