Video games that are considered moving art are rare and don’t happen as often as they used to. Games like Shadow of the Colossus, Okami, Journey, Monument Valley, Echochrome, and various games from large to small budgets would be among that crowd. Lost in Random takes visual and character design inspiration from the likes of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Alice: Madness Returns, and Psychonauts. Now, I don’t know if those are exact inspirations, but it sure does feel like it. I feel like I’m playing a Tim Burton cartoon.
You play as a girl named Even. The world-building in Lost in Random is very well done. By the end of the game, I completely understood this world and the horrible things people have to go through. There is an evil queen who rules a black die. When she rolls a die, it determines where a child gets sent. There are six realms in the world of random. You are, of course, starting out at the bottom and have to work your way up to Sixtopia, where the evil queen resides. Children are used for something, and the queen also takes your sister Odd back to Sixtopia with her. The people of Random used to have their own dice, and the evil queen didn’t like this, so she took them all away, and only she can decide anyone’s fate.
Each realm is very well done. They all look different, and each realm plays an important role in serving the queen. One realm makes the cards, one realm offers the garbage to create the evil robots, and so on. As you climb through the realms, you meet people and can do side quests, which, surprisingly, aren’t that annoying. You mostly finish them all just by completing the main quests in each area, and I rarely felt any made me go out of my way. Exploring is one of two major parts of the game, and it’s quite enjoyable; in fact, I enjoyed it more than the combat, which there is more of. I loved seeing the beautifully crafted areas, talking to the crazy NPCs, and learning how each realm is dealing with everyday life. This kind of detail isn’t put into games as much these days unless they’re strict RPGs.
As you explore the realms, you can shoot down pots to earn coins to buy cards. Cards are used in combat, but it’s not like Hearthstone or anything like that. This is real-time combat with cards that give you what you need in the battle. You can carry a deck of 15 cards, and there are around 30 or so in the game in total. You can usually carry 2–3 of each one in your inventory. The deck is varied and broken down into categories. Weapons, traps, hazards, assists, and so on. The problem is that because the combat is in real-time, it can drag on and take a while to get any battles over with. You start out with just you and your death. You only get to roll a one at the beginning, and as you climb realms, you get more sides. This is an issue because until you get at least four sides, you can’t roll very high. You must run around the arena, shooting crystals off of enemies, to build up your hand. I find this whole process tedious, which really dampens the combat a lot and nearly kills the fun. Once you have gathered enough crystals, you can roll your die, and that determines the spending points you get. Each card has a number from 0 to 3. The strategy is picking the right cards for the situation and making sure you have a varied deck. You don’t want to be caught without a melee weapon or health, for example.
Once you play your hand, you have to shoot crystals all over again or “blink” through enemy attacks. An important card is Blink Attack, which damages enemies as you dodge because, without a melee card, you’re weaponless. This also drags out combat, as I wish the slingshot would automatically do some damage. You’re stuck just running around shooting crystals and hoping a hazard or weapon card comes up so you can attack and do some damage. This also makes for cheap deaths, especially in the board game areas where there are no checkpoints. Board games have various rules in which a game piece is moved around, and your roll determines the moves. There are hazards, enemies, traps, and obstacles to overcome, and I absolutely hated these. They dragged out the already dragged-out combat, and if you died towards the end, it was another 20 minutes to fight your way back to the end.
As you can see, the combat has some great ideas, like real-time combat mixed with card battling, but getting to that sweet spot is a chore. There is also so much combat in this game. Once you left a town, you just went into one arena after another, and it felt like it would never end. The only reprieve in combat was the boss’s fights as they changed things up. The same five enemies repeat throughout the entire game, and then, after a while, it just becomes a game of survival rather than strategy. You already know how to kill these enemies after the 50th time, so the strategy is gone early in the game. I wound up just equipping the cards that did the most damage, dropped my spending requirements down, gave me more spending points, and required fewer crystals to get to the cards. I stuck with melee weapons, bombs, healing, blink attacks, and poison, and that was about it. Most other cards end up becoming useless as the game gets harder.
Overall, the game also overstays its welcome. The combat isn’t interesting enough to last 10 hours. As you battle your way through six worlds, each with multiple bosses, quests, side quests, and cards to buy, the game grows tiresome towards the end. I just wanted to explore the beautiful worlds and enjoy the scripted events towards the halfway point. Every time another board game came up or another arena, I groaned. That’s not a good thing. I liked the mix of combat types, but getting to that point with the crystal shooting is just such a chore and slows the whole game down. What’s here, though, is a wonderful story, great characters, fantastic voice acting, and a beautiful world to explore.
Undertale took the gaming industry by storm. Its Earthbound-inspired humor, innovative combat system, and fun characters drew huge crowds and garnered great sales. The 16-bit RPG was short in length but large in spirit. It’s hard to make you really like a game and remember it in less than five hours, but Toby Fox managed to do it.
You play as a human who wakes up in an underground world run by demons. These demons need one more human soul to break the barrier between our world and theirs. It’s a simple story, but it’s the characters you meet along the way that make up for the overall lack of scope of the game. Sadly, there’s no deep lore or real backstories for any characters, but the here and now is well done, and the dialog is sharp, witty, and fun. The game mocks standard JRPGs and Zelda games all the way through. The beginning tutorial dungeon doesn’t wait to get around to it. Pushing boulders onto blocks just to have one that’s sentient makes the task harder for you. A lot of different puzzle-solving elements are not found anywhere else in the game, but puzzles do exist and can be quite challenging.
