Digging once again in the selections Steam And Xbox Store, I came across a strange thing. Looks like action. And even hack-n-slash. And it seems to look nice, but it’s very budget-friendly. It feels strange in the dynamics. However, I saw my charm in this and decided to give in to temptation, pouring money into a small team of five Chinese brothers for their two projects. They are called The Initial, exactly two parts. They go by very quickly, and that’s exactly what I needed. I love maximum fun in the shortest possible time!

The Initial

The game sometimes manages to include a narrative through primitive, but voiced dialogues with pop-eyed, babbling heads. If the guys had more money, experience and staff, it would have turned out better.

The first game is, one might say, a test of the pen for a group of enthusiasts who decided to get out of the sandbox of “we study game engines” into the Big World with fierce market competition. Since they didn’t seem to have a good screenwriter among their friends, they decided to use gameplay. And an oaky, crooked story – to sketch on the knee between modeling and programming.

And, I must say, it paid off: The Initial quite a sticky, simple, but cheerful combat system, which does not have time to get boring due to the short overall timing of the game: it will take about a couple of hours to complete. But the soundtrack, despite its electronic orientation and energy, is quite successful.

The above-mentioned combat system is quite demanding on reaction and skill, representing give or take the usual, but fast-paced hack-n-slash from a third person. The button combinations are traditional: there are weak/strong hits, there is dodging, jumping, sprinting, blocking. The icing on the cake is finishing off stunned enemies, and, separately, special attacks on a separate combination of buttons. An interesting point is that dodging also allows you to push your adversary away and go behind his back, which is worth actively using: although your opponents are stupid, they can catch you with awkward attacks and put a block. An additional problem may be the presence of turret traps in the arena and reinforcements in the form of shooters: both obstacles force you to rush around the battlefield at breakneck speed. Fortunately, no more than a dozen moving “targets” are dumped into the arena, which is why the fight does not turn into a dump.

It’s a pleasure to chop them: we’ve worked on the feeling of destroying enemies, there is a certain imitation of the “impact” and the satisfaction of piercing them with a blade. To achieve this effect, rapid animations of katana swings alone were not enough, so the camera was taught to shake according to the movements of the main character, thus trying to imitate the action-like shaking of the camera during impacts in AAA games (which, oddly enough, does not make you motion sick at all). Enemies react very sensitively to hits, arching in truly theatrical, painful poses.

Their bodily fluids do the same: https://casinopalm.net/withdrawal/ splashes of blood just fly left and right. An opponent impaled by a finisher causes the camera to shake, and the heroine to either gracefully swing her weapon, or jump on top with a power-up effect, or supernaturally quickly impale him from all four sides. All this is voiced in the style of Chinese action films of the 70-80s of the last century, which adds a kind of hypertrophied gloss: swings and hits are pretentiously accentuated, as if in the hands is not a sword, but a whole shaft.

But the bosses in the game are angry, which is why you have to replay battles with them in order to adapt to their behavior patterns. The default control layout does not help this much: the button assignments are not entirely convenient. Who the hell came up with the idea of ​​blocking on LT, dodging on stick+LT, and sprinting on LB?? It doesn’t help to calm down the irritation and the camera tends to get stuck or pull another trick.

But the same camera skillfully catches pant shots. Please note: these are Chinese dance shots, not Japanese ones! Wannabe-Japanese but Chinese!

After running around in the game for half an hour and estimating the scale of the developers’ work, you can quickly realize that the guys assembled the game, for the most part, from other people’s assets. However, it somehow turned into a lively, playable commercial product with some pretty cool combat animations. Making a big world and vast locations seemed to be too expensive, so they decided to limit themselves to local urbanism. However, unlike the completely cheap-budget Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae there is not one single area for everything about everything, but completely complete, small linear levels, invisibly fragmented into combat arenas.

The boss can easily destroy a significant part of his HP

"Presentation" of another boss before the battle

The Initial goes through quickly, but downright with pleasure: the battle dance in flowing skirts looks beautiful, its choreography is quite good. Blood is splashing, the plot is going on somewhere there, in the background. The gameplay is exciting, the shredding goes on as usual. Several aggressive bosses add dynamics. What more could you ask for from a game that can be bought for the price of two cans of beer and one pack of chips??

I wish there were more such energizing niche games that are “eaten up” in a couple of hours, but in return give a hefty dose of adrenaline!

But The Initial 2: New Stage leaves a more blurry impression. After the relative success of the first game, the developer decided to inflate its ambitions and pump up the sequel with a narrative, which, in my opinion, did not benefit it at all.

Judge for yourself: a fluffy story with talking heads with a very cheap production and so-so voice acting, in which the characters do not quite understand where they are and what they are doing. Just like the connections with the first game are not clear. Judge for yourself: somewhere someone is replicating someone. There are some vague skirmishes between the authorities of the two countries, where someone is trying to destroy someone, but then realizes that they are doing something wrong. Someone is taking revenge for someone because of this, but it’s all in vain. As a result, the very concept of “heroes and villains” falls into a total mess, since everyone unites, because they face a new enemy. It was presented so lazily and stupidly that it wasn’t even worth trying: I lost interest literally at the 20th minute of endless empty-headed chatter with a bunch of names and titles that were weakly tied to the visual sequence. And this despite the fact that I love narrative in games!

The images of the characters, due to their lack of development, can easily be reduced to asses, from left to right: mature ass and infantile ass

Memorization and immersion in the plot are not facilitated by the new symphonic, dramatic soundtrack, designed to put pressure on emotions, playing out classical musical passages, and no less classical works. However, there is variety: sometimes there are pleasant pop songs. The music, in general, was written and commissioned from the heart: it’s pleasant to listen to. But, in my opinion, the energetic electronics of the original worked much better in conjunction with the gameplay.

However, there are a number of bright sides to the game. The same modest team pulled out all the stops and reworked both the visuals and the combat system. Take the same battle: it has become more dynamic, more varied and wider in the possibilities of striking enemies, but has lost a little in the feeling of impact, since they decided to smooth out the camera movements during swings and strikes a little. But instead of just one katana, as many as 4 types of weapons are now available. If you want to wave your technological brass knuckles, go ahead!

A bunch of modifier chips were introduced into the game, with their own special abilities called through RB+ABXY (vortex attacks, healing, strengthening, and. T. d.). The chips themselves fall from fatter opponents.