Let me start out by saying this was a perfect opportunity to bake the game 2Spider2Man. that aside, Spider-Man 2 is a near perfect game. First the nitpicks. The boss battles are all the same 3 stages of fighting down the enemy health. Some criticized the quick-time boss fights of Spider-man and they were wrong. The standard stages and damage sponge enemies are boring. Spider-man is not a boring character. He is a scientist who often outsmarts his enemies. His fights should be as interesting as he is. Not gonna’ lie, by the time of the last boss fight l, I got bored and dialed down the difficulty. My only other complaint is not enough crime. We have a lot of street level action for Spider-man but very little of it is your standard crime. It’s fun to take on symbiotes and robot dogs, but I also want that crime fighter fantasy. This is very nit picky, I know, but that’s what separates a great game from a perfect **** the glowing praise. 2 Spider-man’s with unique dialogue, animations, and attacks make for a very rich playing experience. The whole city is rich with characters, civilians, buildings, and missions. This is the kind of life you wish for every game, and so many games seem barren in comparison. Load times are a miracle. Graphics are top tier. The star of the game is once again the story. It’s not just Peter who is run through the wringer, Miles also has to face his worst enemies. I honestly don’t know how these guys keep their identities secret when their homes, businesses, and schools are the sites of mass attacks. For a game it looks great. The story isn’t text on a screen or audio logs. You have this saga unfold through some amazing set pieces. All in all, Spider-man 2 is a must have game. I highly recommend it.
Despite all I have heard about Frustpunk, I was surprised that it’s just a city builder with style. The game is well made and great for the genre, but it doesn’t bend the genre in was that I found interesting. Then again, this is not my first city builder and I’m not a big fan of this genre. You can actually go way way back to 1982’s “Utopia” to find the essence of a city building game. You need to harvest resources to build buildings that let you harvest resources and build more buildings. The strategy is in optimizing the placement of buildings and the number and type of buildings. That’s the game. While I was enraptured with “Utopia” in the early 80s, I was less and less interested in the city builders that followed. Dress them up how you like, it’s the same game. “Frostpunk” pushes this genre forward by adding a survival element. (However, Utopia also had this with frequent hurricane). The city you build is the last city on earth, heated by one generator, and the only refuge on an earth that is frozen to -40 degrees. This dire situation means making moral choices such as legalizing child labor and 24 work shifts. Survivors are constantly dying. The narrative is laid out in narration, bits of story, and snippets of survivors’ conversations. Is this enough to make an old genre new again? I think that depends on who you ask. For me, not really. Once I figured out the best placement of buildings, saw the tech tree, and figured out how to mine coal, I knew how I’d min max this game to victory. But if I were a little kid again, as I was when “Utopia” was released, I would have spent half a summer figuring out the best way to play “Frostpunk”. Technically, “Frostpunk” offers up a lot nice additions to city builders. You can see your little people down there on earth trudging through the snow to work their jobs and collect resources. A larger map shows you where scouts might go. Pop ups for random events appear, creating a story for this last city. This is the kind of hand crafted quality that is missing from the mass market games created by the big publishers. All in all, “Frostpunk” is a good game, likely a great game, that I’m not interested in playing. (Full disclosure: I downloaded Frostpunk from my PS+ Extra collection.)
This game is not perfect, but it has taken over my free time. Modern games have lost the power of freedom that comes from letting a player loose in a world to follow the player’s own rules. This relic, with its new coat of paint, should show publishers what’s possible if only they would build it. Graphics and combat are much improved over the original. No longer is combat relegated to constant backpedaling from attacks. Now you can reliably block attacks. To be clear about this, combat in Ovlivion was subpar in 2006, and remains so now. Enemy animations are still “janky” and hit boxes are too large. The improved graphics can only be so good. The outdoor environments, for example, were only outfitted with so many polygons. Lighting can get weird, but gone are the days of “bloom”. This is a remaster, not a remake, so keep expectations in check. The meat of the game is the chasing of numbers. I would love to say the meat of the game is the all of the narratives to tell in Cyrrodil. Truth is, you immediately become enamored with making your character more powerful. Fortunately, this game offers many paths to power. Maybe too many. You might find yourself wrapped in reflect damage armor or a 100% chameleon suit. The dumb ai cannot handle player creativity, and you’ll see a lot of players discuss how powerful to make your character and keep the game challenging. The freedom to break this game is what feels so good, and if I were to fix anything, it would be introduction of enemies that also break the game. You know, god tier level fights. Narratively, the game remains a dud. A few of the faction quests have some interesting options for players. These are stealth/assassination mission. You could obviously find better stealth/assassination mechanics in 2006 (or even in the Thief games of the 1990s). What sets Oblivion apart is the ability to wield some crazy powers that can make the player character invisible, make enemies attack each other, and boost attributes like jumping high to extremes. The game needed more missions that opened up options for the player’s toolbox. Instead, we get a lot of go here and get that missions. Part of the problem with the narrative is the way Bethesda handled voice acting, which was as cheaply as possible. The game needed more voice actors, better direction on line reading, and a natural conversation system. Not joke, to persuade an NPC, you have to insult them, make a joke, say something nice, and brag, rinse and repeat. It’s not intuitive. It’s not fun. It can all be avoided with a persuasion spell. And it doesn’t matter anyway. No matter what your character says, you’ll always have to go there and get that. All in all, I wholeheartedly recommend Oblivion Remaster. Despite all its flaws, both original and remastered, the game offers a truer RPG experience than anything else, and that includes Bethesda’s other first person RPGs, Skyrim and Fallout 4. You build and play a character with stats (except Personality) that truly make a difference in gameplay. You can complete the game at level 1 if you want. The choice is yours and this is something that has been robbed of players in modern games, especially the micro-transaction storefronts posing as games.
The only thing I’m surviving in this game is boredom. All major game companies having been pushing the trend marrying the largest budgets with the most generic gameplay. Why risk a divisive reviews when you can have a solid 80 Metacritic score. Except this game isn’t a solid 80 or an 8/10 for me. Personally, I was bored and stopped playing. But objectively, I can see the quality that was put into this snoozefest, and the appeal it may have to someone new to the genre of adventure games with “Souls-like” difficulty. Let’s get the criticism out of the way. The difficulty remains an issue with this installment of EA’s Jedi series. The fighting part of the gameplay is built around perfectly parrying enemies to open them up for attack or bounce back laser blasts. Sometimes enemies glow red and instead of using that muscle memory you built for parries, you need to perfectly time a dodge out of the enemy’s path. This type of hard core gameplay completely negates the casual appeal of Star Wars game, and EA added a lot of accessibility features to compensate. As an older and thus slower gamer, I appreciate a larger parry window. But ultimately I just don’t like this style of gameplay. If I’m playing a Jedi, I want to run around smashing buttons and swinging a laser sword while performing a cinematic backflip. An equally big issue is the level design and minimap. I knew I was in for some generic gameplay when I saw the first box canyon. Then you travel to another planet with with another box canyon. Come see the Jedi’s tour of the galaxy’s greatest, most confusing box canyons. Then there are the doors you can’t open yet until you unlock a new power and backtrack the entire level. But worst of all is the getting lost because every inch of this box canyon looks the same and the minimap makes absolutely no sense. I love a screen that is free of UI clutter, but this game needs on screen waypoint markers and magical guiding lights more than any other. I really don’t get it. Games like Tomb Raider figured out decades ago. This is basically Tomb Raider with a laser sword. The culprit must be bad level design. The combat itself is so-so. Aside of the issues I have with “Souls-like” combat, the enemies are dropped here and there between long stretches of struggling with the in game map. The battles have no sense of urgency. The enemies are just there and you have to fight them to progress to the next area. This is just a lazy, generic approach to gameplay that has become all too common with so called AAA games. At least Jedi: Survivor does not teleport enemies onto the battlefield. I believe that gaming companies like EA have lost the purpose of gameplay: fun. To them, it’s about having a long playtime to validate the cost of the game and so fights become something to fill time. This is why fights in Jedi: Survivor, fights feel so perfunctory. I would prefer an option of running or sneaking past enemies. The game has its good qualities. The graphics are great, characters look good, and animations are smooth. The game also has a nice Star Wars feel to it. If I’m taking a virtual vacation with these games, I want to be somewhere I would like to visit. The story is alright. You have characters that will awkwardly stand around until the player initiates conversation and side missions that have no relation to the Jedi’s journey, but the story is set up as another epic journey for our hero. All in all, I cannot recommend this game. However, I know that my perception is forged by decades of playing these kinds of games. Would this game bore me 20 or 30 years ago? Probably not. And so I cannot give this game a less than good score. But I also cannot give this game a great score. It’s not a great game.
Well made puzzle game and if you like this kind of game, you should stop reading this review right now. It did not take much time in Blue Prince to see where it was going. The player needs to enter 45 rooms to unlock the 46th and final room. The trick is that the player chooses the rooms. This could very well be a solitaire card game with a grid game board. There are limited grids, so you’ll run out space for rooms, and limited doorways to branch off new rooms. On top of all that, the rooms have little rules and sometimes little puzzles. It’s like the old Choose Your Own Adventure style books that mixed in Dungeons and Dragons elements. “Lone Wolf” is a good example of this. This makes the experience of Blue Prince rather unique. Unfortunately, as an old gamer, I can clearly see myself refining my formula for building out the rooms, getting better and better with each run, and then completing the game with prime confidence. I can see it so clearly, in fact, that I see no need to play through this game at all. This depresses me because the game is very well made and the concept is new to me. There are folks that enjoy iteration as a gameplay element. And maybe they’ll give this game the love it deserves. All in all, Blue Prince is a puzzle game that you should try. You might not be like me. You might love it for what it is. Full disclosure: I downloaded this game through the PlayStation Plus Extra collections.
