Sometimes, the smallest thing can completely ruin an experience.
Every now and again when putting together This Week In Games every Monday, I’ll spot an indie that sticks out for one reason or another and I’ll include it in the list. Occasionally, the developers or smaller publishers will notice and they’ll get in touch.
This happened with Warlocks 2: God Slayers last week, a pixel-art platforming adventure with a bunch of spellcasters trying to take down the Faun God. It’d already stood out to me when diving through Steam’s upcoming games (although it’s out on the Switch as well), and the art seemed charming, so I was happy to give it a go.
So I download the game and fire it up on my home PC. It runs well enough for the most part. The UI was a little small on a 4K monitor, but that was fixed with a UI scale option in the settings.
But after about half an hour something seemed … amiss. Often I’d find myself leaping from one ledge to another, and I didn’t really have any visibility on what I’d be jumping into. Sometimes the map design would require that your character drop down a ledge or two, but you’d have absolutely no way of seeing what you were dropping into.
That didn’t seem right. So on a hunch, I forcibly closed the game, restarted in windowed mode, and dragged Warlocks 2 to my second 1080p screen. Unsurprisingly, the difference was night and day.
The change seems to have been prompted by booting up on a 4K screen. I couldn’t get the game to change resolutions, but after the bizarre zoom was corrected by switching to the 1080p screen (which you can’t do through the in-game video settings) the game played just fine on both monitors.
But if I hadn’t found a solution, I would have likely given up on the game. I’d already had a few near deaths thanks to the sheer inability to see where I was going, which wasn’t helped by the totems that constantly respawn enemies until they’re dealt with. It was aggravating and far from fun, but fortunately it wasn’t intentional.
So I’m glad that things sorted themselves out in the end. I don’t mind a challenge, but I’d prefer to choose when my hand is tied behind my back instead of a random bug doing it for me. If you’d like to see what Warlocks 2 is actually like, there’s half an hour of gameplay from the PC version on the Kotaku Australia YouTube channel below.
(If you want to see more local video, let us know!)
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