I'd recently talked about my experience with Alien Isolation, a game in which the environments and atmospheres are one of the most immersive and engrossing Sci-Fi worlds I'd ever had the good fortune to play. Thus, it'd only be fair to follow it up with yet another contender that features both an engaging environment and some impeccable design.

Not to mention, the mechanics and systems present in Prey align almost precisely with my ideal preferences: a compelling narrative, meaningful choices, satisfying gameplay, and solid player customization. I'd argue Prey is as close to perfection in a game as any could come, and so it's no wonder I'd decided to revisit what I'd consider the top of its (limited) class.

A lived-in world; a snapshot of humanity

It's strange: the station is very nearly abandoned, and yet it couldn't feel more alive. I have to think this is a result of wonderful writing and environmental design, but regardless it seems like no small feat.

For the abundance of hostilities and the lack of either hospitality or the comforts of human presence, it never really feels like you're alone. Part of this comes down to the writing.

Any person who's worked in some kind of corporate or professional atmosphere has likely seen what the in-world emails emulate. They feel so believable, especially when you see things like the foam-dart-based assassin game email, the tabletop RPG campaign, the whistle blowing and subsequent quashing, the gloo-based snowman, and so many others.

And that's without having mentioned the rather stellar voice acting to go along with the dialogue and voice diaries you find scattered throughout the station. It all feels so compelling and like lives truly lived. This being in complete contrast to the station's actual situation whereas you're like an archeologist uncovering the remains of an ancient civilization; a snapshot prior to its downfall.

Despite the sprawling expanse of the station, the only spaces that ever felt devoid of humanity were the GUTS and space itself. The former was designed with practicality in mind: what was essentially the station's veins distributing life to the remainder of the facility via air, power, and water. The latter needs no explanation as the there's little comfort offered by the vastness of space. It's no small wonder they managed to properly segregate that feeling of humanity and isolate it from the remainder of the station and it's truly a testament to cohesive direction.

Play your way: for better and worse

Prey is classified as an immersive sim, which is an incredibly niche genre that's often incorrectly assigned and features somewhat broad criteria it must meet in order to satisfy the label. An overly simplified definition would be a game that prioritizes player choice with an emphasis on progression that may or may not have been intended by developers through one of its many systems. Often what makes these games so unique is how many mechanics are often implemented relative to more streamlined titles where only the best execute it competently. More on this later.

When I'd first played Prey, I'd opted to embrace my human side: rescue everyone I could, only invest neuromods (the game's perk points) into human-based improvements, and rely on ballistic weapons and firearms. I'd had a great time then but did so with the caveat I'd return to the game with the intention to reject humanity in all forms and fashions. Fast forward to now, and that's what I've done.

What remains so striking to me is just how much variety the player has in approaching the multitude of situations and obstacles throughout the station. Obviously it's by design given the genre, but as I alluded to earlier, only the best do it this well.

Going the route of focusing on human enhancements and neuromods means a greater ability to interact with the station: hacking computers, repairing equipment, moving objects with sheer strength that block your path. In comparison to my recent playthrough, that utility seemed almost like easy mode at the detriment of combat effectiveness.

It did, however, force me to utilize more interesting methods to overcome certain situations. Recycler charges were an easy, albeit simple, cleaver where I'd have possibly preferred a scalpel. So instead of choosing the path of the butcher, I opted for one of the surgeon. I'd noticed that explosive canisters were riddled around the station (clearly OSHA has zero governance in space) and was curious to see if a well-placed and delicate application of demolition-based relocation would suffice. And much to my own delight, it would seem I'd discovered another avenue for progress.

I get it. It's a simple line of reasoning that doesn't seem that earth shattering, but often games aren't as interactive or as intuitive as we want them to be. So it is refreshing when the idea of real physics can be applied in-game.

Counter to that, the gloo gun was something I found to be disappointing in how rigid its interactivity was. I'd hoped that the expanding nodules expelled by the gloo gun into tight crevices would act as a kind of lever prying objects from their footholds. Instead it would either clip through the object or bounce and fall unceremoniously like a scoop of ice cream off its cone. The latter is about how the gloo gun left me feeling in the end, but that's an otherwise small issue.

What I really enjoyed, though, was often taking significantly more time exploring my surroundings as there are so many options to proceed: maintenance hatches, hidden notes, environmental clues. There were so many options I'd missed because I'd had my utilitarian bludgeon capable of lifting any object or hacking any computer, and it's actually a touch of a shame my first experience had been so streamlined by no one's fault but my own.

Exploration is king

I've come to discover in my many years as a gamer that exploration remains one of my most cherished elements in any game. This likely all stems from my younger years where I spent my time scouring the alien landscape of Morrowind and thus it's no wonder it became the spark in what kindles my fervor. And wouldn't you know, this game features it in spades.

Amongst all of the systems present, I'd argue the foundation and success for all of them stems from this cornerstone. Character advancement is tied to neuromods and resource gathering, meaning incremental improvements do not rely on experience gain from killing enemies or completing quests but instead require the player to rummage through the station.

The core narrative expects you to explore the station to some extent, but much of what brings the station its depth is tucked away into locked rooms or little offshoots that expose the cracks on what seems another flawed Utopia. Not that it ever presented in the same way Rapture from Bioshock did, but it certainly had a more refined air of altruistic scientific exploration than the employee undercurrents would have you realize.

On combat: encroaching tedium

Unfortunately, one of Prey's weakest aspects remains its combat. Not for a lack of execution or because it's poorly implemented. It controls well where your toolkit between weapons and powers provides a welcome array of variety. Instead, it has to do with the overall level of fatigue I felt by the end of both playthroughs. Keep in mind, neither was exceptionally long, clocking in at about the mid-20s. I don't think it unreasonable to expect a game's systems to stay engaging through the whole of a playthrough.

Its follows a sort of bell curve of enjoyment to me: you're severely underpowered relative to your enemies at the start which requires significantly more caution and planning. Tedious, sure, but not does not stay overly long or is exactly unwelcome as you find your footing in the game's honeymoon phase.

What the game does incredibly well is give Gothic/Risen levels of growth in character capability: you start as a piss poor representation of function steadily improving in overall effectiveness until naught can resist you. Enemies are not mere sponges that grow as you do; they are mortal, after all, and you are to be feared. That feels exceedingly rare as developers seem to dread removing the sole aspect of what can make a game challenging, even if artificially.

The issue is, for as powerful as you become, the threats do not relent. This leaves the player meandering towards the game's finale in this kind of purgatory where opposition is not challenging enough to be satisfying but not so simple as to be mindless. A flaw, sure, but not damning.

No, where I've elected to bare my dissatisfaction is in the fact it made the exploration more of a chore. I said it earlier: exploration is the best part. And the game expects you to revisit areas often, meaning you'll clear them at least once in the numerous times you'll return to them. However, this is largely irrelevant as the areas will change aesthetically to reflect the growing influence of the Typhon. With these visual changes will come a slew of newly spawned enemies making each subsequent visit feel like a greater punishment for simply wanting to unravel the station's many threads and secrets.

Mooncrash

I've prattled on about most of the game's major aspects already, but feel the Mooncrash DLC offers an experience unique enough to the base game that I need to touch on it a little bit before wrapping up.

Mooncrash is Prey's one and only DLC and is essentially a roguelite campaign set in a curated map amidst the TranStar lunar sibling site to Talos 1. While much of the gameplay remains static from the main campaign, the brand new location coupled with the genre shift and some mechanic tweaks give a decent amount of content to delve into.

Unchanged, and still ultimately king, remains the exploration. It's a joy to meander through the handful of new locations. The only downside is that the simulation you use to explore the lunar base comes with a time limit. I get why it's there, but that doesn't mean I enjoyed that aspect.

Still, there's plenty to discover between the different escape methods, playable characters, equipment, and lore that it's well worth your time and a welcome twist on the base game. On top of that, enemy health appears to be toned down, making the enemies far less obnoxious than I had previously harped on in the base game.

Final thoughts

It's both a shame and a boon we're unlikely to ever see a sequel to Prey given the game underperformed at release only to become a kind of cult/beloved classic in the following years. Still, that may not be a bad thing given the sheer budget that would go into a sequel given the current state of AAA budgeting. That'd require an asinine amount of sales to cover and would likely all but see Arkane dissolved. It'd be a massive blow to the industry as I consider Arkane one of the few studios who continues to deliver on their vision and by the company's roots.

I've been exceptionally fond of Arkane as far back as Arx Fatalis, and while not every entry in their catalog has yet found its way into my heart, Prey easily takes place at the throne.

I don't think it's unreasonable to find faults with Prey, but regardless of any nitpicks you may have, it's a wonderful game in a genre that's sorely underrepresented. If you've never taken the chance on Prey, I highly encourage you to give it a look as some piece of its identity is likely to be compelling to you.

Yooka-Laylee’s reception perhaps has to do with the mismatch between anticipation and ambition. People expected Banjo-Kazooie—a simple, straightforward game built around the most basic, predictable, formulaic genre imaginable, which does not deviate from exactly what you expect it to do. In reality, Yooka-Laylee is more of a successor to Banjo-Tooie and Donkey Kong 64, as in, it’s more about the Metroidvania progression.

Banjo Kazooie also had a Metroidvania-style structure, where you learn new moves within each level and make a progression, but the stages themselves didn’t contain many challenges requiring moves you learn beyond that stage. It had some puzzle-like progression, but such gatekeeping was so few that such jiggies were more or less optional and easily memorized. Banjo-Tooie made the change where the entire game was designed to make you struggle for any progress. It’s why the sequel is divisive, because the whole game is a puzzle.

Every game genre has this division, this compass ranging from BOTW to Skyward Sword, from MGS1 to MGSV. You have one extreme of the collectathon genre with Super Mario Odyssey, which is about “do whatever you want”. That gives you all the fun moves from the beginning with no gatekeeping and allows the player to use all those moves to travel the world quickly to complete the stage on their own. The only thing blocking you is your skill. The other extreme of the genre is the puzzle platformer, which is about limiting the player to show a distant reward to look forward to. The stages are designed around the player progression. Banjo-Kazooie falls somewhere in between, which is why it appealed to many audiences.

I think Playtonic made a mistake in appealing to the Kazooie crowd that funded the campaign. These are not only the developers behind Kazooie, but also Tooie and Donkey Kong 64. With Yooka-Laylee, they were compelled to create an evolution of that latter formula because this is the normal gameplay loop. Purchasing a few moves from the snake per stage, the stage expansion system, and the number of inaccessible challenges that demand you to backtrack all overwhelm the player on the first visit. Half the time you explore, find something, but you can’t do anything. Then you go back and have to expand it to find that it was not even full all along. The stages gatekeep the player too much that at times the game comes across as Lego Star Wars. It constantly teases the player with the Pagies you can’t get, so you memorize them and backtrack to return hours later. You always come out of the worlds feeling like they are unfinished, unsatisfied. Completionists who like to do one-go will always feel their flow is disrupted because they are missing out half of the content of the world on their first visit.

Personally, I prefer the sandbox-type of Mario, where the game dumps all freedom, since I view a collectathon as not best suited for such puzzle-like progression, which is one of the reasons why I don’t like the Lego game. This would be all personal preference. I will say that obtaining each Pagie created much more satisfaction no power star or moon could provide. Each paper is not scattered as if they were thrown haphazardly, unlike Odyssey. Each Pagie felt special because you solve a unique challenge behind it, whether that is a small story or quest with interesting characters, a puzzle, platforming challenge, minigame, etc. There is a care to their placements. This makes the individual Pagies matter and valuable. As you are grown, you are making little incremental progress for each visit, and when the world is completed, the satisfaction is incredible. You know this feeling from the map-based games like classic Zelda, Resident Evil, and Metroid. The initial feeling of the world overhwelming you is gone once you are grown and eventually conquering the worlds.

With the direction this game has in mind, the big failing of this game is just the massive scale of the open-ended map, which doesn’t fit the type of progression this game goes for. The repeated playthroughs fit better for the small world, which makes going back and forth and backtracking tolerable and allows the player to keep track of inaccessible and accessible collectibles. Yooka Laylee’s inflated worlds don’t utilize the player movement. It’s just pressing the stick forward and rolling. Repeat. There is not much care put into the map designed around the traversal system. If the map size were reduced to two-thirds, this game would have seen a significant improvement.

So add in the lack of identifiable landmarks, it compounds confusion about where that damn snowman was, where that puzzle or challenge was… and then the initial lack of moveset and strict stamina meter making just searching for it a tedious slog. What is the purpose of the stamina meter for rolling? Is it just for power-up collectibles that exist for the progression? It exists to hinder the pacing and stretches out the playtime for no good reason. Why not make attack consume stamina instead, because at least that would have made me take a more careful approach to fighting enemies rather than mashing X.

There are many big design issues like that. It retains many of the problems present in Banjo, such as the combat being terrible, platforming itself being lackluster, a restrictive hubworld, and the overreliance on minigames, but I still enjoyed the game more than I expected. While playing it, I was bracing for the game to go terrible at any moment. I enjoyed World 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5… then I realized the game never went terrible. This is a fun collectathon romp with bumpy spots. In fact, I appreciated this more than many of the classic 3D platformers, and not just because of the nostalgia I have. I played the Banjo games relatively recently, and I didn’t think they were the masterpieces. They also had a share of frustrating bullshit (swimming, flying, platforming design), so as a whole, Yooka-Laylee was not a hard pill to swallow aside from the map size.

The full moveset gives the player greater flexibility to move around the stage than any of Rare’s classic platformers. Once I unlocked everything and returned to World 1, it gave me a sensation that very few games could give. From the beginning, where you could only jump to glide around everywhere, exploring the out-of-bounds areas, it is so amazing. I recommend just zipping past to World 5 rather than staying in one world too long, so you can get all the moveset and then return to the older stages.

It’s no wonder it couldn't find an audience, and hearing how the remake went to a more Super Mario Odyssey route, I'm curious to see how well the original will hold up in years later. There is a masterpiece hiding behind the original game, but it’s too disconnected and scattered. It’s still not a disaster that people made it out to be, and it is certainly not a failure on every level. We all played a game like this dozens times before on the older consoles, and they are considered classics. This is not worse than them. I can’t be too harsh toward it considering it was the small team trying to not just recapture but actually evolve their old classic with positive results. It has the vibe, charm and soul that other studios would kill to make something on this level.

The votes are in! The community's choice for a long title to play together and discuss in September 2026 is...