Robocop: Rogue CityThis AA game is truly a love letter to fans. They even got Peter Weller to play Alex Murphy. Bravo. The game nails the essence of Robocop. You play as a human shaped tank, mowing down criminals. Enemies are highlighted in the delightfully green computer graphics of the 1980s. They explode in a bloody mess made possible with 8th generation console graphics. Best of all, this is a shooter through and through in an age where shooters have been supplanted by third person hack and slash games. The game itself is definitely a AA effort. Areas are small. Glitches abound. The story is rather short and that is with a lot of padding. I have nothing against this. There was a time when an eight hour “campaign” was standard, and you could start and finish a game in one sitting. What could have sent this into AAA levels of gaming is a larger, freer downtown Detroit. I would have loved driving around as Robocop and stopping random crimes. Instead we have a couple blocks of walkable space and only a handful of crimes in the linear story. There is really no point mentioning the story except to say that all the highlights are there from the movies and this is all sold by the setting. The retro-future dystopian Detroit never looked worse. The characters come straight out of the movies, especially the aforementioned Alex Murphy voiced by Peter Weller. We’ve seen movie tie in games before but few have us step into the world of the movie like this. All in all, Robocop: Rogue City is a worthwhile shooter regardless of whether you’ve seen the move. Full disclosure: I bought this game on sale a month before it went “free” on PS+.
“Sid Meier’s Colonization” is an aging classic that could use an update but will never get one. This game reminds me of a quote from the show “Lessons in Chemistry”. One chemist asks another chemist why he keeps re-reading the same book when the book never changes. Ah, says the other, the book never changes but the reader does. Back in the 1990s, “Colonization” was the successor to “Civilization”, the most popular strategy game series of all time. “Colonization” was different. You needed to trade with your rivals. You needed to prepare for independence from foreign powers. Concepts were not all presented in abstractions. Each game took hours and days to play, which was perfect at a time when I was young and poor and cable TV was **** meat of the game still works today. You take the poor and discarded members of European society and train them to work jobs in your colony. It’s this planning and the fruition of those plans that feels so good. Eventually, you stop relying on Europe and build your own arms industry to fight them. Along the way, you can trade with the indigenous people or cruelly destroy them. This is what brings people back to this old game. It’s fun. Nowadays, I see that a lot of the game was powered by my own imagination. The combat, for instance, uses a non-functioning random number generator that results in off balance battle results. Loading save games is a standard method of play. Almost every mechanic requires player action, including moving ships or wagon trains one tile at a time. You can set up trade routes, for example to move raw sugar to your rum distillers, but these routes all too often don’t work. Later in the game, units will disappear because this game was written on the assumption that your late 1980s and 1990s computer would lack enough RAM yo handle more units. It is up to the player to deal with these issues and fill in the gaps, making the game an elaborate version of solitaire. This is where I have changed. In the last 31 years (how old am I?), my knowledge of the colonial period and the original American cultures has grown and changed. I’ve also become accustomed to more complicated strategy games. I’m sure Sid Meier would have added more to “Colonization” if file sizes weren’t limited by floppy discs. By the time Sid Meier released “Civilization II”, CD-ROMs became standard and that game was packed with voice lines, full motion videos of advisors, and mini movies about world wonders. Would an expanded story include small pox outbreaks, slavery, or any acknowledgment of the great loss of life and culture? This game is trapped in a time capsule, and the the best the player can do to rewrite history is to play as France and try set up cities amongst existing settlements. There is no real option to play with history. Lastly, the game has no port for modern hardware. It has to be run using emulation, and that emulator, DosBox keeps crashing in late game. Even a controversial classic needs a little love.
A funny thing happened while playing this top tier AAA game: I stopped having fun. The main culprit is the “Soulsification” of gameplay and its emphasis on difficulty that just shuts out older and slow players or players who are stressed for time who just don’t care about getting good. The gameplay itself is the problem with this game. The main issue is the parry mechanic. You can no longer simply block with a shield. Every block has to be perfectly timed with an enemy attack. Time it wrong and you are worse off than not blocking. The accessibility options will let you tweak enemy damage but not increase the parry window. A longer reaction window would also help with attacks that can’t be blocked and attacks that must be counter attacked with a shield attack. The first God of War game came out in 2005. It’s long overdue for this franchise make their games accessible to an aging player base. A minor enemy of fun in this game is the repeated backtracking to already explored areas for minor fetch quests. This is not an open world game and traversal is not fun. Some of the puzzles were not that fun either. I can see why folks like the climb anywhere mechanic in the latest Zelda games. That‘s enough negativity. The world, story, dialogue, and voice acting in this game are the best around. When people say they want single player games, they mean story telling and world building like this. You could take away all the combat and turn God of War into a story based game like “Detroit: Become Human”, and players would still love it. So all-in-all, I recommend this game with caveats. If you are a novice gamer or older gamer like myself, you might struggle to enjoy this game. With some tweaking, this could be a perfect 10/10 game. Right now, it just isn’t.
Humankind feels like Civilization for grownups. There is the familiar tech tree, unit upgrades, city settling, and wonders of thee world. For better or worse, every system is more complicated, more fleshed out than Civilization. I really only have two criticisms. Everything looks soft. Most tiles are a sandy yellow and I cannot tell the difference between dry grass, prairie, desert, and rocky land. The districts provide soft bonuses to adjacent tiles. The leaders look soft, like Sims from Sims 4 with about the same amount of personality. The bonuses from civics, civilizations, and building and such are soft, adding up to something in total but not very interesting on a turn by turn basis. Call me old fashioned, but I would rather directly build farms to make food and mines and lumber mills to make production. The use of fame as a victory condition is soft, and building early fame means going through the motions in later eras. The in game stories are soft. After playing a few games, I stopped reading the text and just clicked the option with the science bonus. A lot of these kinds of games are afraid of having the player make meaningful choices. The world is too big. Territories are so huge that there is no way to build out all of those hexes. Armies take forever to walk across continents, though the 4 movement helps. There is so much territory that I can’t set up check points or respond to an enemy army on the other side of my empire. The map design does not help. Regardless of the map settings I pick, all I see are 3 giant potato shaped continents. The game hates oceans. I would love a map that corresponds to our earth. Everything else in the game is great. The combat is first class and I can see why Firaxis borrowed a lot of the same concepts for Civilization 7. In Humankind, you can stack units into an army of 4 to 8 units, depending on your level of technology. This lets you combine units like Hoplites, archers, and Mongol Hordes. Then when you go to fight, each side deploys their units on the map for a mini version of a Total War game. Amplitude put a lot of work into the unique units for each civilization, and it’s fun to mix and match different types of units from different eras. Units are fairly cheap to buy with gold (or people) so it does not feel as bad to lose unit here and there like with Civilization. The different civilizations for each era are also great. In addition to unique units, you have unique buildings. The benefits of each civilization can be strikingly different, and progressing to a new era opens up the opportunity to pick a civilization for the current need. I would prefer if there was an option for each type of culture from start to finish. You can begin and end with Egypt, for example, but you can’t play with Egypt in between. Likewise, the French show up a couple of times but you can’t start or end with France. I would love to be able to play my favorites or feel like I am truly rewriting history. Some of the civilizations also have better bonuses than others, such as being able to own more cities. The premier feature of the game in my opinion is playing the stone age tribes. Instead of starting with a settler and a warrior, you start with a hunter-gatherer tribe. You then have to fight wooly mammoths and find nuts and berries. The game lets you quickly move onto building a civilization or spend more time building your tribe. Each era also ads this kind of freedom to keep building up your current era civilization or skip to the next era earlier. I’m a **** for gameplay features that give me **** last note is the “influence” system. A lot of these types of games will limit empire growth with one made up mechanic or the other. I don’t know why, but “influence” has become the arbitrary limitation in many of today’s strategy games such as Stelaris and the new Civilization 7. Influence is related to the city cap in that exceeding the city cap decreases influence. But at some point in the game, influence no longer matters, and you can go crazy founding new cities. Although I do not like these kinds of arbitrary limitations, I applaud the game for giving players the power to overcome them. Really, though, these games should have better systems to reign in players. All in all, Humankind is one of the better Civilization competitors, better than Civilization 6 and probably better than Civilization 7. Full disclosure: I played this game on PS5 and have no opinion on the expansions or updates available to PC gamers.
Steamworld Dig 2More steam, more world. I’m not sure what makes mining games so enjoyable. But I know it isn’t platforming and boss fights. Sometimes you mix peanut butter and chocolate and get something really get and other times you just get generic experience. What I want from a mining game is plotting paths, going deeper in the mine, a figuring out how to safely haul back the goods. “Steamworld Dig 2” starts out slow. Instead of heading into the mines, you learn how to jump, run, and wall climb. A thing story is put before you: find the protagonist of “Steamworld Dig”. Then when you enter the mines, the mining is a shallow experience. The wall jumping and later the grappling hook and jetpack make mining a trivial experience. The danger in the game is the difficult platforming segments and run-of-the-mill boss fights. “Steamworld Dig 2” is not a bad game. The mechanics work. Wall jumping just works with no learning curve necessary. The grappling hook feels a little like “Bionic Commando”. The jet pack becomes a cheat code, something that many games are afraid to give players. Enemies are interesting. Some explode. All-in-all, “Steamworld Dig 2” is a decent experience. I just wish it scratched more of that mining itch. Full disclosure: I bought this game for $2.
Just shut up already! This game has some of really fun and inventive ways to play. You play as Jot, a character in a book who learns how to get out of the book and manipulate the book. There are lots of fun possibilities. Except the game constantly stops you dead in your tracks at every possible moment. Games have been ruining a player’s good time with cutscenes for decades. I’m not sure why. We’ve seen a better way with games like “Half-Life”, “BioShock”, and “Bastion”. There is no need to clunkily stop the action to force the story on the player. And yet that is what “The Plucky Squire” does over and over and over again. The story isn’t bad. It’s actually really fun. Bringing the 2-D characters into 3-D isn’t new but it’s never been done like this. I imagine that for some players, the draw is the story and the gameplay is the drag. This game also lacks polish. Some bugs required restarting from an earlier save. Some bugs require closing out the game from the PS5’s home menu. A game made for a wide audience, i.e. non-gamers, is less forgiving when you also have to fight the game itself. All-in-all, “The Plucky Squire” is an interesting experience that is worth trying. I would have like more freedom. I would love a text free, pause free, cutscene free mode to let loose and enjoy myself.
