Drive Girls (PS Vita)

 Drive Girls is a game that had been on my Vita wishlist for a long time, and when you look at it on paper, it's not hard to see why: a beat em up developed by Tamsoft, with a weird gimmick? Of course I'm going to be interested! (The weird gimmick being that the playable characters are girls who can transform into cars.) Unfortunately, I recently got ahold of it, and it's a big disappointment.

 

The main problem can be boiled down to the fact that although the Simple series was dead by the time Drive Girls came out, it still displays in abundance the worst excesses of that budget range, despite being sold as a full price title. There's a lot of recycling: the enemies are various kinds of generic giant slightly robotic-looking bugs, with only a few models being repeated in different sizes and colours. Even more egregious is the fact that while the first two stages take place in different locations, stages two to six all take place in the same location!

 

But anyway, the transformation gimmick. For the first few stages, it's a lot of fun! You beat up the enemies, and when a new batch appears in the distance, you transform and drive towards, then into them, as a cool little opening gambit. You'll soon learn that the safest and most effective way of dealing with enemies is to transform and drift around in circles, doing big damages to any bugs that get in your way. Even this gets taken away from the player, though. After about five or six stages, rows and rows of landmines start appearing. The landmines do a ton of damage to you, but they're only set off if you go over them in car mode. So, in lieu of giving the enemies themselves an effective defence against your drifting, the game essentially punishes you for trying to use what is not only its main gimmick, but the most fun and effective way of playing. 

 

As well as the regular beat em up stages, there's some stages where you race another cargirl around a track. These are surprisingly straight-laced and down-to-earth. The only real deviation from a normal racing game in these stages is that you have a boost that's charged by driving through the small groups of enemies dotted around the tracks. It's okay, but nothing special, and very very easy once you've figured out that running over bugs charges your boost.

 

This game was a big disappointment. Tamsoft are one of my favourite D-list developers, but I guess Drive Girls really proves that they are still D-list nonetheless. Go and play one of the Oneechanbara games instead, and don't waste any time on this one.

Simple V Series Vol. 2 The Tousou Highway Full Boost - Nagoya-Tokyo Gekisou 4-Jikan (PS Vita)

 That incredibly long title means it's once again time to look at that most beloved of budget game franchises, the Simple Series! It's a bit of a sad entry this one, too, since as far as I can tell, Simple V Series Vol. 2 The Tousou Highway Full Boost - Nagoya-Tokyo Gekisou 4-Jikan is actually the last ever Simple Series game. It's also  a part of the same subseries as a game I've covered in the past, the post-apocalyptic longhaul road trip Simple 2000 Series Vol. 112: The Tousou Highway 2 ~Road Warrior 2050~. Which means that it's also a Tamsoft game! We all love Tamsoft, right?

 

Anyway, like Road Warrior 2050, it' another longhaul road trip, though this time it's set in present-day Japan, and as far as I can tell you're getting briefcases to deliver them to the yakuza so that they'll release your secretary, who they've lock in a dungeon. While Road Warrior 2050's journey was punctuated by occasionaly sections where you fought waves of enemies on foot, Full Boost breaks up the long drive in a variety of other ways.

 

The game's main gimmick is that it's not intended for you to complete the whole journey in one car. Most of the vehicle types get damaged very quickly, and all of them have alarmingly small fuel tanks. Obviously, a car with no fuel can't go anywhere, and also if you're in a car when it explodes, that's an instant game over. Furthermore, a car's maximum speed gradually reduces as its fuel meter and structural integrity decrease. So, you get out of the car, and try to steal another one. This is a part of the game that's a little sloppy, though, as the only reliable way of getting a car to stop long enough for you to get into it is to let it run you over. Inexplicably, this doesn't hurt you at all.

 

Of course, the police aren't going to just let you go on your highway carjacking rampage, and they'll regularly come along to try and spoil your fun. If a police officer catches you on foot, or pulls you out of a stationary vehicle, they'll try and handcuff you, and getting free reduces your stamina a little. Running also reduces your stamina. Despite all this, it seems like the developers wanted to create a non-violent game, as you have no way of keeping the police away, even temporarily. So if there happens to be a few officers around while you're trying to switch to a new vehicle, it can be a little awkward and very difficult to get away with it.

 

The last thing I want to talk about is the power up system. There are power-ups strewn about the roads here and there, and collecting them progresses a Gradius-style power up chooser along the bottom of the screen, with four different things to choose from. You might be tempted by the quick thrill of selecting Boost every time you pick up an item, but honestly, it's worth saving up four of them each time to get the last option, Guard. What this option does is gives your current vehicle an impenetrable rainbow forcefield, increases your top speed to how it would be if your car was undamaged and full of fuel, and it stops your fuel meter from depleting while it's in effect. Practical and fun!

 

The Tousou Highway Full Boost isn't some grand swansong for the illustrious Simple Series to bow out on, but it is emblematic of the series at its best: it's a fun, unpretentious game with a lot of low budget b-movie charm. I do recommend giving it a shot, though it's a download-only Japan-only PS Vita game, so its legal accessibility isn't great, and it's only going to get worse as Sony continue their policy of gradually pretending the system never existed. Still, if you can get ahold of it, you should. It's fun.

