Cuphead Review | ft. @Strippin | The Completionist

indie games come and go every day but one in the game that I've been watching like a hawk has finally come out ever since its announcement in 2014 cuphead has had my attention taunting me from afar alas and kept getting delayed days turned into months months into years and in the back of my mind I always knew I knew that one day I was gonna have to play and complete this beautiful game but just because something is beautiful doesn't mean it isn't difficult I may be in over my head now that's been out for a few weeks it's time for me to take a big old gulp of what Cup it has to offer really drink it all in zip by glorious sip ok I'll stop now sorry about that this one word on the street is that this game is very very hard and completing it is something of a nightmare so I decided to double down this week and make it even more challenging I'm bringing in my buddy Sam thorn aka stripping a good buddy of mine happens to be really good at video games it's a big time stream of red twitch.tv slash stripping we're gonna do this co-op style Sam welcome to the show what's up bud longtime viewer first-time go host Josie I'm gonna have you man thanks man yeah oh you ready to chug this mom Oh burning me then show me Yoona send me up dead script I'm sorry this is let's let's just jump to the credits this is gross [Music] our first glimpse at cuphead came during the e3 2014 xbox press conference right in the middle of a montage of upcoming games we only got a few seconds of it but pretty much everyone wanted to know more about that beautifully animated side scroller yeah I was sitting right there screaming wait what the hell is that go back go back tell me more about the cup guy it was a while longer before we would get a proper look at cup head we already knew the animation was stunning bordering on being one of the best looking games of all time but we didn't know how its gameplay was gonna shape up turns out cuphead was a boss rush style game from an indie studio with a lot of ambition studio m.d. HR had been working on cuphead since 2010 and was founded by Chad and Jared moldenhauer these bros have been putting themselves through the wringer to bring their dream game to life going as far as to refinance their house to keep production going the dedication seems to have paid off since the final product is a universally praised run-and-gun shooter with wall D crave and interesting country style fights right away my completionist sense was flaring up I knew this thing was gonna be tough but I also knew it'd be a great opportunity to show off how well I can muscle my way through a truly difficult video game and how's that working out for you so far drug not super great Sam this game can be a real even the first few bosses took me several tries to defeat and I'm hearing rumors that accomplishing every possible task in this game is a monstrous undertaking which is why I brought you along today with me Sam thanks I'm excited I think as you should be considering that we're going to have to beat every boss collect every coin and a whole bunch more together are you excited buddy are you ready for the pain I am a regret green to this and I regret our friendship entirely [Music] you [Music] I'm gonna come out and say it Sam cuphead is the best looking game of the year really we had breath of the wild Bishop horizon persona five hell-blade mary odyssey splatoon drawed a new one child came out this year I stand by my statement cuphead is the best looking game of 2017 I mean I can see where you're coming from I guess it is entirely hand-drawn mm-hmm every character in the game does have dozens of animations and they're all lovingly crafted yeah the bosses are all unique go on the levels do look an awful lot like they will lift it straight out of a classic animated movie you're getting there and it has I guess been a really nice change of pace from all the polygonal realistic games this year almost there all right fine it's the best-looking game of 2017 nothing looks like it nothing ever has and I doubt anyone would be willing to put in the work necessary to make anything like ever again it's a beautiful game alright you're damn right while playing through couplet I was constantly amazed by the sheer creativity from developer studio MD HR every single character every single boss was completely unique and unlike anything I had seen before and that's undoubtedly due to the developers decisions to emulate the visual style of 1930s Fleischer Salle cartoons it's an animation style that hasn't been popular for the better part of a century but its faithfully recreated right here in cuphead it's almost so well done that sometimes you forget that it's even a game at all honestly that huge flower cagney carnation one of the most inventive boss characters I've ever seen even if I'm not sure exactly how he's a would have more flex shoot seeds like a Gatling gun of the dozens of bosses in cuphead no two aren't anywhere close to similar every single boss has its own look its own stage and its own mechanics that are completely different than anything else in the game but Sam why are we killing all of these lovely creatures anyway it's because the devil told us to that's [Laughter] after losing in a game of craps in the devil's casino cuphead and his brother mug man who I'm playing ass end up owing this souls to the devil rather than give up so easily I offered to go and collect on the debts owed by the other inhabitants of in Coney Island of course those debts are the contracts for the souls of everyone else on the island and those folks aren't gonna give them up so easily would you drug oh absolutely not even if I technically oh the devil a contract for my soul you can bet your ass I'd be fighting to keep my signature off that piece of paper until my dying breath I'm not going through whatever torture field library that dude's got waiting for me even in a world when the only video game was five nights at Freddy's don't you even joke about that to match the vintage look of cuphead the soundtrack in this game is moi exquisite think about every