Developer: Phoenix Labs
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
I would describe Dauntless as a more simple version of Monster Hunter. It is to Monster Hunter what Fornite is to Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. To further that metaphor Dauntless is free and shares a very similar art style to Fortnite. Dauntless launched a few weeks ago while I was away for Memorial Day Weekend. The queues were three or four hours long and people were digging it. After seeing that I decided to see what it was all about. My initial thoughts of it being a more simple version of Monster Hunter was spot on. While you hunt monsters in a large area there are much fewer weapons with less complex movesets. After killing a monster you get some of its pieces in order to craft more armor, but there are less kinds of monster parts.
It's a cool thing, because the fact that its free makes it available to a much wider audience. I also think that it will work as a springboard for people to eventually get into Monster Hunter. Since Dauntless is free it has a lot of free to play elements. There is a battlepass that levels up as you play, much like many first person shooters on the market. You can pay for better prizes and higher experience gain in the "Hunter's Pass" as well as buying consumable items and things of that nature. The few hours I played for I had a good time, but felt it was too simple as someone who plays Monster Hunter quite a bit. Some of my friends who played hit a wall, that made it so they would have to grind a ton to move on. This is something that happens in every game, but is often exacerbated in free to play games.
I don't know that I'll go back to Dauntless, but it is a really cool game. Everything you do leads to progress, so even if you're going back to fight weak monsters with friends you're still making progress. The absolute best part is that it has full crossplay. PC, PS4, and Xbox one users can all play together at the same time. In the future the game is coming to Switch and they'll be in the hopper as well. It's an awesome thing that gives me hope for crossplay in the future. The issue for me is that once I played real Monster Hunter everything trying to ape its style feels like a pale imitation to me.
Game: Cytus Alpha
Developer: Rayark
Platform: Switch
A few months ago I started playing a mobile rhythm game called Cytus 2. In addition to be a unique and interesting rhythm game it also had a very cool story. The original came to Switch with all the DLC and I just had to pick it up to see what led to the awesome game I had been playing. What I got was essentially the same gameplay (which is great), but with an interesting story portrayed in a boring way. While Cytus 2 has you leveling up characters, figuring out codes, and reading in world messages Cytus Alpha dumps text on you in paragraphs with no real context.
In the world of Cytus Alpha a disease has crippled humans and their plan to survive is to freeze everyone while robots rebuild the world. Things don't quite go as planned and some of the robots become sentient. It's interesting, but just reading large paragraphs of text between playing songs doesn't make it compelling. I never looked forward to completing 8 songs to read this story, whereas in Cytus 2 I constantly want to see the next story beat.
The good thing as that as a rhythm game it's great. For the Switch they added a button mode that is functional, but doesn't feel great. When playing handheld you can use the touch screen, which works surprisingly well on Switch. I prefer the touch control, because it's what the game was designed for and it feels cool to tap around the screen like a pianist. The way the game plays is a horizontal bar bounces up and down the screen. Circles will appear, and when the bar coincides with them you have to tap their center. It starts off simple, but with the addition of hold and slide notes things get hectic pretty fast. Cytus Alpha is a great collection of everything the original Cytus had to offer at a much cheaper price than buying all the DLC in the mobile game.
Game: Ace Attorney Investigations 2
Developer: Capcom
Platform: DS
In May the fan translation patch for the Great Ace Attorney finally finished. In a state of excitement I ordered the Japanese cartridge and learned that I would need to get custom firmware on my 3DS in order to tun the translation. I added custom firmware to my old 3DS, because if I messed it up it wouldn't matter too much. Thankfully all the tutorials online are almost foolproof and go into super in depth explanation about every aspect of the process. Being high on the success of getting custom firmware I then went on to add DS emulation to that 3DS. I've had a cartridge for Ace Attorney Investigations 2 for a while, but the translation for that game only runs on a dumped ROM in an emulator. Personally playing DS games in an emulator really bothers me, so I got the real thing running on my 3DS!
Much to my dismay I remembered that I had never beat the original Ace Attorney Investigations, so I started that over and ended up completing it over the course of a few weeks. It was an enjoyable experience, but man is the second game much better. The first case drew me right in, but then I fell off the game in the second case. It was so poorly paced that when I got to the third case I had to put the game down and take an extended break. I'll eventually get back to it and complete it and move on to the Great Ace Attorney.
Investigations differs from traditional Ace Attorney games because you play as a prosecutor. Everyone loves Miles Edgeworth, but now you get to play as him. Regular games in the franchise see you navigating areas through a series of menus, but with Investigations you move Edgeworth around manually to investigate crime scenes. The original Investigations introduced a mechanic called "logic" that sees you combining two pieces of information to come to a new conclusion. Investigations 2 layers another mechanic called "logic chess" on top of that. Edgeworth enters into 1 on 1 conversations with people. Throughout the conversation you look for tells (similar to newer games in the franchise) and attack statements that may be false in order to gain more information. It's an interesting mechanic that mixes things up further from the traditional Ace Attorney games.
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