I’ve always been fascinated with space and what planets on the surface look like. Weather patterns, mountain formations, various chemicals, and minerals do certain things with the weather and whatnot. This is what Exo One explores. While there’s a paper-thin story here about a spacecraft being discovered on Earth and NASA trying to use it to launch a crew to Jupiter, The vessel gets lost, I think, and you wind up bouncing around a dozen different planets trying to find your way back to Jupiter. It’s barely there, but it gives you a reason to keep going and provides an overall goal.
The controls take getting used to, and by the end of the game, I never quite cared for them. They seem overly complicated, but you essentially control the ship’s gravity and flight direction. You can roll on the ground to build up power (the orange glow in the center of the ball) and can lift off or smash down to the ground by increasing gravity. You do also have a double jump button, which comes in handy for fine-tuning your flight path. You want to stay in the air as much as possible, as this is your best form of movement. In the air, you can travel farther, as you will be traveling dozens of kilometers on each planet to get to the goal.
Each planet is completely different in the sense that some are covered in oceans, some have no ground, and some have more complicated terrain to get around. Some have little gravity, and some give your ship a bigger boost due to the increase in lightning in the area. You can boost your ship with various things, like flying into clouds, wind paths, particles, and various other boosters. These boosters are usually visible a few kilometers away, and you want to get to them. There are some instances in which navigating has become irritating and frustrating. A couple of planets have strong winds or will cut your controls completely. One planet had me just rolling along the ground for over 10 minutes, using the wind to guide me. The terrain itself seems almost randomly generated, and hills are your enemy. You want to boost downhills and release gravity, going up like a giant ramp. This is impossible in areas with strong winds, as they slow you down.
There are upgrades for your ship that are kind of spread around on some planets. These increase your glide and overall power, and they are helpful, but getting to them can mostly be a chore. Fine-tuning and aiming for a small spot is really frustrating. You can constantly turn around and try again, trying to gain just the right height to reach an upgrade. The enjoyment is the constant momentum you can create via rolling on the ground, boosters, and using clouds to gain altitude. Once you reach the goal, which will be a giant blue light in the sky, you warp to the next planet, and I love the variety. Not a single planet is the same, and soaring over large oceans or weird formations is just awesome. The visuals are fantastic, with great water effects, rain effects, and an overall amazing sense of speed.
There’s not much else to the game except to enjoy the scenery. There are no high scores, no hidden secrets, or anything of that nature. Think of this as a “walking simulator” but up in the sky. The only gameplay is maintaining your flight and fighting elements on some planets. It’s over in about two hours, but it’s a beautiful two hours. If you love exploring planets in games like Mass Effect, you’re going to enjoy this quite a bit.
Well, here we are again. Another Halo, another semi-reboot, and after a 12-month delay, was the game worth the wait? Well, for starters, I can say yes, but the biggest change here is the new open-world, a la Far Cry style. The campaign opens up with an epic cinematic opening level that’s rather typical of Halo. Lots of explosions, exposition on what the hell you need to do on this new Halo, and the game picks up after the events of Halo 5. This is Cortana’s story, but you don’t realize that until about halfway through the campaign. Speaking of the campaign, it doesn’t really pick up until halfway through as well. Because this is an open-world game, the entire game had to be rebalanced and changed a bit, but the core of Halo is here and better than it’s ever been.
After you finish the opening sequence, which runs you about 30-45 minutes, you are spit out into the open world, or technically, a large chunk of the Halo ring. Unlike the finely nuanced corridor shooting that previous games were, campaign missions take place just like those, but you have to get to them in the open world. So, overall, the campaign itself doesn’t really take place in this open world, but instead in instances like an MMO. The open world itself is 100% filler due to the fact that it actually worked by luck, not by design.
Think about it. The building blocks for an open-world game were already in place. Halo has excellent balancing already. The weapons, enemies, recharging shield, and a few abilities and vehicles already exist in the franchise. Just take all those and tweak them a bit and throw them into a big open space, which technically Halo also already did, and it just works out of sheer luck. The only reason, and I repeat, the only reason, why this open world exists is for unlockables. Mjolnir armor for multiplayer skins and upgrades for the five abilities you get, which are mostly useless by the way. You get your recharging shield, which you can upgrade. Again, this is an excuse to upgrade cores. Then you get the biggest change to the game, which is the grapple. This allows you to traverse vertically as well as horizontally and is awesome to use. After this, you get a shield, which is useful, of course, but the two abilities I never used were a sonar enemy detector and a dash ability. In the heat of battle, I don’t need to dash. I can just use the grapple and get much further away, or use the shield to regenerate my own.
