SenorKoquonfaes

I suppose I can’t be too critical **** that cost me about $5 CAD, but overall, 890B doesn’t even get the basics right. It’s just an incredibly dull game that barely offers up anything that resembles an engaging gameplay loop and is surrounded by an equally dull, clichéd and poorly written story. 890B is set in the near future where the planet has become borderline uninhabitable and research is being conducted on trying to find a new home planet. You play as Noah, a scientist working at the research lab along with Luna, the only other character in this game. The game starts you off in the middle of a power outage and you need to reboot the system in order for work to continue. Luna supposedly has the knowledge to continue with this research and can’t continue her work until the power is restored. When it comes to creating a story, I tend to emphasis that it’s not the “what”, but the “how” and the “why” that matters in terms of making a good story. 890B doesn’t do any of that: the “what” is overly clichéd and done-to-death and the “how” and the “why” are neither creative nor engaging enough to overcome it. The primary gameplay loop is mostly just that of a “walking simulator”. You wander around this rather small and dull looking area, collecting white cubes that are the game’s way of saying “interest with this”, as oppose to using, say, button prompts or subtle object highlights like almost any other game. Occasionally, you’ll get to play some mini games that are required to progress through the game. The first one places you in front of a terminal window and you need to enter phrases into the command line. The list is more-or-less given to you, you just to enter them in the right order. The second mini game is a series of Snake-like challenges where you need to navigate the snake through a circuit board to reach a connection point without touching the edges or else you’ll need to start that level again. It was marginally nostalgic, but trying to guess where the chunky white line is going to break when you need to turn a corner was more troublesome than it probably should be. The third and final mini game is just a box pushing puzzle where you need to move a number of blocks on to green, highlighted sections without pushing any of them off the edge or you’ll need to start that level again. this is the only remotely challenging and engaging aspect of 890B and it only lasts for 5 levels, albeit of increasing difficulty. There’s no voice acting or spoken dialogue in this game, it’s all delivered through text. The writing comes across as incredibly stilted and unnatural. It kind of made me wonder as to whether or not English is the developer’s native language, given that there seemed to be a number of awkward translations such as “Why there isn’t any book here?” when interacting with an empty bookshelf or “Lot’s of books in my room. Maybe I can get some of the Harry Potter’s one.”. It’s unclear as to whether or not the publisher or the developer had access to any sort of localization team, so maybe it was just a case of “it is what it is”. Like the rest of game, 890B’s graphics are pretty rudimentary and unremarkable. It’s kind of funny how we’re supposed to be in a research lab capable of interplanetary research, but resembles more of a half-empty, open concept office space with some random crates and other stuff lying around. Overall, 890B fits the motif of virtually all other Eastasiasoft games: a title that you buy on sale, keep chambered for a quick and easy 1000G and then purge from your hard drive the moment you’re done with it.

Similar to the first game, the combat arenas are spaced out nicely with a decent focus on dialogue and exposition scenes. These sections of the game really highlight Jackie’s voice actor Brian Bloom, the same guy who voices BJ Blazkowicz. I feel that he gives Jackie more of an emotional range compared to the previous game and it really helps add to Jackie’s already compelling character. At various points in the game, Jackie suffers from these visions where he see’s Jenny and it becomes clear that Jackie is still trying to cope with the violent death of his girlfriend. Instead of the World War 1 interludes in the first game, The Darkness 2 features these story pieces where Jackie is committed to an asylum with member of his family appearing as either patients or staff members. These parts of the story occur whenever Jackie is brutally injured and they really stood out to me because it actually sewed some doubt in the back of my mind as to what timeline was actually the real one. We’ve learned that the Darkness has the ability to make it’s host hallucinate. Couple that with all of the emotional trauma and injuries Jackie has suffered and it’s not unreasonable to assume that Jackie is in fact committed to a mental asylum and the crime family timeline is all in his head. While the story may not be some intricately woven, mind-melter of a story, it’s still a great one that’s easy to follow along and had me hooked the entire way through the game. The combat loop in this game is much improved over the previous one. The main attraction is going to be your Darkness powers. This time around, the game features a skill tree that you can sink “Essence” points into and ties into the game’s points system. It features a more arcade style FPS, where scores are popping up on screen for kills, headshots and various execution moves that you can pull off using your Darkness powers. These upgrades really emphasis the potential power you can wield with the Darkness, something that I feel the first game largely missed out on. You can acquire skills that you allow you to pull of various executions that can regenerate your health, ammo and a few other abilities. The executions are basically Jackie pulling off glory kills and they’re all well animated and incredibly gory and violent. The enemy variety has also seen a big improve movements and helps add more depth to the combat. Certain enemies will rush you with melee weapons, some shoot at you while behind cover, others will teleport around the arena and are a massive pain in the ass, some enemies carry shields that need to be broken down, stun locked or distracted using "Swarm" before being killed. You've got enemies with some sort of leash that can take your weapon away and you got some annoying bastard that shines a spot light on you, nullifying your Darkness powers. This all means that you have to be able to prioritize your targets depending on what gets thrown at you from one combat arena to another. I generally went after the spotlight enemies first so my Darkness powers could be used as often as possible. The leash enemies are better off being killed at longer range and I found myself using "Swarm" the most often on shielded enemies since they can also distract other nearby enemies, sometimes offering a brief reprieve from the combat. Graphically, I was surprised to see the game use the cell-shaded art style akin to the Borderlands and Telltale games. This is a noticeable departure from the previous game, where the art style felt more grounded in reality. I think the overall atmosphere is better in the first game, the but the art direction in The Darkness 2 still works really well and I think it helps future proof the game graphically. On a technical level, The Darkness 2 is fine. The loading times aren’t all that long and are disguised well enough using cinematic sequences. The framerate remains pretty steady, with no noticeable dips during combat. I had no crashes-to-dashboard or any soft locks. I did experience enemies clipping into a wall or through a floor once, but that was about it. On the whole, it’s good looking, polished game. Voice acting is well done, the lines feel well paced and delivered naturally. I like Brian Bloom as the voice of Jackie and Mike Patton returning as the voice of the Darkness is the standout performer here. He really nails the tone of the Darkness being this malevolent, kill hungry entity that dominates it's host. Overall, The Darkness 2 is a great game that was a pleasant surprise for me. The combat and movement is vastly improved and your Darkness abilities feel much more powerful and satisfying to use, offering plenty of cathartic, power fantasy moments. The story kept me hooked to the end and I really dig the different take on the game’s art direction. This is a game I wish I had played sooner, but I’m glad I eventually did get around to it.

The story itself I think is perfectly satisfactory and held my interest the whole way through, wanting to discover more the closer we got to the depths of Area 51. The story does end rather abruptly and you’re not given much in terms of exposition before the credits roll. Overall, the story mostly boils down to a typical military jarhead kind of narrative with not much in the way of any character development. The core mechanics of the game are pretty standard for the time and are perfectly functional: you’ve got regenerating health, a two weapon limit, a weapon melee attack, you can crouch behind rocks or walls to take cover and you can ADS with your weapons for better accuracy. There is no sprint function, which is kind of a shame and makes traversing the levels kind of slow and tedious. I did notice some destructible cover in the game, such as doors or partially fractured concrete barriers. It’s a nice detail that I wasn’t expecting to find in this game and actually forced me to move and find new cover a few times instead of just camping. The primary gameplay loop involves progressing through mostly linear, scripted action sequences: shoot some “Reborn” soldiers and/or Xenos, move through a hallway to the next objective/combat arena, have a mini boss fight where you need to shoot it’s glowing weak spots as well as fend of smaller groups of canon fodder and repeat. Similar to the story, the gameplay loop and core mechanics are also perfectly satisfactory, if a tad unremarkable and largely repetitive. However, it functions as needed and I was alright with that. The weapon arsenal works as needed but is very limited in terms of what you can use. You have an M4 assault rifle, a USP .45 Tactical Pistol, an XM8 Sniper Rifle, Frag Grenades, a rocket launcher and an AK-47 which is only available during the start of the game when you’re fighting the Iraqi Republican Guard. You’ll also only get access to two of the “Reborn” weapons, which are an energy scattergun which behaves sort of like a shotgun and a Plasma rifle with rounds that can be detonated mid-flight. For a contemporary FPS game for that time, that arsenal is way too small in scope. There are no variants of other weapons or alt fire modes and having just two “Reborn” weapons feels like it’s really short-changing the player. The lack of weapon variety can also make the shooting and the overall gameplay feel even more repetitive than its already is. Occasionally, the combat arena gets broken up with either driving sections where there’s not a whole lot of expositional dialogue or combat (it’s often better just to drive past the fight and hit the next checkpoint), “on-a-rail” sections like a mounted vehicle turret or a helicopter minion or a turret section. The game also features a light tactical element to it: you can press the RB and order your team to focus fire on a targeted enemy or move to other areas of the combat arena. While this sounds useful in theory, like using it to have them flank enemies or provide covering fire, in practice your squad mates will often just mover into an open area and get gunned down or take there sweet ass time trying to take down a single enemy. It’s often just more expedient to kill the enemies yourself and the only time I regularly used this command was when you need them to open doors in order to progress the game. Graphically, I think the game is fine for 2007. The textures are of decent quality and the lighting seems okay. It does kind of overdo it with the bloom effects, but plenty of other games from around that time period were also guilty of that. On a technical level, this game does have some issues. The most egregious one being the frame rate. It never really feels all that steady. It dips pretty frequently when loading in a new area and during certain combat encounters. It’s at it’s worst during the final chapter as you fight your way deeper into Area 51. There were at least 3 or 4 times where the frame rate dropped down into Powerpoint Presentation territory, despite the fact that there wasn’t a lot happening on screen. Thankfully, it never screwed me over during a combat section or mini-boss encounter but it’s arguable the game’s biggest technical flaw. The loading times feel mostly fine. I didn’t notice any significant texture pop-in or streaming and got no hard crashes. Blacksite: Area 51 can be some half decent fun as a mindless, alien shooter. But overall, it’s a textbook example of a middling game. The mechanics all function well enough and the game doesn’t overstay its welcome. But it’s just kind of a forgettable FPS game that doesn’t really excel at any one thing nor does it execute any really poorly either. If you can find a copy of it for a bargain basement price and you’ve got an afternoon to kill, you could do worse than Blacksite: Area 51.

Trackmania Turbo is broken up into 4 different environments: Canyon, Valley, Lagoon and Stadium. Each environment offers up it’s own unique atmosphere and track designs. I can safely say I love the environments for Canyon, Valley and Lagoon. Canyon has you racing through areas that remind me of the Grand Canyon. Valley has you racing through forested areas that feel like they belong somewhere in the European country side, and Lagoon has you hurtling through rollercoaster style tracks with a tropical beach backdrop. The Stadium tracks aren’t bad, but the environment just felt a bit too sterile for my liking. The individual tracks themselves offer up an incredibly surreal racing environment. The goal is to simply race from the starting line to finish line as quickly as possible. This is easier said than done for a lot of the tracks in this game and it won’t be long before Trackmania Turbo’s difficulty rears it’s ugly, rage-inducing head. There will be corners that need to be hit at the optimal driving line, drifting around them at just the right angle in order to maintain your speed. There will be walls that offer up what feels like an almost 90 degree banking as you try and not slide off by going to slow or fly off the edge with too much speed. There will be rollercoaster style loops and corkscrews that are disorienting and difficult to navigate and there will be massive jumps that will need to be hit with the right amount of speed for a smooth landing instead of taking an awkward bounce off the road. While all these challenges culminate into quite the spectacle, I found myself either crashing into walls or barriers, flying off the track trying to drift around a narrow corner or crashing and loosing speed on a rollercoaster loop and falling into the abyss. Each track has checkpoints that scattered throughout the race and you can revert to the last checkpoint by pressing the “Y” button. While this sounds like an anti-frustration mechanic in theory, in practice, I found this feature to be almost useless. Firstly, most the tracks are all fairly short. Some of the early tracks can be finished in around 15 seconds, some of the longer ones take about 30-40 seconds. There are a hand full of circuit races that take a bit longer and perhaps this is where that checkpoint system has value. Aside from that, you’re better off hitting the “B” button to restart the race. Second of all, restarting at last checkpoint doesn’t reset the timer to what it was when you hit that checkpoint, the clock keeps running. Do that enough times and you won’t register a fast enough time to progress to the next series of tracks. It may not always be ideal, but I found the more expedient method was to just restart the race. To that point, if you need to restart or load your last checkpoint, there is no load time. The game will immediately drop you back to where you’re suppose to be. No need to stare a loading screen, stewing in your own rage. Trackmania Turbo features 200 tracks that all need to be unlocked in the game’s campaign mode. Each of the four environment’s tracks are broken up into White, Green, Blue, Red and Black series. The “White” maps are generally the easiest, the Blue and Red maps offer up a more healthy challenge and the Black tracks are absolutely merciless. The game rates you on a Bronze, Silver, Gold or a green Trackmaster medal (meaning you beat the track developer’s time) depending on how fast you make your way through the race. You’ll need at least a Silver medal on each track in a series in order to progress in the game. Naturally, this becomes harder to pull off once you start getting into the Blue and Red tracks. I personally capped my play through of this game at the Red Canyon series, since my budget for Xbox controllers can only be so much before it starts eating into other expenses in my life. There’s going to be a fair amount of trial-and-error to a lot of the tracks, to the point where hitting the “B” button to restart the race was almost instinctual for me if I hit a wall or took a corner in a **** way. Like most arcade racers these days, you might expect some customization tools for your cars. Aside from it’s paint job and decals you can’t customize your car in any meaningful way. Performance wise, this game is great, even on Vanilla Xbox One. It maintains a steady frame rate with no stuttering or lagging. I didn’t experience any crashes-to-dashboard, texture pop-in or streaming. Having no in game loads screens when restarting or reverting to last checkpoint is a godsend, all things considered. Overall, Trackmania Turbo is a fun, challenging, surreal arcade racer that offers up decent replay value and longevity. It’s tough to recommend this game to casual arcade racing fans due to the game’s difficulty. But for any arcade racers that are up for a decent, rewarding challenge, than Trackmania Turbo is a great game for you.