single early cartoon you've ever seen that's scratchy yet charming jazz style music is everywhere in cuphead it's enough to transport you back to a bygone era of entertainment where movies with dialogue in them honestly there are a few times where I wish it wasn't a talkie the music's great but some of the voices are so destroyed that they end up sounding creepy and weird sometimes like in the game shop just downright terrifying because everything else sounds so good through the vinyl scratches just comes off as a little too much while it's a small criticism it's definitely worth calling out especially when you're hearing the voices over and over and over again while playing the same levels over and over again after dying over and over again thankfully that's the only issue we really had with Cup heads looks and sounds the game runs smooth as butter like a game that requires such precision in its mechanics should if you look closely you can see every frame of its hand-drawn animation with every movement and when you're not frantically trying to dodge spiked casino chips and fireballs it's absolutely stunning to take a look at maybe watch a youtube video like this one right here exactly where on youtube good tonight yeah so don't say anything stupid Sam you've never played Bioshock well there goes all of our credibility [Music] cuphead is in no way an easy game to complete it is not your on just watching you run through single-player mode was giving me terror sweats that difficulty is what cuphead is all about you're playing through a beautiful level after beautiful level learning boss fight patterns slowly getting better and better until you can easily fight your way through the toughest of big baddies I love the joy from playing comes from realizing and knowing that you're improving things seem absolutely hopeless when you first jump in with bosses cutting you down left and right often before you can get past their first form but then you get slightly better you learn you find your playstyle and figure out how to make it work for you in the long run cuphead doesn't mess around with getting you into the action right after the initial cut scene you'll thrown in to your first boss battles against a dirty potato a crying onion and a carrot that somehow has psychic powers is reasonably easy but once you finish it and end up in the overworld you realize that the ease you enjoyed will not be around for long it's a good thing that the overrule that self is so surprisingly enjoyable it's just as detailed as the main gameplay and all the work that they put into this overworld makes sense considering all the activities and secrets that it holds our coins on down secret paths discover and some low period NPCs you can interact with the all-star present in the overworld is so charming they almost begs to become its own fully fledged game type maybe one day from that point forward its boss fight after boss fight after boss fight you finish one some paths open up and you immediately dive into the next one the pace can feel unrelenting but hey Puppet isn't here to hold your hand it's here to beat you in this submission or die trying' the vast majority of the bosses follow the same simple formula you share them with a magical finger pistols until they die with the basic weapon you can chew in eight directions much like contra games you can also jump and do an aerial counter move on any pink enemies or projectiles something that's going to become necessary for our completionist run jerrod it's not all boss battles though there are also run-and-gun levels which are platforming stages in which you have to kill smaller enemy types and collect coins to spend on power-ups there's also the plane bosses which put you into a side-scrolling type style aerial shooter these bosses are particularly big finally there's the mausoleum levels there you'll file off a bunch of ghosts that can only be killed by jump Ares while all very different all four level types have one thing in common they're a huge pain in the arse until you figure out exactly how to pull them off it is nice if the mausoleum exists I was downright terrible at using the parry until I was forced to use it on one of those levels in fact I learned something new or just about every level I played who needs a long-winded tutorial anyways I'd rather get my ass kicked until I do better who doesn't want to get be up till they learn right even with specific bosses it's all a learning process fights were done perfectly only last about a minute or two but can take dozens of tries to get down correctly and I really appreciate this especially when facing off against some of the harder bosses like The Phantom Express off the dozens of attempts I had his patterns down but no single failed run ever felt like a heartbreaker cuz I always knew that I could return to the same spot in just a minute or so the fact that the death screen has a progress bar that shows you exactly how close you were to ending whatever monster you're facing off against goes a long way in keeping you motivated and focused there are even little flags that show when busts form changes are gonna happen you'll always know when you challenge the boss enough to Gay's Final Four to truly complete cuphead we're gonna have to use every tool at our disposal Sam especially because eventually we're gonna have to run this thing without getting hit by a single ability together you and me co-op style thankfully to run to help us along cuphead has provided more than a few upgrades for our arsenal including the basic piece shooter weapon there are six weapons total and cuphead there's the homing shot chaser the short-range shotgun spread the boomerang style roundabout weapon the charge delayed shot and the bouncy lobber and every weapon has its basic shot plus a more powerful ux move that can be used at the cost of one of the combo cards you can get by landing shots on enemies there's also super attacks which consume all five of your attack cards but do something game-changing like a kamehameha style laser beam or turning you invincible for a short time be careful though if