Double post, as you all know this means there is something new that has happened. Oh also, REVIEW REVIEW!
New Jim Review I missed from a few days ago, it is a seven game cluster, but he stopped at the fourth one.
Garten of Banban I to IV (
a), he gave them 1.5/10, 1.5/10, 1/10, and 2.5/10 respectively. I won't collect the scores for all of these from other sources as they are mascot horror trash, seven games in about a year tier trash.
New Jim Review from today,
Still Wakes The Deep (
a), a game I was a bit interested in then saw the developer was The Chinese Room and decided I didn't want a Hold W Simulator bore fest nor do I care for the absolute trash that is Cat-And-Mouse Stealth Horror where you just hide and if you are found you decide if being caught and resetting is a better use of your time than surviving which is just a frustration simulator for me as they genuinely rarely feel like you're the reason you succeed or fail and horror is something that wears off quickly. So you know, the only two things those hacks make. I am sure it is very pretty and has amazing atmosphere, sound, direction, and aesthetics though. You know, because The Chinese Room doesn't make video games, they make interactive virtual art installations.
Jim, being someone who hates playing games and therefore likes the work produced by hacks, gave this little thing a 9.5/10. Metacritic is 74, User Score is 8.1, Steam is 90% at time of posting.
New Jim Review on
Puppet Master: The Game [
a], Jim gave it a 3/10 and is currently the only review at all on Metacritic. Steam is giving it a 86%.
Time FOR A REVIEW REVIEW ON
Puppet Master: The Game! A quick update on other people's scores, Metacritic doesn't care, not even userscore exists. Steam is still 86%. The way the developers act though, I wouldn't be surprised if they are deleting reviews.
Jim's Shit Review said:
Puppet Master: The Game is an impressively authentic representation of the movies it’s based on, because it’s complete and total shit.
I’m a fan of Full Moon Studios’ intellectual property, and it’s important I specify intellectual property, because the actual films are some of the worst schlock on Earth. Cheap, poorly shot, boring, littered with filler to pad the runtime. Some of them have so many flashbacks to previous movies that they’re literal clip shows. It’s shameless.
Jim opening like this shows a certain disdain for the source material, I never watched it myself so I have no opinion. It still sets a certain bias that I am not sure if it will maintain throughout or not, but puts him as suspect for everything going forward.
Their sideline operation, producing endless toys and replicas of their diminutive monsters, seems to hold itself to standards so far above the movies. It’s as if the media exists solely to sell the merch, and let’s face it, that’s probably exactly the case.
This is rich coming from someone as much of a coomer as Jim, who I know buys shit related to media that only existed to sell toys himself. That said, as someone who appreciates high craftsmanship toys and figures for the craftsmanship itself, I'd put some of the nicest Puppet Master stuff I've seen on shelves around the middle of the scale, but that scale is very pyramid shaped so it is still quite high quality compared to the competition all things considered.
It sure as heck works, considering I want to start collecting Puppet Master shit again now. Maybe they'll give me some as thanks for my review!
Look, it's becoming self-aware! It's evolving! That said, Jim's fans seemingly antagonized the developers in his comments and they talked shit in said comments as well, plus we already know he gave them a 3/10 so no way are they giving this fat fuck who can definitely afford to buy his own tat any free toys.
How thoroughly fitting it is that Puppet Master gets a derivative free-to-play game, a slapdash mess more concerned with charging ridiculous prices for DLC than actually providing a quality experience.
Finally he talks about anything to do with the game. Let's check those DLC prices real fast, because it could let us shit on the game with Jim, or call him a bit unreasonable in the claim of "ridiculous" when we're talking F2P. A quick look shows there are 8 DLC, each of which offers a collection of skins, not just a single skin, for one or more characters. Some of these are for a collection of characters and go for $7.99USD, others are for only two characters and go for $5.99USD, and there's a case of one for only one character that is $2.99 USD. The total cost of all these skins is only $50.92USD. Now one DLC here is uniquely a ripoff. That is the "Movie Edition Blade + Execution" which is only for a single character with a character skin, a collection of weapon skins, a new emote, and a new execution being sold for $7.99USD.
