The Jimquisition

There’s little left to say of interest, I wasn’t just being glib when I claimed the baggage of Wolverine is much more interesting than Wolverine itself. Not good enough to offer an interesting point of praise, not bad enough to interestingly dissect, Marvel’s Wolverine isn’t the best at what it does, but what it does still isn’t very nice. Did I do the comic book reference right? I'm more of a Beano reader.

Serious Sam: Shatterverse is a Serious Sam game without the charm and a roguelite without the roguelite. It wants to try something different but doesn’t try hard enough for it to work, layering only the flimsiest towel of a concept atop a skeletal frame. A promising creative conceit is wasted, an incentive to play isn’t evident, and all it really achieves is making me want to redownload the older Serious Sam games because they’re actually pretty great.

As a sequel, Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 does a great job of advancing the series in thoughtful rather than dramatic ways, retaining the gameplay of its predecessor and expanding on what players can do within that framework. These positives are tempered somewhat by unremarkable campaign levels that aren’t as repayable as they need to be, but things are exciting while they last, and they last long enough to be worth the entry fee. Also, Drones are still complete assholes.

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North Legacy Edition is one of the most pointless releases in all of media. As charmless as it was forgettable, the original game was just another flop of its era, and this is a straight replication of the same thoroughly unappealing swill. I can’t even call it a cash grab, because that’d imply there’s enough cash worth the effort of rehashing something nobody wanted the first time around...There are so many promising games that never shipped for a litany of sad reasons, yet we get to live in a world where this f..king shit shipped twice. Proof indeed that all our gods are dead.

The systems governing Splatoon Raiders are better than Splatoon Raiders itself. It features a rich enough well of progression and a wide enough variety of playstyles that the less exciting gameplay might feel worth slogging through. While combat’s entertaining at times, the miserable level design and an overall lifelessness really lets it down. Whether you’ll like Raiders ultimately comes down to how deeply you get into its fine tuning options, but the elements most pertinent to a videogame really struggle to hold up their end.

We have on our hands an enjoyable game with some of the worst audio direction in videogame history. It constantly attacks the ears with unbearably performed voice clips so repetitious, and unnecessary that I lost all desire to keep playing it. Reducing NPC chatter in the options doesn’t work, changing audio language doesn’t help - the only way this game should be played is with its yammering fully disabled, but that's a garbage solution! The wider experience does itself no favors by being repetitive in many other ways, but even if it were an exceptional game, I'd still be completely put off by the fucking noise, and the fact it was explicitly designed to be so offputting only makes it more contemptible...Can voice acting ruin an entire videogame? The Adventures of Elliot has answered that question, and the answer is shut the f..k up, videogame!

Slots & Daggers is one of the breeziest roguelites out there, but it’s no less absorbing. Its slot-based combat is both terrifically conceived and executed, and there’s some fun humor attached in a vaguely defined story between boss fights. It’s a low cost and cute genre entry that I would love to see more of, but I very much appreciate what’s there. Plus you can fight egg men.

007: First Light is a high quality experience that easily supplants GoldenEye 64 as the quintessential Bond game. Delivering every required component of the classic spy series and delivering a truly relevant storyline, it’s the very picture of what one might call a romp. Now that the origin tale’s out of the way, I’m very much looking forward to seeing more from this particular take on James Bond.

Even when more effort than normal has been put in, Bubsy is still a joke that you have to pay for, a punchline with a price tag. Bubsy 4D stops more than a kilometer short of an extra mile compared to the orange bollock’s usual outings, going further than usual to produce a tolerable but starved experience. If only the effort spent trying to validate a lack of material was spent on material, this could have been something. Maybe not something good, but something.When you get down to it though, “lol Bubsy” is the ultimate reason for its existence. As usual...Bubsy 4D is the best Bubsy game ever made.

Everything is Crab is brimming with so much potential and I genuinely hope it keeps evolving alongside its menagerie of critters. The concept is wonderfully flexible but it’s been realized with such rigidity as to trap it in the shadow of its own immense promise. Still, it manages to provide plenty of fun even if it does get predictable, and the premise alone is clever enough to make it a worthwhile genre entry.