Another great entry in a great series of fun games. Same fun and simple gameplay, cat puns, and now pirate ships. Although I have no dollar per hour issue with short games, some games really need time to shine. The story in Cat Quest 3 is so short it feels inconsequential. The map feels small. The enemies feel weak. Just when you feel like you are ready for a greater challenge, the game is over.
This is a tough one to review. I can see how this game is a great turn based strategy game. I can see the joys of using licensed Marvel characters. But I cannot enjoy the gameplay. This is an on-rails strategy game and I was bored immediately. The game begins by laboriously taking you through all the ways you can upgrade your team of heroes and all the material you will have to grind. To me, this is a warning. If this game were simply pick a team of heroes and watch them synergize, I might have hung on longer. But knowing that I will need to collect card to upgrade cards to beat the final boss, I chose to not do any of it. X-Com presented the same struggle. I loved the character creator and I enjoyed the idea of planning out attacks on the battlefield. Then I got bored and beelined the story missions. Avoiding the grinding of side missions makes for a tough fight in the final missions because you need to increase teams skills and research better weapons. Midnight Suns has an easy mode, but it needs a zero grind story mode. The gameplay is standard choose an attack or heal until all enemies are defeated. Unlike X-Com, there is no overwatch ability to let attack during the enemy’s turn. (Or at least I didn’t get far enough to find out if there is one). Moves are flashy because you get to play with superheroes. The skill or fun is setting up a chain of events like knocking an enemy into a hole or grouping enemies for an area or attack. Standard stuff and no issues there. My issue is with how limited the player is in these encounters. You don’t have much room for heroes to move. The missions are get in and get out. I would love a sprawling D&D style game where the heroes could move around the city and take on enemies at the player’s discretion. Instead of that, the game gives you a small area to roam real time as some guy or gal named Hunter. It’s not great and I made liberal use of dialogue skipping. The graphics are also subpar, looking very last, last gen. For these kinds of top down, turn based games with fewer frames to render, I expect something more beautiful. All in all, I am sure this is a great game of its genre. I hope this game has a demo. You really need to play it yourself to determine if it is something you like. Full disclosure: I downloaded this game from my PS+ Extra collection.
Destiny 2: The Final ShapeDestiny 2 greets new and returning players with a lengthy montage of the history of the game and then dumps them into a world with no direction as to what they should do and why they should do it. Even for someone who has played all the story missions from each expansion, there is a lot of confusing story that comes from the seasonal pass that Bungie sells. I felt a sense of regret about buying into this game again but also a sense of relief that I can finally put this game to rest and never play it again. The star of The Final Shape is not you the player, Cayde-6, or the big bad guy. The star is the online store. The first tab on the “director” screen is the store. You can buy rewards to make your player character look like less of a space hobo, season passes that come with better weapons, and tiny increments of story to keep this hamster wheel turning. If you have fully accepted out dystopian world of live service gaming, you might say this expansion is fantastic. But if you are like me and see all of this monetization as garbage that ruins a game, you will say that no matter how good this expansion could be, it is saddled by garbage. (It also hurts that everything you worked for in prior games is meaningless. Your guns and the clothing you liked are all obsolete, again, so you have the incentive to keep buying more.) The limits of live service is no better shown in the inability to pause the game. If you need to stop and help your kid or take a phone call, you’ll have to replay the mission from the start. Ten years into Destiny and this is still a problem. The story of The Final Shape starts off in a confusing way. The setup occurs off screen unless you also bought all of the prior season content. You cant buy that seasonal content now. If you missed this part of the story, the best you can do is watch it on YouTube. There is a lot of talk about “paracausal” things and other gobbledygook. The main point is that there is one bad guy who wants to use “the light” to turn the universe into an abstract painting. The campaign ends with a title card that says “THE FINAL BATTLE WITH THE WITNESS APPROACHES”. What a ridiculous ending for the end of a 10 year saga. I’m sure this means the story won’t really be resolved unless you grind levels for the 6 player raid and buy more season passes. My first thought about the gameplay is that we are ten years into this game and nothing much has changed. In fact, I would love to go back to the original Destiny when my player character could revive himself from death and hammer enemies with a sniper rifle that generated its own ammo. The new mechanic for The Final Shape is pressing down on the joysticks (L3 + R3) when a meter bar fills up. This gives you “chromatic” power. Although that sounds amazing, what it really means is that you can now damage “chromatic”. It’s not near as fun as blasting enemies with a black hole or zapping them with lightning. The Final Shape has some rough edges. One early mission required me to collect some kind of psionic dropping to open a lock. I couldn’t find them anywhere. Looking up the issue, certain enemies where supposed to leave paionic droppings when you shoot them, but it wasn’t working for me. Aside of game breaking bugs like this, a lot of encounters appear to made for groups of players and not solo players like me. Some enemies knock you off cliffs to your death. Others, like the “Tormentor” can insta-kill you. And because the game still has enemies that teleport everywhere, you can’t play this tactically. This still isn’t Halo. I’m glad this is The Final Shape, because this will be the last of Destiny that I will ever play.
Destiny 2: The Final ShapeDestiny 2 greets new and returning players with a lengthy montage of the history of the game and then dumps them into a world with no direction as to what they should do and why they should do it. Even for someone who has played all the story missions from each expansion, there is a lot of confusing story that comes from the seasonal pass that Bungie sells. I felt a sense of regret about buying into this game again but also a sense of relief that I can finally put this game to rest and never play it again. The star of The Final Shape is not you the player, Cayde-6, or the big bad guy. The star is the online store. The first tab on the “director” screen is the store. You can buy rewards to make your player character look like less of a space hobo, season passes that come with better weapons, and tiny increments of story to keep this hamster wheel turning. If you have fully accepted out dystopian world of live service gaming, you might say this expansion is fantastic. But if you are like me and see all of this monetization as garbage that ruins a game, you will say that no matter how good this expansion could be, it is saddled by garbage. (It also hurts that everything you worked for in prior games is meaningless. Your guns and the clothing you liked are all obsolete, again, so you have the incentive to keep buying more.) The limits of live service is no better shown in the inability to pause the game. If you need to stop and help your kid or take a phone call, you’ll have to replay the mission from the start. Ten years into Destiny and this is still a problem. The story of The Final Shape starts off in a confusing way. The setup occurs off screen unless you also bought all of the prior season content. You cant buy that seasonal content now. If you missed this part of the story, the best you can do is watch it on YouTube. There is a lot of talk about “paracausal” things and other gobbledygook. The main point is that there is one bad guy who wants to use “the light” to turn the universe into an abstract painting. The campaign ends with a title card that says “THE FINAL BATTLE WITH THE WITNESS APPROACHES”. What a ridiculous ending for the end of a 10 year saga. I’m sure this means the story won’t really be resolved unless you grind levels for the 6 player raid and buy more season passes. My first thought about the gameplay is that we are ten years into this game and nothing much has changed. In fact, I would love to go back to the original Destiny when my player character could revive himself from death and hammer enemies with a sniper rifle that generated its own ammo. The new mechanic for The Final Shape is pressing down on the joysticks (L3 + R3) when a meter bar fills up. This gives you “chromatic” power. Although that sounds amazing, what it really means is that you can now damage “chromatic”. It’s not near as fun as blasting enemies with a black hole or zapping them with lightning. The Final Shape has some rough edges. One early mission required me to collect some kind of psionic dropping to open a lock. I couldn’t find them anywhere. Looking up the issue, certain enemies where supposed to leave paionic droppings when you shoot them, but it wasn’t working for me. Aside of game breaking bugs like this, a lot of encounters appear to made for groups of players and not solo players like me. Some enemies knock you off cliffs to your death. Others, like the “Tormentor” can insta-kill you. And because the game still has enemies that teleport everywhere, you can’t play this tactically. This still isn’t Halo. I’m glad this is The Final Shape, because this will be the last of Destiny that I will ever play.
