The Jimquisition
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There are so many of these bloody games on the market now, all vying for attention, all doing the same thing, and none of them doing enough of anything good. This is just one in a line of flimsy “service” games, light on original content but plenty heavy on microtransactions. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has its moments of messy fun, but those moments are entrenched between gulfs of numbingly inane “looter shooter” nonsense.
Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is a very good thing. Adorable, silly, and quite funny indeed, this roguelite might be a big genre shift from its predecessor but it’s just as lovable. It hurries itself along a bit too much, but the fast pace of gameplay and swift progress at least ensures it never gets dull.
The “remastering” is of highly questionable value and the extra content is weak. No Return is a cheaply recycled and tawdry take on roguelite gameplay, while the Lost Levels were lost for a reason. Worse, such additions hammer a final nail into the coffin of this game’s creative ambition, definitively invalidating an already flimsy story with the kind of combat-focused experiences that communicate only one thing to the player - violent videogames are cool.
Gangs of Sherwood surprised me by rolling its credits a few short hours after starting, but it wasn’t the brevity I found surprising - it was the fact people were willing to attach their names to what they’d done. As much as I believe in due credit, if I’d have been involved with this game I’d have asked to remain anonymous.
Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection is really rather sad. It looks and feels cheap, the drought of available options is stark, and the fact they couldn’t even include save states or rewind options without being extremely frugal about it is audacious at the very least. To top it off, all six games - masquerading as seven - are garbage. Pure, utter garbage. Yes, even the ones you remember.
GameMill Entertainment continues its run of rushed, cheap, utterly contemptuous scam jobs. Yet another game where you can see how the developers at one point hoped to make something good until reality hit them in the face, forcing them to spray some vomit onto storefronts and call it a day.
Karmazoo is a wonderful cooperative puzzler that encourages wordless teamwork in a way that should lead to chaos but instead results in elegant simplicity - most of the time. With its cute sense of humor and even cuter character designs, there’s a huge amount of appeal in simply unlocking and trying new characters, of which there are many. A game about being polite to strangers is as twee as it sounds, and it’s a tweeness I’m absolutely here for.
It’s the kind of game that makes the case for some sort of independent trading standards body in the game industry. I say this with all due gravity - The Game Mill should not have been allowed to sell Skull Island: Rise of Kong. In an industry with adequate customer protections, it should be recalled.
I adored the first Alan Wake, and I’ve either loved or liked every Remedy game since then. This is the first time I’ve felt so displeased by the studio’s work I’ve actually been angry about it. The pompous writing, the shoehorned mechanics that push a tiresome narrative conceit over the quality of the narrative itself, the archaic combat, the amount of time it spends doing almost nothing, Alan Wake 2 is fucking insufferable most of the time.
RoboCop: Rogue City may not boast the high production quality of a top level “AAA” videogame, but it’s more fun and shows more sincerity than most of them put together. What it lacks in polish it more than makes up for in its provision of fuss-free action with immensely satisfying weaponry alongside the occasional glimmer of witty writing. It’s nowhere near as beautifully satirical as the film from which it sprung, but it’s still made with clear love for the original, as well as a ton of sincerity.
Stray Souls is easily one of the worst horror games ever made. The fascistic interests of its director aside, this is a defective product duct taped into a barely coherent mess of prepurchased assets, algorithmically generated art, and bargain bin genre tropes.
Lords of the Fallen comes with some big caveats - it's designed to ambush the player in really snide ways, its boss distribution is erratic, and it really needs a proper map. Despite these annoyances, I’ve been utterly entrenched in a beautiful world, hooked on solid gameplay, and inspired by exquisite art direction. The persistent multiplayer is a treat, while the two-sided world makes for some clever navigation. It might be fundamentally unoriginal, but it heaps of ton of stuff onto that foundation.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder is like a rapid firework display of ideas that never stops dazzling, throwing curveball after curveball and never lingering on a single concept. There’s something to be said for gameplay that doesn’t outstay it’s welcome, but often is the case that Wonder’s twists and tricks barely make it through the threshold before they leave, never to return. I’m impressed by what Wonder does, amazed at its drug-like wackiness, and left with a longing for some of that stuff to stick around longer than it does.
Spider-Man 2 continues the high level of slickly presented entertainment seen with Insomniac’s first jaunt to Manhattan. Playing as the Spider-Men is yet to be anything other than beautiful, both figuratively and literally. Great as it may be, it's held back by some dodgy writing that fumbles its payoffs and dips too often into waffle. Between those moments of deflation, however, there is a truly gorgeous and absorbing game packed with delightful action where simply moving feels good.
Sonic Superstars is the first decent mainline Sonic game since Sonic Forces (an objectively okay game as rated by civilized minds). A distilled descendent of the original lineage, Sonic Team’s rare display of restraint has resulted in a game that succeeds through the purity of its simplicity. However, the stark contrast of convoluted, tawdry boss fights offsets its positives significantly, contributing some truly offputting misery to an otherwise entertaining time.
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide has a solid foundation that just needs more built atop it. Slaughtering legions of Chaos freaks is fun for a while, and the in-game chatter between characters is surprisingly funny to the point I was invested far more than I otherwise would’ve been. Sadly, the unbalanced classes and poorly paced missions, plus a complete lack of incentive to play after hitting the level cap stop it short of what one wants from a horde shooter.
El Paso, Elsewhere does nothing new as a videogame - the whole point of it, in fact, is to do everything old. Despite revolving around the nucleus of a Max Payne homage and flatly refusing to flesh out the mechanics of a game from 2001, El Paso manages to transcend its skeletal concept thanks to an arresting presentation and brilliant story. Incredibly written with themes that speak to me on a deeply personal level, it compensates for its weaknesses as a game by simply being a brilliant piece of media.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is truly exemplary, one of the few videogames in history that wholly deserve the universal acclaim heaped so freely upon releases above a certain marketing budget. The choices offered to the player in terms of both crafting an adventurer and influencing the story do an incredible job of translating Dungeons & Dragons to a form of interactive software that surpasses the loftiest expectation. The script is incredible, the gameplay beneath it downright luxurious. There won't be another like this in a long, long time.
Mythforce is shallow and inauthentic, hiding its creative mundanity behind the insincere promise of retro silliness. This lack of artistic integrity is matched by a lack of quality control, awkwardly bolted together as it is with unrefined controls, dreadful performance, and archaic gameplay. At its very best, we have a boring and bland dungeon crawler of a distinctly unrewarding stripe, but it’s almost always far worse than that.
This is a game that features the line, “It’s quieter than a mute nun’s pussy on Christmas,” and by the time you hear it you’ve been exposed to so much wildness it’s simply par for the course.