Lara Croft’s adventure since 2013 has been amazing. The reboot was one of the best in the game industry in the last decade, and it turned a sexy heroine full of corny stories and janky gameplay into an open-world, complex trilogy. Shadow of the Tomb Raider continues Lara’s saga against Trinity and Doctor Dominguez, who are trying to basically destroy the world.
The game opens up with an epic prologue, just like the last two games, and we see how hardened Lara has become since the last game. The entire game is about Lara and Jonah trying to find something called the Box, which is a Mayan object that can stop the world from ending. It’s a little more complicated than that, but the story is much better than Rise’s story. At least we get more glimpses of Lara’s past and some advancements in her character, like we saw in the first game.
However, I feel the story is a little more unbelievable than the first game. Instead of just trying to survive and escape an island, she’s doing some crazy Hollywood stunts that are totally unbelievable, like running along with debris in a flood. It made me shake my head, but I kept pushing on as it was exciting but felt like a total departure from the first game’s atmosphere and ideas. The world also isn’t large and open like in the last two games. Instead, it’s broken up into smaller parts that can be easily traveled to, with the largest part being Paititi City, which is a pain to navigate, to be honest. I didn’t like this change very much, and as I played through the first third of the game, I was waiting for it to open up into the big open world like the last two games. It just felt more cramped and claustrophobic. I also got bored exploring some of these areas, trying to find all the secrets. It’s just not as exciting or varied as the last games.
That’s not to say the world here is bad. The new jungle theme is a nice departure, feels organic, is highly detailed, and features some new combat ideas. Lara is in full commando mode, as she can cover herself in mud, hide in trees and vines along walls, and take people down. She looks badass doing it, and the combat is much more refined here, but some of the other ideas from the last games almost feel pointless here. All of her upgrades and crafting don’t really fit in here much, as the game’s focus isn’t so much on survival. There are various upgrades for different ammo types, longer breathing, and not having to press the action button when she does long jumps. Some upgrades are repeats, and I never used any of the special ammo as there isn’t as much combat in this game as the previous two; it’s mostly restricted to the story missions. You can craft outfit pieces that grant different passive abilities, but again, these felt pointless as there isn’t much combat in the game and it’s highly focused on stealth.
The story itself is quite short at about 4-5 hours if you skip all the side stuff. It also didn’t feel as epic or as impactful as the last two games. While Rise’s written story was pretty bland, it had some great gameplay set-pieces throughout the entire story, and this game only has a few. I don’t want to bash on the game, making it sound awful, but it’s just trying to evolve while towing stuff from the first game with it, and it feels like extra baggage. I really enjoyed Shadow and wanted to get all the side stuff. I had fun solving the puzzles and climbing around the gorgeous areas, but it just didn’t have as big of an impact on me as the first game did. I loved seeing Lara again, as her character is fantastic, but it’s all more of the same and feels very safe.
As it stands, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a safe sequel that’s shorter and tries to cut corners and do less while dragging to gameplay ideas for a larger-than-life world with it that just doesn’t fit in. The combat has been greatly improved, but there isn’t much of it, the story is short despite being a better story than the last game, and the large open world is basically gone. What we get is a mix of the last two games, with some new ideas here for a new game. It’s the culmination of the best that all three had to offer, but just not enough of it. The graphics are out of this world amazing, with beautiful animations and voice work, but it’s just not enough to make it the king of the action-adventure genre again.
Shenmue is one of those games I never got a chance to play and have wanted to all these years. You always hear people talking about it; it pops up in “Best of” videos and “Worst of” videos, especially for the Dreamcast system itself. Shenmue was a beast all on its own back in the day, as no one had tried these gameplay ideas before. Sure, it’s an adventure game on the surface, but it’s also a life simulator, fighting game, and mini-game extravaganza all in one. It’s weird, beautiful, ugly, and frustrating all at the same time, and yet somehow it all kind of works.
You play as a high school boy named Ryo Hazuki. He gets home one day, and his father dies while fighting a Chinese man named Lhan Di. He steals something called the Dragon Mirror, and you must somehow get it back. The weird thing about the story is that the end goal never really matters, but all the stuff in-between. What is this dragon mirror, and why does Ryo need to get it back? It’s really never explained except something about fulfilling a prophecy and the end times will come if Di keeps it… I don’t know; the story is so unbelievable and weird.
The game starts out like any other adventure game as you wake up in your room and commence rummaging around the house, pulling open drawers, finding items, and trying to figure out where to go. Thankfully, that’s something Shenmue does, as I rarely didn’t know what to do or where to go. After setting foot in the village, I watched a few cutscenes, knocked on about a dozen doors, and kept going through the town, figuring out where to go. Eventually, I ended up in the main city, where half of the game takes place. The first few hours have Ryo running around asking questions to get clues, then going to that person or place for either a cutscene or more clues. This continuous cycle of clue-finding felt satisfying as I met some interesting characters and felt connected to the world of Shenmue.