Crusader Kings 3 starts with a disclaimer that tells you that this game cannot be won. The purpose of the game is to play out the story of a mediaeval ruler for your own amusement. That would be fine if I didn’t feel like I was playing a video game, but I definitely was. The game throws in the option to create empires, take over the map, and dominate religion. Winning is very much on the menu. You immediately see all the limiters put in place to hold back the power of players. Aside if goal, the game has “prestige”, “faith”, and “renown” and currencies. Players can only wage a holy war on a kingdom once a lifetime. The player character can only hold so much land and have so many vassals. Rulers have to pick one discipline to follow. These game mechanics are so blatant that any experienced player will have an easy time abusing them. They are also so blatant they ruin the premise of enjoying the story and not trying to win. I would dump all of that and focus on the two mechanics that matter: gold and public opinion. Public opinion is presented in positive and negative percentages. NPCs have plusses these numbers right in front of you. (Apparently no one can hide their true intentions.) public opinion affects gold. Too much tax lowers opinion. Bribes raise opinion. It’s simple enough and complex enough that the game should dump the made up currencies of prestige, faith, and renown. Gameplay is hampered by how poorly the game runs. The UI is no help. The UI throws up a lot of useless information and hides important information. You cannot easily see how titles correspond to the map. You might enter into an alliance and then find out your ally is on the other side of the map. You might make a vassal too powerful because you can’t easily see their holdings. I’m sure this looks fine on a PC with an ultra wide monitor, but it doesn’t work so well on console. Some things don’t work. Contextual information might disappear. Items might not be selectable. Numbers might not be real. Army sizes are ridiculously obtuse. A tiny country might have a huge army. Iceland, for example, might have the largest army in the game. Options like marriage will show no possibilities on one screen and several possibilities on another. My praise for this game is limited to the well developed system for the relationships between royals. This isn’t a Civilization game with its immortal leaders. If you don’t set up succession, your heir will inherit a fractured kingdom. If you don’t marry for alliances, you may be outmanned in warfare. The meat of the game is setting up marriages, alliances, and proper rights of succession. Little stories are interspersed during each reign, but they are repetitious and of little consequence. These interpersonal relationships could also be helped with some UI changes. Personally, I would like the game to dump a lot of the numbers based UI elements and go full skeuomorphism. Show me a court of advisors I can order and see what happens. All in all, I cannot say Crusader Kings 3 is a good game. Overall, it is merely mediocre. It is unique in its genre, though, and I cannot say it has any competition for the type of game it is. There are certainly other strategy games that do strategy better, but they do not have the depth of personality that this game has. I’m surprised that the third iteration of the Crusader Kings franchise hasn’t figured out how the game should look and play. Full disclosure: I downloaded Crusader Kings 3 from my PlayStation Plus Extra catalogueCru
All of the beautiful artistry and voice acting talent is wasted on a generic shooter that feels like it was designed by committee. I’m not joking when I say the game introduces you to the 3 branches of magic: “blue magic, red magic , and green magic”. Or if you are colorblind, gray magic, gray magic, and gray magic. That should stop you right there from playing the rest of this game, but if you continue, be prepared to have your game hijacked by boring cutscenes and padded by boring puzzles. The game is known as a magic shooter. Instead ****, the protagonist shoots blue, red, or green blobs out of his hand. Like a gun, the hand needs to be reloaded. Other spells work like grenades or the whip in Bulletstorm. The block button throws up a magic shield. There could have been interesting combinations of defensive and offensive spells to fight endless waves of enemies in the Everwar. Instead of that, you switch colors to shoot at a small number bullet sponge enemies until they die and then slow walk to the next set of enemies. There is potential in a Call of Duty with magic and all of that potential is wasted in this game. The design of the game looks deliberately mediocre. You see eyeless helmets straight from Destiny. You see the training dimension of floating blocks that is so overused in so many games. You see the female NPC with half her head shaved so you know she’s edgy. You fight in a lot of caves and box canyons that give you the impression of an open world but are actually level designs from the 1990s. You hear every kind of accent in this generic magic world that has no identity. Games should not be designed by committee. MBAs should not make creative decisions. This game honestly reminds me of Jedi: Fallen Order minus the charm of the world and the like ability of the protagonist. The dingus that you play in Immortals of Aveum has permanent Dreamworks face and speaks in humorless jokes and painful sarcasm. Like the Jedi game, you work through intersecting maps that have areas that you can unlock later if you enjoy backtracking several times through one play through. The map in Jedi: Fallen Order was one of its downsides. Players do like backtracking. Players do not like seeing all of the content and abilities they are missing. But I’m sure EA only learns the wrong lessons from its successes. The worst of Immortals of Aveum is boredom. Combat is boring. Bullet sponge enemies that suicidally charge you are boring. The cutscenes are painfully boring. The entire world they built with its 3 colors of magic is boring. There is nothing of value here. This is a bad game.
Back when I originally reviewed Fallout 4, I dinged the game for looking ugly during an ugly transition from PS3 to PS4. In 2024, the Fallout 4 version for PS5 has not aged well. The 60fps frame rate and faster loading are great. But Fallout 4 looks bad. Compare it to The Witcher 3 remaster or the Mass Effect Legendary remaster and there is no contest. Fallout 4 is a game gone wrong. What was Bethesda doing during the 7 years of development for this game? It's not just the lighting, made worse because most of this game takes place in unlit interiors. The character models are rudimentary for their time. I have the impression that Bethesda recycled only a few character models from Fallout 3. You’ll see the same character models over and over. Lack of quality is everywhere. Enemies are completely uninteresting and 60fps doesn’t improve them. The dialogue options are generic, use of charisma is rare, and charisma has no impact on story. The V.A.T.S. system from Fallout 3 returns without any apparent improvements. (This whole game feels like DLC for Fallout 3.) Players can queue up attacks in a way that briefly turns battles into turn based encounters. I like V.A.T.S. as an alternative for RPG fans who are not saavy with shooters. But a 60fps frame rate is made for shooters, and with games like Mass Effect Legendary Edition showing is gameplay that holds up over a decade later, the gameplay in Fallout 4 looks even more rudimentary. These are fundamentals that Bethesda should have nailed down early in development of Fallout **** the way, I have not got gotten to the worst part. The game forces players to build settlements and manage the settlers. At first, I thought this idea was a little tacked on but had intriguing implications. Those fine thoughts were dispelled as soon as the game forced me to assign a settler to work a water pump. There is no overarching menu screen for this. The PS5 version does not fix this. You clumsily enter crafting mode, walk your protagonist over to a settler, highlight a settler with your reticle, walk over to a resource you want the settler to work, and then highlight the item you want the settler to work. Worse, if you do not set up your settlements with enough defenses, they will be constantly attacked by enemies. Don't help fight off these attacks. They never end. Adding insult to injury, every building option you gave looks a ramshackle shack. All this lumber and you can’t make a decent log cabin. Bethesda games have become famous for mod support. They will prevent you from earning trophies but they also provide roundabout fixes for some of the most obvious problems with Fallout 4. I saw some that make collecting items easier which makes base building easier. Various other mods solve the settlement defense problem. The problem with outsourcing game fixes to the community is that most of them will essentially break the gameplay. I would rather have a well designed ****-in-all, Fallout 4 is a crap game and the PS5 version doesn’t change that. All I really want is for an open ended RPG like Skyrim to have a baby with a good looking RPG like The Witcher 3 or Mass Effect 2 and 3. I felt close to this with Cyberpunk 2077, but every time Johnny Silverhand started a monologue, Cyberpunk 2077 moved away from the player freedom that players love about Bethesda games. (Some call these games “Western RPGs”.) The niche that Bethesda games carved out is so rarely filled that I am forced to give Fallout 4 extra points for existing.Full Disclosure: I downloaded Fallout 4 for "free" with the PS+ collection on PS5. Not only did I not pay $60 for this game, I also did not suffer long loading times.Full Disclosure: I downloaded the PS5 version of Fallout 4 from my PS+ Extra collection.
The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice EditionSome games benefit from DLC and this one of them. For the original “The Outer Worlds”, I was underwhelmed by the PS3 era graphics and mediocre gameplay. I gave up less than half way, making “The Outer Worlds” one of the rare games I did not complete. Years later, this enhanced edition shows up in my PS+ Extra library and I gave this game another chance. Still mediocre, the graphics are slightly better and the DLC content offers a better story. I will admit that this game scratches that itch that Bethesda created with Morrowind more than 20 years ago. If you want to shortcut a quest by finding the item on your own, “The Outer Worlds” will sometimes let you do that. If you want to finish a quest you way by stealth, savvy conversation, or guns blazing, you can sometimes do that too. Where “The Outer Worlds” falls short is in both quantity and quality. Dialogue options are not that good. The skill tree is shallow. Weapons are that interesting. The unique “Science Weapons” ****. The stealth system is rudimentary. “The Outer Worlds” is simply not a good game. It is like a AA version of a Bethesda game and it shows. (Even Bethesda games are no longer as good as Bethesda games once were.) The “Spacer’s Choice Edition” improves on the game a little The DLC stories are interesting. I stopped skipping all of the dialogue because I started to care about what the NPCs were saying. The setting were a little more unique and the enemies a little more interesting. Giant slug boss? Yeah, I’ll fight it. Talking my way out of fight, sure, I feel like I’m playing “Mass Effect” again. The PS5 version also looks a little better. Movement is not as janky. Lighting still stinks. The game should have highlighted all enemies. The whole world looks like a pile of crushed Skittles. All in all, the “Spacer’s Choice Edition” does not improve this game in a way that would increase its score by a whole number. But if you are intent on playing through “The Outer Worlds”, this is the way to do it.
“Rollerdome” looks super fun. Just not for me, apparently. I liked the retro-vector graphics look and the promise of twitchtastic performance. I did not like the mix of shooting and roller skate tricks. My first thought is why no one has remade “SSX Tricky”. This is the apex of games where you perform tricks for points. I would love an “SSX Tricky” with guns. My second thought is why “Rollerdome” is limited to boxed in arenas. One of my problems with “Rollerdome” is that the movement options are for the sole purpose of reloading guns. Somehow, performing mid-air tricks generates bullets, and you need those bullets to battle enemies. There is a game missing here where gaining speed up ramps and wall riding is a fun way to traverse a mission zone and zip around enemies. So all in all, “Rollerdome” is an interesting mix of genres that did not work for me, and this is how I score it. Full disclosure: I downloaded this game from my PS+ collection.
This game is “Gone Home” in space. If you have ever followed movie sequels that end up in space, you know that space does not make that genre better. The same is true here. “Tacoma” has a systematic way of unlocking areas to explore. Not by hiding keys or combinations to locks. Instead the game brute forces a waiting period for each zone to explore. You can read up on all the absent people to find a few clues to open lockers and such, but mostly you are going through the motions. Whether the characters are interesting may depend on the audience. “Gone Home” had some relatable characters who were present only in the things that were strewn about their house. Tacoma is a lot less intimate. This is not only a space station but also a workplace. The environment is sterile, spartan, and devoid of personality. The story is so-so. This being an investigation of an abandoned station, there are no stakes. There is no suspense. The characters of the story appear as phantoms. The world of the past is presented as blocky, digital projections that has been used in a variety of games like “The Division” and “Detroit: Become Human”. This is become as played out as audio logs and diary entries. Digital sleuths have needed something new for a long time. As a chill game, “Tacoma” is successful. Though not the best of the genre, it is also not the worst. I would love to see a game like this in VR. Full disclosure: I played this game via my PS+ Extra collection before it left the service.
Same tired gameplay of Borderlands 3 with some inside jokes for people who have played Dungeon & Dragons. My first thought and last thought about this game was that I was bored. I was bored of blasting bullet sponge enemies that rushed at me with suicidal zeal. I was bored of changing guns and clothing every thirty minutes as they became obsolete. I was bored of repeatable, random encounters. You could call this game a bored-er-lands expansion. I do appreciate this game as a stand-alone expansion. As an optional ability, players can wield spells which change up the game play a little. None of the spells do more than add additional damage to enemies, but that additional damage can be something to behold. The story is not so much an adventure in a Mediaeval version of Borderlands as it is an homage to Dungeons & Dragons (and friendship.) The gameplay, unfortunately, is the same stale gameplay that I was bored of in Borderlands 2. Graphics are of course no better, and they really should have been. The worst of this game is the failure of an “end game”. The entire story campaign and side missions are just the start of what should be hours and hours of fighting random encounters with your friends. Except that after all this time, no one is playing this game. I tried matching making for hours and only found one other person playing and they only matched with me at the final boss fight. Few games plan on their game dying, and do not funnel all remaining players into one game mode. Instead, this game splits the player base by player level and activity. Full disclosure: I downloaded this game from the PS+ Extra catalog. I know this game was set loose for PS+ Essential subscribers for one purpose: selling DLC expansion packs. Considering this game is a ghost town, there is no way I could ever enjoy the DLC with friends or even strangers. Dead game is dead.
