Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous – PC Review

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous by developer Owlcat Games and publisher META Publishing—PC review written by David with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

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Back for the final release of Owlcat’s newest interpretation of an Adventure Path by Paizo Publishing for their game Pathfinder, called Wrath of the Righteous, and I am excited to have had my hands on this. I play a smattering of these tabletop systems, and Pathfinder’s first edition (with some tweaks, admittedly) has been my home for over a decade now. I’ve even got a play-by-post campaign I’ve been running with one other friend over Discord almost as long as Discord has been the gaming go-to. It’s a system that works in a lot of mediums, can be adjusted for a lot of settings, and holds a cornucopia-world setting that doesn’t feel too forced. These are all true for other rulesets, other settings, but while we can list wonderfully crafted CRPGs that hold true to their world, how many truly capture that feeling of the source material? I’ve only got one hand worth of fingers for my answer to that question, and Owlcat crafted two of them.

I already talked about how the game opens and the first chapter or so’s story overview in general in my beta preview article, so we’re not gonna rehash the story, since they didn’t change any of it. Here, we’ll be talking primarily about mechanics and design choices, limitations, comparisons with Kingmaker, which I also reviewed, as well as the revival of both isometric adventure computer RPGs and tabletops. If you’d like to see where Owlcat came from, or more context for the plot than you get here, check those out. In Wrath of the Righteous, you’re the Commander of the Fifth Crusade against the invading demon hordes of the Worldwound.

My biggest gripe with the game brings down one of my otherwise favorite parts, the narrative choice. Just like Kingmaker, this game is interspersed with scenes framed as if taken out of a book written by a bard you’ll meet. Unlike Kingmaker, this bard is a side character, not involved with the party, and I didn’t meet at all that I remember until Act 2. Wrath also seems to want to force an extreme out of the character outside of situations that don’t directly impact your alignment. At one point, I came across a Hellknight, an order allied to the Crusades, unarmed, unarmored, bruised and battered, looking as though he’d swum the abyss-plagued river to reach us, to tell me of his squad, under attack and outmatched by the ambush.

Your choices are binary: You can either ride out to save them immediately or, and I quote, “Throw him out.” instructing your guards to just eject a wounded ally from the camp. No middle ground, no chance to help him another way. I’m Chaotic Good, and while the game does a decent job of making sure your alignment can shine through, the fact that I just didn’t have time to backtrack my entire army two days to save his squad kinda felt like something Kingmaker’s final form would have at least had some option in the middle attitude wise, if not leaving the whole thing open as an issue for the Baron themself to solve as a choice. Pretty minor complaint, but one that stuck out to me.

Switching gears, I’m a huge fan of the characters in this one. Irabeth and Anevia Tirabade are paizo creations, the dynamic of a half-orc Paladin and a human rogue who leads a Crusader spy network, married and stomping demons together, but their personality and voice are all the work of Owlcat writers and the fantastic voice actors slotted into these roles. Companions too, Woljif holding steady as my favorite so far, we've got a pretty solid and intriguing cast that has me wanting to know more, from the Life Oracle with a taste for the cruel to the odd elf girl with the new Witch archetype.

Here’s another thing Owlcat has nailed this time around, the variety. Increased classes, races, and archetypes to choose from, backgrounds that affect your skills and proficiencies, it’s all golden to bring out that feeling of the Pathfinder RPG. Along with the standard Paizo fare (with all Unchained classes being represented instead of the CRB versions), Owlcat has created a few archetypes (and all of the background traits) of their own. Some are interesting, some are simple, all fit the way official Pathfinder RPG archetypes interact with their classes. The Arcanist has a "Nature Mage" archetype that didn't exist whose only purpose is to give an otherwise unaltered Arcanist class the Druid spell list instead of the usual one, the Witch has one that shifts the class to function more akin to an Oracle, gaining a curse and a Charisma casting ability score instead of the Intelligence and a Patron, they get to keep the familiar though, which is golden. Arcane Enforcer is a Slayer archetype that replaces Slayer Talents with Arcanist Exploits, allowing me to make a martially capable assassin character with full Base attack bonus and a telephone ability to ignore obstacles and Attacks of Opportunity keeping me from my sneak attack. I enjoyed this archetype so much that I converted it to work in the tabletop and have it currently in use in a game.

