As a person who enjoys the stories and characters of the Final Fantasy franchise, I'm immediately more likely to be invested in Dissidia NT and what it's offering me. However, that's not enough; I need to love these characters and this complicated and opaque game type, and truly enjoying the heart of it isn't really possible for me.
If you're in for some meditative classic gaming, Hyakki Castle is for you. It's a game that knows exactly what it is, and it has no interest in punishing you or making you feel like you don't get it. It's a friendly, old-style game that wants you to succeed, and that seems to be less and less present now. It also has cat people in it.
“Age of Empires IV” is a simple, pleasurable game that rewards developing high skill but does not require it to push and learn your way through. It gives you troops and their upgrades and some buildings and lets you decide what you want to do with them. It gave me a lot of freedom to make my own choices within a narrative that constantly told me how cool I was for playing in a historical playground with some of the coolest people who ever lived. These pleasures are few and far between in life, and I savored this one.
Skylines 2 appears to be the distinct result of a dev team looking out at other places to find beauty and, more importantly, designing with an aim toward getting players interested in thinking of themselves as people making aesthetic choices. It’s thrilling.
The next-gen upgrade is going to make that available for more people, and I’m excited for that. But it did leave me with a melancholy feeling about where we’ve been and, given the future of The Witcher franchise, where a post-Cyberpunk Witcher game might go. I hope CD Projekt Red’s 2015 RPG, rather than the one it released in 2020, is the foundation that’s built upon.
Gotham Knights is lacking some of the interpretive moves that made both Rocksteady’s Arkham games and WB Games Montreal’s own Arkham Origins so fascinating and unique. It’s yet another encounter on the same rain-soaked streets.
GTA 5 feels like an infrastructural flavor in gaming at this point, delivering that same action driving and shooting, showing up to comfort you wherever you might want to play it. When novelty appears, like when I was driving through the night and Burial’s “Hiders” played on the in-game radio, apparently added back in 2017, it really stands out. But playing GTA 5 today is not generally an exercise in a new experience for millions of us. It is a return to the familiar, a known entity, and these new-gen versions of the game offer us repetition with slight differences. If that is what you’re angling to get out of your time in 2022, GTA 5 is there for you.
But it is impossible for me to play the game after this patch and not think about how so many other games, with so many more interesting ideas and takes on the genre, are not going to get the second swing that Cyberpunk 2077 is going to get over the next year. Years of dev time to produce a standard and familiar 1980s dystopia in a pretty good frame. Just another day in Night City.
More than anything else, playing this trilogy in 2021 forced me to consider what a "remaster" is on a fundamental level. Is is just juicing up the graphics and making the main characters a little more detailed? Or could there be something more to it? I've been living with these games since they were first released. They each fueled moral panics in their own way. GTA 3 and Vice City were at the center of a resurrected set of arguments about video game violence, and how it would turn kids into mass killers. The spectacular nature of these claims propelled lawyer Jack Thompson into the limelight, and turned him into a special kind of video game culture villain, the bogeyman who still gets invoked when people are afraid anyone is going to touch their video games. San Andreas' Hot Coffee fiasco, produced when developers accidentally left the scripts for a sex minigame in the game files on release, ended with a class-action lawsuit settlement that allowed offended players to collect $35.
In a recent session, I had a rival pair, and one of them was slain by the final boss in the last turns of the entire game. I was presented with an option to either allow them to slink off the battlefield with a career-altering wound or have them strike out with their dying strength, dealing massive damage and sealing the victory. I weighed my options and had them take out the boss. What better way to end a rivalry than by saving the world?
9 fits that bill, and you're probably better off with Shovel Knight or Freedom Planet's oldschool-yet-new sensibilities. Every time I try to think about what the motivator for playing this game would be, I immediately dismiss it. I repeat: I have no idea who this is for.
player contests and player vs. environment puzzles. Currently, Hello Neighbor tries to have its cake while eating it too, and everyone goes home disappointed when that happens.
It's not just the online mode: from play to unlock design, I did not have a good time with Toy Soldiers: War Chest. This anecdote might sum it up best: a friend back from a long trip watched me play a single mission. We sat in silence through interminable wave after wave, and about halfway through the hour-long mission he blurted out "why are you even playing this?" I didn't have a good answer.
Like its forebear or Van Sant's Psycho, The Revolution carries many interesting pieces inside of a rough, and unlikable, exterior. The weight that it wants to carry proves too heavy a load for what the game is able to do. Overwhelmed, the game collapses.
I am not out here hollering for a specific mode of card game design, and I love that we live in a world where there are a plurality of games for people with different desires and likes in their card games. I am simply saying that Artifact has emerged into a world where digital card games finally seem to have figured out the sweet spot between mechanical complexity and friendliness for new players, and it has totally ignored any and all of those lessons in favor of a model that, to me at least, seems to be interested in attracting diehard fans of massive complexity and basically no one else. And maybe that works for Valve and the Artifact design team, but it sure as hell doesn't work for me.
Ultimately, I want to enjoy Before the Storm as much as I did Life is Strange, but I think some serious shifts will have to take place between this episode and the next in order for me to really get onboard.
At the highest points, Call of Duty has evoked the flavors of films like Sicario. They show you the shape of things, and they present a messy world that soldiers make their way through. Sadly, the narrative of Infinite Warfare is closer to something like White House Down, a series of black and white tropes that merely tell us the same stuff that we knew already: we’re good, the enemies are bad, and we can murder the world into the shape we want it to be.
It denies the player a blank slate through which to make their own choices. Michonne is in a strange space between brand promotional piece and a true season of The Walking Dead game. However, all of that said, the compressed three-episode nature of Michonne could be to blame for that, and only time will tell if the full work coheres into something more than the slight thing we have in the first episode.
I believe that Armello has many of the pieces of an amazing game, but those pieces don't quite fit together just yet. I think that the development team, if given the chance, could iterate on this design to hit a perfect mix of computer mediation and boardgame excitement. While Armello misses the mark for me, I look forward to whatever they cook up next.
But at the end of the day, there just isn't that much here for me, even as a casual-sometimes-hardcore Halo fan. If you think Destiny could scratch the itch you have for Halo, pick it up over this game. If not, buckle in for an underwhelming mechanical retread with a so-so story framing the whole experience.