The Jimquisition
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Arms is a really weird game. At its core it's a simple, accessible fighting game with a really strong gameplay loop and room for player growth competitively, but a pair of fundamentally flawed control schemes, a lack of decent modes and a glacially slow random unlock system for items that fundamentally change how characters can function make it a really tough package to recommend.
While that core combat is still strong, I'm personally getting a bit weary of Tekken relying on it's barely changed core combat to keep it relevant in a world where fighting games are fast evolving into vastly more rounded products. Tekken 7's combat isn't bad, it's just a bit stagnant, and I don't know how much longer it can get away with that reliance on not fixing what ain't broke.
If it had controlled better and its "emotional" bullet points didn't come off like "sad indie game does a sad thing" convention, the potential is there for this to be an all-time great. As it is, RiME offers a fantastically designed world with some neat obstacles and a superb linear flow, held back by technicalities and instances of the banal.
Overall, Injustice 2 takes a strong fighting game, delivers an incredibly rewarding and lengthy single player that feels like a priority rather than a tacked on afterthought, and considerably increases the scope of the game by adding in a vast number of well made additional characters to the mix. Sure it hits the uncanny valley a bit, and I'm not keen on the loot boxes or their DLc plans, but it's hard to deny how much fun I had with the game at launch.
It's good to see the back of Prey.
If the wave of Roguelikes were to break today and nothing of note were to arrive in 2017, Flinthook alone would still make it a pretty good year for the genre.
It's a damn fine remaster of a truly magnificent game.
By varying its approach and exploring new areas for the realm of interactive fiction, Giant Sparrow has crafted a game worthy of the praise so liberally lavished upon its peers.
Outlast 2 can't compete with its own legacy, and while it's still a decent horror game with plenty of scares to offer, there is nothing I can point to here that I could claim as an improvement over the last one.
I wish this game had a head so I could stamp on the back of it and push it mercilessly into a pile of sick and guts.
The remaster itself, tragically, is really quite good. It runs beautifully in 4K at a smooth 60 frames-per-second, with characters and environments that still look striking today. Aside from some occasionally buggy ally A.I., it's polished up nicely, and I wish I could say it was worth rushing out to buy.
The Sexy Brutale deserves as much attention as any Horizon, Zelda, Nioh or Persona.
Andromeda is fun… sometimes. Other times it's a dreary slog through recycled cutscenes, infantile character interactions, and a lot of badly masked loading screens.
Yooka-Laylee is a game out of time, clinging so desperately to past glories it doesn't seem to understand the Earth kept spinning after the N64 was discontinued. It's everything wrong about the formative years of 3D platforming and it somehow retained none of what made the genre's highlights endure. Yooka-Laylee is, in a word, rubbish.
I was damn impressed by Persona 5, and will certainly be returning to it once I've had a few months to decompress from this super concise playthrough. I played 120 hours in just a couple of weeks and damn it was a lot of fun.
Few games are able to showcase the power of the medium like Nier: Automata.
Truly, I wish I could say I understood what all the critics were raving about in their onslaught of 10/10 reviews, but I don't. I see too many things getting in the way of the brilliance, too much repetitive busywork and full-on dick moves for me to say this is even close to my favorite Zelda game, much less in the top five.
Vaccine is shit, but it does say its own name in a creepy deep voice when you start it, which is the single thing it has over Resident Evil 7.
Berserk and the Band of the Hawk isn't a bad time, but it's not quite the Berserk Warriors I was hoping for. The story mode is great fun for a while but soon falls apart, character unlocks are tantalizing until you realize how thin on the ground they are, and generally nothing good the game does comes without at least some minor caveat.
Horizon: Zero Dawn is just brilliant. I speak as a critic who has played more "open sandbox" games than any one human should and has grown so very weary of them. I should have gotten sick of this thing in an hour, but I've been glued to it for days and days and I don't want it to end.