What we've been playing - Agatha Harkness, karate, and the Smurfs

A few of the things that have us hooked this week.

9th November

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week, we're nostalgic for how Agatha Harkness used to play in Marvel Snap, we're unexpectedly bowled over by a new Smurfs game, and we finally find a Vampire Survivors clone good enough to stand on its own. What have you been playing?

Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.

Marvel Snap, iOS

Agatha Harkness is my favourite card in Marvel Snap. When I play, I like surprises - surprises for me as much as who I'm playing against. So I play a lot of cards that add random cards to the deck: I like to be surprised by the cards in my hand. Then there's Agatha. Agatha makes your plays for you, and then plays herself in the final round. Surprise upon surprise: I don't know what cards I'll be getting and I don't even know how I'll be playing them.

Thing is, that's how Agatha used to work. I went in recently after a decent absence and to my horror Agatha had been changed. Now she makes plays on the even turns and the player makes turns on the odd turns. At first I was so upset by this I wanted to delete the app and stop playing forever. But I stuck it out for a bit and... it's fine?

As intended, Agatha is a much more viable card now. She's wild, but her wildness has limits, and there's space for you to try and build from the random decisions she makes. Agatha now feels like a dialogue. I think that's super clever, and just the kind of reasoned alterations I expect from the people running the game.

Part of me does still miss the original Agatha, though, the one who was all or nothing. Speeding along, brakes failed, no steering. This was Marvel Snap as I played it for a surprisingly long time. It's a shame that experience is gone, but I know I'll keep playing anyway.

-Chris Donlan

The Smurfs: Dreams, Switch demo

Last year, the Grinch Christmas Adventures was the game I’d sit and play with family members during the colder months, and there's a strong chance it will be this year. But there's a new local multiplayer challenger that's come along to battle for its place as my family's favourite - The Smurfs: Dreams.

It’s worth saying that we only got our hands on a demo, but we’ve replayed this multiple times now and each time, we figure out something new. A curse has befallen the Smurfs so you need to enter their dreams (as other Smurfs) and save them from the nightmares within. The first level is one that seems like a dream, a land made of sweets and cake, though it’s not really because of the digestive distress caused by eating too much of it - most of the Smurfs have turned green!

But it's the second level where I really clicked with the game. It's a world made of mirrors, so certain puzzles can only be solved by checking out the reflected world, and a few items can only be found by looking at the paths in the reflected world, not in the one you’re currently standing in. Having to move your Smurf in the real world while also using their reflection to solve or get over obstacles added another dimension to the level that I really wasn’t expecting to find - especially in a demo.

In short, I'm sold. Oh Smurf.

-Marie

Karate Survivor, PC

How do you improve on Vampire Survivors, that auto-attacking fidget spinner of a game that came out a couple of years ago? It was a massive success so many games have tried, but it's also a deceptively hard task, because despite looking like someone made it in their school break, Vampire Survivors does what it does very well. It takes a relatively simple idea and, a bit like Slay the Spire I suppose, nails it in a charmingly lo-fi way. To add anything more to it would be to smother it, almost, so what do you do?

Karate Survivor has an idea. It takes the Vampire Survivors core - an auto-attacking hero who levels up and gets new abilities while defeating screens full of enemies - and adds satisfying new systems to it. It also does it using one of the most appealing themes I can think of: '80s and '90s martial arts films - think Rumble in the Bronx. You are - as far as I'm concerned - Jackie Chan, tumbling around kitchens and bars and pool tables while hitting people with lampshades, hoofing saucepans at them, and generally making a massive mess. It feels great - it looks great too. There's a '90s-bright, oversized pixelated chonk to proceedings, and the martial art animations are captured beautifully.

At the centre of it all is probably the cleverest thing of all: an ability system based around sequential order and combos. As you level up, and open chest-like things, you gain red or blue attacks. Put a red attack next to a red attack, and they combo, meaning they do more damage. Go a step further and put a red number-one attack next to a red number-two attack and the combo explodes; now when you hit people, an extra special effect goes off, doing way more damage than a normal strike. Chain a bunch of these together and you could be devastatingly powerful, and you'll have to be, to survive what the game throws at you.

For now, I love it. I love the timing of it, as you wait for your next sequence of attacks to go off, and I love the energy it injects through its kung-fu mayhem. It's only cheap - go give it a try!

-Bertie