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…
Baldur’s Gate 3 Review
Well here we are after five weeks and 127 hours: Baldur’s Gate 3. I don’t have an intro other than a promise there won’t be any real spoilers and I will be occasionally and perhaps unfairly picking on other developers like Bioware and Bethesda in here. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a CRPG which, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, is a turn-based RPG generally viewed from an isometric or top-down perspective, though if you’re using a controller in Baldur’s Gate 3 you’ll have a more Bioware-style third person camera. You play as one of several preset characters or a custom one (with the preset characters coming along as party members) in the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons & Dragons. Regardless of your character choices you’ll end up captured by a marauding mind flayer (squid-faced psionic monsters) airship and infected with a parasite that threatens to turn you into a mind…
Secret Invasion: a Furious Failure
It’s no secret that Marvel’s Disney+ shows haven’t been hitting the mark. You could probably draw the whole of the MCU’s Phase 4 shows like a playground slide, with WandaVision and Loki at the top followed by a long descent down to the bottom, with maybe a few small bumps along the way for Ms Marvel. Phase 4 went so poorly that it feels like Disney just shuffled it along and tried to move us straight into Phase 5, foregoing the traditional “Avengers level threat” that capped off every other Phase and just taking us straight into a new year… with Ant-man 3 which no one liked either. Secret Invasion is the first show of Phase 5 and unfortunately it seems this change of Phases hasn’t shaken off the Phase 4 cobwebs, because Secret Invasion deserves to be right at the end of the slide. What makes a piece of…
Trepang2 Review
If you ask someone about the F.E.A.R. franchise they’d probably just remember it as “that horror shooter on the Xbox 360,” and completely ignore the fact that it was actually a solid action shooter in its own right that just happened to have a creepy little girl in it. Fans of F.E.A.R. are quick to point this out when you don’t mention that detail, and it’s a little strange that few other games have tried to capture the same feeling of being a super soldier that moves so fast they can slow down time. Fortunately we now have Trepang2, an indie-developed love letter to F.E.A.R. and all that it entailed that recently came out on PC and will soon be on consoles as well. Let’s get something out of the way right away: the gameplay is why you’re going to want to pick up Trepang2. If you hated the gameplay…
Lies of P Demo Impressions
I don’t tend to do impressions pieces about demos for games that I’ll probably play at some point, as I learned a long time ago that two pieces about the same game just led to repeating myself. I’m making an exception here with the Lies of P demo because it’s a game I’ve heard very little about until now and think more people should be aware of it before it comes out in the fall. Lies of P asks a question we’re all going to be asking over the next few decades: has fair use gone too far? Horror movies about Winnie the Pooh might have most recently fueled this question but now we have Lies of P giving us a Dark Souls-style game starring Pinocchio, which as far as strange mash-ups go is probably one of the most surreal I can imagine. To the game’s credit the world they’ve…
Darkest Dungeon II Impressions
The first Darkest Dungeon was a game I wanted to love with its moody aesthetic, terrific art, and amazing narration, but I couldn’t get over the game’s primary mentality of your characters being expendable. I’ve cut my teeth on perma-death games like Fire Emblem and X-COM where the deaths of your soldiers actually mattered, so a game where you were encouraged to throw your soldiers to their deaths just to get six more gold pieces didn’t sit right to me, and combined with the repetitive nature of the game I was barely able to finish it. Darkest Dungeon II finally left early access this month and it lured me in with the same content as before but with a completely revamped game system that actually emphasizes the importance of your characters, so here we are with an impressions piece and a game I might actually put effort into finishing this…
Resident Evil 4 (2023) Review
Resident Evil 4 is one of the best, most influential games of all time and I’ve wanted to do a review of it ever since I started writing reviews. The opportunity never really arose, as I never really felt like there was a “right time” to spill my guts about the inspiration for the entire third person genre post-2005 and the game that single handedly saved the Resident Evil franchise. But now we have the remake of Resident Evil 4 (here after referred to as REmake 4 for the sake of clarity) so I’m going to kill two birds with one stone and talk about both games at once! This review will have two parts, a quick no-spoilers section for people that have never played the first Resident Evil 4 and then a relatively spoilery section in terms of game events and changes compared between the two games for those…
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…