Paper Mario (2000)

Developer: Intelligent Systems

Genre: JRPG

Platform: Nintendo 64, Wii, Wii U

Why should you care: Paper Mario is Intelligent Systems' follow-up to Super Mario RPG, and the first entry in what became a whole series. Same basic setup as every Mario game: Bowser steals a magic artifact and Peach needs rescuing, except here it plays out as a turn-based RPG with a paper cutout aesthetic.

I don't have much experience with the Mario franchise, so maybe others can weigh in what makes this title unique. One thing I noticed that will be important for me this month is that there is an Archipelago randomizer (unofficial) mod available for it, which could immensely increase this title replay value. Archipelago is a great way to get the multiplayer experience even with friends whose schedules and game tastes don't align, so I'm always on the lookout for more enjoyable titles with these mods.

What is GotM?

Game of the Month is an initiative similar to a book reading club, where every month the Patient Gamers community votes for a long game (>12 hours main story per HLTB) and a short game (<12 h) to play, discuss together and share our experiences about.

If you want to learn more & participate, that's great, you can join the /r/patientgamers Discord server to do that! (link in the subreddit's sidebar) However, if you only want to discuss this month's choice in this thread, that's cool too.

September 2026's GotM theme: Release Year 2000 / 2001. To avoid confusion, we'll settle on US initial release dates. Remaster/Remake dates are not considered (though you are free to play those versions if they exist).

To sum up my thoughts on Blasphemous 1:

• repetitive, simplistic combat
• clunky platforming
• competent but not amazing level design
• a few baffling design decisions leading to unnecessary friction
• some excellent boss fights
• amazing artstyle
• unique and interesting setting
• incredible vibes

Basically, nothing special in the gameplay department but the experience was elevated due to the amazing atmosphere of the game. I enjoyed the game, played through it twice, and was excited for the sequel.

My complaints of Blasphemous 2 can be summed up as: it's more of Blasphemous 1. There were a few tiny pain points addressed but overall, I really feel like the developers learned absolutely nothing about combat, level design, boss design, or enemy design inbetween the release of B1 and the development of B2.

Perhaps its unfair to judge a sequel harshly for being more of the same, but I do expect or at least hope for a studio to learn and improve, especially when they are building upon a game which was essentially a diamond in the rough. I saw the potential in Blasphemous and so Blasphemous 2 represents that potential being unrealized.

A huge part of my enjoyment of the first game was the novel setting, but the setting is less novel the second time around. I was banking on some significant gameplay improvements but there were none. You'll trudge through similar looking environments, chipping away at the health of enemies which are often directly ported from the first game. Basically every enemy in the game has 1 attack. You dodge/parry the attack several times and chip away in-between. Nothing about the game feels new or exciting at all. The bosses in B2 are often harder but definitely not funner, imo. Final boss is toxic.

If what you want from B2 is more of B1 then you'll love it. If you're expecting anything more then you'll be disappointed.

The votes are in! The community's choice for a short title to play together and discuss in September 2026 is...

Pikmin (2001)

Developer: Nintendo

Genre: RTS, Puzzle

Platform: GameCube

Why should you care: Pikmin was Miyamoto's first GameCube project and reportedly grew out of him messing around in his garden. The game's hook is a real-time strategy game where the resource you're managing is a countdown clock, not gold or wood.

The Pikmin themselves are little plant-creatures you grow in groups and throw at problems. And I mean that literally - you fling them at enemies, obstacles and objects to fight, build, and carry things back to base. Each color has different resistances and abilities, so a lot of the puzzle-solving is figuring out which combination gets a job done before the day ends and you're yanked back to the ship.

What is GotM?

Game of the Month is an initiative similar to a book reading club, where every month the Patient Gamers community votes for a long game (>12 hours main story per HLTB) and a short game (<12 h) to play, discuss together and share our experiences about.

If you want to learn more & participate, that's great, you can join the /r/patientgamers Discord server to do that! (link in the subreddit's sidebar) However, if you only want to discuss this month's choice in this thread, that's cool too.

September 2026's GotM theme: Release Year 2000 / 2001. To avoid confusion, we'll settle on US initial release dates. Remaster/Remake dates are not considered (though you are free to play those versions if they exist).

I consider myself to be a big fan of the souls Series. I got every achievement in Dark Souls 1+2, as well as Sekiro. DS3 only had one play through and Elden Ring is in my mental backlog for some other time. I decided to try returning to the series roots with Demon Souls.

The Good:

Atmosphere in this game is unnerving and uncomfortable in the best way. You can feel the world is in deep shit with how bleak everything looks and sounds. Another thing to mention are the shortcuts in this game, they are very satisfying to find and unlock. The maiden here is my favourite because her accent sounds Czech to me. I believe there are no truly awful bosses, at worst they're annoying or forgettable. A lot of these guys have a trick you must understand before winning. I liked King Allant the most and even lost a level to him.

The Bad:

Health system in this game is whack. The hp penalty is rough and almost forces you to permanently lose half of your ring slots just to mitigate it. I had to upgrade vitality a lot to not get one shot in soul form by certain attacks. On the other hand, smaller damage means nothing because health weed is so plentiful. I didn't even have to farm and still face tanked everything. Boletaria drops and shops let you have dozens of ripe weed and heal everything mid fight. I imagine mages could probably spam spells for days.

Weigh limit is frustrating because you have to dump everything extra after returning to Nexus. What's the point? It just adds tedious procedures to the objective list.

The Ugly:

The game is so narrow, it feels claustrophobic. Narrow mines where a single enemy blocks your path, narrow bridges where stingrays try to push you away, narrow prison corridors etc. I upgraded strength to shield block everything because dodging just didn't feel viable. I want to see how devs did any of this stuff as a dex build.

Weapon upgrades are comical in how much stuff you need. A single +10 weapon requires a bucket of various shards and chunks, and there are like ten types of these rocks. I was 3 large shards away from upgrading sword to +9, but I really didn't want to farm.

Conclusion:

This game is full of jank and dumb mechanics, but it has a certain charm to it. I don't think I'll play it again though, the level design seems to strongly favor tanks over anything else.

While there are technically still three weeks of summer to go, for anyone with kids in school (or in school themselves) the season is already over. That's often a double-edged sword, but for my part I'm happy to take it. It's been a rough adjustment on schedules here early on, but we'll all acclimate soon enough. Only 4 games to show for this August, though with one of them being newer we'll limit conversation to three of them. I suppose that's the price you pay when you commit to a months-long JRPG, eh? More on that this fall. For now...

(Games are presented in chronological completion order; the numerical indicator represents the YTD count.)

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#53 - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 - PS5 - 7.5/10 (Solid)

The first Tony Hawk's Pro Skater might be one of my most played Nintendo 64 games (yes, I was one of those kids who didn't have a PlayStation). I must've played that campaign through start to finish at least a few times, to say nothing of the numerous sessions of Graffiti or Horse my brother and I killed time with. Strangely, despite how much we both dug the game, we never owned or even so much as played Pro Skater 2. Probably a symptom of games costing so much more relative to income back then (it's true whether it feels good to admit or not), and the fact that we did not actually have any income of our own to spend on them. We did end up eventually snagging a GameCube and renting Pro Skater 3 before fully buying Pro Skater 4, but that second entry – widely considered to be one of the greatest sports games ever made – was for me the fish that got away.

That made Pro Skater 1+2 a somewhat unique value proposition for me: here's a game that promises to deliver on my ancient nostalgia and yet it's simultaneously my first chance to discover an apparent all-timer. As such it's no surprise that my experience playing the game also had a kind of hybrid quality to it. The nostalgia was there for sure, but buried under a murky haze, half caused by my own memory fog blending all the classic Pro Skater games together and half by the game's own overlay of modern sensibilities. I was immediately put off by the home menu hub/UI, which reads less like a throwback to a simpler time and more like every bloated annual 2K Sports game on the market. Thankfully this was just the bones of a true progression and challenge (read: a bunch of stuff for diehards to do beyond the norm) system rather than a gateway to microtransaction hell, but it felt at odds with the concept of a game that tries to transport you back a couple decades in time.

On the gameplay side I think the hybrid nature of the game worked better, in that all the mechanical upgrades from later Pro Skater games are baked into Pro Skater 1+2 by default. In the first Pro Skater landing a trick off a vert ramp was the end of that combo. The only way to score big points was to get some air off a regular ramp, do a trick, and then chain some grinds together. But then each successive game increased the move list to allow for eventually stupidly long combos, and now I got to go back to the old haunts with these new skills and mess around in a brand new way. Pretty cool! But if you're a purist, the option to disable these more advanced techniques is also there, and that's cool too.

Despite my past fondness for the multiplayer modes of the first Pro Skater I didn't bother with them here; nobody to play with on split screen and the idea of matchmaking with random online strangers doesn't appeal to me because that's not what I'm coming to this game for. Nevertheless, the option is there, as is the ability to create your own skate park like in the later Pro Skater games. So all told I think this game surpasses my memory of the first Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, landing about on par with my enjoyment of the GameCube entries in the series. But for me the truest nostalgia was slowly trimming away half that music playlist over the length of my career run until I was left with only the good stuff. Now that brought me back.

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#54 - Q.U.B.E. 2 - PC - 8/10 (Great)

The first Q.U.B.E. game was a pretty clear loose Portal ripoff which eventually strove to further differentiate itself with a bolted on narrative in a later version. The results of that late arriving narrative experiment were mixed even though the game itself was largely a good time, so I was curious to see how this sequel would handle things. Happy to say it's a clear improvement on an already fun game, which means if you dig first person puzzlers Q.U.B.E. 2 is absolutely well worth your while.

Turns out it makes a big difference to go in with a story in hand rather than hiring a writer to show up two years after release to try to make sense of things. In Q.U.B.E. 2 you play as a different character from the first game, set some time after its events, further exploring the meaning of the cube structure and what it portends for mankind. This is all again communicated through voiceovers and "found footage" style recordings, but it's a pretty engaging core mystery, very well supported by the game's aesthetic and atmosphere. Like the first game, the ending didn't quite land as well as the journey, but I think others with different narrative tastes will probably appreciate it more.

The draw for me though was the puzzle design. The first game had fun and novel puzzles but eventually started to get in its own way, adding complexity for complexity's sake and killing the pacing. It was also littered with secrets to get, which would force you to "solve" a given puzzle in a completely different way so as to reach the collectible, and these immediately proved more trouble than they were worth to me. So what a relief that Q.U.B.E. 2 dispensed with these secrets altogether and streamlined the main puzzles into just the central ideas that worked. Those ideas were still plenty numerous and creative, with new stuff added onto the first game's basics, but never getting bloated or too cumbersome. Each puzzle hit me right in the "ooh, so satisfying" portion of my brain, so I had a ball with it the whole way through...

...up until the DLC. The first DLC chapter Lost Orbit was a dive straight back into the "arbitrary complexity is king" mindset of the first game, all the way down to the return of collectibles. Some of these puzzles were built around the game's relatively unreliable physics to where you see the solution but can't execute on it because of timing problems and other inconsistencies. The second DLC Aftermath initially felt like a great compromise in that it brought back the high quality puzzle design of the base game and even introduced a new puzzle object to play with while keeping those collectibles around for the completionists. However, once I knocked out the last of its main puzzles I discovered that all the collectible secrets in it were actually mandatory for finishing the DLC at all, and that's bogus. So a slightly bitter taste in the mouth to finish things off, but if we just pretend the two DLC chapters don't exist, Q.U.B.E. 2 is one I'd highly recommend.

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#55 - [Redacted]

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#56 - Botanicula - PC - 7.5/10 (Solid)

Playing the first two Samorost games got me caught up to Machinarium, so I'd been looking forward to beginning a journey through the rest of the Amanita Design titles for quite some time. On that point Botanicula really does feel like nothing so much as a blend of the two concepts of those other point-and-click adventure games. The problems to solve feel a little more cleanly defined as in Machinarium, but those are now separated from that game's relatively sensible robot town setting and married instead to the bizarre revelry that defines the Samorost series. In Botanicula you play as a handful of different seedlings who travel together along a great tree, seeking for a way to fend off the spiderlike shadow beings who are slowly killing it. Such a setting provides the design team with ample creative room to present really any kind of strange creature they might contrive.

This odd bestiary is the true focus of Botanicula, to the point that completing certain interactions with each type of tree-dwelling critter you encounter will give you a sort of trading card so you can go look at them at your leisure whenever you'd like later. Collecting them in this way will also unlock little bonus scene snippets at the conclusion of the game, but if I'm honest that's not a real draw for me. I did however like fuddling around on each screen in the moment because you never knew what stuff might trigger or where that might lead you. Sometimes that fuddling turned out to be the actual critical path while other times it was nothing at all, but almost always my curiosity was rewarded with some kind of stimulus response.

I do think the aesthetic style of the game (the art of Eric Carle meets impressionist painting) made things occasionally tough to parse, especially when all you've got to anchor yourself to are freaky bug-things that don't necessarily have any real-life analogues. And there were still a couple bits of click-hunting typical of the genre, though playing this one after Samorost 2 it's clear how much the developers improved on that front in the seven years between games. So while I wouldn't go so far as to call Botanicula an essential title, if you like these kinds of games it's definitely worth your while.

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Coming in September:

• Not content to limit my rail grinding to skateboards, I've spent the past months playing tiny spurts of Mario Kart World in bits of evening downtime between dinner and kid bedtime, but I've specifically avoided actually beating the game. That'll change right as we roll the month over.
• We started the summer with a 15 year old action tower defense title and by golly we're gonna end it with one too. Sanctum takes the honor this time around.
• After that I'm thinking a brief visual novel to act as a reset so I can feel good jumping into whatever mystery genre comes after, so we'll hit up The Last Show of Mr. Chardish before adventuring once more into the great unknown of the 100+ game PC backlog.
• And more...

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The last time i played FFXII, i remembered i got somewhat far then dropped it. As it turns out, my teenage ass quit the game pretty early, in the second town of Bhujerba. Now that i managed to finish the game, i remembered why i dropped it.

Playing as a young man named Vaan, he lost his brother in the war between Archadia and Dalmasca. Since Dalmasca is currently under Archadia's control, it make sense for Vaan to be angry and wanting revenge. This occupation and the political conflict around it is what drives FFXII story.

