JohnGrey

As a platforming fan, I began 2017 with high hopes. The trio of A Hat In Time, Yooka-Laylee and Super Mario Odyssey promised to make it one for the ages. Unsurprisingly, the promise was mostly undelivered. Super Mario Odyssey, whilst technically proficient and occasionally fun, abandoned any pretence of being anything but a set of Nintendo-red training wheels to hook a new generation of participation trophy receivers on Nintendo's IPs, providing hardly the barest fraction of actual platforming. Far more egregious, Yooka-Laylee was published as a barely-playable mess, and whilst subsequent patches have blunted the technical issues (the general lacklustre gameplay precludes my using 'resolved'), unfortunately charm and soulfulness cannot be transmitted via updates. I was prepared for a hat trick of crushing disappointment when I somewhat reluctantly put down money for A Hat In Time. It is with grateful relief that I can say, at last, that the money was well-spent. This game is everything that I looked for in platforming of 2017. It demanded all of the time and precision that SMO forewent, and it delivered all of the charm and evolution of platforming collectathon mechanics that I expected and utterly failed to receive from Yooka Laylee. The only faults I find are a general roughness to the art design and implementation, which is nonetheless effective, and an occasional annoyance with the loading times undoubtedly caused through the use of the now-archaic UE3 engine; it's my hope that a future remaster will smooth over both of these issues and vault the game from good to superb. In the meantime, even as it stands, A Hat In Time delivers in spades on its core promise of being a cute-as-heck, fantastic platformer that is worth every penny of reasonable purchase price.

Sonic Forces Review Switch Version 1.01 I was nine years old, and already well loyal to Nintendo, when Sonic the Hedgehog burst onto the games scene in 1991 and forced me to join most of my mates in vassalship to SEGA. Britain had been in the first Major ministry for less than a year and the Soviet Union, then politically little more than inertia and wishful thinking, was a mere six months from delivering the death blow to a half-century long Cold War. Though I did not have the language or context to describe it at the time, I recall a attitude of youthful exuberance, playful irreverence and cautious optimism that a decidedly new day had dawned, and SEGA's new mascot felt utterly at home. I've been there with Sonic through most of the intervening decades: making the leap to CD, to the Dreamcast Adventures, even to the trying and inconsistent Modern days. Twenty-six years removed from that first adventure, I, now a middle-aged and facing a world far more dystopian that the halcyon days of the nineties, decided to play and review the blue blur's newest adventure, and find that I much prefer the metaphysical horror of helplessness caused by real life to the metaphysical horror of uselessness found in Sonic Forces. It is, in the most concise and charitable phrasing I can muster, a testament to aspirations of mediocrity. Please note that I very specifically and intentionally write 'aspiration to' it, not the state itself, because I cannot reasonably even call the game mediocre. To my own mind, mediocrity would be stagnation, an inability to move beyond or improve upon whichever of the formulae, that have comprised the frantic experimentation of period inaugurated by the reboot of doom, is momentarily on display. This, alas, Sonic Team could not even muster. The level design, which to my opinion peaked in creativity with Colors and in consistency with Generations, has retreated in virtually every metric. Length, variety and dynamism are an unimagined dream in the doldrums of this disaster's roughly fifty stages. General control has managed to become even more wildly inconsistent, punctuating what is mostly sluggish and cumbersome translation of movement with the occasional burst of comical slipperiness, and the boost mechanic, having already overstayed its welcome on the whole, when coupled with the absurd brevity of the stages, is a recipe for game that appeals to speedrunners and few others. The art design is mostly clean though uninspired, but critically the technical presentation is notably poor on the Switch, and most other systems not natively outputting at 1080p, strongly suggesting that next to no optimisation was done despite it ostensibly being a mainline multi-platform release. By far the worst offender of this title, or the greatest victim depending on your degree of empathy, is Sonic's lore. Now having suffered three consecutive titles featuring time travel, cross-dimensionality or both, all pretence to a cohesive narrative has been obliterated. Worse still, the infantile writing of Ken Pontac and Warren Graff, already culpable for Sonic Lost World and all Sonic Boom games, delivers a story bereft of nuance or any emotion beyond shoneny angst, taking what ought to have been desperate and harrowing fight against tyrannical annihilation and giving it the emotional weight of schoolyard tussle over favourite Pokemon. It's a strange thing to grow up with, and in some ways away from, a cherished part of childhood, and frequently it's only in later adulthood when we find the strength, or perhaps resignation, to be more cynical about our formative years and those things which hallmarked them. With Sonic Forces, I sincerely believe that the time has come for the games community to have a frank and honest communication about the place of Sonic and whether his relevance, at least in the 3D platforming space, has passed from the commercial to the historical. For more than a decade I, and many others in the fandom, have soothed the wound of SEGA's and Sonic Team's incompetence with the balm of 'the next game', but there is a limit to the latitude that can be given to a pastime that demands so much and consistently offers so little. In life, there is always that moment, as certainly harrowing as it often is bittersweet, where we confront that not only are our days truly numbered but that those behind us are, with a moral certainly, better than those before us. I cannot help but question whether that time has come for Big Blue.

