Basketball has never been better in video games than it was in NBA Jam. Unless you count Acclaim’s run in the game around the millennium, which unfortunately makes up most of it, but when NBA Jam is NBA Jam, it’s the best. It’s just? unfortunate we haven’t seen it since (holy? crap) 2011.

It’s expensive (I assume) to license the names and likenesses of NBA players, so while RoboDunk lacks flesh, it has it where it ?counts: dunks??. 

RoboDunk (PC, Switch, PS4, PS5 [reviewed], Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Jollypunch Games
Publisher: Jollypunch Games
Release: September 25th, 2023 (PC, Switch), January 21st, 2025 (PS4, PS5 Xbox Series X|S)
MSRP: $14.99

RoboDunk lifts the brutality of NBA Jam’s 2v2 gameplay (technically built off of Arch Rivals) but puts its own twist on it. Most prominently, there is no shooting. I mean, some of the robots have firepower, but they won’t throw the ball unless it’s to pass. The only way to score is to dunk. To make up for the lack of three-pointers, you can charge your jump, and the higher?? the charge, the higher the jump, and th?e more points you gain. 

Like NBA Jam, violence has no repercussions, so you’re encouraged to throw elbows and shoulders to dislodge the ball from your opponent’s grasp. Alternatively, when you have the ball, you can also throw up a temporary shield around your robot that shocks anyone who tries to touch your ball. Each bot has its own special weapon that works on an ammo system. Some will drop turrets, others shoot lasers, and some just have a different type of tackle. You get money for doling out punishment, so there’s no reason to not make the competitors go home in te?ars.

RoboDunk’s central mode bills itself as a roguelite, which essentially means that you take on runs, progressing through harder and harder matches until you even??tually fail and have to start over (though you can pay to start from a more advanced stage. With the money you earn from matches, you can buy more bots, upgrade them, or unlock new perks that appear randomly before matches.

The core gameplay is solid. It’s as brisk as its main influence, never really stopping gameplay as you push toward the enemy net and get pushed back in return. The charge-dunk system provides some good risk and reward, as charging up your j??ump leaves you exposed but allows you ?to pile on the points faster.

Each match in the roguelite mode has different modifiers, including what hazards hit the court, such as rolling spike logs and random meteors. They also run at different lengths and for a varying number of rounds, making it important to actually look at the setup before diving in and adapting to what’s in front of you. Taken entirely based on the core gameplay, RoboDunk is simple but entertaining.

The actual roguelite framework, however, I’m not all that hot on. It’s presented as a progression where you’re given a choice of three matches, each of which offers two semi-permanent perks and features different rulesets. While this works from the perspective of being a roguelite, it takes away from its feel as a sport. It feels like progression only in the literal sense, but it doesn’t feel like you’re accomplishing ?anything meaningful.

More importantly, however, the perks are over-crowded, and money comes so damned slowly. You ??get a payout depending on how high you score, how hard you hit, successful shielding, and your use of weapons, and then this is subtracted or increased by the difficulty of the match. On a good match, I’d see around 50 of the in-game currency. This can be boosted by choosing bots that you don’t use frequently. As the robots sit on the bench, they’ll gain a percentage boost, so you’ll get a higher payout. This is actually an interesting wrinkle since it means you won’t just stick to one robot and pour all your upgrades into it.

However, since you’re spending money on new perks, new robots, and?? upgrades for those robots, actually making meaningful progress feels extremely slow. What’s worse is that the difficulty modifier is extremely small, so it never feels like you’re getting ade??quately rewarded for winning harder matches. It really deadens the drive. There’s less compulsion to push harder and further since it feels like everything is at a constant rather than a curve.

There’s one complaint that I feel weird about, but I think I can explain it: robots have no place in basketballs. Hear me out. Part of what made NBA Jam’s more outlandish elements more effective is the fact that you were watching real NBA players dunk from great heights and hit the floor. It’s less effective with robots. I completely believe they’re capable of superhuman dunks because they’re not human. I have no idea whether or not getting shoved into the concre??te would hurt these particular machines. Visual feedback was used to communicate impact, but because there’s no skin in the game, I always felt a disconnect in watching things unfold.

The robots themselves, and even the ar?enas, are supported by a surprising amount of background lore, which does a lot to flesh things ou??t. There's a lot to do and discover, but it struggles to feel worthwhile. It never really feels grounded. Being able to connect is a key part to enjoying sports, not just in video games, but in reality.

Having another player join you really helps things since, rather than being a random assortment of machines, it’s you and your chum playing basketball. As multiplayer often does, it lessens the complications caused by the slow progression and adds more meaning to the matches. You can also strategize better with one player handing defense and the other going in for the dunk. Co-op also demonstrates how well all th??e mechanics work together.

And that’s kind of the bottom line: RoboDunk works quite well on a functional level. Its dunk-centric basketball is a quick, enjoyable snack. Its toy-like aesthetic and minimalistic stop-motion animation is effective. However, the framework just doesn’t support it quite right. Barring my (possible superficial) thoughts about robo-dunkers, th?e roguelite setup doesn’t provide a compelling experience. It’s a decent game to pick up and play, but it’s not the slam dunk it should be.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Robodunk appeared first on Destructoid.

The metroidvania genre is all over everything these days, especially in the indie sphere. A dime will get you a dozen. I get the appeal; it’s one of the best ways to tell a narrative in a 2D game. But wh?en there are so many coming out at any time, which one do you choose? It’s easy to feel burned out on them.

So, I’ve been ignoring a lot of titles that boast the metroidvania label in their press releases. I’ve probably missed out on some good ones, but I just can’t look at another rectangle-dominated map screen. Okay, one more, I guess. Blade Chimera caught my attention because it’s created by Team Ladybug and WSS Playground, the folks behind Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth. Not my favori??te game, no, but solid and dependable. Plus, ?it’s cyberpunk this time around, so that’s always a win in my book.

Blade Chimera (PC, Switch)
Developer: Team Ladybug, WSS Playground
Publisher: Playism, WSS Playground
Release: January 16th, 2025
MSRP: $19.99

The plot in Blade Chimera is strikingly boilerplate, but the setting is at least unique. It takes place in a near-future Osaka where demons run amok. 30 years previous, people started transforming into monsters of folklore and legend and caused a ruckus. During that time, The Holy Union, a pseudo?-religious group, overthrew the government of Japan and took control in an effort to protect people from the demons.

Now,? this is where it gets kind of trite. You play as Shin, a guy recently found cryogenically frozen, and because of his prolonged stasis, has no memory of his life before being frozen. However, he kicks ass, and quickly ascends the ranks of the Venatars, The Holy Union’s enforcers. However, he’s principled and frequently questions if indiscriminately mowing down demons is morally correct, especially after he meets one that can turn into a sword.

So, from the start, you can kind of guess where this all is going. I wish I could say that the characters and situations make up for its predictability, but that would only partially be accurate. There are some fun moments, but it’s clumsy a??t best.

That’s starting off on a bad note, but that’s the biggest problem out of the way, and it’s nothing huge. The game itself is butter. Like Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, it’s tangibly Castlevania: Symphony of the Night-inspired. Forget the Metroid part; its entire framework is Symphony of the Night. Its protagonist even sports long white hair.

However, Shin is proficient in firearms. You wind up with three attack buttons, two being whatever you want them to be, and the last belonging to Lux, the aforementioned big sword. The game suggests that you use one button for ranged weapons and the other for melee, and that’s sound advice. Before Blade Chimera even verbalized it, that’s how I designated the ?bu?ttons in my mind.

Lux is more than just a big sword; she’s also your source of magic attacks. You unlock these through an upgrade tree, and using them effectively can make all the difference in boss battles. As a sword, you c?an plant her in the wall or?? ceiling to hold a button or act as a platform. She also had the ability to exploit “time rifts�that were scattered around. These do an inconsistent variety of things. They’re often used for simple puzzles, but mainly, you find them as grappling hooks, bridges, or hidden pathways. It’s all simple, simple stuff, but it works as a way of mixing up things a bit.

Uniquely, Blade Chimera doesn’t really use traversal powers to gate off your exploration. It does to some extent, but mainly for secret areas. You unlock powers like double-jump and dash by leveling up, so it’s u?p to you how they’re prioritized. Instead, you’re mainly gated off using actual gates that you don’t have the keys for. However, the actual locked doors are rare enough that they don’t have the chance to really feel artificial.

It’s al??so very good at incentivizing exploration. This is largely through its 56 hidden jigsaw pieces. Throughout the world, you’ll bump into doors that c?an only be opened if you have enough of the pieces. If you go to the effort of rooting them out, you’ll find some of the best weapons and items behind them. It strikes me as being the bluntest way of hiding such goodies, but it’s strangely satisfying.

It’s maybe the art style that does such a good job of covering such artificialities. I hadn’t paid much attention to the marketing, and the Blade Chimera doesn’t overtly talk about it until later, but just based on the enemies and environments, I could tell it was future Osaka. Considering tha??t, like most metroidvania games, you’re exploring an abstract 2D world, it says a lot that a cities culture can be communicated so clearly, even to someone who has only visited the place once.

But the pixelated sprites are where it truly shines. There’s an incredible amount of detail in every frame of animation, breaking away from its Symphony of the Night inspiration. The same variety of huge bosses that were so prominent in Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth make an unmistakable appearance here and are just as thrilling. But?? more importantly, to a geek like me, Ladybug doesn’t commit any pixel-art faux pas. There isn’t a mixel to be seen, and everything seems to move on integers, which keeps things looking authentic. It also speaks to the underlying passion when an artist goes the whole mile to present a specific aesthetic, and it’s so well executed here.

To stretch the gameplay out a bit, there are side missions you can take, but it’s here that you find another soft spot in Blade Chimera. I initially went about trying to complete every?? side mission, but I found they come in two flavors: Interesting story asides and onerous grinding. The vast majority belong to the latter category. It will task you with eliminating demons within certain criteria, such as in a specific area or ones that are a specific c??olor. What this often boils down to is finding a point in the map where these demons exist, then exiting the screen and re-entering to respawn the enemies and taking them out until you reach the goal. Ideally, you take on these tasks alongside your main objective, but these only lined up for me in a few instances.

The other side quests are more worthwhile. They usually involve helping citizens out by seeking out items or investigating crimes. More importantly, they?? feature moments of character development. The most interesting is perhaps between Shin and a particular rival. You can generally identify the side-story missions because they have a much higher payout than their grind-centric counterparts. I feel like the busywork could have been completely excised without compromising anything since I ended the game with far too much money, and I felt the runtime was appropriate for the genre.

Blade Chimera is exactly as I expected: solid and dependable. It’s not the most remarkable game I’ve played in the genre, nor is it very inventive. Despite its cyberpunk leanings, it perhaps leans a bit too hard on its Symphony of the Night aspirations, which hamstrings its attempts to find its own identity. Not to mention that its narrative is so ??predictable, the only thing that kept me guessing was whether or not it was trying to be subversive or if it was actually that obviou??s.

However, it’s done with a lot of skill and a tangible amount of passion. If it’s something of a clone of Symphony of the Night, it’s less plagiarism and more “imitation is the sincerest form of flatte??ry. It makes itself worthwhile with solid design and enjoyable combat. It hides a lot of its flaws beneath a communicative art style that captures its setting and its characters so well. It’s maybe not what I’ll reach for first the next time I’m in the mood for a metroidvania, but it’s a symphony in its own right.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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After a hands-on preview of the first three chapters of Dynasty Warriors: Origins back in November 2024, Origins became one of my most anticipated releases of 2025. The first three chapters got me hooked, and I not only wanted more of the fast and simply fun-to-play combat I'd come to expect from the franchise, but I was gen??uinely looking forward to continuing the story.

Admittedly, this is not quite something I had expected going into a Dynasty Warriors game, especially once again telling the tale of the Romance of the Three Kin?gdoms, a tale the series has already told man,y many times. But I found the angle of placing the story and its direction more in the player's hands an exciting and enjoyable way to push the hack-and-slash series forward in te??rms of storytelling.

Thankfully, developer Omega Force doesn't let its foot off the pedal after the first three chapters, and in fact, things only get bigger and better as Dynasty Warriors: Origins progres??ses, both i?n terms of battle size—arguably the franchise's staple feature—and absolute scale.

Dynasty Warriors: Origins (PC, PS5[reviewed], Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Omega Force
Publisher: Koei Tecmo
Released: January 17, 2025
MSRP: $69.99

Dynasty Warriors: Origins kicks off at the beginning of the Yellow Turban Rebellion, a period of peasant revolt and uprising in Chinese history that is essentially the progenitor of the fabled Three Kingdoms period. Players take on the role of The Wanderer, a formidable warrior experienc??ing amnesia at the time the events of the game kick off. Now, typically, I'd argue that an amnesiac main character is a bit bromidic in nature, but it fits what Omega Fo??rce is doing with the essential reboot of the franchise with Origins.

Even though the Romance of the Three Kingdoms saga has been told time and time again in this franchise, using an actual single player character rather than having you play as various historical leaders and soldiers from the period opens up unique narrative points for Omega Force. Throughout the game, you'll make friends and enemies with characters from each dynasty and are often given the choice of who to side with and join on the battlefield. It's a much-welcomed and pleasant surprise to play a Dynasty Warriors game where you get to ma??ke some choices that actually feel like they matter and have some ??weight behind them.

As someone who's always appreciated the historical period in which the series takes place, th??is is the first tim??e I've felt an actual bond with the characters rather than just assigning a "good guy/bad guy" label based on whether they were an ally or foe on the battlefield. Speaking of bonds, there's an actual Bond System at play that allows you to grow your relationship with various lords and officers from the Three Kingdoms era, unlocking unique story events with them as well as unique rewards. Maxing out a bond with a character leads to a special cutscene highlighting the bond between you and that character.

While I do think the unique player-created character being the MC was the right move, it did, unfortunately, affect the overall connection I had to the main character in a negative way. Throughout most of the campaign, your character is rather reserved and unemotional, mostly due to the fact that he doesn't ev??en remember exactly who he is which is. As you progress through the story, your memories return, but in the end, I found myself more interested in the connections I made with the various other major characters rather than my own character.

There are ten weapon types throughout Dynasty Warriors: Origins, most of which unlock as you play through the campaign, with the Halberd unlocking after completing the campaign. The weapon type you use dictates your playstyle, Battle Arts (essentially skills in battle), as well as the combos and attacks of both your ??Heavy and Light attacks. Each time you use a weapon of a specific type, you'll build up your proficiency with it, unlocking n?ew attacks and combos with them. It also progresses your overall Rank, increasing your character's Health, Attack, and Defense, meaning changing it up and trying out new weapon types can still build your character strength even if you end up not sticking with it.

I found myself drawn to the Twin Pikes weapon type, massive axe-like weapons that your character wields in each hand. I felt like a full-on berserker, cleaving through hordes of enemies?? with ease while occasionally jumping into the air to leap slam down on my opponents with the Twin Pikes. They deal a ton of damage—in my limited testing, possibly the most overall outside of the late-game unlocked Cresent Blade and the post-game unlocked Halberd—and come with a ton of AoE attacks to really mow through battles.

Each weapon type also has some unique cadences that you can learn and execute to give you even more of an edge for dedicating the time to learning the?? weapon. For example, with the Twin Pikes if you hold Guard and then initiate a Heavy Attack and continue to spam the Heavy Attack button, you'll spin around whirlwind style—like I said, a berserker—continuously. If you manage to time your final Heavy Attack press right as the attack lands, the final attack is empowered, dealing more damage and resulting in a cool enhanced attack animation.

Thinking back on my childhood experiences with the Dynasty Warrior franchise, it's easy to remember what made them stand? out so much: the massive battles. With Origins, Omega Force ??redefines massive battles, with some maps hosting up to 10,000 soldiers on the screen at a time. As you progress through the campaign, the battles not only get bigger but more intense as well. Along the way your army will grow as well, giving you access to new Tactics that will allow you to issue commands to nearby soldiers in your army. The Tactics you can use range from issuing a charge to cut off an advancing army or launching a targeted arrow strike to thin out numbers.

This added gameplay element felt like a refined version of the system in Bladestorm, another series by Omega Force and Koei Tecmo that features massive battles, and it's a welcome addition. There are also times when the Tactics you issue are incorporated with major development points in the historical story of the battles you are fighting in, resulting in sweeping changes to the battle?? and even the battlefield. The ability to so fantastically interweave the storytelling into warfare is impressive and a big step forward for the narrative approach of the series that until now has been rather lacking. And, it's all done without holding back the core strength of the franchise: its fast-paced hack-and-slash combat. If anything, it amplifies it.

Completing the Dynasty Warriors: Origins campaign unlocks a New Game Plus mode that allows you to continue building your character from where you ended the campaign while going back and exploring the various choice points throughout the game and giving you the opportunity to see how things differ based on your choice. You can change which faction you join, to see how the entire story would have unfolded had you joined that faction instead, all while continuing to level and power up the same character. In this sense, the NG+ mode feels more like the classic replayable grind of the series and one that I actually look forward to doing, which hasn't been the case since Samurai Warriors 4 for me.

Everything that makes Dynasty Warriors great has been built on and amplified in Dynasty Warriors: Origins. The fast-paced combat is more fluid and satisfying than ever, and I think the decision to allow players to build up their own character is the right move for the franchise moving forward. I wasn't sure how Omega Force could take a series coming up on three decades old and make it appealing to newcomers while appeasing long-time fans, but they found a way. For me, this is the best Dynasty Warriors yet, and I'm excited to see what's next.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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It was difficult to be a Nintendo fan during the Wii years. The initial hype around its motion controls died pretty quickly when it became clear its real-world application was extremely limited. Worse, Nintendo seemed to be looking to gain favor with a broader audience and it ?seemed ??that its output suffered.

What sucked most was that it felt like motion control was being shoehorned into everything. Mostly because they were. I think 2010’s Donkey Kong Country Returns is exemplary of this. Retro Studios did an admirable job continuing Rare’s legacy, but the absolutely baffling decision was made to incorporate controller shaking. In particular, you had to shake the controller to get DK to roll. Rolls were necessary as a form of attack, ?but more importantly, rolling was used to extend jumps. Precise jumps, specifically. Jumps that you would see in the hardest levels. And it didn’t matter how simple the motion was, it was unreliable.

There was no reason for it, it could have easily been bound to the same button as “pick up/grab,�you know, just ??like it was in earlier games. You couldn’t turn it off. The mere fact that it had to be this was frustrates me to even talk about, but actually playing the most difficult levels with this hamstringer drove me insane.

So, anyway, Donkey Kong Country Returns HD doesn’t use motion controls and is?? better for it.

Donkey Kong Country Returns HD (Switch)
Developer: Retro Studios, Forever Entertainment
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: January 16, 2025
MSRP: $59.99

Technically, you could play Donkey Kong Country Returns without motion control on the 3DS already with Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D, but I feel like this sort of game ne??eds a? bigger screen.

The original Donkey Kong Country series?? was a heavy-hitter on the SNES, practically putting Rare on the map. If someone tells you that those games were only loved for their graphics and had standard gameplay, they were clearly in a Genesis household. Rare may have fronted with the lavish 3D-to-2D sprites, but the level design was top-notch. Sometimes maddeningly so. Loads of variety across its worlds.

After Nintendo and Rare had split, it seemed unlikely the series would continue in any form, so it was a surprise to see it again in 2010, and even more surprising to find out that it’s every bit as good as the original trilogy (motion control frustration aside). Honestly, while I prefer the vibes of the SNES titles better, the levels in Donkey Kong Country Returns reach offensive levels of creativity. From riding rockets to avoiding giant rhythmic hammers, it’s a master ?class at setpieces. It provides a stiff but fair challenge across its eight (main) worlds, and constantly finds new ways to surprise.

One of the first things that greets you when you start up a new game is a difficulty setting. There are t?wo, and they’re hilariously named “Modern�and “Classic,�which made me wonder what year thi??s is. “Modern�is easier because I guess COVID caused our thumbs to atrophy and our patience to thin. You have three hearts by default, and Cranky’s shop carries more items.

Beyond the fact that something from 2010 is considered no longer modern, I find it amusing that there’s an easier difficulty because Donkey Kong Country Returns already has difficulty options. It caused a bit of discourse at the time, even before the Dark Souls Easy Mode debate. There’s the Super Guide that plays the level for you if you screw up a few too many times, something that became insulting after the motion controls let me down ??during difficult segments. There are also potions that make you invincible for a while. But, yeah, extra difficulty op??tions never hurt. I just wish they didn’t also make me feel old and worried for the new generations at the same time.

The story of Donkey Kong Country Returns is somewhat divorced from the original series, which was an escalating fight against an insane lizard. Donkey Kong’s banana horde is stolen again (as Cranky Kong points out, “So, who hasn’t stolen your bananas at this point?�, but this time, it’s by a strange army of t??iki idols that can hypnotize the wildlife. Thankfully, DK’s advanced primate brain is immune to hypnosis, so he sets out to reacquire his bananas, ??assumedly before they turn brown.

Much of Donkey Kong Country Returns feels like a re-tread of the first game. You have all the barr??el blasting and mine carting that made that title stand out. Moreover, the heaps of tantalizing secret items that are dangled just out of reach make a return. While it’s a linear platformer, Retr??o Studios followed Rare’s example of sticking extra challenges and hidden nooks to find as you race to the goal. More importantly, you’re rewarded for searching things out, with additional levels awarded, mainly for collecting all the KONG letters.

The view is zoomed out a lot farther, and climbable surfaces have?? been added, which allows levels to have a lot more verticality to them. This also means that minecart sections require fewer split-second reactions. Personally, I never had a problem with the minecarts in the SNES game, but I know some hate those levels, so maybe this is less vexing? If it’s not, you’re going to hate the rockets.

Alongside the minecart segments, there are levels where you ride a rocket barrel through a forced scrolling section. These require you to press the jump button to pull up and raise your altitude, so it requires a bit more awareness than, say, a scrolling shoot-’em-up. It requires a feel for the responsiveness of the rocket, and there are some really narrow parts that might end up frustrating. I loved the rocket segments each and every time; they may be my favorit?e part of the whole experience. There’s something to be said about the simplicity, but Retro Studios was still able to put in some incredibly thrilling segments around your rocket-propelled journey.

The bosses are a bit more of a mixed bag. Each one is heavily pattern-based, and there’s a lot of variety between them. Unfortunately, that same variety means that some are better than others. I had difficulty even figuring out what I had to do on some of them. Adding to that, the collision detection in Donkey Kong Country Returns is questionable a lot of the time, and this seems to manifest most when it comes to bosses. I’d find myself taking damage when I was clear of danger to the point where I captured a video of one moment, then viewed it and confirmed that the two models didn’t intersect. What the hell? I’m not sure if the shaky collision was this way in the original version. It’s only a minor annoy?ance overall; it just seems like an out-of-place loose thread in an otherwise tight and polished ??game.

The graphical glowup in Donkey Kong Country Returns is pretty understated. It’s mostly what it says on the tin: a higher-resolution version of the original. Donkey Kong has some added fuzz, but it’s clearly set before Tropical Freeze since he hasn’t yet discovered the amazing ?conditioner that gave him his incredible coat in that game.

The best comparison I can give is to say it’s like Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD. Nothing has really changed art-wise. The lighting is better, but it’s far from astounding. The textures are sharper, but they haven’t really changed. Backgrounds are largely untouched. It’s not the same magnitude of upgrade that Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door got, it’s largely just Donkey Kong Country Returns with more pixels.

It was nice to revisit the game. I find that with platformers, unless they’re extremely unconventional, they kind of get sectioned away in my brain. Even when they’re particularly well-executed, as is the case with Donkey Kong Country Returns. But actually sitting down and playing them, I find I can still appreciate? them.