You can also unlock superweapons, which are higher-powered versions of every weapon in the game and show up red. You unlock these by doing bounties. As the game progresses and you unlock more of the world to explore, you will, of course, get more vehicles as well. All are here from the past, but you can also fast-travel to the FOB that you must liberate to unlock vehicle stations. The last activity is liberating squads spread throughout the area, and then there are large installations that house tons of enemies. That’s pretty much it. If you stripped all of that away, there would be no reason to have this world to explore. You can just blow through the campaign missions without upgrading or doing any side missions, but I do recommend at least upgrading the shields and the grapple. These are handicapped from the start, unlike past games, and the game gets brutally hard later on in the game.
Once you finish the campaign, you can go back and unlock more stuff or dive into multiplayer. At this point, do we need so many Halo games online at once? The Master Chief Collection is still alive and well, and so is Halo 5. Literally, the entire Halo franchise is available to play online, so what’s the difference here? Well, not much, really. There are three different types of weapon classes. Hardlight, regular ammo, and energy ammo also go for the campaign. To me, the entire online experience blends and blurs together. I can’t tell the difference between this suite and Halo 1. Call me an idiot, but my favorite part about Halo has always been the campaigns and the story. The multiplayer is fun. The maps are well done, and the modes are all here, except we now get a stupid battle pass just like Call of Duty does. This just locks away cosmetics for your Spartan, but I also never cared about customizing one anyway.
The visuals are really good. While not groundbreaking, the open world looks great, albeit the same throughout. It’s just dirt and trees throughout the entire game. There are good-looking textures and nice lighting effects, and the game seems well optimized even for lower-end hardware. The Xbox Series X version looks mostly like the PC but with slightly lower graphics settings, as you would expect. The game does look dated on Xbox One, pretty horribly, and Xbox One X is passable. The best way to play is on a Series X or PC, for sure. However, no matter which console you are on, you will have a smooth experience.
Overall, the campaign’s story is decent, but nothing special. Finding out what happened to Cortana after going rampant is interesting, but the new antagonist is just a typical dumb Brute with nothing special going on with him. I love the Halo universe and story, but it’s better explored in the novels and comics if you want to dive deeper into the lore. The world is a complete filler and just works by luck rather than by design. They took everything that already worked in the game and just plopped it into this open world. I will admit that I had a lot of fun doing the activities. You only get a few, and it keeps it nice and simple, unlike Ubisoft open-world games.
Supermassive Games have the ability to tell great stories and present scary atmospheres and settings. Until Dawn is one of the best PS4 games to date and I loved it. It seems that either their budget is lower, or they’re not taking enough time to finely craft these Dark Picturesstories because thus far they are B-grade horror at best that you quickly forget after the credits roll and House of Ashes is no better. There’s so much left open and unexplored in this paper-thin story that chugs at a snail’s pace until the last hour of the game.
I understand that adventure games like this need time to simmer and do a lot of story building. Life is Strange is a great series that does this very well without feeling boring. House of Ashes is mostly boring. The game drags the pointless story scenario by scenario without anything happening. You keep expecting something to be explained or some backstory to unfold or characters to grow and expand, but that never happens even once here. You play as a group of stereotypical U.S. Marines who are sent down into an ancient temple in Iraq to find some sort of superweapon. Immediately the characters start off unlikeable. Stereotypical Marines of every flavor here. The hard-ass who is rude and has a foul mouth, the jealous couple, the science nerd, the sensitive nerd with glasses who wears a helmet, and the voice acting that accompanies this is pretty bad as well. The guy who plays Jason sounds like he’s faking a mid-western Texas accent and it just sounds so cringy. Everyone sounds like they’re whispering at a high school play recital and it just feels so off.
It takes forever for the team to actually get down into the temple and start their mission. There are just tons of standing around and lots of backhanded comments to each other. The only plot within the group is that Rachel was married to Eric (the leader) and is now secretly dating Nick. Okay? And why do I care? There’s no backstory here, no history, nothing. The game just throws you into these characters’ lives like we already know them. They don’t have strong enough personalities to make you really become attached during the game and I just didn’t care or route for anyone. The vampires you fight take forever to show themselves and become revealed. There are few action sequences and when you do get into them laughably easy with just simple quick-time events and nothing more. This isn’t really a game, but an interactive movie at best.
Failing these quick-time events (you’d have to not be paying attention to fail them) is how most choices and paths change in the story. Sometimes there are dialog choices and I have to hand it to Supermassive for making these choices mean something every single time. They don’t waste a single one. There are choices I made at the very beginning of the game that affects the team all the way through the end and it makes me think back and regret those choices. This is a good thing as it means their choices and path system isn’t useless like most “choose your own adventure” type adventure games are (looking at you David Cage and your games). There are flashing points when you can control a character for all of 10 seconds that are collectible that you can find to unlock interview videos (yawn) and achievements. I tried to make an effort, but despite how little you control characters I still missed stuff. However, the story isn’t interesting enough and takes so long to pick up that I didn’t want to go back ever again. There’s nothing to care about enough here.
