As you level up and progress, new jobs open up, but it's not a tacked-on system, choosing jobs changes the game's makeup and that of your party, so simply unlocking a new job doesn't necessarily mean you assign someone to it.
Being placed in a world akin to a setting kids might be whisked away to if they were transported to a nightmarish version of their own imagination -- by that interdimensional beast that lives underneath their floorbirds -- it's, yeah, terrifying.
It's also as strange as Mario's team-up with a sentient hat that for some reason lets him Being John Malkovich a dinosaur.
As Faraday, the setup is simple, you're a lone shipwreck survivor left to pick up the pieces, rescue those lost or trapped, and lead them through a fantastical world. Rebuild.
Sometimes that focus is nudged in one direction via shifting screen real-estate.
After 60-hours of walking the streets, driving through the Badlands, and diving through the wreckage of a now underwater part of Pacifica, that sense of awe, scale, and detail never really went away. That said there were more than a few momentary stutters, Relic Malfunctions, whenever a character did something glitchy or the AI behaved in such a way as to remove all pretense of that title. Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Nope.
And an adventure starring a mortal out of their depth in the land of gods and monsters and thick Greek accents.
That said, Spidey fans will dig it. Sony fanpeeps will sing its praises from Manhattan rooftops and it fills a gap. There’s just a question of “is it enough?” and even as a massive comic book geek and lover of all things wall-crawling, I’d have waited another six months for a more fleshed-out experience, and one that doesn’t overly mimic the foundation of its origins. Miles might learn from Peter, and Peter might be the ‘A’ Spider-Man, but that doesn’t need to mean Miles lives exclusively in his design shadow.
In the end Age of Calamity is more Breath of the Wild than Dynasty Warriors, and I’ve been purposely vague when it comes to the storyline and specific quests for good reason. Although they were far and few-between in Breath of the Wild, when you did get the ol’ cinematic it was pretty special. In Age of Calamity you have more of these, both in quantity and in terms of high quality production values. To the point where you can’t wait to see what happens next.
And the best Kaizo creators also deepen their own understanding as they then attempt to skewer their own established patterns.