Gaming PlayStation 4 (Console)
- Thread starter Biscuit1871
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Onrush is free for psplus members ATM, it's pretty good tbh. Could do with some tweaks but a good game to just jump into for a quick round.
Anyone been playing Thronebreaker? Just finished first playthrough and really enjoyed it.
I just bought Hong Kong Massacre - will play it when I get in this eve but looks amazing fun!
I was just browsing on the store, saw this, and the video had me sold! It's only £13.99 - so am not expecting the deepest game, but it looks like a shot of John Wick style action!
I was just browsing on the store, saw this, and the video had me sold! It's only £13.99 - so am not expecting the deepest game, but it looks like a shot of John Wick style action!
https://www.psu.com/reviews/the-hong-kong-massacre-ps4/Every single moment I spent playing The Hong Kong Massacre I never wanted to stop. Every time I narrowly missed a bullet, killed the enemy that shot that bullet and cleared a level, I just wanted to keep playing. Similarly, whenever I died I wanted to have another run through a level and try to succeed where I had just failed. At the end of every level, I breathed a sigh of relief upon succeeding as the camera zoomed in on my final enemy as they slowly fell to the ground, lifeless.
The Hong Kong Massacre manages to stay compelling, intriguing, and enjoyable across its 35 levels. The game oozes with a style that translates into an awe-inspiring ride where I couldn’t believe the moves I was able to pull off with the tools the game gave me.
The Hong Kong Massacre has a vision for what it wants to be. It aims to emulate the classic John Woo action movies, but bring that stylish slow-mo’ action to videogames. It delivers on that vision. Action and chaos are constantly taking place around you, whether it is a window being smashed by a stray bullet or five men surrounding you all shooting shotguns and pistols. There is no escaping the crazy action that Vreski have placed into every level of this top-down twin-stick shooter.
You will enter a room and enemies will immediately notice you, even if their back is turned. You cannot stealth your way through the game. You have to commit to being in the middle of the action and be capable of making split-second decisions that can end your run or complete it. By split-second decisions, I do mean split-second. Everything in the game is fast, snappy, and inhumanly fast. Enemies walk faster than you, they, and you, die in one shot and gunfire will instantly travel from the barrel to the other side of a room.
You will always be in the middle of the action in The Hong Kong Massacre, there is no escape.
The small independent studio from Sweeden does allow you to manage this in a few ways. The central mechanic that emulates Vreski’s vision and fundamentally allows the game to work and be enjoyable is the option to slow down time at any moment. This results in you being able to survey your current situation, dodge otherwise impossibly accurate bullets and plan your next movement. The Hong Kong Massacre is this mechanic. The game revolves around halting everything around you and using that time to cause your own chaos. It needs to be used at all times to ensure your success
However, that mechanic doesn’t come in an unlimited supply. You have a meter that will slowly drain during the moments where time is slowed down, quickly refilling when you return the streets of Hong Kong to the regular flow of time. This forces you to make wise use of that meter as it won’t stick around forever. If you are able to use this meter effectively, then you can stay in slow motion for an extended period of time, due to the fact that it refills partially upon killing an enemy. This creates a risk vs reward scenario. You can push further into the action and refill that meter but at the risk of losing it all if you are not an accurate shot.
The second mechanic works in tandem with the other. The dodge move allows you to slide underneath bullets, cartwheel through enemy gunfire, and leap between buildings. During this dodge you are invincible, allowing you to dodge that impossibly precise enemy gunfire.
Dodging over bullets and through windows is insanely cool and fun to pull off, creating the game’s best moments.
Using this while slowing down time creates the best moments of The Hong Kong Massacre. Bursting through a door, sliding underneath a spread of shotgun shells, turning around to headshot a second enemy, and bursting through a window to do it all again is a thrilling loop that is both visually stunning and incredibly gratifying. Watching yourself pull off moves that overcome incredible odds felt awesome in level one and continued to surprise me all the way to the end. That is set to a pumping and vivid electronic soundtrack that emphasises how awesome you are at playing The Hong Kong Massacre.
