Red Ronin - Thoughts

It takes a lot of guts to look at sliding block puzzles and think, "You know, if only there was a way to fit some Hotline Miami in here!" Despite reeking of a drunken 2AM epiphany, Red Ronin seeks to do exactly that, marrying ponderous ice physics with violent, frenetic action. And while this blood-soaked Sokoban appears to be a smash hit in its first chapter, Red Ronin's ugly bits will eventually unfurl as its concepts vie for attention. The puzzle side of the game will argue for more complex and methodical setups, while the violence demands more reflex-based traps and harder boss fights. Red Ronin likes to believe these two concepts can work out their differences, but their incessant tug-of-war-ing will come at the cost of the player's patience—and sanity.

At the very least, Red Ronin shows that its premise has legs. Enemies are restricted to moving a square at a time but the protagonist can zoom across the arena until she collides with an obstacle, slicing up any opponents in her path. While you'll feel like a murderous bolt of lightning in the first chapter, each subsequent chapter introduces its own unique speed bump: patrolling bots that kill upon contact, enemies with 2 hp, lasers that sweep across the arena, and plenty more. As mechanics are added the odds will be increasingly stacked against you, forcing you to lean heavily on the game's two collectible resources: time-stop and mid-direction change.

These abilities are integral to Red Ronin as a puzzle game, as a good chunk of the challenge comes from where and when you'll use them. At first these power-ups seem like a cool way to allow for some player expression in battle, letting you take shortcuts to the end of a fight with smart ability use. That, and any leftover power-ups can be taken into the next battle, which can give you a leg up on a tricky opening. But as the game goes on your freedom to use these power-ups diminishes, until you're forcibly chaining them together in a conga line atop a tight rope. The game is absolutely better with the power-ups than without them, but the level of restriction Red Ronin prefers is that of a straight-jacket, offering little room for personal flair, style, or even mistakes. Puzzles often have one solution, and dallying outside that golden zone will undoubtedly result in a swift and decisive death.

Despite the game's numerous issues (which I'll get to shortly), what miffed me most of all was the lack of a rewind function. A good portion of the game's eccentricities may boil down to personal preference, but how do you miss adding a way to undo actions in your turn-based puzzle game? This is an issue that only gets exasperated as the game gets harder, seeing as deaths send you back to the start of a battle, instantly undoing an upwards of twenty or thirty inputs. And since there's little flexibility in how you move through a level, you'll often be memorizing the exact inputs required to get you to the spot you previously died at—and then you better pray you can figure it out from there. Stage inputs will be burned into your retinas as you run through the first half over and over and over again, with small mistakes weeding their way into your actions due to sheer fatigue. The lack of a rewind function may start as an understandable omission, but it won't take long before you'll see it for what it truly is: inexcusable.

While no rewind is a slow-killing poison for Red Ronin, a more immediate and pressing problem the game has is that it isn't strictly turned based. Laser traps and bosses break out of this constraint, operating independently of your turns and actions. This means that as you're sitting there trying to work out your next best move, a boss can put you in his crosshairs and blast you all the way back to the start of the fight. However this rule-breaking is also strangely infrequent (barring Stage 6), meaning you never really get to train the reactions required to play Red Ronin like a coked-up samurai. It's an uncomfortable pivot; for 90% of the game you'll be allowed to play as slow and methodically as you want, but the last 10% thrusts you into a Guitar Hero duel, where missing a single note incurs a reset. Naturally, it's here where you'll rack up most of your deaths, as you'll be backed into dead ends constantly via bad judgment, sloppy execution, or (most likely) a sad combination of the two. For the slower players out there, the bosses are likely where Red Ronin shall bury them.

Strangely, however, reactive players don't get a much better treatment since the game lacks (noticeable) input buffering. Hitting a direction mid-slide doesn't queue that movement up when the slide ends, which makes the protagonist feel sluggish and unresponsive, as if she's taking a leisurely breath between actions. This can lead to a lot of stupid deaths where you're thoughtlessly inputting a correct sequence of actions (up-left-up-right-down) but if you don't wait for each animation to finish an input gets dropped somewhere (up-left-right-DEAD). Worse yet is that activating your abilities can freeze the real-time bosses but only when they're between their actions, meaning occasionally you'll miss your window to pause the boss fight due to a lingering animation. And then the boss with throw bombs at your feet, then the game will pause (but not the bomb timer), then you'll be frantically trying to unpause the game, and then finally blow up mid-slide to safety.

