Tag Hero Shooter

Plants Vs Zombies

Impressions: Plants Vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville – Complete Edition (Nintendo Switch)

Sean Alexander
Plants Vs Zombies
Join the Battle for the Neighborville!

EA and Frostbite finally make the leap!

EA and the Nintendo Switch haven’t always gone hand in hand. Support has been light, with numerous indie efforts from EA Originals, and the yearly undercooked FIFA Legacy Editions. But now EA and developer PopCap have seen fit to finally bring Frostbite, and their family friendly third person shooter, to Nintendo Switch.

Firstly, some context: Frostbite is EA’s in-house engine, developed by DICE, primarily for FPS titles like Battlefield, but lately has been the basis for Madden and FIFA among others. This engine was once touted as impossible on Switch and was the excuse for EA not porting their proper titles.

For further context, Battle for Neighborville is a 2019 shooter similar to the Garden Warfare series. This entry drops character variations, and featured heavy monetisation that led to the player base falling. On other systems this title is simply a mess. Support was dropped one year in and future updates are scrapped. So why bring this game over now?

A little gameplay snippet for your eyeballs.

So How Is This Different?

So Plants Vs Zombies hit a rough patch. Here though, PopCap has made what is in essence a different game. While it does run at a lower resolution and at 30fps, this is by far the definitive experience.

Firstly, the monetisation aspect has been removed. There is no premium currency and no purchases. Every cosmetic and reward in the game is gained through standard coins for completing missions and playing multiplayer. If multiplayer isn’t your fancy, this version also includes offline PVE in multiplayer settings.

All the Prize Maps from the other versions are available at once to be cleared at your leisure, and Prize Bulb rewards are now easier to gain. You can now carry 999 of these and costs have been reduced for items.

Even character upgrades and the few unlockable characters are cheaper than ever and always available to buy. The random cosmetics are half the price of previous versions, and pay-outs for tasks and playing games are increased.

Add in touch menus and highly customisable motion aiming, and this is the way to play Battle for Neighborville today.

Is Anything The Same?

In terms of game balance and structure this is still Battle for Neighborville. Matches are 8v8 instead of 12v12, which tasks players with considering their team structure more. No longer can each class be accounted for in a match.

Character upgrades, assignable via upgrade points, remain as well, as do the heavy cosmetics. These are good incentives for levelling up and promoting characters, and different situations will have you mix and match depending on the mode.

Speaking of multiplayer modes however, at the time of writing only two of the modes are permanent: Garden and Graveyard Ops, a co-op experience, and Turf Takeover, a more Overwatch styled objective based game.

Team Vanquish (Deathmatch), Vanquish Confirmed, Gnome Bomb (A capture the flag style game) and Suburbination (King of the Hill) are all weekly events that will cycle through. This is both strange, and also understandable. The core mode is Turf, and while having at the very least Team Vanquish accessible at all times, a good weekly variety should keep players engaged. This also feels reactionary to the state of the player count on other systems.

All the single player modes and PVE are accounted for here too, even the fully online hub world.

Nothing like a cheeky snipe at point blank!

How Is The Multiplayer?

A big thing for this title is multiplayer, and this is where the game shines. Matches are quick to get into, responsive and joining with friends is easy, either in game or using the Switch’s built in invite system.

There is little to no lag, and though right now there is some AI backfill, you’ll find humans a lot of the time. Matches are quick, fun and frantic, and even amongst clouds of explosions and fire, the Frostbite engine remarkably doesn’t falter. The only drops to frame rate are in cutscenes.

All this goes on flawlessly while also enabling video capture from the Switch itself, a feature some intensive games remove. Every match will be different, but no less fun and engaging: It’s easy to get lost for a few hours both in handheld and docked mode. It’s a great time regardless.

So it’s Good?

Plants Vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville – Complete Edition, is easily the best version of this game. Removed from the business practices that bogged it down, and while effectively a stagnant game without updates, this is the version I see lasting the longest. Frostbite has translated marvellously to the Nintendo Switch, and it truly feels like it belongs on the hardware. All the quality of life improvements shine through and bolster a very robust multiplayer experience.