The core gameplay loop will feel familiar to any one who’s played a Gears of War game or something comparable to that. The level design and art direction are similar to what you’d see in games like Call of Duty or Gears of War. That’s not to say it’s bad or unoriginal, the levels function as needed, they’re mostly well rendered and will feel familiar to a lot of gamers. Weapons are all based on real world models and are broken down into 4 categories. You’ve got Assault Rifles and LMGs, close combat weapons like Shotguns and SMGs, long range weapons like sniper rifles and Rocket Launchers and Pistols that have infinite ammo. You can also collect money from smashing open crates and killing enemies in order to purchase weapons through pay phones found throughout each level. The combat in this game I’d say is pretty decent. There are some good blood, gore and particle effects when killing enemies or when bullets are whizzing by you and bouncing off walls or objects. The Shotguns and LMGs have a pretty heavy sound to them and they’re both fun to use. The game even has it’s own version of bullet time called “Gangsta Fire”, which will feel familiar to anyone who’s played a Max Payne or F.E.A.R game. You can also use Gangsta fire to help you get in close to enemies and perform a “Counter Kill”. Hit a series of button prompts with the right timing and, if done correctly, it allows 50 to pull off what is essentially a Glory Kill. While it won’t regenerate your health, it does regenerate your gangsta fire, offers up huge points bonus, feature some pretty brutal animations and the enemies can’t **** you over while this is happening. The one interesting and kind of funny gameplay mechanic is the “Taunts” system. I’m trying to think **** where **** talking enemy NPCs as you put a bullet through their brain was a part **** core loop and I honestly can’t think of one, before or since this game come out. Immediately after killing someone, click in the Left Thumbstick and 50’s going to throw out some hilariously “scathing” one liners. Call some one a “Punk **** a “****ing ****!” or to “Eat this, you **** and it gives you a score increase of +25% per kill, on top of whatever bonuses you accumulate as well with each kill. This all helps culminate into the game’s end of level points system. The game also functions a lot like an arcade style shooter, where points and combo multipliers are popping up on screen almost constantly. You get extra points by chaining together multiple kills, for lighting enemies on fire, blowing them up with explosives or getting a headshot among other bonuses, while using mechanics like the “Counter Kills” and “Taunts” to bolster your score even further. Several times during each chapter, these “Scenarios” pop up that require you to complete a specific task within a time limit. These “Scenarios” are optional in the sense that you won’t fail the chapter if you miss them, but they also give you points towards your end of chapter score. These “Scenarios” aren’t all that hard to complete and they largely boil down to “Kill X number of enemies with a certain time” or “Collect X amount of money within a certain time”. At the end of each chapter, you’re awarded either a Bronze, Silver or Gold badge based on how high your score is. There’s achievements tied to getting all of the Silver and Gold badges, but if want those Gold Badges, you’ll have to play on Hard mode since the game doesn’t afford you enough points on the lower difficulties. Don’t let that dissuade you though, this is a pretty breezy game even on Hard mode with only the last few missions providing anything remotely challenging. Certain levels end with a boss fight against a helicopter that gets rehashed three times and it just feels really uninspired and repetitive; use “Gangsta Fire” and shoot rockets at it until it blows up. On a technical level, this game is mostly fine. It runs pretty smoothly on both Vanilla Xbox 360 and Vanilla Xbox One. The loading times are pretty quick and I experienced no freezes or crashes-to-dashboard. The game does hitch for a moment when saving a checkpoint but run pretty smoothly otherwise, with not much in the way of lag or stuttering during combat. The game runs on Unreal Engine 3, so graphically, it looks fine. It does however suffer from pretty noticeable texture pop-in, especially when initially loading into a level, that UE 3 became infamous for. Overall, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand was a pleasant surprise for me and I didn’t think I’d enjoy this game as much as I did. It’s just a mindlessly fun, third person shooter that’s easy to pick up and play, while coming in with a play time of around 5 to 6 hours. If you’ve got a weekend to kill or if your in between your favourite releases, you could do way worse than 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand.

I have a growing appreciation for games and media that are able to bring significant, historical events to my attention and creating a satisfactory experience from them. I don’t necessarily mean events like World War 2, The Cold War or interpretations of contemporary military conflicts; stuff like that has been and will continue to be done to death. No, I’m talking about major historical events that I would likely have never heard of had I not played the game itself. Well, 1979 Revolution: Black Friday and the developers at iNK Stories have done pretty much that, doing an admirable job at providing a crash course in the Iranian Revolution in video game form. You play as Reza Shirazi, a photojournalist who has returned home to Iran in the midst of the revolution after living abroad in Germany. Reza is developing photos from his latest outing when his hideout is raided by the police and is subsequently imprisoned at Evin Prison, notorious for the amount of political prisoners it housed both during and after the Islamic Revolution. He is then interrogated by a man named Hajj Agha as to what he knows about the Iranian Revolution in an attempt to overthrow the Shah. The core gameplay loop is very similar to what you would experience in a Telltale game. That is, interacting with various objects/events in your environment and make dialogue choices that can affect how the story plays out. There are two achievements tied to making all peaceful or all violent choices within the game, so whatever side you pick, keep your decisions making consistent. There are a couple of scenes where some of the decisions you make play out in front of you, so it was nice to know that at least some of my choices mattered in this game. There are also QTEs that you’ll need to pass and various points in the game and mostly amount to pushing the left thumb stick in a certain direction or mashing the “A” button. The voice acting is well done, but is kind of let down by janky and stiff animations. While it does an alright job of giving a sort of generalist take on the events of the Iranian Revolution, I felt that the overall story was needlessly brief and lacked a fair amount of meaningful character development for its cast of characters. This also meant that the voice acting in certain scenes didn’t hit me as hard as they could have. While I reacted to them on a basic human emotional level, it was missing that next step that you usually get when you’re truly invested in the characters ****. Visually, the game looks kind of rough and unpolished. The lights, shadows and textures make a lot of the environments feel kind of dull and flat. There are a few instances where objects have been both poorly modelled and obviously textured, like the food you see at Reza’s family’s home during dinner time. A lot of background NPCs have very clearly been copied and pasted in terms of looks and animations. The overall graphically fidelity on things like character models and environments all look very dated and the art direction isn’t enough to save it. Overall, 1979 Revolution: Black Friday has a fantastic premise that I would love to see games explore more, especially in regards to other major historical events that may not be as mainstream. I respect what iNK Stories have done here, trying to bring the events of the Iranian Revolution to the attention of people, like me, who might’ve otherwise overlooked this. The game has some good voice acting and some standout moments that make the game feel genuine and believable. But the story just feels like it needed more content; the story had me hooked for the most part, it just left me wanting a bit more. With some chapters being insanely short, that could’ve been an opportunity to build up more of the story, but it never happened. I also didn’t really connect with any of the characters as much as a I wanted to and the short runtime and underdeveloped story likely played a part in that. I think I can still recommend the 1979 Revolution: Black Friday at a discount if you’re idly curious about the game like I was, in search of a quick completion (my playtime last just over 3 and half hours) or if you’re a bit of a history buff.

Set during The Future War, you plays a private Jacob Rivers, a member of the Pacific Division resistance squad. Your unit gets ambushed by a group of Terminators, but Rivers manages to escape thanks to some help from an unidentified voice over a radio. Shortly after, you run into a woman named Jennifer and her surrogate brother Patrick, who lead you to a group of scavengers and their hideout. You can either leave right then and there or look for other survivors; I chose the latter, since I’m a bad ass resistance fighter. While carrying out some scavenging missions, you eventually meet up with a Tech-com unit under the leadership of Commander Jessica Baron. You’re then sent to carry out a series of recon missions to help weaken Skynet’s defences. Jacob is then ambushed by a “skin job”, but is saved once again by a mysterious stranger who crushes it with an 18-wheeler. The Stranger urges them to evacuate the hideout and they seek refuge at Commander Baron’s bunker. From there its another series of missions to try and cripple Skynet and lead an all out assault on Skynet’s core. The core gameplay loop is split between a diet version of the Bethesda era Fallout games (the lock picking interface will look VERY familiar to contemporary Fallout fans) and Call of Duty-style action sequences. Instead of having a needlessly large open world, the exploration bits take part in small, sandbox levels with primary objectives and side objectives. The game’s narrative does a good job of characterizing both Jacob and the NPCs that you interact with. The game features a Telltale games style “choice and consequence” narrative, which was an interesting surprise. Your choices matter and can result in the NPCs you ran into at the start of the game either being alive or dead based on whether or not they trust you enough when it comes to making decisions. This can also lead you being romantically involved with one or both of Commander Baron and Jennifer. Not what I expected from a budget, movie-licensed game but welcomed nonetheless. Jacob himself also has a decent character arc. He goes from being a hapless resistance fighter runner from Terminators and by the end, he’s #2 on Skynet’s kill list, behind John Connor and ahead of Commander Baron, has risen through the ranks to become a Sergeant and is leading the charge on Skynet’s core while brandishing a violet plasma minigun and mowing down robots left, right and centre. The game’s overall creative direction is decent. Story-wise, while it’s not bad, I can tell that there were some corners cut in this game’s story as evidenced by a number of “A few [insert time interval here] black screens. I suspect it was due to time and budget constraints. Overall, it’ll still hit most notes for fans of the Terminator series but also stands on it’s own well enough to be digestible to casual fans or curious gamers like myself. The level design isn’t all that great either; it’s mostly just a bunch of individual set pieces with little or no connectivity to one another. It’s not the most graphically impressive game, but right from the very start it nails to Future War atmosphere brought on by the first two Terminator movies. The Terminators themselves are all beautifully modelled with plenty of care and attention to detail. The weapons all look great too; the shotgun kicks ass despite it being useless against Terminators and the thermal version scopes on the plasma weapons also pay respects to the movie franchise. There is some obvious texture pop in upon loading into the game. The facial animations all look pretty stiff and wooden along with terrible lip syncing. I won’t fault the devs too much for this since larger studios with more resources have tried and failed to make believable facial animations, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point it out. Voice acting is fine, for the most part, although the mixing on Jennifer’s voice is brutal. More than a few times her voice started blowing out the mixing levels to point of getting minor static feedback and audio clipping. On a technical level, the game never crashed, lagged or stuttered for me playing vanilla Xbox One and the load screens are fairly short. Overall, Terminator Resistance is a perfectly satisfactory, budget game that also serves as a great love letter to the first two Terminator movies. Time and budget limitations most likely prevented this from being a fully open world game set in the Terminator universe, which thematically, would be awesome. It’s clear that the devs put their hearts and souls into making the best Terminator game they possibly could, despite having a number of obstacles and stigmas to overcome. there have been some incredibly bad takes surrounding this game upon release, but don’t let that stop you from picking up this game. Pick it up on sale and I think you’ll have a decent time with it.

Knowing basically nothing about this game, I was pleasantly surprised by the time I had wrapped up my playthrough. Glass Masquerade doesn’t have much in the way of a story, but that’s fine because it doesn’t really need one. From what I could gather, you play as a visitor of the International Times Exhibition: Dedicated to the decorative stained glass artisans of the 20th Century. You explore different galleries that represent countries all over the world and solve jigsaw puzzles based on a theme that’s representative to that country. For example: the Russia gallery is a puzzle motif of Yuri Gargarin. From the start menu, Glass Masquerade has a gorgeous and striking stained glass art direction that carries over into each of the 25 puzzles you’ll be solving. The core gameplay loop is… well, puzzle solving. The game initially starts you off at the France gallery, but afterwards you’re free to unlock and explore other galleries as you see fit. Puzzles are rated on a difficulty scale of 3 to 5 stars, though I suspect that might be more of a subjective rating depending on whose playing the game. I personally found all of the 3 star puzzles pretty straight forward, although I didn’t feel much of a difficulty spike between the 4 and 5 star puzzles. Again, your mileage in this game might be different. If you keep hints in this game enabled, each puzzle will provide a few pieces that line up with certain outer edges of the puzzle. This will provide players with a useful jumping off point if, like me, you aren’t that big on jigsaw puzzles in general. Sure, there were some moments where I felt a bit flustered trying to figure out where the pieces fit, but nothing beats the catharsis of having that moment where it suddenly ‘clicks’ for you, rapidly assembling pieces of the puzzle and watching as you place the last few pieces in their place. While you are timed on how long it takes to complete each puzzle, don’t let that scare you off of this game. You aren’t penalized for taking your time on a puzzle and there are no timed/speed running achievements in this game. The music in this game is great, it really helps established the mood of this being a fairly chill, relaxing puzzle game. Overall, Glass Masquerade is a pretty easy game to recommend. My playthrough lasted a little over 4 hours with no use ****.

Despite “Sniper” being in the game’s title, the primary gameplay loop to SGW3 is very reminiscent of games like Far Cry or various other contemporary open-world games in that it invites the player to tackle missions in whatever play style they prefer: Sniping, stealth or frontal assault. This “play it your way” style is also reflected in the game’s 3 skill trees: “Sniper”, “Ghost” and “Warrior”. Sniper is pretty self explanatory: getting kills with your sniper rifle, whether or not you’re holding your breath when you make a kill, kill distance and whether or not it’s a headshot. Ghost is more attributed to stealth: getting kills from in close with your sidearm, performing stealth takedowns and hacking CCTV cameras. Finally, Warrior is based more towards frontal assault: getting kills with your secondary weapon such as assault rifles, shotguns or LMGs. However, despite the invitation to play the game your way, in my experience, I found the sniping to be the most polish and effective way of playing through the game. There is plenty of catharsis to scouting out the mission area, finding a good vantage point and then sniping enemies from on high. Like the previous Sniper Ghost Warrior titles, you have to factor in things like wind speed and direction, bullet drop off and elevation relative to your target. Click in and hold the left thumbstick to steady your aim and a ringed reticle will show up on your scope telling you where to place your shot. While this does take away from the overall challenge of sniping in this game, you playthoough pretty easily without using it, however, there were a few missions where I’m kind of glad that steady aim option. While not as visceral or detailed as the Sniper Elite series, the close up, bullet time, kill cams are still fun to watch as the bullet blows through an unsuspecting target’s head and he slumps to the ground. You’re pretty much given a silenced sniper rifle from the start, so there’s no need to grind different play styles in order to work up to it. Stealthing and frontal assault styles are both kind of mediocre. Stealth can be undone with inconsistent enemy AI and once you’re spotted, not only does everyone in the area know exactly where you are, but they can also rain down mortar fire that locks in your exact location with deadly accuracy. Firing secondary weapons doesn’t feel as gratifying as the sniping and you can die so quickly in a frontal assault, even on Normal difficulty. Much like other contemporary open-world games, you can blow off the main story missions for a bit if you want to explore “Points of Interest”, complete Side Ops are take down various High Value Targets across the game’s three main sandbox maps. There are achievements tied to all of them and exploring certain Points of Interest can unlock special guns to use in the game. This is all fine and good and there’s certainly incentive to do these things, but I do wonder if SGW3 would’ve been better off as a more scripted, linear action game. Couple that with the fact that you have to commute to and from the safehouse in order to start your next mission and I started thinking that SGW3 didn’t need to be shoe-horned into an open-world game for the sake of chasing trends. There are a few other questionable mechanics added to this game, such as the ability to hide in lockers or dumpsters, the option of sleeping in a warehouse to pass the time, even though there it seems to have no effect on your physical fitness or combat capabilities and a crafting system even though the game’s economy gives you enough currency to buy everything you need. I also never got much use of equipment such as Bouncing Bettys, Claymores or the Early Warning devices, since there’s never a spot in the game that forces you into a “defend your position” Horde Mode. Ammo types such as tagging or explosive ammo were barely used in my playthrough. You can tag enemies with your drone and I only used the explosive ammo once during the tutorial when the game made me. A lot of these aspects of the game just felt like throwing **** at the wall and seeing what sticks. Graphics wise, while SGW3 looks good from a distance, upon closer inspection, the various environment textures are of a lower resolution. I liked the lighting in this game, which helped distract me from some of the other graphical shortcomings. However, some of the weather effects like rain and snow are well done. Overall, Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 is just a really mediocre and forgettable FPS with mechanics that have been featured and done way better, in countless other open-world games. I picked it up on sale for $10 and at that price, I think SGW3 can be a serviceable, bargain bin shooter if you’ve got a weekend to kill and are in between major releases.

