just finished doing everything there is to do in
assault suit leynos for the ps4! man, heck, the more i played it, the more i liked it - and i was already liking it almost immediately. it's pretty great, honestly! they more or less took the original and remade entirely in valken's spirit, right down to stage 7 (in arcade mode) being an incredibly direct homage to a couple of particular valken stages.
it controls almost identically to valken minus a few small changes and i'm so, so, so glad they stuck with a classic control scheme. a huge part of the fun of valken is fine-tuning your aim on the fly and then getting a lock down, and it would have been a radically different game if they'd have gone in a different direction. i really feel like these devs understood the appeal of the assault suits series quite well beyond the control, as well, there's a really good mixture of cinematic flair and hard action.
arcade mode is the meat of the game and significantly revamps the original with a hefty dosage of additional atmosphere in addition to quite a few new enemies and objectives. though there's a little bit of dead air and streams of too-easy zakos, the pacing is still pretty tight and i'd say the game is only about 40 minutes long on a decent run. some score-based unlocks provide cross-playthrough benefits, but they're largely minor aside from a few that increase the score of the basic zako and allow you to start getting better weapons a bit quicker on subsequent plays.
choosing 'hard' for your difficulty setting adds some much needed bite for a seasoned player, as hits will gradually reduce the maximum size of your lifebar and add punishment for lazily tanking hits. for those that feel that arcade mode is a bit
too cinematic, classic mode (combinable with hard, if you choose) hews much closer to the original's simpler presentation and higher difficulty and can (minus a long ending/credits roll) be blown through in under 25 minutes - even with the load times! it lacks some of arcade mode's better moments, but it's still quite good and offers much more chaotic action.
though i feel the game doesn't quite hit valken's level of superb quality, it is hardly obsolete and even has a few advantages. being rewarded for playing well with new & better weapons across a single play is frankly
much better than the exhausting upgrade chip management in valken, and the analog stick helps you hit difficult angles a lot more easily so that you can focus a bit more on the delightfully weighted sense of movement.
i even found myself warming up to the hideous deviantart-collab-looking aesthetic as i played, largely because it's surprisingly good at conveying a sense of depth & scale. some lighting effects can feel a bit overused or distracting, but they're a bit of fun, as well, and i never found them distracting from incoming projectiles or getting in the way of the game's very clean & readable hitboxing.
you can find this for under 20 bucks for a physical copy on ebay & amazon, and i really suggest nabbing it.
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if you'd like to see my play, i recorded a 1cc/nomiss of classic mode played on hard difficulty! i play pretty dang quickly and have a nicely trimmed down run with only about 23 minutes of play time (2 minutes are the ending cinema), but i frankly could have gotten it under 20 with a little more effort and memorizing what loadout i wanted each stage.
part 1
part 2
keep in mind that both parts are actually of the same continuous play (check the score), it's just that ps4share only stores 15 minutes at a time. classic mode is
much more difficult than arcade despite the significantly reduced boss health bars and hard difficulty's healthbar changes really force you into some highly aggressive play.
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/JLgVO5p.gif)
ah, man, what a good time.
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edit: i was looking around at what else was uploaded and geez louise, my run of leynos appears to be (by considerable margin) the best play on YT.
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/PdYftZX.gif)
i was chattin' w/ palazzo about the game and was immediately very saddened to learn that dracue went under not too long after it came out. w-why did no one else play this? ah, man. they didn't deserve that at all. find a modern game i like and the dev went under... it feels like you just can't make a classic game, anymore. i want to play gunhound, now! does anyone know if the physical jp psp version of ex will play in english on a US console?