I played and beat the PS1 version and love the hell out of this game. I know BoF3 is the fan favorite but I think 4 pushes ahead in many, many ways (they're both great so who cares). Without spoiling the story: characters are fun and interesting and really get a good amount of screen time each. Some are more focused than others but goodness they're all great. BoF4 solves my biggest gripe with earlier BoF titles, you ALWAYS have your full team with you. So it's not like 3 where if you went into a dungeon and 10 minutes in you find a door you can't access because you didn't bring in Rei or Momo? Well that was you leaving the dungeon to go get them. 4? You have ALL of them, so you just gotta swap to them to handle whatever comes up. Not all characters have an ability to do something on the field but those that do, you'll find that it's huge that you got 'em all with ya. (Well unless the story takes them out of your party for a bit which does happen) The port: The port is so far, exceptional with only a few issues. My biggest issue is there's a bilinear filter over all the pixel art that really takes away from the lovely pixel art. I really hate these filters and the GoG port as of this writing? It's not something you can turn off without a mod- which there is one. This GoG port is a lot better in terms of load times, instead of 4-5 seconds to load into each battle and a lot of slow fades to black for a lot of little things? Battles are near instantly loaded. Everything feels FAR snappier because all the masked loading is just gone. It also runs better than the PS1 version which, really pushed the hardware at the time to it's limit. Some towns would slow down real bad when turning the camera or having Nina fly. Not here so far. If GoG could just add an option to disable the bilinear filtering, it'd be the go-to way to play this game. There's a mod so it still is the best way to play it but, you know there's an asterix.
I don't know why Flashback can't catch a break. It gets a really bad reboot that missed all the points of the original and it even managed to screw up the included version of the OG by putting it on an arcade machine that you can't zoom into and borked the sounds. Now this comes out and you'd maybe expect a remaster like Another World/Out of this World where you get true widescreen, touched up visuals, better performance. No. This is the most bizarre port of a game I think I've seen. It's got a bad CRT filter, that awful smoothing filter that destroys pixel art and some other options better turned off. It has a remastered OST as well as sounds which sound like they have lost all identity (ha ha. . .), like they ran the midis through some new instrumentation and called it a day. Inoffensive but not great. And some sounds are not remastered but from what I've been able to tell are mostly from the Genesis/Mega Drive version. This is where it gets weird though, you can enable '8-bit' audio where you'd assume it'd take the sounds/music from either the Genesis or Amiga version but . . .no. It takes various sounds from the Genesis, SNES and Amiga versions and they clash so badly. If this was my first time playing the game I'd be baffled what the audio designers were doing. I mean- I still am but for a different reason. The audio is all over the place with this. The game runs fine, the game looks fine (with the filters off) they even have a rewind feature so the game is less punishing. But the presentation is so, bad. It was so bad it even extended to the Switch special edition which came with a fake SNES cart for a case where the manual didn't even fit into it. Also, SNES? Why? Arguably the worst version. IDK. The core game is still here and good but the presentation is just not doing it justice. Flashback is seriously cursed. Fantastic game, bad reboot, jank 'remaster' and awful sequels.
I played this on PS4 first and avoided the PC port because, well it's not hard to find the port was botched at first, and for months after that- after they delayed it nearly a year. But now, it's a fine port. I played for over 4 hours and there's not been a crash or any notable issues I can see. The game runs super smooth and the enhanced visuals are nice. The game itself? It's an action RPG, a lot of hack and slashing but playing on the higher difficulties will make you have to play smart. You have a dodge that if timed right gives you a quick dodge slowing down time and allowing you to smash the enemies, there's also a flash guard- not sure if there's an ACTUAL guard but the flash guard is similar, but instead of things slowing down you speed up. You can also somehow do both, so I imagine if you got really good at the game you could embarrass a field of enemies. Visually, well it's a port of a port- originally on the Playstation Vita then PS4, then PC. I didn't play the vita version but being aware OF the Vita's abilities- for the Vita it's not groundbreaking visually but it's pretty enough to get the point across. Runs at 60fps and has an in built super sampling which is nice if you don't know how to do that on your machine. The music to this game is great. It's got one of my favorite game songs of all time that I fell in love with rather quickly. Look up on youtube "Sunshine Coastline" it's so good. The voice acting is good/passable after they redid it- well the VA was never the problem, it was the translation that was improved. It includes JP audio if that's more your thing. EN is more useful since the characters callout things in gameplay like enemies being weak to characters or items to harvest. The short is, a once broken port is now a very solid one that's also improved in performance & visually above all other versions. If you're interested, it's worth a play.