I was expecting a doom and gloom protagonist, but Vaan isn't all that. Sure he wants his revenge, but he's still just a naive young man, learning about life and trying to get by. Against a whole kingdom with advanced tech, what can this amateur thief do? The story flows nicely since the first big conflict, but definitely not quick enough for me. Its not helping that i wasn't impressed by Vaan at the time.

By the end of the game, i do appreciate him better. But i can say he won't be on top 5 best protagonists in any list whatsoever. And this isn't exactly about him either, i just think that if i take him out of the equation, the story will flow exactly the same. He feels inconsequential that he makes me wonder if he was a last minute addition.

Regarding the overall story itself, i also think my teenage ass won't appreciate it much. There is an emotional core, but it leans itself more toward the subtle, political thriller. This old me enjoyed it and think the story is going well until the reveal of the Occuria, which gives more question than answers. Just like Vaan, i think this ancient race can be taken out and the story will turn out more or less the same, just less flashy. Maybe that was why they add them, to make things more interesting.

Moving on to gameplay, the MMO-style battle feels weird at first but grew on me pretty quickly. There wasn't any battle screen to switch into, because we fight the enemies there and there real time. It feels action oriented, but it wasn't. To make things less chaotic and tedious, the game has the Gambit system where we can "program" our teammates. I think its missing some QoL feature like switching gambit preset on the fly, but other than that its easy to get into.

The game has some of the BGM in the series i'd say, and some fun sidequests. The bounty and monster hunting really take advantage of the MMO-style exploration and map design. Hunting down the best gears is also fun, although it can be infuriating to some. I mean, if the strongest bow in the game is invisible and has 1% of dropping, i can see why people won't bother. In the end, i just used the RNGhelper lmao.

Overall, i did enjoy the game. Once things get going, it gets going. It doesn't need much grinding either, good if you have limited time. I still have some questions though, maybe some of you can enlighten me and make me appreciate what i miss. I'm still not sure what the Occurians want, they want Ashe to destroy Archadia because Venat is helping Archadia? And what is Venat's motivation, he wants to help Vayne to free humanity from the Occurians? Also, i just realised this near the end, Basch looks more like a Sky Pirate than Balthier.

Anyway, thanks for reading fellas.

With the recent news about obsidian shutting down work on Avowed 2 and being set to work on fallout, a lot of discussion about Avowed started up in the online community - primarily focused on how many people saw it as "A mid flop".

I have been a pretty solid Obsidian fan ever since i played Fallout: New Vegas (cliche, i know) over 5 years ago and have since played almost every single of their games including the Eora series which i would describe myself as a pretty mayor fan of. Since i recently got myself a new computer i decided to therefore check out Avowed to see what the fuss was all about.

The Good:

The general artistic representation. The enviroments are very detailed and vivid, and i feel it says plenty about obsidians sucess in this regard when my favorite environment was a desert, a place otherwise dreadfully boring in most other games. The living lands have been hyped up as this totally wild and unihabitable place in the earlier games, and i would say without a doubt that Avowed manages to live up to these expectations.

The Music. The soundtrack is both ephemeral and moody and generally really good at easing you into the universe, I especially enjoyed the track that plays in Paradis, the first major city in the game.

The companions.
One thing i feel that avowed did very well was making the companions feel like real characters. Each of them have their own place in the world and they all feel rounded and complete in this regard. Due to all the companions also having at least one other character they already know on the team, the group did very quickly feel like a giant team working together alongside each other, something other modern games and movies fail at.

The Mixed:

Combat.
The combat of avowed is pretty fluid and frantic, however it suffers from two pretty big flaws, those being the general tankiness of enemies and the lack of enemy variety. I played the game as a wand-wielding mage and from what i have read online this is the most "fun" way to play the game as your special skills can get really beefy. However, i still struggled with combat becoming unfun, especially in the later chapters where i more often than not would just run away from a fight rather than fighting the same xaurips i had been encountering since act 1.

The general game world.
While i would say the artistic direction is good, the general game world does have some serious flaws. To put it bluntly, it very often just feels kinda dead and deserted. In most cities and settlements there is very little to do other than just picking up quests and visiting the vendors one singular time, since after getting a few levels higher you will have outscaled whatever loot they could sell.

In many ways, the cities remind me of other isometric CRPG titles, where they are simmilarily static, but once you make the transition from top-down to POV, the staticness becomes a lot more pronounced.

The game world is otherwise littered with chests and backpacks giving you the same basic money and upgrading materials that you will need for all your tools. I actually don't fully dislike this, as it allows you to upgrade your older tools easily and that way get a rather solid "set" of tools and armour you can use throughout your entire game.

The writing.

The writing is propably *the* most inconsistent part of this game, carrying both its highest highs and lowest lows. Some of the worse parts worth highlighting are the constant "marvel" tier quips that your companions come with in random conversations (which annoys me even more considering how much i like them outside of that!) or the very forced crypticness of the voice in your head that just makes it a total pain in the ass to even understand what they are trying to say for the good first third of the game (it does get better later on though)

The parts where the writing is good are however also *really* good. Kai's entire questline about processing the grief of his old desceased friend is just amazing to play through, and some of the choices you get put through later in the game (like the big dilemma at the end of act 3) had me actually have to take a break from the computer to think about in real life.

This general inconsitency also extends to the main story, which abandons it's most interesting plot points in the last 3rd of the story. The base plot about the dreamscourge is not really that interesting, but the dynamic between the colonizing aedyrans (which you are a part of) and the other inhabitants of the Living Lands is really amazing and even forced myself to ask some questions about my own political convictions.

Spoliers ahead:

Specifically, when Fior mes Iverno was burnt down in the end of act 2.
Until then I had proudly taken the actions that would benefit aedyran influence in the country, but also been good to distance myself from the steel garotte. I always play as "good" characters when i play these games, but ultimately your character in this game is also personally chosen by the aedyran king and thusly i felt it was my duty to further his goals, without violence of course.

In act 2 there is a mission to find a spy in the local militia of Fior mes Iverno, and at the end of that quest it is revealed that the spy did murder more than two people, but did it all to support the aedyran side and prepare the city for our eventual takeover. I let her go, since i thought it was "only" normal influence and such, and while her ways were violent, she only did it to people who would have killed her otherwise for supporting us.

When Fior mes Iverno then burned down i was forced to reconcile with the fact that this was entirely my own fault, and it was in this case i began thinking deeper, that because i was "just following orders" i allowed myself to blindly stumble into an entire disaster that could have easily been avoided had i just stuck by my morals instead of following some vague belonging and nationhood.

The Verdict:

All in all I enjoyed my time with Avowed. While it does have it's flaws, there isn't a single thing about the game i would say is wholly bad and overall i felt the game was both fun and interesting, though ultimately something i would be hard pressed to reccomend at its full price.

Rating: 7/10

This post will be mostly spoiler free until one point which I will point out as I think this game is good and I think it is entirely possible someone will appreciate the positives of this game more and my dislikes will matter to them less. If someone told me this was their favourite game of the year it released I would not think that is a crazy opinion.

When I started playing this game I had very high expectations as people often say on social media this is one of the best recent Obsidian games and I really liked their other games too. It has a very good metacritic score and many content creators I watched really praised this game. I also enjoy slow game with lots of reading so this seemed perfect.

The main element of this game is the story and while I think it has very interesting ideas and themes the story drags on with too much repetition, dropping themes and replacing them with new ones quickly and without enough connecting elements. There are some pretty bold story decisions which are fresh, but also they are often unsatisfying. And this would still be very compelling if it was not dragged down by gameplay being extremely slow and making the game a lot longer. I loved about half of the time spent with this game, but half of the time I just wanted it to end.

Spoilers ahead:

I played the game spoiler free until close to the end where I got some minor things spoiled to me. After I finished the game I looked on reddit for some information about the story.

Story:

So the story is set in 16th century Swiss Alps village where in the first act you are a young artist working in the local abbey scriptorium when a visiting nobleman gets killed and you decide to investigate as the abbot decides your mentor who is almost certainly not the culprit as a scapegoat. You talk to people around the town, you inspect items and you have some speech checks based on actions and your background you choose at the start. There is an in game timer and you find 4 suspects while you have time to investigate about two and a half. You give your findings to the official and then one is executed. Also there is this (in my opinion a bit contrived) element where there is a "thread-puller" in the village who gave the victim and suspects a letter to meet to set up this murder which seems so likely to fail. I also did not like that you investigate this element very superficially despite getting a lot of information for potential leads at this point.

The game seems at first like a murder mystery game, but you realize during act 1 that it is really not about that. It is a story that asks questions what to do in life that has a lot of uncertainty. Results of our actions can have long reaching consequences and we have to make decisions with imperfect information. And what to do with this? Is being always honest the best choice? Or should you lie to implicate the most likely culprit? Should you even interfere? And during the investigation doing obvious things might lead to best evidence, but often it does not. Sometimes illogical things and chance (or Providence) might lead to clearly bad decisions having best outcomes. Does anything really matter at all?

This being about the narrative and not the mystery itself becomes very apparent at the end of act 1 where you realize you have to make a decision with very imperfect information and the killer is not confirmed and the game just continues. This plot twist of an accusation based on so little and without a resolution is very interesting and the story (and gameplay) peaks here in my opinion. If the game ended right here or shortly after I would absolutely love it.

Then act 2 begins and you choose another set of background traits and come back 7 years later and you try to solve another murder and this also ends up quite badly with bloodshed with many peasants dead and the abbey destroyed and many characters dead. The same existential themes remain and I think they outstay their welcome as it just becomes too repetitive and less effective. In my opinion these themes are way better in shorter form than a longer one.

Another element here is introduced and that is main characters melancholia / depression which I did not like as an addition here. It is obviously interesting and makes sense as a result of act one, but a lot of happens to the MC between the acts and that felt really cheap. We just briefly read about the tragedies instead of exploring that at all. Roleplaying these parts about events we know nothing about felt awkward.

Then we move to Act 3 which seems divisive to some and not just me. As the MC is seemingly dead we move to a linear story with a new PoV some years later where our new characters explores the history and decides what to record with the information we got. I thought this really just drags on and is really another repetition of the same theme until the very end where some reveals and emotional scenes really hit. And there is some satisfying character development and seeing the results of our choices. Also I do like that the game gives some answers to the questions it asks us.

Setting The setting is interesting and I think it is covered with detail in a lot of places, but pretty shallow in others and the potential is wasted quite often. I for roleplaying chose my background very similar to myself in real life and often special dialogue choices would be quite obvious things in my opinion. And often observations would be like that too.

And all my story critiques about pacing and repetition would be much less important to me if the gameplay did not slow the game just too much.

So the days are spread into times of the day when you do your investigations and villagers and events happen around the village. So after each time progresses you should check every place because you might encounter a npc with new dialogue, some new event or a clue however (especially as acts progresses) there is just not enough content in the village so you spend a lot of time rechecking around 40 areas where only 1-2 have something relevant and just 1-2 have some flavour. A lot are used for nothing or just tiny details.

Act 3 is also a series of linear tasks which felt very unsatisfying after the open nature of previous acts and controlling another character to me just made the final act very tedious except its ending.

Also the themes of the game can make you just stop caring about choices at some point as seemingly smart or kind decisions can lead to good or bad results at random. Which is interesting, but at the end after it is repeated for 15 hours when the point was made after five it was just not fun to go through the motions.

And finally I thought the artstyle was lovely. Especially in the few scenes where the UI is removed and the scene is zoomed out to enjoy it fully.

I played the original Subnautica in 2019, back-to-back with SOMA and Alien Isolation. The three formed a sort of purple patch in my gaming history that I haven't recreated since and all are top tier games for me. I could sense that so much of what made Subnautica great relied on its newness, and the wonder this unfamiliarity created, so when Below Zero came out I deliberately avoided it for years. I was hoping I could forget as much of Subnautica 1 as possible and play it with a fresh set of eyes. Well, seven years later, 2026 came around and with Subnautica 2 on the horizon, now seemed as good a time as any to give Below Zero a chance. I completed it in about 2-3 weeks with 14 hours logged. I guess this is kinda short (online says 20 hours is about right), but to be honest I was ready for it to finish. Despite taking a 7-year break, Below Zero remained very much under the leviathan-sized shadow of its predecessor. Most of the systems and core game ideas are the same, and unfortunately most of the new features make it weaker. Taking seven years off did help recreate a sense of wonder, but not enough to sustain it for a 10+ hour playthrough. It’s still good, perhaps great, but too much “more of the same” to have the same impact as its bigger brother.

[I've written carefully to avoid spoilers, but I really think the game benefits from knowing as little as possible, so unless you've already played it I'd stop here.]

Strengths

The world design is still amazing. It’s detailed, varied, and lively. The twisty bridges biome is particularly great, as was my first encounter with the thermal vents as they loomed out of the darkness around an island. The creatures are beautiful and scanning things to learn about how the ecosystem fits together is a delight. Lifeforms are well integrated into the game mechanics, there are fish you can drink, plants that create air or heat, etc. The pop-in is greatly reduced from Subnautica 1, so you’re not constantly reminded this is a video game. That said, a lot of the biomes are kinda murky (maybe to reduce pop in), dull or empty. The lilypad biome in particular was not fun to explore.

A key part of Subnautica, which Below Zero recreates fairly well, is the sense of progression and the world opening up to the player. At first you stay in the safe shallows, never more than 50m below the surface and cowering from ominous bellows. By the end you fearlessly delve hundreds of meters below the surface, and the sense of discovery and empowerment is palpable as you come to understand just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

So-so

Below Zero includes survival and crafting elements, and although some of this gets simplified via progression (e.g. a water purification machine mercifully replaces having to catch bladderfish ) a lot of it doesn’t. This means that discovery doesn’t always yield understanding and mastery, thereby allowing old problems to be retired. Instead, in many instances discovery simply gives way to repetitive labor. The key building materials of titanium, copper and quartz are just a perennial hassle, and it gets really irritating to have to put something important on hold so you can swim around looking for raw materials. In the end I just built as little as possible, which saves resources but basically skips over the whole base building mechanic which is a shame. A better system would let you create permanent resource harvesters to create a known and steady, if finite, supply.

A bigger problem is that you can find yourself needing something that you have no idea what it is or where to find it. After two hours trying, I couldn’t figure out an in-game way to find the spiral plant clippings needed for synthetic fibres, and eventually looked it up. The same happened with the power-cell charger schematic, which turned out to be somewhere I'd already visited but simply hadn't spotted. Subnautica 1 had this problem too, but the devs could have done more to fix it for Below Zero. That said, it’s hard to find the balance between pointing the player in the right direction and being so heavy-handed that the player-led exploration is undermined, and I’d rather have to look a couple of things up than have quest markers ruin the experience.

