![]() It’s also more reasonable than its predecessor in that shopkeepers won’t immediately turn hostile towards you if a random act of God causes trouble in their shop, and you’re given much more light in the notorious dark levels this time around, making them a little more forgiving.īut the biggest difference in Spelunky 2 is that it is no longer a linear progression of levels that has you going from mines, to jungle, to caves, to temple, and for the truly hardcore, to Hell. It doesn’t sound like much but it’s a godsend in a game where your very limited health is persistent from level to level and the only other reliable way of restoring it is by locating and bringing a lovable animal friend to the exit (alive). The most substantial leg up is that, if you’re okay with being a soulless monster, you can bomb turkeys for life-restoring cooked meat. Mossmouth does do a few small things to make the early goings of Spelunky 2 at least a tiny bit easier than the original. You get just the right amount of mid-air control to make pinpoint-accurate jumps with great speed, and just the right amount of leeway on timing to easily make jumps in tight spaces that would be extremely frustrating in a lot of platformers. It helps, too, that the controls are a dream. This feeling of getting better, and knowing that it's not because of anything but your own skills and knowledge, is incredibly powerful, and it makes Spelunky 2 one of the most rewarding video games I’ve ever played. But even though your character doesn’t get any stronger between runs, your brain is continually armed with new experience that can help prevent that same death from happening again… or at least if it does, you know it’ll be your own fault. ![]() “Dying is punishing, yes, as it causes you to restart all the way at the beginning and lose whatever powerful items you might have obtained in your previous life. What ends up happening is that the more you play, the more a visual language starts to take form that allows you to instantly recognize whether you can drop down without taking damage, if there’s something around that can be used to trigger an arrow trap rather than your own body, where you should use a bomb or rope to find an easier route down instead of taking the danger-filled main path, how far away you need to be in order to avoid harassment from the tiny ghosts surrounding the witch doctors, and so on. (Oh and you Spelunky pros who don’t fear the ghost and instead use it to increase the value of scattered gems, just know that’s not going to be quite as easy this time around.) To survive for long you have to read the room accurately – and do it fast. At the same time, the clock is always ticking: if you take more than three minutes on a level, a nigh-unstoppable ghost spawns and will relentlessly hunt you down. “Part of the genius of Spelunky’s design is that its randomization demands that you carefully examine each area so you don’t run head first into an arrow trap, or get bounced by an enemy onto an insta-death spike, or drop an ill-advised bomb where it will do more harm than good.
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