The core gameplay loop centres around selecting a character class and then shooting your way through enough bad guys to clear the level. Clear enough levels to finish the chapter, of which there are six of them. If you die, you’ll have to start the level again, unless you earn the “Extra Life” combat perk. There are six different classes to choose from: Assaulter, Breacher, Shield, Agent Fergie, Recon and Off-duty Guy. Each class has its own different weapons, gear and skill upgrades as well as having their own strengths and weaknesses. There’s also a general “Team” skill upgrades that carry across all character classes. Throughout each level, each kill, hostage rescued, bomb defused etc. will fill up a perk metre located in the top left corner of your HUD. The perks are: “Body Armour”, “Gear Refill”, “Medkit”, “Respawn Player” (for online co-op gameplay), “Extra Life” and “Sniper Support”. However, depending on your character class selection you may also have access to perks like “Light Machine-gun”, “SMG Assault”, “MP5K SMG” and “Akimbo Pistols” just to name a few. I found the “Sniper Support” perk to be the most useful, since it allows you to tag up to three enemies and kill them, great for the hostage rescue situations or clearing out a room that’s just a straight up death corridor. “Body Armour” and “Medkit” perks were also quite useful for obvious reasons. Each chapter takes you to various levels of increasing challenge which helps keep the game interesting and engaging. Each chapter is comprised of 12 levels. There are four different mission types: “Hostage Rescue”, “Clear Hostiles”, “Bomb Defusal” and “Arrest Warrant”. The former two are going to be the more common mission types, especially early game. “Bomb Defusal” is the only game type that I felt presented a somewhat decent challenge, since your on a time limit (naturally) and the bomb location is randomized on each playthrough of that level. The rest of mission types are all fairly easy to master once you get the hang of the game’s mechanics, enemy types and level layout. The levels are all fairly bit size, lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to maybe several minutes on some of the later maps that are bigger and more challenging. That, along with the “just one more level” addictiveness made it so that I was done Chapter 5 and onto the “Challenges” chapter before I even knew what happened. After completing each level, you’re graded on a 1 to 3 star system. It seems your rating is only affected by killing hostages and using the “Extra Life” perk if you die. Either one of those situations results in a loss of 1 star, so if want 3 stars on a level, it has to be a no death and no hostages killed run. This sounds harder than it is, but once I got use to the core gameplay loop, these runs became fairly easy to achieve. Time to complete and shooting accuracy don’t seem to affect your star rating, so take your time on a level if you need to and don’t worry too much about spraying and praying the odd time if it happens. The game’s art style is great. The pixel art is well done, from the character models and animations, to the level design to the design of the weapons and perks. There’s even gore effects if you gib enemies with an explosion. The sound design is well done too. Guns sound punchy, most enemies go down with a few hits or one hit from a weapons “Focus shot”; I found that the Assault rifles just shredded everything. The sound effects when you gib an enemy with an explosion sound fantastic, just this subtle squishy and splotchy sound that is hard to describe. Enemies go down with an audible pained grunt, so you know when to move on to the next target. The music in this game is alright. I only counted a handful of tracks that loop depending on the level you’re on. It’s not grating or annoying, since the levels are over in just a few minutes, but you’ll definitely notice it long before you’re done with the game. On a technical level, the game runs great on Vanilla Xbox One. Levels load up instantly, which is great for a game where dying means you may have to start the whole level again or die multiple times trying to get a feel for a level. Overall, Door Kickers: Action Squad has plenty of things going for it that make an easy game to recommend. It’s got a fun and engaging core gameplay loop that’s highly addictive, great pixel art, an accessible achievement list and a ton of replay value. The lack of any story may turn some players off, but i think the game is still plenty of fun without it.

The premise of We Should Talk. sounded interesting enough: A choice-and-consequence, narrative adventure that’s suppose to mimic discussions about everyday life and building personal relationships. Seemed like it had potential to create some interesting stories given that the press kit indicated being able to craft discussions with at least 3 or 4 characters. Unfortunately, for a game concept that lives or dies by developing relationships, We Should Talk. doesn’t really do the greatest job of letting you do that. You play as an unnamed woman hanging out at her favourite bar called “The Getaway”, unwinding after a stressful days work. The bar’s atmosphere feels pretty welcoming. A smaller, cozy space lit up by the neon lights around the bar, with music and the chatter of other patrons filling the space around you. After talking, and in my case, flirting, with the bartender Sarah, you’re given a drink of your own creation and the game gets underway. The core gameplay loop focuses on crafting your own responses to various conversations using a dialogue scroll wheel interface. This can allow you to change up what you’re talking about and what sort of tone you want to take in the conversation. For instance, you can choose to get a bit flirty with Sam or play things a bit more straight faced. You can be polite or completely shut down the conversation. You’ll be switching between your current relationship with your partner Sam, your ex-boyfriend Dante, who’s back in town for a new gig and stranger sitting next to you named Jimmy, who looks like he might’ve just been ghosted. You’ll spend most of the game talking via text messages with Sam, your partner who works with kids with disabilities. The conversations, for the most part, flow pretty naturally and you’ll spend most of the game building or in some cases, tearing down your relationship with her. Your relationship with Sam is the one area of the game that feels like it’s had the most work put into it and perhaps that’s the point. However, I didn’t really get that same kind of feeling with the other characters that you can interact with in the game. Aside from getting you your drink and an option to flirt, like I chose, there’s not much in the way of building a connection with Sarah. Which is unfortunate because she seems like a super chill person that I absolutely would like to know more about. There’s your previous relationship with your ex-boyfriend Dante, which in theory, should provide an interesting wrinkle in this game’s overall narrative. However, in practice, the conversation with him is over way too quickly and you don’t get much backstory into what your relationship with him was like, other than maybe one or two lines of dialogue between you two. You can choose to see him on the side which can influence which ending you get, but because of how brief and vague the interaction is, the decision doesn’t feel like it carries much weight or consequence. Lastly, there’s Jimmy, a stranger sat next to you at the bar who mistakenly takes you as his date that he met online. Oddly enough, this is the one conversation that felt the most relatable for me. Other than some brief small talk and the option to befriend Jimmy (there’s an achievement tied to this), the conversation is over pretty quickly with not a whole lot ventured and not a whole lot gained. It plays out about the same why I’d handle myself in this situation: tell him he’s mistaken me for someone else, make some small talk out of politeness and then go back to doing my own thing without really getting invested in their story. I also had a hard time getting invested the main character. Along with being a nameless protagonist who you barely even see throughout the game, there’s not much given to you in terms of her own backstory other than she’s a regular at the bar and that she use to be in a relationship with Dante. You get to more about your partner Sam and her backstory, however, she never really reciprocates the opportunity for you as the player to learn more about your own history. This added some difficulty when it came to getting invested in the relationship with Sam, since history between you two feels so one-sided, it’s tough to get any point of reference when it comes to dealing with/improving your relationship with her. Graphically, the game isn’t anything overly impressive. The bar atmosphere feels great and lively. The models are these heavily stylized, low-poly characters that are fine. However, most of the game is set starting at a nondescript smartphone screen placed on top of some cocktail napkins. Overall, We Should Talk. does have an interesting enough premise about building/managing personal relationships, but in practice, the relationships felt hard to get invested in and are hampered by a very short runtime. This feels more like a demo rather than a fleshed out indie game that ultimately left me wanting more.

The first thing that stood out to me is the cell shaded art style akin to the Borderlands games. The environments are well-lit, colourful and kind of striking in how beautiful they look. The overall design gives off a much more fun, arcade style shooter, helped along by scores popping up on screen when you kills guys, bullet hole decals popping up on screen when you’re getting shot and seeing a geyser of blood erupting from a guys chest after you shot him point blank with a sawed off shotgun. The environments still feel true to the Wild West overall motif. They even mix it up a bit by having levels where you’re fighting guys on a train, fighting your way through a mountainous area inhabited by Native Americans and wading through a flooded swamp marsh to fight guys on a dilapidated old steam boat. Further more, towards the end of the game the environments feel more creepy and ominous as you fight your way through a forest, a ghost town and a cemetery in quick succession. You play as Silas Greaves, a legendary bounty hunter recounting his old stories to some patrons in a saloon in Abilene, Kansas. Each story represents its own chapter that you get to play through and experience with Silas as the narrator. Over the course of the game, Silas will tell his stories about his run-ins with legends like Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy and Jesse James, among others. It all culminates into the story about Silas’s brothers were hanged by a gang of outlaws and Silas wanting to seek revenge. The chapters are all fairly short and you can finish the main story in about 4 hours, but its still a well told story that doesn’t overstay its welcome. In terms of the main campaign, it’s an Old West style FPS. You have 3 different revolvers, 2 kinds of shotguns and 2 kinds of rifles. You can also throw dynamite and there’s even a few sections where you get to hop on a Gatling gun a mow down enemies in droves. The shooting feels really good and responsive, helped along by good sound effects and visual feedback from enemies like watching blood shoot out of the spot where you shot them. The game goes for an arcade style setup where scores are popping off all over the screen and you’re trying to chain kills together in order to keep your combo multiplier active. When you’re done with the Campaign, there’s also an “Arcade Mode” and “Duels Mode”. Arcade Mode has you replaying sections of various levels featured in the Campaign with the goal of racking up the highest possible score, leveraging different kinds of kills, combo multiplies and extra time. Your score is based on a 1 to 3 star rating. Duels Mode has you replaying all of the main boss fights in duels with various levels of the game serving as the backdrop. From a performance standpoint, I played through the game on vanilla Xbox One and the game runs pretty well. Loading times are short, lasting maybe a few seconds. No crashes-to-dashboard, no game breaking bugs or glitches and the frame rate was pretty steady throughout. Overall, I’d say that Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is great game that’s easily the best in the series. I love the game’s art style, the shooting feels tight and responsive and Silas as the main character was better than I would’ve expected.

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You gave them real hell! The trouble came from the city yes! I'm telling you, the reason is there! Have you seen what is happening? It is they who are to blame damn wise men! If we could reach their bosses the city council they would surely say what we must do now the city council yeah! What the hell is this?! Here's the key, use it! Go through the basements and the sewers and you will reach the elevator! There will be a train. That's your only way of getting to the city. Help, you can make it, hurry up! Argh!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

See a lot of these areas are copied and pasted, whole hallways, rooms, so it gets a little confusing. I think this game is making my brain smooth.

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The first thing I learned about this game is that you can make the robot dance by hitting the ‘Y’ button, which is just fantastic in its own right. Add in the fact that there’s an achievement attached to it and you all the motivation in the world to make it dance at least one. Planet of the Eyes is a 2D puzzle platformer where you take control of an unnamed robot that I suspect will probably draw some comparisons to the likes of Wall-E or BD-1. The game starts with a small space shuttle crashing into the ground of an unknown planet. You survive the crash, pop out of the shuttle and discover you’re now stuck on a foreign and hostile world. Not long after that, you come across an audio log, presumable left by your creator, suggesting your explore the planet and hopefully find him. You then proceed to traverse and puzzle solve your way through the world and hopefully reach a satisfying ending. The story is told via audio log narrations that you can collect throughout the game. While there’s no achievement(s) tied to collecting them, the voice over is well done. It strikes a good balance between eerie and cynical. The one aspect of the game that stood out to me the most is the game’s art direction; it’s striking, vibrant and very stylized. The graphics make use of strong, flat colours and simple, subtle gradations with great contrast between the light and dark areas of the game. Along with the use of simple, flat shapes, Planet of the Eyes is a pretty nice game to look at. The core gameplay loop revolves around platforming your way across hazardous areas and solving mostly physics-based puzzles. There are a few times where you’ll also have to evade enemy creatures, but it too is also tied to puzzle solving. There’s the usual trial-and-error moments that come with virtually all games of this genre; one of the platforming puzzles towards the end of the game took several tries for me to finish. While these moments can be marginally frustrating at times, the load times after each death are quite quick and the checkpoint system is pretty forgiving, so I never found myself ascending the slopes of mount rage quit. The mechanics of the puzzles will be familiar to pretty well anybody who has played these types of game before: you push/pull objects, pull levers, time your jumps across platforms, dodge hazardous traps and enemies etc. You can certainly argue that these mechanics are nothing new to genre, but I’d argue when it comes to making good game mechanics and strong and engaging core gameplay loop, the ‘what’ is less important than the ‘how’ and the ‘why’. The mechanics fit the game well, they work as intended and I didn’t come across any game breaking bugs or glitches which can really hamper some physics puzzles. Planet of the Eyes also has some great sound design. The ominous ‘humming’ and ‘droning’ really give off an other-worldly vibe that meshes well with the game’s overall environment. It really helps create a tense and desolate mood for the game. Sound effects for things like bubbling lava, live electrical cables and even your feet clanking against the metal of a destroyed space craft are all well implemented. Overall, I did find some mild enjoyment during my playthrough of Planet of the Eyes. The game has some great art direction, familiar puzzle mechanics and great sound design. A cheap sale price, short play time and a fairly easy 1000G is enough for me to recommend picking this up.

Developed by No Code who are the same studio behind Observation, Stories Untold is a four-part episodic, text-based adventure game with some brief first person exploration sections. Each episode starts off with a brief credit sequence and an opening theme song that reminds me of the TV series Stranger Things. Each episode has it’s own unique setting and different gameplay mechanics. The overall motif of Stories Untold is well done. Each episode gives off a wonderfully rendered 80’s retro vibe that feels authentic. The meticulous attention to detail from the textures on the equipment to the sound design is fantastic. Between this game and Observation, developer No Code seem to really grasp the subtly in horror when it comes to writing a story. That what you can’t see is always scary than what you can see; a monster becomes less scary the more often you see it. Not knowing or seeing what’s the cause of something scary or horrifying creates a strong sense of dread and suspense that keeps a player engaged with a game like Stories Untold. The game’s story telling also does a great a job of blurring the line between what’s real and what’s imaginary. Can we really trust what we’re seeing on screen with each episode? Was that scurrying noise outside real? What about this weird, other-worldly thing we’re witnessing? It’s all woven together extremely well and amounts to telling a thrilling and suspenseful story. On a technical level, the game runs perfectly fine. It’s obviously not the most graphically or hardware intense game I’ve ever come across. I didn’t experience any game breaking glitches, crashes-to-dashboard or bugs while playing on vanilla Xbox One. Music and sound design is fantastic. From the intro credits song to clicking keys on a keyboard to big musical crescendos during intense sections of the game; it’s all well done. Same goes for the voice acting. Overall, I can absolutely recommend playing Stories Untold for it’s strong overall creative direction that involves telling a great, thrilling story while presenting it in well designed, genuine retro environments. This sort of game is highly unlikely to have any mass appeal, but at a fairly low cost and a short playtime of maybe 3-4 hours long, it’s still worth a try. You might end up like me and be pleasantly surprised by this game.

