Enlarge / In the new expansion pack The Delicious Last Course, Miss Chalice makes three.
MDHR study
Some people will look at an expansion pack like Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course and decide after a single glance. The beautiful brutality of this $ 8 add-on follows the same path as the original 2017 Cuphead game, a notoriously tough descendant of the Mega Man game design school. Maybe you like to play games as beautiful as they are difficult. Maybe you don’t.
I’m here to talk about the last course because maybe I look a lot like you. I’m not the target audience for Last Course. I never won the original Cuphead. I have stated that a difficult match like this is easier to watch than to play. But when I saw the hands-on demonstration of the expansion at this month’s Summer Game Fest, I shrugged, grabbed a gamepad, and tried it. I could also deal with among other scheduled game demonstrations, I thought.
And then I fell in love. For whatever reason, the demo I played and my subsequent completion of Last Course’s “normal” difficulty content, grabbed me and didn’t let me go, which is why I feel compelled to recommend it.
Another getaway to the island, with useful new skills
Enlarge / Miss Chalice can only join the battle when she tricks one of the original main characters into biting a magic cookie. This temporarily sends another person to a ghost kingdom so he can join them. The trio embarks on a quest to bring her back to life for good, without the need for complicated cookies.
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Like many other classic “expansion packs”, Last Course requires you to own the original game (which is conveniently on sale in most digital download showcases between the date of publication of this article and July 7) and incorporates new content into Cuphead’s 2D action base. The original game divided its 18 boss battles into three “islands” of content, and Last Course adds, among other things, six bosses on a new island.
Enlarge Ad / Miss Chalice’s double jumping skill will be helpful in getting away from the annoying gnomes that cling to her feet.
MDHR study
It also features a third playable character, named Miss Chalice, and appears when you team up with a specific “charm” of Chalice in any of the existing characters (Cuphead or Mugman). It comes with four default health points (compared to the other characters’ three points) and three unique abilities: an invincible dodge roll, a double jump, and a stop. (The latter gives players a bigger “hitbox” when they try the game’s crucial stop maneuver, which makes it easier to counter enemy special color attacks.) Because it must be activated as a charm. , Miss Chalice cannot equip other charms of the game. , and in two-player co-op sessions, only one person can turn their character into Miss Chalice.
As I made clear before, I’m not a Cuphead professional, so I was thrilled with the new rookie-friendly character when I first tried the game at Summer Game Fest. All of your special abilities are tuned for greater maneuverability to help you deal with the chaos that is an average battle of Cuphead bosses, and in addition to your extra health point, you also have a custom “superattack” option that out of order. any damage. Instead, it gives you an extra, temporary health point, and this can be regenerated during long, brutal boss fights. Once unlocked, it’s also available at the levels of the original campaign, making it an ingenious entry point for anyone like me who has never passed the original campaign.