The combat system is the most unique aspect of Undertale. You can attack, but the entire system is mini-game-focused. There is a meter on-screen, and you need to press the attack button when it’s in the center. Different weapons move this bar faster or have multiple hits. The enemy attacks are all skill-based. It’s essentially your own fault if you die. The center of the screen shows a white box, and your heart is the object that you need to move around to essentially dodge various bullet-hell-style mini-games. Spirling projectiles, daggers, flames—you name it. There are several dozen different attacks, and each enemy and boss is unique in their own way. The game’s other system is its moral system, and you can be a pacifist and not kill a single enemy thanks to the Act command. You can try to figure out how to weaken the enemy through charm or talking and spare it via the Mercy command. If the enemy’s name is yellow, you can automatically spare it. This is an interesting concept and leads to two different endings based on whether you’re a pacifist or not. If you choose that route, you don’t get any XP to level and just get gold, which can be used to buy better armor and weapons.
There are a few towns you can visit to shop, but a funny tidbit is that you can’t sell anything in the game, and the shop owners comment that they don’t want your junk. There is one town you can sell at, however, so make sure you save all your old items to score big towards the end of the game. There are also a few side quests you can complete, but these are cryptic and require holding on to certain items throughout the game. The tip here is to save everything in your box near the save points. Don’t drop anything. When you’re not fighting, you can solve puzzles, as stated earlier, and these range from mini-games to various switch-based puzzles. Backtracking is thankfully minimal, unless you want a certain item at a shop that you couldn’t afford previously.
The sheer variety of the gameplay is astounding. Not a single battle is the same, and not any boss battle plays out the same. Sometimes you have to fight, and sometimes having a specific item makes the fight easier or ends it instantly. Levels aren’t labyrinthine and difficult to navigate, and random battles are minimal as leveling up isn’t quite necessary. At the end of the game, I was level 12 and had the most powerful armor and weapon. Due to the variety and constant changes in the way the game is played, it never gets dull or boring. I played through the entire game in one sitting because I wanted to see the ending, and the game was just so fun and interesting. I can’t remember the last time I sat through an RPG like this and was this hooked.
The visuals are incredibly charming. They are clearly inspired by Earthbound, and each character has a whacky 90s/16-bit style to them that I adore. The soundtrack is also amazing, and I listen to it often outside of the game. Toby Fox did an amazing job with this game, and it’s something you only get once in a lifetime. There hasn’t been this unique Western JRPG 16-bit clone that I can remember. Undertale is the perfect RPG. No grinding, fun characters, great writing, charming visuals, fantastic music, and constantly changing gameplay with a unique battle system that has never been done before If I were to pick something to gripe about, it would be the cryptic nature of the items you need to find or hold on to, as there are no hints as to whether you need said item at all. You just end up with a character asking for something or maybe accidentally using an item during a boss fight and having it do something.
Adventure games that both have shock value and a good story are rare and hard to come by; sadly, Martha is Dead is not one of those. You would mistakenly think this is some sort of horror game with monsters and demons, but it’s barely even that. This is a ghost story, a story about battling mental illness, and a story about surviving WWII in Axis Italy. You play Guilia, who is Martha’s twin sister. This is a detective game more than anything, with plot twists and an interesting vintage camera system.
The game starts out simple enough. Introducing controls, the plot, character building, and the whole nine yards that adventure games typically put you through. Martha’s best feature is the camera system. While you can take photos anywhere (I don’t know why you would), you need them for specific plot points. Guilia is trying to talk to the White Lady of the Lake and find out why her sister died. This is kind of the first half of the story, as it jumps around so much. The game is very plodding, slow, and constantly leads you on for little payoff. Taking photos for objectives is simple enough. Just get the focus and distance right, and snap the photo. You then get to develop the photo, but instead of taking you through the entire complicated process, the game explains to you what that is and says it cuts 90% out for better gameplay. Why? You just focus and position the negative for exposure and then develop it in liquid, but the point at which you stop it is the same for every photo. A pretty lame “mini-game,” if you ask me, with tons of lost potential.
With the camera feature out of the way, there are other small gameplay things you do, such as a morse code mini-game, which I actually enjoyed. I had to look up a morse code chart online and decipher it myself. That was actually well done and made me think, but that’s the only part that did. 75% of the game is spent in Guilia’s house or the wood’s winding paths. There are a few scenes where you control a motorboat, but it’s just to get to the other side of the lake. You are mostly wandering around at a slow pace, going from point A to point B, and interacting with objects. Go check out the graveyard, go back to the house and develop the photo, go back to the lake and find an underground bunker, go back to the house, and put up a flag. The constant backtracking is tiring and clearly used for filler.
Then the last hour of the game is zero gameplay. It consists of long puppet shows recapping the entire story, like you already didn’t know what happened. The story thinks it’s more complicated than it is. Honestly, the puppet shows are cool-looking, but they didn’t advance the story. The story here gets recapped numerous times in various forms, which is really annoying and makes the player feel dumb. After the puppet show stuff, you just walk around interesting scenes with narration, and that’s it. The best parts of the game are the gory death scenes, which are pretty nutty. They would make Mortal Kombat fans blush. But in total, this is maybe five minutes of the entire game. There’s a bike you can ride, but the control is terrible, and it’s only used to ride around the house and surrounding path, so what’s the point with that?
Then there are the visuals. Yes, the game looks damn good. Crazy detailed textures, amazing lighting effects, and models—and it just looks like a AAA title—but at what cost? The game runs horribly on even my RTX 2080 that’s overclocked. There is ray tracing in the game, but I couldn’t tell the difference between that and ultra-graphics settings. I feel this was put in more for next-gen consoles for a subtle effect. The game has constant stutters, frame drops, weird frame rates with ray tracing on, and even DLSS set to ultra-performance. At 3440×1440, I had scenes that ran at above 60FPS with ray tracing on, and then I would turn around and the frames would drop by over half. Without DLSS? Forget it. The game would drop into single digits one second later, and then inside the house it would be 90FPS. Super terrible optimization all around here, and even with DLSS set to ultra-performance without ray tracing, I still saw dips under 60FPS. Totally unacceptable. DLSS shouldn’t be used as a crutch.