Observation is a sci-fi, story-driven, thriller indie game. The best way I feel like I can sum up the game’s overall motif would be: shoot “2001: A Space Odyssey” in the style of “Paranormal Activity” where you take control of “HAL 9000”. As the player, you take control of S.A.M or the Systems Administration & Maintenance AI program on board the titular space station. The game begins in media res with incoherent radio chatter and static, a dark as pitch room somewhere inside the space station, an emergency broadcast being sent out and a booming brass horns music crescendo. You soon learn that most of the stations crew members are M.I.A except for Dr. Emma Fisher, the station’s medical officer, who has no luck in trying to restore communications with Houston and her five missing crew members. As you continue through the story, you discover that large chunks of the space station are no longer accessible and the station is WAY off of it’s presumed charted course. There’s also this weird, other-worldly entity that occasionally interferes with your system’s programming; flashing “Bring Her” across the screen as well as weird alien-looking symbols. Ultimately, you need to figure out what’s going on and what the plan is for getting out of this desperate situation. The core gameplay loop revolves around you navigating through the station’s camera system in order to address certain situations in various sections. You can only slowly pan the camera around and toggle between 2-3 different camera angles. This helps add a bit of tension to the core gameplay loop, since you’re never really sure whether or not something is going to appear in front of you once you pan to the other side of the room. Or you might switch camera angles and discover some kind of sinister entity is in the same room as you. You can use the cameras to scan documents or hack laptops in order to gather schematics, audio logs, files and pictures, open/close/lock/unlock hatches to other sections of the space station and/or access other electronic devices to complete mission objectives. The game opens up a little bit when Emma gives you the ability to switch to a hovering drone camera that allows you to explore the station more freely, while still allowing you have the same capabilities as the stationary cameras. This helps you in finding collectibles in hard to reach areas of the station as well as allowing you to travel outside the station on the occasional space walk. The core gameplay loop also involves a lot of puzzle solving and while I found the puzzles to be fairly straight forward, the game isn’t going to spoon feed you anything if you’ve forgotten what to do. The puzzles range from scanning an environment for a laptop code, to reactivating the stations coolant systems to reseting the communications array to sent out a distress call. The puzzles all feel uniquely varied and use different aspects of the stations system and as S.A.M, you have the all encompassing knowledge to solve them. The only puzzle that does get reused is the hatch door puzzle where you input line drawings on a grid to either open, close, lock or unlock them. Observation really stands out in it’s atmospheric audio design. The game really does a great job of conveying the sense of deathly quiet isolation in the seemingly limitless emptiness of outer space. Everything from the crackly radio communications to the sounds of airlock decompression all give off the expected muted sounds that make the whole thing feel authentic, which helps with immersing me into the game even more. None of it ever feels tacky or out of place. Graphically, I’d say Observation is great. As I mentioned earlier, the contemporary interiors of the space station are all beautifully rendered. The sky boxes, though mostly empty due to the vastness of outer space, still feel breathtaking to look at when you get the chance. The dark, claustrophobic and foreboding nature of the space station is also well designed, contributing to that sense of unease and suspense. The video filter they’ve applied that makes everything look like it’s running on an old VCR tape was a subtle but noticeable design choice that I liked. I did find the facial animations to be a bit wooden. From a technical and optimization standpoint, I didn’t experience anything in the way of screen tearing or texture streaming. The game never crashed-to-dashboard nor did it ever lag or stutter. The biggest issue I had was the initial loading screen when starting the game: on my end, it took 51 seconds to load the game (yes, I timed it.). In terms of play time, my play through lasted almost 9 and half hours, including collectible hunting and exploration. If you don’t to do either of those, I suspect you can finish the game in around half of that time. Either way, the story never really feels padded out or that it’s overstaying it’s welcome.

You play as Detective Michael Stone, a grim, hardened investigator. He arrives in the town of Pineview to help the local police solve what they and the locals believe is a murder-suicide involving a young couple that recently moved to town. The Sheriff is all but ready to deem the case solved to help put the town at ease in the lead up to a major festival happening next week. Stone believes there more to this than meets the eye and alongside a young, empathetic officer Amy Blunt, you’re tasked with discovering the truth about what really happened. Rainswept flips between two stories: one explores Chris and Diane’s relationship development and the other revolves around Detective Stone trying to solve the case while also battling some demons from his past. Chris and Diane’s relationship starts out as a classic love story. Meeting because of mutual friends, outside and away from the noise and grandeur of a big party, a night lit up by fireflies and paper lanterns. They take a spontaneous trip to some secluded island only to talk for hours under the night sky. Chris even manages to convince Diane to sneak out of her parents’ home and run away with him to Pineview after sneaking into Diane’s home buy climbing up the drain pipe. Along the way however, it starts to become clear that there are some cracks forming in the relationship. “You don’t know me, Chris. when you do… you won’t like who you’ll find.” was a pretty eerie line that stood out to me and in hindsight, offered up some pretty serious foreshadowing. I won’t spoil much else, but the game goes to some dark places with Chris and Diane’s relationship, to the point where their arguments become so vitriolic and toxic I found myself saying “Yeah, you know what, a murder-suicide is probably what happened here!” As much as they apologize and try to make amends after every fight it’s ultimately for nothing. Detective Stone’s story is where the core gameplay loop revolves around. You explore the town of Pineview, collect evidence from the crime scene, talk to the locals about the murder case, discuss next steps with your partner and interview any witnesses or suspects involved in the case. Don’t expect to put the pieces of the puzzle together and solve the mystery yourself; reaping the benefits or suffering the consequences of what that entails. The game effectively does all of that for you. There also dialogue options presented to you throughout the game, but don’t expect it to influence the story in any way. As you progress further in solving the case, it becomes increasingly clear that Stone is dealing with the mental fallout of one of the worst moments of his life. His wife had died while he was working a case and he feels responsible for her death, believing he put her in danger. Visions of his dead wife haunt him, first at night when he tries to sleep, but then bleed into his waking hours as well. These visions and feelings of guilt become so overwhelming towards the end of the game, it effectively inhibits Detective Stone from being able to do his job properly. The apex of this being when he baselessly accuses a suspect of being the murderer during questioning before suffering a mental breakdown. Despite suffering some major setbacks, Stone still manages to solve the case. However, this is where my biggest gripe with the game comes in; the conclusion of the case felt like it was reaching a bit. The art direction is beautiful. Certain scenes in the game are beautiful composed. The backdrop of Pineview’s main street area is made of up of colourful, simple geometric shapes. The character design is a bit more of a mixed bag. While the flat colour and simple forms fit of the characters’ body fit with the overall motif, the character’s proportions feel a little bit strange. Their faces are mostly a blank space save for 2 small black dots that represent their eyes. There were a few scenes where the characters were trying to convey some pretty heavy emotions, but instead, just stared blankly at the screen because of their rudimentary facial features. On a technical level, I did experience some issues with the game. When I was investigating the crime scene, Detective Stone’s walk cycle locked up and he proceeded to glide around like he was on rocket skates. Trying to exit out of the Notebook is a bit finicky at times. There are also issues with some of the character animations: the walk cycle is incredibly janky. It’s very clear they tried to loop the animation but couldn’t get it to work. In fairness, the run cycle is far more fluid. Some movement transition animations appear to be missing. There was one instance when a character went from laying down on the floor to immediately springing up into a kneeling position. Overall, I think Rainswept comes across as a good visual novel. While the story premise is a bit cliched, it doesn’t hold the game back from exploring compelling stories.

The adage: “The pen is mightier than the sword.” and how it ties into the current media landscape has never been more poignant than it is now; we’ve never had mass media like this compared to any other point in history. Headliner decides to tackle this premise more directly. You play as the titular Headliner for NoviNews, the primary major news outlet in the fictional nation of Novistan: a dystopian world where most, if not all, of it’s citizens have been genetically modified before birth, government surveillance is on every street corner and a mysterious plague is sweeping through the nation. Your job is to fill news slots for that night’s broadcast on topics ranging from healthcare to government to law enforcemente etc. Choosing what stories you run has a major influence on the events that happen in Novistan; the citizens take what you publish as gospel. Do you stay objective even if the truth is uncomfortable? Do you keep a consistent message throughout even in the face of contradicting evidence? It’s up to you! The core gameplay loop revolves around getting briefed in each day by your boss before being seated at your desk with a number of articles in front of you to either publish with a green “checkmark” or reject it with a red “X”. What makes the game kind of thought-provoking and even mildly challenging in my initial playthrough is that I wasn’t really sure which stories were true or not as you’re never given much context for Novistan’s backstory, so I was kind of just trusting my instincts when publishing or rejecting articles. On top of that, there are days where you have a certain quota that you have to hit (publish 1-2 articles, publish a maximum of 3 articles etc.) as well as being presented two articles that are stapled together; you can only approve one of them, the other is automatically rejected. The gameplay reminds me of a very rudimentary take on Lucas Pope’s “Papers Please”. While “Papers Please” had a number of different elements that factored into an acceptation or rejection state, Headliner: NoviNews is very binary in it’s decision making. You still get a sense of there being multiple branching paths and factors that impact your decisions for every playthrough, however, the game forces you to publish a number of articles that land on opposite sides of rather polarizing topics with virtually no room to nuance things. Each day after you finish your shift, you make the short walk home to your apartment where you get to the see the results of your decisions play out around you. These segments of the game present strong, visual results that do a wonderful job of illustrating that every choice you make matters. Along with being able to see your decisions play out in the broader world, you also have a few NPCs that you can interact with over the course of the game: Evie, your co-worker and potential love interest who immigrated to Novistan. Justin, your aspiring comedian brother who is battling mental health issues and Rudy, the friendly owner of a family-owned local business. These NPCs offer up a more humanized and in-depth look at the consequences of the articles you publish throughout the game. I felt that all of the characters came across as likeable and even relatable in some instances and you’d be forgiven if you wanted to do right by them. Conversely, you can also royally **** them over and the game isn’t afraid to go to some dark, unpleasant places as a result. Factor in that you also need to keep your boss happy, secure your own income and avoid NoviNews losing corporate funding and you get a tough balancing act that illustrates that decisions are never made in a vacuum. After completing the game, the end screen states that it’s meant to be played multiple times and given that different choices can lead to a number of different outcomes, that’s understandable. What I found to be a bit unexpected was that during my second and third playthroughs, there’s an interesting Groundhog Day-style meta narrative emerging. I breaks when you hit your fourth playthrough, but it still offered up some incentive to replay the game just to see where this narrative would go. My biggest criticism with Headliner would be the heavy-handed and lacking-in-nuance way it presents it’s story and your decisions that influence it. The story takes place over the course of just 2 weeks, so it has to severely escalate things in order to reach certain plot milestones. The game’s graphics are a bit of mixed bag. The 3D characters are these low-poly models that look ugly, it’s very clear they only made like a half dozen or so character models and just copied and pasted them throughout the world. The characters that appear in dialogue screens all have an anime art direction to them; it’s not bad by any means, it’s just not for me. However the art direction for the city background and overall night time atmosphere is well done.

Bulletstorm’s core gameplay loop is to “Kill with Skill” in the form of “Skillshots”. Since most of the enemies can be pretty bullet-spongey, Skillshots represent the most efficient way of killing enemies. Bulletstorm has a database of 131 different Skillshots for the player to try and pull off throughout the course of the single player Campaign and various other game modes. Skillshots reward you with points for killing enemies in the most hilarious and creative ways possible: shooting an enemy is the ass rewards you with a “Rear Entry” skillshot, putting a kill shot into an enemies neck rewards you with the “Gag Reflex” skillshot as he gargles and chokes on his own blood and going full-on “THIS. IS. SPARTA!” and kicking an enemy off of high places rewards you with a “Vertigo” skillshot, among many others. Some are tougher to pull off than others; I ultimately settled into a routine of using a half dozen or so Skillshots that I could reliably pull off. Some are locked behind certain combat encounters and some are locked behind a weapon’s alt-fire mode. On top of being fun to execute, the points you acquire from Skillshots serve as the in-game currency which you can spend on weapon upgrades and ammo by linking up with a “Dropkit” (which will also give you access to your Skillshot checklist and gameplay stats) via your “Energy Leash”. While you can acquire small amounts of points from simply shooting enemies, you get far more points by executing Skillshots. The game also utilizes the tried and true “bullet time” mechanic, where kicking or pulling an enemy towards you with the “energy leash” triggers a bullet time sequence where you can better place your shots or quickly survey your surroundings and pull off a Skillshot using environmental hazards like a giant cactus or live electrical cables. In terms of weapons, Bulletstorm offers up a pretty decent arsenal for you to leverage. There’s your standard assault rifle (Peacemaker Carbine) and pistol (The Screamer) but there’s also a quad barrel shotgun (the Boneduster) which became my go-to weapon in most combat arenas, the “Flailgun” which fires a length of chain with two mines attached to both ends which can wrap around enemies and restrict their movements or the “Penetrator” which fires a giant drill head that can pierce through multiple targets and embed them into walls or ceilings. Each weapon has an alt-fire mode known as “Charges” that need to be unlocked. The game’s single player campaign has seven acts and lasts about 5-6 hours, providing a fast paced, fun and easy to pick up experience. I’ve done three play throughs of the campaign because I really enjoyed my time with it and wanted to see how many different Skillshots I could unlock. The campaign has two collectible strands in the form of “Newsbots” and “Electroflies”. The enemy variety adds to the challenge of the game and forces you to adjust your play style on the fly. Some enemies will dodge your kick unless your force them into a pain state, some are too quick to be leashed and some can only by killed by hitting glowing weak spots. Some enemies will charge at you with melee weapons, some shoot at you from a distance and some are deadly in close combat so target prioritization in combat arenas is advantageous. Aside from the campaign, there’s Anarchy mode, which is a 1 to 4 player horde mode. It’s perfectly serviceable, if unspectacular. Odds are you’ve played this sort of mode a bunch of times before. The other game mode I checked out was Echoes mode which serves as an arcade style, score challenge mode that drops you into short sections of the single player campaign and tracks your score based on kills, skill shots, time completion etc. and then assigns you a rating from 0 to 3 stars. There are local and global leaderboards that host your score and I found this mode to be quite enjoyable, playing through all 30 Echoes. On a technical level, Bulletstorm does have some issues. I did experience some frame rate drops in a few of combat arenas, some stuttering and 2 crashes to dashboard in the later stages of the game. Graphically, the game looks great, as a remastering probably should and the load times aren’t overly long. The levels are very linear and don’t offer much in the way of exploration. My only major gripe with Bulletstorm is it’s price point. $40 CAD for a remastered game that was only 6 years old, is kind of a joke. Overall, Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition is fun, mindlessly fun shooter that’s easy to pick up and provides some decent replay value via it’s Skillshots database and various game modes besides the main campaign. If you missed out on playing the original, I definitely recommend picking this up

Need for Speed Carbon signalled the end for what was easily a 3 to 4 year peak for the Need for Speed franchise. The night atmosphere reminds me so much of Need for Speed Underground 2, a game I thought was highly addictive. The addition of muscle cars was a fantastic decision and one that I had hoped would be made for this game when it was released. The canyon races were a welcomed addition as it was both immensely fun to fly down the twisting, narrow canyon roads at high speed and butt-clenchingly tense since it was possible to drive off the edge of a cliff and lose the race, something that was not present in any other Need for Speed title. Overall, Need for Speed Carbon is still an endlessly fun game, even if it didn't quite measure up to Need for Speed Most Wanted.