Mix together Sonic+Megaman X+Sparkster/Rocket Knight+Pulseman heck, a bit of Chip and Dale with Millia (one of the three characters in this game) and some of Treasure's magic together and you have a heck of a crazy game here. This game feels like the devs heisted people from the Saturn era to bring a game that not only looks but feels like an old school platformer. That's not to say it's like other games claiming 'retro', no this one actually has the feel, the characters have the ol' Genesis/Playstation/Saturn era weight/ feel of 2D platformers. No havok physics engine just whatever the heck made them feel like they did. Play any old platformer on the Genesis/MD, NES,SNES you know what I mean. The game clearly has a LOT of effort behind it, there's a lot of detail put into the game like holding a button to access bloopers while the story is playing out. Dancing around disco balls while fun music plays. My favorite: while in some boss fights your friends will come in to help you fight, Carol leaping in on her motorcycle to kick the boss and Milla straight up dropping health from a plane. It's really charming to see all this in action. There's 3 characters to choose from, each playing differently from one another and with their own unique level to go through. Apparently there's 2 more characters on the way to boot. If you're going to blow off this game because it looks like a Sonic ripoff you're missing out because that's not what the game is. It's inspired yes but only the narrow minded are going to call it a copy. Mario inspired Sonic, Sonic inspired ...many things (Rocket Knight, even Crash Bandicoot) it's how things go. Brilliant game and I hope to see more from the creators. $15 gets you around 3 hours for one character playthrough and for those who skipped to the end here, each plays very different and have some unique levels and paths in stages the others have.
Let me start with the positives, the game is really pretty, animates super well, the music is wonderful, the game is colorful and has nice art. What it does, it does well, you even get some character variety in the mix with different play styles and story. The combat is also really fun as well, allowing for a range of combos and moves thanks to the skills and even a new weapon adding to what you can do. The thing that makes this game hard to recommend is the controls...You have a form of dash that allows you to dash forward or straight down and that's usually a useful move. There is no dedicated button for this move, you hit diagonal/down and you dash, hit it in the air and you dash straight down. See where the problem is? I can't say how many times I accidentally dashed straight down a pit and had to retread old ground or tried to dash off an edge only for it to not work. The other issue is, this game has no platforms you can go through, or ladders. Sounds like an odd complaint till you factor in you can wall jump off most walls and instead of being able to move through the floor you now have to go through winding hallways through every area in the game, making it feel like the game is artificially lengthened. This only being more frustrating when you fell because of the controls and have to do all this again. Speaking of the map, you only get a map of the area you're in, so no overworld map meaning you either gotta look one up or know where you're going. I really wanted to like this game, and the thing is I kind of do. But the controls and awkward navigation REALLY made it hard for me to finish the game, and I did finish it and it was really interesting but I can say frustration was equally met with fun which to me is a bit of a miss. It's by no means terrible, it's a good game that just needs refinement....and a dash button.
I hadn't played X-Wing in any form since I was a kid, till this fine GOG release! It seems very faithful to the versions I played, both the Dos and Collectors CD. Though, I didn't recall the game being so vague about what's going on in the missions, but more on that later. The game is known for it's excellence in sci-fi space combat and ship resource management, and for good reason- no one else has done it as well. Yes other games will have a shield bar and missile counter but in X-Wing you maintain where the power goes in your ship, regen your weapon batteries, your shields? You can even take power directly out of one system into the other. You can change the number of your weapons that fires per trigger pull, which weapon you fire, your speed. It's hard to really get across how detailed and elegant the ships systems work. It's complicated but not overly so! GoG thankfully provides a the original reference card to help learn this. Keys are also rebindable! Now I've played more Tie Fighter honestly and this is where I was smacked in the face with in surprise: In Tie Fighter your mission objectives are listed: what is in progress, completed and failed, also you have audio messages relaying info on mission critical craft and their status. In Xwing? You have to know what's critical and keep track of the text box on the bottom for any info on it. Your goals screen says what the objective is, but not it's status. So ontop of dogfighting and maintaining your ship you gotta read important info. Don't take this as me bashing the game, I love X-Wing...But Tie-Fighter comes out ahead certainly as it was a later game. X-Wing is 100% worth getting if you have ANY interest in space battles. It's far more in depth and interesting than the Rogue Squadron games with more feeling of being involved with the story.
