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Supergiant's Pyre: Wizard (NBA) Jam

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I just burned through Supergiant's latest, and I'm still really impressed by whatever they're putting out. It has all the aesthetics merits of Bastion or Transistor, plus some excellent, surprisingly-deep quasi-basketball gameplay. I was particularly impressed by how it seemed like the AI actually knew how to exploit the rules the way a player might. For example: players have auras that, if you run into an opposing player, that player gets taken out of the game for a few seconds. The character holding the ball, however, doesn't have an aura, which encourages you to sometimes toss the ball at an opposing player and immediately bum-rush them, banishing them. It's a simple but somewhat-unintuitive consequence of the rules (the game introduces tossing the ball as a way to score goals, passing to your teammates is another button), and I was floored when the AI pulled it on me before I figured the strategy out for myself.

 

Beyond that, the story has some really great hooks, mostly playing out in Banner Saga-style interactions as your team travels from match to match. The second-act turn when you discover

Spoiler

that you can only have your teammates return from exile one at a time (meaning your roster would slowly leak its most experienced players), weighed heavy on my mind for the rest of the game in the best way.

The story even accounts for you losing matches, to the point that I'm pretty sure you could lose literally every match in the game and still finish.

 

So, uh, anybody else playing it?

 

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I'm playing it. It is the first Supergiant game that I unequivocally like. I enjoy sports games that don't exactly parse to any real world sports games, and I think the visual novel meta-layer that it is wrapped up in is a natural fit. But uhh... I can't find too many other people that think that. So far I've heard a lot of complaints from people that enjoy the sports game that find the visual novel stuff tedious (it is a lot of reading involved in this game), and people that enjoy the story seem to hate the actual mechanics of the sports game. So that's a bummer, but this is the first game they've made where I totally enjoy all the interactions involved in the game, and the production values are out of this world like all their games.

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This is sounding like something I'd like. There was a mobile game from a couple of years ago where you were a highschool football player and it was visual novel choices like whethet or not to steal the opposing team's mascot before the match and how to deal with drama. Then ylu would play a football minigame that felt like it influenced the story. I loved it.

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5 hours ago, clyde said:

This is sounding like something I'd like. There was a mobile game from a couple of years ago where you were a highschool football player and it was visual novel choices like whethet or not to steal the opposing team's mascot before the match and how to deal with drama. Then ylu would play a football minigame that felt like it influenced the story. I loved it.

 

This sounds kind of entertaining. Do you remember the name?

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1 hour ago, Gwardinen said:

 

This sounds kind of entertaining. Do you remember the name?

 

Surviving High School: Football Star

I don't know of a way to play it anymore but here is a YouTube series I haven't watched.

 

 

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I'm about halfway through Pyre. Its just as polished and solid as Bastion and Transistor and has a great sense of style. I've still yet to be challenged though even using the Titan Stars if I have *ae on my team I can warp to the ball and drive it to the pyre with infinite stamina, or with a leveled up Pamitha- take the ball to a corner and then fly at the goal and it doesn't really matter how strong the AI is in that situation they are going to lose. I feel like this could be a really great sports game in versus mode (unfortunate that it has no online play) but the balance in single player doesn't quite get there because like most sports games, the AI is not adequately good at playing the game

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Yeah a 3 vs 3 online multiplayer team game would be the dream. Obviously I understand that would require a lot more balancing and resources that are outside the scope of even a successful indie studio, but still...

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Finished this yesterday! Total masterpiece. Everything worked together perfectly. There are parts of Transistor that still cut a bit deeper for me (the ability customization and music, basically) but overall, I think this is Supergiant's best game by a good margin. Certainly their fullest and most engrossing. I loved the setting and characters, loved the Rites gameplay and was incredibly impressed by how responsive to player choice it is. I kinda want to jump right back in and play it again.

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has anyone played this with mouse and keyboard? I found Transistor interminable with controller but really liked it when I played it like dota. From quick looks, the pace of the game seems well suited to M+K since it seems to treat your units like an RTS. 

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4 hours ago, Reyturner said:

has anyone played this with mouse and keyboard? I found Transistor interminable with controller but really liked it when I played it like dota. From quick looks, the pace of the game seems well suited to M+K since it seems to treat your units like an RTS. 

 

The controls on keyboard are undeniably odd (W, Shift, and Space are the keys used if I remember correctly, though I enjoyed the use of the mouse.) I never found them to impede my play though, and I loved the game overall.

 

I would probably rate this as my second favorite Supergiant game, close behind Transistor. The writing is my thing, the gameplay is refreshing, and the music and art are outstanding as always. Without spoiling anything, I found one of the game's main non-action mechanics to add a lot of significance to my choices, which I hadn't been expecting at all. My only real complaint is that the game is overly easy on the default setting even with a lot of the optional modifiers turned on (though certain team comps are much harder than others to play against,) so I'm planning on going back through on a higher setting.

 

Would very much recommend.

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I played on M+K, but modified the controls to use more of a WASD setup than the point-and-click default, because I found that a lot more intuitive. I have a feeling that a controller would be ideal though.

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I quite like this game but I loathe the sportsball. It's the same disastrous thing that happened with Frozen Synapse turning into Frozen Endzone. I just can't enjoy sportsball computer games, and I've been trying since Sensible Soccer, probably (maybe speedball?).

 

Luckily the art, writing, world and characters are enough to make the ballgmae speedbumps bearable.

 

Supergiant games all have in common for me that their mechanics are adequate at best , from Bastion's meh Zeldalike, to Transistor's irritating pause and sprint gameplay to, well, this. But they are still just such a joy to partake in just because everything else draws me in. Oh well.

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