And while Donkey Kong Country Returns HD doesn’t revolutionize the game, it still manages to become the definitive version of the title. If you haven’t played it before, you owe it to yours??elf to try it out. Retro Studios outdid themselves. They took what came before and expertly expanded and improved on it. It’s an astounding display of creative level design that is near unmatched in sidescrollers. And now you can play it without hav??ing to shake your controller.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Oh, I’ve been waiting for this. My Summer Car has been in Early Access since 2016, and I’ve eagerly awaited the chance to review it for real. It’s finally here, which means there’s no escap??e. It’s time to pull this bad boy apart.

But I want to be upfront: My Summer Car is wildly unconventional. It has an almost incomparable design philosophy, completely shirking the evolution of games that came before it. As a result, it’s clearly for a specific type of person, but I can’t tell you what that type of person is, nor can I tell with any certainty if you would fit in that ca??tegory. At best, I hope I can get you curious enough to try it. At worst, you won’t get what I’m talking about.

My Summer Car (PC)
Developer: Amistech
Publisher: Amistech
Released: January 8, 2025
MSRP: $14.99

My Summer Car transports you to rural Finland circa 1995. You’re dropped into the shoes of a young ??adult left unsupervised for the summer. You’ve got a moped, a front-end? loader, and a car that has been busted down to its individual components. The obvious focus is getting that car put together, but the end goal? Ehhh.

There is technically a way to roll the credits without dying, but doing so relies on arcane knowledge. Personally, I’d say the end goal of My Summer Car is whatever you make of it. There are a lot of things that you can do, a??nd some of them result in rewards. There are also a lot of ways you can fuck up, and many of them result in death.

Yeah, death. Rural Finland is a dangerous place and My Summer Car loves to se?e you suffer. It prominently features a permadeath. This can be turned off, but that comes with its own inconveniences. Alternatively, if you’re savvy, you can create backups of your saves so you c?an resume later in case of catastrophe.

It’s down to preference as to whether you’ll accept permanent death. I always leave it on because it adds much weight to how you interact with the world. You will buckle your seatbelt and drive more safely if you know that slipping off the narrow roads can undo your progress. However, it’s a cruel game. If any of your mortal stats completely deplete (hunger and thirst, for instance), you can drop dead. There’s a chance you’ll be killed if you pick up the telephone during a thunderstorm (I looked it up, and apparently, that can happen in reality). I once died because I didn’t flip?? the master brea??ker before changing a fuse.

Oh, apparently, you can die if you piss on the TV. I don’t know why you’d try that. I guess if you felt the need to just hose down the living room so your parents know you now own the place. I’m not sure why someone would go to the effort of designing and programming that particular way to die, but ??that demonstrates the developer’s bizarre priorities. One of the new threats is that if you leave the door to your house open, a wasp can get inside. The player character is allergic to wasp stings.

Even if you have death turned off, My Summer Car has many ways to punish you. If you leave the stove on when you leave the house, there is a chance your house will burn down. That's it. No more house. Technically, you can still survive homeless, but I’m sure you can understand why this would be inconvenient. You can also be thrown in jail if you try to?? evade police or murder someone (either accidentally or intentionally). Otherwise, there’s always the risk of getting in an accident and totali??ng your car. The worst part of that scenario is the long, long, very long walk of shame you have to perform back to your home.

Wrecking your car isn’t necessarily the end of your Finland adventure. You can drag it to the local mechanic, Fleetari, to repai??r. As far as I know, you can’t permanently destroy anything, but it’s hard to tell with this game. Fixes require money, however, and economics are difficult. There are a lot of odd jobs you can do, including chopping and delivering firewood, picking strawberries, sucking septic tanks, and selling homemade alcohol. However, they aren’t always available and some of them have roadblocks of their ow?n, such as having to pay for the septic truck’s gas.

If My Summer Car has anything like what you’d describe as a gameplay loop, it would be work, get money, spend money on car mainte??nance. But that kind of breaks down when you realize that building the? car is mainly for its own sake.

Johannes Rojola has the design sensibilities of a seagull full of cocaine. Efficiency is a foreign concept, and almost nothing added since the start of Early Access has been to the benefit of the player. My Summer Car is a nest of side activities, sub-plots (as if there’s a main plot), and cruelty. He goes into minute detail about some of the strangest things. This might be the most complicated simulation of a sauna that humanity wi?ll ever create. I’m not sure who else would think to allow you to piss on the stones.

The whole car construction thing is a real work of effort, though. Each piece is affected by physics, so you’re literally picking things up, moving them to where they need to go, snapping them together, then bolting them on. Like almost everything in this game, it’s temperamental. It’s not the most efficient or intuitive way to do this, either. It works, the depth of it is incredibly satisfying, and you would probably ??never see this in a big-budget production.

One of the strangest quirks of its design is how much it allows you to clip through objects, and it’s stranger still that you’re practically required to do it to find all the bolts on the car. Many games go to great lengths to keep things corporeal and avoid letting the player phase through the geometry. My Summer Car just says, “fuck it,�??and makes it a feat??ure. If something important falls through the floor, you can find it at the landfill.

But, as weird as the design can get, it’s all in the service of some steadfast commitment to realism. While ??a lot of death in the game can seem unfair, everything fatal is rooted in reality. Yeah, maybe you don’t expect? to die just because you’re chopping wood while filled with more alcohol than a brewery, but common sense would tell you it’s a bad idea.

It’s also realistic in the sense that rural life is boring. There’s nowhere to go, there’s nothing ?on TV, there’s nothing to do. Work is sometimes slow to come in, and much of it requires you to plan your day around it. It isn’t efficient to go and suck out one person’s septic tank; it’s better to wait until all your customers require the service and then do a circuit. You can fill the trailer full of firewood all you want, but the guy who buys it will only request it once a week. The dance pavilion is only active on one day of the week, repairs and orders take time to finish, and the drunk who needs a ride home only calls sporadically.

Also, make sure you pay your phone bill. I was wondering why no one was calling with jobs, then realized that the phone company had cut me ?off.

If anything, the real challenge of My Summer Car is finding ways to fill your time. Frankly, part of my over 200 hours of playtime was spent idling in?? the game world while reading something at my desk. If you ask me, it’s boredom b??y design. It really lets you feel the ennui and makes the simple feeling of getting in the car with somewhere to go feel impactful. Every accomplishment is magnified. Weird, weird stuff.

If there’s one place I’m less enthusiastic about, it’s that absolutely nothing in My Summer Car is explained. In 2016, I figured out how to put? a car together by rubbing stuff together and finding out how it fit. But that only gets you so far. It won’t help you tune the engine or tell you what to do when you blow a cylinder. There’s also nothing in the game that tells you that you shouldn’t piss on the TV or that you can cook sausages on the stove by placing them directly on the burner.

This means you must rely on outside information, such as the My Summer Car Wiki. In a way, this makes up for the fact that you can’t just converse with the folks around you to learn things. In reality, you might be able to bring up in conver??sation that you can only stay awake if you drink a cup of coffee every five minutes and be told that you have caffeine addiction. You might mention to the store clerk?? that you want to piss on the television, and they’ll say, “I wouldn’t do that, friend. That’s how my uncle died.�That’s kind of outside the boundaries of what’s feasible in game design.

Especially since everyone speaks Finnish in Finland. As you’d expect, a lot of this is subtitled, but not all of it. The stuff that is subtitled might be subtitled poorly. There are talk radio programs, and I can’t help but wish I knew what they were saying. It does lend to feeling like you’re living in a country that doesn’t speak your native language. Although, since you?r character is canonically Finnish, the exchange student excuse doesn’t make much sense. On the plus side, I now know how to swear in Finnish.

Though, really, if there’s one thing I absolutely hate, it’s the constant degradation of your Satsuma’s individual engine parts. I’m not just talking about the oil and brake fluid, but the alternator and pistons. You can’t just buy new replacement parts, only Fleetari, the mechanic in the area, can fix them. It’s expensive. You have to pull the entire engine out of your car and hand it to the mechanic; he won’t just do it himself at his, y’know, garage. It also takes a little while for him to finish. That would be bad enough, but they degrade so quickly.

It can feel like you’re driving a machine made of gossamer. Even if you don’t bump it around or drive it hard, it’s going to need to see the car ??doctor way sooner than you’d want. You can drive the van instead, which doesn’t degrade or break down, but it feels weird playing a car-building game and having to take it to a different person to repair behind the scene??s every couple of weeks.

There’s a popular supplement for the game, MSCedit, which lets you open your save file and modify it. Cheating, essentially. Well, cheating overtly. However, there’s a point at which the game’s obstacles start to get in the way of your enjoyment, and for me, it’s having to worry about whether or not a piston is on the verge of blowing because I drove Grandma to church one too many times. It’s a step too far and probably should have stopped with replacing fan belts, spark plugs, and gaskets. I get that it's part of the game's intentional design �??the Satsuma is supposed to be a piece of crap �but I hate it.

As I said, the endpoint of My Summer Car is extremely nebulous. I’m not sure how you’d really reach it without knowing the criteria in advance because it gets pretty specific. Yet, despite this, there are pretty lofty goals to achieve along the way. Getting your Satsuma certified as road-worthy is one. Winning the rally or drag races would be another. Helping the drunk guy move into a new home is a big event. You only get there by simply existing and? surviving in the harsh environments of Finland.

There are plenty of lackadaisical simulators out there that revel in their own awkwardness. I’ve stared into the dead eyes of enough Unreal Engine assets to last a lifetime. But My Summer Car is not that. For all its ugliness, its rough edges, and t??he way it shirks conventional design, it’s a completely earn?est product.

Rojola has said that he is “developing dream games for [his] own enjoyment.�Whether or not it’s your dream game is another matter. For me, it very much is. It’s one that I’ve returned to frequently since its Early Access life for another taste of its brutal depiction of Finnish rural life. The friction it creates with its harsh punishment provides meaning to those peaceful moments as you drive along its winding dirt roads. It might strike some as boring, too cryptic, or too unwelcoming, but regardless of whether or not it’s your kind of ride, it's exactly what it intends to be. There is no experience quite like My Summer Car.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game purchased by the reviewer.]}

The post Review: My Summer Car appeared first on Destructoid.

I remember reading a preview for The Thing in a magazine back befo??re its release. The game, I mean, not the movie. It’s certainly a game that sounds interesting on paper. So, it’s been stuck in the back of my mind for decades, but I never really made the move to play it.

Why?? would I? I hadn’t watched the movie, and reviews at the time of launch were lukewarm. I knew it developed something of a cult following since then, but even among fans, I heard the same thing: The whole psychological element was too ambitious and didn’t actually work very well. I’ve been left to imagine its failings.

But I rarely miss a remaster from Nightdive Studios, and since they’ve taken on the task of polishing up The Thing, then the stars have certainly aligned. I even went and?? watched the movie while running a fever and cuddling with my dog, just to make things memorable and a little awkward. But you don’t necessarily need to have watched the movie to understand what’s going on in the game. I think you should, though, because then you will truly appreciate how completely daft this game is.

The Thing: Remastered (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch)
Developer: Nightdive Studios, Computer Artworks
Publisher: Nightdive Studios
Released: December 5, 2024
MSRP: $29.99

The end of The Thing: The Movie was left pretty ambiguous. I don’t really want to spoil it for you beyond that. It’s a great movie. And since its ending was left so open, a narrative follow-up had a lot of room to breathe. A story could be really delicate with things and even heighten the mystery of the original. That’s not what The Thing: The Game does, however.?? It st??omps right up to the movie and starts breathing down its shirt. The only mystery it heightens is how this wrecking ball got here.

This was 2002, and the standards for video game storytelling couldn’t get much closer to the floor. This is especially true for shooters. It was a time when Half-Life was still naively hailed as having spun a tale rivaling Citizen Kane. So, I probably shouldn’t have expected much, but The Thing: The Game has the sort of narrative I would come up with off-the-cuff if I was trying to make fun of the concept of a sequel to The Thing: The Movie.

You play as Captain J.F. Blake who sounds so much like Kyle Travers from Final Fight: Streetwise, I actually had to look up the voice actors to convince myself it wasn’t. It takes place right after the movie, so it’s still the 1980s, but he has one of the most popular hairstyles of the late �0s, right down to the spiked-up bangs. He’s Special Forces, and that’s all there is to him. He’s the only competent person in the universe, and he knows it. There isn’t an ounce of humanity to the guy; he’s just a br?ick. A big, grumbly block who wears forest camo pants in Antarctica but won't put on a hat because it would mush down his hairdo.

It starts off interestingly enough. Blake’s Team arrives at U.S. Outpost 31 from the movie and start sorting through the wreckage. It’s a very understated time in the game, as it ?mostly just introduces you to the concepts of the game while allowing you to visit set pieces from the movie. It’s kind of quiet and tense, which is so uncharacteristically restrained for the game in hindsight.

The team did consider what made the movie great when they came up with the design. The one thing they added that I think works well in the game and doesn’t get enough credit is the fact that you can’t linger outside for long. It’s winter in Antarctica and nobody brought ?a toque. You’ll freeze if you don’t find shelter. This gets squandered when 80% of the game is in tight concrete corridors, but the hostility of the open air is a nice touch.

What gets the most marketing hype is the trust/fear system, which is just�I get why they’d focus on it in advertisements, because it’s something that makes the game unique, but it’s so poorly implemented that it might as well not be there at all. The Thing: The Game is a squad-based third-person shooter, an??d the idea is that you need to keep your s??quad from freaking out when any one of them could be a thing in disguise. The idea is that you, as a player, don’t know who to trust.

The fear aspect works the best, but it’s not very impactful. Your squadmates start getting nervous when they’re around gore and dead bodies, but the problem is that the areas you traverse are absolutely lousy with corpses, so it's hard to tell when you're in a fear zone. It usually only becomes a bit of a problem if you stand around in a room with a mess on the floor. Once (and only once), I had to physically push ?a squadmate out of a room so he could get a breather and get a grip. So, it kind of works; it's just really clumsy.

When I completed the game, I got an achievement that said I never let a single squad member reach maximum fear level. That means I actually don’t know if something cool happens when they completely lose it because I was apparently a really soothing presence for those around me.? Maybe it’s because I constantly live in fear and anxiety, so I know how to empathize with others feeling it.

The trust system is completely pointless, though. Sure, some dudes will refuse ??to follow you because they think you might have a thing in your pants, but getting them to come around is just a matter of shoving ammo into their pockets. Their trust is only between you and them; squadmates always trust each other unless it’s for story reasons. They don’t need to kiss and trade ammo. For that m??atter, it's hard for them to distrust you once you've loaded them up. They’ll only start feeling iffy again if you keep shooting them. They don’t seem to think it’s weird that you obsessively check every notepad and carry an armory on their back. Ammo is the only thing they trust.

The whole idea that any one of them could be a thing is the least meaningful layer. It’s true, some of them will sprout tentacles. You can do a blood test to see who’s human, but it doesn’t really work. Like, at all. Dudes you already tested might turn out to be full of things anyw?ay. That doesn’t matter though, because the moment they start to change, all your teammates will suddenly snap and start shooting at them before they’re even done transforming. Even if they didn’t, the friend-things aren’t any?? tougher than any normal thing. They aren’t a threat. So, who cares if you can trust them?

That’s the biggest problem with The Thing: The Game’s superfluous systems; it doesn’t try for tension. You play as some generic good guy. Practically a super-hero. At the best of times, The Thing: The Game?? is a dumb?? shooter. It smells like the early �0s. It’s not really a horror game; it just has some gross bad guys.

Your squad isn’t consistent, either. They get swapped out at almost every loading screen. They don't have charming personalities to get attached to. It doesn’t matter if Simmons expo??ses h??is thing. Simmons wasn’t special. There’s an identical dude down the hallway.

It’s a good remaster, though. Absolutel??y solid. You can tell the tech folks at Nightdive had fun working on a post-millennium game since they loaded it up with all kinds of fancy lighting effects. True to their M.O., they kept it looking like something you’d expect from the era, but it’s not hard to see and appreciate the glow-up. It also ran flawlessly on my PC.

There isn’t as much in terms of extra material as a few of their previous releases. You ca?n view the game’s or?iginal trailer and there’s some concept art, but not a whole lot that’s insightful. I was kind of hoping that a game that looks to have fallen apart in production would have more of a story to tell, but if it does, it won’t be found here.

They clearly couldn’t do anything about the game’s weaknesses. That would take more than a remaster. It’s not just that the fear/trust/infection systems were buggy or weren’t fully implemented. No, the o??riginal developers had some high-concept ideas and tried to put?? them into a dumb shooter, and they didn’t fit. The dumb shooter was the prevailing force, and there’s no undoing that.

I also ran into a lot of glitches. I’m not sure which ones were already there and which were introduced in the remaster. I’m also not certain which ones will be fixed by the time you’re reading this since I got to touch The Thing early for this review. And really, the glitches I ran into we?re mostly just hilarious. I did have to load a recent save to undo a bug a couple of times, but more often, they were just funny, benign things.

The best one happened early. Your squadmates will sometimes throw up when they’re in a bad situation. I can relate; anxiety makes me throw up, too. However, one dude apparently started the puking process right as a cutscene started. The camera snapped back to show the two of us walking into frame, he continued the process of throwing up, but it wouldn't interrupt the animation. Instead, it played the retching noise, and all the vomit came out from between his legs, so it looked like he was violently evacuating his bowels onto the floor. I laughed so hard. I still giggle whenever I think about it. I caught it in my gameplay capture, and I keep?? watching it.

Really, as much as I think The Thing: The Game is kind of terrible, I did find it entertaining. The story is just so braindead and full of cliches that I wanted to see more to find out if it was going to be so obvious the whole way through. It definitely has reverence for the source material, but it wasn’t exactly gentle when it came to building on it. To be fair, I would have been surprised if it had even com??e close to matching the movie in terms of storytelling, so it’s maybe what I should have expected from a 2002 licensed title.

I still applaud ?Nightdive for this remaster. They’re the only ones with the guts. Regardless of how I feel about the game itself, they gave it the same loving attention that they normally do. More importantly, it’s a licensed game, and those tend to be th??????????????????????????e most unlikely candidates for a re-release.

Part of me wishes their effort was spent on a better game, but the other part is happy that I got to experience the absolute mess that is The Thing. I know it sounds weird to hear, “This is a mess; you should totally check it out,�but that’s what I’m saying. The Thing is a fascinating cluster of missteps, and a completely unconvincing facsimile of its source? material. But it’s hard to look away when it turns itself inside out.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: The Thing: Remastered appeared first on Destructoid.

Every so often, I get the urge to play puzzle games just to see if I am as smart as I (sometimes) think I am. I don't usually pour too many hours into them since my brain can only handle so much. Yet, my experience with Dungeons of Dreadrock 2: The Dead King's Secret was the complete opposite, as I constantly lost track of time with its many puzzles. I even had to force myself to put it down, with the thought of "just one more puzzle" lingering in my mind. 

DoD2 continues off from the original narrative, featuring the same retro-inspired art style. I'm new to the series, but understanding its storyline wasn't too much of a stretch. It's your classic adventure where the hero, aka the ?sorceress, ventures into a treacherous place to find the Crown of Wisdom.

Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 - The Dead King's Secret (Switch[reviewed], PC)

Developer: Christoph Minnameier

Publisher: Christoph Minnameier

Released: November 28, 2024 (Switch)/December 5, 2024 (Steam)

MSRP: $14.99

While playing the game without the original is possible, I recommend putting in the time for the first one. The two stories are heavily connected, with key characters from Dungeons of Dreadrock frequently appearing. In fact, there are several split-screen moments when the characters clash together in an effort to thwart the Dead King's evil plans. It's a cool concept to see, and it's made for some pretty unique gameplay. But, of course, the true highlight of The Dead King's Secret is the puzzles. There are about 100 levels to clear, each containing a?? complex challenge to decipher and a fe?w enemies to keep you on your toes.

What I greatly admire about this game is how different each puzzle is from the last. It's not a typical rinse-and-repeat process in which puzzles start to blend together. Every challenge feels carefully crafted, making them stand out individually. On one level, you'll have to memorize specific movements of enemies, while another can revolve around reconstructing a skeleton?.

The puzzles are also unlike anything ?I've experienced before. They all have a unique charm that goes beyond traditional puzzle games. One prime example of this is how levels can connect. A trapdoor you passed by earlier can be crucial for later, requiring you to drop a weapon to help you out on the following floor. Even enemies must be lured to the next stage to assist you with other foes. I like this concept that makes you rethink what you did previously, and it's got some brain gears moving that I didn't know were there.

The farther you go down the levels of DoD2, the more challenging it gets. Fortunately, you can use cheats to skip stages or unlock hints to explain what you need to do in detail. You'll get one clue to help steer you in the right direction, and if you need some extra guidance, you can continue to unlock the rest to complete the level. I tri??ed my best not to use it just for the sake of pride. However, I admit that I had to rely on it during the later stages.

It almost felt impossible to finish some levels without the hints. Maybe it's merely a user error on my part, or perhaps you actually do need to use them every once in a while. I'd be curious to see if anyone out there could accomplish it without 'em. I know it's a tal??l order, but it would be a nice challenge if you're looking to shake things up.

Besides the puzzles, there are numerous battles you'll go through each stage. I will say that it's not the most intricate system since it??'s mainly just the sorceress unleashing a single strike directly ahead. On the other hand, the game does mix things up a bit with the various tools ?you acquire during your journey. For instance, you'll gain a flute that can deter enemies, followed by an ability to turn into a bat. It helps make combat feel less tedious, giving you more ways to take down your enemies.

The boss fights also feel like a puzzle in their own right, where you'll need to strategize your movements and time your attacks. The final stage, in particular, was the ultimate puzzle-solving test, forcing you to remember patterns and not providing many hints to help you out. Like many levels, this one will have you doing things over and over again until ??you get it right. It can sometimes be frustrating, but once you overcome it, you'll feel pretty accomplished. The music makes you feel even more victorious with its epic med?ieval-like soundtrack. I found myself dancing along with it, celebrating the feat of every passing level.

The ending to The Dead King's Secret is worth the time needed to clear 100 levels, which is 10 hours or so. It would've sucked to go through all that just to have a subpar conclusion, but luckily that wasn't the case with DoD2. One of the main reasons why it was so remarkable is the fact that there are two endings. I never expected to see this feature in a puzzle game. By its conclusion, I already had to jump back in to see what other choi?ce I could have made.

Dungeons of Dreadrock 2: The Dead King's Secret is a must-play for puzzle gamers. Challenges never feel the same, and they'll have you thinking outsid??e the box to try? to solve them. The victorious feeling after completing puzzles can get addicting, and you may have a hard time putting it down, just as I did.

Plus, if you enjoyed this game, you can look forward to another entry, as it's already been confirmed to be a trilogy. I'll undoubtedly be there ??for the next one and have plans to tackle the original to play catch-up.

The post Review: Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 – The Dead King’s Secret appeared first on Destructoid.

How good are you at following instruct?ions? How about while you’re under a ?timer? What about when your life depends on it? Me? Maybe not so great. Maybe.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is probably the last game I’ve been anticipating for the year. Well, that’s assuming a couple of them that have been quiet for a while aren’t going to drop. Anyway, playing the demo, it’s h?ard not to fall in love with its tricky diagnose-replace-repair gameplay laced with dark humor and a severe potty mouth.

So, I voraciously ate into it when I finally had it in my hands for this review, but after all the time I put into it, I still haven’t hit the credits. After, urgh, 25 hours, I still haven’t found the bottom of Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop, but I’ve seen enough to tell you that you should definitely play this ga?me if you think you can withstand the pun?ishment.

Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop (PC)
Developer: Beard Envy
Publisher: Kasedo Games
Released: December 5, 2024
MSRP: $19.99

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is, on the surface, a game about repair. Folks d??rop in with their aili??ng spacecraft, and it’s up to you to diagnose problems and make repairs. Each ship is separated into modules, and each craft has a random variety and number of them. The modules range from fuel, oil, and oxygen to AI, reactors, and just one big lever. You’re told what needs fixing, so you don’t need to figure out which of them is broken, but each of them breaks in different ways, so it’s up to you to figure out what needs to be repaired and what it looks like when everything is working.

