act 2 is⌠not fun! i can basically go down the reasons i didnât enjoy the game without spoiling anything about the gameâs actual plot.
like iâve said already pretty much the entire charm factor of the first act is gone. act 1 laughed in the face of trial-and-error point-and-clicks that acted like you were stupid for putting the wrong two items together by giving completely unique flavour for every combination of items. even if you knew two items didnât go together, there was incentive for you to try! act 2 has none of this. 90% of object interactions are the same almost verbatim âthese items probably wonât work togetherâ text. thereâs no incentive to try out different items, which makes a majority of the gameâs objectives into just âclick on the one right thing and then walk to the end of the roomâ.
the rooms themselves are totally empty! most have between one and three interactive objects in them; any other setpieces, no matter how intriguing they might be to the player and/or the viewpoint character joey, serve no plot purpose and are therefore purely background. the few objects that can be observed have only short, dry descriptions; any object description longer than a single sentence is a RARITY. even extremely obvious and again, interesting to the player combinations yield zero returns. thereâs a huge ant lusus in one scene. applying the lusus handbook to this lusus returns the message⌠thereâs nothing in this book about giant ants.
there are entire rooms full of CHARACTERS who canât even be OBSERVED⌠4 characters in a room of maybe two dozen can be clicked on, and no real reason is given for this. i suppose the player is just expected to ârecogniseâ who the âmain charactersâ are because they already saw the troll call⌠how many years ago?
not only are the rooms empty but they are huge. they are way too large for the miniscule amount of content in them and this is ONLY compounded by the backtracking fetch quests you start being put through in the second half of the act. a character literally makes fun of you for going back and forth through the game over and over again but no remedy is provided. one of the ultimate objectives of the game involves backtracking all the way back to the START of the game⌠only to be told you have no reason to be there, and should walk right back to the end again.
the entire inventory system is basically a joke in this act. most of your items will not get used. when you do get a new item, you will almost invariably get rid of it again by the time you leave that same room. again, almost no item combinations result in anything funny. one of the only act 1 items that gets used in this act is - if youâll allow me to spoil one thing - xefrosâ microphone, which he gives away to another character at almost the beginning of the act. xefrosâ entire ârapping about random objectsâ shtick from the first game is completely discarded! it literally almost feels like an excuse for the writers not to have to write any more witty flavour than they absolutely have to. joey gets a new abilitech in this act which she uses exactly once. the rest of her abilitechs are basically dead space in her inventory like everything else.
instead of the actually charming⌠you know⌠pointing and clicking aspects of the first act, the developers seem to have taken on board how popular the friendship simulators were, and tried to make act 2 a dialogue-driven character game? which would be fine if⌠the characters were interesting. the fact is that most of the stuff they might have wanted to explore in act 2 has ALREADY BEEN DONE, in the friendsims. let it be said that the ace attorney minigame we all knew was coming takes up about half of the game. anyone who told you hiveswap act 2 was about 8 hours of playtime obviously milked as much out of this courtroom sequence as they could, which, if you donât care about hiveswapâs small cult cast of jadebloods and tealbloods, is very little. most of the gameâs dialog was obviously written for this scene. unlike the rest of the game, almost every little combination of choices has its own unique text in this part of the game: but if youâve never played an ace attorney game before, you will have a hard time finding any of the right or even interesting combinations. to put it bluntly, unless you were already really invested in some of the elements involved, this part of the game will be a long, boring slog.
the game isnât even particularly funny. act 1 got laughs out of me. act 2â˛s jokes either fall flat or quickly beat themselves to death. the cultural references serve no purpose. ace attorney âbecause lawyers!â is funny as a sight gag (like tereziâs OBJECTION!s in the original homestuck) but it serves no purpose as an extended, hour-long part of gameplay. and why does an ongoing gag about KPOP of all things take up so much of this scene, in a game thatâs been patting itself on the back over its appeal to 90s nostalgia? (this to me is one of the most damning examples of the what pumpkin team putting out stuff that they personally find hilarious without once stopping to wonder if itâs a product that will actually have appeal). why is the âhighblood statueâ used in a single scene actually an anime figurine? because anime is funny, i guess?
the game DOES look beautiful, with little exception (the gameâs minimalist philosophy makes most of the rooms like pretty empty, after the immediate âwow weâre on an alien planet!â magic wears off), but i struggle to say itâs even a serviceable bit of software. the gui is practically inscrutable. every door says something different on it. âexitâ? âopenâ? âuseâ? some doors just have a pair of feet hovering above them, which means âwalk through doorâ (just like in act 1, which worked fine). except sometimes the feet just mean âwalk on this floorâ. it depends entirely on which room youâre standing in.
the actual gameplay is hardly any better. letâs ignore the ace attorney minigame for once. any puzzle that isnât âbring item from character a to character bâ is literally indecipherable. theyâve graciously allowed us to finally use the hint button, which is completely necessary for some of the more arcane ââpuzzlesââ (which are really just more of the same trial and error click-and-clicks), but for some reason⌠only joey can get hints? youâre free to switch between joey and xefros at any time, but only for xefros does the button say âhints currently unavailableâ. if you want hints you have to switch to joey. this has no other bearing on the gameplay.
music is fine, but not âweâve been sitting on this soundtrack for years!â or âwe got the undertale guy to compose for us!â levels of blow-your-mind incredible. itâs obvious that the soundtrack composed years ago is not reflective of a game that was clearly cobbled together within the last 15 months. did i mention that out of the 38 troll call characters who were literally advertised as âthe cast of hiveswap act 2âł, zebede and charun are just entirely absent without cause or explanation?