Overall, Martha is Dead mostly relies on shock value for the few scenes that have it. It’s neither a horror game nor a puzzle game. It’s just an adventure game with various story elements tossed together, boring backtracking, and little gameplay to keep you interested. The photo mode is ambitious but purposefully handicapped when it could have been as robust as real-life photography back in WWII. It’s a missed opportunity. The game spoils itself constantly with frequent story recaps, and in the end, there’s a final plot twist. The story runs its course about two-thirds of the way through, and you’re left with a giant recap scene with no crazy finale that most adventure games have.
I had actually never heard of this game before seeing the remastered release make some noise. It’s an arcade game from the mid-90s that’s basically frisbee with tennis rules. You pick your character based on their speed and power and toss a disc around a court. It sounds way too simple at first and looks simple at first glance, but the controls have a steep learning curve due to the speed of the game.
Don’t expect a story or even a back story for the characters here. This is pure arcade action, and it’s all about the sport. The game has an 80s aesthetic of purples, blues, pinks, and oranges. It looks really good, and the characters look nice too. There’s a surprising amount of detailed animation here as well, especially for a top-down sports game. The first thing you should do is read the tutorial. It shows animations to help you understand the text, and at first, it seems simple. You can dive for the disc, toss it back, do a curve toss, and do a lob. Simple enough. It gets more complicated as you add power for each move. You need to stand still and press up or down on the control stick plus the respective move button. There’s strategy involved in this, but mostly for other players.
That’s the downside here. The AI is downright cheap, and I almost felt as if I scored out of pure luck. There’s a difficulty setting, of course, but it just feels like you’re playing against an AI, and there’s no way around that. There’s online play, which is awesome, but lots of practice against the computer is recommended to get better. You should pick a character and stick with them at first. Faster characters don’t need to dive as much as they can dart around the court, but the slow players rely on diving quite a bit, but they have more power and can toss the disc faster and harder.
There are mini-games thrown in that can help you master the controls and your play style, but the best practice overall is with someone else. This is truly a two-player competitive sports title through and through. There’s also nothing more to this game, so it’s great for pick-up and plays and not much else. About 30 minutes per session is all I could stomach before I felt like I was either beating my head into a wall or just couldn’t tolerate the same thing. There’s only one court, and the visuals, while looking fine here, are dated and look blurry, but the control is responsive and there are no audio issues.
Overall, if you hate or don’t want anything to do with 90s arcade games, then stay away. There won’t be anything here to interest you. Being an arcade port or remaster, there’s not much the developers could have added without breaking the core game. It’s fast-paced, fun, and a blast with another person, but the single-player AI feels cheap and calculating, making the game not as fun. At least there are mini-games to help hone your skills.
Well, I finally pulled the trigger and bought a system I thought there was no point to. I was on vacation in Oregon when the local Target finally had some in stock, and I said, “What the hell? It can’t be that bad.”The box itself is more vertical and more compact than the original models, which I found strange. Smarter packaging techniques, I guess. Once I pulled the tablet itself out of the system, it looked bigger, but I wasn’t sure. The bezels were nearly nonexistent, and the bottom and top edges were smooth and round. Overall, the tablet itself felt the same, maybe just a bit heavier.
The white Joycons were beautiful. It’s a brand new color we haven’t seen yet, and it makes the Switch look very smart and less like a child’s tablet. Those weren’t any different, but the straps looked different. They have the same white and black straps that the Skyward Sword Joycons had. I guess this is the new standard now. The dock was probably the biggest physical difference. While it’s white, looks beautiful, and adds to the smart, higher-end electronic look of the OLED, the back is different. There’s a quarter circle cut out for cables, and the back flap isn’t hinged. It just comes off, which is kind of annoying. However, there’s no USB A port back there, but a LAN port now!
Other than these noticeable differences at first glance, the HDMI cable, charger, and grip are all the exact same.
The Differences
When I first powered on the Switch, the difference in screen quality was noticeable, even with just the Nintendo logo flashing. The colors are brighter, sharper, and more vibrant, and somehow the screen just has a smoother feeling to it. It almost seems like it has a higher refresh rate, but I know it doesn’t have one. It just felt that way. The usual setup process was the same as any switch, but I did notice the internal memory has been doubled to 64GB, which is great for anyone just starting out and doesn’t have a massive library. You won’t need an SD card for a while, at least.
The OLED feels heavier in the hand, and it is slightly bigger. The screen ate up the large LCD bezels of the original models and then expanded out about 0.1mm, so the screen size expanded a whopping 0.8″ and it shows. The bezel-less design is so clean and sleek that I can’t go back to the original model or even to the Lite. Games look amazing in motion on this thing, and then there’s the controversy about the Vibrant mode exclusive to the OLED model. The Vibrant mode pushes the saturation a bit and doesn’t look good on some games, and you can really see it on the home screen, but it works well in games that are full of color or are very dark. Flashes of color pop in dark areas, and it just looks so good. I didn’t realize the upgrade would be this noticeable, but it’s stark if you hold any other Switch model up in comparison. The colors, even in the standard contrast mode, make the other models look dull and less colorful in comparison.
