Corpse Party: Blood Drive - PC Review

Welcome back everyone to Heavenly Host Elementary School, the location of death, dismemberment, ghosts, murder, and supernatural quasi-underworld. Once again you begin the journey into the school of nightmares, all in a ploy to bring your friends who died there back to life.

If you aren’t familiar with the Corpse Party universe, or like me you’ve been slacking on it and need a refresher course, worry not, for the game does a decent job of summarizing the major points up until Blood Drive when it’s needed. The basic premise is that prior to the start of Blood Drive, a group of friends performed a spooky ritual that was said to be able to bind those who perform the ritual together as true friends. Unfortunately, not so much, as it actually just brings the performers of the ritual to another dimension that acts as a “killing pen” for a vengeful ghost. This happens in one of the previous titles, and a group of the friends manage to escape, although not without casualties.

In Blood Drive, the main focus is on Ayumi Shinozaki, one of the escapees who has some form of spiritual power, and was the one who was tricked into getting her friends to perform the ritual previously. Now she wants to return to the school of horror and rickety floorboards in order to find a grimoire that will allow her to resurrect her friends.

Evidently enough in a survival horror game, this isn’t exactly a jaunt in the park, as the school is full of sharp pointy floor protrusions, malevolent spirits, monsters, trip wire traps, and some really sketchy floor construction. It’s your job to guide Ayumi and the other characters through the murder school, collecting items, running away and hiding from ghosts and monsters, and trying, and probably failing, to avoid the unreasonably invisible trip wires. Blood Drive takes place in chapters, each one building on the previous, where you need to explore the school to find objects to open up more of the school, or to find somebody else trapped in the spooky confines of the bloody halls. Armed with only a flashlight and any talismans you find on your way, you need to disable the traps, slap talismans on the ghosts (that can be dealt with), and find the Book of Shadows that will allow you to resurrect your friends.

Now let me just state right here that I’m a big wuss. Horror games freak me out and I get super jumpy. Add this to the fact that I always want to explore everything I can and this makes for what others have called “hilarious free entertainment” while giving me a horror title to play. While Corpse party definitely isn’t as spooky as some more realistic titles, Blood Drive being an isometric with chibi-like anime-styled characters, rather than the monsters, what spooked me out the most was generally the atmosphere, followed shortly thereafter by accidentally hitting a trip wire or stepping on some pointy objects I didn’t see because I was conserving flashlight battery power. The monsters and evil spirits? Not so bad until chapter 4. Chapter 4 and onwards? I really want to give the design crew a flying lariat.

I see where the idea came from, you’ve got monsters and spirits chasing you, so you need to hide in closets interspersed throughout the school and wait for them to lose track of you before you can emerge from cover. There are a couple glaring issues with the implementation here though. First off, the monsters and evil spirits have a detection range that includes “off-screen”, meaning they can, and will, rip you out of a closet and beat you if they spot you hiding. Problem two is that they’re deceptively speedy. No seriously, they can freaking book it like a track team member. For the evil spirits it’s…I hesitate to say “better”, but talismans will basically eliminate the evil spirits that appear as dark shadows, however both the talismans, and as far as I could tell evil spirits too, are limited, so pay attention with that.

The third, and arguably most glaring issue, is the sheer volume of evil spirits you can have chasing you at once. Even through cut-scenes. I think my record was about five before I said “screw it, I’m loading a save point” because these little buggers are freaking relentless. More often than not I found myself running out of stamina and then a surge of just black would chase me faster than I could get away as I tried to make my way to a closet to hide in. The only way “around” this I found was that saving and loading resets a spirit to it’s original spawn location. I abused the heck out of this, and anyone who knows me can say that I really don’t like abusing a gimmick or glitch unless I’ve proven I can be almost as effective, or more, without it. Not here, no way.

While the atmosphere, music, and storytelling have always been something I’ve really loved about the Corpse Party series as a whole, Blood Drive feels bogged down not by gameplay mechanics, atmosphere, or story telling, but by whatever douche rocket decided to program the evil spirits the way they did. Once you learn where the spirits hang out it isn’t so bad, bad it honestly got so frustrating trying to repeatedly run away, and failing miserably, that I legitimately almost just stopped playing right there. There’s plenty of depth to the game, whether it consists of the storytelling or finding the name tags of previous Heavenly Host victims scattered throughout the school, so it feels a real shame that I didn’t enjoy playing this as much as I was hoping to.