The visuals are actually quite good, however, the engine is poorly optimized even for high-end PCs, but again, it looks great. The monster designs are awesome too, it’s just too bad the characters look weird and ugly. I also don’t like that there’s no mystery here. Why are the vampires here? The beginning of the game shows a chapter of ancient people who worship or are trying to stop these vampires, but it’s never explained why or how. There are no explanations here. Even the few collectibles don’t tell of much that’s going on. Just, “Evil scary vampires, and we must stop them”. This game’s story is something you’d see on in the early 2000s on the Sci-Fi channel at 2AM and just watch it out of sheer boredom. Lots of shooting stuff, no one runs out of ammo, their packs hold infinite items, crowbars magically attach to their backs, and so on. It’s so hoaky I couldn’t help but shake my head or laugh at certain scenes.
Overall, House of Ashesis probably a fun entertaining game to look at and play with a partner or friend for an evening, but that’s it. You won’t get anything out of this game, and it’s not even really scary. The vampires look cool and so do some of the human vampires, but that’s it. Military stereotypes, unrealistic events, forgettable and boring characters, and a story that doesn’t go anywhere at all.
A brand new category was introduced this year. Sequels need to take accountability for not evolving or changing anything. Sometimes you don’t fix what’s not broken, but you still need to add something. There are plenty of sequels released year after year that doesn’t change enough to justify the cost or just exist.
While Modern Warfare 2019 was a fantastic game and brought the series back to its roots it quickly slid downhill and doesn’t seem to be stopping. Battlefield was successful and bringing the series back to the past, but Call of Duty: WWII was mediocre, and Vanguard doesn’t seem to be much better. While the story campaign is entertaining yet forgettable, I remember the campaign from Modern Warfare 2019 and played through it twice. It was very entertaining and well done. The multiplayer in Vanguard is the most disappointing part. Copied and pasted from the last two entries while shoving some Overwatch stuff in like Plays-of-the-Game and points for voting on the MVP. While the game looks fantastic and plays well we still get ho-hum maps, and lame Zombies mode that takes the best parts out, and just one of the worst games in the series in a long while.
I love games like these. Short little indie games that do something AAA games don’t care to notice or even glance at. Unpacking is what you get on the tin. There’s no story here at all, no characters; you just get put into various years from the late ’90s to 2018, unpacking a person’s belongings in various homes. It seems dull on paper, but it’s actually quite satisfying, and the enjoyment solely comes from you wanting to decorate everything correctly and not just put things where they go.
Bedrooms consist of era-appropriate computers, lots of clothing, knick-knacks, plants, posters, frames, shoes, workout equipment—you name it. Bathrooms will have bathroom items, and kitchens will have things like food and utensils. There are also living rooms that have video game consoles, knick-knacks, frames, pillows, blankets, plants, and other items. There are a lot of items in this game, but here lies my biggest complaint about this game. It’s incredibly repetitive. After the second “album” that I completed, I pretty much saw every single item. Sure, unpacking boxes and putting things away satisfies an OCD in most people, but out of the six levels, how many dozens of underwear, bras, and clothes do I need to hang? Things only got interesting later on when new objects or large items did pop up. Laundry baskets, trash cans, umbrella stands, and dish racks were far and few between, and it wasn’t until the last level where you get every room and pretty much unpack every item in the game.
As you start off in 1997, you may get a bit of a nostalgia hit; there are a lot of 8-bit-style items laying around from the era. CD players, cartridge game systems, old stereos, crazy teen angst posters, and anything else you can think of from your childhood. The game is set in an isometric perspective, so you can zoom around, and that’s about it. There are numerous boxes in various rooms, and when you click on a box, it opens, and inside you just see packing paper. Clicking the box has an item pop out, and most are regular everyday household items. Most of the boxes are to be unpacked in that room, with the occasional item being misplaced. You can rotate items and even activate some items for achievements, and the snapping feature works rather well. A book can lay flat, or if you push it up against a shelf, it will stand up and stack.
There are a few challenges when it comes to space. Some rooms will be very minimal with a lot of items, and you have to be clever and organized to get everything to fit. Once you unpack every box, items that are in the wrong place will flash red, and most of this made sense, but some didn’t. Why do I have to put a backpack on a shelf when on the bed makes sense? There were a few cases in which I couldn’t make out what the items were at all, which had me clicking and placing them on everything until I found the right spot. I also wish I could unpack the furniture and literally unpack an entirely empty home. Maybe some outdoor areas would have been nice, like backyards, sheds, garages, or other settings like offices, which would have added variety.
What’s here is still rather charming, with some nice music that seems to stop for long periods of time, which I hated, and there’s a seemingly pointless photo mode in which you can add borders and stickers. This feature just felt like filler content to me, but this is a very unique game, and there’s nothing else out there like it. The game is so short that you can finish it in less than two hours, so
Life is Strange is one of my favorite games of all time. It just captured the small-town teenage adventure that a lot of us can reminisce about. It was one of the few games that I played that were so emotional and really made you feel for the world and characters you were in. The series keeps trying to capture that lightning in a bottle and doesn’t quite do it as the first game did. That magic is hard to reproduce, but True Colors is still quite an emotional game with great characters.