With a huge 7″ screen, a sizeable upgrade is nothing to scoff at. The next best thing to hold up that giant screen and the heavier Switch is the kickstand. This is probably the second biggest change, as the stand goes along the entire back of the switch and is basically a metal plate that folds out almost flat. You get steeper and shallower tilting angles this way, and it no longer basically stands straight up. This is great if you’re sitting higher or standing and can lay the switch flatter. With the metal design, it no longer constantly pops off and is leaning on one side of the switch. The MicroSD slot is also just underneath here and is easy to access. This should have been on the original model, but we won’t go there.
The OLED’s 4310mAh battery is exactly the same as the older model, but it lasts a bit longer thanks to the OLED’s better power management, but it also depends on the game. Brighter and more colorful games will drain the battery faster than darker ones. Nintendo claims a wide range of 4 hours to 9 hours and 5.5 hours playing Breathe of the Wild. On average, you will get around 5 hours of life for most 3D Switch games, and more for 2D games. One thing I see anyone failing to mention is the improved top buttons. The power button is now oval instead of round and less inlaid, and the volume rocker is thinner and sticks out a bit more. All these buttons have more of a subtle, sharper click and aren’t as mushy. However, the game card door no longer has a notch for your finger and instead has a small gap for a fingernail and is harder to open. It’s also rectangular instead of a rounded door.
Lastly, I want to mention the speakers. They have improved quite a bit, are the third-best upgrade for the Switch, and add another plus to the edge towards a purchase. I didn’t know this going in, but the speakers are larger (or at least more exposed) and are located on the bottom of the system instead of the back. The speaker’s grilles are right where the kickstand opens and go right along to just under the screen. The sound is louder, clearer, and overall more of what I expect from the fantastic sound quality of Nintendo’s 3DS lineup. The 3DS has fantastic handheld speakers and has always been hard to beat. When it comes to your old Switch cases, this will fit, as it’s only 0.1mm longer than the standard Switch, and it fits for me even in a tight case. I also want to mention that the white OLED just seems like an added bonus for the cost, and it looks smarter and sleeker than the black model does. It’s not as eye-catching.
Overall, the Switch OLED is a phenomenal upgrade over the standard and can justify the extra $50 price increase. With almost a single-inch larger screen, better and louder speakers, a bigger and better-designed kickstand, better top buttons, a LAN port in the dock, and seemingly better battery life thanks to the OLED screen’s better power management, there’s so much going on here that is hard to see on the surface. No, there are no upgrades under the hood; the overall design is the same, but the gorgeous display with the Vibrant setting (on some games) just makes this the best handheld screen on the market and surpasses the 2012 original Vita OLED screen, which had the crown for the best handheld screen until now. If you can’t justify the extra cost for another switch, just know that, of course, no single thing is worth the cost increase, but everything added together makes this an amazing package.
*Note* The OLED model DOES have 5GHz wifi. During testing, it wasn’t seeing any 5GHz connections for a few days, but it’s working now.
Fall of Man was a hot mess, and it showed. It was a frustrating, clunky, one-foot-stuck-in-the-last-generation game that just didn’t show off what the PS3 could really do. It almost seemed like it was being developed on PS2 and got ported over later on. Resistance 2 fixes nearly all the issues with Fall of Man, but because there were so many problems, Resistance 2 didn’t get a chance to really shine. It also holds on to some of its predecessor’s problems.
First and foremost, Resistance 2 looks miles better than Fall of Man. Even years later, the game looks great. With highly detailed textures, the scale of the game has increased tenfold. No longer are there boring .JPG mountains in the background. We get full-on battles and giant building-sized ships in the sky, giant aliens roaming the city, and more enemies on screen. The weapons look better and have moving parts; the characters look better; the Chimera has more detail; and overall, the game looks like a next-gen game should. It’s part of the upper echelon of PS3 games, graphics-wise. However, that’s about the peak here. The story still doesn’t explore the Chimera enough, their planet, or their origins. Nathan Hale has been updated with a voice and infected by the Chimera, but it doesn’t make him more interesting. He’s still a typical white-bald dude from the 2010s. The secondary characters are dumb, and their origins aren’t explored. Again, there’s no reason to care for anyone here.
With the story being a toss-away, the gameplay has improved to some extent. There are more weapons, and this time around, you only get to hold two at a time instead of all of them. This makes you strategize your needs based on the current situation. Some of the original weapons return, such as the Carbine, Bullseye I and II, Fareye, Auger, and the Rossmere. However, the Auger has been improved by letting you actually see the enemies through walls this time. There are some new interesting weapons, like the Marksman with a secondary fire that shoots a plasma ball, and the Magnum, which has explosive rounds. The weapon arsenal is better than ever, and the aiming has improved as well. The weapons have weight, and the Chimera aren’t bullet sponges. They actually have animations to show they’ve been hit, and you can interrupt their shots.
There are boss fights this time around, which are pretty cool and cinematic. Your environment is the United States this time around, and you jump from various cities such as Chicago, Louisiana, and San Francisco, just to name a few. The varied locales are a nice change of pace from the previous game, but the game changed its boring color palette from gray to brown. Everything in this game is brown, with very little color. At least we get new enemies to change things up, like big Titans; these guys rush you and have shields; there are Chameleons, which will one-hit kill you unless you shoot them down (one-shot kills them); and Mauraders, which are giant, four-legged creatures that show up a couple of times in the game. The largest problem from the last game returns, and that’s the insane difficulty. This game is so poorly balanced. It starts out easy and nice, and then about halfway through, you’re restarting areas over a dozen times because there isn’t enough ammo in the area, you don’t have the right weapons, the cover is poorly paced, or there are just too many in the area for you to take on. You die in just a couple of hits, but the health meter was axed for regenerating health, and the “red screen”
The last few levels of the game were insanely hard and unfair. The game is only about 6 hours long, but it took me over a week to finish it because of the constant deaths. The campaign isn’t worth playing again, and the multiplayer servers are shut down, but I do remember playing a demo of the multiplayer back in the day, and it wasn’t anything special. Resistance has never been a fun multiplayer game, but the co-op campaign might make it more enjoyable and less difficult. While I praise the game for fixing many of the problems, it introduces new ones and retains a few major ones.
