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I wanted to like Punk Wars. Its promise to be a stylish 4X style game about warring punk factions intrigued me, and it only really needed to strongly hit one target for me. I'd have happily taken a vapid but immersive tactics game; a thoughtful exploration of post-apocalyptic punk with bland combat; an all-style-no-substance experience that carried the game on vibes alone. Instead, I got the worst of all worlds: a dull, poorly balanced game that doesn't commit to its ideas.
I don't think there's a situation so bleak they wouldn't try to render in service of people-pleasing and making sales climb higher. Battlefield 2042 represents the pinnacle of a feedback loop that told its creators that bigger is always better. Now that we're here, I'm sure we were never right to think that and I don't think we're stepping back from it anytime soon.
Between the lack of marketing leading up to its release, its poor pacing, and the thin writing and investigation mechanics, Twin Mirror smacks of a game that just wasn't given enough time. With some polish on the game's earlier moments and more thoughtful dialogue, it could have stood a real chance. Unfortunately, between the stilted narrative development, cheerless puzzles, and wooden, small-town cliches, there's less here than whatever remains of Sam's journalistic career.
It sells a London where you shoot rockets from a drone into the London Eye and then unlock the "Lambeth Defiant" rewards. A London where you can recruit and control everyone on the street, but can't reach out and touch them, or talk, or interact in any way that isn't knocking them out or shooting them in the head. A London where the city fades to background noise as you drive from waypoint to waypoint, and then stealth, and fight, and shoot, because there's nothing else to do.
Maybe in a few months there'll be patches, course corrections, and I'll get an update and try it again. I came to Mordheim late and I have no idea what the base game was like. XCOM 2 needed War of the Chosen to really become the game I wanted to play. Maybe Rogue Factor just needs time to make Necromunda become the badass squad-skirmish game that I wanted it to be.
Once you complete Crystal, you're allowed, like many games, to retain your save and begin again with additional difficulty. I won't be doing that. Instead, I'll be replaying Muppet Treasure Island, the reigning champion of Jim Henson-verse videogames since 1996.
This is a game that doesn’t seem to care at all about the very real horrors of modern Central and South American history—that presents a dire international problem as something that can be solved through the clean precision of four American badasses pulling off sync shots. Whether out of neglect, a lack of understanding or a deep callousness, it turns the suffering of the people who right now live under vicious cartels into a playground for a forgettable sandbox shooter. Its audience needs either a willful ignorance of—or a disturbing outlook on—the world around them to be able to play Wildlands without a deep sense of unease.
I realize now that I wish that this game could make me feel like an outsider in a strange town: That feeling is America. And The Crew has none of the licentious anticipation for the fictional pile-up, nor any of the guilty pleasure of rubbernecking—American pastimes, both. The missions never just say "Get to Wyoming," and then let me plot my own foolhardy, American route there. They don't even let you look at the map. Just trust the waypoints and go.
It's essentially a glorified DLC pack of new levels, plus a level editor for folks who want to make their own murder rooms. The exact people who Dennaton Games were supposedly condemning in their first title are, apparently, the exact audience of people whose money they would like to take, again and again. I guess they figure those people like rape and torture, too, plus more methodical killing. Maybe they're right—but it's too bad, since it comes at the expense of making a game that has anything whatsoever to offer beyond phoned-in grindhouse schlock.
Forever stuck in the programmed roles the game assigned them. When there is no way out, no real play, there is no message, no change. Animal Farm lives forever, dying and being born, always doomed to failure.
There's a new Far Cry out. There's always a new Far Cry out. Maybe it's time for that to stop?
The way characters move and express in combat never gets old, even as everything around it quickly does. I can see the massive amount of love and care put into one element of the game, which conveniently is the most visible one for observers. But once I pick up the controller, it becomes clear that level of detail is only surface deep.
Whatever profound or resonant thought about selfhood or nostalgia or the trauma of remembering is buried in summary, in lulling, tired melodies. Fundamentally, Kingdom Hearts recurs in the way capital recurs, pushing on despite its contradictions and always banking on something new. We deserve better stories than this, but now, more than ever, I know we won't find them here.
If Yakuza is to truly grow, we need to be the one to call it in.
Panzer Dragoon: Remake barely makes an concessions to how games have grown over the last 25 years, and that makes it hard to care about it. The superior sequel will be getting a remake next year; this might be one of those situations where the first game in a series can easily be skipped over in the hagiography. Even the biggest members of the Dragoon Squad can sit this one out.
Rise & Shine has all the markers of a hit indie game. The gun’s add-ons, a series of upgrades that include a special curve-the-bullet ability, give the game an individualistic “hook”, and the art style is funky and appealing. If you approach it with the expectation of being entertained, you probably will be. But if you’re looking for a game that will reinvigorate your passion for the innovation of the indie game scene, look elsewhere.
There are a handful of good stories to be found in Andromeda, but they’re hidden away, worthwhile moments tucked within hours and hours of disposable ones. In an effort to be as comprehensive as possible in tone, styles of mission objective and purpose, the game ends up feeling as impossibly vast as nature but as rigid and artificial as a computer system.
As fun as popping zombies in beautiful environments is, it's not enough to save Black Ops 3 from being just a miserable little disappointment, a cobbled together version of Deus Ex and Syndicate that can't do right by its pop sci-fi leanings or the series' run & gun entertainment. As someone who's always been an apologist for the series, it makes me a little sad to see that Call of Duty might finally be the creatively bankrupt game everyone believes it to be, unsalvageable even by the grace of Christopher Meloni himself.
Playing Starfield makes me want to play games that explore space and games that were made by Bethesda, but it doesn’t make me want to play Starfield. It tries to give us the universe, but it’s so weighed down by its own ambitions and a fundamental lack of inspiration that it can’t even get into orbit.
We may not have been enjoying it the way Supermassive intended, but that made the experience that much better. I'm thankful that summer camp is over, but I will hold a piece of Hackett's Quarry in my heart for at least a week. It's the slogan of the camp, after all: "What doesn't kill you will make you stronger.