you screw up using one of the suit you'll lose all 5 como cards for no reason at all and that feels bad man there's also six charms that you can use to make yourself that much more powerful in your quest to bring down all those pesky bosses you only have one charm equipped at a time so be sure you know what you're getting yourself into when you spend your hard-earned coins there's my personal favorite the smoke bomb which turns you invisible and invincible while dashing super useful for dodging a particularly nasty attack which by the way happens all the time I personally love sugar which makes you first jump into an automatic parry super useful considering the Power Move is pretty tough to get the hang of in the first place there's also the heart which gives you one extra HP but we won't be using that one because we have to be every single boss without getting hit right but also a pork rind shop there's the super meter filling coffee a damaging parry move whetstone and the upgraded twin hearts Jerrod like I said I'm gonna be using that one either I can't be able to get hit when I'm this good and we're gonna have to be that good to pull this one off Sam are you ready to deep dive into one of the toughest completionist games we've ever attempted no but let's go make no mistake cut bet puts players through bullet hell there is constantly a barrage of crap flying towards and past you that's aiming to kill you it's stressful it's blindingly fast and it's often times unforgiving while early stages and bosses are relatively simple the latest stages ramp things up will have an overall increase in boss difficulty as well as adding enemies and hazards during those boss fights which are based on the themes of the levels themselves here's the thing about cuphead it's not that it's hard you can learn to deal with part each and every time you manage to pull off a perfect run of a boss it was one of the most high five required moments of my life oh I'm away my wrist still hurts from when we be grim matchstick can you please tone down your hand smacks Trodd no can't do amigo yet the real thing about cuphead is that there's just so much to it you can totally just play through the game beat every boss and just be done with the game but true completionists true madmen will want to go further you can always get better at cuphead we learned that fact after unlocking something very special something that we had only heard rumors about going into our playthrough something so horrifying I can't believe we even attempted it expert mode once you finish cuphead once you'll unlock expert mode where everything that was once old is now new again everything will move faster than before making even the most simple of bosses that much more difficult and guess what Gerard we're gonna have to bring this one down too without gang hit it's safe to say that expert mode has been one of the most difficult challenges we've ever faced here like a bleach nist when i found out that it existed i was crushed that's why i waited so long to talk about this game we'd already struggled through so much and here's yet another playthrough of this thing and even harder than before we've gone so used to the timing on the normal mode they took a while to get used to the exercise mode trials more than once I was waiting for a specific attack to come out and it's getting nailed by a full handful of seconds before I was expecting and to get that coveted 100% in cuphead well it's more like two hundred percent because the first 100 percent is for the normal playthrough and then two hundred for the second playthrough an expert mode but you know what I mean by completionist 100% we had to earn s rankings on every boss mission in expert mode that means performing at least three Perry's doing at least six super moves beating the stage around two minutes a little over or under is okay and of course not taking a single hit ever in the boss fights drawed let's not forget about those P rankings we had to get on all those running gun stages to get those we have to collect every single coin within them and beat those stages without firing a single solitary shot this might sound impossible but you can even get past the mini bosses in the run and gun stages by using calculated dashes or teleports yes I know it's crazy but we had to do it but Capet is far from perfect this game is absolutely riddled with bugs that make completing it far harder and more frustrating than it ever had to be just left the top of my head there were some wonky hit boxes glitched achievements and sometimes straight-up game crashes the game actually crashed so often on the Xbox one that halfway through our completion we just abandoned the console and start all over again on the PC but the worst glitch of all was that little line of code missed place somewhere the game smiles that made it so that our controllers would sometimes randomly start vibrating incessantly for no reason your controller is supposed to vibrate when you take a hit but it's not supposed to last for an entire game this might not sound like the most egregious glitch in the world but in a game that requires this kind of focus and precision it was pretty much a dream killer even if you restart the level the vibrating will still continue until the next time you get hit the only way to stop the shaking is to take a hit and in a playthrough we can't get hit once but we pulled off too right we did it sure but wasn't worth it Sam I think so for a game that's so simple at its core it's amazing to have so many things to do in cuphead even if it did take years of my life to pull off carpet gives you the option to go deep into it but doesn't require it it's challenging on its own but doesn't demand you to go into the lengths that let's say a completionist and his streamer buddy would have to go through it's nice to have options you know it's certainly been a pleasure playing this game with you Sam but if you blow this at the last second of the devil fight I swear to samus I will fight you how can you be so sure that I'm the one that's gonna screw up Jerrod you've been known to get hit by goopy