Simulator games these days are becoming a serious addiction for me. With Power Wash Simulator becoming one of the best zen-like time sinks I’ve ever played in my life (when it’s out of Early Access, I will do a full review) and my past addiction to time management games like Diner Dash, I can easily play this game for hours on end with tunes in the background cranking out cars. There’s not really a story here, obviously, but you start out from scratch with the most basic tools and a small garage, but over time you can expand, make repairs faster, and fix up cars from the ground up even.
You start out with just the basics. One lift, slow examination, mounting, and screwing skills You start with the first of 30-story repairs by doing tire changes, fluid flushes, and basic repairs. The great thing about CMS is that it slowly gets you familiar with how cars work and break down. I felt like the game was rocket science at first and quickly got frustrated. What’s a rubber bushing? Where are they all? Then I realized that all the bushings are tied to the suspension. You eventually learn each section of every car and will start building engines from the ground up, and then entire cars. After about three or four hours I was expanding my garage by adding car washes, another lift, spending XP to make my skills faster, and adding things like a welder to get rid of rust on bodies.
Things get easier and faster once you unlock diagnostic tools like an OBD scanner, a multimeter, and fuel and engine pressure tests. In the beginning, you basically have to take everything apart and look for the completely rusted parts, as those are the ones needing replacement. The beginning cars will tell you what’s wrong so you get the hang of how the gameplay loop works. Later on, every part will be undiscovered, and it’s up to you to diagnose, visually examine (it’s an actual diagnostic mode), and know how to spot fully worn parts. Sometimes you can take a car on a test track to get a wider diagnosis of what’s wrong, then there’s the test path for brakes and suspension. Eventually, you’ll get the hang of what diagnostics work for each condition of a car. If the car won’t start, then you should use your examination mode first, then your OBD scanner and multimeter, and fix those parts. If the engine fires up but won’t drive, then you need to do the other tests. Sometimes none of the tests will tell you what’s wrong, and you have to do exploration diagnostics.
There are other elements like a spring puller for shocks, a tire separator and balancer, and a brake disc lathe, and you can do a small minigame to repair parts that aren’t completely destroyed, of course, once you unlock all these tools. You can even do headlamp adjustments and alignments. It’s fun changing fluids, screwing in parts, and discovering new engine types with more pieces than before, but after you finish the story, all that’s left are random repairs (which are quicker than story missions) and visiting the junkyard and auction to rebuild cars and sell them for more money to turn around and buy more cars, but what’s the appeal in that? Driving the cars on the track is really generic and boring, and the fun part of the game is the mechanic part. I don’t want to collect cars, really. Once I upgraded and bought all the expansions there wasn’t anything left to do.
After about 20 hours, I could build any car with my eyes closed, and this is my main concern with CMS. The individual car systems are limited in scope. Yes, there are many engine types, but they all go together basically the same, just with different parts and varying sizes. It was fun to build an engine on the stand and lower it into the car. I had fun restoring several cars, repainting them, or giving the car performance parts to stick on the dyno. However, if it’s not for a repair, I didn’t feel any satisfaction. Once you rebuild a few cars, you experience the most challenging part of the game. There were a few issues early on in which you could get stuck with no money if you start buying up too much. You need to grind repairs until you get around 30,000 credits and can rebuild and sell a simple car from the junkyard to give you your first serious payment.
The other issue is that everything is canned. all animations, movements, and actions. This isn’t a Surgeon Simulator or a Cooking Simulator. There are no hands you can control in real-time. When you click it apart, there’s an outline of where it needs to go. You hold the mouse button down, and the part appears, as do the screws. You hold the mouse down on all the screws, and you move on to the next part. It’s essentially like building Legos. The overall longevity of the missions outside of the story will determine how much you get out of these limited systems within the cars and various small mini-games. It becomes redundant and almost boring after so long when the entire reaches its peak early on.
What’s here is a satisfying and fun simulator for at least 20–30 hours. You will want to grind the story missions, unlock everything, and experience everything at least once. Restoring cars from just the frame is fun, but I also would have liked more exterior customization. It’s very limited to just doors, windows, hoods, trunks, lights, mirrors, and that’s it. There’s also almost no satisfaction from just buying cars, restoring them, and keeping them to race on a dull track, or selling them for money that isn’t really needed anymore once you unlock everything.
Most video games based on movies are notoriously terrible, and thankfully, the trend has mostly ended. With game development costs in the rough, it’s not feasible or profitable to pump out a game in six months based on the next big movie. Weapons of Fate is a rare video game-only sequel to a movie because the movie bombed. The story seems interesting at first. The voice acting is great, and many of the original cast members from the movie return, but the game is over so quickly that the story doesn’t get time to unfold. It plays out like a typical Hollywood action movie. There are lots of cool and interesting words like “The Immortal” and “The Fate of the Loom,” but they mean nothing in the end. It seems almost like an Assassin’s Creed-type storyline where you play as the child of an assassin and are trying to find the killer of your mother. There are legendary real-world assassins who are buried in special tombs, and so on.
