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,…
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…
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…