Even if the issues I mentioned so far weren't present, I still wouldn't call Red Ronin perfect. Not only are its puzzles too exacting for a game trying to be stylish and smooth, but critical information is easily muddled by the amount of enemies on screen. Foes lack a visual "danger zone" that lets you see their striking range, hiding the fact that they both move and attack adjacent squares. Although you'll learn this lesson very early on (the hard way), I think it would still be helpful to see their striking range with the press of a button. As more enemies are added into the fray it can be hard to parse which of them will move in what direction too—like, if there was an enemy to your bottom left and one to your bottom right, figuring out which of the two will move into the bottom middle spot first could be integral to your survival. This only gets worse as big guys and far-reaching foes are thrown into the mix, muddying things until there's not much else you can do besides blindly search for the correct path. Ultimately, as fights grow more chaotic and frustrating, you'll come to rely on trial and error to find the way out, which isn't nearly as satisfying as outsmarting your opponents.

Lastly—and I'm hesitant to even mention this—but the story is surprisingly not good. A "cyberpunk revenge story" doesn't need much besides a good aesthetic and cool tunes to listen to, but I was surprised by just how unfulfilling Red Ronin felt. It's main character is a selfish, thoughtless, bitter human being, bosses are weirdly flippant when staring down their would-be murderer, and any pathos the game shows in its dossiers is gone as soon as characters open their mouths. On top of this, the game opens with a cliche, in media res hook of falling of a building—and that scene is nowhere in the game! The whole thing ends on a cliffhanger! For most other video games I usually handwave away the story when it's not that strong, but here I was left flabbergasted by just how hard Red Ronin missed the mark. And it was such an easy mark to hit too!

I don't regret playing Red Ronin but I can't help but feel overwhelmed by its disappointments. I think part of it is that I find the concept really fascinating; most of the time action games get infused with puzzle elements, and not often the reverse. Throw in the fact that Sokoban puzzle games are a dime a dozen, and Red Ronin manages to shine all the brighter: it's nakedly violent, constantly creative (new mechanics every level!), and isn't afraid to give the ol' noggin a workout. But its strengths are diminished by too many asterisks, its two-faced nature splitting the experience in half instead of coming together. If you decide to try it, enjoy the first level—because it's all downhill from there.

Jetboard Joust - Thoughts

Jetboard Joust is a weird game that flounders like a fish out of water. Don't be fooled by its sharp retro aesthetics and vibrant art—there's a lot going wrong under the hood. You may be able to wrangle its chaotic gameplay and eradicate its volatile enemies in the first few stages, but gradually Jetboard Joust spirals into madness, eventually exploding—gleefully—into a fireball of noise, pixels, and flashing lights. Most of the game's issues can fit under the general umbrella of "needs tweaking", but I'm not convinced months of edits and updates could save Jetboard Joust. The rot at Jetboard Joust's heart is less tangible and more philosophical: it doesn't know what to do to make itself fun to play.

In Jetboard Joust, you're tasked with fending off an alien invasion on five worlds, each world comprised of eleven stages. For each stage you'll have to eliminate an unspecified number of alien waves while protecting itty-bitty alien kids from abduction. Should the alien babies get whisked off to the top of the screen, a super strong enemy will spawn... which isn't that big of a deal as a single joust can obliterate it. Sure, you'll lose a little bit of money at the end of the stage as a punishment, but ultimately saving the tiny tots is optional. Hell, it might even be preferable to let some of them get vaporized, considering how often the abduction alarm will be ringing in your ears. That, and the unskippable "civilians saved" animation work towards making you actively detest the helpless dummies you're trying to protect.

Luckily they'll be an afterthought most of the time, as you'll be dealing with a wide variety of alien menaces. As negative as my impressions are for the game, there are a decent amount of weapons and enemies to play around with, both of which expand as you make your way through the campaign. The most common enemy you'll face are fellow jetboarders, which can range from cannon fodder to aerial assassins—depending on what weapons are mounted to the tips of their boards. Like you, jetboarders have access to a huge assortment of armaments—specifically, your armaments. But unlike you, they're not bound by ammunition or feeble human reaction times, allowing them to wipe the floor with you should you misjudge the reach of their firearm. And that'll happen a lot, given how absurdly chaotic the screen gets as enemies rapidly populate it, all of them salivating for your demise.

Jetboard Joust's obsession with swarming the player is the first of its many pitfalls, as it turns the game's later worlds into an indecipherable gamble. Both the number of waves and enemies contained therein increase the further you get into the game, to the point that a single screen can be jam-packed with twenty or thirty foes you need to be reacting to. Worse yet is that enemies can vary wildly in firepower, capable of dealing anywhere from a sliver of damage to half of your health bar, and you have nearly no invulnerability frames, which allows a single misread to tank a run. Not since Wizard of Legend have I played a game where death is so effortlessly paid out to the player!

That's not to say Jetboard Joust is a hard game however, as it's fairly lax outside of a few glaring instances. Health and ammo are guaranteed to drop as long as you're doing a little bit of damage to your foes, a merciful mechanic that you'll need in order to survive the game's longer waves and boss fights. You'll heal to full health in between each stage and saving up enough money will allow you to purchase an extra life if you happen to fall in battle. Plus you're guaranteed an extra life before the big boss fight that caps off each world, which you can use to get a good handle on their capabilities.