Nice looking remaster. Old school gameplay feels old. Instead of a tense shooter or startling horror game, this game mostly felt like a sedate puzzler. The fault may be mine. I’ve played so many games that I can see the boss levels coming, know the need to hoard materials, and have pre-built strategies for dealing with enemy pathfinding. Where the game shines is in the presentation. The game engine looks good. Fire, water, and exploding heads are all well done. The game also equips the player with fun weapons. The story is alright for a 1990s game. This was before games like “The Last of Us” upped the stakes for storytelling. The game does not shine in its Metroidvania backtracking and forcing players to manage inventory with key items and ammo. I tell you, 8 grenades takes up more space than one car key. Solving little puzzles is fun. Running through the same rooms over and over, looking for the clue you missed, is not fun. I understand the difficulty of game makers in making these environments in the 1990s and the difficulty of a PlayStation of that ear in handling any area larger than a few rooms. In some ways, this game is like a museum piece, and I do appreciate the fidelity to the original gameplay. All-in-all, this is a decent game. The game as a product has a lot of extra material included different story paths for each play though. I just did not find myself engaged with this game to the point that I did not want to play anything else. I unfortunately found this game to be too much of a chore.
This is game is good. The game world is as fanciful as you would expect. Game play is classic platforming/beat’em up. Thumbs up. This is not a perfect game. The action is aggressively stopped by cut-scenes. What happened to in-game cutscenes? What happened to NPC dialogue in the background? Every time I am ready to have fun or pick up beloved collectable, I am stopped by ham fisted progression of the story and often whisked away to a new game map against my will. Worse, some areas are off limits during the second half the game. Some abilities in the game have no combat role. They are solely for making artificial stops to progression. These gripes only amount to a couple of points. This game as a whole is an excellent experience that bristles with quality. The platforming sections are challenging but not tedious. Enemies and bosses can feel tough but never unbeatable. The game lets you stock up on healing items and bonuses. Characters have personality. They joke. The world is as ridiculous and imaginative as the first Psychonauts. I recommend this game for everyone.
This is a delightful puzzle experience that I highly recommend for everyone. Although some of the puzzles are devilishly clever, this is really a game about enjoying a new experience. The least of the weirdness in this game is making objects change size based on your perspective. I would never spoil anyone’s experience with this game. Trust me, it’s wild. The design of the game is incredible. Games have played around with perspective and design that is not anchored to reality. The Ashtray Maze in “Control” comes to mind or that one transforming mansion in “Dishonored 2”. These are mere levels. Few games as a whole play on these inventive themes. PlayStation Plus members might recall “Maquette” as a similar example. More games should play with the possibilities of the medium (and stop regurgitating the same tired open world level design.)“Superliminal” benefits from looking good. Good use of color and light defines spaces. The game teaches the player through play with visual cues alone. The story, if there really can be one, is told via loudspeaker and audio logs. This has become a tired trope but in this case I saw a lot of reverence for classic first person puzzlers like “Portal”. All-in-all, this is a must play game that everyone will enjoy, whether they like puzzle games or not. Full disclosure: I downloaded “Superliminal” from my PlayStation Plus Extra collection. This kind of game is one of the reasons I covet PlayStaion Plus. More gems, please.
Some games will absolutely get you in the mood for more action and “Synapse” is one of them. My neck and legs were aching because I wanted to keep running and gunning, smashing enemies with the Force, and hurling bombs. All the good action is right here. The graphics work well for a VR game. I find that a less detailed environment elicits less motion sickness. The enemies have a good amount of contrast. Objects have a nice glow to them. VR as a medium is about where 3D graphics were in the 1990s, and a game that caters to the compromises is a lot more fun than a game that fights **** actual game is fairly short, maybe an hour. But you will die and need to upgrade. I was so close on my 4th run but became a little too cocky and lost it at the end. The beauty of this game is that it didn’t matter. I had so much fun jumping in again that I never felt like I was spinning my wheels. This is a tight rinse and repeat experience. Some of the technology works so well in the game that it should be bundled with the PSVR2. You can use eye tracking to select objects to manipulate with the Force. A little aim assist would be helpful for shooting because your gun position is only relative to your hand position, but I loved the ability to aim and shoot at enemies behind me by reaching my arm back. Navigating space with the left stick while using the Force became a little cumbersome. I would love to have a way to use my legs and body rotation to ambulate, but like I said, we are a decade or two away from consumer VR like in the movies. All-in-all, this game is a must play for VR.
Teardown“Teardown” is a unique experience if not necessarily a good one. The technology is very neat. Everything is made of voxels, as in little cubes that behave individually. It’s like if “Minecraft” blocks were much, much smaller and behaved as real objects. Explode a wall and little voxels pop out of it. Smash a foundation, and a whole building collapses. The technology makes for a feel good **** problem with “Teardown” as a game is the lack of game elements. You can happily destroy things in sandbox mode and that is fun for an hour or two. The story mode had you using destruction to commit a series of crimes. This all sounds more interesting than it really is. Instead of tunneling to a vault to avoid guards or smashing through a wall to smash and grab, you take on a completely empty map and set up a crime as you please. Some missions will have alarms that force you to follow an efficient path to complete all crimes in one minute. With no real stakes, I found myself beset by **** voxel technology has some real potential. I would love a multiplayer shooter with an entirely destructible environment. I would love to blast through roofs to drop down on enemies or drive a vehicle through a building to flank an enemy. At least teardown does have vehicles and sense of physics and movement that is simply unavailable in a game like “Minecraft”. Need more, though.Full disclosure: I downloaded this game as a launch title from my PS+ Extra collection. This is a great PS+ Extra title. Nice to try but not to buy.
Dodge, dodge, hit. That’s the game for about nine hours. I have nothing against the genre of close-up third person horror game. But if you are going to make it a game of fighting and shooting, then make it fun. The basic combat is simple. Shoot when you have ammo and use your stun baton when you don’t. There is also a kind of Gravity Gun like from Half-Life 2 that I either forgot about or spammed incessantly. The game cannot figure out which is the most fun way to play and that is a big problem. The background of this game is interesting to a point. I can only enjoy the refined graphics of so many dark hallways and caverns dripping with alien goo. The characters are as realistic as you would expect from a PS5 generation game, except they move in perpetual slow motion. I would love to speed up the action 1.25 times. The story is simple enough. Go from point A to point B and don’t die. You will run into several floors that give way and make you find another back. Bosses will appear and use up your ammo reserves. Jump scares happen about when you expect them too. I’m sure that this will all be new for someone and I hope they enjoy it. For me, I can see how this game works the way Neo can see through the Matrix. Full disclosure: I downloaded this game from PlayStation Plus. All-in-all The game gives me “The Order 1886” vibes. Clearly pushing the graphics of the system and clearly missing the point in gameplay. Not bad. Not great.
TchiaTchia is a delightful little game about New Caledonia. The game world itself is not little. The open world map is full of oceans and islands to explore. I would love to take a vacation there, hike up a mountain, swim in the ocean, and eat some fish and rice for lunch. As a vehicle to share culture, this game is a major success. The gameplay of Tchia brings something new. Tchia has the power to become any object in the game. Want to roll around as a rock? Become a rock. Want to be a canister of exploding gasoline? Go ahead! Be bird and fly up to your objective. Be a fish and swim down to a secret chest. I love these possibilities. After playing games for decades, I love being surprised by something new. You really cannot get this kind of innovation from the major publishers. The characters and game world all have a low budget, indie, novice developer feeling. I would never want to change that and I am certainly not reviewing this game as a big budget AAA game. I like seeing the labor of love in every wonky looking character and smooth textured cliff face. The world has a uniqueness that sets it apart. The flipside is that the game looks rough, like something made by fans in Sony’s game making game, Dreams. The missions in the game are limited and also optional. In the true nature of a “chill” game, any gameplay sequence can be skipped. The size of the game, though, means the game never outwears its indie style. There is an end game for anyone looking to collect everything. Full disclosure: I downloaded Tchia from my PS+ Extra collection. I’m sure most people did. The game launched on PS+ Extra. I’m glad it did. New Caledonia looks like a cool place that more people should virtually visit.
“The Quarry” is good for what it is. If you ever wanted to watch an 18 hour movie or play a game that requires a button press every 15 minutes, this is the genre for you. The character models, voice acting, and writing are all fine. The game does feel like it exists in one of the better summer camp horror movies. It’s nice to see some big stars mo-capped in this game. The walls between mediums are falls. But why not make this a live action choose your own adventure? Live action interactive movies fail because they are bad movies. I just kept feeling that nothing mattered because these are video game characters and I am playing a video game (or at least trying to play a video game). The mechanics in this game are odd. I don’t like them. You move from un-skippable cutscene to un-shippable cutscene often with little more player action than deciding how much of a jerk a character should be during conversation. Sometimes you can move a character around and look for clues that are conspicuously highlighted with a prompt to press X and that don’t matter to the story. Sometimes it’s not clear when a playable section starts, and characters may die because you were bored and looking at Reddit on your phone instead of watching for monsters. Interactivity really ramps up later in the game when was the most bored and ready to finish this story. Some characters died because I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to **** story itself is interesting and kept me playing. I don’t know much about whether my decisions changed the underlying story. The game was just a little too long for this story. It’s supposed to be one summer night, and I played long enough for two. I would have loved a shorter story and more incentives to play it again with different endings. (Skipping cutscenes would be wonderful). The game has a movie mode but I didn’t try it. Full disclosure: I downloaded “The Quarry” from my PS+ Extra collection and had to race to finish it before it left PS+ Extra.