Paladins is an interesting release on Switch

Impressions: Paladins (Nintendo Switch)

Sean Alexander

Paladins manages to be a fun game on the surface and in gameplay, but it has a few steep cliffs.

Paladins is an interesting release on Switch

Paladins went free to play on Switch so we got a chance to try it out!

Paladins is an interesting title. A Hero Shooter with various modes and teams of 5 battling it out for supremacy. Each character is unique, each mode offers new challenges.

There are daily rewards, levelling up both your characters to unlock new skills and your general account for rewards. It’s all very progression based.

Which is exactly why this is a free to play game.

 

How Does It Look?

Paladins looks fantastic on the system

Paladins looks mighty clean on Switch

Paladins looks good on Switch. Nothing about it feels off, though the dynamic resolution can be very obvious in high density moments, but everything is smooth and fluid.

There are a variety of HUD options and placements, cursors and more. The UI is very customisable with one caveat.

As health bars of allies show up a “Sickly Green” when impacted with a status ailment, and enemies are red…a colour blind mode would have been very helpful!

 

How Does It Play?

Some of the load times are a bit extreme

Paladins can at times take a good while to get going however.

The gameplay itself is fairly simple, divided into 3 modes. Team Deathmatch where you compete to get the most kills, Siege where you battle to capture a point and then escort a payload to the enemy base, 1 point for each action, first to 4 wins.

Finally there is a standard Control mode, where you occupy a marked space and accumulate 400 points to win, fighting off the other team to do so.

These modes are all good fun, however the Siege mode lasts for far too long compared to the others, especially when wrestling for control.

Controls are snappy and responsive, and nothing feels out of reach. Interestingly you can get battle buffs by performing well during matches, earning credits to spend for that match. This is best done while respawning of course but it keeps things dynamic and allows you to adapt.

Of course this all comes with a downside: Load Times. Loading can take a while and especially getting into a match. It’s nothing major but for something on a console known for being snappy, this is a bit surprising.

Stage variety also seems a bit light, but that could just be bad luck during matchmaking. It’s hard to tell.

 

Let’s Talk Progression

Sometimes simplicity is best.

Paladins is an absolute behemoth of monetisation, and it’s confusing.

Progression in Paladins is strange. You level up characters and unlock cards and new abilities for battles, clear daily challenges to earn Gold and maybe even Crystals…but getting more from the game is hard.

You have a very limited number of characters initially, and this makes choosing one difficult since the game doesn’t allow duplicates on a team. Further to this, finding the characters in the store is difficult, and expensive in terms of Gold, as they are buried amongst voice samples and outfits etc.

But most egregious is a Battle Pass, akin to Fortnite with challenges for rewards, that you pay for with Crystals, a Season Pass, that gives you all Battle Passes, and various chests of randomized items.

Crystals are the premium paid for currency and the sheer wealth of options for expanding what you can simply do in the game is insane. It’s a complicated and frankly worrying mess that so much is gated off, as the game is genuinely fun.

But if this seems like an issue, there is a Buy All option with the Founder’s Pack. For a fee you unlock everything and this is how the game initially launched. I would recommend that over the restrictive Free To Play release.

 

Overall?

Paladins is an excellent game marred by some weird choices for monetisation. It tries to accommodate every model known to the industry at once.

This is the biggest downfall of the game, as what is a very fun time is locked behind a grind and premium rewards.

If you want to see the game in action, we have a two hour stream below:

 

Thanks for reading everyone, and don’t forget to share what you think of Paladins on social media or try it out for yourself, it is free to start after all. Until next time, Happy Gaming!

LawBreakers: You Can’t Sell a Game on a Name

Sean Alexander

LawBreakers is an interesting game. Not really from the game part though.

 

So who has heard of Cliffy B? A man whose affectionate nickname stands out because of his involvement in titles such as Gears of War, Bulletstorm and Jazz Jackrabbit…okay maybe just the first one. He also worked on a lot of the Unreal series. So yeah, guy has a resume.