This is all handled through a tactile interface where you pull levers and push buttons. Once you find something broken, you have to head to the store (right next to the repair bay) to buy a replacement and slot it in. You can get a welder that will restore shattered parts, but I found it somewhat unnecessary, as parts are relatively cheap. It’s a game that feels similar to Papers, Please, b??ut with less paperwork and more refilling blinker fluid.

To help, you’re provided an all-inclusive instruction manual that goes over everything you?? need to know�mostly. You usually don’t have context for what is going on until you’ve seen the module itself and have gotten to know the various parts. Even when you do, it’s not difficult to make a mistake??. You might get a pancake wrong or forget to close a hatch when you’re finished. Personally, I’ve never gotten to the point where I’m completely confident in front of a reactor. But then, if you get a step wrong, they blow up in your face and take, at the very least, you along with them. Possibly the neighborhood, as well.

You play as Wilbur, a hapless guy with a four-eyed fox head. He’s just the latest in a line of mechanics employed at Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop. Hints are dropped at what happened to the previous ones, but you can probably guess. You’re given free rein of the shop. Most of the profit you make is yours, but every thre??e days, you need to pay Uncle Chop R.E.N.T. to maintain your employment.

However, before you even really get grease on your ??hands, some dude shows up and blows your (fox) head off. It’s a good indication of ho??w things will go from here.

You’re saved by a coworker who also happens to be the living personification of death. You’ve made an impression, so he will “zoop�you back to the start of your employm?ent every time you screw up bad enough to die. The purpose of this isn’t completely clear at the start, but it’s nice to have job security. Als?o, yes, this is technically a roguelite.

There are two modes of play in Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop. The first has the day pas??sing by in real time, l??eaving you to try and fit in as many jobs as possible before bedtime. This means there’s a lot of pressure, and you’ll have to flip through that manual of yours pretty quickly whenever you’re faced with something you’re not completely familiar with. It also leaves more room for mistakes.

The second way of playing removes the time limit. You’re given room to complet?e three jobs and can take as long as you want on them. Making a mistake (or “fucking up,�as the?? game puts it) results in heftier penalties. However, in my experience, it’s a far easier way to play. When you’re given as much time as you need, it’s easier to complete a job without any mistakes whatsoever.

It doesn't necessarily feel like the intended way to play. However, it also feels like a necessary compromise. Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is brutal. It throws new stuff at you all the time, practically smashing you directly into a wall. It can be cruel about it. Just wait until the first time you see a?? reactor. Yeah, you read that manual in advance. Go ahead. It?? won’t help. You’re one forgotten switch away from nuking your face off.

Sometimes, after the first R.E.N.T. is taken care of, a dude will land with pipe bombs strapped to his ship. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got the day timer going, you’ll ?have one-and-a-half minutes to deduce what wires you should snip using the Venn diagram from hell. I got really good at bomb defusal. I’m a wiz at reading Venn diagrams.

Even when you’ve got all the tim?e in the world, one fuckup can be all it takes to gutter a run. Some customers have the “Perfectionist�trait, which means that if you make a single mistake, it will completely negate everything you got correct and leave you out of pocket. It’s a gamble since you only need to leave one too few shots left in their ??identification module to lose all your hard work. If you miss R.E.N.T., your job being terminated is the least of your concerns.

There’s also the chance that a customer will show up requiring a fix you can’t provide. This sometimes happens before you have the “Pancake�machine required for building specialized parts, but I also had one that needed a fuse that wasn’t available for me to purchase yet. I’m not sure this is intentional design. The game will sometimes let you know when you don’t have the machines needed to fix a ship be?fore you take a job, but it doesn’t work every tim??e. I’ve learned to just buy the Pancake and Encoder machines immediately at the start of the first run and avoid rebreathers on the first day.

But even still, my last run was ended because I took a job from an armed customer. He tried to rob me, but when I refused to empty my pockets, he shot my brain off??. This is Fuck Around and Find Out: The Game.

It’s okay, though. Every time I got my run nuked, I’d just slump my shoulders and decide if I had time for another run. The only aggravating part about it was that my deadline was coming up and I like to have a game beaten before writing the review since you never know when something will shake apart at the las??t minute. However, I think I’ve gotten to what is essentially an end (there appears to be multiple). I just know that there’s a tonne left hidden because the places you can stick your fingers to find secrets are on display at all times.

What made it so hard to stay mad at it was that, even after restarting dozens of times, I was still being presented with new stuff. Not necessarily modules; I know how to fix a rebreather in my sleep. It’s the interactions with customers and coworkers. Every time one gets out of their ship, you never know if they’re going to give you a hug or complain about how you smell like wet?????????????????????????? dog. Visiting the speakeasy before or after work also gives you the opportunity to see more of the station’s denizens and pick up side quests.

But it’s maybe the fact that Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop doesn’t lean entirely on cruelty to Wilbur that makes it more tolerable. As much fun as it is to see a hapless protagonist suffer, and it feels appropriate in a workplace environment, it can get tiresome. Instead, most of the characters have a softer side. Droose, especially, outwardly seems to care about Wilbur, and some moments with him are endearing. He and some of the cust?omers will offer frequent?? words of encouragement, even if others are deliberately trying to blow you up.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is a lot. It’s a lot more than it has to be. While its design is tight and well-executed, it offers an obscene amount of variety and seemingly endless things to see. Which is good, especially if you’re like me and you find yourself in a hellcircle of 11th-hour fuckups that prevent you from witnessing the final clock out. And I think it says? a lot when, despite how badly I’ve been savaged by its unforgiving nature, I’m happy to start up a new run and try again.

It’s pretty clear that not everyone will think that way. A game about throwing ?levers and getting blown up repeatedly isn’t going to gel with some. And while there is some permanent progression, the only thing you carry over between runs that will help you is what you were able to learn. A fondness for troubleshooting will get you far.

But regardless of whether or not this is the type of game you think you’d enjoy, it’s clear that Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is exactly what it wants to be. It’s an expert mix of cruel work-a-day tinkering and dark, vulgar humor. A bottomless well of savagely comedic moments, beckoning secrets, and puzzles that require Ikea furniture-level manual comprehension skills. If you’ve got room in your skull for some truly useless knowledge and can tolerate having your face stomped on a few times, you’ve got a friend in Uncle Chop.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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I really enjoyed the grab bag that was Taito Milestones 2. It featured some predictable hits but then flanked them with some hilariously dreadful games, or, as I put it in that review, “bad in an almost impressive way.�So, I’ve been looking forward to Taito Milestones 3 for another injection of titles.

This collection is dominated by a coalition of the Bubble Bobble and Rastan series. But, like before?, there is also a smattering of more obscure titles. However, this time around, I wouldn’t say any of them ??are “impressively bad.�But rather than just talk about them vaguely in the preamble, I’m going to take the approach I’ve started doing with arcade collections, and I’m just going to do a short review of every game in the collection. There are 10, so brace yourself.

Taito Milestones 3 (Switch)
Developer: Hamster
Publisher: Inin Games
Released: December 10, 2024
MSRP: $39.99

Bubble Bobble

Bubble Bobble is the best game that lets you play as a bubble-blowing dragon that can turn people into corndogs. It’s the most known quantity in this Taito roundup, one of their longest-lived properties. I have a certain affinity for the game, having owned the Game Boy version (where the hell did it go?) and encountered it in arcades a few times, once at the hockey arena in Bobcaygeo?n of Tragically Hip fame. Another time was at the Toronto Union Station, where it beckoned me from across the ?arcade with its chirpy music.

The only problem with Bubble Bobble being on Taito Milestones 3 is that it’s one of those games where you might already own mu?ltiple versions of it. Few Taito-related collections drop without its inclusion. That’s not an issue for anyone who doesn’t own it already. If you’ve somehow avoided it, you should totally have it in some form. If you already own it, it's a bummer that ??it’s taking up room here. If you’ve never played it, wow, guy, get on that.

It’s great with two players (in fact, if you want the best ending, you have to beat it with another person). However, if you’re used to the console versions, you might find the lack of continues to be a bit jarring. There’s actually a secret to avoid starting over. To continue, you need to cram more credits into the machine, then hold the start button a?s you’re losing your last life.

Rainbow Islands

Rainbow Islands is technically the sequel to Bubble Bobble, but they’re rather dissimilar. Following the events of the first game, Bub and Bob have been transformed from radical corndog-conjuring dragons ?into diminutive Fatty Arbuckles who piss rainbows. And rather than try and process every monster on the map into food, the rotund twins have to climb to the top of a series of platforms.

You can use your rainbows to walk across, and stacking them up is ?the key to climbing. However, if you jump on them, they shatter, but this can take? out enemies below you. Directly hitting enemies with rainbows will also just remove enemies; they’re deadly. Throwing rainbows at certain spots will spawn food. I haven’t seen a corndog appear, which is unfortunate.

It’s a pretty solid game, except for the bosses. The bosses just suck, barely putting up a fight and following patterns that are typically easy to exploit. The two-player mode is also alternating instead of Bubble Bobble’s simultaneous cooperative??, which is extremely lame but not the collection's fault.

Rastan Saga

Rastan does not feel like a real game. I’ve described a couple of games like this previously, but pretty much every cartoon in existence had an episode where the protagonists get sucked into a video game, and it’s always way off when it comes to video game logic. Like, it’s obvious that the writers and animators know nothing about video games aside from vague concepts. That’s Rastan, except it’s a real game.

Which isn’t to say it’s bad. It’s just the fact that the protagonist is a generic, muscled, Conan-like barbarian who walks with a stiff upper body and swats at enemies with various classic weapons. T?he music is good, but it’s crunchy and meanders about. 

But for something that is so generic it’s almost surreal, Rastan is a pretty fun game. Its usage of pester enemies, especially during platforming and climbing sections, can get pretty vexin??g, but it has good flow and pacing. The bosses are surprisingly entertaining, as w??ell. It’s not the best game, but in terms of the shirtless barbarian genre, I can dig it.

Rastan Saga 2

I think Taito Milestones 3 heard me making fun of Rastan Saga’s appearance, so it came at me hard with Rastan Saga 2. By that, I mean that Rastan Saga 2 is magnit?udes worse than the first game. I’m not sure what happened. They made the sprites bigger, which was how 2D arcade games tried to flex back in the day, but they’re all low-detail and dopey looking, and there are only a few frames of animation to most actions. The bosses are all ridiculous slapfights, and the hit detection is just cruel.

But the level design is horrendous. Unlike the various scrolling methods of the first game, these are all flat and cut out of big blocks. What really ground my goat was some of the jumps they ex??pect you to make. There are places with a ceiling directly above your head, and you’re expected to jump up and over a pit. This means? that, to not hit your head and stop all upward motion, you need to scooch out until you’re hanging on the ledge by a pixel, then jump up and over. 

After making one such jump on the second level, I realized I had to play through to the end of the game in that sitting because I wasn’t willing to suffer i??t a second time. Unfortunately, that’s not the only instance of those s??henanigans getting pulled in this game.

Champion Wrestler

I left Rastan Saga 2 in a frustrated daze, so if I’m a little too positive on Champion Wrestler, thatâ€?™s why. It’s great! Well, kind of. It’s a pretty typical setup of shortening your opponent’s health bar before going in for the pin. What I like best about it is that it’s really mashy. When you get pinned, you mash the two buttons to try and get free, and when you pin, it’s the same thing. I think that’s what makes a good arcade wrestler: enthusiastic mashing.

It also has Rastan as one of the characters, so I got to beat him up a whole bunch. It turns out I’m actually really good at Champion Wrestler (at least on its default settings). ?After getting a feel for the controls, I didn’t lose again until after winning the title. Maybe it’s just easy, but if that’s the case, don’t tell me. Let me have this.

Each round is capped off by a detailed portrait of the winner and loser. The winner always gets to do things like drive around in a sportscar with a bikini-clad woman and rub themselves with money, while the loser often finds them?selves picking through the trash. It’s, uh, sometimes kind of depressing.

Cadash

This is another one that I had prior experience with because Cadash is rad. Well, okay, Cadash is kind of basic and clunky, but it ties in RPG systems like stat building. In a way, it feels more like Dungeons and Dragons than the actual Dungeons and Dragons game that Capcom put out. That’s partially because the levels have s??ome degree of exploration to them and there are NPCs to talk to. It satisfies arcade operators by keeping you on a timer you can replenish using items and spells.

The?? original vers?ion supported four players, but only by linking two cabinets. Pulling off in this version would have been impressive, but the extra mile wasn’t taken here. However, the two-player mode can still be fun if both players understand that there may be a bit of grinding required to stay ahead of the game.

I like Cadash. It has that classic tabletop RPG feel. It’s extraordinarily clunky and has a habit of screwing you over, but its inclusion of stat progression makes it a welcome change from straightforward action games. The timer system, as much as it's there to make you empty you?r pockets, is lenient enough to not feel rushed. It’s not the most intricate game, but it has it where it counts.

Thunder Fox

It’s easy to get some real Rush’n Attack/Green Beret vibes from Thunder Fox. It’s a run-and-stab shooter, mostly, but there are a lot of little side vignettes where you fly dopey-looking vehicles or ride them across the water. It’s, uh, not quite as good as??, like, any number of games I coul??d compare it to, but it’s also not awful.

It’s so unremarkable I’m having trouble thinking of anything else to say about it. Yeah, I guess we’ll leave it at that. It’s a pretty generic cross between Contra and Rush’n Attack.

Runark (Growl)

Weirdly, the title screen presents this game as Runark (the Japanese title), but when you launch it, it’s Growl (the international title). I guess it doesn’t matter since I don’t t?hink there are any major differ?ences beyond the title, but it struck me as a bit awkward.

In any case, Growl is a wild game. It’s a beat-’em-up where you play as a ranger trying to violently stop poachers. Up to four players can rip their shirts and join in, and it is chaos. Growl thr?ows heaps of bad guy??s your way, and the rangers aren’t afraid to pick up guns to use them in the service of protecting animals. Just hordes of dudes and these women who are dressed like they’re using their bare legs to climb the corporate ladder.

Absolutely hilarious. You walk through a series of same-y backgrounds, freeing wild animals who will then assist you. Enemy limbs can be liberated from their bodies with a well-plac??ed explos?ion. There are some incredibly funny digitized voice samples. It’s really not the best beat-’em-up, but it makes up for a lot of its deficiencies with its ludicrous premise.

Warrior Blade: Rastan Sage Episode 3

Taito really went all-out for the third game in the Rastan series. It was originally available as a double-monitor arcade cabinet, like Taito’s own Darius 2. The characters are huge, which, as I’ve already said, is the way arcade devel??opers like to flex their graphical horsepower. And the sound and music were clearly mixed around the idea that you’d be sitting on a subwoofer.

Surprisingly (especially after playing the last game), it’s al??so quite decent. Rather than being an action platformer, it’s a straight belt-scrolling brawler. There are three characters to choose from, and you get to pick from four levels to decide your route through the game. The combat itself isn’t varied, so instead, you’re put through a lot of different set-piece levels where you ride on a dragon or fight while sliding down a hill. The hit detection is a lot more f?air, and the bosses are huge.

Even more surprisingly, it isn’t all that difficult. That might be because the cabinets it would come in would often charge more than a dollar to play, but that didn’t stop Darius from being tough. Warrior Blade might not be the best beat-’em-up I’ve ever experienced, but it’s enjoyable in its own right and a welcome apology for Rastan Saga 2.

Dead Connection

Here’s an interesting one. Its inclusion?? is a special treat since, if I’m not mistaken, this is the first time that it’s been ported or re-released. It’s also a somewhat unique game, as it’s a single-screen shoot-’em-up where you run around movie set-like dioramas gunning down thugs. Appare??ntly some FBI agents have had enough of crime and have decided to just take down Marlon Brando’s lackeys using whatever force necessary.

If I saw Dead Connection in an arcade or laundromat (and I never did), I’d definitely slot a quarter. There’s something?? captivating about the way it’s zoomed way back from the action. Your bullets tear through the scenery as enemies pop up behind cover. You’re free to roam as necessary to flank your foes or just explore.

The main downside is that aiming sucks. It’s eight-direction, and you need to rely on its auto-targeting since there’s no nuance between those directions. It’s also hard to tell when your shots are going to colli?de with obstacles, and sometimes, it feels like your bullets are lodging themselves into thin air. Enemies don’t have that issue, so you just have to keep diving to avoid incoming shots while trying your best to find good vectors. It can be a bit frustrating, but it’s something you get used to with repeated playthroughs.

I almost forgot to mention, the version here is the Japanese release. I don’t kno??w why, but it means the text isn’t in English. This doesn’t matter when you’re in-game, but it does mean that the cutscenes are still in Japanese. That’s lame. It’s ??possible they’ll patch it on launch day, but I’m not certain.

The Collection

As it was last time, Taito Milestones 3 is actually just a collection of games in Hamster’s Arcade Archives series, some of which aren't yet available individually. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t have much to complain about with Arcade Archives. Except maybe the price, and Taito Milestones 3 relieves that a bit by allowing y??o??u to buy in bulk.

But what I'm trying to stress is that the collection is a launcher for individual games with the Arcade Archives wrapper. It’s a bit awkward, especially since the emulator itself has gone through a few iterations, and that’s reflected here. They’re consistent enough, but some of them have a softening filter by default that you need to turn off if you want crisp pixels. Unlike an individual Arcade Archives release, you don’t get all the regional versions. This is the strangest when it comes to Growl, which is called Runark on the title screen, and Dead Connection, which, for some reason, uses the Japan??ese version. Weird stuff.

Despite that, I’m happy with this iteration of Taito Milestones. It’s nowhere near Capcom Arcade Stadium in terms of features and content, nor is it as robust as past collections like Taito Memories. But I’ve played enough sub-par collections recently that I’ve come to?? appreci?ate this level of care.

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There’s always been some debate around whether or not games are art, but in the late aughts and early �0s, some decided to really push for it. Sometimes, this resulted in kind of mostly successful experiments like Citizen Abel: Gravity Bone or Limbo, while other times we got more unfortunate, pretentious attempts like The Path.

It was a really insecure time for video games. We seemed to want some sort of permission to take this hobby seriously, so it’s like, collectively, as players and developers, we tried to prove video games were something they weren’t. Oh, they’re totally art. You can see that in games about flipping eggs and trimming hedges. But it’s more about harnessing the interactive element to get that piece of yourself across. A developer might try to capture how they think or see the world by asking you to live it. I’m not sure what The Path was supposed to say. Don’t do what you’re told?

We’ve largely moved past that, or at the very least, games that are 100% message have more of a purpose. A self-assuredness. It often feels more earnest and less pretentious. Which makes Miniatures something of a blast from the past.

Miniatures (PC [Reviewed], Switch, Mobile)
Developer: Other Tales Interactive
Publisher: Other Tales Interactive
Released: November 14th, 2024
MSRP: $5.99

Now, I’m not actually saying Miniatures is pretentious. No, I'm the pretentious one today. But, it’s at least making no mystery of the fact that it’s a digital art exhibit. What I mean is that it is only interactive-adjacent, and it is very art. I wouldn’t even call it narratively focused because the stories are pretty abstract. You’ll either connect with th??em, maybe just find them amusing, or maybe yo??u won’t.

For?? me, it reminds me of extremely late nights of being bored in front of Teletoon??. Nights when my parents were out, so I had free reign of the TV and could watch whatever bizarre concoction was on the station in the later hours.

Teletoon would often air things from The National Film Board of Canada, which was actually the butt of a Simpsons joke back in the day (not while they were still good). Very cultural stuff, but a lot of it was extremely strange. Sometimes, it would be something relaxingly amusing. Other times, it would be a piece of Canadiana, with the deepest of it being something from our aboriginal cultures. When you’re a pre-teen at 11 pm, it doesn’t matter what it was. Any? attempt by an animation student to stretch the??ir legs would hit like some sort of forbidden fever dream.

That’s what Miniatures took me back to; a decaffeinated Saturday night in my father’s La-Z-Boy. It’s four short chapters that sometimes make you poke the screen. On Switch and mobile, you can literally poke the screen, but here I was jus?t poking it with my mouse pointer. Clicking, if you will.

I’m not trying to be dismissive, but the interactivity is very basic in Miniatures. One of the chapters has you trying to arrange a band of small sand-critters in a little sand-critter town in an ??extremely roundabout way. This was by far the most amusing one for me, as you largely press on places you think something should happen and then watch while that something happens. It’s well-animated and amusing, so that’s something.

There’s one where you pan the screen around to follow a story, and every so often, you need to click on something in the environment to uncover a trigger that allows you to move on. This one was my least favorite, not because of the lack of interactivity but because I di??dn’t connect with it. As far as I could see, it was a directionless story that wanted to look like it had something to say but didn’t say anything at all. Or maybe I just didn’t see the message.

As for the other two, I can at least understand what they’re trying to communicate, but I think a lot of Miniatures fails because it will elicit a feeling and then not do anything with it. They don't use that feeling to deliver any sort of message. These are short, short little chapters �miniature, if you will �so if they want you to just soak in the feeling, then there isn’t much time to do so. One strength in the artistic side of video games is that by having the player take part in something, you can hold their head beneath whatever you’re trying to convey, and when they're good and soaked, hit them with what you want to say. Miniatures neithe??r has a point nor does it drown you for very long.

But, with those last two, I at least got the vibe they were putting down. One seemed to focus on childhood loneliness and discovery, while another gave a sense of tension and dread. I’ve found I’m typically able to pick up on subtext, even in games that aren’t taking an art-first approach, so I’m not deaf to what’s going on in Miniatures. I mostly have two problems. Number one: I don’t think it leverages the advantages of an interactive medium for conveying ideas. Number two: I don’t connect w??ith the idea??s that are here.

This makes it kind of hard to review a game like this because its effectiveness will vary from person to person, and I can’t speak to what you’ll feel. Maybe you’ll see yourself reflected in one or all of the games here. What I can say is that from an interactive standpoint, as well as a narrative one, I find Miniatures lacking. In comparison to other games that I would applaud for their contributions and approach t??o the art form, this wouldn’t be high on the list, but I wouldn’t throw it away wholesale, either.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Words have weight, which is why I swing them around with reckless abandon. I’m not sure that’s what Great God Grove is about unless you only take it literally. It’s more ab??out identity, authority, communication, and mis?understanding.

It’s the follow-up to Smile For Me by Limbolane. But while the two games have similarities, you might miss the relation just by looking at it. One game has you interred in an asylum, while the other has you fixing the relationships of the gods. However, what they have in c??ommon is head nods and fi??xing people.

Great God Grove (Switch, Xbox Series X|S, PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Limbolane
Publisher: LimboLane, Fellow Traveller
Released: November 15th, 2024
MSRP: $19.99

Great God Grove puts you in the boots of a Godpoke, which is, as far as I can tell, a sort of courier. To be honest, I’m not clear on a few concepts here. For all I know, a Godpoke might just be someone who wears a poncho. You arrive?? at the eponymous grove just in time to see ??the gods close a giant rift in the sky that threatens to end the world. The problem is that the gods aren’t entirely interested in saving the world. They’re far too wrapped up in their own problems.

Previous to your arrival, the last messenger of the gods, the mysterious King, sent letters out to all the gods. The letters are obvious attempts to drive wedges between them,?? but as King had always been a trusted friend and reliable enough to be elected to become the next god, they took those words at face value. Now, nothing is right in the grove despite being a crucial time for the whole world.

Before you even get to the grove, King’s trusty mail cannon, the Megapon, lands directly in yo??ur lap. With this device, you can suck the wo??rds out of one person’s mouth and slap them in the face of another. Or just right back at them. That happens sometimes.

