2020 Game of the Year: Hades
There are a lot of reasons why I don’t review certain games. Generally it’s because I haven’t bought them, and occasionally it’s because I think that everything there is to say about a game has already been said. However, there are the rare games that I don’t review because I have nothing bad to say about them, since I find it very hard to do nothing but heap praise upon a game with nothing to follow it up with beyond a few nitpicks. Sometimes it really does feel like doing a positive review is just listing all of a game’s features rather than critiquing them, and that’s been the problem I’ve had reviewing Hades. This is my third attempt at writing this review, and since this is a game of year review as well I’m going to cheat a little and be a little more loose with how I make…
Ghostrunner Review
November 2nd, 2020 Let’s get one thing out of the way: I am TERRIBLE at platformers. I have no sense of timing and I actively dislike the instant kills that come from the bottomless/spiked pits that inherently come with the genre. And yet, for some reason, I keep playing them. Rather than try to psychoanalyze why let’s just go straight into my review of Ghostrunner, because at least in this instance I can blame it on my cyborg ninja addiction. Hotline Miami was a bloody and sometimes frantic top-down murderfest where you died in one hit but everyone else did too. Mirror’s Edge was a first person parkour game about overthrowing a corrupt government and looking cool while doing it. Put them together and you get Ghostrunner, a frantic, first person parkour murderfest about overthrowing a corrupt government and looking cool while doing it. You die in one hit but…
Death Stranding Review
October 30th, 2020 There was a lot of weird stuff in the Metal Gear Solid franchise. Ghost ravens, bullet telekinesis, a man so angry he wouldn’t die, a woman that could breathe through her skin, the list goes on and on. So you might understand why I didn’t bat an eye in Death Stranding when a man was lifted off the ground and eaten by a giant ghost while a corpse next to me went off like a nuclear bomb. I might have asked some questions if it was another developer, but the strangeness of Hideo Kojima is something that I’ve just learned to roll with, assuming he’ll explain it all later. And explain it he does. After what feels like every “quest” in Death Stranding you’ll be bombarded with emails and interviews that will just fall over themselves trying to explain the weirdness that makes up the world around…
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Impressions
September 1st, 2020 Massive, long form single player RPGs aren’t the most common thing any more, at least when it comes to western games. In the days where everything is trying to be a live service or a “play your way” adventure game there’s a significant lack of games along the lines of Witcher, Dragon Age, and even Skyrim. Fingers crossed for Cyberpunk 2077, but until then there’s a remaster of 2012’s Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning coming out (creatively named “Re-Reckoning“) so I decided to give the original version a shot…and stopped ten hours later, which is why this is an “impressions” piece instead of a full review. Frankly the only thing Kingdoms of Amalur does right is the concept of its plot, so we’ll get that out of the way first and then beat the game to death for the rest of the review. So often video games feel…
XCOM Chimera Squad Impressions
April 27th, 2020 I’ve been wanted to get back into XCOM for a while now, though the time commitment and my distaste for fighting the Chosen has made that more of a challenge than I would like. Fortunately there’s been a surprise XCOM release in the form of Chimera Squad, which provides a slightly different XCOM experience at a budget price (said price being $20 normally or $10 until May 1st, 2020). I’ve only been able to get through ten hours due to reasons that will become clear in this review, but I figured I’d throw together an impressions piece because I’ve had several people ask me how I feel about the new game. Here’s the basic premise: after leading humanity’s triumphant resurgence in XCOM 2, we’ve jumped ahead several years to find Earth in a tenuous state of ceasefire. Aliens and humans living together, mass hysteria. The cornerstone of…
DOOM Eternal Review
March 26th, 2020 Have you ever had that problem where every introduction you write to something sounds like the conclusion to your essay instead? I’ve written three openings for this review and they all sound like I’m reaching a final declaration before the review even starts. Maybe it’s because DOOM Eternal‘s changes from DOOM and my gripes about them could be written on a postcard, or maybe it’s because I’ve never been any good at introductions or conclusions to begin with. Either way, please enjoy this meaningless paragraph as we head into my review of DOOM Eternal. One of the things that DOOM did so well was having a story while rarely letting the story get in your way. It had the Mass Effect Codex for those that wanted to dig deeper and the Bioshock “past event ghosts” to give players minute details about what was going on around them,…
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…