With that being said, the original Metal Gear Solid trilogy isn’t just a trio of great games that people have strong nostalgia for. They’re genuine masterpieces and deserve to be preserved into perpetuity. This collection is a perfectly adequate way of preserving them for this hardware cycle.
Crymachina asks probing questions about the nature of humanity through the lens of machines, and its conclusions are evocative, emotive and ultimately quite uplifting. It does sit in the shadow of a giant of a game that already canvassed exactly the same subject through exactly the same lens. However, there’s a greater warmth to Crymachina that makes it more relatable than the relatively academic NieR: Automata. Throw in some vividly memorable art direction and what we have here is a JRPG that might surprise people with just how memorable it proves to be.
Hellboy: Web of Wyrd looks the part. It’s a gorgeous game and I was really hoping that it would deliver the vision for the character and comic in the same way that it captured the aesthetics. Sadly, instead, we got a stodgy roguelike that largely misses the point of what either Hellboy or the roguelike should offer. Equally sadly, we continue to wait for a truly great Hellboy game.
Dementium is not even slightly entertaining and all the developer has achieved with this re-re-release is broadcast that their original game wasn’t ever anything more than a gimmicky novelty. What an incredible own goal when Dementium did actually have something of a legacy from people nostalgic for the DS.
I am quite sure that some people will absolutely love the intensity of the horror and dark fantasy that infuses Lords of the Fallen. As cartoonishly silly as it comes across by trying so hard, it is technically impressive. Similarly, the game is perfectly solid mechanically, and while it does have some issues with pacing and the design of some boss battles, it is, for the most part, very playable. I had more fun with this than I think it deserved, and while I’m not sure whether I was laughing with it or at it most of the time, I was definitely laughing and having fun with it. Who knows? Perhaps satirising the self-seriousness of dark fantasy was the entire creative point and if so, bravo developers, you nailed it.
Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is a return to form for the series. What had become a formula so bloated that it lost sight of what actually made the series good has been simplified to make it more engaging. What you get here is an efficient and clean historical action game. One that gives you the chance to explore a less-travelled part of history from a part of the world that people are usually too busy demonising to explore as a setting. Ubisoft would benefit from writers who understood how to convey narrative efficiently, but in every other way the more focused and streamlined experience that Mirage offers makes it the most cohesive entry in this series for a very long time.
I realise that Asterix & Obelix isn’t as commercially valuable as, say, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars or the Fate anime property. It’s never going to attract a major project from a top-flight developer. Nonetheless, there are small developers who have taken the iconic French comic and done something that shows respect; at least they have done their best. There is nothing like that in Asterix & Obelix: Heroes. It’s a cheap and tacky cash-in, and everyone involved in the comic over the years (the 40th book in the series comes out this year!) deserves better than this.
The next step for Big Ant would be to start capturing the nuances of the sport and convert excellent ball-to-ball action to give us the full match experience, when events that happened in the 10th over can impact on how bowlers, batters, and the crowd itself behave in the 40th. If Big Ant can get there, make it feel like tactics matter and results are less pre-determined and arbitrary, and then they will produce a cricket game that will finally move from the cusp to sit alongside EA, Sony and 2K’s sporting titles in offering something that truly understands and captures the spirit of the sport.
Gothic is getting a full remake, which will release in 2024. I actually expect that to be good, because the developers can use the modern tools they have to modernise and restore the original vision of the game. Unfortunately, though, that’s the final nail in the coffin for the original. Unless you have a very academic reason for wanting to play an artefact of B-tier game design from the early turn of the century, there’s just no reason to play this port.
I generally like the “filler” titles in the Dragon Quest franchise. Dragon Quest Treasures was a delight, as was Builders, as was the VR game that I played in an arcade in Japan. This is a versatile property and most of the developers that work on it clearly enjoy what they’re doing. But Strash is different. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth as it comes across as cynical, and derivative to everything but Dragon Quest. Most egregious of all is that somehow, despite being based on a well-regarded Dragon Quest anime, it genuinely seems like the developers failed to understand what makes Dragon Quest a uniquely special property. If they did understand it, they comprehensively failed to articulate it. I’m genuinely disappointed, but, on the plus side, I fully expect that the upcoming Dragon Quest Monsters game will completely right the ship. The great thing about this series is that even in its lowest moments, it never takes long to bounce back.
Fate/Samurai Remnant doesn’t require you to know the Fate series to play, but it will convert you to a fan by the end of it. It’s written well, gives you an interesting world to explore, and has a clean combat system that never wears out its welcome. Given that this does take place in an entirely new chapter for Fate, Type-Moon now has a bunch more characters to spin into mechanise for this money-spinning behemoth and, as much as I hate admitting this to myself, I’d be all in for all of that. Fate/Samurai Remnant has reinvigorated my love for the property all over again.