lagron the easiest boss in the game you take that back that was one time my controller was malfunctioning there was lag a dog barked I hadn't had my coffee yet someone came in the room and I it sounds like excuses to me hey look man I apologized for that I'm sorry just move on only if you let me play his cuphead because I'm sick of being the Luigi to your Mario okay fine you can be first player but only this once and don't tell anyone else I did this [Music] cop heads main reward much like hard games of its ilk is the personal reward of knowing that you managed to get through all of it I suddenly feel accomplished not sure I'd put myself through the torture again though pulling off everything without getting hit was certainly one of the most challenging things I've ever done in a game perhaps even in my life and my thumbs are going to pay for it for weeks they're definitely a couple of cool things you can get for pulling everything off in the game forget an a-rank all bets are on every boss level you can unlock an old-timey two strip color mode which makes everything just a bit more washed out oh yeah and we went ahead and unlocked black and white mode too that one was done by earning a P rank on every running gun level P for pacifist that particular challenge may sound hard but it really isn't as tough as it seems especially if your gods like we are and while there are a good amount of achievements in cuphead they're shockingly easy to unlock for the most part the only ones we're talking about are the ones you'll naturally get by earning S&P rankings throughout the game once again cementing the fact that competition want anything from you except your immortal soul while we completed cop head there were two full campaign playthroughs one on normal and one on expert mode a team boss is defeated twice which equates to 36 bosses total killed zero shots fired doing a pacifist run on the run and gun levels 1831 total deaths 17 hours of total playtime on the Xbox 135 hours on the PC totaling 252 hours of total playtime and 6 near fistfights between me and Sam do you uh you actually think our friendships gonna recover from this one I think it might be just stronger than ever Sam if years of you bugging me to come on the show couldn't harm our friendship I don't think a simple retro shmoop is gonna do much damage to what we built it's truly something special you know thank God cuz after this nightmare I'm never coming back but you can keep your show I don't need it peace to say the true award for completing Cup and his friendship you're my friend Sam Sam I want you to play games with me again come Sam Sam at the end of the day cuphead gives back exactly what you put into it if you're looking to get into a challenging game that you can complete in a few hours you can do that if you want to speedrun something difficult I can't think of a better option if you want to get really deep into it and achieve perfection on every level and every achievement you can do that too but the key here is that you don't have to and you know what I wouldn't recommend it either cuphead it's an absolute joy to play whether you give up after a few bosses or squeeze every last drop out of the liquid in the little guy's head it's a great game that I recommend everyone plays but not a game I can recommend completing because of the amount of insane hours necessary to complete it now I don't want to be the meme that says that cuphead is the darksouls of running gun games but make no mistake cuphead even without the need to complete it is very very difficult although the journey is quite fruitful it's constantly rewarding you with upgrades with consistent reminders of motivation when you fail upon death with things like the face flags making you feel like you were almost there just when you failed well it seemed like we breezed through the game and playing cuphead requires a stupid amount of skill we did it on co-op just to prove that we could it's no easy feat and anyone who does this should be proud even if you do on your own and while you do get cool filters in the end for some completionist things the game does not give you enough for a total reward for the journey of completing the game the journey is fun and the challenge is awesome but the payoff is a little disappointing so with that in mind I give this is game our completionist rating of just finish it just finish it finish it you are a meme [Music] finish it that's all time we ever tonight guys so please as always let me know if it over today's episode somewhere on the Internet guys Sam is awesome please go follow him over at twitch.tv slash stripper that's where I live the man streams almost every day and if you want to see a good game or kick ass every single day and Sam is your guy if you liked today's video hit that like button share with your friends be sure to subscribe and hey if you missed last week's video on bubsy give a click or tap right here and if you see any of this cuphead merch you can go to the yeti calm and buy it use the affiliate link for tybg in description down below we'll see you guys next week let's go rest Sam

Channel: The Completionist

Views: 1,773,905

Keywords: cuphead, cuphead review, review, cuphead gameplay, gameplay, cup head, cuphead bosses, cuphead game, cuphead game review, mugman, cuphead and mugman, jirard, strippin, completionist, thestrippin, sam thorne, thorne, IGN, platformer, StudioMDHR, game reviews, angryjoe, gtlive, studio mdhr, pgbgameplay, pbg, peanutbuttergamer, the completionist, cup head review

Id: Vnqm18YvvqA

Length: 24min 9sec (1449 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Fehndrix]

Nice throwback to the Aladdin episodes with Sam slowly walking down the hall with his head hanging.

[u/TheGamingTurret]

Oh look

A cup head video review that doesn't even JOKe about it being dark souls! HUZA

Alex in another part of the office: [internal screaming while tied to a chair]

[u/infernalspawnODOOM]

"You are a meme." Wow. Throwin' shade.

[u/this__one]

Seriously though, props to these guys for what they accomplished. Doubly so, since they had to restart after halfway.