This week's new Cloud Monday video is part 2 of playing Battlefield 2042 on PS4, via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.
In Part 1, i was unable to find an online match. so my goal in this Part was to try every online game mode and give said mode 5 minutes to find a game. Because i did this, i found where the Battlefield 2042 community is, they're in the Portal Section, so use the Browse option to pick the best game near you.
The video i got from PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming service wasn't as good as in Part 1, nor was the audio. with how short you're alive for in this game, the visual issues weren't much of a problem. but the audio was a little frustrating. it sounded either low quality or like it was too loud for the speaker but then that sound is played back to me at a normal sound.
What was frustrating about Battlefield 2042 in Part 1 continued here. if the community is all in one place, why haven't the developers changed the UI to send us straight there. there was a Conquest 64 mode being highlighted instead. it baffles me why the developers chose to copy the poor Call of Duty UI and then have no tutorial for how it plays. i still don't know how to lay on the ground.
But with how bad the game is, streaming it does become an option. there's not much of a community behind it so installing the game onto your PS4 could be seen as a waste of space. but now we can stream it from the cloud, well you can check which, if any, modes are populated without having it take up space on your PS4.
For this week's Mobile Friday i tried Switching Heroes: Action RPG from developers ZillionGames on my iPhone 14 Pro.
I've had Switching Heroes: Action RPG on my phone for a while and had seen that it's been regularly updated by it's developers. the only reason why i hadn't played it earlier is simply that i forgot it came out this year.
The screenshots in the app store made it look like the game had good graphics and decent action and after playing for nearly an hour i would agree. i wasn't disappointed by the artstyle either. i thought the monsters looked good and the different places we went to also looked distinct from each other. it would actually be the music and sound effects that stand out as being particularly poor in comparison.
There is a story, but it really didn't add anything to the experience and is very rarely mentioned again. every now and then on screen an image of the tower would appear and we'd overtake someone. but i didn't really know what was happening. Switching Heroes: Action RPG does have a tutorial and at times it's great. but they fail to have a consistent level of quality throughout the experience and the tutorial never talks about the icons on the top right or top left.
i didn't know that the game had both a vertical and horizontal mode. unfortunately, it's hard to recommend the horizontal landscape mode. it feels more like the game can do it, like a check box could be ticked, rather than being designed to use it. it's weirdly zoomed in, the UI doesn't cover the whole screen, and all the text is tiny on the screen. switching to vertical makes things much clearer.
The core gameplay to Switching Heroes: Action RPG is good. as i've played a few of these before i know what to do. it took about 35 minutes before the grind kicked in. it was only brief as i was able to continue to make progress fairly quickly. it's easy to play Switching Heroes: Action RPG one handed and in short bursts, which makes it a good choice for those who commute. i would say that Switching Heroes: Action RPG is a good one of these, but it's probably not making it into my top 5 free to play mobile games of the year.
For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of BUSTAFELLOWS season2 from Nippon Cultural Broadcasting Extend and PQube.
I haven't played the original game that came out back in 2019 so going into this, and any continuation of a story, i'm interested to see if that lack of knowledge would be a hinderance.
This demo is the prologue of BUSTAFELLOWS season2 but it is also different from the start of the game. this means that the save data from this Prologue will NOT work with the main game. for spoiler reasons, it's not made clear what the differences are between this version and the final retail version. I did like that the demo makes this clear before it starts. there's a memo from the developers about this prologue. unfortunately, it's only on screen for less than 2 seconds so for this upload i have extended the time it's on screen so you can read their note.
Personally, i'm not a huge fan of how this prologue told it's story. i admit that i didn't get to the end of it, but with this video already over an hour 15 and my enthusiasm for the story dropping, i thought this was long enough. we start with an introduction to a lot of people who know each other, in a way that didn't quite feel as natural as i'd hope. there's a shocking development, and then the story goes back in time a little. we're introduced to more people who seem to know each other, but then we do get introduced to two new people who seem like they're going to be important to the story. then i ended the demo.
Welcome to Backlog Conquering. This is a series were i play a game from my backlog that i may or may not have played before. the goal isn't necessarily to finish the game, the goal is to play it. that way, i can have an opinion about it.
In Part 7, I got ever closer to the game's Boss. we beat the Jaguar guy and reached a point where the game suggested checking out previous places we've visited before going forward to the end game. i decided to go back to the chicken trainer and finally beat the last set of combo's. it took some time but i got a trophy for it. the next goal was to go back to the mine and finish it. i didn't realize that when you finish a shaft, it unlocks the next one. i had already finished the first shaft so in this video i did the second shaft and then struggled with the third. i came soo close to defeating it's boss, but this video was already over an hour so i decided to give up for today and try again in Part 8.
For this week's Mobile Friday i tried Space Squad Survival from developers Rebel Twins on my iPhone 14 Pro.
I was quite excited to play Space Squad Survival. the screenshots and video on the App store reminded me of FTL: Faster Than Light, a PC game i've played but never finished.
the game starts explosively and the first thing i noticed is how weird the controls are. it certainly took a little bit of time to understand how it worked. all the while, the game's story is still going. when it came to stuff on our ship, the tutorial was simple but effective, perhaps lacking a reason why we're doing what we're doing. But when it came to the planet stuff, that first planet was a blur. the ship is talking to us, there was my shipmate and I trying to adjust to the controls, dodge what's attacking up, whilst there's a timer, and then the whole stage blew up. and wow, it's a lot to take in. i didn't really grasp what to do until by the end of the second planet we visit.
Quite quickly the loop of what's expected of us is revealed. we need to go to other planets to gather resources. we then use them on upgrading or building new elements on/in our ship. at the end of the video i discover there are other 300 stages, i only got to stage 5 in an hour. so there is a lot of content in the game.
Unfortunately, the game is too buggy for me to recommend right now. i encountered a game ending bug where i was stuck in the ship. the game forgot i had completed a stage by watching a video and by using gems so i lost the games and had to do it all over again with no compensation.
As these bugs effect gameplay, they will knock Space Squad Survival down the list of the best played games this year. but i still had fun playing it. perhaps the biggest surprise was how Space Squad Survival does adverts. there is an actual countdown to when the advert plays. that's absolutely fantastic and something i've been asking developers to do for years. and it's not just text on a screen, they've created art that fits the game's to tell us this. I cut out about 6 minutes of adverts from this video, but as the player it never really bothered me because of the game's approach to it.
I would recommend Space Squad Survival in it's current state. i think that there's enough to it and enough that works for it to be an enjoyable experience, i know i had one. at the very least, it's worth downloading now and checking update notes when they come out. it may not make the number 1 spot, but it could still make it into the top 5 of my free to play mobile game of the year awards just 'cause it's fun to play.
