Guardian

There’s a reason Gears of War has survived as a series long enough to earn a prequel. Its specific flavour of bloody, tactical, cover-based combat isn’t done better anywhere else. Unfortunately, E-Day is let down by everything around that fighting, resulting in a safe and repetitive experience that shows you all its ideas in the opening hours and never dares to build on them in any meaningful way.

Ace Combat has always owed a debt to the movie Top Gun, and AC8 borrows liberally from the more recent sequel Top Gun: Maverick, with closeup pilot face-cam shots and a handful of story beats lifted straight from the film. Dialogue can be a bit clunky (again like Top Gun, or perhaps Metal Gear Solid); characters will occasionally pause midway through an otherwise natural-sounding conversation to deliver some convoluted plot exposition or an ideological clanger. But between the truly amazing shot framing and cinematography, emotive motion capture and voice acting, the series’ trademark soaring music and a story that actually sticks the landing, I ended up oddly moved. This is not something you necessarily expect from an arcade flight combat sim.

Where Control evoked an oppressive feeling of distorted reality, here there’s a more conventional tale about a man on a mission of redemption, and there’s even the odd moment of human warmth in Dylan’s interactions with his bureau colleagues and his elusive sister. Just like the gameplay, the story has made a tonal shift towards easily digestible mainstream convention, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, I’m left craving the original’s more hallucinogenic vision of the action-RPG.

Not even a fiendishly illegible puzzle could derail Townfall. This is a taut, smart tale, less about psychosexual terror than psychosocial dread. What’s most surprising is where the game’s sympathies lie: not with Simon, nurse Zoe, or bullyboy Richard, but the people of St Amelia. Their memorial in the centre of town is one of the game’s clearest images, unobscured by fog, though we’re never privy to the exact events that lead to their deaths. Townfall seems to understand that some things should remain shrouded in fog. The fate of St Amelia naturally festers in our imagination. How very Silent Hill.

I’m glad I got to see the story through, however, with its not-so-subtle homages to the likes of Danganronpa and Evangelion. It remains one step away from its mysteries and doesn’t take them to extreme lengths. There’s a profound and alluring melancholy etched into this work, a broken and messy world that’s strange enough to foster questions, but smart enough not to provide every answer.

There is so much seductive and emancipating rage in this game, in its story, its combat mechanics, its gloriously conflicted protagonist. But the crescendo always feels like it’s just out of reach, like an argument in another room, or a war on the news.

These are by far the weakest parts of an otherwise brilliant debut from Bit Reactor, however. And even when the plot falters, touching character moments join digestible, deeply human explorations of this era of Star Wars’ byzantine factional politics. XCOM’s success has influenced countless turn-based tactics games. Few have made squeezing joyfully absurd heroics out of a handful of action points feel this good. Fewer have made me grin so hard at a final lucky shot during a last-second evacuation. That’s my squad down there, after all.

Sophia may traipse a path similar to that of countless treasure-hunting, action-adventure video game classics – but for all the overfamiliar design choices, there is enough verve in the beguiling presentation and lively, compellingly drawn characters to elevate this beyond mere retread. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy succeeds, in large part, because of Sophia, a heroine who confronts history head on, before finally breaking free of it in apocalyptically spectacular style.

That’s what’s so perverse about this game. One of Vholume’s creators made their name with Babbdi and Straftat, two games that look like a product of the demoscene but actually zero in on deeply satisfying mechanics delivered with care. Vholume’s world is horrible, then, but your path through it is paved with joy and exhilaration. It understands that the only thing better than a game that wants to make you think is a game that wants to make sure you never think, even for a millisecond – because if the thinking brain gets itself involved, the whole beautiful thing will fall apart.

All three games now look better and are more easily accessible. The experiences are, for the most part, just as you remember them. As far as remasters go, you’ll feel right at home. At their core, the message is as eternal as ever: war, and its surrounding economy, hasn’t changed. The only noticeable difference is the inflation rate.