Not fun west. As an old man, I appreciate the nod to the old isometric games and twin stick shooters of the past. The thing is, I did not like those games much back then. The fully 3D environment is nice. Just turn your camera, and you isometric view changes. The tiny characters are not nice. What am I looking at? No idea. They are all just tiny figures from where I am sitting. The crux of the problem with this twin stick shooter is not enough twin stick shooting. The player character runs out of ammo all the time. Another problem is adding a stealth element. The characters are just too small to know when the window for a stealth attack starts or where the cone of vision starts. On top of all that, the game is a little glitchy. In one section, I was trying a stealthy approach, messed up, and reloaded. The game tells you to save and reload to try different approaches. How nice of them. Except my reload started with an entire compound on alert and the law after me. Thanks for nothing. The trappings of the game rubbed me the wrong way. The lack of voice acting, the sound effects, and even the look and feel of the world were all grating to my senses. Style is a personal taste and I do appreciate the attention to detail that went into the game world. Objects can be carried and thrown. Barrels can be kicked over. Graves can be dug. So even though I did not enjoy this game, I can see the value to someone else, and thus this game falls on the good side of mediocre. Full disclosure: I downloaded this game from the PS+ Essential monthly game offering.
An oldie but a goodie. Sometimes a game will sit in my wishlist for 6 years and then on my hard drive for another year. And sometimes that game will agar well. That’s my “Firewatch” story. I remember when “Gone Home” opened us up to games as just looking at things at our own pace. Like some kind of visual novel or virtual museum, “Firewalk” is the epitome of walking simulators. Yet my wife got lost and quit out of frustration. There is gameplay within this seemingly chill experience. The visuals are stylized and cartoony enough to avoid being dated. Yet the graphics have “indie” written all over them. Trees float in the air, shadows are painted on, and the protagonist’s body has no relation to his height and position. This doesn’t look good enough to be a virtual escape, even though the game has an additional mode solely for exploration. The story itself is heavy in audio conversation. Most of the talking is by the disembodied Delilah. Her voice sounds too good, not at all like I would imagine a forest ranger dispatcher. Henry’s voice sounds spot-on. The player is given the power to initiate conversations at any time, and could choose to make Henry silent and distant. No spoilers but you will see that the story itself is out of the player’s hands. Things happen. Henry goes places. The scene cuts to black and a new day starts. Cutting to black is a blunt instrument. I would rather have time and options to explore. As it is, the best the player can do is go off course and see an in-game message letting them know they are off course. This created a few problems for the development team the most of which is the huge cost of building diverging story lines. This isn’t “Detroit Become Human”. All in all, I enjoyed my short time with “Firewatch”. Although it did not spark a wave of chill walking simulators, the ideas behind this game live on in games like “Lake” and quiet moments in games like “The Last of Us 2”. I think most gamers like me are tired of listening to audio logs, and the player controlled radio is a nice feature, though you could say this is a staple of Metal Gear games. Full disclosure: even though I play a lot games from PS+, I outright bought this game. I waited years and years for a good sale, and I’m glad I did.
Not even a decent Call of Duty campaign, why bother? Full disclosure, I downloaded this as a PS+ Essential monthly game. I did not play this at launch and really don’t care about unlocking things, season passes, or finding an on-line group for zombies mode. The worst of this game is its enormous file size. Over 170GB of Call of Duty that included a lot of Call of Duty that I did not want and do not need. I think purpose is to so overload your hard drive that you have no space for the competition. No thanks. As soon as I finished the campaign, I freed up my hard drive space. Also bad, Activision wanted me to make an Activision account before unlocking on-line play. Hard pass. Now that Microsoft owns Activision, I am sure this will soon require a Microsoft account. Also a hard pass. The campaign itself is hit and miss. Everything looks a little more PS5 than PS4, which is a nice departure from the last console transition. Remember the lackluster graphics of Call of Duty: Ghosts on PS4? The levels are straight from the PS3/Xbox 360 era. Small, linear, and with little fanfare. Remember when games did wild things like have you fight through a building as it toppled over? The set pieces here are mostly reserved for cut scenes. The a.i. is also brain dead. I hear a lot about advances in a.i. yet video game a.i. seemed better in the early 2000s than it does now. Gameplay in the campaign is a mix of stealth and traditional Call of Duty. This is no Hitman. Stealth levels are small and stealth actions are stiff. I appreciate the series trying something new. I would have appreciated if the effort was more successful. Really not sure how a war game was going to handle the Cold War. But somehow I am supposed to believe that a small invasion of Russia and Cuba was somehow not going to set off World War III. Something like the old 007 games would have been a better choice. The campaign itself is rather short, 6 hours. Not really worth your hard drive space. Because I didn’t make an Activision account, I never tested the on-line game. Does it even matter? The Call of Duty Series is several games past Cold War. I’m sure some people are still playing and I guarantee that their XP unlocks and years of map knowledge means that I am no match for them. Call of Duty needs a neutral game mode like the old Overwatch; something people feel free to jump into at any time. The Zombie mode is available for off-line solo play, and I gave it a try. It is interesting, but really made for a larger group. I appreciated the use of color and rounding out a $70 game as a total package for those willing to buy it at launch. All-in-all, Call of Duty: Cold War is an interesting experiment like Battlefield: Hardline (the cops versus robbers game). Sure, it didn’t really work, but at least Activision tried. Shame on Activision for souring its product with giant download sizes and an emphasis on signing up for the in-game store. Funny enough, I’ve never actually bought a Call of Duty game even though I have played through most of them. I really don’t get why people buy into this.
I hate to give any brilliant labor of love a score that is less than prefect, but this kind of retro love letter can only be so good. For what it is, “A Hat in Time” is perfect. The era that “A Hat in Time” harkens back to is a short one. This is a PS1, N64, Sega Saturn style game with all the bright colors and polygon shading that I barely remember. At the time, I was a PC gamer and my exposure to N64 was limited to playing a Rom of Mario 64 on my PC running 3dfx Voodoo cards in SLI mode. An advantage of an emulator is that you can save your state and thus enjoy unlimited lives. “A Hat in Time” basically does the same, with checkpoints that don’t force you to replay an entire level. So much of this game is just so clever, it would have been a Game of the Year in 1996. Like Mario and his different suits, the Hat girl can don different hats for different abilities. Map elements liven up gameplay. Maybe it’s my decades of experience but enemies are not very threatening. The goal here seems to be more about exploring than fighting. The boss battles are fine. I’ve never been a big fan of boss battles. The level design is also clever in a retro way. Eschewing the power of modern gaming hardware, levels are tight, as if they had to run on N64. This makes for clever use of space and fewer cookie cutter, cut and paste elements. Back in the 1990s, I would have plumbed the levels for all the secrets. Characters are similarly colorful and distinct in their design. This kind of hand made indie darling is a refreshing change from games that come off the assembly line. All in all, maybe I’m too old for this game. Maybe I’m not old enough. I get what this game is doing, but I’m not popping with enjoyment like I would have a few decades ago. Still, I’m glad this game exists and I recommend it for anyone who isn’t wowed by the generic AAA open world looter shooter. Full disclosure: I downloaded this game from the PS+ Extra collection.
What a wonderful surprise. I figured that “Sackboy: A Big Adventure” would eventually release on Playstation Plus and it did. I did not expect much. Wow. I have not seen a level design this creative since “Super Mario 3D” and visuals this visceral since “Tearaway: Unfolded”. The design and animations are just a joy to see. In some ways, the game world reminds of those classic old cartoons where every objects is alive with movement. One level incorporates the beat from “Uptown Funk”. Maybe it’s the old man gamer in me. I’ve played platformers since the early days of the arcade. There is an enjoyment in the feeling of movement and mastery of timing. Sackboy has all that and lots of secrets to find. Sackboy himself jumps and moves well on command. Some platformers are just too strict with the timing of jumps, and overestimate not only the reaction time of the player, but also the limits of the players equipment. In a kind of “Dark Souls” lite, you can regain a life after you die by returning to the scene of crime. Difficulty may depend on your skill level. As a platforming veterans, I found myself steamrolling through the early levels with little problem. Some of the challenge is in finding the secret areas. “Super Mario 3” was fantastic about filling out the game map with nooks and crannies to explore. That tradition continues here. Somewhat reminiscent of “Sonic: The Hedghog”, Sackboy can find himself rolling about tubes that connect parts of levels. And finally, the pedigree of “Little Big Planet” is brought into a full 3D world. Just stellar through and through. I feel a little bad because I gave the PS5 exclusive “Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart” a 8/10. I said that a beat em up with guns like Ratchet and Clank can only be so good. So why can a platform be better? It’s because a platformer does not rely on spamming the trigger. A platformer makes you think and strategize and sometimes find the perfect path and other times resort to brute force. A great platformer can reach the highest of heights. Sackboy nearly gets there. The adventure is a bit limited by repetition, much how “Super Mario World” was a generational leap in graphics and gameplay yet still felt lesser compared to “Super Mario 3”. More is not always better. More costumes are better, and I give full credit to the developers for putting in the work. The little side challenges are also a nice touch. The game includes multiplayer though I doubt many of the folks on my friends list are interested in this adventure. Still, the option of multiplayer is a nice to have. All in all, I highly recommend this game. Sackboy may be one of the most overlooked gems this generation. I understand how people felt when the game launched. $70 for a platformer. The PS4 version means there is nothing special for PS5. None of that means anything to me. This is a tight game and you will enjoy it despite yourself.