Uppers (PS Vita)

I really, really wanted to like this game. On paper, it has so much going for it: it's a modern beat em up that relies on neither ham-fisted nostalgia nor a grind-driven negative difficulty curve, and it has a ton of cool ideas and a lot of visual flair. It's all ruined, though, by one massive insurmountable flaw: it might not have a negative difficulty curve, but it doesn't have a positive one either. It's got a difficulty flatline. What I'm saying is that it's incredibly easy, to an extent I don't remember seeing before in an action game that wasn't made for very young children.

But I'll get back to that, after talking about the game's positives.  Like how all the stages have crowds of girls loitering around the place, and you can get statistical bonuses by impressing them with your fighting. Impress them enough, and they'll even give you love letters! There's also some weird slot machine thing involving them where you can win more bonuses, and a weird minigame that lets you lift a girl's skirt by tapping the X button fast enough for a few seconds. This stuff's all a little unseemly, but it is, at least, original. In fact, I don't remember a beat em up that has you trying to impress onlookers in this way. Surely it hasn't taken 30-odd years of the genre's exitence for someone to come up with this idea?

What I think is the game's best point is its use of weapons and the environment. Rather than being able to pick weapons up, carry them round and use them to clobber enemies, they're all instead parts of the stage. So you use the O button in the right place, and you'll swing round a lamppost to kick the enemies surrounding you, throw a motorbike into a crowd, or event flip a pick-up truck onto a group of foes. Conversely, you can punch, throw, and kick enemies into things to elicit effects: you can cause them to smash through walls, collapse piles of girders, explode burning barrells, and so on. Both these features really add an anarchic feel of mass destruction to all the fights, which is nice.

Of course, that brings us all back to the problem of the game's difficulty. All those cool ideas and visual bombast don't mean much when the game itself is easier than breathing. There's no tension, no friction, and no real excitement. Most of the enemies go down in two or three normal punches, meaning that you only need to use the cool environmental stuff for the tougher enemies and bosses. And even they don't put up much of a challenge. Uppers is definitely the game to play if you ever want to sympathise with Superman's "world of cardboard" speech. I've been playing for over two hours, with hard mode switched on, and still there's no challenge. It might well get harder at some point later in the game, but an action game really shouldn't make you play for multiple hours before getting to the "real" start of the game. Because if it does, then you're likely to just give up on it. Like I have given up on Uppers. One final note: it does have a proper printed manual, with colour illustrations and staples and everything!

Airship Q (PS Vita)

The first I heard of this game was that it was an import-only PS Vita game that had received an official translation, and instantly went and bought a copy, just because we really should reward the publishers who do good things like this, just as much as we should shun those who engage in unethical business practices like encouraging real money gambling and so on. (How topical! I feel lucky that none of the games embroiled in all this loot box controversy are even slightly appealing to me in the first place, though). Luckily, this all paid off, and Airship Q turned out to be a pretty good game!

As you look at the screenshots, I'm sure you'll be reminded heavily of Terraria, and there's no denying that that game must have been a big influence on this one. It's by no means a clone, though, as while Terraria might have an end goal, it's also a non-linear game that takes place in a large, procedurally generated open world, with a heavy emphasis on building bases and so on, Airship Q is a much more linear action RPG ala Zelda, that happens to take place in a world of mostly-destructible blocks, and in which you gather resources to make your tools and weapons.

In it, you play as a girl living in a world of floating islands who built a flying ship with her brother, only for her brother to be kidnapped by a witch, who also turned the two siblings into cats. Your aim (at the start of your adventure, at least) is to rescue your brother, beat up the witch and regain your human forms. In the course of this, you'll seek out statues that let you build more and more pieces of equipment, from stronger mining equipment to pieces of machinery that improve your airship. You'll also eventually find out some secrets behind the world when your true quest is revealed (though since this is a pretty recent game that's still available to buy brand new, I won't spoil things any further). There's even the possiblity of a cheeky bit of sequence-breaking, if you're smart!

It's a lot of fun to play. Dungeons largely involve digging around and building staircases to climb, while simultaneously fighting off hoards of monsters and seeking out the statues hidden within. Exploration has a totally different feel, as you fly around on your ship seeking out islands and dungeons, as well as occasionally fending off attacks from flying monsters,and even huge dragons and enemy ships (dragons are usually guarding some important treasure nearby, while enemy ships are usually great sources for resources like big cannons to steal and attach to your ship, and coal to power your machines). There's also cool little touches like how structures need to be built in certain ways, since unlike Minecraft, everything will collapse in short time if it's not built in a sufficiently sturdy manner (though that's fine if you're just building a temporary bridge or whatever).

Again, I don't want to spoil all the cool little moments and touches that this game holds, so I'll end this review here with a strong recommendation. Airship Q is a great game, and you can pick up a brand new physical copy for really cheap, too!