While Kenabres kinda hurt to get around in its limitations, the real overworld opens up into a dual-map system with wide open roads like we remember from the Stolen Lands. The default map is your party travel, it works essentially the same as Kingmaker’s did. You travel based on your party’s average speed, settings to determine if encumbrance slows, rest to avoid fatigue, the whole drill. Wrath of the Righteous adds to it though. Two new feats, which each come with their own camp task, and a third camp task. With the same six-member party, you’ll have to divide responsibilities a little more carefully, and prioritize what you need. Brewing Potions and cooking a meal for a camp benefit take the same task slot, for example. Scribe Scroll is the other new feat, taking its execution at camp rest as well. these two are party-savers in the core difficulty, especially the stronger my Cleric and Wizard get.

The final new camp task is a ritual to prevent corruption. This entire game takes place in a land called simply the Worldwound. Once a mighty Kellid kingdom of Shamans and Witches, it is now a festering wound profusely bleeding, demons directly from the abyss flooding the land and everything from the soil to the weather corrupting to hostile, toxic, barren waste, and the longer you spend there, the worse it gets. Wrath includes three stages, and each one comes with significant stat penalties. You get a view of the corruption level every chance to rest, and your army’s Camp is a consistent safe place to get that cleaned out.

The map comes with a secondary layer though, the Crusade Map. Shifted near the overworld’s clock, the new map shows your armies, which have limited movement each day, while those movements don’t take up your party’s clock time. As you win battles, your morale will increase, and your armies will gain levels and resources. Spending these resources is as important as earning them, as improving and recruiting more armies will keep you making progress in the Worldwound, the game actually leaving you unable to progress unless you can take the fort before the next city, Drezen, using your armies instead of your party. These battles play out on a grid, with most units not really having abilities, and I couldn’t find myself engaged by them. Staying true to their tendency toward a customizable experience, I simply turned off the automatic decision to fight these battles. I still get the option when I move my armies over them, but for the most part, I just take what happens based on a dice roll and move on.

Kingmaker’s release was painful, I love the game and I think most would agree. Wrath of the Righteous is not. While there are some issues here and there, mostly odd interactions between effects, Owlcat is on it and has released a couple patches already since release. Both issues I had noted to bring up in here were known bugs by the team, and don’t exist at all now, so if you’re weary of the game that direction, feel secure knowing that the lesson was learned.

Summary

While not a perfect one-to-one of the tabletop experience, it might be as close as you can get. Bringing the best of both RPG worlds it stands firmly planted in, a whole stack of options and sliders to adjust which one of those worlds you play in, and the return of the on-the-fly toggling between turn-based and real-time-with-pause, Owlcat’s Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is an exciting, attention-snatching, replayable role-playing experience you’ll spend dozens, if not hundreds of hours in. Whether you play it now on PC, or after it releases on consoles March 22nd, welcome to the Fifth Mendevian Crusade.

Score: 9 / 10

 

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Biped - Switch Review

Biped by developer NEXT Studios and publisher NEXT Studios, bilibili, META Publishing—Nintendo Switch review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

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With the beacons having gone offline on the planet Earth, it's up to a team of bipedal robots named Aku and Sila to repair them. Having literally only two legs and feet to work with, our brave repair bots are going to have to have to work together to throw switches, grab blocks and peddle rafts through canyons in order to get the job done.

Susan reviewed Biped back in April with the help of her partner and moving into late June I can now say that I've done the same. Breaking out the other joycons, Izzy took control of one robot while I took control of the other. This leads into a big thing that stuck out to me with Biped. It's accessible to those that don't play often as she’s not a gamer nor does she game other than Mario Party and the occasional Mario Kart match with some of our friends. She'll watch me off to the side but it's not her thing and the fact that Biped can ramp up it's challenges? I'll be honest I think she more often had a better grasp of moving our robots two legs than I did.