The lack of a map exemplifies this too. Neither Subnautica or Below Zero have an in-game map (BZ does have a poster object though), so for both I made my own pen-and-paper map as I played. This is a really fun and refreshing experience that tests your cartographic skills and I’d strongly recommend it. But, after 10 hours it starts to grate. The world is so dense and complex that you can’t simply mark everything, but it would be really handy to be able to remember where that copper deposit is so you can come back later. I think the intended system is to use craftable beacons, but the number required would impose a heavy resource gathering burden. I can’t help but feel some in-game map creating system would be better. Not a typical “magic” map that just tells the player everything they need to know, but a blank page that you can add landmarks to, maybe by scanning things or using a “triangulator” tool.

Weaknesses

The story of Below Zero is bad. Gone is the mystery and wonder of the first game, instead we get a more personal quest to find your sister. But it’s really underdeveloped and to be honest I didn’t care to find her. There’s a second quest involving aliens, but it ends up being a dreary and repetitive fetch quest that causes you to rush around the environment. Even when you get to target locations, instead of cool and intriguing alien technology its often just a bland cave with a generic alien device that you scan and move on.

The fetch quest nature of the story actually harms the beauty of the environment because you end up trolling back and forth across the landscape again and again, rushing past everything. Even the scary monsters lose all their scare because you simply get numb to running past them. A truly bizarre feature is that while rushing around to fetch things the moving sea truck continually smashes fish with a variety of gross splats and squeals. The biomes are so dense with life you can’t avoid the creatures even if you try to (and they make no attempt to avoid you), so you end up feeling like an environmental desecrator as you drive around, which is really not the vibe I expected or wanted.

In both quests the dialogue is terrible. The main character (Robin) is voiced, but they only speak in sarcastic quips, overly heartfelt statements or just general word salad. You also meet an alien intelligence (Al-An), but it actually talks like a socially-awkward robot. It’s such a missed opportunity, because encounters with alien intelligences are a sci-fi classic with the potential to be really profound, but instead we get something on the level of a sitcom or superhero movie. This exchange stuck out to me as particularly cringe inducing:

AL-AN: How do humans function with such a fallible and inferior body?

ROBIN: Excuse you, my body is anything but inferior. I work hard for my body to be able to do what it does.

...

ROBIN: My body is my own, and I cherish it. It grows with me. Humans have one life. We plant trees we can never experience the shade of. We build for the next generation.

AL-AN: Noble, but again, truly inefficient.

Conclusion

Below Zero does a lot of things right while making a bunch of missteps. Unfortunately, almost all the good stuff is already in Subnautica 1, while the backsteps are unique to Below Zero. What it mostly adds is content, but what it loses is scope for the player’s imagination and a sense of awe and half-understanding. It reminds me of 1978’s Dawn of the Dead. Not only is it not as good as its predecessor, but it makes you wonder if some of the quality of the first installment came from constraints that restricted the creator’s hands, and when these were lifted for the sequel things went downhill. Still there is plenty of the original’s brilliance here. Below Zero isn’t as memorable an experience as Subnautica, but it’s worth a visit.

Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/1vsmgwq/mass_effect_legendary_edition_is_it_as_good_as_i/

Part 2:

https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/1vwbxxz/mass_effect_legendary_review_mass_effect_2/

Mass Effect 3 - "It's been a good ride." "The best."

It's difficult to think of anything to say about this game that has not already been said. It's difficult to think of a story based game that lives stronger in the minds of gamers than Mass Effect 3. I wrote in part 1 about how I remember all the discourse around the game since I played Mass Effect 3 when it came out in high school. I even remember preordering it. Probably the only game I have ever preordered. I remember the straight up insane decision to partion parts of the game in DLCs. I also remember the original ending and the changes they made. It's a game with some flaws. It's also my absolute favourite. Even all these years later, there is just something about ME3 that hits.

I think part of the reason is that it's a return to a truly atmospheric space opera. In many ways, 3 picks up where 1 left off. The Collectors were dealt with in 2, and now we're back to facing the reapers. They are here now. The threat Shepard was warning everyone about for 2 games is here, but there is no chance for, or desire for, gloating about it. Because now the galaxy is ending. The reapers have started harvesting all intelligent life, and there seems to be little we can do about it. This atmosphere is done very well in this game. Everyone in this game feel exhausted, depressed and desperate. Everyone is staring down the barrell of a gun. The Citadel is filled with conversations you can overhear. Soliders about to be deployed to suicide missions. Demented old ladies looking for their dead child. Refugees and soldiers traumatised by what they have seen. Yet there is also this feeling of hope there. For the first time, differences don't matter. People find each other across all divides. The only divide that matters anymore is between the living and the harvested.

For the first time, Shepard also seems to be buckling under the pressure. Shepard is traumatised by what they saw on Earth before leaving. Nightmares plague their dreams. Shepard is tired and running on fumes. The same goes for the companions. They are all constantly thinking that while they are stuck on the Normandy, everyone they knew back home might be harvested by the reapers. Companions like Garrus, Liara and Joker - who all seemed to be so put together and stable - are falling apart inside. This is reflected in the romance you choose as well. I have always picked Liara, but it seems that no matter who you choose, there is this sense that you're having your last days together. That even in the best possible case scenario, at least one of you will die.

Shepard's job isn't exactly to defeat the reapers, but to rally as much support as they can, to make the last push as hopeful as possible. To make sure this prothean weapon that no one really knows how it works can be finished. How good your ending is depends on if you can make as many people as possible work together. How many assets you can gather. The game will thrust you into choices where you have to choose who you want on your side. However, this being Mass Effect, there is often an option to have it both ways if you made all the right previous choices. This might be one of the strongest parts of ME3. You really feel that the choices you made in the universe so far matter here. If you were forced to kill Wrex on Virmire, if you didn't do all the loyalty missions in ME2, if you lost someone in the suicide mission, etc., it will have a big impact on the outcomes in ME3. I think this is where planning the series as a trilogy from the start comes in big. Contrast this with Dragon Age, where almost nothing you did in previous games matter. A lot of small stuff pops up to. Minor characters you had an optional conversation with in ME1 will show up and remember.

The gameplay changes from ME2 to ME3 are not massive. Small tweaks to how Shepard moves. A bit more effort in how melee combat works. Enemy AI is more agressive. Stuff like that comes together and makes the combat feel a little bit better than 2. The biggest change is probably the way weapons work. There is a massive amount of different weapons in this game, and they all feel very different. You now also have to consider weapon weight. Weapons can also be modified with scopes and space bayonets in a cool little system that probably was nice for people who missed tweaking gear in 1. Side quests are more in-depth than 2. Also, gone is the horrid planet scanning and constant door minigames from 2. Instead, Shepard can pick up a million little side quests by listening to people on the Citadel, who will complain about needing something very specific that Shepard will conveniently find on a mission. This will give tiny boosts to readiness, but it adds up after a while. It also makes the world feel more alive.

There is way more of a main story in ME3. In 2, you really only did companion quests. There was shockingly little main story missions aside from companion quests in 2 when you think about it. Instead, there will now be main story missions where one of the companions have a direct personal interest in the outcome, or where you will run into a past companion. You will encounter Jack, Jacob, Miranda, Mordin, Wrex. Thane etc., but they have a different job now and can't join your crew. This is always kind of bittersweet, since they have usually developed a lot as characters. 3 is a lot more brutal than 2, given the setting. In 2, you could save everyone if you were good enough. In 3, you will lose people. You can't avoid it. The stakes are too high for Shepard to save everyone. This leads to some of the most memorable scenes in the series. Mordin giving his life to stop the genophage he created. Legion sacrificing himself to give life to the geth. Thane dying in a hospital and holding a last prayer that turned out to be for Shepard and not for himself. Anderson dying at the very end after telling you how proud he is of you. Now, most of this might happen differently depending on your choices in this and past games. You might lose more people. Luckily the paragon/renegade system is tied to a reputation stat that works for both. So that even though you were paragon all the way through, the special renegade options will still be open. Finally, this system makes sense in this game.

All of this leads up to the ending. Ahh, the ending. What more is there to be said about possibly the most controversial ending in gaming ever? After a deeply emotional ending where you say a heartfelt and personal goodbye to everyone, you get to the end. Look, I could easily write an entire review for just the ending, but this review is already too long, and I still need to talk about the expansions. I will say that I was always in the minority that didn't mind the ending and the choices that much, especially after they expanded the ending. My perspective has always been that I will always be a bit kind to developers who tried to do something brave and different, even if it has flaws. It's easy to see a version where they sort of just repeated the ME2 ending mission, where Shepard shoots the last reaper in the head, says "looks like you're the one who was reaped", turns around and walks in slow mo with explosions in the background, cut to credits. Letting you instead in on what the reapers are by letting you talk to the rogue AI in charge and being able to choose between controlling the reapers, destroying the reapers or forcing everyone into a new partly organic partly synthetic lifeform. Now, will always also say that destroy is the only justifiable ending to pick. Yes, the destroy ending comes with the added downside of killing EDI and the geth as collateral, since the weapon doesn't distinguish between reaper and other synthetic life. However, I feel like the only correct way to play it is by realising that the catalyst is wrong about a lot of stuff. It is essentially an ancient rogue AI that turned on it's creators and is murdering all intelligent life until some magical thing happens that will probably never happen where it decides it doesn't have to do it anymore. You can even catch the catalyst in a contradiction. You can point out that the reapers don't prevent conflict, but instead cause it by murdering everyone in a war. The catalyst uses semantics to explain away this by saying that we might be in a conflict with the reapers, but they aren't interested in war, because the reapers are just neautral computers carrying out a task. Now, three games of clearly sadistic glee from the reapers disprove this. You sadly can't bring up if you created peace between the geth and the quarians. This is a big deal since it disproves the entire point of the reapers, since it proves that conflict between organics and synthetics is not inevitable.

The point is, the catalyst is an insane ancient AI that can't be trusted. So I don't trust that the geth and EDI can't eventually be repaired. The ending destroys the Citadel and the relays, but we see this get fixed in the good post ending. This was all reaper tech, so why can't the geth and EDI also be repaired, when they are the product of technology the galaxy understand much better? Also, Shepard's mission and mandate for the entire trilogy has been to put an end to reapers. Choosing control and becoming AI god emperor of the galaxy, or choosing syntheis and forcing the entire galaxy into a new life form the crazy AI thinks we're "ready" for, is a betrayal of everything you have fought for so far. Everything people have died for so far. So maybe hot take: destroy is the only viable option and should be canon in the unlikely event we ever get ME5. Would love to argue about it in the comments.

In the end, this game is just great. It hit me in the feels just as much now as then. I feel like the ending adds to this feeling, since it also shows the now slightly sad scene of Shepard still being alive if you got what is called the perfect destroy ending. It's sad, because ME5 will probably never be made. Now, the legendary edition luckily puts all the expansions and DLC in there. So no new player has to contend with the fact that this was separated into a million different expansions you had to buy seperately. I feel I should talk a little about the important ones here, not really going into the optional gear like the silly immersion breaking Dragon Age armour.

From Ashes - a shocking decision to cut this from the base game. A whole companion who adds a lot to the game, being an actual prothean asleep for 50 000 years in a stasis pod. He is a bit of a cunt, but has some incredibly hard and quotable lines. He was born during the late stage of the reaper invasion of his cycle and that trauma was his entire life. He shatters the hopes Liara had for him and has a lot of great interactions with him. Especially on the Thessia mission where he reveals that the entire asari species was guided by the protheans in the early stages, which is why they are the most advanced in the current cycle.

Omega - ehh, this one is just fine. You retake Omega with Aria, getting you more war resources. The story is just fine, it feels a bit like an extended cutscene, but it turns Aria into a little bit more of a character. And hey, a female turian is in this one? They do exist!

Leviathan - I actually think this one is really cool and adds a lot. The missions are fun, the characters it adds are fun, and it adds a more creepy and lovecraftian atmosphere to it. You meet the million year old remnants of the race that created the reapers and convince them to help you. It adds more context to the ending, and in my opinion, just reinforces my opinion about how destroy is the only right choice. It adds a lovecraftian feeling of being extremely small in a vast and ancient galaxy. You realise that Leviathan and the reapers is basically just the quarian/geth-issue on speed.

Citadel DLC - this shit right here. I challenge you to name a better DLC to any game ever. Is it a bit silly comedy shift in writing? Yes. Does it really add anything to the lore or introduce fun new gameplay? No. However, this is probably the most heartfelt love letter from the developers to the game and the fans I have ever seen. You know all these characters you have come to love and adore over three games? You get to spend time with them and party with them. You get more cute scenes with your love interest (or more trauma if it was Thane). It's just great. There are so many great characters in this trilogy. Even some of the new ones in ME3. Steve being maybe the best. Playing this DLC feels like every single developer at BioWare at the time lining up to give me a hug. The group pic at the end and the last conversation before reentering the Normandy that I used to title this review? Still a real tear jerker all these years later.

Thanks to everyone who has read all three of these rambling reviews for maybe one of the best game series of all time. I played Andromeda again after this and might write a review for that one too, so stay tuned!

Lately, I've been clearing my backlog of Resident Evil games, and I finally got around to the remake of RE4, which is one of my all-time favorite games. My first experience with the game was on the Wii, but I was new to horror and not very good at games, so I never beat it despite really enjoying it. Eventually, I returned to it on PC and beat it, and I was struck by just how well it held up.

This also makes the RE4 remake the first of the remakes where I actually played the original and can see a lot of the little differences. Combined with my love of the original, I thought it would be worth using that opportunity to do a double feature review of both games.

For context: This will only cover the main campaign on Normal/Standard difficulty and without any mods or unlockables. I also play the original with a controller and the remake with mouse + keyboard, so I can't comment on any potential issues that the other option has with either game.

Not quite a weekend in Ibiza

At a high level, the stories in both games are very similar. Following the events of RE2, Leon becomes a government agent and is eventually tasked with finding Ashley Graham, the missing daughter of the United States president. She was last seen near a remote village Spain, and it doesn't take long to learn that the villagers kidnapped her and are violently hostile to outsiders. They are also part of a cult called Los Illuminados, led by the power-hungry Osmund Saddler. This cult worships a parasite called Las Plagas that, among other things, gives Saddler considerable control over the host. Early on, both Leon and Ashley get implanted with parasite eggs, so they must not only escape but also find a way to remove the parasite. Helping them with this is the suave Spaniard Luis, a former Umbrella researching looking for atonement, and the returning Ada Wong.