It’s just an action sequence and a repetitive shooting sequence to the next cutscene. These are abrupt and frequent, but it’s still not enough to shell out the lore that this type of storyline needs. There’s no backstory for any character. You just get introduced with a few lines, and that’s it. Why do I want to kill these people? Who do I care about my two characters? Who cares about any of this? The game at least tries to give you interesting abilities, decent gunplay, and some scripted moments. There are even a few boss fights thrown in, for good measure. The game plays like any third-person shooter. You run around the incredibly linear and cramped levels and can take cover behind things, pop out, and shoot. This seems standard enough, but I have to give GRIN compliments for good hit feedback when you shoot enemies and they aren’t bullet sponges.
You slowly unlock a couple of abilities. There are adrenaline shots you use for bullet bending and slow-mo dodging between covers. Honestly, the bullet-bending is a really neat gameplay idea. You can pull up a line that you move around that locks onto enemies. When it’s white, the bullet will get them around the cover and corners. The downside is they can’t be moving, but if you hit them, you recover that adrenaline shot back. You can chain these together easily, but it kind of falls apart towards the end of the game. Tougher enemies get introduced and can dodge your bullets. Bullet-bending no longer becomes a one-shot that kills most enemies. Usually, they stagger out of cover, and you have to continue the kill. You still get the shot back, but it can get quite annoying because all of these enemies do become bullet sponges in the end or require melee attacks.
Bullet dodging only became useful during a couple of boss fights, and that’s it. Each level is filled with cover, and enemies use it too. There are moments where you get to use a sniper rifle, mounted machine gun, and cinematic bullet dog sequences in which the game slows down between animations and you have to kill whoever is blocking your way. They’re fun and shake things up a bit, but the repetitive level design and the constant barrage of killing enemies behind cover get tiresome towards the end, and the bullet bending loses its charm fast despite how cool it is. There are rare occasions where a shielded enemy will confront you, and you can suppress them, sneak around the sides, and flank them. This was in the main tutorial, like it was a constant thing. I ran across less than five of these guys through the whole game.
That’s all there is to the game. You just run around shooting, bullet-bending, and killing each wave as you push through the levels. Each chapter has an end boss that isn’t all that tough, but they’re there. You can eventually acquire your dad’s sub-machine pistols towards the end of the game and his suit. You go back and forth between the past and current times. The game is over in less than 4 hours, and you’re left with 4 hours you won’t get back. There’s literally no reason to play this game at all unless you’re super bored and want a decent afternoon with an HD-era shooter.
Resistance has been one of those games I have always dreaded playing. I picked the game up in 2010, many years after the game’s original release, and it felt dated, even back then, clunky, and absurdly hard. I never finished the game. I finally decided to get back into it, and my first regret was not playing this game on easy. This game is so frustrating, unbalanced, and difficult that I wanted to tear my hair out.
Let’s start with the setting and story, as Resistance has always had interesting enemies and plots, but Fall of Man does little to really show this in any way. The Chimera is an awesome foe. Similar to Locusts in Gears of War, these are the only enemies you will encounter. There are only a few types, but each type has been made carefully so you know what weapons to use in which situations. You play Nathan Hale, a typical generic white-bald dude with no voice who is somehow immune to the Chimera infection. He can regenerate health and survive situations most people can’t. The story is told in the past tense by an army officer, and the entire game takes place in England during WWII. I love WWII history, and this game had potential.
This also leads me to the game’s art design. It’s so gray and dull. While the Chimera infrastructure designs are really cool, the overall tone of the game is very boring. The graphics are also really dated. This is another HD-era game that still had one foot in the previous generation. There are also only two other main characters, and they aren’t explored; there’s no backstory. Who is Nathan Hale? Why should we care about him? Nothing.
Fall of Man’s other strength is Insomniac’s signature awesome weapon design that was carried over from Ratchet & Clank. Each weapon is well crafted and has a unique alt-fire mode. Now that I said the weapons were well designed, I didn’t say they were fun to use. The game’s aim is awful. Incredibly squirrely, a terrible zoom mechanic in which the camera just snaps to the iron sights. This is an example of last-generation design. You can move the camera fluidly or have the gun pulled up to your eyes. The PS3 can handle it, I promise. Now the weapons themselves are fun.
There’s a generic carbine assault rifle that’s the only accurate machine gun in the game. Its alt-fire is a grenade launcher (okay, that one isn’t unique). The other assault rifle is the Chimera Bullseye, which has a homing tag you can place on enemies, and the bullets will fly to them no matter where you aim. The issue with this weapon’s tagging system is the awful aiming! It’s so difficult to get a tag on an enemy. The next weapon is a pump-action trench gun. Its alt-fire is a double shot (okay, again, not very original), but there’s a stupid delay after using it for the animation to stop, so I didn’t even bother. The next weapon is a giant nail gun of sorts called the Hailstorm. It shoots nails or can launch a needling ball and slowly fire them at enemies like a turret. There’s a blob mine gun (every Insomniac shooter has a form of a blob gun) with an alt-fire to just remotely detonate them. There’s a rocket launcher with an interesting pressure-sensitive speed adjustment as an alt-fire mode. There’s a sniper rifle that can slow down time, an infamous auger that can shoot through walls, and an alt-fire that puts up a shield. While this is a cool gun for the player, the enemies make it a living nightmare. It’s impossible to hide or get away from these bullets, so you need to take down these enemies first.
There are also a couple of grenade types, like the hedgehog grenade, which shoots out spikes, and an incendiary and explosive grenade. So with the weapons out of the way and explaining how awful it is to shoot them, the overall gameplay is insanely difficult, frustrating, and unfair. The checkpoint system is ridiculously unfair. Some levels only had a single checkpoint, and the game gets insanely hard fast. Some later levels I repeated about a dozen times until I remembered every enemy placement and knew exactly what weapons to use when. I also hate how the Chimera is just a bullet sponge. No one likes bullet-sponge enemies. This also leads to awful hit feedback from the enemies. Gears of War did this the best at the time. Animations that show the enemy is hit. The Chimera just stands there, and you have no idea if your bullets are connecting. Sometimes I would lay hundreds of rounds into one enemy, and it doesn’t help that all the guns are stupidly inaccurate, but the Chimera can hit you from across the map with no problem.