The premise for Biped is really simple. You have two robots that have to be moved with the left and the right joysticks. The left joystick moves the left leg and the right joystick moves the right leg. Extremely easy in theory… but let’s just say that I quite literally at times had no idea which leg I was moving as I had my robot walking backwards all while we laughed about it. And therein lies a lot of the charm with Biped. The creators have made adjustments that you can walk forwards or backwards and it doesn’t matter which way you move which keeps the difficulty down as having to use both legs to move around is already a lot harder than a simple joystick.

Split into a series of visually diverse stages, each stage will increase the level of difficulty of the challenges that lay between you and the beacon at the end of the stage. At first, it’ll just be getting across. Then, it’ll be getting across where the platform will change colours if someone steps on it. So if Blue takes a step, then the next has to be Red, then Blue, and then Red, until both have crossed. Later, you’ll have to do this while also avoiding barriers that will push you off and then after that barriers and objects that you have to step over. And this is just the colored platforms!

To not spoil the fun, as Biped should really be picked up, there is no “I can just take care of this myself” challenges. EVERYTHING is designed as a coop experience from moving tubes to walk on to handing off blocks to one another as you move forward. It does get “harder” but it’s never anything that can be viewed as too hard to pull off. We played Biped in about two sittings and that allowed us to figure everything out and pass through the standard levels. Once each normal stage has been cleared, it’ll also unlock a much more challenging stage which will truly put your skills to the test.

Even with the challenge stages, Biped is not very long but in this particular case, it’s not an issue. You can always go back to do better on a stage. You can always try this out with someone else and it’ll be a different experience as no two people really work the same way. There’s plenty of replayability though it would be nice to see either a level editor or perhaps new stages down the line.

So overall, Biped is an amazing coop experience for you and someone else. The stages are fun, the levels are appropriately challenging, and the graphics are super cute with fun music to add to the atmosphere. Being on the Switch also helps for you to bring it along as long as you’re being safe in the current climate that we find ourselves in with Social Distancing.

Score: 8.5 / 10

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Biped - PC Review

Biped by developer NEXT Studios and publishers NEXT Studios, bilibili, META Publishing—PC (Steam) review written by Susan N. with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

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Introduction

Biped is a cute co-op puzzle game with protagonists Aku and Silo who embark on an Earthbound adventure. Their mission is to activate the beacons that are located at the end of various levels. But before players can dive into the levels, they are taken through a nice little tutorial where players learn the extremely basic controls. Once players start to play through the levels, they realize the challenge it can pose - especially on the bonus levels. After playing through the entire game with my boyfriend we both found it to be quite fun and enjoyable.

Gameplay

Biped is a fairly easy game to understand. If played in single-player mode, the levels are challenging but still doable. These levels are very much the same as the co-op ones but done with AI bipeds. Some of these bipeds are non-functioning characters that players need to pick up and place, while others are sentient and move at a set speed. As a result, I found that certain instances of the single-player mode were harder at times. Where human players can zip through levels with ease, AI characters don't think outside the box, forcing a specific method of completion. Therefore, the single-player mode was more frustrating to me because the AI doesn't make up for my shortcomings ( ^.^ )

In co-op mode, the mode that players are meant to experience, the game reminds me of Overcooked where it requires cooperation and mayhem at the same time. Biped is cute and made me laugh ridiculously, especially when watching the devs play through some of the levels. No one ever said Devs were the best players at their own game!

Anyways, I found the levels to be easier to complete with another person. Players can accidentally kill their partner and can have some hilarious missteps in levels. However, coop mode has its own challenge because the two characters have to stay relatively close to each other. If not, as players move further apart from each other, a bar appears that tells players that they are steering too far from the course. Some of the levels that require players to step on platforms of their color will end up with a large distance between the players. In the water rapids level, players are tied together by a rope, which ensures that they don't stray too far off course - especially since that typically meant falling down a waterfall!