Night Call is a narrative, investigative game that sees you play as Houssine, a Parisian cab driver who works the night shift. Throughout the game, you learn that Houssine has been haunted by a murky past and a criminal record who has been afforded a second chance at life. You’re carrying out your nightly routine when a serial killer murders your passenger and puts Houssine in a coma for a month. You awake from your coma and you’re eventually back on the job. Not long after that a cop by the name of Busset enters your cab and effectively blackmails you into digging up clues in regards to her various suspects in the murder case. Because of Houssine’s shady and criminal past, Busset tells Houssine that he’ll go jail for the crime if he refuses to work with her. There are three cases to choose from and the investigation for each of them last 7 nights. Each case’s core gameplay loop is the same: ferrying passengers to their destinations all across Paris, listen to their stories, get paid, dig up clues for your case and hopefully accuse the right suspect. When your shift is over, you go back to your apartment to parse through information and clues pertaining to the case. I rather enjoyed the duality that Night Call presents here: working a fairly mundane and unspectacular job as a cab driver in contrast to the information-heavy, problem-solving and no doubt stressful job as a private investigator where it’s your ass on the line if you **** this up. The interactions and storytelling from various cab patrons is where Night Call gets kind of interesting. Passengers really seem to open up to you, talking about their relationship issues, their life’s stories and various personal experiences, among others. Some stories/characters are memorable, just a name a few: there’s one passenger who tells a story about how he was so startled by a flock of birds in his backyard that he ran back inside and slammed the sliding door shut, not realizing that his family’s dog was sticking it’s neck out through the open door and was effectively decapitated. This is the sort of death sequence I’d expect out of a Final Destination movie, so seeing something like that pop up here was kind of jarring and morbidly ridiculous. You also get a passenger that is a black cat that has seemingly run away from home. Not only does is it give you a destination, it leaves a decent tip for you as well. Lastly, there’s this one passenger that’s recently undergone some form of brain surgery to merge his brain with a computer chip that allowed him to not only obtain information on a bystander you both drove past, but also hack an ATM machine that allowed him to pay his fare. There are also some surreal interactions that involves a ghost from a bygone era of Paris and a time traveller warning you about serious events in the future. There are dialogue choices with each passenger interaction and while some of dialogue can culminate into grabbing achievements, most of them don’t seem to be of much consequence in terms of steering the direction of the story one way or the other from it’s mostly pre-design ending. Some passenger interactions will grant you a clue to help with your investigation as indicated by a file folder notification that reads “New Clue available in your room”. You can also drive to various investigation points marked with a eye ball icon on the map which provide you with important information and more story related content. Night Call also has some resource management mechanics as well. You have to make sure that you don’t run out of gas for your cab or run out of money. If you run out of money, you fail the investigation. I understand the hint of realism the developers might’ve been going for here as well as adding in some other form of difficulty not related to the investigations, but in practice this resource management loop was a non-factor. I’m convinced you have to actively **** yourself over here if you want fail an investigation this way. When your shift is over, you head back to your apartment to sort out information you’ve collected. The suspects and any clues are all displayed on a cork board with certain clues being connected. Unfortunately, for an investigative, detective style game, you’re not in control of which clues and information get connected to which suspect; the game does all of that for you. This is unfortunate since it does remove a layer of difficulty and control for the player and is kind of immersion-breaking for me. Overall, I found Night Call excelled at being more of a visual novel than an investigative game. The stories told are memorable, while the investigation and detective mechanics are fairly bare bones and come up short in their overall execution. However, I’m willing to take a chance on an indie game with an interesting premise, even if the execution is flawed in some aspects.

My first instinct was that this was going to be a quick 1000G game and not much else. Then I started wondering if maybe Aery was some sort of hidden gem that I had simply skipped over. I had played plenty of games that are an easy 1000G, have a short playtime and are fairly inexpensive that have gone on to tell an amazing story, have a standout voice acting performance or a strong and engaging core gameplay loop… And you know what, sometimes you really should go with your first instinct. Aery is a third-person flying game where you take control of a bird that looks a lot like a parrot. You start the game by flying toward a giant owl in the sky who tells you that it’s time to spread your wings and go on an adventure, to follow in the footsteps of your ancestors and discover the world around you. You then proceed to fly through several brightly coloured, (some to the game’s detriment) low polygon environments that resemble a tropical island, an old, abandoned town and a snow-capped, mountainous region, just to name a few. Your objective is to collect a certain number of glowing, white feathers in order to complete each level. Some of the levels are pleasant to look at such as the Ice Mountain level where you’re flying through Torii gates. The dark purple colour scheme in contrast to the snow caps are quite beautiful and makes spotting the feathers pretty easy, even at a distance. Some of the other levels are just brutal, like the Pagoda Village where you’re flying around in this blindingly bright space with very little contrast between colours and environmental objects which makes spotting the feathers an absolute bastard. You also have to collect 13 feathers here, the second most in any level and it’s a far more open space than some of the other levels which are more narrower in design. There’s no voice acting or narration in the game, you’re told the story through text blocks appearing on screen in a brush script typeface. The music is just one track that’s on a constant loop and you’ll probably be hearing it when you try to go to sleep. The audio mixing/controls in this game also feel kind of off. The music volume can either be obnoxiously loud or borderline muted with very little in between, despite the fact that you’re giving a slider to control the volume incrementally. The game’s sound effects, like when you collect a feather or fly into an obstacle, suffers from a similar issue; it’s either jarringly loud or incredibly muted with not a lot of in between. The control scheme in this game is pretty straightforward, you fly at a constant speed with no way of accelerating or decelerating yourself. You use the left stick to pitch up and down and turn right and left. The LB and RB’s allow you to do a barrel roll in their respective directions. Two quality of life improvement I would’ve added: 1) is the ability to rotate the camera around using the right thumbstick. Given that the core gameplay loop is to fly around and hunt for collectibles, being able to freely look around while doing so would’ve been a nice addition, but I got through the game easily enough without it. 2). When you fly into an obstacle, set the player back a reasonable distance from the obstacle they ran into rather than set them back at the beginning of the level. Sure, the levels are fairly short, but this still came across as a minor annoyance during my play through. My play through of this game came in at about one hour, so definitely among the shortest games I’ve played so far. Achievements are all story-based and unmissable. The game's difficulty curve is basically a flat line. The levels don't seem to ramp up in difficulty the further you progress. It's a shame, since this could've made the core gameplay loop a little more engaging. As an aside, while there’s not much for me to like about Aery, I totally understand and respect the situation that EpiXR Games are in. Aery most likely represented a test run, a “dip your toe in the water” scenario where they wanted to see what they could do as an initial build **** and then set that ecosystem in place for any future games. Given that this is a studio with just 5 employees at the time of this review and that they’re also self-publishing means that they probably don’t have the greatest amount of money or resources to work with. Add in the fact that I can count on one hand how many games they’ve currently developed at the time of this review and I can totally respect what they’re trying to accomplish. Screen caps of Aery - Broken Memories looks promising from a level perspective, so perhaps they’ve already taken in the lessons and experiences from Aery and put it towards building a better sequel. Aery is not the game for me, but I respect the idea of this being a chill, relaxing game that can be enjoyed by someone else as well as offering support for indie devs trying to break onto the scene of the games world.

Shadow Warrior is a first-person shooter/hack-and-slash game. The core gameplay loop is to cut down hordes demons in combat arenas using a variety of guns or your katana. The guns consist of a revolver, an uzi, rocket launcher, flamethrower, shotgun and crossbow. You can also throw shurikens, but they’re kind of weak and not overly accurate to throw. Occasionally, fallen enemies will drop “Demon hearts”, which you can use to take down a sizeable group of lower tiered enemies with a certain radius of you. You can also acquire a skill that allows you to pick up a “Demon’s Head” and use that fight enemies as well. Each weapon has secondary fire modes as well as two other upgrades which you can acquire using money in the Weapon upgrades section: Just to name a few, the revolver fires off rounds in rapid succession like those old Cowboy movies, the uzi has a dual-wield option thats great for crowd control, but you chew through your ammo, the shotgun can equip a quad barrel attachment, since the standard double barrel wasn’t really doing it for me, and can be primed to fire all four shots at once and the crossbow shoots explosive bolts, although I found the splash damage on them to be kind of underwhelming. The movement speed is fast and smooth, just like the original game and akin to other FPS games from that era. The guns sound punchy and powerful and the overall pace of the combat is quite fun and offers up a decent challenge. The levels are broken up into chapters that all progress linearly. There’s also little branching areas that allow for secret hunting. The individual level design, at it’s core, is essentially: hallway, arena, hallway, unlock this door, arena, hallway etc.. That’s not to say that’s bad or anything, for two reasons: 1). The combat in this game is pretty fun and even hectic at times. They throw a variety of enemies at you at increasing numbers, especially in the later combat arenas. Some you can two-hit with the pistol, some are more bullet spongey to the point of almost being mini-boss material. Some will charge you head on, others will attack from a distance with projectiles, so you will have to practice your target prioritization and use Wang’s dodge ability. 2). The game’s art direction is great. The way they’ve been able to render the beautiful architecture of Japanese temples as well as some of the mountainous/cavernous areas of the “Shadow Realm” are well done and help distract from the levels basic layout. The game has three in-game currency methods: “Money”, “Karma” and “Skills”. I never really found the “Powers” to be of much use, except for the one that allows you to partially regenerate your health. Nor did I really get much use out of some of the active “Skills” upgrades. They all revolve around double tapping the left thumb stick in a certain direction and then holding down the LT to charge it up and then release. Sometimes I would try it and it wouldn’t trigger, other times I’d trigger it unintentionally and most of the the time during in the heat of combat, I simply couldn’t be arsed to try it, since I found it way more expedient to just shoot incoming enemies or dice them with my sword. The good news is that Shadow Warrior is balanced in a way where you don’t have to use any of these “Powers” if you don’t want to. I was still able to complete the game using only weapon upgrades and some of the passive “Skills” upgrades. On a technical/performance level, Shadow Warrior does have some issues. Some combat encounters reduce the frame rate down to single digits. Thankfully it never really screwed me over and I never experienced frame rate drops during boss fights. The loading screens can run a bit long. Graphically, Shadow Warrior isn’t the greatest, but that’s negated by the game’s great art direction. There are some audio issues where the timing of the sound effects didn’t align with the actions on screen, however this was mostly related to cutscenes. My biggest gripe with Shadow Warrior is Lo Wang’s hit box detection. It feels like it extends 20 feet around his body. Enemies swipe at me from several feet away and their attacks still hit me. Splash damage from environmental explosions still hurt me even if I was over 15 feet away. Some boss attacks still got me even after I was well out of their range of attack. I found myself saying “That didn’t get me and that got me somehow”. This was probably the most frustrating part of Shadow Warrior, seeing as how I can only imagine how much that’s going to **** you over on harder difficulties. Overall, seeing Shadow Warrior get a contemporary reboot was something I was glad to see. Hopefully it gets new generation of gamers on board with the Shadow Warrior franchise. It’s a fun, fast-paced throwback FPS title that’ll have you slaying hordes of demons while tossing out corny puns and one-liners like an 80’s action star.

Get Even is a first-person psychological thriller where you play as Cole Black, an ex-military member turned contract killer. Gameplay-wise, it's is primarily an adventure, puzzle game that sees you exploring either derelict asylums, buildings or these fractured, dream-like environments that provide you more backstory and exposition. Black is armed with a smartphone that has 5 apps: an evidence scanner, a UV light, a map, thermal vision and a messaging/phone app. I found myself using the scanner app the most since a fairly decent chunk of the game’s evidence collectibles need to be scanned in order for the game to register it as collected. You can also use the scanner app to manipulate anomalies in their environment and use them to your advantage, such as scanning the outline of a concrete divider on the phone screen and making it appear to provide you some cover from enemies. The puzzles in the game are fairly straight forward, mostly involving opening/closing valves ton control water flow or pulling different levers/switches to activate power sources. Each level has various notes, images and recordings that you can collect. They’re all stored on giant cork boards inside the game’s “Filing Cabinet room” which serves has the game’s central HUB. You can warp to and from this room by focusing on a certain picture frame within each level to see what clues you’re missing. It would’ve been nice to have seen the game flesh out this evidence collecting feature a bit more. You have all these documents and recordings pinned up and connected to each other with strings and push pins on giant cork boards, a very “Hollywood” set up and you’re never given a choice to make any deductions or draw any conclusions yourself; the game’s plot progressions does it for you. While gathering clues isn’t needed to progress the game, get 100% level completion and you get a 4 digit code on the bottom left of that level’s board which can then be entered into a keypad somewhere within that level to unlock a secret and/or hidden memory. The overall story and immersion is where Get Even shows off it’s strengths. While it does take a while for the story to unfold and can be confusing in the early going, the end result is worth it. Get Even certainly isn’t shy about going for long stretches where it’s providing exposition via cut scenes, scanning for clues or navigating through these weird, broken memory levels. There are certain points in the game where you have to make a choice that’ll affect your experience later on. Some of them aren’t really on-the-nose but still matter and others may have some serious unintended consequences. The FPS element where I have my biggest gripe with the game. First off, the shooting in this game is terrible. Aiming feels a little clunky, there’s no hit markers, no hip-firing reticle and even getting a head shot can sometimes prove to be inconsistent. Second of all, those secrets that you unlock by getting 100% level completion, are different guns. There’s an automatic pistol, sub machine gun, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle and a crossbow. Since I found the shooting in this game to be pretty terrible, I didn’t see much motivation to try out the different weapons to see how they handled. The only saving grace here is the prototype of the “Corner Gun” which you acquire as part of a mission, does pretty much what you think it does: it allows you hide around a corner, bend your gun around it and then aim and shoot using a crosshair on a small display screen. But even the “Corner Gun” has it’s shortcomings; there’s no iron sight aiming when you’re aiming straight ahead for some reason, instead, you awkwardly hold the gun upwards a bit and then aim using the crosshair on the screen. Lastly, the game rips you for going in guns blazing, saying something to the effect of “This memory is unstable, please refrain from causing unnecessary disruptions.” or “Damnit Black, typical, I knew i couldn’t count on you to going in stealthily.” While you won’t fail a level for shooting first and asking questions later, I’d rather the game not tell me I’m being an idiot or doing something it perceives as “wrong” based on the way I want to play. Also, the game has a “good” and a “bad” ending and getting the good ending is predicated on a less lethal, stealthier approach, so I found myself even less motivate to engage in the combat mechanics since I didn’t want to shoot for the bad ending on my first play through. Overall, Get Even tries to blend FPS, storytelling and investigative exploration and I’m not sure it’s a mixture that entirely works. The game tells an interesting story and fleshing out the puzzles and investigative elements might’ve been the smarter play here. I still had a good time with, I’m glad I didn’t skip this and for getting it on sale for $10 CAD, it represented a great value purchase.