Over all, this isn't that bad for skin content for a F2P game. It's actually below average price as most games charge around $3 for a single skin, while all of these are skin packs. The biggest issue here is that if you don't want every skin in a pack, or only want them for a singular character, you're stuck getting the rest as there's no option to buy just what you want it seems. It is hard to call this "ridiculous" in any way except "ridiculously cheap for how this typically goes." Not saying such market practices are acceptable, but we all know Jim spends more money on loot boxes in a day than this game costs to buy out the entire collection.
Despite such a merciless introduction, my fondness for all this cynical crap has been with me since I watched Puppet Master II at six years old and became thoroughly terrified when a doll with a drill on his head bored into a dude’s skull. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by the franchise’s murderous dolls. A replica of Blade is one of my prized bits of tat.
Just tossing in more of Jim admitting he's a consoomer.
You’ll likely have picked up on how little I’ve spoken about the actual game, save for a few snide comments. This is because talking around it is more interesting than directly going over such shallow pointlessness.
Yes, I have noticed, and if that is true then man this game is incredibly boring as your review is the least entertaining shit I've done all night, and I just did some financial paperwork. Are you going to tell us how shallow it is, or just declare it so?
Let’s get to it.
Puppet Master: The Game is yet another asymmetrical multiplayer experience based on an old horror movie. Pulling not just from Puppet Master, but from fellow Full Moon “classics” such as Demonic Toys and Totem, it pits factions of puppets, toys, and humans against each other. The Totems make up a fourth group, but they’re so weak and wretchedly unenjoyable to play I don’t want to talk about them.
This here immediately sticks out, as to me this doesn't sound like "yet another" such game in this "genre" you seem to be railing against Jim so much you made a fucking video about it rather than talk about the actual news in the industry in a timely manner. Multiple factions being pitted against each other is a bit interesting and, if done well (I am assuming it isn't, because even I look at this and see shovelware), could result in a fun experience as you try to leverage your various faction strengths against each other. Asymmetrical multiplayer rarely works, however, outside 1v1 environments in my experience as it makes it far harder to balance than symmetrical multiplayer to start with and it is always harder to balance more players than less. The more asymmetrical the worse it gets. It seems that the balance is out of whack just from this bit however.
There’s a straight deathmatch mode between factions, as well as one that sees a single human player try to collect macguffins while three puppet players hunt them. If you want to play solo, there’s a fucking dire mode in which you play one of the little dickheads and run around doing Eight Pages Bullshit(™) while a single human enemy wanders around, it’s A.I. too stupid to represent even a minor threat.
So here we got a collection of game modes, none of which are typical for the "horror movie asymmetrical multiplayer genre" Jim has been railing against. Deathmatch is the most familiar as the
Alien vs Predator (2010) video game had a deathmatch mode, but that game is mostly just an FPS with a gimmick and is more based off of an action crossover franchise than a horror franchise. Is
Predator even a horror franchise?
Alien is about half the time when it isn't just being an action franchise, but
Predator has always been just action to me. Otherwise this is a "genre" mostly about a single lethal individual versus several victims. The 1v3 mode is seemingly an inversion of this as it is three lethal individuals hunting a single victim, and for the "Eight Pages Bullshit" mode all I can say is that is a different genre all together, and collection horror games typically have very poor and mostly harmless AI if you just calm the fuck down and learn the gimmick or they are just pure RNG death.
The actual gameplay this rubbish has been built on is frigging atrocious.
Playing it, you can tell what they wanted to make: a cat-and-mouse game of sneaky chicanery as puppets use vents, ceiling beams, and hiding places to take down much bigger humans. Whatever stealth or strategy was intended, however, hasn’t survived the reality of players just circling each other and spamming attacks until someone keels over.
Players always start off by taking the most reckless playstyles. This usually fades overtime as the community experience level increases, the question is if this is a case of the players just not having mechanics properly communicated to them, or if there is no good reason to use those other mechanics. Plenty of games like to toss in stealth and strategy mechanics that fall on their face because the pay off for using them is nothing more than maybe one free hit out of the 15 you need and the time spent doing so could've been better spent relying on blitz tactics to rack up kills.
Each character has a basic weapon and up to three unique abilities, though some have less, some have passive traits, and some have fuck-all going for them. The lack of consistency with each characters’ loadout makes the whole thing feel haphazard and unfinished. Even worse, there appears to have been very little consideration for balance.
