Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Review
I don’t have a great intro for this one. I love Sekiro, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is trying to be a combination of Sekiro and Nioh, and I think the results are a mixed bag. If you haven’t played Sekiro, or have but don’t remember the specifics of the mechanics, here’s a quick rundown of how Sekiro worked. Unlike other Souls games you didn’t need to use stamina for attacks or dodges, but instead every character had a “poise” that would be damaged by blocking attacks or if their attacks were perfectly parried by pressing block at the moment an attack would hit you. Holding your guard up would gradually reduce poise damage which is great news because if a character’s poise is shattered they’re open to an instant kill attack. Most attacks can be blocked but grapples and sweep attacks cannot, however those can be reliably countered with dodges…
Hi-Fi RUSH Review
And now a reenactment of me learning about Hi-Fi RUSH: “There’s a new action game that was surprise released the other day.”“Oh cool.”“It’s like cel shaded Devil May Cry.”“Oh cool.”“And the combat is rhythm based in time with the game’s music!”“Oh no…” Hi-Fi RUSH is set in a cheerful, light-cyberpunk universe where almost everyone is named after a kind of food because everything needs a theme. Our main character, Chai, comes to an event hosted by the biggest robotics company on Earth, Vandelay Technologies, that promises to give anyone who volunteers cybernetic limbs for a better life. Chai’s surgery doesn’t quite go as expected though, and after a freak accident he wakes up with a magnetic robot arm and his iPod embedded in his chest, which somehow has made the entire world move in sync to the tempo of the songs his iPod plays. This unexpected technological event has branded…
Bayonetta 3 Review
Games like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden are few and far between for good reason. It’s tough to make an engaging combat system that flows well without being one note like the Batman Arkham series, and it’s even tougher to make a game where that combat system doesn’t get boring to use. Then there’s all the other problems like enemy design, difficulty, and the fact that this genre does have its devoted fans but it’s not going to sell as well as something like Uncharted. This is why Platinum Games is one of the last bastions of this kind of game, and why Bayonetta 3 has been anticipated for so long, but unfortunately after playing it I think they should have kept us waiting. As a warning there will be some spoilers without specifics further in the review as I get angrier and compare this game to Ninja Gaiden…
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2022) Multiplayer Review
I have no idea how to start this one so we’re just going to jump right in. Lots of people were complaining about the new Modern Warfare 2‘s multiplayer gameplay being a “sluggish, unresponsive step back” during the beta but unless you’re a tryhard that bunny hops and slides everywhere you won’t notice how they’ve reduced the ability to abuse some of those movement options. The multiplayer still feels like Call of Duty, primarily the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot, but unfortunately the game is marred with severe technical issues and some questionable design choices that at time of writing are severely hampering the game’s opening week. We’re going to talk about the most relevant updates to the gameplay mechanics first and then go into the technical stuff later, as I’m assuming the latter will be fixed in the future. The strangest change is probably the perk system, which seems to…
Marvel Snap Impressions
I’m starting to feel like the card game genre is the new MOBA of video games. A Warcraft-based game pushed the genre into the public eye (Dota for MOBAs, Hearthstone for card games), everyone started piling on and now you’ve got card games by the dozens with only a few standouts. Just like how DC jumped into the MOBA space we now have Marvel entering the card game realm with Marvel Snap, a relatively casual and incredibly mobile-focused card game that has spent the last week unironically ruining my life because I’ve been playing it when I should be doing far more important things. Let me tell you why. There’s a lot of very strange mechanics in Marvel Snap, at times I’d swear almost intentionally so (this is a mobile game after all) so let’s start with the basics and expand outward. Marvel Snap is a mana-based card game like…
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2022) Campaign Review
The reboot of the Modern Warfare franchise in 2019 was a breath of fresh (if ironic) air into Call of Duty and after a few less exciting games from the other primary CoD developers Infinity Ward is back with Modern Warfare 2. The last time we had a Modern Warfare 2 it was a very exciting and bombastic follow up to Call of Duty 4 in 2009, and with the early access to the new game’s campaign we can see at least if the single player of the new MW2 will live up to its predecessor. The Modern Warfare of 2019 had a campaign with some great moments punctuated with some of the difficulties of combat in an urban environment that so many other video games ignore, but it got a little repetitive by overusing those good ideas and ended up just being “okay” in my opinion. There’s only rooms…
Deathloop Review
Have you ever had something that you really wanted to like but couldn’t get into no matter how hard you tried? A book, a game, something that you’ve seen lots of people really enjoy but it just doesn’t click for any number of reasons. On Deathloop‘s release I saw a lot of people saying great things about it, both for its original ideas and the gameplay that its developer Arkane has perfected in Dishonored, but something just didn’t work for me for the longest time, with the game sitting in my Steam library for nine months until I finally was able to buckle down and commit to finishing it. If you don’t know anything about Deathloop it’s a game that presents an interesting question: what if Hitman was a time traveling roguelike where you had to kill every target in the game in one go without dying? To that end…
Neon White Review
I wasn’t sold on Neon White when I first saw it. I’ve got an unreasonably negative kneejerk reaction whenever I see “card games” shoved into another genre, probably triggered by the upcoming Marvel Midnight Suns, so seeing a speedrunning-style shooting game similar to Ghostrunner using playing cards for attacks made me so quizzical that I was ready to condemn it to my Steam ignore list and get back to trying to play Deathloop. But then I looked at the art style a little more and saw all the positive reviews and decided to take a stab at it. Neon White is high-speed first-person platforming game with a similar gameplay philosophy as Ghostrunner where it’s built on going fast from one side of the map to the other and looking cool while doing it. Neon White in particular is highly focused on the speedrunning aspect of the genre and features quick,…
Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters Review
XCOM is a game franchise that has many imitators but very few titles that can actually stand up to it. I’m not sure what’s so hard about breaking into the turn-based strategy/tactics genre, but every few years someone else shows up to try to get a piece of XCOM‘s pie with the same formula of turn-based gunplay, tactical positioning, and base management with limited resources and never quite gets it right. That’s where Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters comes in, a game that is very much like XCOM in almost every respect, except that rather than playing as under-equipped and poorly trained soldiers you are instead playing as immortal space knights that kill demons and their worshipers for breakfast. So there’s a bit of a power dynamic shift here. Disclaimer: All of my comparisons to XCOM in this review will be references to the franchise’s reboots XCOM 1 and 2.…
Crying Suns Review
FTL: Faster Than Light was one of those games like Left 4 Dead that managed to capture a very specific fantasy and it hasn’t truly been replicated by similar games that came after it. In FTL‘s case it had essentially created the perfect Star Trek game with randomized diplomatic situations, boarding parties, power transfers, crew assignments, and many other tiny features that all went perfectly together to create an experience that hasn’t be properly done since. So essentially what I’m saying is that you should go play FTL, but if you’ve already done that to death and want to try something similar you might want to look into Crying Suns, a Kickstarted, Humble Bundle-published game that came out about two and a half years ago. On paper FTL and Crying Suns are very similar, as both start with you picking a ship with limited customization options and heading out into the…