You play Alex Chen, a young woman who is leaving foster care for a small town in Colorado called Haven. Not only is there a town mystery to solve, but you are also trying to find a purpose and reason to stay. You end up living with your brother, Gabe, and slowly start unlocking your past and the mystery of the town. That’s as far as I want to go with the story; anything else will literally spoil the game, as there are quite a few big twists and turns, and even just revealing certain things that happen is surprising and unexpected. What I will say is that the story focuses a bit too much on this town mystery and less on your personal feelings with those around you, despite Alex’s “power” involving raw emotion. When I first started the game, I will admit that Deck Nine has a great way to get to the point of how the main character feels about the world around them. When you open your phone, you can read text messages and bulletin posts that help explain what’s going on outside of Alex’s life. I recommend reading these texts at the very beginning of the game because she ends up blocking some people, and after reading this long thread, it kind of helps you see more of what Alex is feeling in her life.
The first chapter is slow to build, much slower than in previous games, and the story doesn’t really pick up until right at the end of Chapter 1. The game also doesn’t have much gameplay. You do get to control Alex in certain areas to “explore,” which only consists of hearing her internal dialog and commenting on things you can look at. I don’t feel this really adds to anything; it just feels like an excuse to make this a game and not an interactive movie. This is a serious issue with adventure games these days. There are no puzzles, no real exploration, just lame gameplay excuses to make you feel like you’re controlling anything. I understand this is so it doesn’t scare off casual gamers, but adventure games are known for their puzzles. The only gameplay in here is a certain scene where you are doing a LARP (live-action role play) that the town takes part in, and the game kind of has a light make-believe RPG thing going on. There are things to “collect,” like looking at certain objects, interacting with things that can be missed, and listening to people’s internal dialogue with Alex’s powers.
There are major choices to be made in the game, and that’s the true core of Life is Strange. These choices are pretty tough and really change the outcome of the story, but there aren’t as many in True Colors as in previous entries. There are only a few major choices where the game pauses and lets you choose. Other things are dialog options, but I never could really tell if these made a change or not, and that’s a real weakness with this game. You could argue it’s so organic that you don’t notice, and maybe that’s better? I’m not quite sure, but I know only the major choices I made were obvious in their effect. I also found that there may be too many characters in this game, and we aren’t given enough time with any of them. Even Alex’s love interest, while touching and emotional, feels shallow and one-note. There isn’t enough time spent with this person to establish this connection. It’s more in line with just a few actions that took place, and suddenly they love each other? It doesn’t feel super organic, and Alex’s other friends aren’t allowed any insight into their past, like with Cloe or Max in the first game. I cared a lot about Alex, but not too much about anyone else because of these factors.
The game isn’t impressive to look at on a technical level; there are some last-gen textures here and there, but the lighting is great, and the facial animations are fantastic. The characters’ emotions really come across thanks to the details put into the facial animations. While the game looks miles better than previous entries, it still feels like parts are older than others. The music is fantastic as always and carries the Life is Strange atmosphere from previous entries. It’s good enough to listen to outside of the game, and I still listen to the first game’s OST all the time. The music plays in just the right moments, really helps carry the emotional scenes through to the end, and adds an extra punch to the gut.
With that said, True Colors does what previous games did well, but it doesn’t quite capture the magic of the first game. There are too many characters, and this brings the focus away from the core characters, and we don’t get enough insight into their past to care about them much. Alex’s love interest feels shallow and underdeveloped, and the mystery of the town itself also brings the focus away from helping the characters grow. I feel there are just too many distractions in the story to make it feel as wholesome as the first game. The visuals, while looking great in spots, feel dated, but the facial animations are fantastic. The music is amazing and helps Life is Strange establish an atmosphere all on its own, but I also feel the choices aren’t as obvious in this game. What’s here is a great game with some seriously emotional scenes that are well done, but don’t come in expecting out-of-this-world storytelling like the first game.
Space rock operas aren’t something you see in gaming much, and The Artful Escape is a visual and auditory treat for the senses. You play a young boy who is living in the shadows of his late uncle, who was a famous folk singer in the town he lives in. He feels forced to follow in his footsteps when he is actually a metalhead at heart. You are sent on an acid trip of a space rock opera through a universe of weird space creatures and worlds. You meet a man named Lightman (voiced by Carl Weathers of Rocky and The Predator fame), who is the most famous person in this universe and shreds like no other. He wants to help you overcome your fear of being yourself, and you go on a journey together to impress the tastemaker, who is the ultimate deciding creature in this universe.