These mechanics combine to emulate classic action movies in an engaging way and commit to the vision Vreski went in with.
The Hong Kong Massacre Does Shake Things Up
That gameplay is at the core of the entire game. However, Vreski does throw a wrench or two in the works to change the moment to moment action. The clearest way they do this is through the four different weapons you can equip and use to take down the countless Chinese thugs you will face.
You first start out with just two pistols that are a good base weapon, accurate and deadly. But, before you know it you are able to switch between a fast firing SMG, a deadly, but cumbersome, shotgun, a rifle with plenty of ammo, and the aforementioned pistols. Enemies will drop these weapons, which you can then pick up and use.
This becomes necessary to do as all your weapons, including your starting weapon, come with only one magazine. Eventually, by playing through levels you can unlock all of these weapons as starting weapons, allowing you to go into every level fully prepared.
On top of that, these weapons can be upgraded, increasing their rate of fire, handling speed, and ammo capacity. These are mostly minor increases, with ammo capacity being the most noticeable. Above all, these upgrades are there to assist you in later levels which throw more enemies at you, in more congested spaces. Changing weapons does add a nice bit of variety, although I found myself mostly sticking to the rifle due to its accuracy and ability to have 100 bullets when upgraded.
Weapons and their upgrades add a nice bit of variety into the mix.
Variety is also added to the formula in the form of boss battles. These take place along rooftops with you on one side and a gang kingpin on the other. You shoot at him across that rooftop, jumping from building to building, through windows, killing grunts as you try to land as many hits as you can. These levels feel like a movie scene and it wouldn’t surprise me if Vreski were directly inspired by a similar sequence.
However, this situation is repeated five times. All of the bosses play out the same way. You jump from building to building, landing bullets on the boss, whilst trying to dodge gunfire from grunts. It holds up the first couple of times, but by the final boss I grew tired of them and was left disappointed, as I felt a lot more could have been done with these fights from a creativity perspective.
Boss battles start off interesting but get old and boring by the end of the game.
Vreski also implements enemies with body armour into the later levels, requiring you to land two hits to kill them. This does cause you to rethink how you approach situations and it does make those situations a little more challenging. Speaking of a challenge, there is some replay value for hardcore players. Each level offers three challenges: beat the level in a certain time, complete the level without missing a single shot, and complete the level without using slow-motion.
These are INCREDIBLY tough and should provide a nice challenge for those seeking it. On offer are more points to upgrade your weapons. I was nowhere near good enough to complete these the majority of the time.
There are a bunch of stats as well as three challenges for hardcore players.
The Hong Kong Massacre Ain’t All Style
Despite my thoroughly incredible time with the game, it does have a few flaws that dampen the experience occasionally. For starters, I haven’t mentioned the game’s narrative yet for a reason: it isn’t very good. It starts off intriguing as you a police officer are being interrogated as to why you have shot up numerous buildings (these are the levels you play, which occur in the past) filled with Chinese gangs.
However, there isn’t really much of conclusion to that story. The game ends on a whisper, rather than shouting in the same style and vivaciousness that is present in the rest of the game. It is a fine backdrop that allows the gameplay to exist, but there isn’t anything engaging past that.
There are also a handful of levels that suffer from large difficulty spikes, either from having far too cramped interiors, having way too many enemies on screen, or both. There were a few times that I spent longer than forty minutes on these short minute-long levels, slowly becoming more frustrated at the unfairness of the situations I was thrown into.
This was all compounded by the fact that your character’s brown coat blends in with the muted colour pallet of the environments, making it hard to see him in chaotic situations. Bullets suffer from a similar issue as they can often end up hidden behind shattered glass or wood. However, as I said those issues occurred only a few times and they were spread out enough to not make me feel like I had a hit a roadblock.
