Treadnauts

Sep

2019

Review Update #4

Sophomore Slump

We’ve hit the Terrible Twos, people, the second anniversary of this website. This last year saw my productivity drop to a trickle as outside events pulled me away from my work (Player 2 and I now have rings, for instance). For half of the year, I wrote only two or three articles a month, significantly lower than my previous six or so. I apologize to my random visitors (who aren’t family and friends) who have been hoping for new content.

This is the cool part though. I have random visitors now. Every week, I see a steady stream of viewers come to my website, and for some reason, my Gorogoa review still gets a lot of hype. Mind you, we don’t have a Solomon Rambling fan club, but we could if I play my cards right.

This year saw me pushing back into the fiction world. Subreddits like r/shortscarystories and r/nosleep have thriving communities, and each story I have posted has resulted in a surge of viewers. I won a contest, and my stories have been narrated twice. Someone even said I was their favorite writer on the subreddit. Blush.

I reference this game later, so it’s relevant.

It hasn’t been without its problems. I have become a popularity whore because I don’t want to write a story that won’t get views. Science fiction and long third-person horror just don’t have the viewer base on Reddit. Unless my story is horror and 500 words or less or is “written realistically from a first-person view,” I can’t post it. Hell, my favorite story, “None of You Can Write a Good Twist,” was taken down because it treated other stories on the subreddit as if they were fake. I get they have a theme, but holy hell, there are a number of stories on r/nosleep which break or bend the rules but stay up somehow. God, it’s amazing how “Heaven Comes for All” even managed to stay on there.

I’m salty; I know it. Although I always wanted this site to be a place for my fiction, there is a part of me who wishes people came in equal masses for my reviews. I appreciate those who read my stories, but I would love to see comments on my reviews (barring those found on my Katamari Damacy review). I would love to be criticized by a disgruntled gamer.

Fetishes aside, it’s been a weird year. We’ll see how my junior year compares.

This, too, is relevant and spaces out the text nicely.

As for the whole “Review Update” of this article, I don’t have much to say. The Nintendo Life community has recently been shredding apart the site’s reviews, so I’ve pondered how I can improve my reviews. Lately, some of them have felt weaker than I would prefer, but I have loved others. Regardless, I have no scores to change.

As for the games, Flat Heroes continues to be absolutely amazing. Every person who comes to play loves it, and it is so easy to get into. I could play that game for hours. Crawl, comparatively, has proven not to be a hit. The controls and rules of the game are far more complex than I had previously thought for newcomers, even if they get it by the end. Four-player games are also too chaotic, making three-player games the best. Although I have not played it with anyone recently, I wish Treadnauts was more popular in my home because it’s the multiplayer game I miss the most.

Other than that, it’s all been new games for me. Hopefully, we get more people commenting on my reviews this year. With more discussion and discord, I might actually change a review score.

Jan

2019

Review Update #3

Are We Done Yet?

Damn you, Solomon. Damn you and your principles and your review updates. I now know full well why other reviewers never look back on their past articles. After a certain point, you forget what you’ve written, and you definitely won’t remember exactly why you handed out a certain score. I am barely able to avoid repeating the same jokes or introduction paragraphs. How can I be bothered to actually reflect on my life choices?

I’ve certainly questioned if I should adjust a score in the last five months. Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, Treadnauts, and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime are all games which I’ve considered. After playing Firewatch and Gone Home, I now appreciate Night in the Woods more. However, I won’t change a single score. After reading Past Solomon’s critiques, I trust him more than Current Solomon’s nostalgia.

Gone Home has also made me reassess the validity of my high scores. Critics loved Gone Home, and after playing the game, I can confidently disagree with their lofty “88” rating on Metacritic. I just don’t think the game is that good, and I recognize people could say the same about Katamari Damacy and Gorogoa, two games I’ve hammered with a 9.5 score. Do I feel my ratings are off? Hell no. Based on my parameters, both games are near perfection. That doesn’t mean others care about my parameters.

This is why I like Metacritic and review scores. No review can tell you if you’ll like a game, even if you read through it all instead of skimming the conclusion. It’s a single opinion; that’s it. If you are interested in a particular title, I recommend you go on Metacritic and read at least these three reviews: one which gave the game the highest rating, one which gave the lowest, and one which scored somewhere in the middle. This brief survey will give you a pretty clear picture regarding if you should go forward with the purchase.

And that’s enough ass-kissing for Metacritic. In terms of updates, the Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth + received the most content when Nicalis gave out the other booster packs (including a new character). As a testament to how much I’ve played Isaac, the update has done little to make me interested in the game again. GoNNER also earned a whole new underwater section (and some other knick-knacks) which just seems to pad out the game more than anything. The developers for Treadnauts gave some extra love to their players in the form of new options for multiplayer plus the ability to shuffle all stages together. It’s cool that they did this, but I haven’t really played more than a few rounds since the update.

I know in my last review update I promised to show how my review scores add up to other sites, but I forgot where I put my Metacritic template, and I’m too whiny and lazy right now to make it again. Suffice to say that my more recent reviews have increased my overall average. I’m still theoretically more negative than my compatriots, but I’m getting more neutral.

On a final note, I want to take some time to shit on the Jackbox Party Pack 3. It’s the only game my family is willing to play, and out of the different games we could play, they only like Quiplash. I’m sick of it all. I’m done making witty penis-related jokes. I have a website for that. I don’t need this in the rest of my life, god damn it.