Don’t think too much into the story, as it’s mostly filler for just a sidescrolling walking simulator with light rhythm mechanics. You always move to the right and can hold down a button to shred your guitar. It sounds awesome, and I never got tired of hearing the licks repeat. Each planet has its own licks, but the visual flair and usefulness of these are never explained, and despite being able to just hold down the button and shred while you slide down slopes, jump over platforms, and bounce on things, sometimes the background interacts and the background music will swell as you jump and shred. It’s cool when it does and sometimes gives me goosebumps because the music is so good, but 75% of the time I was just holding down the button, not sure when it would trigger an interaction.
At the end of each stage, you come across a boss of sorts that displays a Simon Says-style rhythm pattern. There’s zero challenge here, as you don’t need to memorize anything as you can play as the buttons appear. You also don’t get penalized for messing up, and that note just starts over. I found this mechanic fairly pointless and just filler, as some of these sessions are only a few notes long. It sounded and looked cool, but that was it. There’s pretty much zero gameplay here. The sidescrolling and shredding are literally an excuse to turn this story into a game. I also loved the art. There are crazy creature designs and lots of vaporwave aesthetics going on, with a multitude of lights and colors all over the place. Sadly, that’s all the game really offers. While the voice acting is also good, the dialog isn’t anything exciting, and I didn’t care at all about any of the characters. The game is so short that you don’t get any time to really invest in these characters.
So what we get is a three-hour adventure with great visuals and music but boring gameplay mechanics that only enhance the game in rare moments. I also found the engine poorly optimized, as even on high-end hardware, the game dipped well below 60FPS in some areas with lots of lighting effects going on. Turning everything down to low didn’t help much, so this is clearly an optimization issue. With that said, The Artful Escape is great for metalheads who want to chill out for a few hours and enjoy the visual treat, but otherwise, you aren’t missing much here. This is sadly just another adventure game where the developers think it’s cute or revolutionary to forgo any gameplay and solely focus on the visuals and music, but they forget this is a game first.
If you were really into gaming back in the mid-2000s, then Psychonautsis a game you either played or heard of, and that’s thanks to Tim Schafer’s voice being heard. The game was critically well received but sold poorly due to a lack of advertising and support from the publisher. The game was great on PC and Xbox, but didn’t do so well on PS2 due to the system’s lack of power, framerate issues, and downgraded visuals. A few years later, a petition was released to put the game on Xbox Live Arcade for the Xbox 360. I remember signing that petition, and that’s how I finally played the game. It was visually brilliant, but it did have issues with the camera and felt a bit repetitive.
Here we are 15 years later and that same brilliance has happened again. You play as Razputin, a large-headed boy whose dream is to be a Psychonaut. This team of mind-bending heroes is trained to enter people’s minds and rid them of anything dangerous and help people get back to being mentally more stable. I won’t spoil the story and tell if Raz gets in the Psychonauts or not, but the game’s main hub is the Psychonaut headquarters. The story itself is entertaining with the main villain, Maligula, who needs to be stopped before she…does something. It’s never really told what danger Maligula can do to the world as Psychonauts‘ story solely focuses on just the team and never anything outside of it or how they affect the world around them. It feels like a very claustrophobic world and seems a bit strange to be like this, but the voice-acting is wonderful and the dialog is clever and witty at every turn and it never misses a beat. While the story feels a bit rushed towards the end and feels a little too convoluted for what it is, it’s entertaining and all of the characters are a joy to see on screen.
Psychonauts‘ combat has always been something to be desired and kind of takes a back seat to platform and that’s the same for this game. You get one melee button and have to use other Psi-Powers in tandem with this and it feels too easy and a bit lazy. Most of the Psi-Powers aren’t useful in combat so I just stuck with Psi-Blast, Telekinesis, and Pyrokenisis which sets things on fire. Enemies are either too easy or are just damage sponges and towards the end of the game, it really feels unbalanced and just an annoyance. While the combat plays well and there are no control issues, it just feels like it needs more work if there is going to be a sequel. Bosses also just felt like damage sponges and aren’t really challenging. Even the final boss is a push-over. Thankfully the game mostly focuses on platforming.
With that said, platforming and collecting are where Psychonauts shine the most. Each level oozes personality and style. The art in Psychonauts 2 is absolutely gorgeous, with some of the most creative levels you will ever see in gaming. This is art in raw video game form, and they just don’t make them like this, especially in AAA form. Most of the Psi-Powers are used for platforming, and this is another issue with those powers. They are either really useful for a few things or useless for everything but one thing. Projection is gained last, and towards the end of the game, it’s mostly used for that level and collecting a few items in others. Mental Connection is used to swing between nodes; Time Bubble is used to slow down spinning fans and platforms; and Clairvoyance is mostly used to read people’s minds for fun and use their eyes to find treasure in hub worlds. Despite this, you can collect 2D Figments, which are colorful sprites scattered around; emotional baggage and their associated tags, which are needed to collect the bags; memory vaults; relics; and others. You can skip all of this, as it’s mostly for completionists and achievement hunters, but you’re missing out on most of the more difficult and fun platforming if you do. The hub areas, of which there are four, have Psi Cards, Half-A-Minds, and Psi Ranks to collect. There are vending machines to spend the cards on, and you can use Psitanium to buy pins that passively enhance some Psi-Powers, but I felt this was a last-minute tacked-on feature since the combat is already easy.
