Games 8/24/10: Ivy the Kiwi?, Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, Monster Dash
By billyok | Monday, August 23rd, 2010Ivy the Kiwi?
Reviewed for: Wii
Also available for: Nintendo DS
From: Prope/XSEED
ESRB Rating: Everyone (comic mischief)
If you squint hard enough to see through the Wii’s forest of ill-devised motion control tech demos, half-baked mini-game collections and one-trick peripherals, you might be lucky enough to spot a game like “Ivy the Kiwi?,” a completely sublime example of a game that hones in on one thing the Wii does best and takes perfect advantage of it without any unnecessary fuss whatsoever.
“Ivy’s” premise is simple: Ivy, a freshly-hatched chick, is lost and looking for her mother, and players are tasked with making that reunion happen.
“Ivy” presents itself as a sidescrolling platformer, but players have no direct control over Ivy: Instead, they point the Wii remote at the screen and use it to create vines that Ivy can walk on, spring from and use as protection from traps and enemies en route to reaching a level’s goal. Like a lemming, Ivy never stops walking, so a quick, steady hand is needed to create vines quickly and put them to good use.
If you’ve played “Kirby Canvas Curse” on the Nintendo DS, you have a good idea how this works, and it’s no surprise “Ivy” is appearing on that platform as well.
But while creating vines is easier with a stylus, it’s considerably more fun with the remote. “Ivy” lets players “swing” the vines while creating them by swinging the remote in a circular motion, which in turn launches Ivy forward or upward. Players also can treat a created vine like a slingshot and launch Ivy toward enemies and destructible blocks. All of this is elementarily possible with a stylus, but the Wii controls are so natural and intuitive that the sensation of unfurling, swinging and slinging vines feels surprisingly like the real thing.
The bigger screen also allows “Ivy’s” magnificent visual presentation — picture an animated watercolor drawing presented as a living storybook — to dazzle that much more. “Ivy” is a minimalist work in terms of art, sound and storytelling, but it’s a marvelous example of how to do a lot with a little. If little Ivy doesn’t charm you, little else can.
Like many of history’s best 2D platformers, “Ivy’s” adorability belies how challenging its 100-plus levels eventually become. The game is generous with extra lives and endless continues, but in return, it asks players to complete levels without making a single fatal mistake. Simply doing that is a hearty (but very fair) challenge by itself, and the truly bold can test themselves further by trying to collect the 10 feathers scattered around each level and still reach the goal before the clock hits zero. “Ivy” grades players’ performance on each level, and perfectionists can revisit completed levels at their leisure to improve their marks.
Beyond how well it accommodates both novice and skilled players, “Ivy’s” biggest surprise might be its multiplayer (2-4 players, local only).
A co-op mode allows two players to draw vines for a single Ivy, which turns “Ivy” into a terrific game parent and child can play together. Competitive multiplayer, meanwhile, pits four Ivys in a splitscreen race to reach the goal first, which sounds completely ordinary until players realize they can draw vines in other players’ quadrants and sabotage their progress. Instantly, a sweet story about a chick looking for her mama becomes one of the most cutthroat and hilariously fun multiplayer modes to grace the Wii this year.
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Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
For: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: Windows PC, OnLive
From: IO Interactive/Eidos/Square Enix
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood, drug reference, intense violence, partial nudity, strong language)
It’s almost reflex to criticize the storyline portion of “Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days” for being too short at around four hours long. But given how dishearteningly the story’s backward steps outnumber its forward steps, four hours might be plenty — especially if you find the more inspired multiplayer offerings more to your liking anyway.
On the positive front, “Days” is a more polished third-person shooter than its 2007 predecessor. Finding cover actually generally works this time, and while the automatic weapons remain frustratingly inaccurate, the pistols and absurdly powerful shotguns are sufficiently precise. In addition to smoothing out the framerate, a clever new visual style presents the action as though it’s being filmed on a handicam — video grain, compression artifacts, color separation, light streaking — and it effectively enhances the ugliness of the game’s violence. (The nauseating shaky cam effect can, mercifully, be disabled.)
But those filters color a storyline that drops players into much duller scenarios and offers exponentially less character insight than the first game did. Kane and Lynch weren’t exactly lovable in their debut, but “Days” renders them downright loathsome, and helping them reach the game’s laughably abrupt ending feels nearly as empty as getting them killed.
And while “Days” is a better shooter than its predecessor, it still sins too often for its own good. Enemies require far too many bullets to defeat — a problem compounded by the aforementioned inaccuracy — and it’s a slog to take them down when their psychic A.I. allows them to pelt away the second players pop out of cover. Occasionally, the cover doesn’t even work, forcing aggravated players to decide between being slowly decimated by endless gunfire or seeking new cover at the risk of being knocked down and cheaply ripped to shreds.
The failure to truly polish the shooting mechanics makes it harder to understand the complete removal of the squad mechanics that allowed players some control over their A.I. partner in the original. “Days” is best played with a friend controlling the second character via splitscreen/online co-op, but that’s little solace to players who have to fly solo and deal with an A.I. partner who isn’t terribly helpful. Between this, the uninspired level designs and the shoddy mechanics, “Days” doesn’t even need the entirety of its short lifespan to wear out its welcome.
Fortunately, while those mechanics carry over to “Days’” online multiplayer (8-12 players), the level playing field and terrific general premise make them significantly more tolerable.
The common thread connecting the multiplayer modes is trust, or lack thereof. Fragile Alliance pits players in a co-op heist against A.I. cops but lets players turn against the group in the name of greed. (The downside is, of course, getting killed by the group and respawning, penniless, as a cop.) Undercover Cop, meanwhile, designates one mystery player as a mole, tasking him with taking the alliance down from within before the other players can out him.
The pinch of paranoia transforms just another shooter into a mind game with guns, and the ability to parlay heist earnings into better weaponry provides “Days” some badly-needed replay value. Other multiplayer shooters do the shooting part better, but until they rip these ideas off, “Days” is just unique enough to merit a look.
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Monster Dash
For: iPhone/iPod Touch
From: Halfbrick Studios
iTunes Store Rating: 9+ (infrequent/mild profanity or crude humor, infrequent/mild horror/fear themes, infrequent/mild cartoon or fantasy violence)
Price: $1
No one born before yesterday will give “Monster Dash” credit for being original: It’s another derivative of “Canabalt,” and outside of giving players a weapon and some monsters to shoot, it doesn’t mess with the formula. For those unfamiliar with “Canabalt,” the gist is simple: The game’s main character is constantly and furiously running from left to right, and players must hit the jump button at the right times so the character leaps from platform to platform without falling to his demise. The longer he runs, the better your score. “Dash” adds its own small twist to the niche by populating the platforms with monsters and giving players a default pistol (and some clever collectible weapons) with which to dispatch them, but that little touch becomes a big touch when it effectively doubles the number of tasks that “Canabalt” asked players to perform. That doesn’t magically transform “Dash” into a supremely deep experience, but between those mechanics, the multiple environments, the random generation of each environment for each play and the innately addictive nature of pursuing personal and online high scores, there’s plenty of enjoyment to justify the bargain-basement asking price. The appealing presentation — colorful cartoony graphics, a catchy soundtrack and a sense of humor in the menu screens — doesn’t hurt, either.