While Marathon hasn’t grabbed me yet, I’m going to keep plugging away at it before bolting a score on to this review and calling it a day. There’s a lot here, most of it good, and as long as Sony backs Marathon through this teething phase I think we could have a gem on our hands – with some aggressive polishing, of course.
At the end of the day, Monster Hunter Stories 3 is a game that wants you to spend a LOT of time playing it – but it respects that time also. Much like the mainline Monster Hunter series, Stories wants you to spend time thinking about and preparing your loadout before each big fight, fighting and crafting and hatching your way to the right configuration. Battles themselves also take strategy and forethought, making sure you memorise a monster’s patterns and weaknesses to come out victorious. But, once you’ve proved you can do that? It’s all about making life easy for you, rewarding that time you invested. With so many different systems at play, it’s almost a relief to be able to Quick Finish a battle, or easily search for a gene I want my favourite beast to have; I’m keento see what’s in store next, and Stories 3 is excited to show it to me.
I’m not trying to yuck anyone’s yum here and realise that there are many Fatal Frame fans who will be as pumped for this remake as I was Resident Evil 2. To those people, I truly hope that you have a blast. To many others, most of whom have just experienced truly desperate and bleak survival horror through Grace Ashcroft in Resident Evil Requiem, I say simply that this ain’t it. You’ll end up far more frustrated than entertained.
By carefully honouring its past and deliberately weaving together the best of survival and action horror, Resident Evil Requiem finally reconciles the series’ genre identity. This is the most captivated I’ve felt playing a new Resident Evil story since booting up Resident Evil 4 on GameCube all those years ago. It understands why it got action right all those years ago and finally how that best integrates with Resident Evil’s more traditional horror roots – or at least the remakes and reimaginings of them. Leon remains an important ingredient as the poster boy for the franchise, but the real key is partnering him with someone without his courage who’s still determined to survive. Resident Evil is no longer choosing between survival or action. With Requiem, it’s finally mastered survival-action horror.
This is perhaps the Star Trek game most faithful to its source material, as just like Star Trek: Voyager, it’s a flawed gem that I can heartily recommend experiencing, just not without caveats. Both its greatest strength and biggest weakness is that it really feels like the kind of PC game that could’ve come out during the later years of the show’s run.
Mario Tennis Fever is also a letdown as one of the first Switch 2 exclusives. There’s little that feels truly current-gen, and some of the visuals are surprisingly basic and rough.
There's something admittedly unique about Romeo is a Dead Man, but that quirkiness doesn't make up for its middle of the road design. In fact, it's not long before quirky is just there for the sake of quirkiness, not serving anything larger.
While the main story does feel a bit shorter compared to the other Kiwami games, the sheer volume of “stuff to do” in the world more than balances that out. By the time you’ve cleared the main story, bested the Coliseum, completed every bizarre sub-story, completed the photo rally, fought every beatdown target, unlocked every costume item AND forged a deep, emotional connection with every child in your care? You’ll wonder why Kiryu ever left the life behind.
At the end of the day, Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined doesn’t bring forward everything that’s been in previous versions of the title – but that’s not what it’s set out to do. This is a new 7 for a new generation, or even just long-time fans who want to re-experience this story with a bit more velocity than the previous versions allow, without trying to replace the still-excellent 3DS release. Seeing the team this willing to flip the script on the traditional formula leaves me very excited for the future of the franchise; if other remakes (or the distant future release of Dragon Quest 12) can take lessons from Reimagined’s mechanics or art style, I’ll be a very happy gamer indeed.