With that said, the game’s art style is bananas. It feels alive, and there’s so much detail in every single level, and neither level is the same. There’s a 60’s-style acid-induced mind-trip level, an amusement ride level, a library, a hospital, and others. They all feel unique, and I couldn’t wait to see what the game brought next. While the story does feel convoluted, it’s still entertaining, and seeing the characters on screen was never dull. While most people will skip all the collecting, you miss out on a lot as you won’t see what all the levels have to offer. This is interactive art, and there’s no denying that this is just one of the most artistically impressive games to be released in the last decade. While it’s not technically impressive since it uses Unreal Engine 4, it still looks good with great textures and good lighting effects, and there were no bugs in my playthrough.
Overall, Psychonauts 2 is a mascot platformer dream, and you only get these games once a decade these days. While indie games have taken over this hole in the gaming space, it’s nice to see larger-budget AAA games do this too once again. The story is entertaining, albeit a little too claustrophobic in its world-building and convoluted for what it is, but the character writing is clever and the voice acting
Up until this point, Assassin’s Creed had pretty much overstayed its welcome. With the release of Rogue, it was clear Ubisoft was just wanting to use the series as a yearly cash grab. While no single game is inherently awful or bad, the formulaic nature of every game playing nearly the same but with new characters and stories just wasn’t appealing anymore. The game was starting to feel less unique and made from love and care and more like just copying and pasting and inserting a few new characters. Unity was the series’ first next-gen outing with updated visuals, mechanics, and co-op. Unity scales the series back to its roots and focuses solely on the narrative and less on varied mechanics. For instance, naval battles are gone as the game focuses just on Paris, set during the French Revolution. So, like in the original games, we get to run around a large town area full of chests, side quests, and things to collect to gain money to buy customization pieces. Then there’s the meat of the game, which is the story missions.
Honestly, this is where AC shines best—just a large, historically accurate city with fun story missions and a few side quests. Unity’s side activities are abundant and completely optional. These range from various co-op quests to helping solve mysteries using your Eagle Vision to finding chests that contain various amounts of money or customization pieces, emblems, and secret relics. I personally feel there’s too much here, and it’s all padding and filler. I spent a couple of hours doing these activities just to try them out, and they don’t interest me at all. Once you finish the game, there’s no reason to keep playing unless you’re a completionist and want to hunt for achievements. The series has always been great for that.
Unity has a five-tier difficulty system in which missions are rated from one to five diamonds. Of course, you can increase your rank by buying or finding better armor pieces and weapons. You also need to buy skills to increase this rank. I finished the game at rank four and never found the game overly difficult combat-wise. You should never engage 8–10 enemies anyway, and that’s been a rule in the series since the beginning. The skills you can unlock are rather useful, and some are acquired just by playing the game. Poison darts, health, lockpicking, and various things like these have been done in the series before, and at this point, I don’t find it necessary to lock these things away anymore. Just give them up in the beginning and let me acquire armor pieces. It’s just another excuse to pad the game and make you finish missions for skill points. The only reason to acquire franks in the game is to increase your ranking and allow you to buy armor and weapons; however, this is completely optional. You should be at least rank four by the end of the game, but I didn’t have to end up buying much.
The story itself is decent at best. At least we get to see Arno rise and fall as an assassin and regular person. You start out playing through Arno’s childhood and how he discovered the Assassin Brotherhood, and he is on a path of vengeance to kill the murderer of his father. You also have a love interest, Elise, whom you knew as a child, and the strife they go through is okay. Unity’s story was never gripping or kept me on the edge of my seat. There were a few twists and surprises, but nothing amazing. The ending is rather disappointing and typical. The “real world” here with Abstergo mostly takes a back seat, and you never control any character like you did with Desmond. It’s told through dialog and pre-rendered scenes. It’s mostly pointless, and I wish the series would just get rid of this part of the story. I say this in every AC review I do, and I’ll keep saying it.
