Let's Play Video Games

Yoku’s Island Express has a lot of fantastic ideas. It plays with its pinball formula enough to keep what could’ve been repetitive endlessly new and engaging, and it wraps all that up in its beautiful and unexpectedly deep world. Unfortunately, every good idea is slightly undermined by its glaring lack of real challenge, turning its otherwise fantastic design into more of a chore than it really should have been. It’s a nice change of pace from the likes of Hollow Knight and Steamworld Dig 2, but I don’t think Yoku quite has what it takes to stand up as equals alongside them.

Earthlock isn’t going to do much for JRPG veterans, as it lacks a level of polish and epic storytelling of series like Final Fantasy and Persona. But, for people like me who bounce off of anything even remotely hinting at a random encounter or linear dungeon, Earthlock manages to maintain the feel of a JRPG while adding and tinkering with a formula that’s been codified over literal decades. I couldn’t tell you what on God’s green earth is actually happening in it, but I can definitely tell you it’s worth your time regardless.

Frostpunk is a bitterly cold game. Every wife crying over the corpse of their frozen husband, every father dying in the cold looking for their runaway child, every amputation, and every sacrifice made for the greater good makes it one of the most miserable experiences you can find at the moment. And yet, 11bit manages to make such unrelenting suffering an utterly stellar colony simulator and narrative experience that you’d be a fool to skip.

It identified what was good about the first game, ramped that up to eleven, and let players have fun experiencing the Isayama’s world. It’s bursting with character and flying around on ODM gear is still a treat, even if the time-to-kill frequently borders on the excessive. If you can put up with seeing the first season of the show, and locations from the first game, yet again, there are definitely worse ways of experiencing one of the biggest manga franchises this decade than A.O.T. 2.

Pure Farming 2018 might not be the best simulator around, but it does come close. Farming Simulator 17 offers a consistent quality to its environmental design that PF2018 stumbles on, and it’s slightly more respectful of the player’s time (seriously, an hour for a field is ludicrous). What Pure Farming does instead is offer more of just about everything any would-be sim aficionado needs to get into the genre.

Kingdom Come should’ve been good. It was perfectly positioned to be a unique and refreshing break from the magical, mystical medieval worlds we so often inhabit. Thanks to the bolted-together systems that just don’t fit together, technical issues galore, and a niggling sense the game isn’t presenting its historical foundations in good faith, though, it manages to fall flat in every way.

Origins by no means perfect, particularly in its iffy movement systems and overreliance on the new Eagle companion. But by taking a year off a brutal annual release schedule, Ubisoft has given us a huge, polished, well-written game that successfully reworks and pushes Assassin’s Creed forward in ways I didn’t even realise were necessary. Assassin’s Creed Origins is the best the series has ever been by a long shot, and I sincerely hope it’s only onwards and upwards from here.

Call of Duty: WW2’s campaign is surprising in how, by going back to the structure of mid-2000s WW2 shooters, it manages to wriggle free of the series’ more recent missteps. It’s still Call of Duty, complete with a few mechanical quibbles and sometimes embarrassingly tropey dialogue. But shining out from those are some very clever design decisions and poignant moments that can easily go down as some of the most memorable in CoD history. I’m so happy World War 2 shooters are making a comeback, and that Call of Duty is leading the charge.

What S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is to Fallout, Spintires: MudRunner is to Euro Truck Simulator. They share the same DNA, but a gorgeously grim environment and ruthless challenge push the former into its own level of greatness, despite a few technical hiccoughs here and there. MudRunner’s sandbox mode, simplified controls and engaging tutorial mode make it an accessible game for newcomers, but for driving aficionados, there is so, so much more on offer here. As far as sims go, this one’s essential.

I will admit, Death of the Outsider took a while to really click with me. Its recycling of levels grated, and being limited to three relatively plain supernatural powers felt like a step back compared to the other games. But in its place we got the best, most concise story of the series, essential answers we’ve been asking for five years, and a stellar stealth game to boot. I don’t know if we’ll ever see the Isles again, but if this is the end, it’s definitely ended on a high.