Being the wise person you are (or maybe just because it’s a linear narrative), you set to work righting King’s wrong. Immediately, you’re deputized by Inspekta, the God of Leadership, to help their lackeys, the Bizzyboys, figure out what happened to King and why they decided to hurt everyone’s feelings?. However, the leader of the Bizzyboys, Capochin, is only out to please his boss, while the rest of the members are completely incompetent and hapless. So, it all comes down to you.

Largely, Great God Grove resembles a point-and-click adventure game. You can’t suck up any sentence or grouping of words you want; only specific, highlighted things that characters say can go in your Megapon. In this way, they work like any item in something like Secret of Monkey Island. You find hints in the words of the peopl?e you’re talking to and deliver something that will get them to perform some task for you, even if that’s just moving out of the way.

Ther?e’s a bit of a learning curve. For the first area, I wasn’t picking up on the cues, but after the second, I was able to proceed with some expedience. I didn’t get hung up very often, but I have to wonder if that’s going to be everyone’s experience. Great God Grove has an unusual design language built around its central hook, and I’m not sure if gaming literacy will be as important here as actual literacy. I’m not sure if every player can adjust, or maybe I’m the odd one because I had some issues in the first area. I can only speak to my own experience, though, and in my experience, I didn’t have much of a problem for most of the game.

Each area of the grove is home to on?e or two gods. In each one, King has spread some sort of misinformation to throw things int??o chaos, and your overall goal is to sort things out to restore the status quo. Sounds easy, but being an adventure game, it takes more than an apology to work things out.

What really elevates Great God Grove above a typical adventure game is an abundance of style. It mixes 2D characters and objects with a 3D world Paper Mario-style. It’s based around Day Lane’s distinctive, sketchy, express??ive style. While animation is sparse, ??each character has a massive range of poses and emotions that they transition to each new window of dialogue. It can be quite captivating.

Many of the gods are rendered in full 3D, but they’re styled in such a way that it can be hard to tell. Like the 2D folks, the gods spring from pose to pose, with more tradit??ional animation thrown in occasionally to spice things up.

There are also ?live-action puppet vignettes that you can watch for not much reason aside from enrichment. They generally just involve the Bizzyboys giving advice and some background information about what’s going on in the world. As it turns out, I’m really into puppets eating sandwiches. 

There isn’t much out that that looks quite like Great God Grove. The style is executed so consistently and with so much blunt-force pizzazz that it’s incredible that just a handful of people put the whole thing together. There are so many facets of its visual style that look as though they would be very difficult to execute, so the fact that they didn’t choose an?? easier, more conventional route is impressive. It?? pays off because, if absolutely nothing else, the way this game looks will be seared into your eyeholes.

Great God Grove has a lot to say about identity and the way people will stomp on others just for recognition. The gods themselves aren’t much different than ordinary people. They just exist on a less accessible plane of existence. As such, even though you can walk up and talk to them, their followers seem to just beli??eve what they hear and speculate on what they might be thinking, which often is what leads to miscommunication. Misinformation is rife, and people take advantage of that.

Humans seem hardwired to climb. There’s a fear that our lives will be meaningless or forgotten, so we strive for recognition. And to secure our recognition, we’ll often stomp down the people beneath us. We yearn to wear the stomping boots, and a decent person can turn awful the moment they put them on. You face a lot of that in Great God Grove.

At the same time, it’s a very optimistic game. With your intervention, t?he troublemakers you meet see the error in their ways and express a desire to atone for their actions. Call me c??ynical, but I find most people are more likely to become defensive when faced with the consequences of their actions. People dig their stomping boots in and seek justification for what they’ve done. Maybe I just need a stronger word cannon.

In terms of gameplay, I could honestly take or leave Great God Grove. It has great pacing and a unique approach to the adventure genre, but I find the situations in which it’s applied generall?y unexciting. Not overly mundane, but I think with urgent focus on the threat and more dangerous situations??, the dialogue would have more of a chance to shine. But it already shines pretty brightly.

Great God Grove is an immensely polished and precisely executed game, and that’s the most impressive part about it. Its pacing and aesthetic are finely honed and there’s nary a loose thread to be found. A bit more punch and the narrative would be perfect, ??but it presents a good amount of depth to sink into. It also features ?puppets gnawing on a gigantic hoagie, and really, what more can you ask for?

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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I have so many arcade game??s available on my Switch; it’s obscene. Also, kind of expensive, which we’l??l get to. But with the short length of your standard arcade title, they’re easy to dive into when you need a snack.

So, here’s Irem Collection Volume 2, which is, as you have most likely guessed, the follow-up to Irem Collection Volume 1. Irem is perhaps best known for their R-Type series, but the developer was among the best in the arcade days with hits like Kickle Cubicle and Undercover Cops; games that could go under the radar and are therefore rip??e for inclusion in collectio??ns.

But perhaps the most important contribution from Irem is Metal Slug. Not the actual game �that was Nazca and SNK �but it was the place where the staff behind Metal Slug first stretched their legs before setting out on their own. And nowhere is this more apparent than in Gun Force II??, one of the games in this collection. There are also two other games here.

Irem Collection Volume 2 (Xbox Series X|S, PS4, Switch [Reviewed])
Developer: Irem
Publisher: ININ Games
Released: November 14th, 2024
MSRP: $24.99

I’m going to go through the individual games included in this collection, but I want to give a word about how they’re packed: awkward. Kind of awkward. Not every game collection needs to be Atari 50, but Irem Collection Volume 2 is barebones on top of unintuitive. The volume of the menu, for example, is substantially higher than the games thems?elves. Each game has a “casual�and “classic�mode, the difference being that you can’t participate in the leaderboards in casual mode, but you get access to game settings, cheats, and rewind. I’m guessing that they’re presented separately for leaderboard reasons, but I don’t see why they can’t just warn you when you try to turn cheats on. You can use autofire on both, which seems strange.

It uses an emulation platform that I’ve seen before in Ratalaika/ININ re-releases like the Cyber Citizen Shockman games and the Ninja Jajamaru: Retro Collection. That’s not necessarily a good or bad thing. I just want you to know what you’re in ??for, if you’re fami??????????????????????????liar.

There’s no ??supplemental documentation or credits for the original games, which lacked them at release, and we still don’t know who some of the developers were for the games. What’s galling is that the physical collector’s edition of the game comes with things like reproduction arcade flyers and a visual compendium, so it’s not like ?they don’t have anything to show, they just chose not to include them in a digital format.

Annoying, but let’s talk about the games.

Air Duel

The odd one out in the collection is Air Duel. It’s the only scrolling shoot-’em-up of the bunch. It’s extremely ?challenging, but you’re not exactly going to run out of quarters here. It'll be a real climb if you want to place on the leaderboards, though.

You can choose between a helicopter and your typical futuristic jet-thing. The jet thing works about how you’d expect one to work in this kind of game, but the chopper’s gunfire will turn in the direction you’re pressing. It’s awkward at first, but learning to use it gives you the advantage of being able to stay out of the direct line of gunfire and still attack. I didn’t like it the first time I?? tried it, but after clearing the first level, I ??can’t imagine playing without it.

About a zillion of these types of games were released through the �0s and �0s, and you can get a lot of them on Switch. In comparison, Air Duel is fine. I like it, but it’s not likely to be the game I reach for next time I’m in the mood. That will probably be something like Raiden or Raystorm. On the other hand, I now have the worldwide high score on this game. Take that, three other people who have early access to Irem Collection Volume 2. You suck.

GunForce (Arcade)

I’m technically going out of order here, but I feel like the arcade version should come first. GunForce is a run-and-gun like Contra, except with more vehicles and way clunkier. Its subtitle is �em>Battle Fire Engulfed Terror Island,�which is just an incredible mash of words.

GunForce is so clunky that it might take a bit to acclimate. Your dude moves so stiffly, and enemies just pour in from the side of the screen. Crowd control and learning to dodge don’t come as naturally as you’d probably find in a Contra derivative. 

Once you do get a handle on things, it can be an enjoyable game. It gives you a new vehicle practically every few steps and these range from jeeps to helicopters. Powerups drop constantly, and you’re able to grab onto overhanging objects. It’s just getting into or out of a helicopter, climbing a ladder, or letting go of an object that can take a bit of fighting, and in a game like GunForce, a littl??e bit of fighting can? mean another lost life.

GunForce (Console)

I keep forgetting that GunForce even came out on SNES/Super Famicom. That’s probably because it’s not talked about all that much. Not in my experience, anyway. Its inclusion here is more of a “good to have�than a “need to have�situation. It’s largely the same as the arcade version but squished down for less powerful hardware. It plays very faithfully, with the biggest difference being that, on classic difficulty, you’re saddled with a handful of continues. Occasionally, there are too few continues since a bad situation can ?make you drop lives fast. Other times, there are too many because there are only a few levels.

The biggest drawback is that it’s a lot less colorful. GunForce wasn’t a colorful game to begin with, but anything vivid it did got flattened out on SNES. It’s a shame because the console was capable of more. It’s still an okay t?ranslation of an okay game, but being a shadow of another game in the collection makes its inclusion feel somewhat unnecessary. Good to h??ave, though.

Gun Force II

Gun Force II is the last arcade game to be developed by Irem. Named Geo Storm in Japan, it’s largely a different beast from the original GunForce. What links them is the fact that they’r??e both run-and-gun shooters, and they have you jump into a tonne of different vehi??????????????????????????cles throughout the levels. Otherwise, they feel pretty distinct.

There’s still a noticeable degree of clunk to be found in Gun Force II, but it makes up for it by be??ing absurdly over-the-top. Your dude comes equipped with two guns at all times, and at any given time, 80% of the screen is covered in explosions. It’s a game that never lets up, constantly throwing new situations at you. Turning on autofire just makes things mor?e insane. And more fun.

It’s not Metal Slug, but you can see the similarities. You rescue captured people who, in this case, are scantily clad women in torn clothing. The enemy's screams are exactly the same. You can also see a lot of art style similarities between the two, though it’s less pronounced and consistent in Gun Force II. Only Takeshi Okui is confirmed to have worked on the art, but I’d be very surprised if he was the only one from the Metal Slug team.

The Collection

Gun Force II is easily the standout of the bunch. I’ve talked to smaller developers w?ho have worked on run-and-gun shooters, and they often cite it as an inspiration. It maybe doesn’t make the whole colle?ction worth it, but it’s definitely worth playing.

And that’s kind of the hang-up here: whether or not the collection is worth it. It’s one standout title (Gun Force 2), a good one (Air Duel), and one that is simply okay (GunForce). You get different regional versions where applicable, as well as the console port of GunForce. There isn’t really any supplemental material (which isn’t totally unusual), and the UI could be better. The value isn’t quite where it should be. It’s slightly more expensive than buying three Arcade Archives titles and worse value than something like Taito Milestones.

So, overall, Irem Collection Volume 2 is less than spectacular. If the games really appeal to you, then the collection doesn’t diminish them, but it also doesn’t elevate them. In terms of value, you could do wors??e, but it’s not an immediate recommendation. They’re your quarters, do what you want with them.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Chicken Police: Paint it Red grabbed me with its weird, photomanipulated animal-people characters, but held me there with its heart. It features a storytelling that shows a love of worldbuilding and warm characters in a noir setting. So, I’ve been greatly anticipating the follow-up, Chicken Police: Into the Hive.

It’s been given a good runway. A lot of the seeds for its events and characters had already been planted in Paint it Red, as well as the prologue side-game, Zipp’s Cafe. It was ??ready to be bigger and better than what came before and was poised to launch a new chapter in the Wild Gentleman’s World of Wilderness setting. Then, halfway through the game, the wheels came off of it, and now thi?ngs have become more complicated.

Chicken Police: Into the Hive (PC)
Developer: The Wild Gentlemen
Publisher: Joystick Ventures
Released: November 7, 2024
MSRP: $24.99

Into the Hive starts in much the same way the first game does. A dame walks into the home office of Detective Santino “Sonny�Featherland, asking for his help with a??n off-the-books case. Her husband has gone missing, or rather, her husba?nd’s body. But it’s not a murder that he’s trying to solve. None is suspected. It’s the mystery of why someone would dig up his body (as well as others) and steal it.

To make matters more complicated, the man was an i?nsect, one of the oppressed citizens of Clawville who have been segregated to a part of town known as “The Hive.�Insects aren’t allowed out of the hive and animals, especially cops, aren’t allowed in. Undeterred, Sonny grabs his partner, Martin “Marty�MacChicken, and they set out to crack the case.

Things play out very similar to the original game??. You travel Clawville, gathering clues and talking to people. Occasionally, you’ll play a mini-game. Then there are other times that you have to interrogate someone by asking a series of questions to endear yourself or annoy them enough to?? get some sort of revelation out of them.

There aren’t too many surprises in terms of gameplay; it’s still heavily a visual novel with adventure aspects, but not many of them. One of the biggest improvements here are with its art style. This may sound weird, but the lipsyncing on the animal heads is way better. Rather than a generic jaw drop, they move in different ways to pronounce ??syllables. It’s such a strange thing to focus attention on, but it’s actually a pretty slick and appreciable change.

Also, if you, for whatever reason, hated the black-and-white film noir look from the original game, i?t isn’t long before you can change it over to garish technicolor. While I played in color for a while before switching it back to monochrome for most of the game, the color is well done. It’s not just turning off a filter, instead, a lot of attention has been given to making color mode having as much of a distinct look to it as the original black-and-white. The colors are inappropriately bright, with even neutral colors popping off, and Characters wear garish outfits. It’s a great alternative if you get bored of the simpler shading.

The narrative itself starts off more confidently. At this point, the lore has been built up around it, so it doesn’t need to throw off as many off-hand comments to try and set the scene.?? It doesn’t have to make things up as it goes along. It fits together a lot better, and that comes through in the dialogue.

The first two acts are excellent, giving pieces at a time and getting you to figure out how they fit together. It can be pretty heavy-handed at times. You’ll no doubt know who the real villain is and what is happening to?? the stolen bodies well before the game overtly tells you. I was expecting this to lead to some sort of twist, but the red herrings seem to be only for the characters themselves and players will get no surprises. Things become to come undone from there.

There are five chapters to the game, and you begin to see things weaken in the third. It becomes most obvious when the characters know a location they have to go, but? are aware that it’s dangerous and will likely be a trap. Rather than figure out an elegant plan, they just do the obvious and go in the back door. Then things just happen because they’re scripted to. There’s an excellent mini-game here, but I wonder if the visual novel format has caused an issue with the storytelling. It feels like there should have been a great?er amount of action in this scene that just wasn’t there.

Nonetheless, it’s not too bad at that point. After that, however, I’d say it’s just bad. For the final two chapters things just move around in the most obvious of ways. The characters form a plan that even a child could think of and band together. It’s hard to understand the stakes, overall motivation of the antagonist, and why many involved would have a personal interest. Little threads that were left dangling aren’t tied up at all, but rather just swept aside, and?? they will never get properly tied into what’s going on.

And then you move through what feels like sets that should have ha?d greater purpose and screentime, but are largely just there to be moved through. Everything gets wrapped up without much understanding of how a?nything has really been solved by the conclusion. It seems that the antagonist had everything worked out, but they had missed one little detail: gun. And that’s that. Job well done.

It’s obvious something went wrong here, but I’m not sure what. The credits begin with what sounds almost like an ap??ology starting with, “This gam??e was difficult to make.�It then explains that COVID-19, the industry downturn, a change of publishers, and “personal tragedies�had made development challenging. It then says, “But the story seems to have been stronger than all of these. We had no choice but to make it, to close this saga, and still give it a new beginning…�That’s broad enough to be interpreted in different ways, but just reads to me as a wrench got thrown into their plans.

The second half of Into the Hive feels like something that has been merely blocked out. The central plot points and events are there, but you’re just led through them with little agency of your ??own. No real puzzles, just hop on and get where you??’re going.

Beyond the reasons given in the credits, I feel that a few things have gone unsaid. From my perspective, it looks like Into the Hive ran up against the limitations of the visual novel format, its own ambition, and the universal rule that somet??hing eventually has to ship. Whether that last part was more motivated by? publisher deadlines or development fatigue, I obviously have no idea.

There were a number of scenes, especially at the end, that should have had some sort of action sequence or cutscene. Like the first game, you can head down to the police shooting range for target practive. Here, you’re even given the opportunity to try out three guns. Unlike the first game, which had scenes where you put that training to use, Into the Hive doesn’t even feature one gunf??ight. I’m not saying that Sonny and Marty should have started mowing down foes, but the gang war setting would have really fac?ilitated it.

And then there’s the fact that, between Paint it Red and Into the Hive, there was the standalone prologue, Zipp’s Cafe that was released, and another spin-off starring fellow detectives, Moses and Plato, in development. On top of that, there’s WILD Tactics, which looks like a bigger production overall. I have to wonder how many plot points in Into the Hive were set up specifically for later games and how mu?ch was adapted t??o accommodate. And that’s saying nothing about how busy the team must be.

It’s always strange to progress from a part of the game that seems so vivid, well-thought-out, and lovingly configured to a second half that feels like as many strings as possible were grabbed and tied together, which still left many more forgotten and dangling. In some ways, it reminds me of the ending of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2; you quickly snap from one of the best games? you’ve ever played to a patchwork slideshow desperately holding together everything that wasn’t finished. It’s like waiting for fireworks to go o??ff, and someone walks up and pisses on the fuse.

It’s going to take a while for me to process my disappointment when it comes to Chicken Police: Into the Hive. Beyond just being excited about t??he game, I was excited to see how the World of Wilderness would develop beyond these tales of two detectives. I think I’m still interested, but now, something’s rotting in the midst of it all. 

Into the Hive isn’t the bigger and better follow-up that Paint it Red deserved. Itâ€??™s only half of one, and what happened to that other half is a mystery of its own. All that was found was an empty shell and some bloodied remains. Not the way ?it deserved to go out.

_{[[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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The Mario & Luigi series wasn’t in the best state following AlphaDream’s closure. The last actually new title was Paper Jam in 2015, followed by two remakes. It was? a rough final chapter in the studio’s life.

Paper Jam was the worst reviewed in the series (to be fair, Laura Kate Dale, writing for Destructoid, gave it an 8 out of 10). The second remake, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside St?ory + Bowser Jr.'s Journey, was the worst-selling to the point where it was a possible contributing factor to Alphadream's bankruptcy.

Thankfully, the series lives on with Mario & Luigi: Brothership. Being one of the successor series to Super Mario RPG with a unique focus on the two title characters, I feel it has a lot of merit. Brothership demonstrates that but falls way short o????f its potential.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership (Switch)
Developer: Acquire
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: November 7, 2024
MSRP: $59.99

Brothership is one of the more mundane premises in the series. Following digestion, dreams, and a crossover, this one simply has the two brothers transpor??ted to another world in need of saving. The central hook is that they find themselves in command of a ship-like floating island and need to travel the expansive ocean to visit other islands and link them together. It’s a mix of unique and trite.

The hapless world is Concordia. It was once a continent held together by the U??ni-Tree, but someone came along and destroyed their unifying flora. The continent broke apart, with the pieces cast in all directions. The once united populace now struggles in isolation, and it’s up to Mario and Luigi to bring everyone back together. In a way, it’s the most obnoxiously overt allegory, but it still manages to hit narrative paydirt occasionally.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Mario & Luigi series, they’re RPGs that focus on the eponymous duo. Alongside Paper Mario, it’s a follow-up to Super Mario RPG on the SNES, which is to say it’s something of a JRPG-lite. It’s turn-based, like what you’d expect, but it ties in reflex-based actions wherein you can press a button at the right time during an animation to defend yourself or make your attacks stronger. This was first featured in Mario RPG, and Mario & Luigi extrapolates on this to the extreme.

Battles generally involve the two brothers assisting each other in combat, with even basic attacks having them help each other. Hammer and jump attacks are pretty straightforward, but then you get to Bros. Attacks, which have much more variety. In order to get the most out of a Bros. Attack, you have to master their associated mini??-games which often challenge reflex, perception, and your ability to remember which brother is assigned to which button.

As for new features, a big one is “Luigi Logic.�This has Luigi thinking really hard about a situation and coming up with a solution. This is really funny because sometimes the solutions are just impulsive and rely on nothin??g more than brute force and determination, which suggests that Mario is just not capable of tho?ught. But mostly, it’s just the pride on Luigi's face when he figures something out that really drills in the charm. Dude’s just so damned pleased with himself, it’s infectious.

The Luigi Logic moments often show up in boss battles, giving you a chance to do a lot of damage and sometimes stun the boss. They allow for some setpiece moments to crop up that really affect the battle, and some of them are pretty cool, even if they are usually cropped up at the worst tim?es for me.

The dynamic battle system makes the Mario & Luigi games feel distinct next to their more typical genre kin, but it does have the downside of forcing you through the same mini-games repeatedly as you proceed through battle after battle. The repetition could be mitigated by keeping gameplay brief and offering palate-cleansing sections between more battle-heavy dungeons; it’s just too bad Brothership doesn’t do that.

No, not at all. When I finally wrapped up Brothership, it was around the 42-hour mark, and at that point, I was just done with it, which isn’t totally uncommon for me with longer RPGs, to be fair. But Brothership not only suffers from?? the repetition of its battles but also from an inconsistent and bloated pace.

There are five sections to the game, and it starts off well enough. You hop from island to island, and they stay rather small affairs, giving you a taste of variety without getting bogged down. Then, Brothership sags through the second and third areas. It’s a protracted stretch that could have been significantly abbreviated. Nothing much happens narratively. Nothing that couldn’t have just been wrapped in as a sub-plot to another section. Honestly, I probably would have puttered out and lost interest in this part of Brothership if I wasn’t playing it for review.

Things pick up in the fourth part of the game and continue into the fifth, with some of the best moments happening during this time, but then it doesn’t know when to stop. You can’t maintain a climax for, like, 10 hours. Ex??citement doesn’t last that long. A narrative shouldn’t peak and then plateau, because then it becomes dull. The punch loses impact. If I had managed to survive the previ??ous lull, I most likely wouldn’t have made it through the denouement, but I had to power through it.

Brothership is such an inconsistent game. It can be extremely witty one moment, then clueless the next. At some points, it skirts with something profound in its narrative, then refuses to deliver. There are so man?y p?laces in this game that could have been cut down or abbreviated, but a lot of it feels there just as a way of extending the game. It doesn’t feel rushed or unpolished; there’s just too much of it, and it gets in its own way.

And it’s a shame, because there’s a lot of charm that does a lot to keep the experience. It’s focus on connections and bonds works well with Luigi and his brother. There is so much fraternal devotion on display in every m??oment, it’s almost enviable. They are presented in such a way that their coordinated outfits begin to ma??ke sense. 

It’s expressed so well with its art style and lavish animations. Brothership is a great-looking ?game, even without a lot of graphical horsepower and trickery. It bursts with personality and gives so much depth to a pair of mute palette swaps. It’s just too bad that so much of the rest of the cast feels trite. The villains are villainous, ??the henchmen hench well, and, as usual, the support character evokes my visceral rage. On the bright side, it means the brothers shine brighter.

When all is said and done, Mario & Luigi: Brothership isn’t a bad game; it’s just too much of a decent thing. If it had restraint and its pacing was planned better, it could have been the best in the series. Its transition from a strictly handheld platform to consoles is a great one, putting the ad??????????????????????????ditional horsepower to good use.

But because it was allowed to grow ??so long, what would have been easily overlooked inconsistencies become major annoyances. Eventually, all of its problems start to overshadow its successes and they begin to fester. What would be a joyful experience gets washed away in a sea of grey leavin??g nothing to connect with.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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The first time I hopped into the Black Ops 6 beta, I was hooked. So much so that when it ended, Modern Warfare 3 just couldn't cut it for me anymore.