A decade from now, when games consumers and journalists alike look back on the present period, which I have little doubt will be recognised for the commercial and philosophical crucible that it has in fact become, I believe that Super Mario Odyssey will become the poster child for Nintendo as it currently stands, a battered dinosaur with loads of fight and talent that is doing its utmost to walk the line between its shrinking Eastern and Western markets, whose disparate focuses and trends has landed it squarely in the unenviable master-of-none position. So to is Super Mario Odyssey. It would be easy to take shots at the low-hanging fruit of where the game fell to tropes and creative inconsistencies, from lifting the plucky and annoyingly explicative sidekick/minder from Zelda's playbook to the jarring artistic conflicts between the PS2 absurdist nightmare of the Luncheon Kingdom, the 360-era uncanny valley of New Donk City (which inexplicably has a cartoonish Mario character as torch-singer-in-chief) and the ripped-straight-from-Final-Fantasy Ruined Kingdom. SMO's problems, however, go deepen than that, straight through in fact to the definition of what makes a Mario game. Positioned like the answer to the abortive and much-debated Super Mario 64 sequel, to be fair SMO superficially ticks a few boxes in that regard, namely sandbox worlds, and mission-defined and exploration-based collectibles. That said, to this reviewer, the desperate appeal to casuals and first-timers was on parade virtually from the first moments of the game. Movement control was what one would expect from a modern 3D Mario, which is to say masterfully tight, and in the context of this game criminally wasted by the utter lack of opportunity or demand for precision jumping and platforming. Worse still, any such requirement would have been robbed of the slightest urgency by the lack of the traditional lives system, indeed of any possibility at all of losing the game. Instead, it feigns the pretence of a Sonic Boom-style currency-as-lives faux-penalty that is rendered laughably pointless by the sheer volume of coins that can be accrued with virtually no effort at all. Super Mario Odyssey is not a bad game at all, but it is not an especially good game either. It is a thoroughly lower-middle-of-good, baby's first Mario game that is meant unquestionably to appeal to a new, younger audience that has less love for challenges than it does for colourful guided tours whose difficulty curves fall slightly below skimming a EULA on Steam and clicking Next to continue. It will undoubtedly be championed in years to come by those that have sought something, anything, vaguely resembling the success of Nintendo's meteoric domination a generation ago. Already, polls and screeds are ferociously trotted out, generating ledes questioning whether the newcomer has eclipsed the masters of the past. From a visual and mechanical perspective, this cannot be argued nor should it be surprising, the newest iterations of technology are almost always superior. The greatest consideration, however, is the degree to which the game affects the industry as a whole. Super Mario Bros. established the platformer as ultimate genre of its time. Super Mario 64 spawned a decade of powerful and successful mascot-driven 3D platformers. Will there be a resurgence in 3D platformers following on from such a standard bearer as Super Mario Odyssey? If the performances of Yooka-Laylee and A Hat In Time are indicative, almost certainly not. In that context, Super Mario Odyssey, whilst generally (or perhaps vaguely) worthy, is, just as arguably, one more very refined horse buggy for buggy enthusiasts in a world having long since moved on to the automobile.