A lack of consistency isn't an issue in such a game, so long as it is balanced, and it doesn't even necessarily mean things are unfinished. A good sign of something being unfinished to me, someone whose job is finishing games that are unfinished so they can release after they are behind schedule, is if it merely looks like a checklist of X things for Y types of things is being filled out. The lack of balance is the main issue here. If the characters all have their own abilities, and those abilities are not made equal inherently one way to balance the characters is to just give some characters less abilities, active or passive, to account for them having singular far more powerful abilities. I can't tell from what Jim has said here if that is what they were attempting, but I suspect they failed to do so if they were. The point still stands, just because the abilities are not made equal, does not mean the characters can't be.
Not all characters are created equal, something that becomes intensely clear during the “Puppet Wars” deathmatches. The Demonic Toys and especially the limited, ineffectual Totems pale in comparison to the puppets - they have far more characters with better defined roles, as well as more and better abilities per puppet.
Even among puppets, the imbalance is evident.
The way these lines are split up is just awkward in my opinion, but the point is a singular one, the characters are very much unbalanced and as this is faction versus faction that makes the overall asymmetrical balance far more distinctly out of sorts. The factions themselves should at least be fairly equal and fill similar general niches if you're going to do this type of thing, even if it is done in different ways. It is like in an RTS. You might have three factions who all have their basic fodder unit, but the way they do them might differ. One faction might rely on less units that are individually more powerful and durable with strong melee attacks, while the next relies on fast and numerous melee units that are individually weak but cheaper and faster to mass up, while the last relies on a fairly moderate fodder unit that happens to be ranged. I just described the balance of the basic units in
StarCraft II, Zealots, Zerglings, and Marines. In a game like this you might instead want to make one faction have a lot more generalists, another have more specialists, and the last have hyper specialists that absolutely dominate so long as they aren't hard countered. You might also account for this through different team sizes, as well as different individual power levels for each faction. An example of a game that did that was
Giants: Citizen Kabuto which was 5v3v1. Except here we seem to have the fourth faction, humans, which Jim hasn't described yet. I would assume they would fill the role of being able to swap niches. It also doesn't seem like they are of different party sizes.
You might notice I am barely talking about Jim's review, that's because it is more fun to talk around it than about it as he's so fucking boring.
Despite being the defacto mascot of the series, Blade is one of the more useless fighters, his abilities being a short dodge and eyes that expose enemies through walls for a measly three seconds. Beyond that, he just has his trademark knife/hook combo, which is mechanically indistinguishable from the other brainless hack n’ slash melee weapons.
Some of the puppets approach fun, though. Leech Lady is able to place her leeches like traps or throw them as projectiles, as well as crawl on all-fours with hilariously silly animations. She also appears to be so durable as to be downright broken if fighting her is any indication. Six Shooter’s lasso trap is his one lone ability, but between it and his powerful ranged attacks he’s very effective.
Decapitron is probably the most mechanically interesting, able to switch between three heads that either deal brutal electric blasts, provide passive healing for allies, or track enemies like Blade does - y’know, so he can be even more fucking redundant.
Here's some information on how the abilities function at least! The thing is, Jim doesn't tell us if these abilities are being backed with any passives or not. It does show that the puppet balance is a mess, however, but what about other factions? Are they defined by having more passive abilities? Are they defined differently at all? Or is it all a mess? You should communicate this shit Jim so we understand why it is shit!
Sadly, even at its most fun, it’s just not fun. Combat really is a disastrous mess, with melee attackers having no choice but to discard strategy and wildly attack - especially if their bespoke abilities are shit (likely). Some ranged attackers have borderline competent shooting mechanics, but not all of them, and nothing controls or handles in a way that feels tight or reliable.
Bad controls can ruin the fun faster than bad design, and even the best design can't overcome truly bad controls. Unfortunate it controls poorly and there seems to be a situation forcing melee into wildly swinging at each other rather than setting up ambushes as implied earlier. As a game designer my immediate solution to this problem is positional damage, in this case increasing damage done to the head and to the back significantly for melee attacks. The other thing I would want to do is have wind up attacks that leave you immobile and increase the damage you take during the windup in exchange for a massive increase in damage dealt. Maybe set it to be about 90% of what is needed for a one hit kill combined so there is a tiny grace period before you finish them off with the follow up for the other player to react. This type of mechanic would encourage an ambush style of play
The miniature killers can use vents and make use of an environment full of hiding places to theoretically get the jump on their prey, but once again, sneaking is worthless compared to pure aggression. Ironically, it’s human players who are best off hiding, despite the fact they have nowhere to do so. Outnumbered and outgunned, a human’s role is best played by avoiding everyone else entirely.
