The biggest trap for a video game analyst is to believe that a review is only to explain how good is a game in question. The artifice of the numerical note has traditionally made us believe that it is a linear progression, a comfortable ascending straight line, separated into ordered and manageable segments (the indigestible four, the disappointing six, the desired ten). That number that has been so countless discussions so in the center, has, in fact, a utility: it is nothing more than one more tool available to the critic so that it can do its job, one more way to communicate, which is in reality the central focus of almost everything we do. Arrange them to express efficiently, whispers also stimulating, what exactly is the game in question, who can go, transmit something, and also, what kind of person would you prefer to stay out.
The note is nothing but a synthesis of that process, it is the result of cooking a dish, the analysis itself, which somehow crystallizes how it has been for the cook (the analyst) the experience, but of course it does not reduce it nor exhausts. The note of an analysis, I like to think, is like the packaging that has a package before opening it, the form that reflection has taken throughout the process. One can intuit the content, such as imagining what a movie is by carefully observing the cover, but in the same way it is ridiculous to think that one already knows everything about it after just seeing the cover, so is the opposite : Assume that the cover has no value or says anything, that it is preferable to do without it. Because the reality is that, in fact, you can judge a book or a movie on the cover, and we all do it constantly. It is an absolutely natural process in an ecosystem where the media noise is very high and any opportunity to filter in the midst of the storm of proposals is a good opportunity. It is a fallible system, as almost all, with respect to which the text intends to serve as a scaffolding, of the support that strengthens and structures a reflection with respect to which the note is nothing but the conclusion, which, as always, is necessary but not sufficient. No one can deny that the note has a necessarily superficial value; But that is a notion that can also be invested: the surface is, in any case, always a value.
For me, the sense of good criticism is precisely to participate in this filtering process, a sacrificed work, often not very grateful, but also quite mundane, a work with a clear purpose and function to which, in my humble opinion, You never have to miss. A good criticism is a well-packed and correctly delivered package, it is a process that tries to carry an object from point A, the video game, to point B, its potential audience, detailing the ways it can have to be of interest and providing Keys that enrich the dialogue that the player will maintain with the product. The extraordinary critic (among those who personally does not include me) is able to raise this completely common process and turn it into an art, is able to extend it, to mold it, to introduce its voice and make it something beautiful and memorable; But that extraordinary critic, ideally, will never betray the fundamental purpose, that primary function that has a good criticism: to be informative in a clear and forceful way.
There are many ways to do this, and it would be incredibly arrogant for my part to pretend to offer here the Rosetta Stone of video game analysis, I do not believe even good enough or have the confidence necessary to provide ultimate keys on how this work should be done, but from my humble and small corner, I think I can say that, as with that threshold that separates a good criticism from another directly great, which separates a good game from an extraordinary one is nothing but that ability to rise above Your fundamental responsibilities.
Metal: Hell singer is a game that starts from a very powerful idea. In The Outsiders, the study he develops, someone asked: what would happen if we gathered the 2016 DOOM with Crypt of the necromancer? In other words, what would happen if we gathered the revival of the Boomer Shooter of recent years with a rhythm game? It is one of those ideas so good that one cannot avoid wondering how it is possible that it has taken so long time when someone occurs. There is of course the precedent of BPM: Bullets per minute-at which Hell singer even copy the idea of joining the rhythm indicator to the shot grid-but it is fair to recognize that the game distributed by Fun com, owned by the Tencent conglomerate (whoops! ), Double production and ambition values are separated to the title indie of Awe Interactive or considers.
Not all games are born, unfortunately, the same. There are because they position themselves in certain genres whose commercial success and viability is more than demonstrated, they have it infinitely easier than others, more ambitious or avant-garde, which assume more risks with the hope of getting rid of the rest. Metal: Hell singer is ambitious but not too ambitious, it is the kind of game to which it is enough to meet a series of minimums, in this case, to capitalize on that idea of mixing shorter with rhythm game to be satisfactory. With the exact amount of trade, a dose of intelligence and sufficient lucidity not to lose sight of the finish line, a robust, forceful and satisfactory game is obtained. Metal: Hell singer is all those things, and from this tribune I would say that it is very complicated that things do not go well.
In this case, we are facing a game with respect to which the most interesting conversation that can be maintained is not so much that it is good or bad, as of what separates the good from the directly extraordinary. For me, what defines an extraordinary game is the ability too essentially. Games like Dark Souls or Breath of the Wild, are not limited, in my view, to be simply good. They are games with a brutal terracing capacity, which not only show their own quality, but they are and have been able to modify the speech on the video game as a whole; They are games that possess and define fundamental keys, which nail the flag with them, and without which it costs to understand the current state of the medium and industry. But this may be even one step further, because when I talk about essentially, I do not refer so much to the ability to transform the speech on the video game as a whole, but to something sensibly simpler; It is, rather, that the game is presented in a way that is impossible to imagine a version of itself better than the one we have in front.