The game is set in medieval France. The Inquisition is making in-roads into the country and a rat plague is killing people. You play as Amicia de Rune, daughter of Nobleman Robert de Rune, as the two are exploring the forest with their dog Lion. This serves as the tutorial where you learn how to use your sling and traverse the landscape stealthily. Not long after that however Lion chases a wild boar into a darker area of the forest and gets dragged to his death by some unknown force, causing Robert and Amicia to retreat back to the safety their home. Their respite is brief as the Inquisition invades their home, slaughtering everyone, including Robert. This forces Amicia’s mother to sacrifice herself to ensure that Amicia and her younger brother Hugo get as far away from their home as possible. The game’s characterization of it’s two main protagonists are well done. Their relationship at the start is kind of awkward. It’s clear that Amicia has a stronger relationship with her Father than with her Mother and Hugo, the latter two spending most of their time together in Hugo’s room as Beatrice tends to some ailment in Hugo’s blood. Being forced into this dangerous new world alone certainly doesn’t help Amicia and Hugo get off on the right foot. Amicia serves as the voice of reason and responsibility while Hugo serves as the innocent, wide-eye kid that he is. Initially, Hugo’s naivety and childlike whimsy, such as being fascinated by frogs blowing bubbles while underwater, frustrates Amicia as the two of them are trying to avoid danger and survive being hunted by enemy soldiers. However, it’s that same childlike wonder that makes Hugo easier to like as it’s juxtaposed to this death and disease riddled world. Throughout the game, Hugo and Amicia can stumble across various types of flowers, which serve as one strand of the games collectibles. Once discovered, Hugo plucks one of the flowers and places it in Amicia’s hair, an act that does a phenomenal job of illustrating the development and warmth of their relationship. As the game progresses, the two grow more trusting of each other and their abilities, becoming more comfortable around each other often cracking jokes and sharing stories about their parents. By the end, you really do get a sense of how far Hugo and Amicia have come in terms of their familial bond. At first, the core gameplay loop revolves around primarily stealthing around enemy soldiers. Although it’s not always a welcomed strategy, there are times where direct combat is involved using your sling to launch rocks to stun or kill enemies. Head shots are the name of the game here, but the game auto aims like a bastard, making head shots almost insulting easy. The AI can sometimes be as dumb as door nails, all too easily distracted by loud noises, then slowly trudge over to where they though they heard it, stand there befuddled for a minute and trudge back with the customary “Must’ve been my imagination”. I was also able to cheese an enemy by getting him stuck around a light trap and horde of rats, walk around him even though he could clearly see me and then take him out with some “Somnum”. Then the game introduces the plague in the form of rats that behave like they’re demonically possessed. Their glowing red eyes and collective squealing as they nip at your feet, waiting for the moment to devour you and strip your body of all it’s flesh like a pack of piranhas. They erupt from the ground like a geyser and burst through the walls, flooding an area like water. The shear number of them on screen at any one time and how beautifully they’re animated is quite the spectacle. The gameplay loop then centres around using fire and light puzzles to move hordes of rats out of your path, trap them somewhere or cause them to kill enemies for you. Needless to say if you get caught amongst the rat horde, it’s has the potential to be an instant death. The game also features a crafting system that allows you to upgrade your Sling, Equipment and Alchemy. You can craft projectiles such as “Ignifier” which allows you to light torches, braziers and flammable materials. “Devorantis” which, when aimed at an enemy’s helmet, will force them to throw it off priming them for a head shot from the sling. Performance wise, this game is great. The graphics are absolutely stunning, it’s the type of world that I’d love to explore more in VR, minus the rat plague of course. Not once during my 13 hour play through did the game ever hitch, stutter, lag, crash or run sub-optimally in any way. Overall, A Plague Tale tells a beautiful story of family relationship building and resilience in face of monumental danger. A loss of innocence but a gaining of maturity and self-sufficiency while dealing with the horrors of war and disease. This game really put Asobo Studio on the map for me and it’s one of the best games I’ve played this year.

You play as Jake Dunn, codename "Nomad", a U.S. Delta Force soldier working as apart of "Team Raptor", they're dispatched to a fictitious island somewhere east of The Philippines when they receive a distress call from a research team on the island informing them they've discovered some temple that houses technological advancements beyond human capabilities. Raptor's mission is to evacuate the research team and secure any valuable information from the dig site. The team skydives towards the island, but Nomad gets separated from the rest of the team, winds up crash landing on a beach and needs to fight his way through the island’s jungle while taking down North Korean troops in order to regroup with his team. Nomad, along with the rest of the squad, are all outfitted with high-tech weapons as well as "Nanosuits". The Nanosuits give the player super human strength and speed, protection from gunfire and explosives and allow you to temporarily turn invisible. Nomad eventually regroups with Team Raptor, only to discover that an invading race of space aliens starts picking off members of the team as well as North Korean soldiers. Despite this, Nomad and the remaining members of Team Raptor continue their exploration deeper into the island, uncovering it’s hidden secrets and upholding the mission. So how does the game look and feel after roughly 13 years? Well, on the whole, I’d say it’s still good. The game’s environments are beautifully rendered; I particularly liked the way the darker/night missions are lit as well as the way they handled the dense jungle foliage. The main character models are well done and the various textures are still high quality even after all these years. The inspiration from Crytek’s previous game, Far Cry, is pretty apparent here in terms of the game’s environment design, overall art direction and angles of attack for clearing out an encampment. Graphically, Crysis really does give you a sense just how ahead of the curve Crytek and the CryEngine were and they certainly lend credence to the “But can it run Crysis?” memes. Gameplay-wise, Crysis comes with your standard, yet limited arsenal of FPS weapons: pistol, shotgun, two assault rifles, rocket launcher, semi-automatic rifle, explosives and one or two one-off weapons. If you pick up another one, you can dual-wield pistols in this game and any game that has you John Woo-ing your way through it gets a pass in my book. You do burn through ammo quicker by doing it, but overall, it’s still worth it. In order to make up for the lack of weapon selections, the weapons in Crysis offer alt-fire modes/attachments. For instance, the SCAR allows you to equip an under-barrel grenade launcher, a fully and semi automatic mode and the option of shooting non-lethal tranquilizer darts and incendiary rounds. The shotgun can be modded to have a tighter spread at the cost of stopping power. The pistol even has a burst fire option. If you do run out of ammo, the Nanosuit allows you to pick up heavy objects, such as fuel barrels, and throw them at enemy soldiers either stunning them or killing them outright. Like Far Cry, Crysis gives the player options as to how they want to deal with most combat encounters. Do you mark the targets with your binoculars and snipe them from afar? Do you go in guns blazing and rely on your Nanosuit’s shield feature for some extra protection? Or, do you stealth it up by leveraging your Nanosuit’s cloaking feature? It’s up to you! Aiding you in your combat approach is the ability to customize your weapons on the fly, equipping and removing attachments such as sights, scopes, silencers and grenade launchers as you see fit. The game also provides you with some vehicle options, including civilian cars, jeeps and trucks where you can control a mounted machine gun and a tank for one mission which is endlessly fun. Missions progress linearly, but the game will also throw a few secondary objectives to coincide with your primary one. They’re not overly difficult; it’s mostly “disable this jammer here” or “collect this important intel there”. They’re not that far off the main mission path and there are 3 achievements tied to the number of secondary objectives you complete, so there is some incentive to do them. On a technical level, Crysis is still fine. As you might expect, it does take a bit of a hit on the Xbox 360. The game hitches for a moment while saving a checkpoint, I occasionally noticed some draw distance jankiness when looking through the binoculars or a rifle scope, the frame rate can go in the toilet when there’s a lot of fast-paced action. The enemy AI can be kind of stupid at times, particularly when I was sniping. On the plus side, the game never once hard crashed on me and the loading screens are not overly long. So 13 years later, Crysis is still a game that I recommend you play for it’s well-aged graphics, fun FPS gameplay and relatively good story.

Adam's Venture: Origins is a third person, point-and-click, adventure, puzzle solving game that ultimately comes across as... a budget Indiana Jones game. The story is incredibly linear with no real incentive for replay-ability; no choice and consequences, no collectible items etc. The game's release structure was a 3 part, episodic deal with episode 1 being released on October 2, 2009, episode 2 being released on April 8, 2011 and the third and final episode being released on March 9, 2012. Adam's Venture: Origins release is a remake of those previous episodes, cobbled together for next-gen consoles. Set in the 1920's, you play as the titular character: Adam Venture, a young and arrogant explorer searching for the Garden of Eden and Solomon's Temple. You're first tasked with searching your father's mansion to find his new assistant, Evelyn Appleby. Two solved puzzles later and the two of you are now able to enter the mansion's library, where Adam discovers a book that leads him into an underground cave beneath the mansion. There, Adam discovers a secret that leads him and Evelyn on a globetrotting adventure in the sense that they get shuttled along from one set piece to another by solving puzzles. Trying to control Adam feels really stiff and awkward. His jumping ability feels kind of floaty and his mantling ability feels unresponsive. The animations feel really janky and wooden. Lip synching is borderline non-existence as you can barely see characters' mouths moving when they speak. The game's dialogue and voice acting are largely terrible. A lot of Adam's dialogue is filled with sarcastic comments or puns that mostly come across as unfunny or irritatingly boisterous; I found myself cringing nearly every time he spoke. I'm not sure if this was an attempt for him to sound courageous or charismatic, but it fails all the same. A few of Adam's interactions with Evelyn are cartoonishly misogynistic to the point where it's not even remotely offensive, just straight up cringey. For instance, their conversation about who should be driving the car when they escape from an makeshift airport: "This situation calls for a man behind the wheel!" or when they're inside Soloman's Temple, "...I'm the brains, you're the looks. Nothing wrong with that." Now I just kind of chalked all that up to "It's the 1920's and that's just kind of how things were back then." But when you already have a unlikable and irritating character, this sort of dialogue certainly doesn't make Adam feel more relatable or endearing. Despite all of this, the game attempts to force Adam and Evelyn into a romantic relationship, which goes over like a tonne of bricks, given Adam's obnoxious and arrogant personality and Evelyn having almost no personality at all. The overall gameplay experience feels really mediocre at the best of times. It's very linear the entire way. Doors and gates are locked except for the one that you need to pass through. There's invisible walls that prevent you from exploring anything further. The underground caves suffer from this as well. This is unfortunate because the cave environments are somewhat well done in terms of lighting and graphics, but you don't get to see or explore much of them beyond the linear story path. Ultimately, you're really just going through the motions of following the game's pre-determined single path with very little if any extra interactivity. The one saving grace are the puzzles. There are quite a few of them and the game is not going to hold your hand through any of it. Some of them are fairly straight forward, other's feel a bit more challenging and rewarding that really make you stop and think for a few minutes. They do end up recycling a few of them, however. There's a grid layout addition puzzle that revolves around adding roman numerals to the sum of 10 that pops up at least 3 or 4 times in the same level area. Performance wise, the game is a bit of a mess. Textures are of mediocre quality and suffer from obvious pop in. Some of the graphics are badly aliased, like character's hair and foliage. The game also suffers from some clear screen tearing as well, specifically during the mansion level. Arguably, the funniest and most memorable moment from this game has to be when the main villain captures Evelyn and they're navigating their way through the temple. There's a cutscene where he talks about his endgame in a poorly contrived attempt to sound evil or convincing. The camera cuts to Evelyn, who is not only not bound or secured the way you'd expect a captured victim to be, but then proceeds to starting doing some stretches as if she's been sitting hunched over a computer for too long. All while this bad guy is revealing his evil plan... I'm going let that slide since memorable moments in games are still important to me.

