Second Precipice
The episodic Penny Arcade Adventures continue to march along. We jump in on the second leg of the journey, but will we be lost?
Published: February 2, 2009
The longer you wait, then, to take action with a character, the more powerful their attacks can be (culminating in team attacks that can do a ton of damage and assisted by a little help from special supporting attacks that slowly become available over the course of multiple battles). When enemy strikes come in, if the block button is hit around the time of the strike, the damage is lessened a bit, and if timed perfectly, the damage is nullified and the character actually counter-attacks. There's a slew of particulars as to what enemies react to what kind of attacks -- Gabe's are physical (as are your character's), and Tycho's are projectile-based, and of course some enemies are weak against special or team attacks -- but at first I was pining for some kind of super attack meter.
It wasn't until I realized that each enemy had multiple attack animations that required different timings to properly block and that the game would reward you (both in counter-attacks and Trophies if pulled off with a long enough string) for actually learning said attacks that I started to understand why there was no meter. It not only encouraged plenty of concentration, but made the fights quick a bit more entertaining -- more entertaining than, say, customizing a character, anyway, which is laughably basic, though I did appreciate that the character bits you picked out would appear in their entirety in all the game's videos.
Those videos unfortunately highlighted one very annoying little problem with the game -- or perhaps more accurately with the Torque Engine that it runs on: there's a ton of screen tearing. It's especially pronounced in those comic panel-style videos I mentioned a second ago. Because they'll often make rather large, sweeping pans from scene to scene, it really does detract from what would otherwise be a nice set of Flash-style cinematics.
The rest of the game, fortunately, is a little easier on the eyes. Yes, there's still tearing all over the place, but Hothead's artists have done a commendable job of taking Mike Krahulik's art and turning it into an actual 3D model. The animations during battle (and even while just leisurely running from place to place in the main world) are varied and detailed, and the environments themselves have the kind of hand-painted pop that those old-school adventure games I speak so fondly of sported back in their heyday.
There's precious little in the way of actual audio beyond Jeff Tymoschuk's score, which is a jazzy, brassy collection of tunes, all of which are really quite fantastic. They're one of the binding agents for the overall presentation, giving the game the air of a noir mystery peppered with plenty of expletive-laced prose. The rest of the effects, while solid, are your standard grows, punches, rife shots and so on. Good, certainly, but the soundtrack is the star here.
If I'm being perfectly honest here, though, I have to admit that I'm a little nervous about writing this review. Adventure games were never something that I played back in the day while trying to break down the disparate parts like graphics or sound. Instead, it was the collective whole, all those bits; the dialogue, the puzzles, the music, the backgrounds that really drew me in. I haven't been this smitten with an adventure game... well, pretty much since both Sierra and especially LucasArts stopped making 'em. I was also humbled and, frankly, embarrassed by the writing in the game. It's not just chuckle-worthy; most of it -- from idle banter to descriptive text -- is hilarious, and had the (hopefully) unintended effect of making me doubt my own writing chops horribly.
What I'm getting at, what took me over 1400 words just to spit out, is that Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness - Episode Two (HA! I'm not too lazy to type it all out again!) is a fantastic little resuscitation of some of the most tried-and-true bits of gameplay out there. It harkens back to old-school console RPGs and PC adventure games alike, melds the two and yet still somehow manages to feel like its own beast. I rolled into things as Penny Arcade fan that hadn't touched the first chapter and walked out (yes, finally, after almost playing through the game twice) a massive fan of the game. I'll be eagerly awaiting what Episode Three has to offer.