Despite this shared premise, the tone is very different between the two games. The original is shamelessly cheesy. Leon is an action-movie tough guy who loves one-liners, and the other characters, while simple, play off that energy very well. In the remake, Leon and most other characters are far more reserved, and the change is so immediately obvious that Leon's iconic bingo night joke before the title card feels completely out of place in the remake. Unfortunately, this removes a significant amount of the original's creepy-but-silly charm, and it's also not a particularly deep horror story either, so the overall lack of gusto leaves a very significant void that's never truly filled.

To be fair, the remake does try to flesh out Ashley's and Luis's characters more. Ashley, like most characters, is a lot more reserved and soft spoken, but her and Leon have more significant interactions this time. This can lead to some very heartfelt moments, like when Leon comforts Ashley after reuniting in the castle, but it can also lead to sillier ones, like when Ashley gets flustered at Leon saying he appreciates her company. Luis, who is perhaps the only character who retains his original charm, doesn't get quite as much attention, but he does get more screen time, even joining Leon during the chapter in the mines. In both cases, it is an improvement over the original characters, though I still liked both for what they were in the original.

Sadly, Ada and the villains are significantly worse in the remake. The original Ada took seductive charm to a silly extreme, but the new Ada is a generic spy who sounds perpetually bored. Salazar, whose constant bickering with Leon made him iconic, is now just a generically snobbish aristocrat who barely interacts with Leon. Saddler goes from a (figuratively) moustache-twirling supervillain to a generic cult leader, though his new harem is at least unsettling during what little screen time they get. I guess the village chief and Krauser aren't worse, but they were never as charismatic as the other villains. Regardless, it's an all-around downgrade.

As for the horror, both have some fantastic atmosphere but approach it somewhat differently. The original had to work with a lot of technical restrictions, so it made good use of things like fog and less complex assets, like removing leaves from trees, to create a very eerie and "dead" feel that was enhanced by the flat lighting and grimy touches. The remake loses a lot of the "deadness" with things like dynamic lighting, lack of fog and fully alive trees. However, it makes use of the more advanced lighting for very creepy periods of moving through pitch-black environments, and better animations allow for some terrifying touches like how Plaga C controls its host. Enemy design is generally strong across both games, and both also make great use of sound design, with cawing crows and wheezing Regeneradors adding an unnerving edge to both games. Personally, I slightly prefer the more "dead" appearance of the original, and I don't think the remake makes quite as good use of darkness as RE2R or Village, but both are very solid in their own ways.

Thematically, the two games are a bit weird in relation to each other. The original was essentially Alien in a folk horror setting. Las Plagas is an undiscovered species loosely inspired by behavior-altering parasites and the parasitic wasps that inspired the Xenomorph, and it's worshipped by a violent and isolated cult. The sequel also has these elements, but it injects a lot of supernatural horror influences. For instance, when Ashley and Leon get separated early in the castle in the original, it's because Ashley gets agitated and carelessly runs off, which is believable for a behavior-altering parasite. In the remake, though, she seems demon possessed. With this, there's also a noticeable shift of focus away from a fairly healthy mixture of Alien and folk horror into much more heavily pushing the cult angle and Saddler's control.

Personally, I really didn't like this change. I'm not against supernatural or cult-themed horror, but I do prefer the more "biological" approach of the original. It kept the focus on the reality that nature can be horrifying in ways that we often don't consider because it doesn't directly impact humans, similar to the parasitic wasp influences of the Xenomorph. Even Los Illuminados kind of felt like a human expression of a colony that Las Plagas was forming as part of its lifecycle. Whenever the remake did something "supernatural", though, it broke that illusion, and by the end, it was leaning so hard into the cult and its desire for control that Las Plagas felt fairly by-the-numbers as far as RE threats go. It's simply a tool for people with aspirations of world domination, not an interesting entity in itself.

All together, I think the original has one of the more compelling stories in the series. Sure, it's pure camp, but it's some of the best camp there is, and it oozes enough charm to make the game endearing before even considering the fantastic ambiance or gameplay. Las Plagas being, for me, the most interesting biological threat in the series helps as well. The remake, though, strips away too much of this. I don't mind it wanting to be darker or more character-focused in concept, but it also doesn't commit to that enough to make up for the lack of charm. Frankly, you can do a lot better with character-focused horror, so I just don't see its story or world having the lasting draw that the original has had for me over the years.

Leon's struggles with hand-eye-foot coordination

As for the gameplay, the jump from the original to the remake is obviously a lot less significant than for the RE2 and RE3 remakes. There are, however, still plenty of ways they've updated the gameplay.

Of course, RE4 is very well-known for taking the series in a more action-oriented direction. It changed the inventory into a large grid that you'd fit different-sized items into, and it added dynamic resources drops that should theoretically keep you well-supplied. Basically, you had more room for items and a more reliable supply of them, allowing you to kill hundreds of enemies without worrying about running out of resources. Despite this, the game still felt like it approached this more third-person-shooter direction with the mindset of survival horror. The camera was fixed above Leon's shoulder instead of offering free control like in most third-person games. The inventory system still required some careful management and decision-making about how to balance ammo, health and weapon variety, breaking from the usual shooter system of tracking all items separately and with some upper limit. It's little stuff like that that feels closer to survival horror than your typical third-person shooter.

The most obvious place where the survival horror mindset remained, though, was in the continued use of tank controls. To help compensate for this in a more action-oriented context, targeting specific body parts also returns but is drastically expanded, to the point that the damage system still feels relatively advanced even to this day. Enemies react realistically to being shot, and thrill-seekers can charge staggered enemies for crowd-controlling roundhouse kicks, which is always a lot of fun. You can even shoot weapons out of an enemy's hand, potentially turning dynamite-wielding ones into walking bombs, and you can also shoot thrown weapons out of the air to avoid taking damage, which is a lifesaver in a game with no strafing. This very limited movement but very advanced aiming system comes together to create a very unique combat loop, and as you get more comfortable with it, you can get into a very nice rhythm of careful positioning and precise aiming with the occasional ammo-saving kicks and knife slashes thrown in.

Despite this fun rhythm, there's still plenty of tension in the tank controls. No matter how comfortable you get with tank controls, it's always going to put you at a disadvantage when faced with winding, claustrophobic corridors, and it makes moving out of the way of attacks just a little more harrowing, especially when it's an instant-death attack. Similarly, the inability to move while aiming or shooting means that you have to be deliberate and be extremely accurate, which is hard to do when axes are flying and some guy is charging at you with a chainsaw. So while it's more empowering than the games that came before, if you (like me) play a lot of shooters, these limitations really stand out as a reminder that this game is still, at its core, a horror game. Even compared to the many other shooters with horror themes at the time (e.g. Half-Life 2, F.E.A.R., Doom 3), it is by far the most mechanically tied to the horror genre.

The remake, though, drops most of that. You now have a free-look camera and standard shooter controls, and you can swap among up to eight weapons quickly using shortcuts, which is a nice quality-of-life improvement over needing to open the inventory like in the original. The knife can now be used to parry and execute enemies, and while those actions are limited by new knife durability, dynamically-dropped knives and upgrades all but completely negate it. The only thing really limiting you compared to other shooters is the aiming system brought in from other modern RE games. You need to stand still for Leon's aim to properly focus for the best accuracy and power, and adjusting your aim too much too quickly resets the timer. Again, though, you can negate this with attachments, and it doesn't meaningfully impact shotguns, so you can very easily play this much closer to a typical third-person shooter than the original ever allowed.

There are plenty of other little changes as well. There's a new stealth system, but it's useless for most of the game. Enemies are a bit faster and more aggressive despite the still-claustrophobic environments, but this doesn't make up for how much more capable Leon is in this game. Typewriters also now have a weapon-storage system, so you can store unused weapons in case you want to change tactics later. I also believe the dynamic drops are less generous than the original, but the expanded crafting system makes up for it in emergencies.

In short, the remake is all about making the game faster and less limiting. It's essentially a standard third-person shooter, and while that removes a significant amount of the mechanical tension, RE4's enemy roster and encounter design is so incredibly strong that it's still a lot of fun. It's also definitely the easier of the two games to get into initially, but that does come at the cost of the original's uniqueness. On that note, I play a lot of shooters and can adjust to tank controls relatively quickly, so I personally prefer the very unique rhythm and more tense feel of the original. It's just not something that you can get from most other shooters.

On top of that, the remake feels less cohesive overall. The original was hyper-focused on building challenges around the simpler gameplay loop of balancing limited movement and advanced aiming. In the remake, parrying and strafing mostly remove the need to shoot stuff out of the air, and the new aiming system mostly takes that option away until you get the laser sight anyways. Most encounters have also not been properly updated for the stealth system and regularly force you into combat immediately, so stealth feels pointlessly tacked on, and if your aim is good, you can almost entirely rely on the dynamic drop system and ignore the expanded crafting system. It's a lot of little stuff, but put together, it's hard not to see just how critical tank controls and precise aiming were to RE4's combat loop, and with those removed, the remake feels like it's lost in trying to establish its own mechanical identity.

This also impacts the general sense of pacing and difficulty curve. The original game was absolutely spectacular in that regard, and while the remake is still fairly strong, the lack of cohesion means that it's harder to smoothly keep building on top of what came before. A good example of this is the Garrador. It's a blind enemy with very sensitive hearing, so if you shoot your gun or start sprinting, it will charge your position, potentially as part of an instant-death attack. It also only has one weak point on its back. As you can imagine, this enemy is an absolute nightmare to maneuver around with tank controls, and misfiring will leave you trying to dodge with controls that make that harder than usual. By the time of the first Garrador fight, though, you would have already gotten very comfortable with tank controls, so it's an interesting twist that requires you to reevaluate how to use them, and when the double-Garrador fight comes, it builds on what you learned in that first fight about choosing your moments and avoiding attacks. In contrast, the first Garrador fight in the remake is basically a stealth battle in a game that has featured almost no meaningful stealth up to that point, and stealth is impossible in the double-Garrador fight, so it fails to build on what the first encounter offered. Sure, they're still two fun fights in isolation, but they don't fit anywhere near as well into the overall game as in the original.

This can also be seen in the bosses. The original game had cutscene QTEs, and while they were annoying, they did prepare you for the reactionary QTE-dodging of the boss fights. The remake mostly copies the original boss fights, even down the QTE-dodging, but the remake doesn't have regular QTEs. For the most part, I'm glad QTEs were (mostly) removed, but it does mean that, when getting those prompts in boss fights, it feels jarring and unintuitive. Even worse, on keyboard, it's bound to the same key as crouch, which is not only clunky with my bindings (Ctrl), but it also seems really bizarre that the button you normally only press for slow, deliberate stealth suddenly becomes the button for reactionary acrobatics.

This all might seem like relatively minor issues, but a lot of what makes the original so remarkable is that it was incredibly cohesive and clearly built everything around its relatively simple and often limiting systems. As a result, it led to some of the best pacing and difficulty scaling I've seen in a game, and by the end, it truly felt like a complete experience. The remake simply lacks that, and while it does have some interesting ideas and twists thrown in, it just doesn't flow together as well or feel as completely realized in the end. Considering both games will easily take 15-20 hours each on the first playthrough, I feel like that more well-paced and complete experience more than makes up for its opening minutes requiring an adjustment to tank controls.

They can never make me hate you Ashley

Of course, I haven't touched on one of the most notable gameplay features: escorting Ashley. At multiple points and often for long stretches, Leon will have to escort Ashley until the two are separated again. During these stretches, you need to make sure that Ashley doesn't take too much damage or get carried off. If she does start to get carried off, you can shoot the enemy holding her to save her, but if you accidentally hit her, it's an instant game over. While both games stick to this core idea, Ashley's mechanics are slightly different between the two games.

In the original, you could tell Ashley to either "follow" or "stay", and there were rare cases where you could tell her to hide. If told to follow, she would stick very close to Leon, and if told to stay, she would stand in place, so she was predictable enough to reliably keep out of harm's way. If she did get hit, she had a standard health bar that worked the same way as Leon's, but she had less health and couldn't wear protective gear, so little mistakes could be relatively costly with her around.

In the remake, you can still rarely tell Ashley to hide, but the more common commands are now "stick close" and "stay back". The former behaves identically to "follow" in the original, but the latter gives Ashley's AI more freedom to choose where she goes, which makes her a bit less predictable. Normally, she picks a good spot, but I did notice that she would often stay in place if I needed to backed up, eventually causing her to get stuck between me and the enemies for a couple seconds. As for her health, it's now been changed to a two-hit system where the first hit incapacitates her, and if she's hit again before you revive her, she dies. Really powerful attacks can also still kill her instantly.

Personally, I prefer the way that the original worked. I like the more predictable positioning, and giving her a proper health bar nicely ties into the game's resource management. Either way, though, both are a great example of how to do an escort quest. Even in the remake, Ashley is predictable enough to not cause issues, and her AI in general is very good. She won't wander off to do her own thing or rush carelessly into danger. She won't block doors, and if she gets caught between you and the enemies, she'll quickly duck to let you shoot over her, and I can still remember how impressed I was when I first saw her do that back on the Wii. Even the very idea of escorting her fits very well into the general gameplay loop that focuses on positioning and precise aiming, so it avoids feeling like a gimmicky mission. Importantly, she also brings a sense of liability with her. She won't cause a game over from bad design, but there's still a sense of tension as you have to make a conscious effort to keep her out of harm's way. There's no stupid, immersion-break "Ashley can take care of herself" lie popping up on the screen. (Yes, I am still bitter about BioShock Infinite!)

Honestly, part of what made me fall in love with the original was its escort gameplay. It took a deservedly maligned gimmick and made it both fun and natural, and I never really got the hatred for that side of the game. I can understand being wary of escort gameplay, but it shouldn't take too long to see that they clearly put a lot of effort into making it work. Sadly, the games that I've played since that were narratively set up to build on this side of RE4 (e.g. BioShock Infinite) all seemed terrified of any criticism over escort gameplay so ultimately didn't try. That left me a little worried that the remake would also remove that part of the game, so while I prefer the original's approach, I'm much happier that it was kept than disappointed with the changes.

Ok, but which one should I play?

While there's more to the game than what's covered above, I think I've covered the most important parts. Of course, there's still the two big questions people will have when seeing these two games.