So, now that Black Ops 6 is finally out in the world, I no longer have to look outside the window on a rainy day in the hopes of getting back that magnificent Omnimovement. Even though the bar was already set high, Black Ops 6 still exceeded my expectations, making me understand why I became a Call of Duty fa??n in the first place. It's brought back the only thing I ever want in video games: fun. Just p??ure entertainment with a touch of ragequits here and there.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S [Reviewed], PC)

Developer: Treyarch, Raven Software, Beenox, High Moon Studios, Activision Shanghai, Sledgehammer Games, Infinity Ward, Demonware

Publisher: Activision

Released: October 25, 2024

MSRP: $69.99

Black Ops 6, like most Call of Duty entries, comes in three layers: Campaign, Multiplayer, and Zombies. Although the campaigns don'??t normally g?et the spotlight, I still immensely enjoyed this aspect. Transporting us to the hip '90s, every step in this narrative is rich with history, featuring easily recognizable figures like Bill Clinton. I always appreciate when games incorporate a bit of history, providing a unique learning experience.

The timeline takes place after the events of Black Ops Cold War, bringing back key characters like Frank Woods and Russell Adler. You'll primarily play as ??the new hotshot, Case, a man of few words. The team's goal is to investigate the Pantheon, a paramilitary force with the power to instill fear with their governmental conspiracies. They'll turn everyone against you and you??r team, and it's up to you to get some justice. 

You'll switch back and forth between the safe house and the mission, setting up your strategies first and then carrying out the plan after. Most quests also have the choice to go guns blazing, like most CoD entries, or play it out without making a sound. I would say it's a mixture of Grand Theft Auto 5's team-based heists and Metal Gear Solid's Tactical Espionage. It's something different for the Call of Duty world for sure, and it adds more replayability with ?the many ways it can be played. ?;

The story itself isn't the most monumental, especially in comparison to the original Black Ops' thrilling narrative. Nevertheless, its cinematics and brutal takedowns will make you feel like you're some action hero in a movie. The kitchen fight, especially, got my heart pumping, ending with an enemy's head getting boiled up in a fryer. The character and environmental visuals make it even better in l??ight of how realistic they truly are. Sometimes, I would forget it was a video game just because of how true to life the characters looked. 

CoD's multiplayer has finally reached its peak

Considering that Black Ops 6's Campaign only lasts for five to six hours, the real stars of the show are Multiplayer and Zombies. Since BO6's release, I've spent hours on end in both modes, and I can't ??get enough. Despite my initial hesitation about the '90s-inspired weapons (I can't help it. I like my modern stuff, okay?), I've thoroughly enjoyed the available weaponry. Wielding each gun feels much more smooth than my time in Modern Warfare 3. Combining it with Omnimovement furthers it's easy to move mechanics, and it's quite possibly become my favorite FPS gameplay because of it. 

Since it's so smooth to play, I feel like everyone's been on their A game, bringing out those "sweat lobbies" that almost every shooter player has experienced. The maps, in particular, add to the challenge, primarily the small-sized Face Off locations. Skyline, Derelict, and Warhead are my top picks, with their unique points of interest. There are so many hidden spots you can use on these maps, giving you more opportunities for those surprise enemy attacks. What's more, Nuketown has rolled out for the game's post-launch, which will likely be my next favorite on the list. It's already brought a sense of nostalgia to see this beloved map return, stemming from the classic Call of Duty: Black Ops.

I would still like to see more maps in the future since there isn't too much variety in BO6's locations. Plus, there are some that I dread playing, like Vorkuta and Stakeout. They aren't the most fun to play, given how easy it is for other players to target you (it could just be a skill issue on my end, though). The spawn traps have also become a problem; some have used this tactic ??to farm kills at an annoying rate.

In some cases, I've noticed that the TTK (Time to Kill) isn't the greatest. On the one hand, I feel like the CoD goat with the many in?stant eliminations. Then, other times, I feel like I don't deser?ve to be called an FPS player at all the longer it takes to bring the enemy down. However, as more updates roll out, it's slowly getting more balanced with TTKs.  

Classic Zombies is back and better than ever

Now that we've dug into Multiplayer and the Campaign, it's time to talk about my most treasured feature of Black Ops 6: Zombies mode. I've been an undead lover ever since I picked up the magical stuff in Origins, and I'm so happy that BO6 is bringing more content like this back. While I did like the open-world vibes of Modern Warfare 3: Zombies, playing Black Ops 6 made me realize how m?uch I missed Trey?arch's take on it. 

The classic round-based levels return in BO6, raising the mode's challenge the more you push through. Currently, only two maps are available: Liberty Falls and Terminus. I know there was some hesitation amongst the players with Liberty Falls, mainly due to its previous bright appearance and smaller size. Regardless of this, I found the map to be much more inviting than the massive Terminus. Sometimes, I don't want to overstrain myself, primarily at the beginning of a game, so it was nice to get a feel for it initially. Furthermore, Treyarch darkened the look and feel of Liberty Falls to incorporate Zombies' iconic doom and gloom feel. 

Terminus excels in this approach with all the darkness that shrouds this enormous map. Two storylines are also unfolding here, one with a zombie outbreak in Liberty Falls and the other involving a prison escape (zombies are still there, of course) in Terminus. Both maps connect together, centering around the rag-tag team Mackenzie "Mac" Carver, Maya Aguinaldo, Grigori Weaver, Oskar Strauss, Dr. Elizabeth Grey, and Stoney "Raptor One" Maddox. Carver has to be one of my favorite Operators due to his hilarious one-liners. I like anyone who references SpongeBob SquarePants, and that's exactly what he does. 

But what I truly love is the myriad of Easter eggs that can take you on some of the wildest adventures. Even though there are only two maps, there are so many opportunities for you to explore. The Main Quests are one of the most elaborate missions I've encountered. Similar to previous Black Ops' Zombies modes, there are not really any instructions for them, l?etting the CoD community band together to solve them.

A lot??? of hard work goes into crafting Wonder Weapons, such as the Jet Gun and Beamsmasher, which are essential tools for the Main Quests. You'll use them to defeat the most formidable creatures out there, and there's nothing more satisfying than the rewards and triumphs you gain afterward. 

On top of the main storyline, you can have some fun with the Side Quests. I couldn't believe how many Easter eggs Treyarch's packed in, from zombie disco bowling to a treasure hunt riddled with cu?rsed coins. Its brought ?out concepts I would've never imagined in an undead world, but I love being along for the ride. 

So, if you've been missing the classic Zombies, Black Ops 6 is where it's at. You'll get lost in all of its Easter Eggs, which will undoubtedly expand with m??????????????????????????ore updates. Multiplayer will continue to grow, too, whether it be with new maps or quality-of-life improvements. 

Black Ops 6 proves that the Call of Duty series is here to stay, and hopefully??, it'll get even bett??er from here on out. 

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It’s been a real “Will they, won’t they?�dynamic between Vampire Survivors and Castlevania. It’s the crossover that makes the most sense, but it’s becau?se it makes the most sense that I believed it wouldn’t happen. Time makes fools of us all.

Ode to Castlevania is funny because Vampire Survivors is already an ode to Castlevania. Nowhere is this more evident than with? the new weapons that don’t have a lot to do with Castlevania. That’s because all the weapons most associated with the game were already in it originally, from throwing crosses to holy water.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. By default, a Castlevania crossover is going to be the best expansion for the game because I love Castlevania. However, it’s also the best expansion so far for other reasons.

Ode to Castlevania can be summed up as a lot of whips, a lot of music, a lot of Belmonts, and one big map. Unlike the previous two expansions, there is no new Adventure mode here; that one big map is the central focus. And it is big. It’s dominantly Dracula’s castle, filled with bosses and broken into sections via locked doors. It’s not exactly Vampire Survivors m?etroidvania, but that sounds l?ike it would be a hassle anyway.

The castle is laid out in a more-or-less linear fashion. You kick down the door and march your way up to Dracula’s bedroom to put him back to sleep. Is he actually there? Does Vampire Survivors actually have a vampire in it now? I’m not telling because ??that would be lame.

Much like the last two crossover expansions, this is still Vampire Survivors, but it’s wearing Castlevania’s clothes. But unlike those games, Castlevania fits Vampire Survivors a lot better. The enemies, all torn from ?various games in the series, look as though they belong here, and the castle could easily be compiled from various stages already in the game. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t much of a stretch.

The one big level is easily the best that the game has seen. It’s large enough that it’s extremely difficult to make your way through it, from start to finis?h, in a single round. Instead, after beating specific bosses, a nearby teleporter will be activated that you can transport yourself to from the start. This allows you to essentially continue from close to where you left off without having to wade through everything again.

There are a tonne of bosses torn from the series�history, and while many of them are just the sort that you keep your distance from while bashing on them, a few have some unique attacks that make them interesting. T??here are also moments within the castle where things turn into a sidescrolle?r, which can be disorienting but feels appropriate.

If there’s one place that the Castlevania conformity actually hurts the game, it’s with the whips. Most of the Belmonts come packing one, and while they’re all different, most of them kind of suck. They’re often short-range and only attack in specific directions. The whips that were already in the game are far better; it’s just sort of a drag that you can spend time turning yourself into a whip machine for less reward tha??n you’d usually find from holding a whip.

Sonia Belmont has the Sonic Whip, however, which absolutely wrecks house. It’s not all bad, but when you’re shoveling more junk weapons on an already threatening pile of them, it can become difficult to effectively create your desired build. There are other much more useful weapons that were added, fortunately. Although, as I mentioned before, some of them don't have much to do with Castlevania and feel like they were added because they needed to add something aside from? whips ??and spellbooks.

This is all backed by an extremely impressive list of songs and remixes from the Castlevania series. The composers working with Poncle did a great job with Contra in Operation Guns, and the same is true here with tracks torn from all over the series. There are even some t??unes that I wouldn’t have thought to include that are made irresistible through their loving remixes. Easily, one of the best parts of this expansion is the soundtrack.

Overall, It’s a loving tribute from a developer who is a clear fan of the Castlevania series. So much of a fan that there isn’t a Gabriel Belmont in sight, but there is a Sonia. That’s how you really know.

It’s also only $3.99, which is a buck-and-a-half more expensive than something like Operation Guns,? but I think the remix soundtrack is worth the value alone. In a world with horse armor, it’s a?? great value.

As a fan myself, this is easily the most fun I’ve had with the game since diving into the base version. The big map adds a lot more playtime than you might expect, and being able to unleash hell on various foes from the series while a frantic remix of Bloody Tears plays is, as one would expect, rather arousing. The way that Vampire Survivors has matured over the years almost feels like it was preparing to wear the Castlevania dress. And it fits so well. It’s almost ??like it was made for it. ;

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I really enjoyed the first Life is Strange game. Sure, I found Max a little ??bland as a character, but it was still a captivating story I wasn't used to exploring at the time. Now, with Max returning in this direct sequel, I was intrigued to?? see what's changed.

Now that I've given in to my curiosity and spent around ten hours flying through this latest entry, let's have a quick chat about Life is Strange: Double Exposure.

Before diving into this, I need to bring up the original Life is Strange again. Although I won't be spoiling Double Exposure here, the game does expect you to have played th?e prequel and references multiple major plot points from it. I'll avoid spoiling ?these, too, but I will make direct comparisons to both games with this in mind.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure (PC [Reviewed], Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5)
Developer: Deck Nine Games
Publisher: Square Enix
Released: October 29, 2024
MSRP: $49.99

I was already optimistic about Double Exposure after playing the first game. Although I haven't gotten around to playing the other entries in the series, with True Colors sitting comfortably in my Steam Library to play later, I was still excited about this one. Life is Strange was never a perfect ten for me, but it's the closest a choices ma?tter game has gotten so far.

When I first heard about this sequel, I was a little skeptical about how it would take a similar murder mystery concept from the first game and change it in a way that makes it unique. At f??????????????????????????irst, we're introduced to Max, her bes??t friend Safi, and another important character, Moses. The entire premise focuses on Safi's death, mimicking the Rachel Amber story from the first game, with Max discovering she still has her mysterious powers. They may take a different form now, but they still have the unintentional butterfly effect consequences they had the first time around.

If you've already finished the first game, you know exactly how much things escalate early on, with some seemingly random plot twists added for shock value. Double Exposure takes more than a few bits of inspiration from its prequel, but I like how it ties everything together. Like before, everything has a purpose and severe consequences. Well, outside of the dialog?ue.

Unsurprisingly, Double Exposure follows a very similar premise and plot structure. The twists are a mix of surprises and ones that elicited "Oh, I guessed that two hours ago" reactions from me. It almost felt like a nostalgia trip to the first game,?? es??pecially as I got through the story's second half. Although not particularly impressive anymore, it was a familiar setup that helped me understand what was going on without feeling lost.

And yet, even with that said, I was still hooked the entire way through. During my original Life is Strange playthrough, I was pleasantly surprised by how easily I got immersed into its story despite some of the characters being a tad one-dimensional. Double Exposure also captured this feeling. The only difference is that this time, Max was easily one of the most interesting characters to learn about, and her growth in this time skip is apparent. Age has done a lot to her, and although she's still a bit nerdy, she's also a lot more confident and bo?ld. What can I say? She's a cool gal.

Speaking of the time skip, having this take place this far into the future was a solid move on Deck Nine Games' end. Although I certainly related to a few characters in the original Life is Strange, many of the issues Double Exposure's cast faces hit much?? closer t??o home, making their circumstances and dialogue choices relating to them feel that much more significant.

Life is Strange's characters have definitely been the highlight for me so far, and Double Exposure is no exception. There are far fewer memorable characters this time than in the prequel, but they're genuinely fascinating and enjoyable to talk to. The romance options were especially fun to get to know, even if I would've liked more depth to the relationship-bui??lding. The game's justification for not doing so made sense but left me wanting more.

That's my overall feeling towards Life is Strange: Double Exposure. Everything happens so quickly, and I certainly think there was room to get to know the cast a little more, including how Max has been doing since we last saw her. You can get to know people if you snoop around the environment enough, but there was some room to expand further, even if it slightly padded the runtime. Even with that said, I was still happy to meet some new LiS folks and experience some refe??renc?es to others from the first game.

There are a few specific characters from previous Life is Strange games that make a comeback in some peculiar ways. A particular one that stuck in my mind appears in the second half of the game, but I'll let you discover who that is and some of the bizarre antics that arise from it. Let's just say I got an unexpected chuckle in between Max's serious and stressful circumstances. I even got surprise laughs from ?plenty of conversations in this game, which I wasn't expecting when looking back at the somewhat bland dialogue from the prequel.

One point I was initially conflicted about but ended up liking is Max's reintroduction to her powers. While I won't go into them much to prevent spoilers, I enjoyed the changes Double Exposure makes, even if most of it felt like convenient plot devices. When it came to actual gameplay, I had a lot of fun experimenting with the whole timeline-shifting change, especially when seeing how various events impacted the world. Looking past the overarching plot and conflict, seeing the little details in people's behavior, environmental changes, and even different music depending on which timeline you're in all help elevate the already impressive story-telling aspects Life is Strange is known for.

Overall, Life is Strange: Double Exposure is a satisfying sequel that ties in the events of its prequel well. It remembers and stays true to the original story without straying too far from its core. Although it relies a little too much on your having played the first Life is Strange, it continues the adventure well and balances the feeling of familiarity while still keeping things refreshing. If you enjoyed the?? first game, you're in for a tr??eat with this one.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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It’s cursed. Food truck games are cursed. I just want a good food truck game, but this keeps happening. Despite being someone who en?courages people to play less-than-spectacular games, I haven’t been able to finish a food truck g?ame.

This goes back to Food Truck Simulator in 2022. I was quite excited about that game, but when it arrived, it was full of bugs and design issues that caused me to drop it midway through the game. Fruitbus is essentially a repeat of that. Every time I sat down to play it, either a bug or just an annoying design decision would cause me to walk away until I just decided enough was enough. It breaks my heart, but I didn’t finish Fruitbus.

Fruitbus (PC)
Developer: Krillbite Studios
Publisher: Krillbite Studios
Released: October 28, 2024
MSRP: $24.99

Conceptually, Fruitbus is fantastic. You play as someone who has inherited their grandmother’s food truck. It’s seen better days, but all it needs are some new wh??eels, and you’re o?ff into the world. Your job is to convince her old regulars that they need to attend a send-off feast for her.

It’s sweet. In a somewhat morbid but very human detail, Grandma’s remains �that is to say an urn with her ashes �are strapped into the passenger seat. What’s really screwed up about the beginning, however, is that your mother is totally not down with g??randma’s send-off. She doesn’t support you running a food truck, so she retreats to her home on the farthest reaches of the archipelago, only showing up occasionally to tell you what a disappointment you are. I’m paraphrasing her here.

In fact, no one is really feeling much gratitude toward Grandma. In order to get them to the feast, you need to fix their petty problems and feed them food that will remind them of what a great chef your grandmother was. These islanders are a? bunch of jerks.

The gameplay loop is essentially foraging for ingredients, feeding customers to gain money, and using that money to buy new tools and upgrade the Fruitbus. A??long the way, you help the i?slanders with things like forming a band or fixing a lighthouse.

As I said, it’s a great idea conceptually. It’s underpinned with a charming art style, although, I’m not a fan of the? exaggerated stop-motion animations. I can at least respect them. The islands are rather small, but the limited space is well used with small towns and long, open roads. They’re not the most visibly splendiferous, but, hey, that’s fine. There are three islands, and to get to each additional one, you need to?? repair a radio tower and pay a toll.

Again: run a business, do side quests, unlock new areas, tools, and ingredients. ??It’s a solid formula. It could work. I’m not sure where to begin when describing where?? it doesn’t.

The quest design is pro??bably the biggest issue. It’s handled in an immediately familiar way: you drive into town, someone has an icon above their head, you talk to them, and they let you know what they need doing. This goes in a log book, which reveals you’re looking for seven RSVPs, and an unknown number of side ??????????????????????????guests.

Where I ran into frustration is that these guests are irritating. The Crafter is the worst example of this. When you talk to them, they can’t even think about going to grandma’s funeral until they find their lucky coin. Okay, where should I look? The log book says?? that they need to have one of Grandma’s smoothie recipes, and that should jog their memory. Mango, banana, lemon. Groovy. I sell it to them, they drink it, they say they don’t feel like they have the courage to attend the farewell feast without their coin. Bitch, where? Give me a damned hint. A general vicinity where you had it last. A quadrant of the island. Just narrow it down a smidge.

Then there’s the chilli [sic] pepper. The critic wants a salad that features a chilli pepper, which isn’t something easy to come by. I correctly assumed I’d find them at the volcano. I climbed to the caldera, and an eruption spat some out. They’d land, sit for a moment, then disappear. No problem, I got about four of them. I didn’t go straight back to the critic. I toured the island first. The inhabitants used up all my peppers. I went back to the volcano, and there were no chilli peppers. No problem, I’d wait for them to respawn. So, I wait, and I wait, and I wait. I figured that this watched pot wasn't going to boil, so I did other things for a while. I come back much, much later, and still nothing. I never saw another chilli peppe??r.

And I don’t know what is better attributed to bugs, because they happened frequently. The one that really broke me was on the second island. Wheat everywhere, an o?ven in the shop, a bread pan, we’ll be making bread soon. I had a hard time finding a scythe for the wheat, but it wasn’t too difficult when I stopped to think about it. Fixed the windmill, got a scythe, and gathered wheat. Tried to make flour.

The windmill is anything but intuitive. What I eventually discovered was that you need to stack eight pieces of wheat in one of the openings. The first time I did this, no flour came out. So I checked the input slot and found I could pick up the wheat that it had swallowed. Except there was something weird about this wheat; it’s like it was partially removed from the world, but I was picking up a remnant of it. Since I had no flour, I save??d, quit, and went back in.?? No flour, and now my scythe was gone.

I figured that was where I was done, but I eventually went back. This time, I was able to make flour. I went through the needlessly annoying steps just to learn to make bread, and eventually wound up with a loaf. The first pe?rson asking for a sandwich asked for an ingredient I had not yet encountered. No. That’s it.

This may all sound like nitpicking, but these aren’t isolated incidents. I ran into annoyances and bugs throughout, and it’s hard to really demonstrate that without honing in on a few big ones. Problems ranged from small ones that were easy to ignore to bigger ones that would cause me to close the game and come back later, hoping to work around them. It seemed like it was one thing after another, and it left very little time to actually enjoy the things Fruitbus does right. Every time the developer would release a patch, I’d jump back in, but?? the experience would remain the sa?me.

Making a good food truck game in t??his style is harder than it looks. Simply being able to create a driveable vehicle that can hold multiple physics objects without everything falling out, disappearing, or breaking, is a feat of strength. Surprisingly, the bus itself is pretty stable. There were quirks, especially when loading a game or moving furniture, but nothing too vexing.

A lot of the issues I outlined and other big stoppages I ran into could be ironed out with time focused to careful playtesting. I think that another couple of months, and Fruitbus would have been closer to where it needs to be. But barring a last-minute stomp on the brakes, this is how it’s launching. I really, really wanted to love Fruitbus, but I can only review how it was served to me.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Fruitbus appeared first on Destructoid.

I was introduced to Suda51 through Killer7, and was enamored by No More Heroes and its sequel. After that, I feel like things fell into a bit of a lull. He did a lot post-Desperate Struggle, but I mostly remember Shadows of the Damned, Lollipop Chainsaw, and Killer is Dead.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy them; it’s more that I really love Killer7 and No More Heroes. Those games, I just found them to be fine. Enjoyable but not extraordinary. But that was a long time ago. My tastes have matured, I'm more open-minded, and I look at video games in a broader way, so I was looking forward to giving Shadows of the Damned another chance with the Hella Remastered version. So??me people really dig it, so maybe I just ??wasn’t able to appreciate it properly at the time.

Unfortunately, this t??ime it’s no different. Maybe I don’t give my past self enough credit, because another playthrough has not improved my opi?nion of the game.

Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch)
Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture
Publisher: Grasshopper Manufacture
Released: October 31, 2024
MSRP: $24.99

I want to start by saying that Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered is not “hellaâ€?remastered. It is barely remastered. I’m certain that some things have visually improved, but I don’t think the geometry has been touched. I’d call the textures “cleaned up,â€?but Iâ€??™m pretty sure they’re the exact same ones but maybe less compressed. There were moments when it would do close-ups of some objects, and the surface was just smeared and blurry. 

Shadows of the Damned wasn’t a terrible-looking game for 2011, but it wasn’t impressive, either. It wasn’t intended as some sort of technical showcase. But why call it a remaster when it just looks like someone turned the settings up from High to Ultra? It has extra costumes and New Game+. It runs at 4K and 60fps. Some of the visual effects have been improved, but it still looks like Unreal Engine 3 piss. A port is fine, especially for the price. Maybe call it the “Hella Definitiv?e Edition.�But if you want to call it remastered, at least put a rug down.

Anyway, Shadows of the Damned is about a guy and his talking gun descending into Hell to make dick jokes for several hours. Not that there’s a problem with dick jokes. Destructoid was founded on the principles of dick jokes. I just want you to? be ??prepared for what you’re getting into.

Shadows of the Damned plays a bit like Resident Evil 4 ?if you suck some of the production values out of it. You play as demon hunter Garcia Hotspur as he takes his transforming pistol, Johnson, on a road trip through hell to rescue his girlfriend, Paula, from the Lord of the Underworld, Fleming. The goal is to reach a castle that always looms on the horizon, the Castle of Hassle.

That’s pretty much all there is to the story. You advance level ??by level and take out some baddies along the way. Much of the narrative meat is actually just backstory. Being a former demon himself, Johnson will explain the workings of the underworld while you occasionally come across books that reveal the pasts of the bosses you face. It’s not the most exciting storytelling, but it works. Its goal seems to be attempting a dark fairytale, but I don’t think that comes across very well.

