But are the jokes starting to wear a little thin (or am I perhaps just getting too old after 20 years of admiring this stuff)? As its name suggests, this one’s a play on the cosmic horror of Lovecraft and, as you can possibly guess, it too is excellent. Unlike the more “traditional” type of Dungeons & Dragons-like fantasy that Kingdom of Loathing lampooned, West of Loathing was, as the name suggests, a play on the spaghetti western, and it was excellent. ![]() I stopped playing Loathing for quite some time (life happened), but four years ago, West of Loathing landed on various platforms, and it was a brilliant effort to take what people loved about Kingdom of Loathing, and work it into a single-player, offline format. I wonder if I could somehow recover my account to Kingdom of Loathing (if it even still exists)… There was a time when I was losing hours daily to that thing. ![]() Thanks to hugely entertaining stickman character artwork and ridiculously entertaining nerd humour, it was up there with Order of the Stick and B-Bit Theatre as something that I – an RPG fan from childhood – found myself way too hooked into. Kingdom of Loathing is 20 years old now (and still going strong!), and one of the pioneers in Web-based, massively online role-playing gaming. Gungrave G.O.R.The “Loathing” property occupies a very distinct part of gaming and Internet culture. launches on November 22 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC. The only excess I want to see in a game like this is blood. I’m hoping the final product clocks in at a tight runtime so as not to get repetitive and overstay its welcome. I’m excited to see if that level of high-octane action can sustain itself through an entire game. The goal is bombastic chaos, and the slice I played delivered that. It has a story and cutscenes, but I don’t get the sense that the developers are focused on weaving an elevated modern narrative like 2018’s God of War. The level I played was a linear series of corridors presented in an old-school “Stage 1” set up culminating in a robot boss with a big green health bar. That’s where you can feel the PS2 DNA still alive in it. It’s not trying to do anything complicated here it just wants to deliver a lot of immediately satisfying carnage. If it’s not clear already, this is a game that basks in its ridiculousness. ![]() For instance, I could hit a button to turn it into a missile launcher that fired homing shots at my enemies. My trusty casket wouldn’t just allow me to smack enemies with a heavy thunk, but it would also give me access to four abilities. As I held them, I shot at some more enemies over their shoulders and eventually chucked them aside like a projectile weapon. I could shoot out a hook that would drag an enemy towards me. I rack up massive triple-digit combos as I blow through enemies, eventually allowing me to mash the Y button and turn myself into a tornado of bullets. The game simply doesn’t want me to stop shooting, something that’s evidenced by the fact that I can shoot while performing an evasion roll. Guns are my core attack, as I can shoot them off without needing to reload or worry about ammo. The demo compresses a lot of tutorials into a short chapter, which means I got a lot of combat nuances thrown at me quickly. ![]() “The only excess I want to see in a game like this is blood.”
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