First: Is the remake a good remake? I guess that depends on what counts as a good remake. If you were hoping for a drastic improvement and/or a game that retains everything that made the original great, then no, it's not a good remake. It loses too much of the charm and impeccable pacing. On the other hand, if you just want an enjoyable game that provides some twists on familiar story moments and encounters, then it is a solid remake.

That leads to the second question: Which one should I play? Frankly, I'd say both. RE4 isn't the type of game that you play once for the story. It's very replayable, so I would say to start with the original and work in the remake in place of one of your replays.

Final thoughts

Despite some of my criticisms of the remake, I do want to reiterate that I think it is a very fun game. Its biggest issue is that it will inevitably be compared to the original, and it also is, in release order, the follow-up to Village, which is very charming in its own way while offering a more distinct experience. That aside, the remake is still an incredibly fun and at times genuinely creepy shooter, and it's still one of the best "new" games I've played this year.

Obviously, though, nothing really compares to the original. It is one of the most charming and tightly-designed games ever, and that allows it to still hold its own even as we get further from the era of GameCube graphics and tank controls. Everything it does it does with full commitment and without concern for how silly or unorthodox it might be. If you're concerned about it's more dated elements, then I would still highly recommend taking the few minutes to adjust, because the overall journey is remarkably endearing in a way very few games are.

Kane & Lynch 2 was the Serbian Film of gaming, and for all its faults, it managed to make me actually disturbed in the way most other “shock games” in the AAA space didn’t. However, I never played the first game. All I knew about it was that it was one of the biggest industry plants of its time and the Gamespot review scandal. Like, they were so sure it would be the biggest hit in the year that they announced the movie adaptation in the making… It is funny because the games that would have gotten its notoriety today would have been the live service slops like Concord, but for its time, it was cinematic shooters, which appear to be literally every AAA game wanted to be at the time.

The games that aspire to be movies still exist, but at least now they tend to be more open or sandboxy. Not for 2007, when every game wanted to be linear and scripted. For Kane and Lynch, in particular, I’d go as far as to say it is more railroaded than Uncharted 1, which is surprising considering this was made by the Hitman developers. Hitman already mastered merging cinema and sandbox freedom, so I was stunned in the bank heist mission here. The story frames Kane as the expert who has robbed the bank before. Then some random NPC pops up and infodumps “this will happen, this will happen, this will happen”, and you follow those instructions to the teeth. There is a ton of “hold out until the NPC allows you to proceed to the next story beat” moments and turret segments. These make the player passive, and you become an actor acting out a script. Can you imagine if such a heist was actually flexible, as in, you can rob it in any way you can in the way Hitman did with the assassinations?

It wouldn’t have been all that bad if the core combat was fun. Instead, it’s basically a two-weapon limit, hitscan shooting, and regenerating health cover shooter, but it doesn’t even do that well. There is no reason to change your weapon since you can replenish your ammo from the partner AI at any time. Why experiment with arsenal? There is no cover button, so you have to move forward toward the cover to make the player hide, but it often doesn’t work. There is one particular segment in Japan where you walk up to the bridge and hide behind a cover, but the character literally won’t take cover, resulting in frustrating deaths from the snipers. Go play Kill Switch, the very game most cover shooters, including K&L takes inspiration from. Going from Kane and Lynch to Kill Switch is embarrassing despite the fact that K&L came out in 2007 while KS is a game from 2003. Kill Switch’s tight controls and dynamic range of movements all elevate the game to a level that few cover shooters can measure up to

I’m not sure what’s up with IOI, but their combat has been the weakest part of their games. Hitman still hasn't moved past its stiff combat and controls, as Agent 47 still feels as weightless as ever to control. In terms of flexibility or range in terms of movement, the series hasn't really improved. The game still operates on an outdated stealth game design approach, which, after playing something like MGSV, Dishonored, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist, feels clunky on a moment-to-moment basis. So imagine playing Hitman in a run-and-gun way and see how quickly the game becomes super clunky. And apply that to the entire game. That’s Kane and Lynch.

At least K&L2 has its raw, unique aesthetics and vibe to enhance the gameplay. Really, the first game makes me appreciate the sequel more because that took risks and compelling in the way that actually made me flinch with emotions. I can’t say that about the first game, which is a by-the-numbers crime movie. It’s like the lesser director imitating Michael Mann. There is one cool level inspired by Collateral, where you shoot thorugh the crowd in the nightclub. Because the club is so dark, you have a difficulty to identify who are the normal civilians and who are the guards. That was a great set-piece, using the cinematic inspiration as a gameplay. There is also a Heat-inspired firefight in the Japanese streets, and it is a hightlight because the open area gives the player more leeways to fight the enemies.

That never reaches the last third of the game, which takes place in Cuba and Venezuela. At least, there has been a novelty of being a Michael Mann video game, but you are suddenly spawned into a civil war in South America, and it turns into every other military shooter. This is the point where my mind tuned out because it doesn’t connect. So you are trying to find your daughter from the gangsters, and you go to Cuba because those gangsters are waging a war against… the Cuban government. What? It’s not even fun to play. Although the game was never a looker even for 2007 (the year of Crysis, Uncharted, BioShock, and Halo 3), this part of the game feels as if it’s unfinished. The jungle looks ugly. There are no careful lighting considerations. The enemie are plastered thoughtlessly with sudden difficulty spikes.

Also, isn’t it weird how there is no real transition scene? The story hops between various locations, but the moment one location ends, it spawns into another location. Look at this transition from Japan to Cuba. You are already engaged with something, and then cut to black, some half-assed exposition, and you are engaged with something in a different country. It’s jarring, but not in an intentional way like K&L2.

I was actively looking for things to like, assuming that the first game might have been interesting or unique in the way the sequel was. There are a few set-pieces like the club level, but there is not much to enjoy. The story is one-note, and the gameplay is tedious all the way through.

I was recently looking for a smaller game that wouldn't take up too much time while I wait for the next big release that I'm planning to sink my teeth into.

This is where I thought of Echoes of the End. I bought it when it first launched last year but it had mixed reviews so I decided to hold off in case it was fixed up a little. I'm glad I waited because the dev team released an Enhanced Edition a couple months later with adjustments based on player feedback. And they've still been adding to the game over the months, so it's really nice to see a team support their game.

Echoes of the End is the debut game from Myrkur Games and it's a very obvious God of War 2018 clone. It even has a God of War easter egg that you can find in a later chapter which I thought was a fun find. It doesn't do anything nearly as well as God of War with its gameplay or story, but I think it accomplishes everything it's trying to do well enough. It's also only 12-15 hours long and doesn't overstay its welcome.

The combat was engaging enough and I enjoyed using my magic abilities to throw enemies around on the battlefield. There were a surprising amount of puzzles throughout the game, none of which had me stumped for too long but became complex enough in later chapters that I didn't feel bored. And the performances of the cast ranged from fine to good throughout the whole game. Although I think the vast majority of people will be able to see where the story is going from a mile away, I still liked it enough to see it through to the end.

Overall I think it's a perfectly acceptable 7/10 and if anyone is looking for something to occupy their time while waiting for another game, I think Echoes of the End would be a good choice if you're a fan of God of War.

I'm really hoping Myrkur Games has funding secured for another game because they have a very solid foundation here and they've established a world that I could potentially be very interested in if they make the right improvements. I see a lot of potential based on what the team created and if they wanted to make a sequel I could easily see them elevating it to the next level. I'd love for them to make a jump like many other sequels over the years like Uncharted 1 to Uncharted 2, Assassin's Creed 1 to Assassin's Creed 2, or Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2.

(Apologies in advance. Once again, I always end up with huge paragraphs. I'll cover most of them in spoiler tags, and just leave the ending and beginning uncovered if you wanna skip my deep dive into my game of choice. I also had to completely rephrase my title as it was too long, so most of its premise is gonna start in the next paragraph.)

Ever heard about how nowadays games and their dev cycles/sequels take too long, while older games usually took just a couple of years to release? What's an old game that you wish actually had [more] dev time and came out more content or feature-complete? What would be the consequences of that?

For starters my example is not *that* great as far as old games go cause it actually took 4 years. For 2000s standards, it was not good but also not terrible compared to nowadays where 5 years is the average. My wish was for the delay of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which came out in June 2008 and took 4 years to make. 3 and a half years, to be more precise, or about almost 3 years and 5 months after Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater came out in November 2004. Sure, between those two games there came out MGS3's upgraded Subsistence version which came with the much needed QoL improvement of a free 3D camera which became the basis for every subsequent MGS3 re-release, and also Metal Gear Acid 1, 2 and MGS: Portable Ops for the PSP. But at the time, none of them were really that mainline or notable, even tho you could argue Portable Ops was canon and an intended main chapter back then, and people still argue about its canon status to this day. But as far as important releases go, the main team and Kojima were focused mostly on MGS4 after 3 initially dropped.

And boy, what a fucking game MGS4 was. Only those who've played it on the PS3 will know how wild that journey was. And how bitter a taste it left, if you loved all the extra content in the Integral or VR Missions versions of MGS1, or the Substance version of MGS2, even the Subsistence version of MGS3, whose significant bonus gameplay content was just its long-dead online mode, still offered great value even single player cause the new camera encouraged even more runs of the already great story campaign, which at the time, at around 10 to 15 hours with cutscenes, was pretty long. It had its ton of mandatory and optional cutscenes and radio calls, sure, but the balance with gameplay ratio was still fantastic, you could argue it's still the best in the series to this day, as you can spend a good chunk in-between heavy story sessions, just lying low and causing mayhem in the remote Soviet wilderness. Tho of course it got surpassed by MGSV, but in the classic MGS story formula of short but long enough campaigns, MGS3 was the winner.

But then you get to MGS4, and you know. It's just so cutscene + radio/codec dense. 9 hours of it alone, while the actual gameplay campaign barely amounts to half of it. To make matters worse, a lot of the game's ambitions and promises were watered down, like the dynamic battlefield where you could join either side and manipulate the war to your advantage. It's mostly a very linear and narrow corridor full of scripted sequences were the villain-alligned private military soldiers just keep mowing down the underdog local militia NPCs, and a lot of the times you can't influence or change the tide of it at all, specially not without going Rambo or guns blazing. Then there are sections, like just before you reach the building with Meryl, when the enemy soldiers spawning into the map are just endless and you can't just clear the level before moving in, you're supposed to just blast or crawl your way past them. The game's stealth itself is very prohibitive, even compared to MGS3, it's older brother from which movements and mechanics it borrows and expands many of its ideas from. There's barely ANY great ways to hide around the warfare maps without being spotted, unless you're constantly crawling around and making use of the octocamo suit that blends into any texture when you're lying down. The game's constantly throwing at you new weapons, bonus items and opportunities all of which almost never work in the stealth context you're trying to enjoy. Like it wants you to go Rambo and guns blazing all the time. Hell, we have a massive in-game store for buying, customizing and/or unlocking enemy weapons. A wide variety, from all the points we accumulate during gameplay, 90% of them barely help in a stealth-focused run. And it is such a miserable and short affair if you just go against the game's ludonarrative and just blast your entire way through in alert mode. It's not fun, and it'll even punish you for it with in-game stress levels and PTSD mechanics. Like those are too many mixed signals, Kojima. What were you intending here?

Anyway, those are only the first two of five gameplay Acts, surely the other 3 will have good classic MGS stealth, right? Well... Not quite. Act 3 is just a half hour trailing mission that can become two hours if you mess it up. No optional side-missions to do in that great open map that's a recreation of part of real life Prague. Just mess around some semi-empty streets that are under military curfew and have some soldiers in every other corner. After that, it's just a ton of cutscenes, a bike chase on-rails shootout, a boss, and then another ton of cutscenes. Act 4 is a glorious return to Shadow Moses, MGS1's island that's been abandoned for over a decade. But it is also quite short and if you take your time there it's only because you're going down memory lane. It could have been a great return to classic MGS stealth and more complex intertwining levels full of soldiers that actually make your life hell, but it's just a narrow corridor full of stupid robots you can fight or sneak past. The only soldiers there, are the stupid FROGS. A type of superhuman combat unit. Getting in the way of your actually interesting sniper boss-fight. And then more robots as you make your way past areas that weren't in MGS1. The final act? A joke. 10 minutes stealth section where you absolutely can't mess up a centimeter, or you'll end up triggering an alert, which turns into a short, 5 minutes or less alert section. And then a boss, several cutscenes, rinse and repeat until the game ends and there's more two hours of cutscenes. See what I mean? The thing is, it wasn't necessarily supposed to be like this.

The game had a TON of cut content that couldn't make it into the single Blu-ray disc that Konami or Kojima intended to ship it with (there's even a joke about not needing to swap the disc in the same spot you would in MGS1, so they were at least adamand on keeping that joke relevant and not bloating the game files enough to need two installation/play discs). They also stated some of it couldn't make it into the final campaign because of the release game deadline. There's cut content that have been found that could have expanded the Act 3 gameplay at the very least. A lot of it was repurposed for MG Online 2, which lasted only 5 years before servers shutdown even though it was very much still active in player count and it's MGSV successor - MG Online 3 - is still online to this day despite barely any active players remaining most of the time. And ALL of the DLCs for MGS4 went into MG Online, again, a doomed mode that was only revived due to PC emulation. For owners of the PS3 game, specially after MGO shut down, all that DLC was just doomed content. Specially me, cause despite having playing the game before on a cyber cafe a couple years earlier when I didn't have my own PS3, I think I only got my own MGS4 copy in 2013 just after these servers shut, and never got to play the online mode, only the single player.

All that content and and effort, down the drain cause they couldn't keep the servers active and had to prepare the terrain for MGSV's online mode, which would come out in 2015. And couldn't be bothered to come up with a true single player DLC for MGS4 or at least a Subsistence-like edition where the game gets a couple dozen VR Missions and uses some of the online maps for short single player stealth missions, like MGS1 and MGS2 had. They were too busy with Peace Walker, of course. And then the cancelled MGS: Rising, before they handed ir over to Platinum Games and it became MGR: Revengeance. And then straight to MGSV, which had gameplay content galore.