Placing within the framework of the Boomer Shooter, there are many and very large This suffered prolonged exposure period to Call of Duty. The list of games to highlight is fortunately long, and one can mention titles such as Dusk, Ion Fury or post void with the conviction of talking, in all cases, of great games. However, if I had to opt for an extraordinary one, I would choose Devil Daggers.
Devil Daggers is an incredible game not only for everything he does, but also for what not. Its proposal is aimed at establishing fundamental minimums, carefully choosing what it constitutes the essential in a novelty_: music, a certain aesthetic presentation (giant skulls, diabolical colossi, unfathomable darkness) enemy patterns, the movement understood as permanent dance, climbing of being able to obtain increasingly powerful weapons to end progressively more macabre enemies. Everything Devil Daggers puts on the table seems irrevocable, his is an equation in which to change the slightest variable would cause the whole set to fall below. At the same time, one does not know how your proposal could be developed, how to take it even further. Devil Daggers is an essential, complete and total game, and if he defined how extraordinary thus, as that ability to essentially, then Devil Daggers is the most extraordinary game where there are.
Returning to Metal: Hell singer, it is very difficult to imagine someone who can displease his proposal. The combination of the rhythm with the shots and the need to adjust each of the actions-the recharges, the elusive, the changes of weapon-to the rhythm of the music installs a tempo, defines a cadence that seems immensely gratifying. It is one of those games that click and with which you want to chain games without stopping. The answer is solid, the weapons are good, and it is nice to shoot them, the enemies define interesting patterns and the sands have the right dose of obstacles and recesses to offer both opportunities-at the spilled play-as traps-at which they do not pay enough attention. The question at this point is evident: Metal: Hell singer is a good game, but is it orcould be extraordinary?
In my humble opinion it could be, but it is not. Unlike Devil Daggers-as he said, essential, complete and total-metal: Hell singer is left over a few things. For example, the presence of a plot seems accessory in itself in a game like this, where most of the load is resolved in the mechanical, but it could serve to define some issues that could be interesting treated in the proper way. The premise of a female demon who has lost his voice could, for example, establish an interesting speech about empowerment, or perhaps offer a fantasy of power to an audience that has traditionally been excluded in such proposals. The idea of recovering your voice, in the context of a musical game in which we only listen playable What in any case seems obvious to me is that, in all possible ways to articulate the proposal, play through an epic story brilliantly narrated by the award-winning actor Troy Baker.-Surely the worst.
There are other factors, such as the presentation of the unlockable, the mobile game style, in which we are detailed under the epigraph content unlocked during this session the entire challenge of irrelevant rewards that we have achieved in the game. There are also Side quests, offered as optional challenges also accompanied by a narrative by the award-winning actor Troy Baker-thanks to God!-where we are further developed the background of the game. In these missions, runes are unlocked that allow us to obtain skills that clarify and offer mechanical advantages with descriptions that in a gesture of perhaps excessive arrogance on my part, in no case I have bothered to read.
They are not elements that bother, do not dirty or hinder the flow so satisfactory that the game takes once entered into the subject, with the pistol in the hand and the music giving cane. But at the same time, they are not elements that add or contribute anything; On the other hand, they do generate a somewhat annoying noise, while diverting attention from the important thing, the powerful playable nucleus, towards addresses that in the best case contribute absolutely anything.
There are other clearer problems, such as some somewhat scarce duration (eight levels of between 20-30 minutes, designed, on the other hand, to be relegated several times), the repetition of bosses and some strangers bugs with the detection of collisions and geometry of the scenarios. And this is already a matter of taste, but there will be those who aesthetics, which never deviates from the stereotypically metallic, with all its relevant representations of hell with a lot of lava and many zombies and many skeletons, know little.
Metal: Hell singer is enjoyed the more one concentrates in everything that is in the center, the gameplay, the playable response, the movement, the pressure and the emotion of not losing the combo, and is progressively diluted as we direct attention to all that periphery of irrelevant aspects and elements. How to properly value a game with which I have tired of saying that it is right in everything important, and only fails in the anecdotal. Maybe retaking the question I introduced at the beginning: in The Outsiders someone said: What would happen if we gathered the 2016 DOOM with Crypt of the necromancer? Metal: Hell singer It’s nothing less than that, but it’s nothing else. In my opinion, that is not turkey mucus either.
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