Gameplay-wise, Dying Light is what would happen if you combined Dead Island’s combat, crafting, environment design and overall art direction with the parkour/free-running mechanics and level verticality of Mirror’s Edge. This makes traversing Dying Light’s open world incredibly fast, smooth and fun. You can bound from one rooftop to another effectively playing a giant game of “The Floor is Lava”. This also provides a pretty effective alternative to combat encounters. If you draw more than 3-4 standard enemies at once, you’re better off just pulling back and parkour-ing your way onto a rooftop for some relief. The parkour elements are what really stood out to me while playing through Dying Light. Dying Light’s combat mechanics are comparable to Dead Island’s considering it’s the same developer, that’s not really a surprise nor an indictment on the game. It’s melee-centric combat that features a variety of blade and blunt weapons. There are some options for guns, like a pistol, military rifle, police rifle, shotgun and bow. There’s also stamina management and stun locking enemies with kicks and weapon strikes. Weapons and item crafting is also very similar to Dead Island; you scavenge and loot buildings and vehicles for crafting materials, which can then be used for weapon upgrades such as “durability’ or “handling”. You can also acquire blueprints that require specific materials in order give your weapons elemental damage upgrades. You can also craft Medkits, grenades, boosters and lock picks, among others. I personally got more use out of blade weapons than blunt ones, slicing off limbs and heads was never not satisfying and watching the geyser of blood shoot out of the stumps was equally parts gory and delightful. I tried to limit my use of firearms to when I was fighting thugs in isolated environments such as the insides of buildings as part of a mission objective. They can block and dodge your attacks with melee weapons, making them a bastard to try and kill. If more of them gang up on you, it’s game over. They can also shoot you with assault rifles and they can tank more shots than Crane can. Unless you have throwable weapons, this can prove to be a bit of challenge without a gun. The gunplay itself feels great; firearms sound powerful and punchy and while it’s not Call of Duty or Battlefield good, it holds up well enough. Dying Light features a dynamic day and night cycle. During the day, the zombies are mostly non-threatening, unless you come across a fairly sized horde or a few “Virals” that’ll chase you. During the night time, however, is where Dying Light really shines and borders on being a horror game. Along with environments going incredibly dark, the game also introduces a new kind of zombie. Referred to as “Volatiles”, you get a glimpse of one during an early game cutscene, they are bigger, faster and more aggressive than another zombie in the game. Get spotted by one and it immediately becomes the most dangerous enemy in Dying Light. Avoiding it means using all your precision parkour techniques as getting caught or trying to stand and fight results in almost instant death. The night time atmosphere can provide some genuinely terrifying and tense moments. The game also provides you with more XP if you’re playing at night, as well as provide you with a bulk of bonus XP when you decide to take refuge in a safe house and sleep. If that’s not your thing, however, you can skip the night time altogether and go back out in the relative safety of day time. Dying Light features a skill tree that you can sink XP into and grab upgrades, such as crafting twice as many Medkits using the same amount of material, unlocking the ability to drop kick and grapple with zombies, among many others. It’s broken down into 4 categories: Survivor, Agility, Power and Legendary. Your play style will dictate which skill tree you’ll be levelling up the quickest; mine was the Power skill tree which is essentially combat, followed closely by the “Agility” skill tree, which is essentially parkour-ing. The Legendary skill tree only unlocks once you’ve maxed out your other three: Survivor skill-tree 25, Agility 24 and Power 24. Gameplay tip: Try and get the grappling hook upgrade as quickly as you can. This makes traversing the environments even faster and will be a huge quality of life improvement during the second half of the game. Graphically, Dying Light is great. The open world is beautifully rendered and the gore effects are awesome. The game is also well-optimized, even on vanilla Xbox One. Load screens are incredibly short for an open world game and I didn’t run into many issues with texture pop-ins, screen tearing or draw distance. Overall, I can certainly recommend Dying Light for it’s beautiful open world environments, dynamic day and night cycles, it’s fast, fluid parkour mechanics and it’s tried and true zombie slaying combat.

A follow up to the previous game: Decay, Decay: The Mare is an episodic, first person, point-and-click adventure, horror game played from the perspective of Sam, who was recently institutionalized for drug abuse in a place called "Reaching Dreams". After taking some medicine that was left in his room and going to bed, his first night goes off the rails and Sam finds that his dreams and reality are slowly starting to run together in a seemingly endless nightmare. As the player, you'll spend 3 episodes controlling Sam as you explore the dark, decrepit, dingy environments that are very reminiscent of the early Silent Hill games where the graphics are kind of muddy, visually noisy and hard to make out clearly. The core gameplay loop revolves around pointing-and-clicking your way through static environments that mostly feel abandoned, derelict and creepy. You can also control Sam with the directional pad, making him turn left, right and behind him. The images are have a muddy, old-school VHS overlay to them and feel satisfactory in overall quality, if a bit sparse and lacking details. You move your mouse cursor around to try and find hotspots that you can inspect for clues, items, coins (which serves as the game's collectibles) and newspaper clippings for backstory. You can also combine certain items, such as a metal block and hammer handle, to create a sledgehammer that will break down a brick wall, so you can find a clue to progress the plot. There's also puzzle solving mechanics that, while not overly challenging, were still satisfying to solve and represent the only sort of "traditional" gameplay in the Decay: The Mare. In regards to clue and item hunting, you'll be backtracking through various rooms a lot and it can be a little disorienting and tedious at times, since it's largely the same hallways and rooms you're navigating through. There's not much in the way of animations, save for some cutscenes and a few in game moments. There's also not much in way of voice acting, save for the narrator who delivers lines rather flatly and monotonously. This is contrast the game's musical score, which is actually quite good. Specifically during the game's introduction and subsequent cutscenes. Overall, Decay: The Mare falls into a lot of horror clichés which doesn't help it stand out from the pack in any significant way. It has some genuine horror moments and doesn't rely too much on cheap jump scares (I counted maybe one per episode), which is perfectly fine. The game can be completed in about 2 hours, so it's not an overly hefty adventure. There's also a binary, good ending and bad ending choice you can make at the end of the game that provides an unambiguous conclusion either way. If you can pick up on sale like I did for about $7 CAD, then Decay: The Mare can provide a short, satisfactory horror experience.

You play as Rifleman Jack Cooper, a pilot-in-training under the guidance of Captain Lastimosa, both of whom are serving as members of the Frontier Militia who are at war with The Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation or IMC. Cooper and Lastimosa are both called in to combat on the IMC controlled planet of Typhon. A short combat sequence ensues before Cooper and a group of Frontier Militia are ambushed by The Apex Predators, lead by Kuben Blisk, who are a group of contracted mercenaries working for the IMC. They massacre the Frontier Militia soldiers and leave Cooper for dead. However, Captain Lastimosa sacrifices himself to save Cooper's life after he is mortally wounded in combat and BT-7274 is rendered immobilized. His last action is transferring over his pilot authorization to Cooper, making him BT's new Acting Pilot. After restoring BT's power cores from nearby downed airships, it's up to them to uphold the mission that was to be carried out by Captain Lastimosa. The game's overall plot isn't much to write home about; it's perfectly fine. The one thing worth highlighting though is the relationship development between Cooper and BT. While initially tense and kind of awkward, the two of them begin to warm up to each other as the story progresses with BT offering assurance to Cooper in regards to his combat efficiency and Cooper trusting BT with his decision making. This goes a long way towards humanizing both characters despite the fact that one of them is a giant mech fighter. BT will also occasionally drop some pretty deadpan one liners that made my face perk up with a smile. I won't spoil any of them, since they need the proper context and gameplay experience. At first, an interesting addition is the dialogue choices presented to the player, something that doesn't normally crop up in most modern FPS. However, in practice, there's only 2 options and it usually boils down to either playing it straight faced or adding a tinge of dry wit to the conversation. Don't expect it to influence the story or gameplay in any capacity. It does help you bond with the two characters a bit, but that's about all it's good for. The core gameplay loop is split between playing as Pilot Cooper and controlling BT. As Cooper, the traversal and combat mechanics are superb. You can wall-run, double-jump, climb and slide so smoothly and seamlessly. Couple that with punchy, fast-paced combat mechanics that rival the Call of Dutys and the Battlefields of the genre and you have a gameplay loop that's endlessly fun to engage in; there's nothing more satisfying than wall running while cutting down enemy soldiers with a submachine gun. The wall-running and double-jumping abilities add tons of verticality to each level, allowing the size and scale of the levels to feel enormous; you are but one measly soldier in a giant, hostile world. The weapons are all standard to the FPS genre. You have pistols, submachine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, LMGs, rocket launchers, energy weapons, grenades and remote controlled explosives. The weapons all handle incredibly well and all have really unique designs. Taking control of BT is never not euphoric, as you enter combat with other Titans and crush soldiers underneath your giant robot feet. Despite the massive nature of the Titans, combat and movement still flow rather well and can still be exciting. You have the ability to dodge enemy attacks. You can switch out various loadouts on the fly, which is nice, thus changing the types of weapons and abilities of BT. You can unlock various loadouts through story progression as they're very hard to miss during the run of gameplay. I never really found myself gravitating towards any one specific load out since they're all balanced rather well and each have there own advantages and disadvantages. If I had to pick one, I'd say the "Scorch" loadout was my favourite because lighting things on fire is never not satisfying and I probably just put myself on a watch list by typing that out... My one tiny criticism of the Titan loadouts is that the magazine sizes on the primary weapons all feel rather meagre. I found myself reloading way more than I wanted to and it can kind of screw with the pacing of the game. Thankfully, the Titan loadouts also come with a lot of other weapons at your disposal such as shields that can catch and throw enemy projectiles back at them and a hover mechanic, just to name a few. You can also build up your Weapon's Core mode that, when activated, deals a massive barrage of death and destruction to anyone in the way. Another criticism I have is with the Boss fights; they're all largely forgettable. Most of them take place in areas that feel too similar to areas that feature run-of-the-mill gameplay. The one boss fight that actually pulls this off is the one against Viper. Overall, Titanfall 2 provides an incredibly fun and action oriented gameplay experience.

Full disclosure, I genuinely dislike talking about political themes in games. It's not something I'm particularly well-versed in and such discussions can result in a lot of **** from multiple parties. In my experience, a lot of political agendas in games come off as heavily contrived and are often met player backlash as a result. With Black The Fall, however, I sort of have to get into the politics of the game since it plays a big part in it's striking theme. The game is an indie, puzzle platformer game that's set during the oppressive Communist regime in Romania. Further research turned up that the face of Romania's communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu is displayed on giant TV's throughout the game and you can even find a subtle outline of the country in the main menu, just off to the bottom right of the bike. The game supposedly draws a lot of references to Romania's dark past and provides an interesting "what if" scenario regarding the Communist regime not being overthrown in 1989: the end of Nicolae Ceausescu's term as Communist leader. The core gameplay loop revolves around using stealth and puzzle solving solutions to navigate through factory floors, secret passage ways, an abandoned wasteland, a prison complex and ultimately escape. Throughout the game, you'll experience just how far an oppressive regime will to squash any dissenters and maintain order as NPCs are forced fed propaganda and are worked to the point of exhaustion and sickness. I felt that the games graphics were well done. The dark, imposing atmosphere that covers every colour on the grey spectrum do a great job of creating this drab and dreary environment that you want to escape from and never look back. The game also leverages the colour red to indicate security measures, which presents a threat to the player. Funny enough that the colour red has also been associated with Communism (the infamous "Hammer & Sickle"). The game's runtime on a single play through is about 3 hours with very little replay value. Despite the shorter run time, the game still tells a pretty compelling story about refusing to no longer be a cog in an oppressive regime and plotting an escape. The game has a pretty demoralizing ending, considering everything the player has to go through to get to the end.

Life is Strange is an episodic, story-driven game that largely flew under my radar for years. After playing through the game multiple times now, I wish I had known about this game sooner as it's become one of my favourite games of the 2010s. The story follows Max Caulfield, a shy, introverted photography student who returns to her hometown of Arcadia Bay after having lived in Seattle for the past 5 years. After having a premonition/daydream of a deadly tornado bearing down on the town, she discovers she has time rewinding capabilities when she saves a mysterious blue-haired girl from being shot in the Girl's bathroom by Nathan Prescott; son of the richest man in Arcadia Bay, Sean Prescott. After escaping a confrontation with Nathan in the school parking lot, Max runs into the blue-haired girl again only to discover that it's her longtime best friend Chloe Price. As they drive away from Blackwell, Chloe expresses resentment towards Max after she moved away to Seattle and didn't talk to her for 5 years. They get back to Chloe's place and Max learns more about the girl on the missing persons poster Rachel Amber: The DA's daughter and Chloe's best friend after Max left for Seattle. Max learns that Chloe and Rachel had plans to leave Arcadia Bay to head for Los Angeles when one day, Rachel disappeared without a trace, leaving Chloe heartbroken and abandoned yet again. From there, Max and Chloe work together to uncover the mystery behind Rachel Amber's disappearance by gathering clues, evidence and unearthing Arcadia Bay's dirty secrets. I'll park the bus here in terms of explaining the game's plot because ultimately, I'm going to recommend you play this game; you truly need to experience it for yourself. The strong character focus and relationship development for Max and Chloe is what really stood out to me about this game. Despite some justifiable hard feelings from Chloe in the early stages of the game, watching the two of them rekindle their friendship from when they were kids is a truly heart warming to experience and definitely makes you feel something for the two of them. To watch Max's character evolve from this rather meek and shy student to this bold, brave and fierce "Everyday Hero" is something to really root for as well as being a driving force behind the game's story. Conversely, to watch Chloe go from a rebellious punk with a tough, hardened exterior, to a softened, caring and more vulnerable character made some emotions spark off my otherwise cold, black heart. The core gameplay loop revolves around interacting with NPCs via dialogue trees, Max's time rewind ability and finding clues for their investigation into the disappearance of Rachel Amber. Max's rewind ability allows her to change her response to a question or undo an action after seeing what sort of consequences it might beget. Her rewind also allows her to steal items surreptitiously that are a key part of their investigation since items in Max's inventory stay with her and aren't affected by her rewind powers. Graphically, the game is a bit of a mixed bag. The overall presentation of some of the game's set pieces such as Blackwell Academy and the Pacific Northwest coast line are satisfactory, but the game also suffers from "Mass Effect Andromeda Syndrome" where the characters' facial animations look really "wooden" and stiff. As such they don't seem to be able to emote a whole lot unless they're crying. Some of the lip-syncing is downright brutal and further contributes to the "wooden" facial animations. Some of the dialogue, particularly the use of "slang" that gets used seem misplaced and cringeworthy to the point of immersion breaking for me. I wouldn't say any of these things are deal breakers since the game does plenty of other things right and is an overall net positive experience, but I'd be remiss if I didn't flag any of them. My biggest gripe with the game is it's ending. The game starts out kind of slowly but builds to a pretty serious crescendo. While the final interaction between Max and Chloe is definitely memorable and gut wrenching, it more or less boils down 5 episodes and roughly 10 to 15 hours of gameplay into a binary "this or that" choice, rendering all of your previous choices largely immaterial. Fix the ending and Life is Strange becomes a borderline dream game for me. Overall, Life is Strange is a definite recommendation for it's great story and wonderful character arcs.