However, the dialogue between Garcia and Johnson helps elevate it, so long as you can stomach the humor. It is packed with references to sex and genitalia, sometimes ?through double entendre and other times just ov??ertly. Not all of it hits, and some of it completely missed me, but the duo is charming enough. They may not stop talking about their members and the members of others, but at least guys are able to bond over their dicks.

I wound up enjoying Garcia’s wholesome devotion to Paula. Although she’s heavily sexualized throughout the stor??y, at one point even showing off her tits, Garcia is mostly just concerned with doing right by her. It’s a subtle trait that sometimes gets lost beneath the heaps of dick jokes, but it’s appreciable when it comes up.

When you get into the gameplay of Shadows of the Damned, it winds up being unspectacular. A largely linear affair with a heavy focus on combat without a real hook. A lot of the ??setpieces revolve around a darkness that will envelop the area, which will damage Garcia if he spends too much time in it, but otherwise, it’s headshots and weak point?s with a bit of dodging thrown in for good measure.

At least there’s gyro control for aiming. Or there is on the PS5 version, and I assume that’s true for the Switch. It helps in a lot of places, especially when you’re grappling with the Bi?g Boner.

Everything about it is a mixed bag. The graphics are often really mundane and drab, then every s??o often you get an interesting character design. But then, even the interesting characters are smudged in dirt, which makes it difficult to really appreciate their design. It’s sort of the product of the generation it was released in.

The soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill) is pretty great, but like everything, it kind of gets lost. It doesn’t stand out as much as it should and winds up being easily forgotten. It’s easy to forget that this game was made by some of t?he industry’s greatest, because it’s just kind of flat.

I’m not the only one who thinks that, and I don’t just mean that by looking at the original run of reviews. The hella original version was published by EA, and if you want a feel for the dysfunction behind the scenes, it’s what gave Suda51 his grudge against former EA CEO, John Riccitiello. Suda hates the guy so much that he named an antagonist in later No More Heroes games after him �Damon Riccitiello. That was his name in Travis Strikes Again. He toned it down in No More Heroes, calling?? him Damon Ri??cotello, as if that hides the influence.

Shinji Mikami stated back in a 2012 interview with CVG that he thought Suda51’s “heart was broken�by the constant changes EA requested for Shadows of the Damned. He said it wasn’t the game that they had envisioned by the time it came out. It’s not like they could have fixed it in the Hella Remastered version, because they had to change so much. Instead, Suda took some of the early drafts and made the comic Kurayami Dance with Syuji Takeya.

That’s not to say that Shadows of the Damned couldn’t have appealed even with those circumstances. While I appreciate the creative vision and detest the business end of development, it doesn’t always doom a production. But regardless of it, Shadows of the Damned is rather bland, even with?? its const?ant dick-waving. Maybe I’m naive, but I can’t imagine it turning out this way without executive oversight. Obviously, Suda51 is proud enough about the game to consider it worth releasing again, even if it isn’t exactly a gloss-up.

I gave Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered a fair chance to win me over, but I feel the same way I did when I played it back in 2011: underwhelmed. It’s just now, all these years later, I’m a lot better at analyzing its problems and communicating them. It doesn’t help that the remaster is barel??y a remaster at all. The buddy relationship between Johnson and Garcia as well as Garcia’s devotion to Paula have their charm, and the dick jokes do a lot of heavy lifting. However, it’s difficult to get over just how grey and humdrum the underworld is.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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I'm one of those strange people who enjoys playing betas for games when I get the chance. As a writer here it's in my nature ?to help people through stuff like guides, and I have an (at times) unhealthy obsession with gaming, so helping a developer make their game better?? is a nice marriage of the two.

Yet like a lot of people, I also use these betas to help determine whether I'll enjoy the final product. I approach these cautiously as some issues are part of the beta experience, but it's a great way to judge whether the core experience is for me. That was exactly what I did with Wayfinder over a year ago, and I? came away not entirely sold on the MMO style since its always online status and my inconsistent WiFi didn't mesh well. Even then, I ??struggled to see what being an MMO brought to the game. Judging by the initial reception to Early Access, others felt the same.

However, while that's where I'd normally walk away never to touch the game again, Wayfinder is a unique case. Through the course of Early Access, the game has driven itself away from its MMO roots into something more tightly focused, driven by single-player and co-op ambitions over something much larger and more time-consuming. Despite some shortcomings being tough to scrub away, Wayfinder has brought itself up to bei??ng something far more worth the asking price. Not only that but a shining example of how some games are simply better without live ??service being tacked on.

Wayfinder (PC [Reviewed], PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5)
Developer: Airship Syndicate
Publisher: Airship Syndicate (formerly Digital Extremes)
Released: October 21, 2024
MSRP: $24.99

If you're unfamiliar with Wayfinder following its early access makeover (or simply never knew about it), it's a single-player or co-op action RPG where you play as one of eight Wayfinders, characters with unique abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. While one character is focused on supporting the team with damage reduction and healing, others are focused on damage over time, target debuffing, or raw DPS. As a Wayfinder, your goal is to stop the spread of the Gl??oom, an interdimensional infection that claims all life it tou??ches, plunging its regions into shadow and chaos.

This isn't the most unique premise, but where Wayfinder stands apart is oddly in how some of its roots are still upheld. It might be in a new genre, but much of its quest structure, dungeon layouts, and boss design are ripped straight out of MMOs. It feels closer to a single-player/co-op MMO than an action RPG honestly, even if that might contradic??t itself. I've never been into MMOs too extensively (unless you count my obscene amount of hours in Warframe) mainly because of how much pressure you can have in dungeons or raids with other players. At its best, you might have one or two people not pulling their weight, and at worst, someone's spamming in the chat about how you didn't execute the exact button combos that they would've as if you're a different person and not their clone.

Stripping that away while still letting you queue up with random players is a game-changer since it lets you either be a one-man army or squad up and make some new friends. I ran my entire playthrough solo and while some encounters were very challenging, it was always possible with enough?? effort and careful positioning. I also played on the second-highest difficulty, so perhaps I asked for that.

No matter who you're playing with, the game has a lot for you to sink your teeth into. Leveling all those ??characters up can take upwards of a hundred hours if you work at it, and there's a lot of side content in case you're itching for more. For build crafters there's more than enough to customize between ability upgrades to enhance the way certain abilities play with each other, talents to provide incremental stat upgrades and new perks, and a whole host of "Echoes" to apply to your gear to give even more stat upgrades. It's a lot to sink your teeth into, but it never feels too overwhelming provided you understand your Wayfinder's strengths and weakn?esses well. As one example, I focused my build on Venomess toward Weapon Power and Crit Rating, proceeding to do a ton of damage with each strike while applying endless amounts of poison. She was easily my favorite character of the eight, but I got some good mileage out of both Grendel and Silo as well.

Alongside some great character designs and progression, Wayfinder's dungeons are among some of the best in the business. While t??hey can get tiring after the first dozen runs of a particular layout, these never seem to overstay their welcome as far as main story content goes. Even when you do have to repeat dungeons, there are plenty of ways it freshens things up such as modifiers that change how you approach that dungeon, procedural layouts that are different each time, and events ?that provide unique puzzles or combat encounters.

Yet despite the strengths of these dungeons, it's the bosses that steal the show. Thanks to its MMO origins, most of Wayfinder's bosses take on unique movesets that you wouldn't always expect to see with a game sp??orting a narrow focus like this. I don't want to give too many of the surprises away since learning these bosses is part of the fun, but each tends to provide unique challenges that reward careful dodge timing, positioning, and strong DPS. Normally I dread the moment I'm about to enter a boss arena in games, but this care and attention to detail made bosses easily some of my favorite content.

As a cherry on top, the game is presented beautifully. Voice acting is all well done and emotional, the soundtrack gets your blood pumping while offering some enjoyable ambiance for certain dungeons, and each of the regions is crafted beautifully. It's rare to see a game utilize a cartoonish art style and still turn out picturesque, but Wayfinder strikes that balance. Whether it be its dense forests interspliced with ruins, ??icy frost lands, or lush caves, it's hard not to stop and admire the scenery frequently.

While I could sit here and sing its praises, some of the stains from Wayfinder's MMO origins weren't washed out. Most notably, the plot and writing can best be described as a word salad. Exposition dumps are dropped onto your lap with the frequency of loot drops, while nouns are thrown so fast at you that it's hard to keep track of. Combine this with abandoned plot lines and a story that wanted to end after the second major area (though the third location is very nice), and it isn't the most compellingly crafted. You probably didn't look into Wayfinder expecting a narrative masterpie??ce, but it doesn't detract from its faults.

Side quests also pale in comparison to the main quests. Many of the quests feel more akin to fetch quests or "go kill 10 of x enemy" type mission design that make them very forgettable. One notable side quest had me go into a dungeon with a specific modifier to collect two objects, then go into a non-modified v??ersion of that dungeon to interact with the NPC who gave me the quest. Then it had me do that again, and again, and again. Eventually, I gave up and went back to the main story, especially since I'd grinded out enough XP to be caught up fully anyway. It's easy enough to ignore, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't seen far better elsewhere.

While not as big of an issue, Wayfinder's optimization and polish did cause issues at times too. I only had one crash in 30 hours, but the framerate varies wildly depending on where you are in the world. I had anywhere between 30-120 FPS depending on location and battles, meaning I needed to tur??n down some settings and limit it to 60 FPS just to get something stable. There were also plenty of bugs, like final boss enemies despawning after I died once or certain objectives not spawning unless I restarted a dungeon fully.

My gripes aside, I'm pleasantly surprised by just how far Wayfinder has come since I first played that beta. From its lukewarm early access launch, the game has transformed into an experience that's well worth your time if you're a fan of the ARPG/MMO genres. It's the sort of game that brings me hope that, even if this isn't the spark, many more developers will see the value in pivoting their live-service ambitions into something more manageable for a small team. As Wayfinder shows, doing so can result in an experience that's not ??only better for the developers, but better for players too. I also pray for more single-player/co-op games with MMO elements, but I imagine those prayers will be answered rarely if ever. One can dream.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Wayfinder appeared first on Destructoid.

A haunted video game is hardly a new concept. Even before the haunted Majora’s Mask cartridge central to the BEN Drowned creepypasta story, there was Polybius, an unplaceable arcade machine stalked by men in black. It’s a fun c??oncept. 

In 2016 Pony Island took the concept to an interactive level in a video game. It did so with a strong sense of humor, but it was effective in blurring the line between the player and the player character in the game. Tormenture is ?a lot like that with a smidge less humor and, as far as I ?can tell, less of a lust for metanarrative built from vague subtext.

But the concept of a haunted game isn’t enough to make a game compelling, so Tormenture faced the risk of getting lost under a pretense that has been done before. Cro??xel deserves mad respect since their careful puzzle design manages to shine past its attention-soaking veneer.

Tormenture (PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Croxel Studios
Publisher: Billete Cohete
Released: October 21, 2024
MSRP: $14.99

As alluded to, you play as a child glued in front of their newest game. It’s the titular Tormenture, an homage to the Atari’s Adventure. It’s even played on the Limbo 2800, a legally distinct Atari 2600. When I say “glued in front of,�I’m being almost literal. You’re free to look around the bedroom you’re sitting in and interact with the things around you, but your butt is stuck to the floor. You can’t get up to move, you can’t leave the room, and you can only touch the things the game lets you. It kind of sucks, but I understand the design reasons for it. In fact, there's an in-game suggestion for why you can't move, just in case you can't f?ully suspend disbelief.

It plays with retro nostalgia quite well. From the fuzzy CRT with its bunny-ear antennas to the Guess Who? board beside you, it tries to take you back to the '80s. The depicted copy of Tormenture itself has been around. It looks to have been bought from a rental place (for $6.66, no less) and there are notes scribbled into the back of its instruction manual. Your avatar also maps e?verythi?ng out by hand in a notebook; a practice rarely needed today.

Most of Tormenture takes place in the game itself. Certain elements and puzzles from it bleed into the real world, but most of the puzzle-solving is classic Zelda-style. The game resembles Adventure pretty heavily and lifts some of its mechanics, even starting off with a prologue that looks ripped from the game itself. It follows the same one-button limited item interaction. You can pick something up, and you can drop it but you can’t really manually operate it. It also sticks to where it touches your square character, meaning you sometimes need to let go of it and circle around to put it at a good angle. If you’ve played Adventure, this will feel extremely familiar.

You may wonder what you can do with a simple, limited, one-button control scheme. As it turns out, quite a bit. It’s impressive that I never felt that Tormenture was limiting itself by following Adventure so closely.

Your goal is to collect four relics. Each is found in one of the game’s four main dungeons and guarded by a boss. Each dungeon has its own puzzle gimmick. One gives you a torch, and another hands you a magnet. It’s set in Adventure’s flip-screen format, and each dungeon is packed with puzzles that require careful observation. There’s very little combat. There are enemies, but much of the time, your goal is to sim??ply avoid them. Very rarely do you need to use an item from one dungeon in another, and usually when you do, it’s simply to get one of th?e game’s 34 Easter Eggs. It invites constant experimentation, which goes a long way in keeping things engaging.

As I mentioned, occasionally, things from the game bleed into the real world. One of the earliest cases of this is when you need to bl??ow on the cartridge and re-slot it. Over the course of the game, you’re given snippets of information that explain the backstory behind the cartridge. There aren’t any cutscenes outside of establishing shots within the game, but it does a decent job of telling you what’s going on while you’re still nailed to the floor.

A lot of the real-world?? puzzles involve using something in the environment to get something to happen in the game. The stuff in the real world can be pretty basic, but some of it gets built up over the course of the game. You might find yourself pondering over the locked drawers, only to find? they come into play much later on.

Tormenture manages to nail the sweet spot where the puzzles aren’t too cryptic, but they’re challenging enough to make your back feel pat-worthy. A few of them gave me pa?use as I wondered how I was able to figure them out so easily. For most of the runtime, I was rather impressed with how effortless it all seemed. There was one segment that I got hard-stuck at to the point where I thought I hit a bug, but it turns out I was overthinking it. I had to go back and review my gameplay recording to get a feel for where I needed to focus my attention before I noticed that the solution was within reach the whole time.

Backing up, I say I was impressed for “most of the runtime,�and I want to stress that because the final section of Tormenture is the “rest of�that I left out. The main four dungeons are great, but once you have all the artifacts, things get shaky. Beyond running into multiple bugs that required me to reset the game to continue, the last gimmic?k item is extremely unwieldy. The last set of puzzles probably won’t stretch your brain matter very far.

And then there’s the final boss which was, er, torment. I guess you can take this as your spoiler warning, but I’m? not talking about what the fight involves, just the problem I had. 

You can take three hits in Tormenture before you’re sent back to the last clock you touched. It doesn’t really communicate well when you’re on your last sliver of health, but that’s not the issue. T?he problem is that the boss battle is rather protracted. It refills your health between the first and second phases, but the second phase requires you to solve simple puzzles before you’re presented with the biggest puzzle of them all: how are you supposed to beat this guy?

The solution wasn’t immediately obvious to me, so I had to experiment. This required me to go deep into the battle, and if I guessed the solution wrong, it was back to the start. No matter how proficient I became at the fight, some of the attacks are somewhat difficult to read, especially when the boss goes off-screen. Having to repeat and repeat and repeat became extremely aggravating to a controller-breaking degree. And then there are multiple endings, which I assume is based on how ?diligent you are in plumbing for secrets, so I’d maybe suggest poking at all the crevices before facing the big bad.

So, ??that’s disappointing, but it’s a small bruise on an otherwise great experience. As much as I want to put my fist through the drywall whenever I think of that last part, I was taken in by everything before that. And for all I know, the boss could be nerfed in a day-one patch that also fixes some of the bugs I ran into. All my suffering for naught.

I want to stress that everything leading up to that section of the game is butter. Gravy, even. It’s a loving tribute to Atari’s early console and the games that defined it, and it provides a nostalgic vision of yesteryear’s gaming laced with a bit of horror. The final act might be a bit too much torment, but ??it doesn’t crack the polish of the game’s bulk. It’s absolutely worth it, just maybe chamber a few swears in preparation.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Tormenture appeared first on Destructoid.

Movies from the �0s will never die, thanks to video games. Well, and all merchandising, really. And sequels and remakes. But they turn up in video game form with such regularity you’d think the movies had just hit. Ghostbusters, RoboCop, tonnes of various tie-ins. It’s apparently fertile ground.

Licensed movie games were once embraced by the big-budget sphere of the video game industry, but unless it’s a multi-billion dollar franchise, they’ve become rare. This has allowed them to slip into small-budget productions with crossovers galore. Some publishers have begun making it their business model to focus on licensed titles, like Devolver’s new Big Fan Games label and, according to an in-game video, Retrorealms’s publisher Boss Team Games.

Retrorealms, currently consisting of adaptations of Halloween and Ash vs. Evil Dead, has brought up a question in my mind that I hadn’t really thought of in-depth before. What is the goal of a licensed movie game? Not from a business standpoint but f??rom a player’s.

RetroRealms (PC [Reviewed], PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch)
Developer: WayForward
Publisher: Boss Team Games
Released: October 18, 2024
MSRP: $24.99 each, $49.99 bundled

The most obvious business answer to the question of what a licensed game's purpose is would be a mix of profit and advertising. Movie games would often be released right alongside the movie itself as a way of building excitement. If you see something everywhere, regardless of how much you know about it, you’ll probably assume it’s pretty popular. If you’re a gamer, you ??might play the game and want to see the movie. If you’re a film�person�filmer, you might watch the movie and want to play the game.

But, as a player, why would you want to play a licensed game? The answer might be different for many people, but it would probably involve wanting to further interact with the characters or universe they inhabit. Sometimes, we’re not ready to say goodbye to a beloved story, so we seek ways to further our experience. Other times, the reason might be to ??immerse yourself in the film’s world. Rather than simply live out the plot of a movie, you play a part in a completely different story based on what is established in the movie. Or maybe you want a differe?nt perspective on things, to see how they are interpreted by the developer.

I doubt that you just want to look at things that resemble the property that you love. Personally, I don’t just want to play a game where the worlds just look like recognizable scenes and the characters appear as they do in a movie. I want the gameplay to be informed by the concepts in the movie. The N64’s Goldeneye gave a lot of thought to how it would make you feel like James Bond. It gave you objectives to complete beyond just shooting dudes on your way to the exit. RoboCop: Rogue City wasn’t just another FPS. The developers considered how to make you?? feel like both a?n anal-retentive police officer and a tank on legs.

Both the Halloween and Ash vs. Evil Dead parts of Retrorealms Arcade feel like pretty standard platformers where you play as A??shley Williams and Michael Myers. That’s not the end of the world, but I feel they don’t capture their source material very well.

Backing up, Retrorealms Arcade is sort of a platform for other games. While right now, there’s only Ash vs. Evil Dead and Halloween, there’s an indication that more will be added later. You can roam a 3D interior, interact with 3D replicas of props from the movies, and view behind-the-scenes videos. You launch the games b?y stepping up to their respective arcade cabinets. This isn’t a complaint, but it looks less like an arcade and more like a �0s fast food chain with the arcade cabinets in the foyer.

One of the things that interested me about Retrorealms was the hub. I like the idea of the games existing within a space, but unfort??unately, the space isn’t used to add context and body. It’s just a dusty museum with an unrealistic layout. I’d be more interested if it actually looked like an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese and gave some background on the machines themselves. Or a functioning Pizza Hut, I don’t care, but some 3D rooms with dioramas of the games aren’t that compelling.

But that’s just the hub anyway, forgotten when you jump into the games. And the games areâ€?fine. They’re purchased separately or in a bundle, and characters are functionally their own thing, so if you own both games, you can play as Ash in the Halloween machine or Myers in Evil Dead. There are two other characters you can buy separately: Laurie Strode from Halloween and Kelly Maxwell from Ash vs. Evil Dead. Itâ€??™s a neat concept, and it would be a shame if this is how far we get.

Where I’m really down on Retrorealms is the fact that the games are just so basic. The fact that they’re set up as physical arcade cabinets is confusing, because t??hey don’t feel like arcade games. They feel like DS tie-in games, the sort that Wayforward often had a hand in back aro?und 2010.

In typical WayForward style, they’re certainly competent games. They feature some terrific pixel art and a great soundtrack. The problem I have is that 2D sidescrollers with terrific pixel art and a great soundtrack are a dime a dozen in the market today. We are so spoiled for choice to the point where I need a hook well beyond competent/pixel art/soundtrack, whereas that wouldn’t have been the case back when A Boy and His Blob came out on Wii. Now, I need something like an inventive twist on gameplay like Gunbrella, an infectious attitude like Pizza Tower, or era-authenticity like Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland. You can't sla?p the word ?retro on pixel art and think that's authentic. I can smell the difference.

With the only unique aspects being a 3D hub and the ability to buy more characters, the bruises on Retrorealms are only more apparent. The levels are boring. Only a single simple gimmick disting?uishes each of them, and I’d have trouble recalling where each one was placed. The bosses are terrible, all over the place in difficulty. ?The story is practically non-existent, and what is there would probably be better off actually not existing.

The only inventiveness really comes from being able to switch into the Nightmare Realm at will. This is a more brutal ??mirror of the stage you’re on, with harder and more frequent enemies. It will also change the positioning of some walls and platforms, which is usually used in puzzles where you can obtain a ticket to unlock items in the museum or collectible MacGuffins of no immediately discernable use. Unfortunately, these puzzles also waver in difficulty, and I found some of them to be more effort than they were worth.

The characters a??ll play uniquely, but when they’re against such drab backdrops, they don’t have much chance to shine. Ash vs. Evil Dead and Halloween games are interchangeable: 10 levels across five backdrops. All the same boxy platforming, both visually similar. Not that I’d expect them to be vastly different, but that might have made the whole experience more interesting.

If anything, I found the included behind-the-scenes videos to be the most interesting part. Specifically, WayForward founder Voldi Way talking about his appearance in the 1980 film, The Changeling. There’s also a video where the developers cite their favorite horror movies, and none of them name Halloween or Evil Dead. Not that they need to, since that would probably indicate that they aren’t all that well-versed in the genre, but I found it amusing anyway. Unfortunately, there are only four videos as far as I'm aware. I’d assume more get unlocked through various means, but I got an achievement telling me? I watched them all.

Aside from that, Retrorealms Arcade just feels so unspectacular. Competent, sure. It’s not a bad time. It’s just not a particularly memorable one, even if you’re a fan of the movies within. It feels like WayForward made sidescrollers and put the characters in them rather than having the games informed by the characters. So, if you wanted to play a platformer like Michael Myers, then that’s what you get and very little more. There isn’t much meat to sink ?a knife into.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: RetroRealms appeared first on Destructoid.

Even though we still see some solid releases, the slasher niche in lo-fi horror is starting to dull. But if there’s one thing you can count on in the indie and alternative spaces, it’s diversity, and while Sniper Killer isn’t entirely out of the wheelhouse of Henry Hoare and Black Eyed Priest, developers of Bloodwash, it’s also not your typical fare.

Like Bloodwash, Sniper Killer is light on gameplay, leaning more on vibes to get its? horror across. It tells a story that puts you in the boots of both the protagonist and antagonist, and while that runs the risk of falling into ??predictability, a dash of humor and surreality helps keep things interesting.

Sniper Killer (PC)
Developer: Black Eyed Priest, Henry Hoare
Publisher: Torture Star Video
Released: October 17, 2024
MSRP: TBA

Sniper Killer opens in a bizarre way. You start as a mo??del, arriving at an extremely sketchy job for an eccentrically sketch?y dude. But before you can even get comfortable, you wind up as the first victim of the eponymous serial killer.

The game then puts you in the shoes of said killer and lets you get intimate with them. They’re receiving calls from some unknown person on the other end of a radio. The messages tell?? them that taking out their targets is necessary for national security, but there’s a big question mark hanging over the antagonist’s sanity, and it remains there through the end.

