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…
Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree Review
My Elden Ring review was a strange affair where I was bullied into admitting that all of my complaints about the game weren’t genuine problems, so I played devils advocate against myself to the amusement of all. But no more, I say! Elden Ring‘s recent DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, has actual problems and I’m going to talk about those actual problems and I won’t feel bad about it. Probably. Shadow of the Erdtree is relatively unique among From Software’s “Souls” content in that it actually has a pretty straightforward story that’s not only relatively concise from beginning to end but also fills in a lot of lore that was missing from the original game. Miquella, everyone’s favorite missing hostage and noted long-arm-in-an-egg from Mohg’s boss arena, has traveled to the “Land of Shadow” to accomplish something vague (at first) that involves sacrificing parts of himself along the way. Following…
V Rising Review
I had a really hard time knowing if I’d like V Rising from the very beginning. It’s been in early access forever and every time I looked at it the game would be doubling or tripling down on its castle building mechanics. “New carpets,” it would say. “Torches for your pillars,” it would boast. “Support us with this DLC pack that’s nothing but colors of stone for your walls,” the new update would declare. As someone without a creative bone in their body the idea of a game that leaned so heavily on making a castle (or even worse: a castle you can’t even do anything in) seemed like something that would never really gel with me. So I kept it on my wish list for all this time, checking in every so often and not seeing anything to convince me it would be a game that I would end…
Persona 3 Reload Review
Persona games are the hardest for me to review for several reasons. The primary one is that I usually like the games and never enjoy writing reviews for games that I like, but even worse is that most of the people that I’m writing these reviews for ALSO like Persona games. So I’m not going to be influencing anyone’s decisions, not adding anything to the conversation, and not having a great time doing it. But it feels like something I want to do, so we’re going to dive in and talk about another excellent Persona game. For the uninitiated, Persona 3 was the first Persona game that locked in the formula that every other Persona game has followed since: juggling the social circle of a teenager while fighting monsters with your friends during your time off. It’s proven to be a fantastic framework for a game, but since Persona 3…
Game of the Year 2023
If you’ve been around me at all this past year it should be pretty obvious what my game of the year is for 2023. So much so that I almost don’t feel like writing a GOTY piece, much like I’ve skipped out on it over the past two years. However, there were so many great games that came out this year that it feels like a disservice to not write out something acknowledging some of them before I go ahead and write another few paragraphs gushing about you-know-who. This will be a “top five” list, which is in actuality a “top four” list but I thought five sounded better. #5: Something I Didn’t Play There are a few games I wanted to put in this section since every year there’s games that I think look cool but I miss due to console access or just a lack of time. I…
Ghostrunner II Review
The first Ghostrunner pulled me in with its cyborg ninja aesthetic and surprised me with its fast, exacting gameplay that felt very rewarding if you had the reflexes for it. Ghostrunner II is very much the same in that it’s a still a mash-up of Hotline Miami and Mirror’s Edge by combining brutal one-hit-kill combat with intense parkour challenges, but the slight tweaks made to the experience due to its nature as a sequel can sometimes leave a little to be desired. I’ve opened many reviews with a paragraph about video game sequels, but it hasn’t felt quite as meaningful before as it has with Ghostrunner II so here it is again: there are three ways to make a game sequel. The first, and least done due to the risks involved, is to do something radically different from what came before, trusting that your audience will come along for the ride. The…
Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty Review
Cyberpunk 2077 was just an “okay” game at launch. If you took away all the glitches and just looked at it for what it was it really just felt like a bland FPS RPG that invested a great deal of work to create the atmosphere and aesthetic of a cyberpunk dystopia but not much else. While a lot of effort has been put into the game to overcome its technical challenges there wasn’t really much that CDPR could do to fix this fundamental fact about how the core of the game worked… but they’ve tried anyway. About two months ago now they released both the “Cyberpunk 2.0″ patch and the game’s first (and only) DLC to help revamp the game from a gameplay perspective as best they could, and I decided to revisit the game to see if it was any better because of it. A note before we begin:…
Lies of P Review
If you read my impressions piece of the Lies of P demo from earlier this year you’ll know that I had been as pleasantly surprised by it as anyone could be after being told it’s a soulslike based on Pinocchio. I had some concerns from the demo with things like responsiveness and resource generation but overall I thought it was a game with a lot of promise and quickly jumped up to my second most anticipated game of the rest of 2023. I wasn’t able to get to it on release (thanks to Armored Core 6 and Baldur’s Gate 3) but I’ve finally managed to plow through it with all the expectations that a game in Dark Souls’ shadow can generate. And I still can’t decide how well it stuck the landing. The story of Lies of P is if you took faintest dashes of the Pinocchio story (Pinocchio, Geppetto,…
Resident Evil 4: Separate Ways Review
If you haven’t gotten around to playing this year’s remake of Resident Evil 4 (hereafter called REmake 4 to avoid confusion) you’ve been missing out. Fortunately, Capcom has put out some DLC to remind you of the game’s existence, and just before award season too! How thoughtful of them. The DLC covers the Resident Evil 4 bonus campaign Separate Ways, an Ada-focused narrative that tries to bridge some of the gaps in the RE4 story and theoretically sets events in motion for Resident Evil 5. Fun fact for everyone that didn’t play the original: this is actually the second Ada “side story” in Resident Evil 4, with the first being “Assignment Ada” that was included originally on the GameCube release. Everyone basically ignored it after Separate Ways was included on the PS2 and all subsequent releases of RE4 but still, it does exist! Separate Ways has the exact same gameplay…
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon Review
I’ve always liked mechs but I’ve never been able to get into their games. My brain is obsessed with min/maxing to an almost painful degree, so most of the time I just get overwhelmed by opening the mech builder screen in these games and seeing “this generator gives you a +5% energy increase for a -3.5% speed penalty when going around corners on Wednesdays.” That being said, since I am a modern From Software fan now and it’s been a long time since they put out an Armored Core game, I thought I’d try the genre out again. The above is just a disclaimer that I’ve never put much time, if any, into the previous Armored Core titles, so when I attribute long-standing Armored Core traditions to other games it’s entirely due to ignorance rather than forgetfulness. The main thing that stuck with me as I was playing Armored Core…