Sadly, while it did go back to its roots in terms of scope, the game still has mundane, boring combat. The animations are silly with weird clipping issues, and the game is still just a parry fest. You can unlock heavy attacks, but when the enemy’s life bar flashes yellow, you parry and attack. Its uninteresting and head-on combat has never been the series’ strong point, as it should be avoided. Most of the missions require you to find a target, assassinate them, or find your way into a stronghold and gather evidence for something. Eagle Vision is key here, as it lets you see enemies through walls and tag them on your mini-map. As the game progresses, these strongholds get tougher, bigger, and more confusing to navigate. A new addition to assassination missions are side objectives that allow you to make the hit easier. There is usually one assistance and assassination opportunity that requires extra thinking and legwork. Sure, you can just charge in and kill the target, but usually, in later levels, there are just way too many enemies around, and you will never even make it. You also can’t finish the missions unless you’re anonymous, so the target will lay there. You then have to run away and work your way back without being seen to finish the job. It’s best to just do it the correct way the first time around, and it’s satisfying every single time.
I found these side objectives to be rather neat and fun. Sometimes you can free some people to start a distraction and clear out an open courtyard, which gives you quick access to the target. The assassination opportunity puts you right in front of your target without being seen. One mission had me kill someone attending a ball in a mansion. I freed a fireworks cart that would force the target out of the ballroom and into the hallway, which let me blend in with the crowd and kill her without fighting through guards. Some of these were fiddly, and you have to be in the right position at the right time or you will blow it, so a lot of trial and error is still needed, which can be really frustrating but satisfying once you figure out where the target is and the quickest way to get to them. I did find that traversing the buildings can still feel finicky and too sticky. Sometimes I just wanted to hop down to go to a specific platform, and Arno would hop around like a bunny and jump down or go up to something when I just wanted to run straight. It made me fail some missions, and this is still an issue that needs to be addressed.
The visuals of Unity are outstanding, but it’s a technical nightmare. At launch, Unity was one of the most broken games to ever be released, and while now it’s been patched up just fine, the engine is horribly optimized and runs like garbage even 7 years later on new hardware. The anti-aliasing is a resource hog, and I had to turn it off just to get 60FPS on an overclocked RTX 2080. Back in the day, it was impossible to run the game maxed out and get 60FPS, and it ran even worse on consoles. At least Paris is beautifully recreated, and the historical buildings look beautiful and are fun to explore. Everything just looks so good here, but at the cost of a terribly optimized game engine.
With that said, Unity isn’t the worst AC game, but it’s not the best either. I appreciate the return to simpler times with just a core story to focus on and one city to explore on foot. There are still too many side activities to pad the game, and the ranking system is guilty of this as well. Combat is still boring and rough-looking, and climbing around things is sticky and fiddly. While the new opportunities during assassinations are fun to accomplish, it makes the trial and error that much more prominent and frustrating, despite the satisfying pay-off. Unity is worth a play-through if you
Here we are, another year, another Assassin’s Creed game. Having to actually say this is just sad as Assassin’s Creed has always been a good series. The games are high quality, play well, and look amazing for their time, but when you release that same greatness over and over with only minor changes it can grow tiresome. I was personally done with AC when Black Flag was released. I just couldn’t get through it. I already played them all up until that point and I felt AC3 hit the series peak, but they had to keep going.
Syndicate doesn’t do much new, but as it’s the last of the “older AC style games” it does everything very well but is also a little too familiar. While we do get new characters and the continued “real-world” story of the Assassins vs the Templars, the most interesting part of any AC game is the historically accurate world you explore. This time its 19th century England, specifically the London area and surrounding cities. You play as two characters this time, Jacob and Eevie Frye who are rogue assassins that are trying to stop the Templar plot in London. The main villain is Starrick who is pretty decent and well hated, but overall, the actual story is not much to really care about as it drags on a bit too long and takes forever to really go anywhere. Most of the game is just interaction cut scenes on what to do for the current mission and very little progression overall. Eevie is trying to obtain the Shroud relic which grants eternal life and Jacob doesn’t believe in the relics and pieces of Eden and wants to just stop the Templar threat. Both characters play exactly the same minus a few skills, but Jacobs’s missions lead him on a separate path.
Assassin’s Creed has been slowly eeking in RPG elements over time and I hate them. It doesn’t belong in this game at all and it really shows here. The entire map is sectioned off with leveled areas up to level 9. Of course, story missions also require you to be at certain levels and the only way to level up is to complete missions and use your points in the skill tree. Once you acquired enough skills, you will level up. The grinding isn’t too bad here, but a few times the story missions didn’t give me enough XP to level up, so I had to end up liberating sections of the map. This is where the game really becomes formulaic, and you can see the series has hit a brick wall. Each side’s mission that requires you to liberate an area repeats throughout the game. The missions range from assassinating templars to bounty hunts that require you to kidnap the target dead or alive, then there are child labor camp liberations where you just have to assassinate the foreman and free the children, and there are gang strongholds. The gang in this game is the Blighters, and they all dress in red, so they stand out. You just need to kill everyone in these areas. Once you liberate all areas of the city, you then have to fight the gang leader. You get an opportunity to do it out in the open, but more often than not, the thugs will take you down, as there are so many of them. Whether you kill the leader or not, you have to challenge the gang to a stand-off and just eliminate a bunch of them in a closed-off area. Once that area is 100% liberated, you can recruit those green-dressed members to fight for you.