Thanks to their ability to kick enemies over, as well as some generous health recovery, humans are at least better balanced than half the characters people might actually play this game for.
Are humans outnumbered and outgunned due to there being less of them than the other factions while also having weaker abilities or because there are three other factions running around? He hasn't actually explained this bit! This is important for understanding how bad it is! As he is describing it in any given match there are seemingly a bunch of puppets, a handful of Demonic Toys, a few Totems, and maybe one or two humans, but I am not sure if that is how it functions in practice or if Jim's review is just shit.
Objectives, such as they are, seem to go on forever, with lengthy deathmatches and tiresome scavenger hunts making up the majority of matches. The “action” takes place across a selection of bland maps made up of repetitive rooms and corridors.
I asked some people I know with more time than me to go through and play a bunch of the games Jim described as "taking too long" for a given match previously. It seems "too long" is about 20 minutes at most. In the industry there is a fun little rule of thumb for designing gameplay and how much time people actually will spend on things where you're pretty safe. "20 minute loop/match, three hour sessions" that there is the vast majority of people satisfied and accommodated for. Deviating too much from that, up or down, tends to greatly damage your player retention and appeal. People play video games to relax and pass time, and that's the amount of time that you should be aiming to entertain them for. Jim bitching about this so often, especially for multiplayer games with discreet instances of play, really stood out to me and I want to go after this for a bit.
To explain the reason the rule of thumb is such, let's actually address the session length first: You get home from school, do some homework and play some video games before dinner. Three hours is about how much you got, with another three before bed. You get home from work, clean up, handle household chores, make dinner, eat, watch a TV show maybe and then decide to play some games before bed to do it all again, you will usually have about three hours to do so.
As for the 20 minute loop/match time, it turns out 20 minutes is just a solid length of time for people who like to go "I'll play one more X before I get off" when they are trying to decide if they can afford to spend longer on their video games or not. Anything shorter and people seem to decide they are spending too long in between matches, and any longer and they decide they can't risk another round. It seems the way this is currently being referred to is as "instances of play". Which is defined as: "Mission, match, quest, dungeon, or other such easily identifiable and discreet period in the uptime and downtime cycle of the game which can be used in the phrase 'I will play one more instance of play before I get off' as a way to determine a reliable, but potentially variable, period of playtime. This does not include time spent primarily menuing and preparing for the next instance of play, often called 'down time'." This is pure jargon and the type that gets shuffled up frequently, but it seems the current data I can get from the companies I work with are using that term in their analysis or simply refer to the more common terms that this is meant to encompass directly.
This isn't universal, but this is the type of fun data that the industry uses when designing mass market consumer products. We used to use the benchmark of one hour sessions, but it seems like three hours is a bit better. This also doesn't apply to narrative or exploration focused genres such as CRPGs and open world games. Those get their own weird data to go with them and are designed around such accordingly. These rules of thumb just cover the majority of the normie slop.
As for bland maps, well I have been bitching about the dying art of level and map design for a while. It doesn't help that good level design for PvP requires things to be short of too much visual distraction, and F2P needs to be playable on your high school/college school laptop to do well. You need to aim low for the requirements to make money off F2P due to the demographic and market you're mostly going to be pulling in. You also need to keep unique assets minimal so you can load the copies from memory rather than load too many from disk while playing the game while working with low memory systems in mind. This is something I am certain is an issue, but one that exists for a reason. Also highly detailed and expensive environments have a low rate of return for the time (and therefore MONEY) investment involved for what they actually do for your game and player retention. Aim for "good enough to not look like complete trash that isn't worth the price tag or my time", you don't actually need to go further so long as your visual style is decent. A place that gives better returns is actually sound design, music, and animation as those give information and feedback. If you're going to spend time on the more "artistic" aspects of your game, spend it there.
Visually, Puppet Master is pretty basic and terribly animated. The execution sequences performed on downed humans feature some funny kills - such as Six Shooter lassoing a victim’s neck before firing all six guns at point black range - but character models always clip through each other, move awkwardly, and ragdoll with little regard for physics or anatomy.