His latest project was LawBreakers. A competitor, not-competitor to Overwatch. Using anti-gravity mechanics, you could move in ways that differentiated the gameplay from its other hero based shooter brethren.

Unfortunately LawBreakers has been a bit of a flop. In some respects that’s an understatement and I’m sure the game itself has a lot of heart put into it, as the development team is clearly passionate, as is the publisher, but sales wise, it didn’t do well, and it’s player base is unfathomably low.

 

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Personally the first reason I can think of this happening is obviously Overwatch. If you want to release a hero based shooter, you need to stand toe to toe with the marketing juggernaut that is Activision-Blizzard. You need to be able to outpace and match Overwatch, no matter how different your gameplay is, it’s occupying the same space and aiming for the same players.

Just like Battleborn, another game that was attempted to be sold on name alone. Sure, Gearbox software has a name to them, one of…mixed quality…but it’s still a big name. But that enough wasn’t going to stop Overwatch, which release just before it, from casting a shadow and kicking the game aside. Not even going Free To Start saved it.

LawBreakers fared even less well. It came long after Overwatch had established itself as THE Hero shooter title. Millions of players, millions in revenue, it’s a juggernaut. What hope did LawBreakers have of snatching some of that away, especially without the marketing behemoth that is Blizzard behind it?

 

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The next thing that stood out to me, or rather, didn’t, was how under the radar this game was. Before release I was aware of a beta. I was aware the game existed, but I didn’t know much about it. All I heard, and all a lot of articles really said was that it was kind of like Overwatch, and a game from Cliffy B. What the game was certainly could have been conveyed better, especially what made it different from Overwatch, and it certainly didn’t quite grab the zeitgeist like a viral hit would.

The weird thing is, who can say why this happened? I’d certainly like to believe it is because, yet again, you can’t be a comparatively smaller publisher shouting your lungs out about a game, when there is a man with a megaphone right next to you. You won’t win that battle, not without some unprecedented windfall.

It could have just as easily been a case of not presenting the rights parts of the game.

 

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The next point is what I think really damaged the ship. As I stated a lot of the buzz around the game was “It’s from Cliffy B!” and while that CAN sell a game, it more often than not doesn’t.

Example: Mighty No. 9. From Keiji Inafune. Game wasn’t that good really. Heck even long-standing industry veterans can’t sell a game on name alone. The name of the company behind it, or the franchise in question can certainly reach the masses. Granted the game still needs to be good. But the masses don’t know the individuals. Ask anyone who Shigeru Miyamoto is. They don’t care about that. They don’t know the people.

More so, you can certainly say “Oh, this is the man behind the concept”, but…what about the rest of the people actually making the game? Yes, Keiji Inafune could say Mighty No. 9 was his idea but the rest of the team was responsible for execution. A single name behind a game does not a good product make.

 

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The reason I wrote this article is that publisher Nexon had a huge $32.6 million expenses hole in its financial reports, and naturally investors want answers. Apparently that was to be filled by LawBreakers, and the response the company gave was…interesting?

“…the timing of its launch turned out to be unfortunate, specifically the blockbuster PC online game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds came out right about the same time, making the market environment very tough for first-person shooters in general and for LawBreakers”

Source

Now I can understand this being the case on PC. But on consoles? Well Xbox One only just got PUBG and the PS4 hasn’t yet and won’t for a while. So this argument even if true only holds partial water. But on top of that no mention was made to the in-genre competition from Overwatch and Paladins.

But as I mentioned, even prior to launch this game didn’t really spark interest or catch attention. Nexon was banking on sailing a ship into a port already full to bursting with other similar ships. PUBG was just passing by.

 

This just goes to show that your name can’t sell a game on its own, and nor is throwing yourself into a crowded space without catching the eye of consumers a good idea.

And blaming a game that was passing by? A lot of other games managed to sell well this year despite PUBG being a thing. But damage control is damage control. You can’t tell investors “Our bad” otherwise confidence plummets. When you have a huge black hole in finances the last thing you want is people jumping ship.

 

 

As always I hope you enjoyed this article and that you give it a share and comment on social media! Until next time, Happy Gaming!