If you ask whether Corpse Party: Blood Drive is a “good game”, the answer would have to be “not really”. The story is engaging and the characters are all fairly unique in their own rights, and there’s enough back story given to you in-game and in the dictionary you get that you shouldn’t feel too lost while playing. Unfortunately the game takes a hit for how infuriating the chase mechanics can be. Especially when coupled with some often rather vague directions and arbitrary backtracking that doesn’t always make sense as to why it was needed in the first place, and Corpse Party: Blood Drive just can’t squeeze itself out of a really mediocre feeling. It’s a nice sort of wrap-up to the series, or at least the “Heavenly Host saga”, as a sequel series has also been released recently in the west, “Dead Patient”, which you’ll probably see pop up on the review site shortly after this, so it does round the series out for those who’ve followed it this far.

Game Information

Platform:
PC
Developer(s):
5pb./Mages,
Publisher(s):
XSEED Games
Genre(s):
Horror
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
Sony PlayStation Vita, Nintendo Switch

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Richard

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Punch Line - PS4 Review

With slapstick humour and plenty of fanservice, Punch Line can aptly be summed up by stating its title. Punch Line came out as an anime in 2015, and I watched it back then, and have the same thing to say about the game now: “this is ridiculous”. Not a bad ridiculous mind you, just…ridiculous.

In case you were curious, the show/game is, for the most part, a series of gags and “punch lines’ (title drop). In fact, every characters name is a pun on their personality/role in the story if you know enough Japanese to pick up on it, or bother to google it. Even more so because the title “Punch Line” sounds like “Panty Line” when said in English with a Japanese accent, which brings us to the plot!

You play as Yutan Iridatsu, who got involved in a bus jacking incident, and then became an astral spirit, while somebody else is using his body. With the help of the spirit of the cat Chiranosuke, Yutan needs to find a way back into his body by using his meagre spirit power. How does this relate to the title, you may ask? Well, if Yutan sees panties twice in a row (or for too long for the purposes of the game), then he gets too excited and a meteor crashes into the earth killing everybody. Yes, really. Thankfully, as a spirit body, Yutan isn’t tethered by the pesky laws of spacetime, and can return to certain points in the past to try and reclaim his body.

Punch Line plays in episodic segments that consist of: visual novel style plot advancement, a “scare people for points” segment, and a “trick” segment. At least for the first half of the game, the second half is almost exclusively story time. The idea behind the spooking people is that you need soul fragments in order to increase your power as a spirit, so you need to literally scare them out of people. Don’t worry though, they’ll be back to normal after a good nights sleep.

You can scare the tenets of Korai House (the boarding house where Yutan lives) by messing around with stuff with your spirit powers, which you use by pointing and clicking. Similar for the “trick” segments, you have a goal that you need to accomplish by setting up various pieces in order to create a domino effect that will end in your desired result, although the logic jumps for those can be pretty ridiculous at times, but that’s just par for the course with Punch Line.

There’s not a whole lot more I can really say about Punch Line without just giving the story away, but I will say that it was genuinely funny, and there were a lot of fully animated cutscenes too, which was really nice to see. The music was good, and some of the character songs were absolutely hilarious. The characters themselves are also all really unique and entertaining.

The quicksave function during the story segments is really useful, and almost TOO quick. Unfortunately, the game really feels like it was truly meant as low budget episodic segments. Well done low budget episodes mind you, but the feeling is still there. There are a lot of chapters, but they’re all pretty short, and the trick segments barely last any time at all, and feel more like they were added in just to keep from having to call Punch Line a “Visual Novel” instead.

This is really unfortunate because I do really enjoy the type of gameplay they were advertising in the trick segments. If you’re looking for more of that, try playing “Ghost Trick”, the only mobile game I’ve ever actually paid money for. Back to Punch Line though, the character polygons would snap to different poses a lot during dialogue, and while the characters were all really animated, it really gives you a sense of disconnect.

All in all, I came away pleased with the experience. While I did know all the plot twists from the anime, the game was still fun and short enough to pick up a chapter here and there. While Punch Line really feels more like a handheld or mobile experience, it’s still a lot of gags, fun, and good music. If you haven’t seen the anime, now you can play it, so get out there and don’t stare at the panties!

Game  Information

Platform:
Sony PlayStation 4
Developer(s):
5pb.
Publisher(s):
PQube
Genre(s):
Adventure
Visual Novel
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
Sony PlayStation Vita
PC

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Richard

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Phantom Breaker coming to PS4

We were big fans of this title. Just check out PY's review or his three different Play Time segments (parts 1, 2 and 3). So yeah - we're pretty excited for this announcement.

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