【Review Preface】
At the "State of Play" live event of Sony PlayStation in 2021, a new action game "Master" developed by the French Sloclap team based on Chinese kung fu culture was officially announced. The game has attracted the attention of domestic and foreign players as soon as it was announced, and after experiencing several ticket jumps, the game is finally going to be released this month, so let's take a look at this game created around the white eyebrow fist!
It is a great honor that this time Ranger Network was able to unlock the game "Master" in advance and bring reviews to the majority of players!
【Even if the teacher is also the father】
The game's plot begins on a rainy night eight years ago, when the villain Yang leads his team to sneak up on the protagonist and his father's martial arts hall and kill the two, unexpectedly the protagonist is actually revived with a string of copper coins. The story returns to the present, after eight years of cultivation, the protagonist begins a journey of revenge, and according to the clues collected, the protagonist finally meets the first enemy "medicine man" after experiencing many difficulties. However, in the course of the battle, the "medicine man" was not surprised by the protagonist's ability to "come back from the dead", so why did the villain group kill his master? Do you know anything about copper coins?
In general, the story of "Master" is like a kung fu film of the last century, the young protagonist embarks on the road of revenge after watching his father being killed, and the appearance of the villain five in the prologue also makes a certain "spoiler" for the player, but unlike the traditional kung fu film, the "Master" adds a fantasy color to the whole by adding a plot in which the protagonist can "come back from the dead" with copper coins.
Compared with the "unremarkable" plot game, the teaching can be said to be very brilliant, in the prologue of the game, the player controls Yang to deal with his master, the game does not give teaching, the player can only rely on their own keyboard or handle buttons to deal with the people in the martial arts. The author's evaluation of Yang's eventual defeat and killing of the master can only be that "the newborn calf is not afraid of the tiger, and beats the teacher to death with his fist." "With the appearance of the opening staff table, the game begins the teaching process, the player needs to make basic operations such as turning and partnering against the five enemies according to the prompts given on the screen, and the player's revenge road officially begins with the end of cultivation (teaching).
I don't know if you have any impression of the corridor battle in the first promotional film, but we will experience this scene in the first level of the game. In the first level, on the way to meet the medicine man, you have to pass through an old-fashioned residential building, and when the protagonist opens the door, the scene will be directly converted from a third-person action game to a 2D clean version of the game, and at that moment it seems that the game becomes "Jackie Chan Kick Pavilion", and there are more than one such transition in the game.
【I am a septuagenarian man who was reborn】
When the game announced the first promo, the protagonist can be revived by increasing the age of death, which makes people relish, and I will talk about the unique death growth mechanism of this game.
The death age increase mechanism of "Master" is incremental, for example, the protagonist will become 21 years old after the first death is 20 years old, the second resurrection of 21 years old when he dies is 23 years old, and so on... Whenever the protagonist grows 10 years old, the copper coin around the waist will be broken, and when the five copper coins are all broken, the protagonist will enter the real death the next time he falls, which means that the final age of the protagonist will be controlled between 71-79.
▲ The youth of the protagonist
▲ The old age of the protagonist
In addition to the change in appearance, the most intuitive effect of the protagonist's age increase in the game is that the vitality will decrease with age, and the attack power will increase, and the production team will simulate a real kung fu practice. In addition, the skills in the game are also affected by age, such as specific skills such as rain strikes can only be learned when the protagonist is young, and such a quick punching move that is more than 29 years old can no longer be learned (which is reasonable).
▲ True skill tree
In addition to these skills that need to be released by rubbing moves, there are also "concentration skills" in the game, when the player presses the LT button of the handle, it will enter the "bullet time", and then the player can attack the opponent by selecting various parts, and do a move to defeat the opponent, these moves all reveal the strong and fierce and unpredictable characteristics of the white eyebrow fist.
【Real Kung Fu Game】
As a game based on Chinese kung fu culture, real martial arts movements are naturally indispensable. In order to better show the action scenes in the game and portray Chinese kung fu realistically enough, the production team specially hired a kung fu master as an action director. This kung fu master, named Benjamin Colussi, went to Foshan to visit Liu Weixin and immerse himself in learning the Baimei fist technique. The protagonist's actions in the game are all due to his movement capture, which is the biggest reason why the movements in the game "Master" can be so smooth. Since it comes to Baimeiquan, it is necessary to mention one of the most famous disciples, that is, the Chinese kung fu superstar Jackie Chan, and the game executive of this game has also revealed that the concept of the game "Master" is inspired by Jackie Chan movies.
Since there is such a hard-core production team, hard-core operation is naturally indispensable. In order for the protagonist to better deal with the enemy's moves, the game has set up four defensive actions: blocking, parrying, flashing in place, and dodging. Compared with other action games, the four defensive moves of "Master" give players more choices, players who are accustomed to bouncing can use parry to make the enemy hard and straight before shooting, and flashing in place requires the player to guess whether it is the upper or lower attack according to the enemy's shooting habits to make a response. So many defensive actions can also be seen that "Master" is a game that promotes defensive counterattack, and players who are accustomed to just being frontal can suffer hardships.
Finally, talking about the difficulty of this game, in order to highlight the strength and ferocity of the white eyebrow fist and the unpredictable changes, all the characters in the game have almost no forward shake, and the player can only predict the opponent's actions through the familiarity again and again, plus the defense method mentioned above the opponent will also be used, which forms the first major difficulty of the game. The protagonist's age reached 70+ when I first passed the first chapter, and I thought that the difficulty of this would give the player the option of age reset or copper money repair in the second chapter. Who knows that when I entered the second chapter, my age was still locked at 73, and after experiencing a fight, the protagonist I controlled could only fall to the ground, and the original copper coins could not be repaired, and time could not be turned back. Reasonable control of age has naturally become another major difficulty in this work, and such a difficulty has to remind me of One of Shinji Mikami's divine works "The Hand of God", which is more difficult than the two.
【Evaluation Summary】
If you had to name a game with Chinese kung fu elements in front of the screen, I'm sure most people would probably think of that 10-year-old work, "Bloody Rogue". The appearance of "Master" undoubtedly breaks the answer to this question, and the most realistic game kung fu performance so far, and the different fighting ideas generated by different ages, all reveal the intentions of the production team. As one of the few pure action games at present, it is worth every player who loves action games and likes Chinese kung fu games, that is, the difficulty requires players to go through a period of training.