Maybe it’s been too long. I just don’t at all care for this kind of roaming stealth and screw up and fight game. Most all of the time, you can be seen and trip all alarms and run away and wait for the authorities to give up the chase. Because you can teleport, it is extremely easy to beat the a.i. And with the design of this game world and some finicky mechanics, you will spend a lot of your time outsmarting the a.i. Flat out, I do not like limited open world levels for these kinds of games. “Deus Ex Mankind Divided” had this mechanic and it was as frustrating then as it is now. Because most doors are fake, you cannot just go anywhere and do anything. Everything is a poorly planned environmental puzzle that has a one proper way to proceed and a few other glitchy ways to proceed. Don’t give me the ability to teleport to a window and then make only one window functional. Don’t say a door is breakable if I can’t break it. Don’t litter your map with NPCs to incapacitate if there are no closets to stuff them in. The game world itself did not age well. Often you will run into twins and triplets chasing after you because the developer made only a few crude looking character models. The lighting in the game is terrible. If you made the game dark like they want, you can’t see anything. Turn up the brightness and your screen will burn out your eyes. Other games in the PS4 generation had HDR. Why were Bethesda studios so behind on this? Stealth is ok. Enemies react to sound and seeing you. Like Dishonored 2, enemies are a little too perceptive. There are no shadows dark enough for this thief. In one part, an NOC alerted another NPC, which is a bit of a cheat. On the other hand, I once used an NPC to explode something and it counted as a silent action for me, the player. Full disclosure: I played this from my PS+ collection on PS5. Fast loading meant more time trying different strategies. The backlog of PS+ Extra means I cared little for reading the made up back story of these video game characters. This game only means something to me if it is fun to play, and it is only middling so. This stealth genre has really fallen on hard times.
Great game. Looks amazing. Maybe I’m an old man, but this type of game limits how good it can be. No doubt this is one of the best looking graphical showcases ever made. I am playing this in 2023 and the game still stuns compared to other PS5 games. The best description I have is “playable Pixar movie”. I know the characters are made of triangles, but I can’t see it anywhere. Weapons and interactions with the environment also look great. The colorful character and level design finishes this showcase. The gameplay is the same Ratchet and Clank I played on PS4. Harkening back to the days before twin sticks, this is not so much a shooter as a beat’em’up with guns. The weapons have a nice fun factor. Though none of the weapons seem as crazy as the old Sheepinator, I have a lot more of this game to play. The gameplay does not feel as good as a shooter, but then again, no shooter has the fun world traversal of this kind of game. The games story is your basic map traversal, destroying all enemies, and triggering a cut scene. This kind of game was never my thing back in the PS1 and PS2 generations. I was all about shooters and strategy games on PC and Xbox. There is no nostalgia button for me here. I see the limits on gameplay as a limit on how much fun I can have. I have no issue with the humor in this game. I would like to see more of it. I also have no issue with all ages wholesomeness. I could fill this game with more cute animal aliens. I see this game as a launch window title to tide over players until the big games like Horizon and God of War release. For a PS+ Extra subscriber, this is a nice surprise. Full disclosure, I downloaded this game from my PS+ subscription.
I’m not a DLC guy but I wanted to play more Horizon Forbidden West and this DLC is more **** game. The DLC is a full game experience: cut scenes, voice acting, new robots to fight, another Cauldron to explore, and a lengthy boss fight. Best of all, the DLC introduces a fun new weapon. I really wanted more of this DLC to play with the new toys. I’ve read reports that this DLC is the best looking PS5 content ever, but I didn’t think it looked any better than the base game. This whole cross generation debate is overblown. The DLC does look good and offers up more of the great use of color and light that makes the world of Horizon look better than the real world. The story is a nice follow on if the base game. Something that bothers me a little is how nice Aloy is to all these jerks. I want her to say, “Don’t call me outlander, you dirty foreigner!” But that not Aloy’s style. She’s a good person and when I had my one chance to choose her reaction, I chose the heart option because I knew it would make Aloy happy. My one gripe is that this DLC needed a second tutorial. I didn’t remember much of any of the controls from base game. My preferred DLC model is actually a smaller stand alone game like Infamous First Light or Far Cry Blood Dragon. Boil down your game to the most fun elements and a story will no padding, and I’ll buy that every time. I understand the need for a DLC here, as the new tools can be brought back to the base game for some overpowered fun. Full disclosure, my review here has nothing to do with the dollar per hour fallacy. DLC are never as good a deal as the bad game, and that is why I almost never buy DLC. (Frugal is as frugal does.) As DLC go, this is one of the best.
Uh, another one of these. I remember the disappointment when I played “Steep”, and this is more of that. The game starts out with some awful tutorial sequences. Thankfully, the cutscenes are skippable. I hated ever word of the dialogue and all of the voice acting. “He’s totes leg, stomp that trick!”. Barf. The game looks fine, I guess. There are lots of on screen menus and glowing things to clutter up the experience. Despite the fast loading SSD of the PS5, the game will go to a dead stop to show you gear or new events you unlocked. The game mechanics are serviceable. The gaming industry has really run into a rut. Making a game that works just isn’t going to get more than 5/10 from me. There is no avoiding a comparison with “Descenders”. The gameplay mechanics “Descenders” is just better. “Riders Republic” requires holding down a button until a rotation lines up with returning to the ground. “Descenders” properly has the player manipulate the sticks to freely rotate the bike. Many prior sports games, such as “Steep” had serviceable controls for performing tricks. I really rather play a remake of “SSX Tricky”. Most people would. In a couple of years, Ubisoft will release another extreme sports game with zero improvement in the controls and the genre will continue to stagnate. The worst of “Riders Republic” is its awful push for DLC content. This is the same problem as Steep. I do not feel like I am playing a whole game. There is no career path or queue for races. You have to navigate this big open map with a fixed number of events unless you buy seasonal content or whatever on-line crap Ubisoft is selling. What these games needs is some kind of Olympics level event built in and not sold piecemeal. The game world looks as exactly as generic as you might expect from Ubisoft. Maybe if this was baby’s first extreme sports game, ”Riders Republic” would all be new and wonderful. But I don’t play games to unlock whatever and buy whatever. I want finely tuned tracks made to delight and challenge players. The downside to a big sandbox is that everything is made of sand. Maybe if the game would just shut app and let me play, I would have better feelings about the whole thing. The game world itself is some kind of bmx hellscape. Imagine hacking in Yosemite and running into race marks and 20 snowmobiles blowing past you. Full disclosure: I downloaded “Riders Republic” from the PlayStation Plus Extra catalog. I have no incentive to “get my money’s worth”.
Looks good. Kind of boring. Not innovative in anyway. The last Bethesda game released for PlayStation is not the worst time you’ll have. The game’s start is a bit frustrating. In between cut scenes and tutorial screens, it feel less like you are playing the game and more like the game is playing you. The world though, is a colorful and detailed Tokyo that makes the Night City of “CyberPunk 2077” look dull. Too bad Ghostwire Tokyo has no life. Literally, the streets are empty. The combat feels subpar. You can sneak attack and snipe enemies or attack them with gloat things while backpedaling. You could call this game “Backpedaling in Tokyo”. Bethesda once angain again proves they are not the masters of video game combat. The ideas are there. Your ghost powered protagonist has 3 different colors for attack and a block button for defense. Enemies need to be beaten down enough to expose their glowing hearts. Some need to be beaten down more than others. All of enemies follow the same a.i. programming: suicidally charge the protagonist. Missions and side quests are a mixed bag. Sometimes you are fetching this or defeating waves of that. A rare side quest might have you sneak up on an animal spirit. Despite the paranormal premise of the game, you do pretty much what every game has you do. With different textures and more swinging, this could be Spider-Man Tokyo. Even the ghost vision is just a variant of the detective vision introduced in “Batman: Arkham Asylum” and copy pasted into dozens of games since. Some games are better off as AA games and this is probably one of them. The gameplay here does not sustain a AAA length game. More isn’t always better, folks. Haven’t we players unlocked enough areas already? Haven’t we fetched enough things for enough NPCs? I do give the game credit for recycling good video games tropes. This is not a bad game. Maybe just lower the difficulty and stick to the main story quest. Full disclosure: I downloaded this game via PlayStation Plus Extra game catalog.
When this game was released, I thought, “Great, the two worst characters in the Uncharted series.” So I sat on this game for almost 6 years. In actuality, the characters really come into their own in this game. The adventure has a lot of classic Uncharted moments, if a bit dragged down by a little too much Call of Duty action. For starters, I am a big fan of standalone DLC. Games need not be so bloated. Short games like this are a good reminder of that. My playthrough was almost 6 hours, and I mean that as a compliment. For finishers, the essential guts of Uncharted are there. The characters have their little jokes and asides, the game has lots of climbing and puzzle solving, and you get to gun down dozens of men (they were all bad). My one nitpick is the how the fights go. Enemies pop up in all sorts of places. Some wear heavy armor (in a jungle?) and some have laser sighted sniper rifles. You even have a few vehicles to take down. Levels needed a little more attention to stealth and less attention to emptying magazines into enemy after enemy. The last chapter of the game has redeeming qualities, combining the best of the driving, climbing, and train segments of the Uncharted Franchise. All in all, this is a quality adventure to make you free time more enjoyable. Full disclosure, I downloaded this via PlayStation Plus twice, once as the PS4 version on the old PS+ and once as the enhanced PS5 version on PS+ extra.
This is my first VR game so I have no VR games to compare this to. However, I was immediately shocked and delighted by the quality of this experience. I felt like I was on an amusement park ride only with no line. Everything looked and felt AAA. This is the high bar that other games need to meet. The gameplay itself is fun and simple. You climb. You shoot arrows. You craft items by literally putting them together. The enemies are no cake walk. My one gripe is that in the middle of battle, I can get stuck in the crafting screen. Maybe have different back locations to pull different ammo from. Full disclosure: I am prone to motion sickness and I paced myself. I played the 8 hour story in 1 hour increments. The game has clever ways of dealing with motion sickness. Climbing feels like you are pushing the terrain away from you. Walking requires arm swinging and the movement helps. (I tried to pretend walk but kept getting off center.) On rails actions will narrow your vision so you feel like you are looking at a big screen and not messing with your brain. Dodging and turning are “snap” motions like teleporting. After a month of playing with VR, I feel a lot better about VR and this game. No doubt that VR has its drawbacks. My living room has the bare minimum 6x7 space for VR. I would love a VR room like Troy and Abed’s Dreamatorium. The PSVR2 works with glasses but I recommend you buy lens inserts for it. I wore my smaller spare glasses with a glasses strap to keep them from falling down. I had to crank the PSVR2 to my forehead to keep the lenses aligned. A beautiful game like Horizon gets ugly without proper lens positioning. The lenses need constant cleaning. I keep a lens cloth nearby. VR is also expensive. Of all my PlayStation friends, I am the only one playing PSVR2 games. Horizon makes the most of the tech. If you are going to spend money on VR, this game is a must buy.