The rest of the game plays out like speed dating with different characters. Sometimes, you’re the victim, but other times, you’re Detective Comardy, the officer in charge of stopping the Sniper Killer. This creates a somewhat enjoyable dynamic of performing the murder and then checking out your handiwork up close. And while it’s obvious what your objective will be when you’re playing the killer, each time you step into the shoes of Comar?dy, it’s hard to tell where things will go or how they’ll play out.

The alternating of roles keeps things fresh. One of Sniper Killer’s greatest successes is the tonal differences between characters. It?? is, as I mentioned, difficult to tell exactly how up a tree the murderer is. While the obvious logic would suggest that they’re merely acting out a fantasy, clues left around their safehouse, the fact that his targets are where they’re described, and visits from a creepy neighbor keep you guessing.

Things aren’t mu?ch bette??r on Comardy’s side. The police are only seeing random killings, but something feels off about them. When Comardy starts to find evidence that the killings aren’t as random as they seem, it raises more questions before taking a more surreal turn.

Unfortunately, as deft as the narrative is in some places, it could be a lot punchier. There isn’t a great deal of tension, and while it establishes a decent mystery, it never fully delivers on it. Certain aspects of its plot never get the payoff they should have. The City itself, a gritty place that has seen its share of carnage, could be better explored. There’s an indication that it will wind and twist itself up, but the climax feels like it just arrived because it had to. It's like there was no clear vision of what Sniper Killer was really g??oing to convey. It’s not that there isn’t a decent story here; it just feels like there was more potential than what was delivered.

The gameplay its?elf is, unfortunately, rather shallow. Adventure, investigation, and even stealth mechanics don’t amount to much. There isn’t much in the way of puzzles, so while early missions may challenge you to find a vantage point as the killer, the method is usually obvious. Later missions require carefully picking out your targets and landing your shots, which is a bit more enjoyable but still not very engrossing. The best mission requires you to hit targets that aren’t human, which requires a bit more thought. There’s variety, at least, even if it’s all rather flat.

Meanwhile, Comardy’s investigations don’t require any real detective work. There are moments when you are back at the office and need to pin evidence to a board, but it finds its own place without you needing to make any deductions. These scenes only serv?e to give you a look into the character’s thoughts, which are mostly confused and ??not very insightful. He has other moments of gameplay that I won’t spoil, but while they’re narratively interesting, they also lack some needed depth.

As for everyone else, they’re interesting narrative vignettes that serve the story well. They round up the perspective of the killer. While Comardy scenes make him seem like a maniac, and the sniper scenes suggest that there may be a reason to the madness or madness to the reason, the victim moments simply show him as a monster. Sniper Killer could have easily excluded these scenes, ?but it’s stronger for including them.

Sniper Killer manage?s to stay entertaining for its 2-3 hour runtime. In terms of shortform horror, it’s a capable tale that is a welcome diversion from being pursued by a killer or, alternat?ively, being the killer. We get both here, which winds up being a rather intriguing approach.

The frustrating part about Sniper Killer is that it is so close to catching onto something truly inspired. The character changes allow for a full view of the human side to all the creepy horror while it casually avoids walking into clichés. It’s surprising at times, surreal in some mome?nts, and grounded in others, which is the perfect mix for a good horror experience. But it doesn’t quite capitalize on its brilliant parts, which is a shame. The shot is on target, but it should maybe adjust its sights if it wants to hit center mas??s.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Sniper Killer appeared first on Destructoid.

I’ve been playing the Mario Party series since it started in 1998. My mother and I used to play the stick-rotation mini-games with the palms of our hands. We both got blisters. We tried to call a tr?uce and outlaw the practice, but in the heat of competition, someone would break, and it would be back to blister-city.

The series is something I can play with my parents and family. Because Mario Party is 80% luck, 15% cruelty, and 5% skill, winning isn’t a foregone conclusion for me. Even with my decades of extensive experience, my v??ictory isn’t guaranteed, so it’s more fun for everyone. I may never be able to pa??y my parents back for my upbringing, but I will not hesitate to rip a star from their grasp.

The series has had its ups and downs. Even if we could glean fun from any entry you can name, some are more beloved than others. Super Mario Party, we weren’t too hot on. It had four boards, and you hit the bottom of it way too soon. I always hoped we’d get DLC for Mario Party Superstars, and was a bit disappointed when Super Mario Party Jamboree was announced. My skepticism was unwarranted: this is the best Mario Party has ever been.

Super Mario Party Jamboree (Switch [Reviewed])
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: October 17, 2024
MSRP: $59.99

If you’re not familiar with the Mario Party series, it’s a cross between a board game and a video game. You pick a character from the Mario series, roll dice, and take them around the board. The go??al is to gather coins that you can trade for stars and other items and events. The person who ends with the most stars, wins.

When everyone completes their turn, you’re all taken into a short mini-game to compete. These are all very simple, sometimes involving direct competition,? whereas others have you collect as many coins as possible. Some spots on the board will also start mini-games that have players put their coins down in a winner’s pot, and others are duals between two players. W??inning mini-games doesn’t guarantee you’ll win, however. It’s all about the stars. If you have 200 coins and no stars, the person who has one star will cinch the win. On the other hand, if two players have the same number of stars, the most coins decide who wins the tie.

To win, you really have to play the board. You have to be locked in on reaching stars before anyone else and take advantage of every opportunity to steal them from others. There are optional bonus stars at the end, rewarding players for sometimes random accomplishments, giving players one last opportunity to steal the game. There are lots of opportunities to screw over other players; Mario Party can be extremely vicious.

One thing I really want to stress is that this variation of Mario Party doesn’t really follow the deviations made for Super Mario Party. Character-specific dice aren’t included, and it reverts to the 1-10 dice blocks. However, rather than the old standard 20 turns, the default is now 10. You can pick up Jamboree buddies, which we’ll get to, but they’re not quite like the allies you could gain in Super Mario Party. Instead, they only stick with you for three turns and can cause a lot of stuff to ??trigger twice, such as buying a star or even suffering Bowser’s wrath.

Super Mario Party Jamboree feels a lot closer to the original format, which is probably the intention after Superstars. There are board gimmicks, but they don’t entirely overshadow the central formula. If there’s one thing I’m glad they kept, it’s the amount of characters from Super Mario Party. Somewhere north of 20. I mean, I’m always going to play as Luigi, regardless of who gets added, but it’s nice to have a bigger cast? for variety’s sake.

There are also superfluous side modes, like one where you cooperate to fire cannons at Bowser and a few motion controller activities. There’s also a weird story mode where you explore under-construction boards and help with their setup. They’re okay distractions, but I don’t think they’re going to distract from the standard Mario Party mode. That’s fine. I’d probably be upset if it felt like resources had been taken from the board gamepla??y, but considering how strong it is, the side activities are just a bonus.

Speaking of motion controls; they’re optional. That’s not to say that every mini-game can be played without them, but rather that you can just toggle them out of circulation. This reduces the pool of games that might come up in any given round, but at least it means that you can play on a Switch Lite or Pro C??ontroller if that’s your preference.

Speaking of “pro�there’s a “pro mode�in Jamboree that should ease things for anyone who hates the luck aspect of Mario Party. What it does is set a number of factors to be more static. For example, there are no hidden blocks that would randomly award somebody a ??star or coins. When you send out a Boo to rob a ??player, they always return with 15 coins, but you can still pay them to steal a star. There’s only one bonus star at the end of the game, and its criterion is announced at the beginning of the game. There is a limited number of stock at the item stores. A game is also locked to 12 rounds.

I’m no doubt forgetting to mention a few rules, but the important takeaway is that it’s a mode for people who want to take things more seriously. As I s??aid, there’s still an aspect of luck when dice rolls are involved, but there’s less to get in the way of any strategizing. It’s a welcome inclusion for anyone frustrated by random chance and want their skill to play a more prominent role in their victory.

And speaking of skills, if there is one thing that bothers me about Jamboree, it’s the fact that a lot of the Jamboree Buddy games rely on skills that my family can’t match me at. Unlike Super Mario Party, you don’t gain allies simply by landing on a designated spot on the board. They appear occasionally, and once?? you reach them, it begins a mini-game where everyone competes. The victor gets the buddy, regardless of who actually reached them on the board. The person who triggered the mini-game does get an advantage, b?ut it’s not so immense that it’s insurmountable for everyone else. It would be less fun if it was, I suppose.

But the problem is that many of these mini-games are much longer than standard ones and involve reflexes for platforming or rhythm. Not to brag, but my family can’t compete with my expert-level Rock Band skills and Champion’s Road honed platforming. Not in the same way that they can in games about cutting a steak perfectly in half. I norma??lly win the most mini-games anyway, even if that doesn’t mean I always win the game, but ??this feels like I will always have the best chance at companionship.

Understandably, that’s more of a problem in my personal circumstances and isn’t going to bother everyone. Jamboree Buddies don’t completely? skew the overall outcome of the game, as they only provide a temporary advantage to a player and can actually wind up hurting more than helping. However, it’s also strange that these mini-games are so much longer than standard ones. It feels like everyone gets dragged into them, and the game stalls temporarily. It’s almost disorienting when they happen.

Circling back to my personal circumstances, it’s important to note that if my family didn’t play Mario Party with me, Mario Party Jamboree would be effectively worthless. You can play just about everything single-player, but the series is only really exciting if you have someone to play it with. That hasn’t changed with Jamboree. You can play it online, but I feel? that something is lost when you’re not in the same room as the people you’re stealing stars from. Torpedoing someone’s success just isn’t the same when you can’t hear them mope and/or scream.

If you do have a reliable group �preferably one who you already play Mario Party games with �then Mario Party Jamboree is probably going to be your new go-to. In many of the recent entries, I feel a lot was phoned in. Not enough would be changed, but some aspects would feel weaker or even unwelcome. However, while Jamboree mainly just builds off the original framework, it’s a lot tighter and more rounded than we’ve seen since the N64 days. I’ll admit it can be hard to get excited about yet another Mario Party, but this one is absolutely worth attending.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Super Mario Party Jamboree appeared first on Destructoid.

Europa is a beautiful indie gem with its illustrious visuals and environmental storytelling. While the gameplay might be lacking in som?e parts, the na?rrative journey certainly makes up for this aspect.

This game tells an emotional story with stellar voice acting from the narrator Earl Fisher, who plays the kid prota?gonist's father. As we continue through the game, we get more information about the lore by picking up notes, and the plot has a grea?t flow with twists and turns towards the end. It also tells an environmental message but it doesn't strike at the heart enough to be effective.

Europa (PC [Reviewed], Switch)
Developer: Helder Pinto, Chozabu (Alex PB), Novadust Entertainment
Publisher: Future Friends Games
Released: October 11, 2024
MSRP: $14.99

Flying through the air is bliss in Europa. You get a real thrust of power from the jetpack, letting you leap high distances. It controls very well too. You'll be able to get collec??tible crystals from the top of wrecked buildings in the environment and find other secrets around each level with the jetpack.

Most of the game involves you collecting objects like a flicker of li?ght energy or interacting with mechanisms in each area to move forward. They're fairly easy to spot most of the time, but it still feels rewarding to sp??ot everything you require, especially with the exhilarating flying mechanic.

Fun, yet easy puzzles in Europa

There are some puzzles here and there. There's a fun, albeit easy, puzzle, which has you rotate blocks in a clockwise manner to reach three areas of the map. Additionally, there are platforming challenges that involve blocks disappearing after each second jump. Europa won't challenge you, but they're rewarding to complete just like finding each object in the levels. I'm not usually a fan of puzzles in games, but even I have to admit, it would have been great to have more difficulty in Europa.

One of the weakest parts of Europa is its enemie??s. They seem thrown in as the main character only gets dazed, not knocked out by his foes. There are turrets that fire projectiles at you but they're fairly easy to dodge. Whenever they do occasionally land a shot, it feels so weird when a huge projectile hits the child and it barely phases him. Some stingrays shock you and do nothing else other than being a mild inconvenience. The enemies ar?e just annoying and ruin the flow of the gameplay. It gets repetitive too and can be quite annoying to get interrupted when you're trying to push an object into the correct place.

While the enemies do get repetitive, the game's environments do manage to change up the formula when you head into a new biome. There's enough added to the mechanics to keep Europa fresh for its 3-4 hour playtime.

A stunning game through and through

The game runs surprisingly smooth, and throughout its 3-4 hour length, Europa didn't have any noticeable bugs, framerate drops, or any other graphical issues. There are big environments with little pop in here and there, and some particle effects hang around the character's jetpack that pop on screen. Europa does something very similar to Journey, in which you can s??ee the end goal, ?the human civilization on a floating island, on almost every level. As you proceed through the story, it gets closer and closer, leading you up to the wintry top of the mountain.

Europa is gorgeous. The visuals are bright, the torn architecture and robots that remain from a war years ago stand out, and the artistry of the game's skylines like the Northern Lights-esque night are breathtaking. There are some wonderful set pieces as well like seeing the island of Europa in the distance, flying sections with a colossal robotic creature, and visages of a war gone by. It certainly gives the fantastical vibes to Studio Ghibli's work, especially Castle in the Sky.

While not as compelling as Austin Wintory's Journey soundtrack, Europa has a stirring score to complement the beautiful visuals. The piano-le??d music leads to how you're supposed to feel ??in the moment, and towards the end, it genuinely gave me goosebumps in my arms.

Europa is a delightful work

Overall, Europa is a wonderful indie title that is a breath of fresh air from the triple-A fare of this busy season. The art style is striking, the storyline is intriguing, and moving around in the sky is satisfying. While the game can be repetitive at times with its annoying enemies (that only stun your character), Europa is worth your t??ime if you want to take your gaming slow for a few hours. It is fairly short at 3-4 hours, but there are colle?ctibles you can try to find that can extend your playtime.

[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]

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Remaking Silent Hill 2 is a paradoxically enviable and unenviable endeavor for anyone. I im??agine that most developers with their fingers in the horror genre would love to get all handsy with what has long been cons??idered one of the pinnacles of the art form. On the other hand, it invites endless scrutiny from its legions of passionate fans, and you will never, ever please everyone.

In fact, attempting to improve on the original is suggesting that it wasn’t already perfect. It wasn’t, but the sentiment is somewhat understandable. Without ??getting to the most granular of details, it’s hard to tell what compromises the original team had to make and what did and didn’t live up to their visions. What was informed by the technological challenges of the time? No answer is going to be correct in every fan’s mind.

So, the direction that the Silent Hill 2 remake c??hose is adding a lot while also changing very little.

Silent Hill 2 (PC, PS5 [Reviewed])
Developer: Bloober Team
Publisher: Konami
Released: October 8, 2024
MSRP: $69.99
If you’re new to the Silent Hill series, I want to tell you that you don’t need to play the first game to get into this one. Not only does it have a different protagonist with different goals, the story has a complete?ly different focus. It still involves a guy looking for someone, but that’s mainly because in order to get a character to stay in a clearly unsafe environment, they need a strong motivation, and love has made fools of many.

I?n this case, we have James Sunderland looking for his wife, Mary. He receives a letter from her, telling him to meet her in the titular town of Sile??nt Hill. The problem is, as James tells it, she’s been dead for three years. However, even though he is unsure why, he travels to the town anyway to try and find her.

When he arrives, he finds it shrouded in fog and completely deserted. And not recently, either. It looks like the place has sat to rot for quite a while. Worse, he quickly discovers it’s full of monsters. Nonetheless, he’s set on finding Mary, and won’t let anything stand in his way. Then things just get progressively weirder from there. The big twist to Silent Hill 2 is one of the most spoiled in video games, but I’m not going to add to that resonance. Besides??, if you want t??o know more about its depth and execution, it’s been covered repeatedly by people far more devoted than me.

If you’re nearsighted, your place is in Silent Hill, where it’s always foggy, and if it’s not foggy, it’s dark. 23 years of added horsepower have certainly made things look a lot more active and detailed. Much of the time, the Silent Hill 2 remake looks fantastic. All of the time, it heightens the atmosphere of the original. It’s not quite as foggy, but the billowing plumes of white that block your vision still capture the right feeling. From one side of the street, you might only be able to make out the faint outline of the roof on the other. It’s even better when it’s dark, where the small pinpoints of light struggling to illuminate in the distance give the town an ??even more pronounced feel of otherworldly desolation.

The downside to? this is that it’s a bit of a technical mess. I played it on PS5 and favored quality over performance, but the hit to the framerate isn’t really my problem. My biggest issue was with temporal ghosting, which is a common problem with Unreal Engine 5 games. Often, I just found this distracting, but sometimes it would affect gameplay by making some creatures visible in the dark just because of the streaks they’d leave behind as they m??oved.

There’s one particular fight in a meat freezer (you know the one if you played the original) where th?e enemy would move in the gloom, making them hard to track. However, because of the ghosting, I could usually see exactly where they appeared and where they were hiding. I suppose in Silent Hill you can explain everything away as the work of whatever supernatural power is controlling things, but it looks gross and clearly isn't an intentional stylistic attempt.

The original Silent Hill was exceptional in a lot of areas, including art, atmosphere, sound design, and especially narrative, but the combat was legendarily terrible. Thankfully, it wasn’t really at the forefront of the game. There was a decent amount of it, but also long swaths without an enemy. Well, I have good news an?d bad news. The good news is that combat has been significantly improved. The bad news is it’s n?ow a major focus.

There’s a lot going on with the combat. There’s an auto-targeting system going on for melee, which means James will often swing at things around him, even if you’re not directly pointing at them. The downside is that he sometimes will interpret an intended swing at an upright enemy as a stomp to one laying supine, but it’s rare enough that it’s not a problem. Meanwhile, for firearms, you can aim like any other over-the-shoulder action game, but J??ames is about as unsteady as you’d expect from someone sleep-deprived and unfamiliar with guns.

You can also dodge, which is key. It essentially sets James up with a short moment of invulnerability, where he’ll react to whatever is coming at him, even when it’s extremely improbable that he’d be able to get out of the way. Sometimes, this c??auses an attack that clearly hits him to miss, but it’s probably better than it is undependable. It feels pretty good, and that’s what’s important. I’d?? definitely take the new fighting system over the old.

But that, unfortunately, leads me to my biggest complaint about the game, and that’s the length. The original experience was about 7-9 hours, whereas I clocked in at 18 hours on the? remake, and that includes a bunch of dicking around the town. Some will understandably consider the substantially added length a good thing, but I don’t think it’s earned.

The narrative hasn’t been much expanded, which is definitely for the best. Everything plays out exactly as it did in the original, with a few additions and minor tweaks. But everything between the narrative moments has been bloated out. You’ll spend more time wandering the apartments and hospital fighting the same small handful of enemies and searching rooms that sometimes only include a monster, a bottle of health, and nothing else of interest. It’s worth noting that the bulk of the added length is in the interior sections. If they had instead focused on extending the moments you’re wandering the town immerse?d in the mystery, it probably wouldn’t have felt like such an issue.

Length is rarely a positive thing in horror games. The longer you play in a game’s world, the more comfortable you become in it. You feel more capable. You’ve seen the monsters enough to know how to deal with what the game throws at you. Surprises lose their effectiveness, tension turns to discomfort, and it becomes hard to stay invested. Some complain that Alien: Isolation is too long (and I agree), but I at least feel that a lot of that mid-game malaise pays off when the last twist is revealed, whereas the added fluff in the Silent Hill 2 remake ju??st feels like content for content’s sake.

Whether or not that’s a problem will depend on your tolerance. Largely, while I felt that it was a detraction, I don’t feel like it’s a massive issue t?hat completely ruined the game for me, it’s just an unnecessary self-inflic?ted wound that gets in the way of what most people are here for: seeing a beloved classic benefit from modern hardware.

Largely, the remake of Silent Hill 2 was a success beyond my expectations, but ?I had my expectations securely in check. Truly, much of its success come??s directly from what was already established by Team Silent in 2001, but retaining the atmosphere while upgrading the visuals is a feat in itself. I also found that the redone cutscenes, while largely being shot-for-shot reproductions, have a lot more nuance with the added facial animations and details.

Some restraint when it came to the length of the remake would have done wonders. But aside from the needless bloat and technical problems, there’s still a lot to like. Remaking Silent Hill 2 could have gone horribly wrong, an???d maybe this modernization won’t replace the original for some, but it’s at least a worthwhile new perspective.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Historically, expansions in the Diablo series have been very solid. Both Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction and Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls added new areas, content, and classes, focusing on adding more and build??ing up what players love about the base game rather than making drastic changes.

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred follows a similar formula. It expands on the base game with a new area, Nahantu, some new content and systems, and an all-new class—not just to Diablo 4, but to the franchise as a whole—the Spiritborn. But all t??hese new features are just the tip of ??the iceberg in terms of content with this expansion.

If I had to use one word to sum up Vessel of Hatred as an expansion, it would be big.

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred (PC [Reviewed], PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Released: October 8, 2024
MSRP: $39.99

Vessel of Hatred picks up right where the Diablo 4 stor??y ended. Lilith and Inarius are no ?more, and the Cathedral of Light is decimated. One of the three Prime Evils, Mephisto, Lord of Hatred, has been trapped in a soulstone by Neyrelle, a scholar who has decided to set out towards the lands of Nahantu on her own with very little indication as to why. However, it's apparent that Mephisto himself is influencing her, as shown by a bloodied wolf following Neyrelle in the epilogue of the base game. If you've already played through the base campaign, you can jump right into the expansion story with a new or existing character.

The story in Vessel of Hatred puts you on the path of tracking down Neyrelle, heading to the new area of Nahantu to find her. The opening cutscenes introduce us to the Burned Knights, a militant fanatic faction formed from the remnants of the Cathedral of Light. The Burned Knights play a pivotal role in the story, as they are also trying to hunt down Neyrelle, seeking vengeance for what happened to their order, and Inarius in Hell at the end of Diablo 4.

I'm still a bit torn on the pacing of the story in Vessel of Hatred. Not so much with the actual progression of the story itself throughout the roughly 8 hours it took me to get through it. In fact, my time with the campaign felt like it flew by, though that's probably just because the length of the campaign in an expansion is obviously going to be much less than the beefy 30 or so hours I put into Diablo 4's campaign.

My concerns lie more with the overall pacing for Diablo 4's bigger story at hand. I expected Vessel of Hatred to be about Mephisto, but it's really all about Nayrelle. With Diablo 4 set to receive annual expansions, I hope things won't be moving too slowly. If the plan is to dive into Mephisto more over the course of seasons, that's one thing. But if we're to go through several Mephisto-centric expansions year after year, I only hope I'm still around to see when we might finally encounter the big guy. You know, Diablo.

In a way, Nahantu is a stark contrast to what we've come to expect from Diablo in every way. Instead of darkness and death, Nahantu is a massive jungle—a little brighter, more vibrant, and full of life. There are some darker parts, both visually and in terms of tone, but for the most part, it's a breath of fresh air ?to explore as an environment. I even found the new dungeons and Strongholds to be a nice change of pace. And the new main hub, the city of Kurast, nestled in the jungles of Nahantu, is actually pretty cozy. I'm sorry, Kyovashad, but I'm AFKing in Kurast from now on.

I played through Vessel of Hatred as the new class, the Spiritborn. Never before seen in the Diablo universe, essentially a monk and shaman hybrid: I was skeptical about it when it was first announced. Well, I'll admit that I was wrong. This is the most fun class in Diablo 4, an?d I'm afraid I'll have trouble playing any of the othe??rs now.

The Spiritborn is built around four different Spirit Guardians. First is the Jaguar, which focuses on fast fire elemental attacks. Second is the Gorilla, a defensive juggernaut built around tanking and mitigating lots of damage. Third is the Eagle, which?? utilizes lightning a??ttacks mixed with the ability to quickly move around the battlefield. Finally is the Centipede, the poison-centric Spirit Guardian that deals damage over time and debuffs enemies.

