The game bears some new features in its console incarnation, the most noticeable being a “dynamic” difficulty setting, resulting in a faster flow of play and more aggressive enemy AI.
Your personally designed Miis step in for the original characters from Pilotwings 64, but trust me, nobody really wants to revisit such “memorable” avatars as Goose, Lark, and Robin.
With so much detail being applied to certain visual elements that series fans will appreciate, I find it a little inexplicable that other, more recognizable levels of presentation are left out to hang and sully such a realized experience.
The largest defining component of Ōkamiden’s experience involves the “celestial brush” gameplay, used throughout the game as the means with which Chibi and his various partners interact with the game’s tightly constructed dungeons and battle monsters.
Even the most graphically snobbish would concede that de Blob 2 is a candy-colored treat for the eyes, made even more so on an HD display.
An updated graphics engine pumps up LBP2’s visuals with beautifully rendered environments and enhanced liquid and particle effects, allowing for a more “produced” game to step in and sweep away some of the dust left behind from the first title.
Fluidity offers a mostly solid WiiWare puzzler with some satisfying moments and an overall pleasantry in its execution, pierced with primitively unresponsive motion controls and, more disappointingly, some unrealized potential in its design.
The way that the fidelity of the environments are incorporated into stages occasionally flash brilliance, such as tugging on a loose button attached to a backdrop to scrunch an area together and traverse areas that were before inaccessible.
While I understand the desire (perhaps need) to give the Metroid series more depth and characterization (modern video games practically demand it), giving a voice to Samus Aran may be one of the largest crimes against the franchise to date.
What surprised me during my play-through wasn’t the stellar depth of the gameplay (which I was expecting), but rather the breadth of it.
Each objective in each galaxy is just long enough to keep things fresh without feeling monotonous.
Surgery, the mainstay of the series, is again present as one of the six arms of play and is, for better or worse, intact almost exactly as before.
Gamers looking for an engaging story or politically charged setting need to keep right on drivin’.
The game’s climactic set-piece battles are as tense and exciting as any other action game to date.
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