Things have been so busy around here lately that I’ve only just found the time to do a review followup, and I decided to go with Wulverblade. There are games that are technically ahead of it in the queue, but a bunch of those won’t be receiving followups because the effects of their patches are imperceptible, or the publisher slighted me in some way and made it difficult to judge any changes objectively. Anyway, Wulverblade hasn’t received any patches in quite awhile (the PS4 version hasn’t, at least), so it seems likely that this will end up being the “final” version.

Here are the patch notes

One of the things I really love about the PS4 is this update history feature that shows you a list of what the patches have changed. The descriptions can tend to be insufferably vague for certain games, but it’s a good starting point nonetheless. For example, I know exactly what the first two fixes in version 1.02 are for. The first refers to an achievement for defeating the final boss without losing a life that used to refuse to trigger, which was pretty maddening because of how difficult accomplishing this tends to be (before you become comfortable with the controls, obviously).

The “invisible leaderboard issue” was a strange bug that affected all platforms for awhile. Basically, after finishing a level or run in the arena, going to check the leaderboard would sometimes cause all of the scores to be blurry and impossible to read. You could still see your rank and everyone’s avatars, but the score was illegible and other people’s names were missing. You can see that in the video above at 51:37, which I made around a week after the game first released.

Then there’s the new game mode

I don’t really have anything else to say about version 1.02 because I never changed the controls, never indulged in co-op, and honestly haven’t noticed controller vibration since the days of the N64 rumble pack. That just leaves version 1.01’s big addition, which is a “new unlockable game mode.” This was always planned, of course, as evidenced by there being a third game mode that simply couldn’t be selected at release, and what it boils down to is a fun little mode where you can play through any of the stages in the beast form that’s ordinarily only available at the end.

To compensate for this, many story scenes have been cut to accommodate the fact that the beast forms can’t speak. Another concession is that the overpowered form means not having your scores in this mode saved to the leaderboards.

Out of curiosity, I ran through the last level in this mode to see if there was any special content at the end. You don’t even get the ending cutscene or credits, so this appears to be a mode designed primarily for when you feel like overpowering enemies to blow off some steam. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

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