After you liberate your first two areas, these missions get old really fast, and I didn’t bother with the last two cities. Most of the main missions are pretty much this combined with just unique areas and circumstances. Kidnapping, assassinating, stealing, blowing things up, and of course, there are secondary optional objectives you can meet for more XP and money, but some of these just seem impossible to accomplish. It was fun to try and strive for these, but if I blew it, I didn’t bother restarting or anything. One new addition to the series is vehicles in the form of horse-drawn carriages. These drive okay for the most part but are pretty useless once you start unlocking more fast travel points by syncing up at high points. They drive okay, but there are a lot of physics glitches in this game, and often you’d see horses fly off into space or freak out and run off into the abyss.
Syndicate has a lot of great-looking outfits and items to unlock. Each character has an outfit, gauntlet, and sidearm to equip. Most of these have to be crafted or met at a certain level, and you can find them by meeting secondary objectives on missions, locked chests, or by just playing the game. I feel the game is far too small in scope to need RPG elements. Once you get to level 8, you can finish the game, and there’s no point in continuing to play anymore. The only reason you need to level up and get better equipment is to survive the story missions. I was able to finish the game in about 13 hours, and I still felt this dragged on. Without the grinding, the story takes about 6–8 hours to complete with 8 sequences. I enjoyed the story, and the Frye twins have great personalities, but overall it felt average and forgettable at best. They didn’t go through enough personal issues; they got away scot-free for going against the order’s rules, and overall, the entire Assassins Order played no part in this game. The missions felt like they were just stringing you along and barely had a story to tell as an excuse.
As it stands, when I finished the game, I felt the side stuff was pointless and boring. I enjoyed the unique story missions the most, and yes, acquiring skills is just fine, and the skill tree was actually useful. My characters felt more powerful as I leveled up, and it made doing certain things easier, like when Eevie can stay still and become invisible when she masters the Stealth Tree. There are crowd events to complete in each area, like stealth, kill a messenger, or scare some bullies, but these aren’t fun. They are just there for completionists and to pad hours onto a game. I felt no reward or accomplishment when just checking these boxes for items I wouldn’t even need to use. You can upgrade each piece of equipment once to add a stat, but this is mostly for melee combat. Which, in fact, is terrible. It tries to be like Batman Arkham’s combat system, where you mash one button and then counter or break defense. When the enemy’s health bar flashes yellow, you can press the parry button, and when the health bar is gray, you can break their defense. It doesn’t chain together smoothly, and half the time it felt unresponsive. Some of the kill animations are also way too long, and there’s a lot of clipping. While it feels and looks brutal, it’s just button mashing.
The overall movement and flow of Syndicate feel a bit janky. A lot of time, the character would hop around like a rabbit when I was trying to get down somewhere to hang on to a specific thing. A lot of the time, this blew missions, and I had to restart. You can free-run up or down with two separate buttons, but you also get a grappling line, and it doesn’t work as you think. You have to be directly under a building to grapple up, and you can grapple across rooftops, but it does come in handy for assassinating people in large open areas. The problem is that you can’t grapple back out quickly, as you must be right next to a building. This felt only half-useful most of the time. Other than this, the only side missions I enjoyed were with real-life people such as Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Dickens. These missions are always enjoyable in AC games, but the same repetitious missions repeat here as well.
The game does look absolutely stunning, though. For the time, the game was ahead in terms of technical achievements for graphics, and no GPU could run the game at maxed-out settings and 60FPS, but now that it’s been five years, I can see why. The Anvil engine is horribly optimized and runs poorly on GPUs that are four generations newer. I had to turn anti-aliasing completely off on an overclocked RTX 2080 as I couldn’t get 60FPS with everything else maxed out at 1440p. That’s the game’s fault, not my system. When you do get it running well, it looks stunning, even today. Great lighting effects, outfits that look gorgeous, and beautiful recreations of historical buildings. I enjoyed exploring London. However, the facial animations and models on everyone, but the main characters, looked horrendous, and the same five-character models repeated. The game is a little rough here and there, and I also found on my 1660ti system that the camera had jerkiness to it despite hitting 60FPS with everything maxed out and anti-aliasing set to FXAA (otherwise you lose 20FPS and it’s not worth the cost).
As Syndicate stands now, the series really needs to reboot or go back to simpler times when you just had a nice narrative and a few things to collect. Outside of the mediocre story and somewhat fun story missions, the side missions are repetitive, formulaic, and get old fast. There are only chests and newspapers to tear down walls, and even these are old as they have been in every single game except the first one up to this point in time. You can make beautiful, historically accurate worlds, and you can have state-of-the-art graphics, but in the end, the series will get stale and tiresome fast.
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ORC is probably the worst game in the entire series. It's objectively awful. Being bad isn't different. Different is Outbreak…