Oct

2018

Treadnauts

A Pleasant Panzer Party

Like a Swiss Army knife, the Nintendo Switch carries a couch multiplayer game to cater to just about any social situation. For large casual crowds, the Jackbox Party Packs or Super Mario Party can eliminate those long awkward periods of silence. Games like TowerFall, Puyo Puyo Tetris, and Crawl can appeal to your geeky friends on game nights. The likes of Snipperclips, Overcooked 2, and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime set the mood when you and your buddies enjoy both cooperation and high blood pressure. Even when you’re desperate for anything, there’s 1-2-Switch.

Treadnauts strives to blast a niche for itself in your multiplayer library by throwing you and your compatriots into a bunch of tanks to shoot and stomp each other into smithereens. At first glance, this “competitive platform fighter” may look like a simplistic romp due to its basic premise: destroy the most tanks or survive the most rounds. Although it does boast accessibility, Treadnauts also offers surprisingly intense matches in which dexterity and acrobatics determine the true tank champions.

The developers strayed a little far from realism when designing the tanks. The war machines push forward relatively slowly on their treads but miraculously can climb walls and hang from ceilings. Holding ZL removes your traction entirely and sends you sliding across the arena. Each tank carries up to three shells which gradually refill over time, and tapping or holding X fires a straight or angled shot, respectively. The tanks can double jump, and firing mid-air sends them in the opposite direction of the shell. Using this recoil, you can reliably keep your vehicle in the air with consecutive shots.

The character select screen provides a space to practice with the controls, and once you’re ready, you and up to three humans/computers can move onto the arenas. You choose from four themed locales, each of which contains 10 unique stages (plus four unlockable ones) which cycle after each round. The variety goes a long way to keep the gameplay from going stale, and the developers fortunately added an option to mix and match stages between locales after the game’s release date.

Each round, itself, typically lasts under a minute. A single shell obliterates an opponent, and your treads can accomplish the same by crushing your enemies underneath them. In terms of defense, you’ll rarely outrun your attackers on the ground, but both your bullets and your treads (with enough momentum) can destroy enemy shots. In the air, you can be nigh untouchable with proper shot placement.

Most players will have a grasp on the basics after two or three matches. After an hour or two of playtime, you’ll be comfortable with maneuvering through the air, positioning yourself for a stomp, or countering shots at you. However, even several hours into the game, you may never feel entirely in control of your tank. Treadnauts aspires to replicate the maneuverability of the cars in Rocket League, but the controls don’t provide that precision. Aiming your tank mid-air can feel overly sensitive, resulting in misplaced jumps or shots. More frustratingly, your controls are reversed when your tank is upside-down. Your left is its right, and although this would make sense to anyone below the equator, it’s plain unintuitive for the rest of us.

As such, Treadnauts is better geared for casual competition as opposed to hardcore bloodbaths. However, you can customize your matches to play just about any way you want. Like a child with no fashion sense, you can mix and match whatever modifiers you like, such as slowing the gameplay, enhancing your tanks’ mobility, giving everyone jet packs, making everyone invisible, eliminating all in-stage items, creating teams, or replacing shells with lasers. If editing your own rules doesn’t appeal to you, Treadnauts offers preset rules like a no-frills competitive mode or “Sherman’s Chess” in which your bullets can freeze mid-air, creating a minefield out of the map.

As you play, you gain experience points, and each level up grants even more modifiers. The thrill of unlocking new content eventually turns into a chore as you realize one level equates to 6-7 multiplayer rounds. The customization options enhance the gameplay and stand out as the main highlight of Treadnauts, so it’s confusing that the developers locked much of the content behind arbitrary point values. Unlocking everything can take up to ten hours or more, and grinding levels may wear at your sanity before you reach your goal.

For those who appreciate the cold isolation of a single-player mode, Treadnauts’ Target Test tasks players with destroying a smattering of targets under a set amount of time. Across the forty stages, you’ll need to slide, fly, and shoot perfectly to nail a gold or platinum medal. These medals yield considerable XP, but the time limits demand such flawless execution that you may struggle to even rank silver. Coupled with the aforementioned control issues, achieving the coveted gold on each stage takes dedication, payloads of time, and a bottle of aspirin. Without online leaderboards, Target Test will have little appeal to many players and leave you longing for other single-player options.

On the presentation side of things, Treadnauts adopts a light-hearted, cartoony look which sports quite a bit of character, from its overly distinctive tank pilots to its celebratory champagne shots to its snarky comments between rounds. The music complements the tone well enough but is usually lost amongst the sounds of explosions, engines, and the tears of the fallen. The game runs smoothly for the most part, but four-player matches can experience occasional frame rate issues.

Conclusion

Amongst the multitude of quality multiplayer Switch games, Treadnauts offers a quirky and inventive experience best enjoyed in 4-5 round increments. Its immediate accessibility engages new players in its frenetic action, and the huge menu of modifiers creates a substantial amount of variety for dedicated gamers. Even with competent bots and Target Test, this game isn’t for those going solo, and it asks a bit much from its players to fully master the controls or unlock all the content. Despite this, Treadnauts mixes the right amounts of chaos, skill, and strategy to liven your social situations with friendly competition and celebratory shouting matches.

Arbitrary Statistics:

Score: 7.5
Time Played: Over 5 hours
Number of Players: 1-4
Games Like It on Switch: Rocket Fist, TowerFall

Scoring Policy

A Pleasant Panzer Party

Conclusion

Arbitrary Statistics:

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