Bottom line, I think MGS4, while a great finale for the mainline saga (at least back then, they've made MGR later, tho that's not mainline, and MGSV, which is chronologically a prequel), was so unjustly rushed over. Of course, Kojima's ambitions and vision for the game were already sky-high over this 4 year dev cycle, it was the most expensive thing Konami had done yet (before MGSV), and they would NOT budge and make the game's development costs even more expensive while delaying it a year or two so its 5 Acts could have more traditional MGS gameplay or at least have their levels expanded, or package the game with a bunch of extra & VR missions like the expansions of MGS1 & 2. I wish they could've planned it better somehow. Not announced it for 2008 cause they wanted it to be PS3's first Killer App so bad (probably also had an agreement with Sony, as they badly wanted a game like MGS4 in those first two years). If they had released it in 2009 or 2010 while holding people over with another PS2 entry in like 2007, I think it could have been a good compromise. Instead of wasting the story & concept of Portable Ops in PSP, rename it and repurpose it for the PS2 as a true MGS3 direct sequel/interquel, that improves upon all the things people love from the 2004 game, such as the jungle survival aspect, aesthetics and whatnot. Instead of the concrete buildings that permeate most of the PSP game. Just change the subtitle, adapt the story a little for actual 3D cutscenes worthy of a MGS3 sequel instead of a spinoff, and promote the game heavily so it's another PS2 Swan Song title alongside God of War II. The success of things like GTA Vice City and San Andreas in-between GTA III & IV is a good example of how it could have worked for Portable Ops turning into a PS2 game instead that would actually sell well and justify Konami in allowing a 2009 or 2010 deadline so MGS4's true scope could be realized, in a way that we get a much healthier gameplay/cutscenes ratio and bonus content/missions.

The alternative, could be to just launch MGS4 as it was and maybe still make those online DLCs, but not go immediately work on Peace Walker or Metal Gear Solid Rising. Just put these off, take a couple of years and released a Integral/Substance version of MGS4 (which nowadays we'd call a Directors Cut) that's filled with extra missions using the online maps, as well as VR environments, maybe even some new levels in the campaign itself. Could be a good compromise. And with that delay, Kojima could allow himself to be even more ambitious when making Peace Walker if they chose the upcoming PS Vita as the target hardware instead. The game was already fantastic, albeit heavily limited by the PSP hardware and controls, and you can feel those limitations even when playing the HD Edition in PS3. Just imagine what it could have looked and played like if it came out for the Vita, which had two analog sticks, a touchscreen and a rear touchpad, which replaced buttons like L2 and L2 as well as L3 and R3. And how good it could have looked, if Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Killzone: Mercenary and Gravity Rush 1 are anything to go by. Oh, what could have been.

In either case, development on Peace Walker, MGS Rising and consequentially MGSV would be all delayed by the extra dev time on a 2010 MGS4 or its 2010 expansion re-release. Then we'd get a 2012 or 2013 Peace Walker made natively for PS Vita, with probably a PS3/PS4 port down the line. MGS Rising being delayed could potentially buy enough time for Kojima to not even cancel it, instead developing it alongside Peace Walker and maybe releasing in 2015 exclusively for next-gen on PS4 and Xbox One. Now imagine that. I don't even want to know how long until we'd have MGSV. 2018 and the very earliest, provided it started development before MGS Rising finished but most realistically, 2019 for Ground Zeroes alone, then 2020 for The Phantom Pain. In that world, we'd unfortunately lose Death Stranding and Kojima getting his independence and creative freedom. But damn would I love it for the series.

Alternatively, the domino effect of all that is that somehow, Peace Walker comes out in 2012 while MGS Rising is still quietly cancelled and given to Platinum Games. MGR: Revengeance still comes out in 2013. Ground Zeroes comes out in 2016 and The Phantom Pain in 2017. Somewhere along all that, the P.T. fiasco and Kojima Productions's deteriorating relationship with Konami still happens and they all leave, with MGSV releasing without his name on the cover, tho still stamped all over the game at the start of every story mission/episode. That would delay Death Stranding by at least 2 or 3 years, provided Kojima managed to still establish his new studio with PlayStation sponsorship in 2017 right after finishing work on MGSV. Which would make Death Stranding 1 basically an early PS5 exclusive at launch, coming out 2022 at the earliest. At this rate, we'd still be a year or two away from Death Stranding 2. If it wouldn't launch at the very end of 2027 after a 5.5 year dev cycle, then it release just outside the physical media window. Making it Kojima's first entirely digital game, wether he liked it or not. Still probably a PS5 game. It would be at best, a cross-gen release if PS6 indeed releases by the end of next year and isn't delayed.

Anyways, that was what I wanted. Not the delay of everything else, of course, which would ultimately negatively impact Death Stranding or even prevent the perfect storm that made it possible. But just the delay of MGS4, or its continued development until 2010. Is it selfish of me? Definitely, specially cause 6 years for an important sequel like that back then was basically unheard of outside of GTA IV, and even that had big, culturally impactful non-numbered titles like VC and SA released in-between. But god, I would just love to have seen Kojima or his team give that game the time it deserved. Almost every other big Metal Gear since MGS1 got that, even if MGS3 had mostly the online expansion. MGS1 Integral, MGS2 Substance, Peace Walker, which is already a huge game without any expansions, and of course, MGSV and then later Death Stranding 1 and DS2. MGS4 is the black sheep of the family in that regard. Widely controversial for being more of a 15 hour playable movie than a game, it had so many cool concepts and ideas that couldn't have been explored properly because there was just not enough time. If I could turn back time and make a wish on a game's development, that would've been the one whose course in history I'd change.

Now, I realize that this is far from the only rushed game in the past 30 or 40 years, that a lot of fans would wish wasn't impacted by either insufficient deadlines or fast dev cycles (definitely not MGS4's case, as it already took too long by 2000s standards). What are your examples? And how would they impact the studio, publisher or franchise's timetables if they were delayed or kept getting new expansions or re-releases?

Hi folks. Some of you may have read my previous write-ups on playing PS1 Games. I’ll link them at the bottom of the post.

This is part of my effort to play PlayStation 1 games that I’ve never played– and often never heard of– until now. I’m buying these games physically, popping them into my PlayStation 2, which is hooked up to an old Sony Trinitron KV-1981R TV, and trying to give each title its due. I love early 3D graphics, tank controls, and everything that comes with this generation.

Today I want to discuss Future Cop: L.A.P.D.. This is a third person shooter developed by EA Redwood Shore where you control a mech in a Robocop-like hellscape.

This game was a blast to play. Besides some cutscenes to setup the missions, the game wastes no time dropping you into its third-person running and gunning action. You can freely change from a mech to a mech-car at any time, which changes how the mech moves.

The cutscenes create this mix of dystopian satire which perfectly punctuates the insanity of the premise. You’re a cop in a mech gunning down mutants and criminals. Just accept that and enjoy the gameplay.

There are eight levels, each a variety of locals like a beach, a prison, and an airport. For how simple they look, I never had a hard time parsing the environment – whether to understand the space as a game or a simulation of reality. The maps sort of look isometric in their presentation. Maybe I get that feeling because the spaces look miniature, particularly when there’s deep water and you can see bodies or sea creatures crawling on the bottom. A map editor for this game would be a lot of fun to play with.

Mostly, the game consists of shooting enemies, finding switches, and navigating the space with light platforming to find the boss and defeat it. Sometimes there’s side objectives, but overall each level is linear.

As you progress, more platforming gets added into the mix. I’m generally good with platforming, although the camera and sometimes the physics did make these sections a little difficult. In one late level, you’re jumping from conveyor belts over pits of lava or drops that can kill you. Thankfully, I made it through that on the first try. I really like how the game makes full use of its vertical space, often having you re-navigate an area from a higher vantage point.

Many levels required multiple plays, though, for me to clear. Often, I would get to a boss, get obliterated, and then have to play the whole level over. I admit to wanting checkpoints some of the time, but honestly, the game is fun enough that I didn’t mind speeding through the levels.

A better variety of weapons also wouldn’t have hurt. I get each of them is supposed to be useful for different situations, but I rode the Gatling Lasers, Fusion Rockets, and Shockwave special for most of the game without needing to switch. Only the final boss, a rogue AI, benefited from switching to the grenade launcher.

The gimmick of changing from a mech to mech-car, I think, works well. The game rarely forces you to do so unless you’re traversing water, which gives the player a lot of freedom to make those decisions. Admittedly, there are times where you have to jump a ramp as the mech-car, and the game does sign post that with dialogue. But more often than not, I would change into the mech-car when dealing with crowds or wide-open spaces.

I always mention music when discussing games, and Future Cop is no slouch in this regard. Some of the electro beats this game deploys are so funky! Go listen to “Zuma Beach” when you get a chance to see what I mean. Some of the later tracks aren’t as memorable to me, but they get the job done.

Now, Future Cop has the distinction of inspiring the MOBA genre with its multiplayer mode. I’m not familiar with MOBA games except passingly, but I did try out the “Precinct Assault” mode against the AI. I can see the appeal and definitely would have enjoyed that mode with friends. However, on my own, after beating the game, I couldn’t put more than one try in before calling it quits. Very cool stuff to see where inspiration can come from.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with Future Cop: L.A.P.D. and would recommend it as a solid PS1 game right up there with Syphon Filter and Tenchu.

However, after the “hardcore” nature of this game, I figured I should play something more lighthearted, so I picked up Ape Escape! I’ll be sure to write about that game soon.

Prior PS1 Reviews:

Syphon Filter

Tenchu: Stealth Assassins

Omega Boost

Spyro the Dragon

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

Edit: Original post got removed because apparently the title was bad. Some quick responses from the previous discussion:

I understand the game was lacking in many aspects but keep in mind I came to this game expecting absolute trash based on the reviews. But was surprised how much BETTER it was than expected, not that It stands up to the top RPGs.

For reference, my top RPG games would probably be the likes of Oblivion, KOTOR, ME, DA:O, CP77 TW. But I've already played all the greats, so after those you gotta find enjoyment in games that aren't as good but still have some enjoyable aspects to them, which I thought this game did.

I also got the game when it was heavily discounted.

(Note: This review is based on about 20 hours of playtime, roughly halfway through the main story, mostly wandering around and side questing.)

The game has been in my backlog for a while. My expectations were underwater after seeing how it was received initially. But I've been craving a good open-world RPG lately, so I finally decided to dive into my Star Wars backlog. I finished the Jedi: Fallen Order games first and thought they were just okay. Nothing to write home about. Then I started Outlaws, fully expecting to dislike it, but 20 hours in and I'm really liking it. It’s exactly the kind of Star Wars game I’ve always wanted, just exploring the galaxy as a regular person.

The map design shows a ton of love for the lore. I love the fact that you aren't a superhero saving the world. Playing as a relatively normal person dealing with syndicates makes for a nice, laid-back explorer/stealth gameplay.

While the story isn't an epic saga like Mass Effect or hardcore like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, it is still decent enough to keep you engaged. I really don't understand the hate this game received. Maybe people just wanted an epic adventure.

Overall, it feels like Horizon Zero Dawn and Cyberpunk 2077 had a Star Wars baby.

Pros:

• Great environments and setting.

• Good exploration and stealth gameplay.

• Great, immersive atmosphere.

• Delves into the Star Wars underworld lore pretty well.

Cons:

• Gunplay and combat aren't anything to shout about.

• The story is okay at best.

• It's a bit too easy

However, it makes sense from the character's point of view that combat wouldn't be the focus of the game, and a small-time outlaw story fits the setting well.

Who should play it:

• Star Wars fans who would like to explore the world outside the typical Jedi/Sith stories

• Space and sci-fi fans.

• Anyone looking for a laid-back, atmospheric, and immersive game.

Who should skip it:

• Players looking for high-intensity, high-adrenaline, edge-of-your-seat games.

• Anyone who needs in-depth, hardcore RPG mechanics like Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

• Anyone who can't do without lightsabers and typical Star Wars clichés.

• Anyone who wants epic story RPGs like ME, BG3, The Witcher etc..

Overall Rating: 7.5/10

I wish it hadn't been received so badly by the fans; the game could've become great with further sequels and development. I'm not saying it's amazing or the best thing since indoor plumbing, but I don't think it deserved so much negativity. Feels like people were hating not because it's terrible, but because it's not exactly the type of game they wanted it to be.

Bold prediction: I think this is one of those games that will age well, and people will come to like it with time.

If there's a single event that shaped recent history of Marvel-themed videogames, it's got to be Marvel's Avengers. A AAA action game with Square Enix behind based on the second most recognizable Marvel name (after Spiderman) that not only failed to deliver an engaging story or deep meaningful combat, but was ultimately a cashgrab game-as-a-service aimed to mimic the Warframe/Destiny formula with a theme that didn't fit. On the one hand it's funny DC/Warner didn't see the kilometer-wide crater it left and fell inside with all their equipment with Suicide Squad, but on the other it's a shame it's shockwave collapsed other important Marvel games. People here have talked at lenght about Guardians of the Galaxy, a solid 8/10 action game which flew under the radar after that aforementioned disaster.

The other game that was utterly destroyed by the aftermath of Avengers was Midnight Suns, the latest tactical RPG from Firaxis before they decided to meticulously destroy the Civilization formula from the ground-up. Although, being honest, they partially did this to themselves. You gotta undestand Marvel is one of largest IPs around and 90% of the people who looked at the trailers don't know what a "sectoid" is, so you got a bunch of flashy CGI trailers only to then be revealed this is a turn-based strategy game with cards. I kinda sorta understand why the "normies" thought this would be another mobile slop game like Marvel Snap (not saying it's "bad", but it's average mobile content).

Now I understand you aren't that, you're a ultra-smart nerd lover of this sorts of games: so what do we have here? Well, Marvel's Midnight Suns is a narrative tactical-RPG, much in the vein of Xcom, but also picking elements from Persona and modern Fire Emblem, and adding a deck building mechanic like in Slay the Spire.

The story is, what I've seen, a loose adaptation of the Midnight Sons arc from the comics, but with lots of fanservice for MCU fans. Long story short: Hydra has resurrected Lilith, Mother of Demons, to help take over the world, and so the Avengers have to look for help in the Midnight Souns to stop them. The plot centers greatly on the magical part of Marvel: Dr Strange, Scarlet Witch, Agatha Harkness (who's good here) and the witches of Salem, the Darkhold... although there's also the Avengers and Hydra, a couple of X-men and your friendly neighbourhood arachnid-human to not alienate movie fans. The player character is a customizable OC called Hunter, child of Lilith, a 1700s demon hunter who's resurrected to fight their mother once more. They're easily the strongest of all characters is required in all main missions (although in sidequest you can ignore them).