I tried to dabble in all of the Spirit Guardian skills to some extent to get an overall feel for them, but found myself mostly going into Eagle and Centipede. I love anything DOT-related, so the Centipede is right up my alley, but being able to zip around and chain lightning attacks with Eagle-focused skills was a lot of fun, too. With some skills, I felt as though I was playing an elemental variant of Monk from Diablo 3. With others, I felt as though I was playing an ARPG version of Udyr from League of Legends. I think that's what makes the Spiritborn feel so good; in a way, it feels l??ike multiple clas??ses in one.

I'm no theorycrafter or anything when it comes to builds, but it feels like you can really mix ??and match the four Spirit Guardians or just focus on all the same skills of one and still have a good time. Obviously, there will be min-maxers that will prove me wrong and point out the mathematically superior builds, but I think you can build how you want with the Spiritborn and still be able to get things done.

After completing the Vessel of Hatred campaign, you can continue ?to level the same way you did in the base game, via world events, Helltides, dungeons, etc.?? However, there are also two all-new forms of content in the expansion: Dark Citadel and Kurast Undercity.

The Dark Citadel is an endgame experience built co-op with 2-4 players. I only got to do one Dark Citadel run, but it was a ton of fun. You and your team progress through a bigger dungeon packed full of enemies, having to occasionally split up and each focus on different areas before coming back together to take on challenging bosses. It's another way to progress at the endga?me, which is a welcome addition to Diablo 4. Progressing through the Dark Citadel will net you weekly rewards, including loot and Dark Citadel-exclusive cosmetics.

Meanwhile, Kurast Undercity is a time-attack dungeon where you can both level and farm late-game items. Both of these add to the ARPG grind cycle, and it was a good move by Blizzard to add new forms of content that will become an integral part of the experience instead of just expa?nding on the exist?ing options—like dungeons and Strongholds, just to name two.

These are the main new features in Vessel of Hatred, but there are many smaller a?dditions that help polish the overall Diablo 4 experience, and all of them are well-executed in the expansion. Mercenaries, a popular syst??em from previous Diablo entries that allows you to recruit NPCs to join you in your adventure, has been added. You have a unique rapport with each of the mercenaries you recruit, which increases as they join you in combat, letting you unlock new rewards and even unlock and progress their own skill trees to further increase their effectiveness.

All of this new content is complimented by major base game overhauls coming alongside the expansion. Th??ese changes will affect?? everyone, including those who don't purchase Vessel of Hatred. The Max Level is now 60 instead of 100, but the Max Paragon Level is now 300 instead of 200. The difficulty system has been revamped, letting you play any non-Torment difficulty right out of the gate at Level 1. As such, all top-tier gear can start dropping starting at Torment 1, but drop chances go up with each Torment Level increase. This is a great change as it allows you to start farming your best gear earlier while increasing your farming efficiency as you become more powerful.

To top it all off, Vessel of Hatred launches alongside Season 6, titled Season of Hatred Rising. It looks like a meaty season that adds the colossal Realmwalkers to Diablo 4, which you might remember encountering in the Battlefields of Eternity in Diablo 3. There is so much content packed into this expansion that I can't even begin to picture what Diablo 4 may look li?ke yea?rs down the road if the upcoming content pieces are all of this size and caliber.

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred is exactly what I want out of an expansion, bringing in more content and new systems that build on the base game and move it forward in a meaningful way. Outside of some slight concerns with the pacing of the story as a whole, everything Vessel of Hatred brings to Diablo 4 is well-executed and a worthwhile addition. There's no fluff with this expansion. It's just more Diablo, made better.

The Spiritborn is quite possibly the most fun class in the franchise's history, and after some minor tweaking, I think the Dark Citadel and Kurast Undercity will help flesh out the late-game grind. Paired with all the revamps and improvements the base game has received through its first five seasons, Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred has Diablo 4 in its best form yet.

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The closer you move to reality in a racing game, the faster I lose interest. I love racing games, or just driving games in general. I play them all the time, and I have for most of my life, but I have no interest in the Gran Turismos of the world. Even Forza and The Crew are pushing it. It’s not really until you hit Burnout territory that you can get my attention.

But I especially love racing titles from the time before polygonal 3D took over. OutRun, Rad Mobile, the incredible Cool Riders: games that had to rely on graphical tricks and math to make their roads stretch to the horizon. One such method was Sega’s “Super Scaler�technique, which would stretch, shrink, and rotate sprites to make them look like they’re closer or further from the screen. This resulted in games like the aforementioned Rad Mobile and, more importantly, 1988’s Power Drift. That’s where Victory Heat Rally gets its design.

When it had its successful Kickstarter campaign in 2020, Victory Heat Rally was all in on the Super Scaler visuals. A lot of that has been lost in the final v?ersion, but the result is a clear love letter to a beloved corner of the arcade.

Victory Heat Rally (PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Skydevilpalm
Publisher: Playtonic Friends
Released: October 3, 2024
MSRP: TBA

Despite its name, Victory Heat Rally is a mix of circuit-s?tyle tracks, rallies, and side modes. If you go through the campaign mode, you’re dropped on a map screen that has you go through each of the cup’s tracks individually before getting more competitive in a Grand Prix. You can also play classic Arcade GP and Time Trials, but those kind of feel like side activities with Championship mode as the focus.

The vibrant visuals front the entire game. Early footage of the game’s development showed a closer adherence to the Super Scaler motif, with its tracks made of segmented sprites. That was dropped somewhere along the way in favor of a smoother look to the tracks, and while a lot of the sce?nery is still 2D sprites, there are a number of 3D elements to the environments. Because of the sacrifices, it doesn’t look like a lost arcade game from a bygone age. Though, you can play with a pixel filter, which I preferred.

But the spirit is still there. Tracks are veritable rollercoasters that dip and climb and loop around themselves. The camera tilts as your car turns hard around corners and shakes on hard bumps. It’s also fast. Very fast. The visual style is largely excellent, and the bright colors and chibi proportions give it a unique feel, even against older titles from where it gets its inspiration from, such as Power Drift and Choro-Q.

As a racing game, Victory Heat Rally plays a lot like recent Mario Kart games without any weapons or items. There’s a lot of emphasis on drifting around corners (or just as much as you possibly can), as doing so will give you a boost. It’s exactly like Mario Kart’s drift system, where ??you build up levels of “sparks�based ??????????????????????????on the speed and tightness of the turn. It works well, but it can get a little weird at times.

I think this is partially based on my choice of gamepad. I was playing with a PlayStation Dualsense, which has an analog trigger. Occasionally, my drift would reverse direction if I went directly into an opposite turn rather than use the boost I had ??built up. It’s just a theory, but I think th??is might happen if you ease off the drift button (the trigger) but don’t let it go entirely.

I had a lot of frustration with g?amepad controls, and I think this started after a recent update to the pre-release version because I don’t remember having issues when I started. Most frustratingly, when going?? through menus, it would register button presses multiple times, so if I wanted to select a track to see what medal I had on it, it would sometimes go directly into the starting grid, forcing me to open the menu and quit the race.

For that matter, I don’t feel like I should have to select a race to see what medal I have on it. There should be a quicker way; at the very least having it shown on the world map itself. You need a certain number of points accumulated to access later GPs, so I’d have to go back through previous events individually to see which ones I only had silvers on. And to make matters worse, going off the edge of a map is supposed to take you to the next cup, but often would just take me ?to some random cup that might even be in a completely different driving class. It became frustrating in the later stages of the Championship mode.

The frustration is compounded by the incredibly uneven difficulty curve. Occasionally, I’d hit a rally whose target time was much tighter than seemed?? reasonable. I’d feel like I ran a perfect race in a higher-end car, just to find I was a second or two off from gold. So I’d run it again and again, and each time would get the same result. And this started happening as early a??s the second class.

That may just sound lik??e a skill issue, but when I’d encounter the track again in the context of a GP, I would absolutely wipe the floor with the computer drivers. In fact, regardless of whether or not I’d struggle with a rally race, I never lost a single GP, which are set up as the real events. The challenge should stiffen toward the end rat??her than be a breeze outside a few random events.

The occasional spike in difficulty led me to abandon my perfect gold run attempt, so I haven't entirel?y finished the game. The last GP I came to seemed to require a gold on every track just to participate, and I wasn’t willing to try and scrape? off the fraction of a second I needed to complete some of the rallies. My frustration had already peaked, though I could see myself going back later after I’ve cooled.

A lot of this points to a?? simple lack of polish. It’s stuff that could conceivably be patched later on, and it’s nothing end of the world right ??now. It can get in the way of the good-feel racing, but not nullify it entirely.

However, another problem arises further into the game, which is that, despite its outward style and garish colors, there’s a weird monotony in Victory Heat Rally. A ??lot of the cars you can drive look the same: a series of boxy coupes broken up by the odd curvier number. I could honestly not tell the difference between some of them, which took much of the fun out of unlocking new characters. Adding liveries to their design might have been enough to add? a dash of personality, but most are just flat paint jobs. Speaking of which, additional colors have to be unlocked for each individually by winning enough races. And you can’t pick; they get unlocked in a linear fashion.

The tracks tend to run together as well. They’re all smoothly curving rollercoasters with lots of elevation. Well, not all of them. You can certainly tell the difference between a snowy one with slick streets and an airport theme with narrow roads. However, they often lack hooks like you’d find in, say, an F-Zero track. There are no unique hazards to be found, few with 90-degree turns, and not many ridiculously long jumps. I think part of the problem is?? that they go b??y so fast. Most of them feel great to race on, but there are so many of them, and they begin to blur together.

The soundtrack has a simi??lar issue. The tunes are mostly enjoyable, chirpy, and high-energy, but you’ll miss them if you blink your ears. There’s also one singular song mixed in that I absolutely loathe. I think it only came up twice in the whole game, but it was enough to make me consider turning off the music entirely.

In general, I really enjoyed Victory Heat Rally. But anytime I’d sit down with it, frustration would? build until I would have to take a break. And it isn’t frustration with the racing itself, either. When wheels are on the pavement, everything is fine. It’s energetic, quirky, and full of fun, drifting action.

It’s the house that was built for the actual racing that is the problem. Beneath the vibrant colors and retro sensibilities, it’s disappointingly unpolished and monotone. Getting through the championship took me short of 6 hours, but it feels like it would be better off being half that with better attention to detail. As it stands, Victory Heat Rally isn’t the bumpiest ride I’ve b??een on, but it would benefit from a tune-up.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Almost one year after releasing Throne and Liberty in Korea, developer NCSoft has teamed up with Amazon Games to publish the free-to-play MMORPG in the Western market. Throne and Liberty is a pretty important MMORPG to both companies as it is NCSofts first non-mobile-focused MMO in about a decade—Rest In Peace Wildstar—and for Amazon, it's certainly hoping to help fill the hole of recently canceled Bandai Namco MMORPG they were set to publish in the west, Blue Protocol.

At its core, Throne and Liberty is a free-to-play MMORPG with a focus on guild content via massive-scale guild vs. guild PvP, and open-world public event PvE that can host hundreds of players participating at once. It's an ambitious outing to bring the social aspects back to the genre; and for the most part, it succeeds. For better or worse, Throne and Liberty in many ways feels like a modern-day Lineage, a??nd for many fans of the genre, that'?s a breath of fresh air.

Throne and Liberty (PC [Reviewed], PS5, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: NCSoft
Publisher: Amazon Games
Released: October 1, 2024
MSRP: Free to Play

You start Throne and Liberty like most MMORPGs: creating your own character. Some would argue this is the most important aspect of an MMO. The character creators itself is pretty expansive, allowing you to customize your character's appearance through a variety of sliders, changing things like hair and facial features. However, two key typical MMO character creation choices are missing from T&L: race and class.

Humans are the only option in Throne and Liberty; sorry, no elves or orcs here. And while class diversity is traditionally a staple point for MMOs, in T&L, your combat gameplay and diversity are instead based on your weapons. There are seven weapon types in total: Crossbow, Dagger, Greatsword, Longbow, Staff, Sword & Shield, and Wand. You can equip two weapons at once, mixing a??nd matching the skills for each of ??the weapons to create your own combo builds.

I started off with Crossbow and Dagger as it seemed like a pretty deadly combo for PvE. Using a mix of skills from those two weapons I was able to b??urst down enemies from afar, then switch into a deadly flurry of attacks with my daggers as they got closer. As I reached the higher levels I found that I enjoyed the ranged style of gameplay more, so I replaced my Dagger with a Longbow. I know, I know, it seems like an odd choice to be using both the Longbow AND the Crossbow. But both weapon types have specific skills that complement each other, and I've found the synergy between the two while blasting enemies at range and kiting them around very enjoyable.

At a glance, the tab target acti??on combat may seem rather basic. After all, this has been the pretty standard combat for MMO for a couple of decades now. But there are innovations to the system. For starters, every weapon comes with a unique defensive skill, that is bound to the 'Q' key on PC by default. Each of the skills lasts for a few seconds and will reduce incoming damage you take w??hen active. However, if you're able to execute a well-timed use of the skill, you can completely parry and negate damage while also automatically dealing damage with a follow-up attack. It creates a very dynamic and fluid real-time combat system in both PvE and PvP while still using the tab target premise.

Little innovations like this mixed with the overall high level of polish that makes T&L succeed so fun. NCSoft isn't?? try??ing to reinvent the wheel, but rather present a very high-quality wheel with fun improvements to make the tried-and-true systems feel more fun and intuitive.

While the questing experience is rather par for the course—you know, the standard go here, kill this number of enemies, repeat—there is enough variety scattered throughout to make the journey a lot more bearable than most MMOs. Every hour there is a rotation of content throughout the entire world of T&L, which repeats every three hours.

So at midnight, every region has a special event called a Dynamic Quest that takes place, and scales players to that region's appropriate level. Dynamic Quests are area-wide public quests that are meant to be completed by a large group of players to get the best rewards. For example, the Dynamic Quest in the re?gion called Nesting Grounds is the Lantern Seed Festival. Players must work together to complete a variety of tasks across three different phases to successfully host the Lantern Seed Festival.

Suppose the players at the event are able to complete all three tasks quickly enough. In that case, the remaining duration of the event spawns a special boss fight that players can continuously kill until the event ??ends to earn bonus rewards. After the event e?nds, all players who participate will receive level-appropriate rewards including experience, which always makes them worth doing. These Dynamic Quests will spawn every 3 hours starting at midnight, giving players the opportunity to join in on many throughout the day as they level and reach new regions.

Then,? every three hours starting at 1AM, unique World Bosses spawn throughout all of the regions. In the lower-level regions, several portals open up at the World Boss spawn locations, allowing players to form massive groups before going in and attempting to take down the boss before the timer runs out. In the higher level regions, World Bosses will spawn in either a Peaceful or Conflict phase. In peaceful, the encounters are the same as the lower-level ones; make a group and go kill the boss. But when a World Boss spawns in the Conflict phase, the area around the world boss is open PvP, meaning you'll have to fight with other players while al?so trying to kill the boss. It's a unique experience, albeit a bit of a hectic one.

An important element to any F2P MMORPG is its monetization. Throne and Liberty is in a unique place compared to similar releases in the genre. There are two main types of currency: Sollant and Lucent. Sollant is essentially Gold, earned by killing enemies, completing quests, doing dailies, etc. You'll use Sollant when upgrading or crafting ne??w equipment, leveling up skills, or buying consumables from the vendors.

Lucent, on the other hand, is the "premium currency". You can purchase Lucent directly with your hard-ea??rned cash—currently ranging from $9.99 for 500 Lucent up to $99.99 for 6,000 Lucent—or can obtain it by completing various in-game activities. You can even get rare drops simply from killing mobs that you can then sell on the auction house that other players can buy with Lucent.

That's where things get a bit weird when it comes to the "Pay to Win" discussion that plagues all F2P MMORPGs. Directly in the cash shop, the things you can purchase with Lucent isn't too bad. There's a battle pass with a free and paid track, with the ?paid track costing just 500 Lucent. You'll get a handful of upgrade materials, skill growth books, and a couple of cosmetics. Nothing too crazy, and all farmable outside of the pass other than the cosmetics. Outside of the pass, you can only buy cosmetics, dyes, rename scrolls, and server transfer tickets.

But where things get a little dicey is? the auction house. With the Auction House using the premium currency of Lucent, paired with t??he option to just swipe to buy Lucent, players can in theory buy a ton of Lucent and just buy all the gear and upgrade materials they need to power level their gear without having to actually play to get such upgrades.

The argument most will make in regards to monetization is that it's "Pay to Skip" rather than "Pay to Win". There's a ceiling to how high you can upgrade even the best gear the game has to offer, and even someone playing comple??tely freely will be able to farm out the materials to reach that ceiling. The difference is that someone who throws a ton of money at the game will be able to reach it quicker. It's a hard balancing act because obviously an MMORPG has to make money, and lots of it; they aren't cheap to develop. Going the F2P route makes things even trickier, as the developers can't rely on subscriptions to fund future content releases. That's probably a discussion for another day, but it's also something very important to mention as for a lot of people the decision to play an MMORPG is often influenced by its potential future. No one wants to invest a ton of time into their online character if the future isn't bright.

I've enjoyed pretty much everything I've done in Throne and Liberty so far. The combat is fluid and fun, and the world is massive and beautiful. Whe??ther it's working with my guild to complete guild activities, grouping with randoms to complete dungeons and world bosses, or even just exploring the world, I've had a good time. It's been a long time since I've logged out of an MMO and imm?ediately looked forward to logging back in.

Throne and Liberty feels like a step back in the right direction for MMORPGs, reviving a lot of the social features that seem to be missing from modern entries in the genre. While you can certainly still play solo, T&L gives you the opportunity to socialize and play with others in every aspect of its gameplay, even while leveling. It's a refreshing feeling for the genre that reminds me a lot of the classic days of MMOs, comparable to EverQuest and the original World of Warcraft release.

Like most MMORPGs, the fate of Throne and Liberty will rely heavily on the decisions NCSoft and Amazon Games make in regard to future content. Nothing beats a solid MMORPG launch; and so far, at least the Early Access launch has been incredibly smooth. But the ability to keep meaningful and fun content coming is what keeps players logging in and overall making the MMO feel worth playing. In its current state, you'll be hard-pressed to find an F2P MMORPG with as much content and polish as Throne and Liberty. If you've been looking for something that puts t?he MMO back into MMORPG, this could be just what you'r?e looking for.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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It’s hard not to fixate on playing as Zelda in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Link has been the mainstay player character in the series si?nce its inception, barring some smaller moments and the collective hallucinations that were the CDi titles. So, this has been a long time coming.

But it would take more than simply being able to wear a dress to get me excited. Zelda is about as blank-slate as Link. Her personality changes depending on the needs of the game, and most of the time, she still manages to be the most boring person in the room. Thankfully Echoes of Wisdom is more than jus??t a dress-wearer. It instead mixes elements from the series to create something distinct with appropriately mixed results.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Switch [Reviewed])
Developer: Nintendo, Grezzo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: September 26, 2024
MSRP: $59.99

You start off playing the familiar green-skirted hero, Link. You’re given a tutorial on exactly how to Link, which would be a clever misdirection if Echoes of Wisdom didn’t give away the plot on its cover. With your sword and shield, you fight Link to the Past-era Ganon, but on the edge of success, the ground opens up and swallow??s?? Link.

Zelda, who was inexplicably captured before the events of the game, then steps into the player character's shoes. It seems that Hyrule has been getting swallowed up by sinister-looking rifts, sucking in whoever was standing there at the time. As Zelda, you need to find a way to close them and rescue the people (including Link), along with your insanely generic assist partner, Tri.

The big twist on the Zelda formula is that you can conjure items into the environment, and typical gameplay has you figure out how to use them to bypass obstacles. In that way, it’s a lot like Tears of the Kingdom. Even despite its top-down perspective and less complicated physics engine, it also feels a lot like Tears of the Kingdom, which is fine. It invites a lot of comparison to a much larger game on the same system, but at least Echoes of Wisdom has classic dungeons.

You?? can also create any non-boss enemy in the game, and there’s something deeply satisfying about fighting alongside a Moblin. Zelda herself is mostly relegated to pulling something heavy from the ether and hurling it at her foes. Not far into the game, she obtains the ability to essentially transform into Link and fight more familiarly, but the transformation is on a rather short timer, meaning you can’t just choose to play as Link for the whole game.

On the other hand, you can fill that bar using a properly mixed smoothie, which Echoes of Wisdom is strangely obsessed with. Throughout your adventures, you’ll be tripping over apples and blocks of butter, which you can then take to a friendly Deku Scrub to mix into a usable item with a variety of properties. It’s a bit like the cooking system in Breath of the Wild, but far less deep.

The obsession with smoothies has another downside, which is that Echoes of Wisdom thinks that ingredients are a worthwhile reward. There’s not much more deflating than completing a sidequest or climbing to an out-of-reach treasure chest and finding that it contains five cacti. I’m not expecting a heart pi?ece every time I find someone’s cat, but I was carrying an entire grocery store of unused food by the time I finished the game.

It’s going to sound like I’m really down on Echoes of Wisdom for a lot of this review, but I want to stress that this is because it doesn’t really hold up to the comparisons that it sets itself up for. It uses the world of Link to the Past with its borders extended and parts of it jumbled around a bit, but it never comes close to matching it. Its echo system has a way of making you feel clever, but it’s nowhere near the level that Tears of the Kingdom d??oes. However, it’s a decent game in its own right.

I’m happy to see the return of the art style used for the Link’s Awakening remake. I think the toylike look of it is very charming, and it does a good job of evoking the 2D games of the series. However, like Link’s Awakening, the framerate is extremely inconsistent. T??hat hasn’t been changed. Traveling the world means seeing the game start to chug frequently. It’s bad enough that a sudden drop in framerate threw me off during a mini-game and resulted in me failing it. Not the end of the world, but never something you like to see.

I was never married to the overworld/dungeon format of pre-Breath of the Wild games, but it’s nice to see Echoes of Wisdom return to it for varietyâ€?™s sake. Usually, dungeons are also preceded by segments in the “Still Worldâ€?where chunks of landscape float in empty space, sometimes at unusual an??gles. The challenges here are usually not as intricate as the dungeons themselves, but they’re decent appetizers.

For that matter, the dungeons are a bit of a letdown. Unfortunately, they chose Link to the Past’s world as the setting, because the monotonous delves really stand in stark contrast to the thematically-focused ones of the SNES title. Despit??e havin??g completed the game just last night and having cleared the whole thing in a brief timeframe, I would struggle to tell you how each dungeon differentiated itself. I could tell you how the Zora one is unique, but nothing beyond that.

This may be a side-effect of the echo system; it’s hard to fine-tune puzzles when there are so many things to account for. When experimentation is encouraged, it’s hard to prevent shortcuts. There was one recurring puzzle where you needed to place a block on two tiles simultaneously. I was able to figure out a method that bypass??ed however the designer intended you to solve it that worked every time.

But in the absence of a solution to that self-inflicted pain, most of the puzzles are figuring out how to place an object?? on a switch or simply traversing difficult terrain. As a result, everything becomes monotonous, and that feeling continues to grow as you proceed. I became very proficient at traversal and switch operation, so everything became routine halfway through.

For a game that encourages the player to use their creative imagination, there’s a noticeable lack of imagination in the design of Echoes of Wisdom. It feels like the development team was pushing against limitations that weren’t there and came up short. As I said, in its own right, it’s a decent game, it’s just not a particularly memorable Zelda game, which is sort of ironic.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom puts a new spin on the series�formula but never quite finds itse??lf. I like coming up with creative ways to use as bed as much as the next person, but I’d prefer if the challenges were more consistently creative in return. Instead, things just bled together until I could have just played on autopilot. It takes more than a dress and a bed to keep things interesting.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game purchased by the reviewer.]}

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