Uploads from That Boy Aqua

Currently Playing: My Honest Thoughts on Tides of Annihilation

What do you think? Gas or trash? Get 20% when buying G Fuel: https://www.gfuel.com/THATBOYAQUA Tides of Annihilation is the first game from chinese studio Eclipse Glow Games, and I was fortunate enough to be one of the first people in the world to play it, alongside getting a chance to ask the developers some hard hitting questions, I’ll be able to show you gameplay of the bosses, some of the levels, and give you an idea of what the game is shaping up to be like, and honestly, I think this game has the potential to be an absolute smash; assuming the rest of the game is as good as the demo we played. Tides of Annihilation follows the trend we’ve seen over the past few years of asian developers making single-player focused games with mass global appeal. We saw this with Stellar Blade, one of my favourite games of this generation, and Black Myth Wukong which boasted concurrent player numbers that live service MMOs would kill for. Where will Tides of Annihilation stand among these games? Well, let's first take a look at the game's inspirations. I think a good game can never be adequately described as being “like something else”. But I think mentioning some of the games' clear inspirations will help give you an idea of what to expect. The game's mosaic of influences range from devil may cry, to more recent tiles like Stellar blade. Hell; some of the animations in this demo seem 1 to 1 the same as stellar blade, specifically when Gwyndolyn is falling and when she is ascending a rope, if I have footage I’ll show it. But the biggest influence is the Arthurian legends. Gwyndolyn is our protagonist, and the last surviving human on earth. Recently given the power to summon and control the knights of the round table, she must go on a journey across different realms to assemble the holy grail. Despite being a very eurocentric game, we can see lots of influences from other cultures too, such as a boss fight we had against the egyptian god Anubis, and we can see in Gwyndolyn's design that while she does have armour reminiscent of a knight, her flowy fabrics bring to mind a kind of elegance that the developers specifically stated were inspired by chinese fashion. To go back to the Stellar Blade comparison, I think if I were to pinpoint the game Tides of Annihilation is most like, then it would indeed be Stellar Blade, and that’s a damn fine game to be compared to. It’s combat feels similar, though lacks the ability to parry all attacks, and certain cinematic finishing moves feel very much inspired by Stellar Blades retribution system. According to the developers however, they took considerable inspiration from Devil May Cry, and that tracks, given the abundance of combos and air juggles we can perform. This inspiration is also seen through the knight combos, which remind me plenty of something like DMC Devil May Cry’s ability to sue both angel and demon abilities. We get a main knight and sub knight, with options for fast, status based attacks that do things like close gaps, slow enemies down, and create areas of effect, and slower larger attacks too. I think where this combat system shines is in its simplicity. I found the combat incredibly easy to pick up, mostly because the individual controls for Gwyndolyn and her knights are mapped to only a few buttons, but the depth of the combat comes from learning how best to combine abilities and attacks; and the reward is a satisfying flurry of particle effects, that walks the very border of being too much happening at once; but we’ll get to that criticism later. For now, I want to focus on the visuals because it was the most impressive part of the demo, however there is a caveat.