But the real crapshoot is in the game's guardian battles: special encounters that occur at the end of individual levels. The enemy pool for this is vast and fairly random, handing you anything from easily-dispatched trash mobs to a battalion of Enforcers: enemies that can easily demolish you even with your best weapon at the ready. God forbid they warp in with a sniper rifle or shotgun, because in either case you'll be space dust in seconds. Almost no other game I can think of has such polarizing finales, where defeat or victory can be determined in the first five shots—and you often have no idea on which side you'll end up on until the particle effects finally fade.

Of course, even during some easy encounters you'll still have a chance to bite the big one, largely because parsing the game's visuals is a challenge unto itself (turn off screen shake ASAP!!!) While screenshots make it look sleek, Jetboard Joust's adherence to two primary colors creates a lot of unintended noise on the battlefield, especially since a lot of the info given to you (ammo, health, lives, abductions) is presented in the same monochrome shade. At the very least, the game needed to offer the player character more colors in order to make them stand out more easily; having each weapon come with its own unique palette would've been an easy way to tell which armament you have equipped, instead of forcing you to rely on a small text blurb at the top right.

Jetboard Joust's weapons are unfortunately another aspect that ratches up the game's zany factor, ranging from Goldeneye's klobb-esque tickle machines to screen-clearing explosions. Two weapons will be granted to you at the start of a run and then you'll have to seek out the rest on the map selection screen, often foregoing valuable treasure or upgrades to do so. This pushes the player to rely on the armaments they're randomly given, especially since any new weapons acquired arrive at their lowest level, requiring thousands of dollars of investment to get up to snuff. But in an effort to get you to swap weapons often, Jetboard Joust reduces your ammunition to a comical degree, granting only a few shots before you have to change your weapons up. And did I mention you can only carry a single weapon at a time? The rest of your firepower will be scattered around the stage as tiny pick-ups, blending into the background and often getting in the way of much-needed power-ups like health and ammo. In order to survive you'll have to swap weapons constantly, especially when you start to rub up against the game's wholly unnecessary durability system (yes, really) in later worlds.

The only other weapons innate to your standard board are a largely ineffectual pea shooter with infinite ammo and the titular joust ability. Jousting is a neat concept—it's a high-powered horizontal attack that's doubles as both a dash and bomb—but when and where joust restocks pop up are completely random. At times you'll be well-stocked and able to joust across the screen to your heart's content, but other times you'll be frantically searching for a single drop in order to safely dispose of a pursuing Enforcer. Along with your weapons, you're able to upgrade your jousts (and armor) for an increasingly high price—but where weapons scale asymptotically jousts scale linearly, meaning they'll be a sunk cost for the endgame. At that point jousts are mainly used as a quick escape so you can go surface skimming for the right power-up.

While most of the game is a kaleidoscope of exploding pixels, boss fights are where Jetboard Joust's high-octane madness slows to a crawl. These head honchos have an awful combination of bad traits: every boss is equipped with astronomically high health and hard to hit weak points, factors which are barely tolerable on their own but a waking nightmare when paired together. Without the right weapon fights can go on forever, as none of the bosses (besides the last) are effective at killing you, let alone hitting you. Sadly, you'll be struggling to hit them too, blowing through your best weapon's ammo as they rapidly jiggle around the screen. Eventually you'll get lazy and slip-up, all in an attempt to speed the process along, and maybe even dying—which means you'll have to do the fight all over again from the beginning! Worse yet is that bosses can appear randomly in stage waves later on—and sometimes multiple in the same wave! It's completely random!

All of these flaws meld together to form a game that feels barely enjoyable, but what really kills my desire to touch the game again is its padded length. Jetboard Joust is interminably long for an arcade shooter, taking roughly four hours to beat if you know what you're doing. Add in the fact that it's a permadeath roguelite and you'll feel like putting it down for good when you die three hours into your run on the last world. Thankfully you can unlock warps to future stages as you play through the game, but you won't be able to keep your prior upgrades and weapons. Instead—bafflingly!—you'll be given a random assortment of better weapons and upgrades, meaning you're almost encouraged to die and start from each warp point in case you're having trouble. Sure, it robs you of the true ending, but you'll have to play the game from start to finish without warps to achieve that. And considering that every stage is exactly the same barring which enemies spawn in and where, you'll have felt like you've played the game ten times over by the first time you reach its end.

Like a moth to a flame, I continued to play Jetboard Joust, even after I knew I wasn't going to enjoy it. But I was curious just how much craziness was left, as the horizon burst into coins, laser beams, and random doodads scattered about the floor. In a way I was reminded of some horrendously balanced PS2 games like Chaos Legion or Extermination, in how they urge you to press on because you don't know how it could get worse—but you know that it will. Given how much love and attention was poured into Jetboard Joust I feel it's unfair to simply write it off as a bad game, but I know one thing: it certainly isn't a good one.