Lacking in sound effects and featuring only occasional little noises from the puppets and toys, it’s a quiet sounding game, with only the barest minimum sound effects backed by a very limited soundtrack.
And here we see they didn't spend the time there either. A shame.
As a freemium game, Puppet Master relies on overpriced cosmetic DLC, much of which is based on Full Moon Toys’ many variant replicas. Basically, they’re playable advertisements for that everso lucrative merchandise.
One particular skin costs damn near eight dollars, while others are sold in “packs” starting at $2.99 apiece. Character selection menus are designed to draw one’s eye toward all the costumes, weapon aesthetics, and obligatory emotes, some of which are amusing but none of which are worth paying for.
See above for the cost details. Jim is trying to make this way more expensive than it is. Also, I really don't feel this game hits the freemium definition, as nothing other than cosmetics are being locked behind the paywall, and that term typically refers to locking certain actual content or features behind the paywall.
Good luck selling that shit. Hardly anybody seems to be playing Puppet Master after only a few days, a pitifully scant few matches to be found running at any given time. Over several hours, I'd been able to join and successfully complete two games. Most servers are completely empty, and those that aren't have two or three matches running at most. It's a ghost town, unless the game is just so thoroughly busted it can't matchmake properly - neither scenario would surprise me.
I can't argue against this. I pulled up the numbers, and yeah, the game is a fucking ghost town and almost has been. That is more of what is impeding the sale of DLC than being "overpriced" every would have been. I would like to point out that Jim put out his review at the game's peak and was calling it dead. That is how little traction this game got, but there was a few hundred players in that window.
Honestly, this game at all stages seemed too small for someone like Jim to review it, as he typically goes for a higher tier of product. Premium Indie, breakout Indie Darlings, and A/AA/AAA is more his wheelhouse. There's a reason no one else has reviewed this game. It's a very tiny near indie project that never got traction with anyone since it just kind of looks shit when you see the screenshots and videos on the Steam page and only would attract a very specific niche community. If it wasn't for that "Full Moon Features" name under publisher I'd assume this was a copyright infringing fan game seeing that page. That's actually the weirdest part of all of this is that Jim even wrote this review, as this game basically might as well not exist for how minor it has been. Even if you're reviewing it on the hopes it is bad as it looks, it is still too small to try to drum up anything for the sake of just wanting to put out a low score and feed the negativity machine.
Also the game is buggy as fuck, though you knew that already, right? It’s practically an obligation for this kind of rubbish.
You mean any game released in current year? Yeah, I am wondering when the contractual obligation to leave everything a buggy mess expires on the game's industry myself, finally something we can agree on.
The world doesn’t need anymore licensed horror games copying Dead by Daylight’s schtick, let alone one as awful as Puppet Master: The Game. It’s a total mess, its mechanics so poorly implemented that any intended tactical combat has instantly given way to desperate hack n’ slash button mashing. It’s nowhere near entertaining or deep enough that buying its overpriced DLC is worth investing in, not least for the fact that almost nobody wants to play it.
Except, this isn't copying
Dead by Daylight's schtick. It is actually a pretty distinctively different playing game from what I see. The similarities are even less than superficial here, and to be perfectly honest I don't even like
Dead by Daylight, but even I can see how far the differences go and how little similarity is and I haven't even played
Puppet Master: The Game. That is like saying "Can we stop making horror games that include guns, they're all just copying
Doom (1993)'s schtick." The similarities are just too superficial for it to hold up.
Also, reminder Doom was supposed to be a horror game.
Can we turn one of these 80s horror films into something with some substance now? This asymmetrical online shit has clearly reached the barrel’s bottom if this is what we’re getting.
Agreed, just for different reasons. I think there's a real market for a game that has you play through an original story based on these old franchises that is narratively focused and franchise and genre aware and just leans into it for the sake of making an actual horror game, and it saddens me no one seems to be attempting such and I just like to see people experiment more with genre and adaptation of ideas into gameplay.
Overall, this review was really fucking boring, it took me six sessions of sitting down and typing this up. I actually have been working on this on and off for weeks because it is just so fucking boring and if I got interrupted it was hard to go back to. Jim said fucking nothing, and in the end I decided to just use it as an excuse again to talk about more interesting things. That's Jim's greatest sin here. He's fucking boring.
