Doom: The Dark Ages Review
The Doom reboot in 2016 was not the most complicated game in the world but it was everything it needed to be. A straightforward gameplay loop and a story that matters as little to the player as it does to the protagonist is basically all you can ask for from Doom, where it’s all about killing demons as priorities one, two, three, four and five. Doom Eternal did what all overly-ambitious sequels do and muddied the waters with more emphasis on the story and a ridiculous amount of options in combat. These options led many players to either suffer from choice paralysis or just hit every button on their keyboard at once, and by the end felt more like you were answering multiple-choice questions rather than playing a video game. Now we have Doom: The Dark Ages, which has decided to go the “third game prequel” route while burdened by…
Dispatch Review
Telltale Games burst into the public’s eye in 2012 with The Walking Dead as a point-and-click adventure game driven by a grim “choices matter” narrative. Wikipedia calls this genre “episodic graphic adventure” but I’m the one writing here so we’re sticking with “point-and-click”. After The Walking Dead‘s success Telltale immediately bit off far more than they could chew by getting as many licensing deals as they could get their hands on and just six years later had to be shut down. Telltale’s death effectively killed this style of game as well but the community interest lingered and now the former developers have returned in two separate companies: LCG Entertainment (dba Telltale Games) and AdHoc Studio. The “return” of the genre was the new Telltale’s launch title The Expanse: A Telltale Series, which was good in its own right but didn’t capture the hearts and minds the way AdHoc Studio’s Dispatch…
Game of the Year 2025 – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
My games of the year awards have a history of being plagued with ninjas. Sekiro, Ninja Gaiden, Mark of the Ninja, and Blades of the Shogun have all been game of the year winners for me, so it’s especially funny to me that in the “year of the ninja” with three surprisingly good ninja video games practically all in a row (Ninja Gaiden Ragebound, Shinobi Art of Vengeance, and Ninja Gaiden 4) that I’m going with close to the exact opposite of a ninja game for game of the year: a turn-based French RPG. If you’ve paid attention to any game news over the past seven months you’ve probably heard of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, as it has had near universal acclaim and has at time of writing the most ever nominations for the Video Game Awards. Rather than bucking trends I’m here to say that yes, Expedition 33 is…
Hades 2 Review
At this point I’ve written so many reviews that I’m sure I’ve given a generic introduction about each game genre. For a refresher on roguelikes: I think having to restart the game every time you die is an overly harsh punishment, I find replaying the same thirty minutes to three hours of a game over and over again boring, and I dislike how most of these games don’t have a story beyond the loosest background excuse for why your character is here. Despite these feelings there are a few roguelikes that I’ve truly enjoyed and the first Hades is near the top of that list thanks to its heavy focus on characters, story, and a feeling of progression even when replaying the same game fifty times. The best I could hope for with Hades II is that it would be a similar experience. The nicest and most important thing to…
Ninja Gaiden 4 Review
After the moderate disaster that was 2012’s Ninja Gaiden 3 I’d basically given up seeing the number four next to the words “Ninja Gaiden,” but here we are. Platinum Games brought my dreams back from the brink with Metal Gear Rising and they’ve done it again with Ninja Gaiden 4. Given the state Platinum Games has been in recently it’s even more of a surprise that it’s actually good! How good? Well I can’t wait to tell you. The initial thing you’ll notice from playing Ninja Gaiden 4 is that it FEELS like a Ninja Gaiden game, at least once you go into the control settings and switch left trigger to block as god intended. This might not sound like an accomplishment (and for many reviewers complaining about “old school design philosophies” it isn’t) but after a decade away and in the hands of a different studio it wasn’t always a guarantee. It’s still as fast and hard as well,…
Let’s Talk About Silksong
At some point in the late 2000s I made playing hard games part of my identity. Reading articles about the reboot of Ninja Gaiden on the original Xbox and how so many people couldn’t even get past the first boss just grabbed my imagination with the thought of “but what if I could?” And so I did, and I kept doing it through multiple Ninja Gaidens, Devil May Crys, Bayonettas, and all sorts of flavors of Dark Souls. As such I’m not really the most unbiased when it comes to talking about hard games, and on top of that everyone has talked TO DEATH about Silksong already and how unfairly hard it is. But I just finished it, got the true ending, and beat all but three bosses (still counted as 100% completion, don’t ask me why) so I want to talk about it too! Hollow Knight wasn’t a game that I…
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound Review
It’s been eleven years since we got a new Ninja Gaiden, thirteen since we had one worth mentioning in polite company, and seventeen since there was a new one anyone would call any good. Now we’re getting two in the same year and Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is first, featuring Ninja Gaiden‘s return to its 2D roots; though not by Tecmo or Team Ninja but instead by The Game Kitchen of Blasphemous fame. With an indie developer and a format the franchise hasn’t been in since 1992, it’s a formula to be a colossal failure or a massive success, with little room in between. If you’ve played or seen the old NES-era Ninja Gaiden games you’ll have a pretty good idea what to expect from Ragebound: a 2D mix of one-hit kill combat (enemies mostly die in one hit, you have a health bar) and platforming that usually ends in a boss fight. However, unlike the NES Ninja Gaiden, Ragebound isn’t what I…
Frostpunk 2 Review
Thirty years have passed since the end of the first Frostpunk and the Captain is dead. In his waning years the city of New London has slowly slipped from a stalwart bastion of humanity to an overpopulated frozen tomb on the brink of collapse, and it’s up to our new player character, the Steward, to fix it. Welcome to Frostpunk 2, the city must not fall. If someone had to describe the difference between Frostpunk and Frostpunk 2 in one word, that word would be “scale.” Gone are the days in the world of Frostpunk where you meticulously place every individual building, build every road, and worry about whether homes or hospitals should be closer to the generator to reduce their chances of freezing to death. Instead expanding the city means building whole districts that come with their own steam hubs, meaning you are building dozens of buildings at once with…
Warhammer 40k Space Marine II Review
This review is going to have spoilers, and I’m sorry about that. Sorry because I have a lot I want to say about Space Marine II that can’t be said without spoiling things from about 40% of the way into the game. Sorry that the definition of a spoiler is so subjective that I don’t know if “things shown in a few trailers” count as spoilers any more. And sorry that a spoiler warning is the introduction to this review that I went with because I couldn’t think of anything better. But trust me, this was the best one. Space Marine II‘s campaign is the least interesting part about it, so we’ll talk about the story first. You play as Titus again, the returning main character from the first Space Marine back from his long penance of being accused of heresy and ready to field all new accusations about why…
Tactical Breach Wizards Review
What ever happened to games that told you exactly what the game was about in the title? What even is a “Mass Effect” or an “Elden Ring”? I open Halo and it’s not about angels but about some dude in green armor fighting aliens. If you’re the sort of person that needs your games spelled out you’re in luck with Suspicious Development’s latest game: Tactical Breach Wizards. Like it says on the tin, Tactical Breach Wizards is about magical characters engaging in special forces/SWAT style breach and clear scenarios with a military backdrop, and is certainly a lot more on the nose than whatever their game Gunpoint was about. If the concept alone hasn’t sold you I don’t know if I can help you, but I can certainly try. Tactical Breach Wizards is a turn-based affair that might remind you of Into the Breach, if I wasn’t the only person I…