The theme of Transference is what initially intrigued me about the game. The idea of being able to upload the human brain into the digital space and create a simulated world based on that brain data is an interesting sci-fi topic and sort of further begets the much larger discussion of merging our minds and bodies with computer data and hardware. The game takes place in the simulated mind built by Raymond "Ray" Hughes, a brilliant but "mad scientist" type character. The simulation also leverages perspectives from his wife Katherine, a successful musician and their young son Benjamin. As the player, you explore this simulated world and discover that this once strong and loving family has devolved into an empty husk of it's former existence. Raymond becomes utterly obsessed with his work on uploading the human conscious to the digital world and it's created a negative impact on his wife and son. You discover that he's downing cup after cup of coffee to stay alert, as evidence by all of the mugs, disposable coffee cups and coffee stained paper littered through the house and he has also been prescribed sleeping pills to counter this. Katherine feels like a prisoner in her own home, sacrificing her successful music career when she married Raymond and to help provide for their young son. Katherine becomes further separated from her musical passion and falls into depression, to the point of having to be prescribed anti-depressants. Benjamin is stuck trying to connect with his Father, whom Katherine describes as a "closed door" and "a do not disturb sign" as well as his increasingly depressed Mother. The core gameplay loop revolves around solving puzzles to "uncorrupt" sections of the simulation in order to progress the story. You'll find light switches scattered around the level which allow you to change the perspective of the level's structure, which are key exploring the game, providing clues and getting some more important backstory to the characters. Katherine's perspective feels a lot like a prison, as shown by the tally marked etched into the wall like a prisoner counting the days they've been locked away for. Benjamin's world feels very empty and lonely, supplemented only by the love for his dog Laika. Raymond's world, unsurprisingly, is about his obsession with his work, as evidenced by the various computers, scientific hardware and research papers littered throughout the family home. The further you progress through the game, the more the state of the family begins to devolve, to the point where Raymond is sporting a nasty cut across his left cheek, indicating some form of abuse; self-inflicted or otherwise and Katherine announcing that she wants to get on a plane with her son and leave Raymond behind. The size and scale of the game is not overly large. Aside from an outside shot of the family's apartment building to start the game, the remainder of it takes place entirely inside the family's home, however the game's dark and chilling atmosphere left me feeling perfectly fine with this design decision. The story is incredibly linear and loses a lot of it's intrigue with a second play through. The game has some strong FMV performances that provide character backstory. The game's sound design is fantastic, particularly Benjamin's cries for help, screams of terror and frustration provide some heart-wrenching moments. My two biggest gripes with the game are as follows: The game's ending is really abrupt and anti-climatic. There's no real satisfactory conclusion for any of the characters and the ending is just you walking through a white "server room" environment before giving you a rather ambiguous ending cutscene. My second gripe is the runtime relative to it's price point: $34.99 CAD for a game that can be completed in under 1 hour is a borderline con. I got it on sale for $10.49 CAD and while that's marginally better, it's still way overpriced for what the game gives you. I can recommend Transference at a deep discount to provide a short, satisfactory gaming experience.

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GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!! GoDzIlLa Is ApPrOaChInG tHe GeNeRaToR, tHe GeNeRaToR iS lOsInG pOwEr!!!!!!!

Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode! Fly off to the right and explode!

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More like "Warcraft III: DE-MASTERED". Seriously Blizzard? Removing features from an already complete game that's 18 years old, broken promises, flagrant false marketing, not honouring customer refunds and banning forum users for providing refund advice for other members? Where are the remastered cutscenes? Where is the improved UI? Why do users have to enable "Reforge Mode" to activate shadows on the old version? Seriously, **** you Blizzard.

In terms of immersive sim games, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is among the best I've ever played so far. It's a fantastic first-person RPG set in a dark and grim "Bladerunner-esque" environment. The game takes place in a series of semi-open world environments that are well optimized and are only as big as they need to be, so they cut down on tedious commuting within the game. Human Revolution also provides and enormous amount of freedom to the player, allowing them to tackle main missions and side quests however they choose The game's combat mechanics are spot on. Shooting feels really powerful, the guns sound great and even on "normal" mode, the combat can provide a meaty challenge. You can only take a few shots before your die. Your guns hurt, their guns hurt, it's all good. The game also implements a cover-based shooting mechanic where the camera switches to more of a third-person view. This is extremely helpful if you choose to approach the game in a more stealthy way, rather than a frontal assault. You can move from one cover spot to another in order to stealth around enemy targets and even bypass them all together if you choose to do so. There's also lethal and non-lethal pre-animated take down moves that look awesome and are incredibly fun to pull off. The game's plot is pretty hefty and can easily provide 30-40 hours of gameplay. The game centres primarily around Transhumanism and how it's the way of the future for humanity. On my initial play through, I didn't really mind this as a central theme since it seemed cool enough. It was only on my second and third play through where I started to pay more attention to some of the dialogue and flavour text that you can read via emails and ebooks. The game briefly explores some interesting topics and it made me wish Human Revolution expanded on these ideas even more, such as predicting the U.S. oil crash of 2015 (a good guess, even though it was wrong), China emerging as an economic superpower over the U.S. and geopolitical shifts in Europe, among other things. If Human Revolution expanded on these topics, while slightly dialling back the focus on augmentations, then this game really could've painted a striking picture as to where humanity is headed in the future. This would've made Human Revolution my dream game. My only major gripe with this game is the ending: there's up to four possible ones and they're all really lacklustre. You essentially approach a giant computer and you pick your own ending. Which ever one you pick ends the game with stock video footage that has barely anything to do with the game and with a voice over narration as to why that choice is the right one. Overall, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a fantastic game. I've easily sunk over 90 hours into the base game alone and it's all been fun. Full recommendation!

I picked this game up on sale for $2.99 CAD because I was told that this game is SO bad, I'd have to experience it for myself. After completing the single player campaign in about three and half hours on normal mode, I can say that it largely lives up to that expectation. They should've called it Kane & Lynch 2: Cover-based Shooting because that's effectively all you do. I normally don't mind cover-based shooting as part of a core gameplay loop, but there needs to be something else, ANYTHING else to break it up, otherwise it becomes monotonous and tedious. The cover system is also a joke, I was under the impression that while you're in cover, the enemy can't shoot you. This is not the case with Kane & Lynch as bullets can sometimes phase through solid objects. The shooting is incredible weak and has no impact or "punchiness" to it, so make it both "cover-based" and "shooting" that they got wrong in a cover-based shooter! Submachine guns are virtually useless as they just spray bullets every where, barely hitting the enemies. Good luck trying to hit enemies from mid to long range as your bullets don't seem to travel that far. Enemies are essentially bullet sponges, sometimes taking almost an entire magazine to drop one enemy. Sometimes I'd hit them in the head and they still wouldn't go down. The game's plot is so thin, it hardly matters: Kane and Lynch are in Shanghai for a weapons deal, they accidentally kill someone they aren't suppose to, which provokes the most powerful and influential man in China who has the police force, his own gang members and even the army in his back pocket and available at on a whim. On top of that, their arms dealer double crosses them when he finds out what they've done and tries to kill them, the get capture by the powerful Chinese guy, but manage to hi-jack one of his helicopters, strafe nearby office buildings and then eventually kill him. The game then pads itself out for another 20 mins by making Kane and Lynch run through an airport in order to get on a commercial airliner and leave Shanghai. Then the game just abruptly ends, cuts to black and rolls the credits. My biggest gripe is with the graphics, this handheld camcorder viewpoint is dreadful. The graphics are so murky and blurry, it was headache inducing within the first hour of gameplay. There are vertical bar lens flares that look terrible and the camera movement while sprinting feels like you're sitting in dinghy in the middle of the Bering Sea. The camera will also randomly go out of focus or drop a noise filter on you in the middle of heated combat. Overall, I can't recommend Kane & Lynch 2, even on sale because there's nothing fun about the game. Boring and unlikable characters, tedious, repetitive gameplay, nauseating/headache inducing graphics and a campaign that's laughably short and unrewarding to play.

A spiritual successor to the System Shock games, Prey is large in it's overall scope, giving you tons of freedom to explore it's world, particularly with all of the space walking you can do on the Talos I exterior as well as exploring the different areas within Talos I, Metroid-vania style. The story's main plot has tons of layers that will keep you guessing as to where you're going to have to go and what you'll end up finding. Same goes for the game's many side quests. The characters are well written with interesting backstories, so they come across as actual humans that are interesting to interact with. Graphically, the game is absolutely beautiful and runs smoothly on vanilla Xbox One. It goes for a similar "retro-futuristic" art direction, akin to the BioShock games. The controls feel a little clunky and combat, overall, is okay. I found it hard to dodge incoming enemy attacks from Phantoms, almost always taking damage and Mimics were sometimes a pain to fight since they mostly scurrying quickly close to the ground. Eventually, I figured that combat wasn't the way to and just opted to run past enemies and onto the next area of the game (this tactic will save you tons of time towards the end). I have a love/hate relationship with the endings. I love the twist it presents the player at the very end, but the two main choices i had in my play through that lead up to it didn't seem to yield much either way and felt a little unsatisfying. Overall, I can still fully recommend Prey for it's beautiful graphics, great RPG elements and it's tense, creepy atmosphere.

An underrated gem that was largely overlooked during the Halo 2, Doom 3 and Quake 4 era of first person shooters, Area 51 is a great sci-fi action shooter that's equal parts fun, creepy and challenging. The ability to switch between human and mutant form, the mutant form offering it's own special attacks and abilities, was a nice gameplay addition that added some uniqueness to it.

Virginia is very much a game designed for the auteur, rather than a broader spectrum of the gaming audience. On the one hand, I totally respect this and even admire it as large chunks of the games industry have all but shunned auteurism in gaming, instead opting to create the most bland, homogenized, inoffensive experience as possible. On the other hand though, these sorts of gaming experiences are largely lost on me, coming across as overly pretentious or too obscure. Sadly Virginia is the latter, not the former in this case. Don't expect much in the way of traditional game play. Even by walking sim/interactive storytelling standards, Virginia features barely any game play apart from use left stick to move around and press A to progress the plot. Don't expect to influence the story in anyway and don't expect much in the way of exploration. The game effectively railroads you down a linear story path with not much room for deviation. The game's plot was tough to nail down at times. From what I loosely gathered, you play as a recent graduate FBI agent Anne Tarver who gets partnered with a more senior agent in Maria Halperin. You're both tasked with solving a missing persons case involving a priest's son Lucas Fairfax. On top of this, the head of the FBI is conducting an internal affairs investigation regarding Maria Halperin and he tasks Anne to keep a close eye on her. As you both travel from one location to another to progress the plot, Anne and Maria begin to develop a stronger, more personal relationship with each other. Eventually Maria finds out that you're investigating her and she leaves you at a gas station by the side of the road. You attempt to reconcile with her by destroying her case file, but it ultimately lands the both of you in jail and then... This is where the plot really loses me. It proceeds to go off on a bunch of tangential, "trippy" dream sequences that are made all the more confusing by the fact that there's barely, if any form of exposition in the game. No voice acting, no dialogue, no text dumps. After a series of these "trippy" artistic dream sequences, the game ends with both of you finding Lucas Fairfax walking down the side of the road somewhere and then the scene just cuts to black. I was really hoping these dream sequences would coalesce into something significant, but it seem to come across as a bunch of pseudo-artistic scenes. The games musical score and sound design is where Virginia really shines. The creators knew damn well that if you're not going to give the player any exposition, you better be able to communicate tones and emotions in some other way. The musical score absolutely nails this aspect. I do wonder if Virginia would've been better served as 90 minute animated movie, rather than being shoe-horned into a game. Between to minimal game play and the artistic expressions the game gives off, I think it would've been much better received as a movie. Ultimately, Virginia is a game that I can barely recommend. If you're into auteur game design, than go for it. I got it super cheap for a $1.99 CAD, so at that price, I think I can recommend it. In any other case, however, Virginia is not the game for me.

Metro Exodus represents a more ambitious approach to the Metro series, mostly forgoing the dark, claustrophobic tunnels of the Moscow Metro in favour of a hub-based, open world game with levels, monsters and enemy factions that are creatively different and larger in scope. However, the game still holds on to some of it's more traditional aspects, specifically at the beginning of the game that leads up to escaping the Moscow Metro and at the end of the game when you explore the dark, grimey, claustrophobic metro tunnels of Novosibirsk. One thing the Metro games do a great job at is world building and characterization and Metro Exodus us really no exception. The characters in Artyom's party come across as actually human as oppose to warm bodies carrying assault rifles. You can overhear/listen to each of their backstories at various points in the game. The various locations you come across paint a picture of a place where people actually live, not just survive. The gun play feels more tightly designed, I like that you can craft things on the fly and weapon maintenance or lack thereof can seriously hamper you in tense combat situations. The controls, overall, still feel a tad clunky and the "sprint" function moves Artyom at the pace of a brisk walk, so trying to run away from enemies is almost pointless. The game's voice acting is still not very good, particularly the English dub with questionable Russian accents. The native Russian language is a lot better, especially for immersion. Although Metro Exodus represented a departure from it's more traditional roots, it still presents a tense, fun and immersive shooter that is set in a much larger world than it's predecessors.

A complete **** of one of gaming's most historic and beloved IPs. Metal Gear Survive shows you where Konami are at with Hideo Kojima no longer with them. The game is nothing more than an insipid, grindy, zombie survival game, also known as the "White Noise" of video game creativity.

It's a first person interactive story that's told through the perspective of two different characters: Caleb Pearson and Madeleine Stone where you explore the subterranean medical research facility called The Assembly. The game's overarching narrative about exploring morals and ethics in medical research is interesting enough and it comes across as a game that we be preamble to larger scale disaster/survival game. The game's graphics are kind of hit and miss. There are some objects that have a low, pixelated texture quality, it's very clear they only made like two NPC models and just copy and pasted them throughout the game, only making changes related to skin and eye colour. The NPC all have the lower half of their faces obscured by masks and hair obscured by a balaclava that make them look like Scorpion or Sub Zero rejects from the early Mortal Kombat games. As such, facial animations are borderline non-existent except for blinking. This is in contrast to the lab's environment design being perfectly satisfactory and one particular section where Madeleine and Caleb's stories intersect for the first time. Madeleine is lead into a suspended laboratory above a chasm, a giant monitor on one side with a map of the world displayed and a series of computers on the other. The setup is very "Hollywood" and it really does a nice job of illustrating that The Assembly really is an underground secret medical lab. Oddly enough, this is where the game presents it's most interesting puzzle element. Sure, there are others before and after it, but they're almost insulting easy and barely worth mentioning. It's a classic doomsday, viral outbreak scenario where you, as Madeleine, need to parse out resources in order to keep loss of life below acceptable limits. It's the most though-provoking puzzle of the game and it's underlying message is all too real. This culminates into the game's peak for me and it's most memorable moment in my play through of this game. The voice acting is also kind of hit and miss. Madeleine's voice acting is perfectly fine in terms of conveying emotion and temperament, whereas Caleb's is a bit more monotonous. By in large, it works well, but there are some scenes where Caleb's voice needed to emit more emotions. Between the two stories, Madeleine's story is the stronger of the two. Her's features more traditional gameplay elements, an exploration of her backstory and better voice acting. Caleb's is more akin to wandering around rooms, opening draws and cabinets and then finding an object to progress the plot. The game apparently has four different endings and at a play time of roughly 2-3 hours, you can burn through the game pretty quickly. Overall, The Assembly is a half-decent pickup on sale but otherwise it's kind of lacking in both it's puzzle elements and story.

I hope the game's director likes seeing mediocre to low ratings on his game, since there seem to be plenty of them. If he had kept his mouth shut and understood what his game TRULY is, then I would've given it a 7 or perhaps even an 8 out of 10. But his overinflated ego and disgusting sense of entitlement both kill my positive rating of the game, as well as my interest in continuing to play it.