Demons Souls for PS5 is stunning game with some fun moments and a lot of unnecessary grinding. I would love to fight my way through a medieval castle, taking down zombies and demons, and end it all with a glorious boss battle. Instead, I found myself tediously farming upgrade material for hours and hours. (Which I found more fun than tediously dying and restarting over and over again). Such a bummer. With some different mechanics, this could be a perfect game. Despite everything I had heard about Demon Souls, it is just another video game. The live, die, repeat mechanic is no different from Super Mario Brothers. back in the 1980s. Demon Souls is in fact a lat easier than I was led to believe because the player has complete freedom to collect upgrades and improve their survivability between attempts to progress. What bothers me is that the process of grinding for power is not much fun. My personally philosophy is that games should be fun from start to finish. Demon Souls fails at that. The game opens with an exquisite medieval environment and enemies. Then as the game progresses, everything becomes stranger. The monsters are cool. Like with most games, it is the humans that are the hardest to fight. Some monsters do little more than take you sword stabs and die. An enemy knight, on the other hand, will ruthlessly stab you to death. The bosses are mixed bag. All of them are interesting. They remind me a lot of the bosses in “Ninja Gaiden” on the original Xbox. I defeated the first three bosses in Demon Souls without dying. Maybe its my lifetime of playing these games and dealing with these boss mechanics and “cheesing” bosses, but hit an run works very well in Demon Souls. Some bosses are a nightmare. I have yet to defeat one called Maneater and I am not sure I ever will. (Nevermind, I beat Maneater and all the bosses. Difficult, not impossible). Then again, I never thought I would ever start playing Demon Souls, and here I am. The mechanics of the game are well done and it feels good to play. The shield blocks and the sword hits. What more does a player need? The circle button is used for rolling and dodging. This button combo has been seared into my muscle memory since “Ninja Gaiden” on the original Xbox. I would love if “Skyrim” played like this or if “The Witcher 3” had shields). Most enemies telegraph their attacks. For most of the game, you can feel safe knowing that a cautious approach will get you through without dying. This remake is a gorgeous graphical showcase. You won’t find ray traced reflections in this dark world. What makes the world alive is the detail of the environment, characters, and animations. Few launch titles are this polished and hold up this well. Full disclosure: I downloaded this from my PS+ Extra collection. I am not risking $70 on this game. Maybe I’ll get tired of grinding souls. Maybe I’ll delete this to make space for another PS+ game. (Never mind. I completed the game in 34 hours. I am ready for a new game experience now!)
“Ubisoft” has become the generic term for any open world game with generic gameplay. Far Cry 6 is a very Ubisoft game, and I could care less about it. All the elements of modern gaming are there: on-line connection for some reason; annoyed; dialogue between mission because game developers hate giving players a moment of silence, mission givers, map icons, and all the usual guns and vehicles. Far Cry 6 also continues the trend of colorful gaming by splattering everything with red paint for the bad guys and blue paint for the hood guys. Every system, down to the crafting menu, has the most basic, generic look and feel. Polished? Yes, but then that polish is cut and pasted across the entire game world. The gameplay feels exactly like the last Far Cry I played, which was Far Cry 4. Gun don’t really feel good. Driving doesn’t really feel good. And hiring enemies with a machete feels terrible. You charge to cut them in half, and they effortlessly knock you down. The only new game element is the “Supremo”, a backpack rocket launcher. This serves as the ultimate ability you see in many other games like Destiny and Overwatch. Everything does work, and I’m this age of busted releases, I give Ubisoft credit for not making a broken game. What makes these kind of generic open world games special is the open world. Give the player an interesting challenge and they will do it. Give the player a lot of cookie cutter based, and they will become bored and stop playing. That’s what happened with me. I could see the entire arc of the game after the first few mission. Doesn’t help that this game is so much like Just Cause 2, and Just Cause 2 made the revolution more fun. All in all, I think Ubisoft needs a change in leadership. As an organization, they just don’t have the taste or desire to make anything memorable. As far as I am concerned, they could give their games away. Indeed, I played Far Cry 6 over a free to play weekend. Despite every monetary reason to play this to the end, I couldn’t do it. Almost anything is more fun than Far Cry 6. I also couldn’t get past the first mission in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and I downloaded that via PlayStation Plus Extra. I probably won’t touch another Ubisoft game for the foreseeable future.
2D side scrolling murder has not been this fun since Prince of Persia. The central focus of the game is traversal, dodging, and shooting in what is essentially a platform game. The protagonist can dodge, roll, jump, swing, zip line, and slow down time. Starting My Friend Pedro feels like ending a Metroid game. The protagonist can also shoot, dual wield, toss explosives, and ricochet bullets. The sandbox of tools makes the game approachable and replay able. Honestly, I am terrible at these kinds of games and I made it through the main story. You guide for the entire playthrough is a talking banana. Honestly, the game did not need narrative device. Instead, the protagonist could be let loose and I will kill anyone that looks like a bad guy. (Is this a moral failing?) The real meta game is gunning for a high score. Performance is ranked on a letter grade scale that includes S for best. (What’s wrong with an A?) I didn’t bather with trying to kill with skill as the tagline for “Bulletstorm” used to say. I found the slowing down of time, for example, to ruin my flow of shooting, jumping, dodging, and kicking. Unlocks found in the game add to the replayability. This is good because the story campaign is only a few hours long. The trouble with the game is a simple lack of polish. Environments look rough. This ain’t Super Mario with guns. Traversal can be awkward at time. This is more of a make and sandbox and throw the player in it sort of game.
Looks good. Plays a like a last gen game. Ultimately a lot of dumb fun and fun is good. The controls are odd. You press R1 with other buttons to do certain special attacks. After 6 hours, the control scheme still felt weird. The game wants you to play with style. Mix and match moves to earn style points. Mixing face buttons with shoulders buttons is not the best way to do this. There is also no dedicated dodge or roll button. I am on old school gamer who played Ninja Gaiden on Xbox. My muscle memory demands a roll button. Another gripe I have with this game is the series of closed off battle arenas. An area locks down until you kill wave after wave of enemies. Then you can progress. I have no problem with “corridor shooters” and linear games that eschew the open world. But games lose their sense of movement and freedom when they arbitrarily fence off an area. If I am to move this story from point A to point B, let me move. The fighting itself is a mixed bag. Weapons feel week, even on the easier modes. Guns have almost no impact and a sword lunge has no penetration. The point of combat seems to be working off combos, and if you like hitting triangle, triangle, triangle, triangle, triangle, you love it. So what makes this game fun? It’s the odd assortment of weapons and goofiness. At one point, the player unlocks a sword made out of a motorcycle. Other games don’t have that. You can taunt enemies, hear fun little asides, and fill up the screen with a laser light show. There is something good about this combat. I can see how an old school following would appreciate this game. For me, this is was my first time. All-in-all, Devil May Cry 5 has a fun formula that could be little better if the game design were a tad more modern. Full disclosure: this was another PS+ Essential game for me. I blasted through the campaign in about 6 hours and never looked back. The trophies call upon players to finish several play throughs. Parts the game have players choose which character to follow. Back in old days, when games were a little more scarce, I would replay games at least once. Now my backlog is overflowing, and one fun little jaunt through a demon infested city is just fine.
Basically Portal without Portals. Solid puzzles. Interesting dialogue choices. Even a few secret areas. I thoroughly enjoyed my puzzling experience. The comparison to Portal is unavoidable. Maybe my kid wouldn’t notice. They never played Portal. Absent a Portal 3, this is the kind of puzzle game we need. I like the simplicity of the puzzles. You do not need to know how to read music or program in machine language. The puzzles are all about moving one thing over there and seeing what happens. And like Portal, you can get the idea of how the puzzle makers designed the game and zip through rooms before the game can finish playing the dialogue. The aesthetic is a nice change of pace from the glut of games that take place in the dark. The game has a story but it is all in the background. Except for the very end, there is no choice for the player to make other than to complete each puzzle. This was also true of Portal and many other puzzle games. The central premise of the game is free will and of course the question is whether the player has free will if they keep playing the game. This ground is well trod, but few games offer as much high level explanation as “The Turing Test”. The puzzle action has a very solid feeling. Some physics based puzzles become frustrating when the physics do not work as intended. Game design has to consider all the ways a player can fail. In “The Turing Test”, I had no trouble with any of the puzzles. Maybe the game was too easy. Really that is an issue of the game’s play time. Harder puzzles take longer to solve. Are they more fun? All-in-all, I recommend this game to all the lovers of puzzle games and every devotee of Portal. Full disclosure: I downloaded this game from my PS+ Extra collection. Issues such as a games length and value are moot when a game is there to be played or not played.
Excellent little puzzle game. I absolutely love the premise and the aesthetic. I could play a whole platforming game based on sign gal or sign guy. What keeps this game from perfection the tediousness of some of the puzzles. I want to enjoy a game, not rewire a house. The premise of the game is novel. You are the person in one of those caution signs. Your power is that you can move from sign to sign. What is your goal? Who knows. You follow clues and traverse a city. Your signs may be 2-D, but the word around the signs is very much alive and in 3D. It’s been awhile since I’ve been wowed by this kind of innovative concept. The puzzles themselves simple enough. Where the game goes wrong is in taxing the player with multiple steps of completing a circuit, retracing, and completing an circuit again. Cut puzzles are fun. Work is not. The obvious problem for a puzzle game such as this is that puzzle that is too difficult will frustrate players and a puzzle that is too easy is just going through the motions. I like games that start with easy puzzles that teach me how to solve the hard puzzles. I also like puzzles that have a trick to them, as in some unexpected way of solving them. Solving a tricky puzzles opens up a part of your brain to something new. The Pedestrian only touches on this, and that is where the game maxes out at being good and not great. All in all, this is a fun little game with fantastic quality. Full disclosure: I received this game as part of my PS+ collection. (This is how I find most games these days). My play through was a little over 3 hours. Your mileage my vary.
