Aragami Review
Aragami really seems like a game that I’d enjoy, being someone who is, at best, mildly obsessed with ninjas. The concept alone sounds like it’s right up my alley: a ninja stealth game where you can teleport between shadows. What more could you want? I could dance around the punchline here, spin a slow burn about whether or not a five year old game is worth your time, but I’ll help you come to the same realization I did in half the time: Aragami is a mediocre game on a weak engine that plays like someone really enjoyed Mark of the Ninja and Dishonored and tried to mash the two together. If that’s all you needed to know then thanks for visiting, but if you want to find out what I mean then let’s get into it. The game’s title is the name of your main character: a shadow creature…
Back 4 Blood Beta Impressions
I want to like this game. I really do. I want to sit down and write out a piece about a modern return of Left 4 Dead. I want to write a stirring impressions piece that inspires everyone to try out the open beta (which is running for the rest of the day today, 8/15/21, and maybe a little tomorrow) and support a gold standard return to these sorts of multiplayer PvE games. I know people who like this game and part of me wants to shut out everything that feels “off” about Back 4 Blood and just play it with them. But here we are just like we were with Evolve, where I played a beta that was reasonable enough but that I can’t shake the feeling will be dead on arrival. All the context of this review is from the point of view of someone who thinks that…
Tell Me Why Review
Tell Me Why is currently free on Steam until July 1st, so I figured now would be as good of a time as any to review it. Made by the creators of Life Is Strange, Tell Me Why follows a similar gameplay and episodic structure to tackle a new variety of the problems that young people face in the world today. While Life Is Strange was all about interpersonal relationships Tell Me Why is more about family and perception, which is a very interesting topic that it doesn’t necessarily land. Good thing it was free. There will be vague spoilers about player choices (or the lack thereof) in this review. TMW follows the story of a pair of twins, Tyler and Alyson, as they struggle with their tormented past. They lived in the middle of the woods on the edge of a small town in Alaska with their naturalist, possibly…
Resident Evil Village Review
For the sake of clarity you should know that this review is going to seem unfair. Many review sites have already pointed out the multiple similarities between Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil 4, which is inevitably going to lead to unfavorable comparisons when you consider everything that RE4 managed to accomplish. When a game’s only major flaw is that it’s too long it’s hard to improve upon it, and it’s even harder to make numerous callbacks to said game and not get burned in the process. So there will be quite a bit about RE4 in this review, and I can tell you right now that a fair amount of it won’t be in Village‘s favor. But let’s start with the connections to Resident Evil 7. In Village you once again play as the oft-abused pair of hands known as Ethan Winters, who has spent the last three years…
Disco Elysium Review
April 25th, 2021 Every so often there’s a video game that comes out that reminds you about the potential of its particular genre. I won’t give too many examples at the risk of starting a fight, but the last time I played a game like that for (western) RPGs it was Divinity: Original Sin 2 with its many branching paths to complete the same objectives. So many times it feels like RPGs are just checking boxes when it comes to quest design, with a completionist-embracing “do all of these things and then you get to move on” attitude that Original Sin 2 shattered by giving you alternatives to the things you need to do to push the story forward. Disco Elysium is, in many ways, another landmark in RPG game design in the same vein as Original Sin 2, only instead of revamping how the genre approaches quests the game…
Persona 5 Strikers Review
April 24th, 2021 I’ve never cared much for the Dynasty Warriors style of games (sometimes referred to as Musou) from an outside perspective. I plant my flag in the territory of games like Ninja Gaiden and compared to their style of combat the Musou series always looked to be more of a power fantasy than anything that takes any sort of relevant skill. The gameplay loop of “Oh let me just press the same button four times before doing one of two super moves that kills fifty guys. Aren’t I awesome?” just didn’t appeal to me, and so I was ridiculously skeptical of the announcement of Persona 5 Strikers. My outside bias against the Musou genre aside it seemed like an unprompted jump between types of games that couldn’t be more different, replacing turn-based RPG combat with button mashing against hordes of enemies, but as I quickly discovered the developers…
Cyberpunk 2077 Review
January 2nd, 2020 If you’ve read or seen anything about Cyberpunk 2077 in the last two weeks then you already know the game is a bit of a mess on the technical level. Socially it hasn’t been doing great either with corrupted saves, seizure-inducing story beats, and rumors of class action lawsuits, but very little of the press that’s flooding the airwaves is bothering to address the main question: how is the actual game? And for the record this question really only applies to the versions of 2077 that are not on the Playstation 4 or Xbox One, since those ports are messes beyond repair (at time of writing). The short answer is that Cyberpunk 2077 is fine, which in itself is probably a disappointment considering how long it’s been in development. Strip away all the technical issues, bad press, and overblown hype and it’s just a passable game that…
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…