As you can guess for the story, the game is way more narrative-based than Xcom, which ditched a main plot in favour to an almost rogue-like sandbox mode where you had to fight against the aliens in procedurally made missions. This solves my main gripe with Xcom that I commented on some other post: in Xcom you can not only fail a mission, but fail the entire campaign and have to start all over, like when in Civilization you lose half-way through. Midnight Suns, however, it's more like a normal RPG, avoiding the "doomed playthough" syndrome.

This can easily be seen in the main base. In Xcom you're an omniscient leader who plays with your base like a side-scrolling building-management game, like in Fallout Shelter. However here it's like the recent Fire Emblem games: you control your character directly and walk around and talk to people the way Commander Shepard would.

But let's talk the meat and potatoes of the game: the combat, easily my favourite of all the similar games I've played. Again, turn based tactics. You control 3 superheroes and have to fight hordes of enemies. The way it plays is that you have a hand of cards, with each card being a possible action to be taken by a character. There's attack cards, skill cards (which are the usual support/buff action) and "hero cards". The point is that there's a combat resource called "heroism" which is basically magic mana. Playing attack and skill cards give you heroism and heroic cards consume it. Each turn you can play 3 cards, discard 2 you don't like to replace them, and move a character once, although they also move with each attack. You can also use environment objects to damage the enemy. This consumes heroism but doesn't count as a card play, obviously.

Then we have enemies, which come in 2 main flavours: either hydra goons or demons called "lilin". They come in 3 tiers: minions, who are goombahs that go down in one attack, elites, who are more meaty and have more special skills, and supervillains, aka, bosses. There are 7 bosses in the main game, although they are recycled over and over. In fact much of the content is recycled, which would be a bore if the gameplay wasn't so fun. Unlike the Heroes, enemies don't have cards but have simple movements that are telegraphed via an icon that say who they'll target, making them predictable and easy to maneuver around.

And this is it, basically. As you can imagine there lots of cards (more than 200, not counting upgrades or consumable items, by my count) with lots of different stats. For example, "quick" card refunds your play if the enemy is KO'ed, so it's a free way to dispose of enemy minions. A "knockback" card is an attack card that pushes back the enemy, and if they hit another one, both received damage. However you can only push back, hence the necesity to use your movement to reposition yourself and get the correct angle. Same with pushing environmental objects. And similar thing with the status effects: vulnerability, taunted, lifesteal... most of them self explanatory.

What I love of this game is, as I said in the title, it's handling of RNG. Randomness hasn't been deleted, as which cards get drafted is important. But you know an attack is going to land. At worst you will alway have 3 plays each turn, it's not like in Xcom when you fail five 70% shots and lose a turn and see the enemy gang up on you and destroy you effortlessly. In essence they've replaced dice with cards, "post action RNG" with "pre action RNG" and this is a great design choice and one you're more likely familiar with if you play board games since they've become a staple of the genre: they limit player choice, avoiding analysis paralisis, but never leave you completely sold.

Now you have different characters with different skills, that are mosly faithful to who they are. Blade is focused on the "bleeding" status effect, that is effecitvely poison. Captain America is the tank that taunts enemies and builds up block (basically armor). Dr Strange is a support mage whose movements can be improved with more heroism. Magik is based around portals and moving enemies around with knockbacks. And Nico Minoru, my least favourite, is basically an entire RNG character whose skills are decided by a roulette, although even then the effects are decided at the tiem of drafting, so you know what will happen.

Oh! One nitpick I have about this is the pace at which heroes are introduced. You see, there are 12 playable heroes, not counting Hunter and the 4 DLC ones which I haven't bought. Problem is 7 of them get introduced in the beginning. The prologue isn't so bad since you get used to them slowly, but then the game opens up and you find 3 more heroes you don't know from anywhere, since they are 3 B-tier marvel characters and you are like "what the hell do I do with you"? Maybe they should've introduced first the 4 Midnight Suns and only then added the Avengers, but then we would've have had a first act without Iron Man and that's a lot to ask from your casual Marvel fan.

Apart of that there's the social aspect of the game, with you being able to talk to the other Midnight Suns and rising up their friendship level as if this was Persona... or lower them if you lack emotional intelligence and end up hurting their feelings. During these prolongued segments in the main base, the "Abbey" you can also explore the grounds around, pick potions ingredients, and solve puzzles as if this was a metroidvania. This part by and large the least polished part of the game, although it has nice rewards and explains more of the plot.

Finally we should discuss the shortcomings of the game. Apart of the previous mentioned lackluster exploration, the graphics are meh at best. Specially the faces look as cartoony as Chief Bradford looked in 2012. Finally the story is... diverse. Each character has their own personality and struggles, which really help sell the fantasy of building a team of heroes, and the game tries to make you feel the Hunter-Litih relation. Although most of it is bland, predictable and suffers from cringe millenial dialogue, where character have to banter about the end of the world. I swear at times this is worse than Forspoken.

Ok, so how good is this game? Well, I've played Xcom 1 and 2, duh, Fire Emblem, Banner Saga, Valkyria Chronicles and a bit of advanced wars, apart of Kotor and Dragon Age. And I think Midnight Suns has the best gameplay of all of them. It's a bit weird at first, since it's very board game-coded like the latest Civilization games, but it's also polished and tight. Then we have the Marvel story and side characters stuff, which is nice, although an afterthought. So yeah, I'd say the game delivers.

Monster Train is a deck building rogue like developed by Shiny Shoe. Released in 2020, Monster Train reminds us that the best part of public transport is the guy on meth who swears he's an angel here to destroy you.

We play as the director of a Hellbound train on a quest to get everyone home safely.

Gameplay involves dying to the boss after an hour of carefully curating your deck because you didn't pay attention to what their special attack is. It even tells you before the run begins. "Don't do a thin deck, it won't work!" Good thing I never learned to read, thin deck here we gooooo.

The Good

I really enjoyed the "dual-class" approach to deck building, giving you effectively dozens of possible starting points. Finding broken combos or trying desperately to figure out how to make the shitty ones viable was a lot of fun. Each combination also having a 'hero unit' that comes in a variety of flavors adds even more layers of complexity that I had a ton of fun figuring out.

I was also a big fan of the card enchant system. With spells the correct choice is almost always 'reduce the card energy cost', but with troops it wasn't always so cut and dry. Gave me a little more control over the RNG so that I only had myself to blame when I inevitably made a poor choice and lost. Of course I still blamed bullshit RNG though, that's half the fun of the genre.

Favorite Screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/QnBqK5I.png

"Where we're going, we don't need any energy."

The Bad

The boss fights feel anti-climatic. After a few rounds you get into a drunken boxing match where you just smash into each other until only one of you has HP left. You just sit there for a minute while the game maths out if you won or not. It also narrows down what kind of strategies are viable because you don't get to play cards while this goes on.

As such you can't build around damage spells since you don't meaningfully get to use them. Almost every deck build I did the chief strategy was get rid of damage spells and get the really good buff spells. "Stack the shit out damage immunity" became my mantra as I got to higher difficulty levels and it pretty much always worked.

To the games credit sometimes you stack armor buffing spells instead. There's even a spell damage card that does your 5x your armor in damage to the enemy and it's one of the only damage spells that do anything useful. Calling that a spell damage build though is a little like when I used to tell my 5 year old 'we' made cookies because he pushed the bake button on the oven.

The Questionable

As neat as the deck building itself can be at times, the enemy variety is sorely lacking. The art for enemies is all very samey which is one issue. Very few units stand out as having their own identity. If you showed me a lineup of every enemy unit I'd be hard pressed to tell you exactly what they do or what any of them are even called.

This leads to the game feeling stale far sooner than it should have. It's like they spent all their budget on making cool decks for the players but forgot that I also want cool monsters to slay.

You know the old saying. It's not the size of the hammer, it's the nail you're stacking HP leech against so that when the final fight happens you can one floor it thanks to being pragmatically invulnerable.

Final Thoughts

It was a fun distraction for a few days but as much fun as I had trying out different decks, fighting the same monsters in the same order every time got dull. I managed to beat the hardest difficulty and then lost all will to keep playing. Though less than 5% of players have the Steam achievement for beating the highest difficulty so it would seem I'm a masochist.

Bonus Thought

There's a PvP mode that's been dead for quite some time. I wonder if the folks who played it for the last time knew they were the last ones to ever play that mode. I wonder if there are any games where I was the last one to ever play it.

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you think of the game? Did you have a similar experience or am I off my rocker?

My other reviews on patient gaming

Poinpy is a vertical platforming arcade game about a cutesy-looking guy endlessly jumping his way upwards as he gathers an assortment of fruits. Each time he collects all the required fruits, he juices them up to satisfy the beast chasing him below, except if he fails to get them all it’s game over! The game originally came out in 2022 on iOS and Android devices exclusively through Netflix Games, but it completely vanished from the platform after a year.

No one knew what happened to it until about a month ago when the game was suddenly re-released for free back on mobile devices having finally freed itself from Netflix contract jail. And instantly I started hearing people saying how much they missed Poinpy! Apparently, this little guy was a big phenomenon in the circles I followed, yet I totally missed out on him when he first came around. Being curious, I downloaded the game on my iPhone – of course it was free, so why not – and now I’m back here to tell you all: this game has the juice.

I was immediately amazed by how tightly designed Poinpy was and how it felt so good to jump around, bounce off walls, and slam down on enemies. The ascent to keep rising higher and collect more fruits was such a simple, yet fun gameplay loop with how satisfying the controls and physics were. Plus being able to tweak my jumping journey with different builds was an awesome addition to the formula too.

The puzzles were a cool challenge as well and a nice distraction from the occasionally intense climb. None were too difficult so I managed to complete them all without any guide – a mild achievement that I was proud of.

Although I can’t stress enough how charming this game was and how that made it such a joy. The adorable design of the characters, how everything moved with a silly whimsy, and the lovable music adorning it all made the entire game such a pleasure to look at and play. I will ride or die for Poinpy. The creator, Ojiro Fumoto, was best known previously for Downwell which is another game that I know nothing about, so I know what I’m checking out next!

Don’t let Poinpy leap past you! This game is cute simple fun with a true excellence in its design. It is free on iOS and Android devices, but it’s so good that I tipped the developer anyway for how incredibly well-made it is. More people need to understand the greatness of Poinpy, and I won’t stop until his status ascends to the heavens like he deserves!

I picked up Wasteland 3 because I was interested in getting into CRPGs and tactical games. I enjoyed Disco Elysium a lot, and I was looking to play a game with some XCOM vibes, so this felt like a natural fit. Sadly though, after 17 hours I won't be continuing with it.

Postapocalyptic games always seem to sit in a tonally strange place for me. I feel like the games are always trying to be more interested in me than I am in them if that makes any sense. The life situations seem peachier than they should be given the circumstances, and NPCs have this tendency to be involved in things I really don't care at all about. I think I just yearn for a bleaker, more sympathetic setting - which WL3 is definitely not. It's very yee-haw and almost every character is over-the-top meaning none really stand out (the radio system when you travel reminds me a lot of GTA). But it's also just really slow and plodding because this kind of game is slow and plodding - and that makes for a strange contrast.

I was impressed with the gameplay at first, but after so long I feel it has sort of waned on me. Combat was interesting for the first few hours, although now I dread it and don't care to optimize my positioning, juggle resources, run around reviving people constantly. My favorite part of the gameplay is the leveling system which has quite a few options. Really the best part for me is the leveling mixed with the overworld stuff. I don't know why it feels so satisfying to disarm a trap or fix a toaster, but it does. I enjoy the experiential "narrative" pieces of the gameplay - hacking robots, taming pets, etc. There are some other minor things to the gameplay: item management, gear enchantments, crafting, faction reputation - your typical RPG grind stuff.

So far the story has had me bumming around in an open world meeting various factions and doing a number of side quests. Quests are slow moving. The factions are varied and unique, but I'm finding it hard to be that intrigued by any of them (with the exception of a robot faction which I adored). The pacing of the game is generally really slow. You get quests, then it takes forever to get to them. You need to level up and prepare for things before jumping in. The quests themselves are typically pretty long-winded. There is a core story line, but it's mostly out of my level range at the moment, so I'm doing eff-all. It's nice to meet new factions, but it also feels like filler and that the core story lacks urgency. Maybe it's something about the characters. Characters so far have pretty much been exclusively throwaway normies and cracked out one-offs - neither having any sort of depth. The only character with any permanence feels more like my drug dealer nagging me on than a character I really want to spend more time with.

So here I am knee-deep in the game, still just a quarter-invested in what's happening and with the mechanics starting to wear on me - waiting and hoping for things to "get good" which feels like a sign that it's time to call it quits.

Oh - and the music was awesome. Wow.

Hearts of Stone (Spoilers below)

Hearts of Stone is DLC to The Witcher 3, offering a focused narrative that takes place in Velen, and features 3 new main characters: Olgierd Van Everec, Gaunter O'Dimm, and Shani. The narrative focuses on the immortal Olgierd, and his binding contract with the mysterious and powerfully magical O'Dimm, which Geralt finds himself in the middle of. During the journey we meet an old flame of Geralt's, Shani, who assists Geralt in a variety of ways.

The narrative is, quite frankly, brutal. It involves several "impossible" tasks that lead to heartbreaking moments, and ending with a difficult decision that Geralt must make. Specifically, the sequence of events with Olgierd’s wife Iris hit me hard, and I couldn’t help but think about it for a few hours afterwards. It’s a fantastic story that only felt like a chore during the moments involving Vlodimir. The moments involving Vlodimir and Shani were especially difficult to get through, they made me uncomfortable and I was looking forward to the sequence ending.

On the topic of Shani, her introduction feels unnatural and forced. If I hadn’t learned, after-the-fact, that she was in the books and previous games, then I would have assumed that she was created solely to have an attractive woman in the DLC. Geralt and Shani discuss their past, but it felt as if the game was trying to convince me that they had history rather than them having a natural conversation. I genuinely like her as a character though, her demeanor is pleasant and I feel like she would be a really fun character for future quests involving injuries or solving mysteries based on illness.

Lastly, the DLC introduces new weapon and armor enhancements called runewords, which is basically enchanting, except glyphs need to be removed before the runeword can be applied. Unlocking upgrades is expensive, and so are runewords in general. It feels out of place for a short narrative focused DLC, perhaps it fits better in the context of when it was released as a way for hardcore Witcher 3 players to spend money and use glyphs that may have been stockpiled.

There is minimal fluff to get sidetracked by, and I highly encourage fans of Wild Hunt to play if they want more of The Witcher.