New way to implement rythm to gameplay! I am a patapon!
PSP, it's a well aged gem, it's not that it's obsolete or bad in any way but many games have an old(er) feel to it, washed out colours, bad texture, and pixelated caracters, in many games they try to push out a tad more than what is possible from the hardware PSP was gifted with from start, often it ends with a half good, half bad result.
This isn't the case with Patapon 2, it has lush color and brilliant estetic 2D graphics, not that demanding but looks great.
Nowdays you can get yourself a PSP v300x quite cheap and a few games along with it for less than $200, i can tell you why this should be one of the games you get.
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Story / Background
Patapon is the name of the tribe, all ressidents in the tribe are "Patapon's". It has a simular as in sims, the are all "sims" even tho they just live in simsville rather than a tribe.
The Patapon tribe want's more than anything to expand and explore, doing so they often go head's up with diffrent tribes and monsters.
Theese Patapon's are lost without help from their leader, yes that is you!, so without the directions witch you handle out via your four drums they can't do squat.
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Gameplay
It's oddly how intence and thrilling just pressing four buttons can be, the main part of this game is played by the four buttons on the right side of the PSP.
Each pressed button make a drum sound, doing a combination of sounds and you have yourself a language that the patapons understand.
pata, pata, pata, poon. - that's forward!
(for ex. whole pack of warrior from your tribe walks forward)
poon, poon, pata, poon. - that's attack!
(for ex. they attack a large creature)
As you understand it's type of gameplay needs a strukture to theese "commands", mostly that struckture is based on a four by four beat, your playing drum becomes almost like a turn based struckture. So while you miss holding the beat while pressing a command you'd have to wait until the 4/4 is on beat again.
Folowing the beat and pressing the rigth buttons will award you with better result in your comands, the Patapons respond better if you are on beat and your more likely to sucsess in your mission.
The game play out in small missions, they're like "go kill some boars" to collect food or another important thing for your tribe.
Each mission unlock the next one, if you don't make it, don't worry just run it till you make it.
Another part of the game is the strategy part of it, you need to expand your warrior's number and strength or else you'll not sucsess in the next scenario.
This is done in your tribe camp.
There are some smart strategy in this game, you have a way of evolving the warriors of your tribe, there are diffrent type of warriors, bow-men, spear-men, sword-men, heroes, each of theese types use a level/ladder as you command and each of them can make use of diffrent equipment.
All this is very cusomisable, you can choose to have five lvl 3 spear-men and only one lvl 9 sword-men or whatever you like to have, that type of settup is not recomended tho!
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Im no big fan of jungle drum beats with cheesy small songs to go with it but i have to admit the sound/music is great.
The 2D vissual as i already mentioned is very good and artistic and makes this game easy to look at.
I have talked alot about the core mechanics of this game, but thats one big factor to why this game is so fun.
Being a much deaper game than most other just by a simplistic 2D design make this game brilliant and well worth buying for your PSP.
What do you get if you mix Lemmings, Age of empires and Guitarr hero? -
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Patapon 2 OFC!