Jake Arias's Reviews
The single positive thing Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance does is end, though sadly, not nearly soon enough.
Deliver Us The Moon‘s gameplay is trash, with its only challenge coming from timed sequences with decorative oxygen canisters and the fiddliness of its context-sensitive prompts. Its story, meanwhile, is strongly reminiscent of Interstellar at several points but so melodramatic and poorly developed that it becomes a predictable soap opera version that’s worse in every way. Finally, there’s the performance, which is so bad that it puts the lie to the assertion that the Switch version was canceled because of coronavirus. This doesn’t even run adequately on a Playstation 4 while using textures so downscaled that text is borderline unreadable.
Even the areas that can be bent in significant ways have serious and sometimes baffling limits that force you into one or two envisioned solutions by entirely sabotaging other approaches. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, of course, as many excellent puzzle games have specific solutions, but where Semblance fails (and does so big time) is that it gives you the impression that you’re being afforded the freedom to come up with your own approach, only to consistently snatch it away from you while the controls undermine you and the simplistic two-tone visuals give you a migraine.
Everything about it is clearly inspired by Final Fantasy VI—one of the games from my childhood that I know front to back—and yet all of the features and priorities that made that game work have been watered down and replaced with gimmicks that appear to have been designed solely to waste as much time as possible. Octopath Traveler‘s dialog drags. Its story meanders aimlessly. Its characters are dull tropes. Its mechanics never evolve. There’s very little to recommend here.
If a great art style and self-indulgent vagueries are all you’re looking for, then Genesis Noir is the game for you. If, however, you’re one of those pesky gamers who expect things to happen for underlying reasons and stories to have characters rather than just a parade of hollow archetypes, there’s nothing here to recommend.
I don’t understand why this exists.
Noita is a game that I generally liked when it was in early access, but the problems that I listed over a year ago have been exacerbated, and the parts that I liked have been minimized by a barrage of new content that makes it harder than ever to piece together a worthwhile arsenal.
Even the gameplay I’d seen praised for its promise ended up being a disappointment, with major performance problems and bugs worsening what would already be a below-average experience. I suspect that what happened is that the monetization and multiplayer grind proved so tedious and horrible for some players that everything else seemed better by way of comparison, leading many to treat the game’s underlying problems with kid gloves. Call it the “ugly friend” effect. Marvel’s Avengers has a decent story, though, even if it’s merely a cynical ploy to trick you into eventually paying.
I’d love to play devil’s advocate, but I hate this game so much.
Fort Triumph is a miserable, uninteresting slog until you manage to level up a team of characters, which makes one wonder why their deaths are even an option in the first place. I can’t help but wonder how the devs squandered their time in early access. Why did it take so long to release something so rough?
There are little things that I adore such as the way your ship crew sings as you sail around (with the songs even changing to reflect the gender makeup of your crew), not to mention a small handful of quests that eschew the rigid, game-y formula plaguing most of Odyssey‘s content in favor of something more organic. The problem is that all of this accounts for between 5-10 hours of content of the 60 that’s pretty much a minimum because of the backwards leveling system and abundance of filler content. The weakest parts of the Assassin’s Creed series have also been retained, while the things that were unique have inexplicably been de-emphasized and complicated to make way for a mashup of features shamelessly borrowed from other series in the hopes of lightning striking twice. The end result of all of this is that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is an overlong, uninspired mess that feels watered down to the point of meaninglessness.
The story might as well not exist, the mechanics are clumsy and prone to screwing you over through no fault of your own, enemies come at you in endless numbers to make destroying things a deeply annoying and repetitive experience, and the slightly upgraded textures—which are the only real difference between this version and the original apart from some newfound performance issues—are virtually imperceptible because of the uninspired art design that's still trapped in the Guerrilla-era war against colorfulness.
The Nightmare Princess feels like it was made by people who were forced to work on a Deception game that they wanted nothing to do with, and, harboring nothing but contempt for it, worked to undermine its development at every juncture. They succeeded at doing so, creating something so abysmally contrary to the spirit of the Deception series and painfully un-fun in general that we'll likely never see a true Deception game again.
Hades is a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler roguelite with a simplistic gameplay loop, some complex perk combinations reminiscent of Transistor, and a reactive story that sees characters react to just about anything that you do. The problem is that all of the things that you can do are limited to picking perks and killing things in the same four floors of the same dungeon, and the story drags its heels in such an egregious way that you have to finish this same 20-40-minute dungeon something like 50 times to reach the actual ending.
Cris Tales bills itself as an “indie love letter to classic jRPGs.” Instead, it so completely misunderstands what makes them great that it comes across like a creepy kidnapper letter composed out of letters cut from various magazines. This is a game that looks fantastic while doing everything at least a little wrong; entire mechanics are outright broken, bugs can strike and render certain battles unwinnable, and stats randomly see massive rises and drops that make it impossible to tell how powerful your characters actually are. Add in Cris Tales‘ slow movement speed and insistence on making you run around doing busy work and you have a recipe for a truly painful experience.
Pacing is a far more important consideration than most people give it credit for. Good pacing can reinforce a gameplay loop and make it truly addictive, whereas bad pacing tends to result in sections that are such a slog that many players stop playing and never continue. Cathedral is a game that doesn’t just embrace bad pacing—it builds a temple to it and worships at its altar.
Sometimes, genre standards exist for a very good reason. Paw Paw Paw is an adorable beat-em-up about an animal resistance fighting against a king insistent on getting everyone in his kingdom into pants, but it makes the mistake of forgetting to include invincibility frames, which means that you can be damaged by several enemies at the same time, dying instantly to endgame opponents whenever they attack at the same time. This isn’t just possible, but more likely than not to occur every time you play through late-game levels thanks to the introduction of opponents who resist stun when attacked, allowing them to kill you instantly in the middle of your attack.
COLLAPSED seems like a game that should be defined by its abundant character customization possibilities, but more often than not, it ends up being defined by its padding and unexpected limitations.
Carto is inoffensive. It’s unambitious. It’s a perfect storm of blandness.
Wasteland 3 could be an entertaining game if not for its nonstop softlocks, disappearing items, and idiotic pathfinding (I’ll get into that later), but these problems stood in the way of my enjoyment while chipping away at my patience in a way few other games ever have.