There are only a few moments where you control another vehicle and get a breather. The constant barrage of unbalanced difficulty and awful aiming, coupled with inaccurate weapons, just leads to a mostly unfun and unfair experience. There’s literally no reason to play this unless you want to complete the entire Resistance trilogy for some reason. There are other Insomniac staples, like skill points, you can acquire but do an undetermined thing that unlocks multiplayer skins. The servers are long shut down, but I did play when they were up years ago, and it’s nothing to write home about. The terrible hit detection carries over, as do the inaccurate weapons. It’s nothing to miss, honestly.
Overall, Resistance is a good start to a series but falls short in a lot of ways. Dated visuals (even at release), gameplay that has one foot in the previous generation, terribly unbalanced difficulty, no-hit feedback from enemies, insanely inaccurate weapons, terrible aiming, bullet sponge enemies, and boring multiplayer. The story isn’t even worth anything to ponder. Resistance has a lot of negatives going for it, but the few redeeming factors are the unique weapons, well-designed enemies, and some interesting interior levels, and the vehicle sections are pretty cool.
The seventh generation of consoles was really rough. While we did get some awesome games, there were a ton of experiments as developers struggled with rising development costs and complicated hardware technology. With the rise of HD gaming, which is games rendered in 720p or higher, there was also a struggle to evolve genres with this newfound hardware. First-person or third-person shooters struggled probably the most in this era as open-world games were evolved and, mostly, well done with games like Grand Theft Auto IV, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Skyrim, and Saints Row. Shooters were stuck in the past, gameplay-wise and design-wise. Corridor shooters with no story or interesting characters, not to mention lacking an identity, helped make up for the lack of the latter. Your favorite shooters like Doom and Quake didn’t really have a good story or characters, but they had an identity that helped them stand apart from other shooters. The look, feel, weapons, and overall design were unique to that game. This just didn’t happen with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 shooters, and if it did, it was rare. We’re going to take a look at the worst and best shooters in this generation of consoles and why the genre stalled and didn’t really evolve much until the next generation cycle.
The Outfit
A launch title for the Xbox 360 and developed by the excellent Relic Studios (Warhammer fame), it was a surprise that the game was so boring and bland and a complete flop. The game forewent realism and instead encouraged total destruction, but the campaign was repetitive and dull and overall a very forgettable experience.
Bullet Witch
I really wanted this game to be good. Not only did it have a fun female protagonist, but it had style as well. However, upon release, it was a buggy, clunky, awful mess of a game and looked really ugly and dated. I don’t know how this game wound up so badly, but even a recent re-release of the game on PC didn’t help it any. There’s a lot of potential here, and if you really want to play it, it’s possible. Sadly, the game flopped really hard despite releasing early in the HD era cycle.
Infernal: Hell’s Vengeance
This is probably one of the worst games on this list. This is “Steam Early Access” quality gaming here. The game is literally incomplete. The controls don’t work half the time, the puzzles don’t make any sense, like they were still in the planning stages, the visuals are horrendous, and the voice-acting is awful. There isn’t a single redeeming quality to this game at all. You’re better off forgetting it exists. What’s even worse is that the console version is an “updated” re-release of the PC version, and clearly nothing was fixed.
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men
Kane & Lynch really tried; they really did. While the cinematic moments are entertaining, the gunplay is weak and feels half-baked, and the story doesn’t really go anywhere. Not to mention, the game looks really dated. The sequel is much better, despite having its own flaws. While Dead Men isn’t inherently awful, you’re not missing out on much by skipping it entirely.
Iron Man
Woof, yeah. I can’t believe I’m talking about this. This was one of the worst games ever made in 2008, and it remains so. This was when superhero games were still awful, plus a movie tie-in? No thanks. Iron Man had a good sense of speed, and tearing apart things was kind of fun, but the game was ugly, bland, repetitive, and just didn’t have a drop of fun. Sadly, everyone bought it! The game sold really well, and I don’t understand why. There were much better superhero games at the time, but because of the movie, I guess people needed it in their lives. Thankfully, movie tie-in games aren’t as common these days because of the rise in development costs and the stigma surrounding them.
You know, making these lists is really depressing. I remember renting this game from Blockbuster when it was released because of the cool new terrain deformation technology that LucasArts was supposedly going to shock the world with. While it looked cool and the graphics were nice, the game was just plain boring. It’s one of the most boring shooters I’ve ever played, and this was a plaque during this time. There were so many generic, boring shooters out there that didn’t want to do anything interesting or build worlds and characters. Generic white dude with a bald head? Check. Sci-fi weapons that don’t have any meaning but mostly resemble real-world weapons? Check. The same multiplayer modes in every other shooter? Check. A single gimmick that the entire game hinges on? Check. Generic military dudes as enemies? Check. Everything is gray and looks like Gears of War, but not as interesting. Check. The list goes on.
Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon
Oh man, whoever was behind this game was a complete dick. Not only was Path of the Furon an incomplete mess, but the humor sucked and there were many racial stereotypes in the game that would make the most racist people on the planet blush. Who approved this script? Even if you look past that, the graphics are last-gen, the game crashes and breaks often, and the game just isn’t fun at all. It’s easily the only bad game in the series. Don’t even pick this up out of curiosity if you can avoid it.
SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs Confrontation
This is easily the worst game in the series. Not developed by Zipper Interactive themselves, Slant Six really screwed up here. While the game felt like a SOCOM game, they forgot everything else. Only seven maps at launch, no campaign mode (whoops), and essentially, since the servers are dead, this game is a piece of vaporware now. The animations were bad, the graphics were dated, and overall, it just wasn’t very SOCOM-y enough to garner sales. By this point, the series was waning in sales and was becoming just another yearly military shooter.
Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard
Eat Lead is a generic and boring shooter, despite its attempt at being a video game parody. The level design stinks, the characters are dumb, the gunplay feels like BB guns, and the graphics are downright hideous. This could have been an interesting game, but instead, we just get more typical shooter garbage of the era. Everything is gray, the lead protagonist is a bald white dude, and there’s no effort put into it.
Damnation
The game originally had potential. It was first entered into an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod contest and became a Total Conversion mod. The premise of an alternate American Civil War is a great idea, but they forgot to make a good game. Awful performance issues, terrible gunplay, bad voice acting, ugly visuals—the list goes on. This is probably one of the worst games of the HD era, hands-down. There’s not even enough here to bother trying out of curiosity. Even the gore and interesting-looking weapons don’t save this mess.
Terminator Salvation
Why is it so hard to make a good Terminator game? Not a single one exists. Salvation is, of course, a movie tie-in but doesn’t feature anyone from the movie. While the game looked decent, the action was repetitive, there wasn’t an interesting story, the gunplay was weak, and the game was just another gray shooter of the era. At least the Terminators looked cool, but it’s still not enough to pick this up. You can also beat the game in a few hours, and it was $60 upon release. Yikes.
Specifically for this era of gaming, Sniper Elite V2 and Sniper Elite III are what I’ll be talking about. Both games are incredibly dull. Sure, the series is known for really awesome X-ray sniper shots and exploding testicles, but that excitement ends before the first level is over. While Sniper Elite hasn’t been an inherently bad series, it’s just not very interesting. This is a generic gray and boring WWII shooter with broken stealth mechanics (somehow it has yet to be fixed), boring level design, and, of course, a pointless story. Hardcore stealth-action fans might squeeze a tiny bit of juice out of this, but most won’t.
Man, at this point, should I just do checklists? Another generic, gray, boring Gears of War rip-off shooter with a single gimmick it hinges on. Look! It guarantees the gimmick is so cool and unique they made it par to the cover art! Yeah, walking on walls doesn’t change anything here. The graphics were pretty good, but other than that, it’s a generic city. Boring weapons, a lame story, stupid characters, bad voice acting, and a complete short and forgettable experience
Army of Two Series
EA was really convinced this new IP was it. So instead of capitalizing on better original IPs like Mirror’s Edge, they took off with Army of Two. Again, another gray, generic, and boring military shooter, but the gimmick here was co-op campaigns. The game was pretty unplayable solo because of the dumb AI, and a lot of situations required quick reactions from both players. The story was dumb, and the attitudes they gave the two main characters were pretty lame. As you can see, this is a plaque from the HD era. Shooters just weren’t very good and were pumped out like candy.
This one had a lot of potential, and I was excited leading up to its release. A WWII Splinter Cell with a female protagonist? It was unheard of back then. Then the game came out, and it was a complete mess. awful level design, stupid AI, terrible controls, boring story, and the lead character had no depth. The selling point was tight clothes and lingerie. The graphics had too much bloom, looked gray and boring, and overall, it was just a bad experience.
Dark Void
This was a reboot of the classic 8-bit game, but it was considered one of the worst games of the era. Here we go again; say it with me now! generic, gray, and dull. It had no life and was just another generic shooter. The main thing that made Dark Void fun was the jetpack! So what do the developers do? Take it away during most of the game. Wow, good job, guys. You couldn’t even get the game’s main gameplay mechanic right. The enemies repeat ad nauseum, and the story is dumb too. Seeing a pattern yet?
Defiance
An MMO shooter, you say? Wow, how exciting! Yeah, not. This was another overambitious project from the start. The game was supposed to tie into a TV series, and the choices players made during the story would affect the show. Advent Rising also wanted a TV show, and look what happened there! The game was just dull, boring, glitchy, and not fun at all. You can’t even try the game now because the servers are offline, so the game makes a decent coaster.
Quantum Theory
Here we are! We made it! The ultimate Gears of War rip-off award goes to Quantum Theory. I remember playing this demo and thinking it was one of the worst games I’d ever played. The game is essentially incomplete and rushed together to capitalize on the gray, white-dude, Gears of War-looking-ass shooter trend. There’s not a single redeeming quality here outside of a few good-looking characters, but this was a Japanese-developed rip-off, so it had that weird stuck-in-the-early-2000s Japanese developer weirdness that took forever to change.
Transformers Series
While the High Moon Studios games were great, this section covers all other Transformers games released at the time. They were mostly movie-based and dreadful. Boring is the best word to describe them all. While they functioned and weren’t glitchy, they just weren’t fun at all. Incredibly short, repetitive missions, ugly graphics, terrible controls—and the list goes on. Not a single one has any redeeming values, even for the most hardcore Transformers fans out there.
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City
When Resident Evil 4 became as successful as it did, Capcom thought it was a good idea to take away tension with each new release and add more shooting. Sure, the shooting mechanic in RE4 was revolutionary, but don’t make the games just about that. ORC was a complete disaster and easily the worst game in the series. nothing but a pointless and boring corridor shooter with terrible cover mechanics, lame weapons, dumb AI, and a stupid story to boot. The game mostly focused on multiplayer, which it couldn’t do right either. The enemies were also bullet sponges. Making enemies take a stupid amount of damage doesn’t make the game more fun. That’s how shooters should be. Stay away at all costs.
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