I Played Modern Warfare for 68 Hours to Get a Skin. Here’s What I Learned About The Game
March 15th, 2020 I’ve mostly managed to avoid Battle Passes in games up until this point in my life. I had stopped playing Dota 2 frequently enough by the time their Compendium system rolled around, and I’ve never touched Fortnite or any other game that utilizes Battle Passes to sell its players DLC. Until Modern Warfare, that is. I had decided long ago that I’d buy into a Battle Pass when Ghost (the iconic character from the first Modern Warfare 2) was added to the new Modern Warfare as a skin, and the commitment only grew when Activision wisely decided to make the level 100 unlock on said Battle Pass be a skin that looks a hell of a lot better than Ghost’s new default appearance. What follows is a look back on the ridiculous amount of time that I spent grinding from level 1 to level 100 of the…
Legends of Runeterra Beta Impressions
February 11th, 20202 I’m a big fan of card games, having grown up playing Yu-Gi-Oh! and spending the last five years playing Hearthstone, Magic the Gathering: Arena, and Gwent. Even so I wasn’t immediately on board with the idea of a League of Legends card game, after all the market has become saturated since Hearthstone’s success, with worthy competitors, disastrous failures, and some games you probably don’t even know exist (there’s one for Lord of the Rings). But hey, it’s a free-to play-card game in open beta, so I gave it a shot and found a pretty fair and engaging experience with a potentially problematic design philosophy. Which, really, is the best sort of thing to review. As a warning there will no doubt be multiple references to other card games in this piece, including Hearthstone, Magic, and Gwent. Liked The Card Art: I’m a big fan of Gwent, which…
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Review
January 17th, 2020 There hasn’t been a good Star Wars game for about a decade, and it’s come to a point that people start to trick themselves into thinking that a bad game is better than it is. Lots of people will tell you that EA’s Battlefront 2 is good now, but it still suffers from the same initial problems on release, just with more content attached. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, on the other hand, does manage to be a good Star Wars game, but unfortunately it draws too many parallels between itself and better games to be truly considered great. To be perfectly honest, the story was the first thing that threw me off about Fallen Order. Set several years after Revenge of the Sith, we were told that the premise would be playing a Jedi that managed to survive the Purge and is now in hiding. Considering…
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Review
November 12th, 2019 I haven’t played a Call of Duty game since Black Ops 2, mostly due to how poorly Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer was designed but also because I didn’t find any of games that followed very appealing. The “everyone is doing this so let’s do something else” ideology that led to Call of Duty 4’s smashing success starts getting a little obnoxious when it gets taken to its extremes, and Call of Duty has certainly suffered from that in recent years. “Everyone’s doing modern so let’s go into THE FUTURE.” “People are bored of the future on Earth so let’s do the future ON MARS.” This went on for some time, reminding people not only of games that did sci-fi shooting better (Halo) but also the one that did fast-paced, twitch shooting, wall running games better (Titanfall). Fortunately someone at Infinity Ward woke up one day and went…
I Think I Hate Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth (a review?)
August 17th, 2019 I think I hate Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, and I’m not sure how to balance that considering how the game is sold. Persona Q2 beats you to death with its fan service, from an intro sung by the musical talent in Persona 3, 4, and 5 to “friendship attacks” that pair your favorite characters together in little cutscenes, and as a fan of the franchise this was working for me on a number of levels. However after beating it and setting it aside for a while there was this niggling thought in the back of my head that Q2 was just…bad. So rather than making a traditional review I’m just going to talk about why I hate it, because why not? There will be some spoilers in this review. The first thing you might notice about Persona Q2 is just a feeling that there’s lack of…
Nioh 2 Alpha Impressions
May 27th, 2019 Nioh 2 was announced at E3 2018 and we haven’t heard a peep about it since. Now it seems that Team Ninja is following the same path as they did with the first game and releasing a series of alphas and betas to get help from the community as they refine their final product. An interview with one of the developers at E3 said that they were going to go “all out” to create their “true vision” of what Nioh should have been, after admittedly being a little more conservative the first time around. Let’s see what “all out” looks like. Liked It’s still Nioh: I will admit that Nioh 2 feels a little skittish after playing Devil May Cry 5 and Sekiro over the last two months, but after a while it clicked back. The difficulty, stamina focus, weapon variety, revenant graves, great art for the…
Katana ZERO Review
May 20th, 2019 Death in video games can be a weird thing, and it means different things to different people. Some take it too harshly, seeing it as a penalty that defeats one’s enjoyment of the game, while others see it as a challenge, one that demands you do better if you wish to succeed. Devolver Digital has always had a strange relationship with death in their games, most notably in Hotline Miami where death was so constant that it took less time to reload a checkpoint than it takes to blink, and they continue exploring what it means to die in a video game in their newest title: Katana ZERO. The most important thing about repetition is how you learn, but few games properly illustrate how video game characters learn from failure. In Katana ZERO your failures are actually a plot point as the player character has the power…
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Review
April 13th, 2019 I’m not able to pin point the exact moment I fell in love with ninjas in video games, so I’ll just blame it on Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (though Scorpion in Mortal Kombat was pretty cool too). Gray Fox walking down that hallway in his “first” appearance, completely untouched and effortlessly blocking bullets certainly made an impression, and subsequent playthroughs of Ninja Gaiden didn’t help dissuade my enthusiasm. Now here we are with Sekiro, a difficult game that tries to truly embrace a brutal fantasy ninja experience…albeit with a magic prosthetic arm. Liked Combat: The combat in Sekiro is similar to what you’d find in Nioh (the OTHER Dark Souls-style game set in historical Japan) where the whole point is to break down your enemy’s defenses and then hit them while they’re staggered. The key difference in Sekiro is that a hit on an enemy…
Devil May Cry 5 Review
March 18th, 2019 Eleven years ago, in an attempt to sate my hype for Ninja Gaiden II, I walked into a GameStop and pre-ordered Devil May Cry 4. A month later I was writing a scathing review that complained about poor combat flow and terrible music, but two years after that I was writing an article for the Badger Herald where I complained about Capcom ruining the Devil May Cry franchise by catering to what they thought Western audiences wanted. So what changed? Devil May Cry, as a series, is one of those franchises that gets better the more you play it, with your first playthrough of any given game acting as little more than a tutorial, with forgiving (though it may not feel like it) enemy attack patterns as you learn new skills and acquire new weapons. As you replay on harder difficulties you’ll slowly start to learn what…
Resident Evil 2 (2019) Review
February 9th, 2019 There are several large gaps in my video game experience, and one of them is the Resident Evil series. I started with Resident Evil 4 and never looked back, relying on spin-off titles like Umbrella Chronicles to keep me in the loop about Resident Evil 0, 1, and 3 without having to suffer through their fixed camera angles and auto aim. The remake of Resident Evil 2 (henceforth referred to as “REmake 2”) provided the perfect opportunity for me to fill in the gap of my Resident Evil knowledge, and fortunately it’s also really good. Liked “Survival”: REmake 2 is probably the closest I’ve gotten to a true survival horror experience, though I haven’t played any of those lovely indie games like Outlast. Ammo is scarce, enemies are incredibly durable, your knives break if you use them too much, and it all comes together to create a…