The game suffers from the main character blending into the environment during some darker levels.
The stylish, shoot ’em up, slow-motion action of The Hong Kong Massacre is a thrilling and just plain cool way to spend a few hours. The game offers you that feeling of being in an action movie, pulling off the impossible and living to tell the tale.
It offers ‘water-cooler moments’ where you can talk to your friends about the awesome tricks you were able to pull off and the crazy situations you found yourself in. The issues it does have are few and incidental that although they may create frustrating moments, the overall package shines far brighter than them.
The Hong Kong Massacre is a challenging, yet deeply gratifying experience you should give a shot. This is an excellent debut for Vreski and makes me excited to see what they do next.
I think the guy(s) that made this posted it on neogaf a year or so ago. Looked good back then too... How long has it been out?
Think it was released a couple of days ago on the 22nd.
This was on the PS blog over a year ago:
Really looking forward to playing it!The Hong Kong Massacre promises balletic slow-mo shootouts on PS4
Swedish developer Vreski channels the spirit of classic Hong Kong action cinema
Hi, my name is Anders and I am one half of a game studio called Vreski, based in the city of Malmö in south of Sweden. We are currently completing our first game to be released on PlayStation 4, The Hong Kong Massacre. I would like to use this post to talk a about how the game came to life and different parts of the development.
Around three years ago we started working on a prototype that would be the foundation of the game as it is today. When we first showed footage from our prototype, we were overwhelmed by the positive response we got from people all around the world. It encouraged us to keep working on the game while trying to improve it as much as we could. Now we want to share what we have been working on.
The game is a fast-paced top-down shooter set in the city of Hong Kong. Inspired by Hong Kong action movies, the game lets the player engage in hard-boiled gunfights around the city in levels ranging from restaurants to building rooftops.
Our initial goal was to make a simple yet fun game with inspiration from old arcade games with modern visuals. We decided from the start that we would only be two people working on it: me and my brother, with some external help for music and art. Therefore it was important to keep the scope of the game small, while we kept focus on making every aspect of the game as good as possible.
The game started as a simple prototype in a top-down perspective where the player could only walk around the levels and attack enemies. The first feature we added was slow motion. While holding down a button, the time would slow down and allow the player to better plan for the next action while making it easier to avoid enemy bullets. Because the player will spend a lot of time in slow motion, we made sure that everything that happens in the game – like visual effects, animations and sound – looked and felt great while in slow motion.
Next up was of course a dive/dodge mechanic. A Hong Kong action game without it would not be a proper one. With the press of a button the player can perform a contextual dive action that includes jumping between buildings, dive through windows or simply slide on the ground. Using this action is essential for the player to survive on a level, plus it looks pretty cool.
With these two core features implemented, we felt the game loop was fun and challenging so we moved on to the next focus area; gunfights.
Taking inspiration from Hong Kong action movies we knew that the gun action would need to look and feel as good as possible, because guns will be fired a lot in the game. Adding destruction, effects and debris to all possible areas was done to get the feeling that whenever the player fires a gun, hell broke loose.
Putting all the above together, we feel we have made a game that is both challenging, fun and visually appealing and we can’t wait to get the game out for you to play.
And if anyone was worried, yes, there will be white doves in the game.
Thanks for reading.
Shame it's not local coop tbh. Would have been my next purchase...
Looks like Hotline Miami with bullet-time and extra special effects thrown in. Could be decent I guess.
Are the Tomb Raiders good games? Rise of the Tomb Raider is £8.99 on the Store and Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition is £4.99. They worth picking up?
They're all entertaining action puzzlers with decent if linear storylines and a decent mechanism for weapon crafting/upgrading. Very much like the Uncharted games really and all have a solid 30-40 hours of playthrough on the main campaign and there's something really satisfying about the stealth and thought that goes into bow combat that you miss in the usual machine gun fest of the Uncharted series.