With some excellent new modes, fun collectibles and unlocks, and some of the most well-executed Bomberman gameplay we’ve seen in years, Super Bomberman R 2 is a genuine return to form for the classic franchise. The quality of the new modes is genuinely surprising, and it’s all designed according to the kind of multiplayer that is popular right now. In other words, this represents the best chance the 40-year-old venerable franchise has to find a new generation of fans yet.
Lies Of P is a decent Soulslike, but it does squander the main opportunity that it had to differentiate itself. The “dark Pinocchio” theme is intriguing and the developers went about it with the right spirit, but struggled to convert it into something as thought-provoking and deep as it should have been. Take that out of the equation and you’ve got a Soulslike that’s a little heavy-handed in how it makes players engage with it, in a world that looks more inspired in screenshots than it is to actually journey through. Ultimately, as enjoyable as it is, Lies Of P stands testament to just how difficult FromSoftware’s formula really is.
The expanded Utawarerumono franchise might never elevate beyond the most niche of niche properties, but it is a wonderful, positive contribution to video games, and Monochrome Mobius continues translates this from a blend of visual novel and tactics to a traditional JRPG with complete success. This is a beautiful, heartfelt and sweet little game that, at around 30-40 hours, doesn’t outstay its welcome. It also reminds you that sometimes a determination to tell a good story really is better than AAA-blockbuster production excesses and flashy and overly complex gameplay gimmicks alike.
So with all of that, this score is not reflective of the quality of the games (overall). I’ll never get sick of NewZealand Story. Most of the other titles are interesting as a curio, too. The quality of the ports for all of these titles great thanks to Hamster’s technology. However, as a package, this is a woeful excuse for a compilation, and that’s particularly surprising given that it came from the same publisher that gave us the Space Invaders Invincible Collection. That was one of the very best retro collections on the Switch. One I play almost weekly to date. “Disappointing” that Taito Milestones 2 lacks the same effort doesn’t begin to describe what I feel it.
The Science Adventure series has always been the “AAA” of visual novels, offering production values and sheer confidence in the experience that is well beyond what almost anyone else can achieve. Anonymous;Code is, apparently, the end of its particular series, and that’s a massive pity, simply because I don’t think I could ever get sick of this kind of creativity. However, as an anthology of stories, the Science Adventure series are a masterwork within video games, and Anonymous;Code is the perfect, thought provoking, intelligent “page turner” to end things on.
Reading back through this review it sounds negative, but that’s because I’m coming to it from the perspective of someone who generally plays single-player and is passionate about the skill tester side of rhythm games. Samba de Amigo is one of those rare rhythm games that isn’t expressly for me. I do love its quality as a party game, and a drinking game, and so it’ll stay firmly in my Switch’s memory. It’s just that, even despite the cracking soundtrack, it’s also not going to join the rotation of rhythm games I use to de-stress and tune out of the world with.
With Armored Core VI, FromSoftware has demonstrated, yet again, that it has few peers when it comes to intelligent and thought-provoking action. You’ll need to be faster on the draw and quicker with the reactions to survive this game’s bullet ballet-like approach, but you’ll also need to be smart and precise, and there’s elegance to complement with the visceral sound of metal rending. Sadly, that’s all FromSoftware has delivered this time around, and for a company that has mastered the ability to give truly memorable context to its worlds, characters, and battles, the shallow hollowness of this experience is truly disappointing.
Sea of Stars deserves to be played, and almost everyone who does play it will enjoy it. It’s a JRPG made for JRPG fans by people who truly love the genre. There’s even something admirable about how steadfast it is in being a classical homage. The sad reality is that most pastiches that lack the self-awareness to break free of being pale homages are doomed to fade while the classic works they ape remain eternally relevant, but for now, in 2023, if you’ve got some time to spare you could do far worse than Sea of Stars.
At the end of the day, I consider the value of these sports management simulators to be an opportunity to teach the nuances of the sport to laypeople. By understanding the underlying tactics and management structure that goes into those on-field or on-track performances, you do come to a much deeper understanding of the sport itself. Football Manager understands this, but F1 Manager doesn’t quite. Not yet. The presentation of the information is accessible and even elegant, but this is an enormously complex sport, and the developers haven’t found a way to translate this so it’s palatable to people who aren’t already deeply invested in the sport. As enjoyable, comprehensive, and well-designed as F1 Manager is, there’s still work to go to get it to the standards of Football Manager in supporting people to develop a passion for the sport.