E3 2015 - Hands On With The Natsume Line Up

Natsume is a company that most people have not heard of, but they have a following that dates back decades and for good reason, they provide players with games that are so simple to learn but still offer hours upon hours of fun. They were in force at E3 2015 showing off the next in the Harvest Moon series as well as two new games, Gotcha Racing and Brave Tank Hero.

First up is Harvest Moon Seeds of Memories, coming to Wii U, PC, iOS and Android and is a game that takes the characters from the previous release but puts them in a new world and changes their personalities. For fans of the older game it's a chance to see what if the citizens of the world were different, but it also means those relationships you built with them will be different going forth.

The game will still allow you to meet and interact with people, like Sam the merchant or Brutus the carpenter, but how you do this will vary as the game will again feature a time of day system. Talk to Brutus at his home he will be one way, talk to him at night in the bar and he will act another, as if he was enjoying a drink or seven. You will still be able to seek the hand of marriage of the one you choose and of course build your farm.

The one thing I noted straight away was the backstep in visuals, not from a quality point of view, though that is there, but from a visual design angle. The previous games have been building towards detailed worlds rendered in 3D to allow deep immersion for the player, whereas the new look they are going for actually has a more SNES, top down look, which would be welcome if it went the whole way, but some elements are not working right there. Of course the game is still in development and it could change, but unless they do something big, that might hurt them.

  

Now Harvest Moon is a series that Natsume have held for many years, but they are also working with Arc System, a Japanese developer to bring some of their titles to the west. The first of these is Gotcha Racing, a Nintendo 3DS game, which takes the idea of toy cars and adds a toy capsule machine into the mix. In Gotcha Racing, the game plays out in a top down point of view, much like the old Micro Machine games, but here your car is defined by the parts you apply to it, which you get from the capsule machine.

    

As you race, you earn coins and with those coins you can get a new capsule, inside is a car part that will help you customise you ride, sometimes it will help, sometimes it won’t, but as you can have multiple cars, you should always be able to find a use for it. You can even take different parts and merge them together in order to attempt to create a better piece, of course this is not always going to work, so you need to way up if the risk is worth it as if you try and fail, the pieces you used will be destroyed.

The game is going to come with 6 different grades to compete through with over 14 courses to race upon, so players will have a lot of game to play through.

The final game that I was able to play was Brave Tank Hero, which is coming to Nintendo 3DS and Wii U and lets you take control over a series of tanks and complete a large number of missions with ever increasing difficulty. The first mission required us to break into enemy territory and rescue a general who was pinned down, we had the choice between a light tank, heavy tank or a damage dealing tank. The light tank has little armour and a small gun, but it's fast, whereas the heavy tank has a lot of armour, a larger gun but it's slow and finally the damage dealing tank has decent armour but the largest gun available.

As you move around, you can shoot at other tanks, but if you roll into battle in a light tank and encounter either of the other types, you will be sure to face defeat fast. As for the mission at hand, we did not have to deal with defeating the other tanks, simply rescuing the general, so went for that and it was done. The next mission required the destruction of enemy tanks, so I jumped in larger damage dealing tank and went for it.

As you complete missions, you will earn stars and then use you can those stars to level up your tanks, which will add more armour, increase the power of the gun or the speed of the tank. For those playing on the Wii U the game supports off tv play, which means you can enjoy the tank gameplay no matter what.

Natsume may not be the largest game maker in the world, but they are offering up some nice games that are sure to find the right audience and while Harvest Moon looks a little strange, Brave Tank Hero and Gotcha Racing look like good fun.