A fun feature that Biped has is a clothing/apparel store. Players are able to customize their characters with hats, wigs, or even sunglasses. These are purchased through coins collected in each of the levels. It should be noted that coins carry over from the single-player game and the co-op game. Once a purchase is made, the outfit can be applied to either character without having to buy it again. When players have completed enough of the levels, they have enough coins to buy all the outfits! Personally, I love the pink and blue hair.

Controls and Puzzles

Players enter Biped Training before they progress. It is here that they learn how to walk, which is not done in a way that players expect.

Unlike other games where the left analog stick is used for forward or backward movement, where the right is camera vision movement, Biped uses the analog sticks individually. The left analog stick is used to move the left leg and the right analog stick for the right leg. Picking up items requires the player to be positioned close to the object and lifting one leg up. By doing this, players will 'attach' to the object they which to pick up. It is at this point where players can do all kinds of things like swing around on one foot, pick up carrots for coins, or open lockboxes. Another thing is that Aku and Silo are able to hold onto objects that need to be carried to other locations on the map. One might ask how that is done, well, when a player is on one foot, they can slide on it. Just don't forget which foot is being used! Sometimes this leads to interesting situations and possible death, so be careful.

Each level has different challenges. In the first set of levels, the Dense Forest, players are learning how to move in unison, as well as basic movement. Once they reach Cactus Valley, levels will require more cooperative tasks like both players need to grab onto certain containers to unlock them. Later on, players go through Snowy Peaks where snow and ice play an interesting role in puzzle solutions. My favorite set of levels is the Blue Rapids where players are bound together by a rope. This was important because one of the objectives is to save the stragglers that are stuck along the waterways!

Once players complete a level set, they unlock challenge maps. I found some of these to be rather easy and some of them were painful. In each level set, there is a 'Pro A' and 'Pro B' group which will test players' cooperative abilities. Each of these levels can seem deceptively simple, but require a lot of coordination. Sometimes this leads to hilarity. Often my boyfriend and I managed to complete areas with PURE SKILL (re: Luck). In other cases, I'm proud to say that we were able to complete the grab and pass tree chopping level faster than the developers did. In other words, while the game is fairly short, Biped provides a lot of entertainment.

Four-Footed Final Thoughts

Before I talk about my overall impressions, I have to address a couple of minor issues about Biped. The first is that in some of the menus, there is no back button! In order to exit out of the game, players have to leave a level to fully back out. But if players are in the lobby, there isn't a way to leave. While this doesn't do much when it comes to the gameplay, it was something that I noticed.

The second thing has to do with the controls. At times when my boyfriend and I were playing, the character wouldn't always execute an action. Since the whole game is played with analog sticks, sometimes the controller dead zone would think that the player was holding onto an object when they had already let go. Now, I realize this might not be a dead zone specific issue, it was something that made it challenging to complete certain puzzles. A controller dead zone is the only thing I could think of for this type of in-game issue.

The final issue I have with the game are some little grammar and spelling errors. Since the dialogue is sparse and often short, I found that the errors were much more noticeable. When porting a game to the English audience, hiring an editor or a proper translator goes a long way.Labels - Pick the ones you need for the article and delete the rest. Can have max of 200 characters.

To add to the final issue, I noticed that when players progress through the game in solo mode, none of the dialogue changes. When players begin the first level, the Biped addresses both Aku and Silo when only one of you stands before him.

However, my minor grievances about Biped are just that, minor. The two robots Aku and Sila are too cute to be mad at, and the 'store' that players can purchase adds character. Sure, one could argue that Biped is a little short but perhaps in the future, more levels could be added or perhaps a player-created section could be explored. Who knows what the future might hold?

Overall, Biped was a cute cooperative experience that my boyfriend and I both enjoyed. While there isn't a lot of dialogue in the game, the Bipeds had character. This is a perfect game for a wide range of age groups and is a great buy for it's price. As such, Biped receives an 8.5 out of 10 in my books.

Score: 8.5 / 10

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