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…
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…