Replayed Rise just before Christmas and then finished the most recent one over 4 days in the lull between Christmas and New Year before getting into RDR2. Both definitely worth picking up at that price.
Bloody hell I didn't have you down as a gamer
Thanks. I probably won't play them straight away as I have a few other games to get through first, but as you say for £13 for the pair I may aswell pick them up. Spend more on my takeaways
Bloody hell I didn't have you down as a gamer
Thanks. I probably won't play them straight away as I have a few other games to get through first, but as you say for £13 for the pair I may aswell pick them up. Spend more on my takeaways
Just because I’ve been around since Pong and Space Invaders doesn’t mean I’ve hung up my joystickYeah the tomb raiders are brilliant imo, there's a bit of everything in there and some of the settings are beautiful, only downside is it doesn't give much option in the way to do things. I don't mind that though, it's a game where you don't need to spend all your life figuring stuff out and remembering everything. It's a nice filler between big games imo.
Enjoyed the first two. Is the last one worth a look then?
Definitely worth a go, as good as the last two with some slight tweaks to the mechanisms and an even greater emphasis on stealth (blending into earth banks Rambo-like after covering yourself in mud) with some more interesting side missions and better developed npcs. Similar to Rise in that there's a supernatural enemy guarding the secret and kicking Trinity's arse too which leads to an intense run up to the final fight as they're much faster and more mental than the deathless ones.
Enjoyed the first two. Is the last one worth a look then?
It's no Horizon Zero Dawn, RDR2 or God of War but a great filler between the games that need you to devote your life to them for a month.
Fair enough, I'll give it a go.
I finished Detroit: Become Human this weekend, it was actually very good. It's certainly Quantic Dream's best one yet for me. The choices and outcomes felt pretty convincing most of the time. And I really enjoyed the main characters. Better than the reviews in my opinion.
For Honour and Hitman Series 1 are this months games, not played either. Any good?
I've just smashed through Spiderman, RDR2 & God of War one after the other. Where do I go from that?
I assume you've played Horizon?
Aside from those I'd say Persona 5 and Yakuza 0 are the other standout games of this generation, for me anyway.
Yeah although I nought but never completed the dlc for that. Maybe I'll try and get back into it.
The Frozen Wilds? It's fecking great man, definitely do.
Depends on what you're looking for. How is your appetite for another hugely long game? Looking at those games, you might want something shorter or less open-world. In that case, have you tried any of Uncharted 4, The Last of Us Remastered, Until Dawn or Detroit: Become Human?
Yeah I've played The Last of Us and Until Dawn. Enjoyed both.
Okey doke. I'll fire her up this weekend.
Those two are my favourite games this gen.
Playing through the entire Yakuza series at the moment.
Persona 5 is such a great suggestion, you should definitely play that, take your time though.
Persona 5 is def my choice for pa4 game of this gen, really hope it comes to the switch, I want to play through it again.
The cat made Persona intolerable for me after a while, had to give the game up.
The voice, the character, the control he has over you going out and shit. I hated it. Shame too because I wasn't far off banging the teacher.
The voice, the character, the control he has over you going out and shit. I hated it. Shame too because I wasn't far off banging the teacher.
If you have a PS Vita or can get one cheap than Persona 4 Golden is also worth a shot.
Already played it, it's very good, but I like P5 better.
Great game, but after completing TLL recently I can see why people say it's the better Uncharted. Loved it....
Yeah Morgana did do my tits in early on, but I actually ended up liking him by the end. But as for the control aspect there has to be a way to limit your activities everyday as has been the case in previous persona games. They’ve just chosen Morgana as the conduit to that here.
Tornado Low Level? Not sure it’s comparable to Uncharted...
The Lost Legacy
Trials Rising is out next week, hope it’s better than the previous game Trials Fusion.
The tracks are much better but how you progress through the game is awful, they’ve turned it into a grind fest.
I think there’s six, one is tandem bike.
Needs more bikes. Fusion too.