Marvel Snap Impressions
I’m starting to feel like the card game genre is the new MOBA of video games. A Warcraft-based game pushed the genre into the public eye (Dota for MOBAs, Hearthstone for card games), everyone started piling on and now you’ve got card games by the dozens with only a few standouts. Just like how DC jumped into the MOBA space we now have Marvel entering the card game realm with Marvel Snap, a relatively casual and incredibly mobile-focused card game that has spent the last week unironically ruining my life because I’ve been playing it when I should be doing far more important things. Let me tell you why. There’s a lot of very strange mechanics in Marvel Snap, at times I’d swear almost intentionally so (this is a mobile game after all) so let’s start with the basics and expand outward. Marvel Snap is a mana-based card game like…
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2022) Campaign Review
The reboot of the Modern Warfare franchise in 2019 was a breath of fresh (if ironic) air into Call of Duty and after a few less exciting games from the other primary CoD developers Infinity Ward is back with Modern Warfare 2. The last time we had a Modern Warfare 2 it was a very exciting and bombastic follow up to Call of Duty 4 in 2009, and with the early access to the new game’s campaign we can see at least if the single player of the new MW2 will live up to its predecessor. The Modern Warfare of 2019 had a campaign with some great moments punctuated with some of the difficulties of combat in an urban environment that so many other video games ignore, but it got a little repetitive by overusing those good ideas and ended up just being “okay” in my opinion. There’s only rooms…
Deathloop Review
Have you ever had something that you really wanted to like but couldn’t get into no matter how hard you tried? A book, a game, something that you’ve seen lots of people really enjoy but it just doesn’t click for any number of reasons. On Deathloop‘s release I saw a lot of people saying great things about it, both for its original ideas and the gameplay that its developer Arkane has perfected in Dishonored, but something just didn’t work for me for the longest time, with the game sitting in my Steam library for nine months until I finally was able to buckle down and commit to finishing it. If you don’t know anything about Deathloop it’s a game that presents an interesting question: what if Hitman was a time traveling roguelike where you had to kill every target in the game in one go without dying? To that end…
Neon White Review
I wasn’t sold on Neon White when I first saw it. I’ve got an unreasonably negative kneejerk reaction whenever I see “card games” shoved into another genre, probably triggered by the upcoming Marvel Midnight Suns, so seeing a speedrunning-style shooting game similar to Ghostrunner using playing cards for attacks made me so quizzical that I was ready to condemn it to my Steam ignore list and get back to trying to play Deathloop. But then I looked at the art style a little more and saw all the positive reviews and decided to take a stab at it. Neon White is high-speed first-person platforming game with a similar gameplay philosophy as Ghostrunner where it’s built on going fast from one side of the map to the other and looking cool while doing it. Neon White in particular is highly focused on the speedrunning aspect of the genre and features quick,…
Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters Review
XCOM is a game franchise that has many imitators but very few titles that can actually stand up to it. I’m not sure what’s so hard about breaking into the turn-based strategy/tactics genre, but every few years someone else shows up to try to get a piece of XCOM‘s pie with the same formula of turn-based gunplay, tactical positioning, and base management with limited resources and never quite gets it right. That’s where Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters comes in, a game that is very much like XCOM in almost every respect, except that rather than playing as under-equipped and poorly trained soldiers you are instead playing as immortal space knights that kill demons and their worshipers for breakfast. So there’s a bit of a power dynamic shift here. Disclaimer: All of my comparisons to XCOM in this review will be references to the franchise’s reboots XCOM 1 and 2.…
Crying Suns Review
FTL: Faster Than Light was one of those games like Left 4 Dead that managed to capture a very specific fantasy and it hasn’t truly been replicated by similar games that came after it. In FTL‘s case it had essentially created the perfect Star Trek game with randomized diplomatic situations, boarding parties, power transfers, crew assignments, and many other tiny features that all went perfectly together to create an experience that hasn’t be properly done since. So essentially what I’m saying is that you should go play FTL, but if you’ve already done that to death and want to try something similar you might want to look into Crying Suns, a Kickstarted, Humble Bundle-published game that came out about two and a half years ago. On paper FTL and Crying Suns are very similar, as both start with you picking a ship with limited customization options and heading out into the…
A Devil’s Advocate Review of Elden Ring
It was recently brought to my attention by both myself and others that all of my complaints about Elden Ring are irrelevant nitpicks. Whether it’s because it’s a problem that doesn’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things or it’s something that most players won’t ever experience, I have already workshopped a lot of my problems with Elden Ring among other players and they’ve almost all been dismissive about my concerns. So, as always when I run into a brick wall while writing a review, I’m going to take a different approach with this one and play devil’s advocate where I’ll point out most (reasonable) problems with the game and the counter arguments against why they aren’t a problem. This way I can complain as much as I want while also admitting that most of my problems have no merit! Everyone wins. Problem: Repetitive bosses/dungeons and the disappointing rewards…
Halo Infinite Review
A small part of me has never believed in Halo since Bungie left. I skipped Halo 4 upon release, I didn’t have a console that played Halo 5, and a playthrough of 4 after the Master Chief Collection‘s release on PC hasn’t convinced me that I made the wrong choice. Now we have Halo Infinite, which takes Halo‘s already relatively loose gameplay framework and spreads it across an entire map for the players to engage with all the enemies, vehicles, and weapons as they see fit in between regular levels. I’ll admit I was extremely quizzical about this change from the onset, especially after seeing the grappling hook when it was revealed (I believe I said something similar to “Sure, you may as well make Halo into Titanfall.”) so I was very interested to see if they stuck the landing. There’s been so much said about Halo Infinite‘s multiplayer already…
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…