Sadly, there’s a huge, disappointingly frustrating factor about all of these events: they are time-sensitive. You have to wait for in-game time to pass before certain events unfold. That wouldn’t be so bad, but you can’t skip time, so I literally went and did other things like chores, cooking, or playing a different game while time passed. Sometimes it would take almost 45 minutes for time to pass where I needed it to be, then a small cutscene would play out, and then it’s back to waiting again once I find the next clue that requires more waiting. It would also be fine if there were things to do, but outside of a few real Sega arcade games and collecting Gotcha prizes, there are no side quests or anything to do. It’s so incredibly boring to sit and wait through all of this, and if you miss your time frame, you have to wait again. Waiting also goes for catching the bus to the harbor and working a real forklift job.
Oh my God, yes, the infamous forklift section of the game. This literally took up an entire 4 hours of the game. You work 8-5 for 5 in-game days driving a forklift from one end of the harbor and loading boxes into a warehouse. It’s both beautifully addictive and stupidly frustrating and annoying. All of this means that the Mad Angels, a drug cartel in the game, will pick on you because you’re new and you can obtain information from them after every fight. Not to mention the annoying forklift race at the beginning of each day on the same track. Man, it’s so stupid and frustrating, and I both loved it and hated it.
After the forklift section, there are a few more fights, and the game is done. The fighting itself is surprisingly impressive, with responsive controls, fast and fluid animations, and plenty of combos. Outside of the free battles, there are QTE battles, which can be hard, and the reaction time they give you is literally milliseconds. The visuals of the game haven’t been updated all that much. There are newer lighting effects and better shadows, and the characters have smoothed over textures, but overall it still looks like a 20-year-old game. There are still plenty of bugs and glitches, such as being stuck in first-person mode after driving the forklift, hard crashes, and objects disappearing completely.
The music is annoying and repetitive, with only one short track per area, and it just isn’t very good. The voice acting is awful, and even the Japanese voice track is questionable sometimes. The audio in general still sounds compressed and really bad, and the game is just really rough around the edges. So why should you play it? It’s a weird piece of gaming history on a system that died faster than it could blink. The characters are interesting, and the various activities are fun, but the long waiting and various missteps keep Shenmue from being a fantastic game.
Shenmue II
I have a weird disposition toward the entire Shenmue series. I really want to love it, but the problem is that the game is so flawed and so strange that it almost feels like a chore to complete. The first game was tolerable as it was fairly short, and the age made it more forgiving, but Shenmue II has no excuse. It was on a new generation of consoles, and I have literally never played a sequel in a series that was a copy and paste of the last game.
The game picks off exactly where the last one took off, with Ryo heading to Hong Kong, and as soon as I saw the first cutscene, I sighed, rolled my eyes, and did an entire facepalm. I expected the game to look fairly newer, have a new UI, better controls, and an all-new look, but we got a literal engine port from the Dreamcast with just new areas to explore and a story that’s four times longer than the original (the original Xbox game had four discs!).
As I got off the boat, I really realized it was the exact same game as Ryo controls, just as poorly. The gameplay is exactly the same to the T, and I buckled in for a long ride. The first third of the game has Ryo running around talking to people, gathering clues, meeting a few new faces, and trying to continue to find Lan Di and avenge his father’s death. At least more stories are explained, and we find out what every mystery in the first game means. To be honest, the first third of the game isn’t all that bad; yes, it’s more Shenmue I stuff, but it’s easy and straightforward for the most part. Once I got to the second third of the game, things got tedious, frustrating, and a little annoying. This series, for some reason, loves having Ryo work and be miserable when it comes to progress. Twice I was stuck having to work on the most boring and tedious mini-game I have ever played to earn enough money to move on. You can earn $10 a crate by helping someone move them from one side of the room to another, and it’s all about QTEs with the directional buttons. You usually never earn more than $60 as there isn’t enough time allotted for more work, and gambling is usually risky and out of the question altogether. The game favors the AI more than you, so you can easily blow all your cash and have to play that mini-game six or seven times over to earn it back again.
Outside of the awful mini-games, the second third of the game has Ryo running around inside buildings that are built like mazes with hallways that all look the same. It’s not as easy as using the elevator, as you will have to use the stairs to go up, use that elevator to go further down, then use the stairs again to go down further. In between are free battles, QTE events, and the occasional boss fight. It’s so tedious and frustrating as there are little dialog quips that are in between repetitive gameplay sections that can’t be skipped and just add to what makes the entire game annoying to play.
Once you get past that third of the game, the last third is the exact opposite of the rest of the game. It’s a 2-hour-long cutscene that lets you interact every so often via dialog or by running down a few paths, QTEs, and more dialog. Let that sink in for a minute. A 2-hour-long cutscene. All you’re doing is going through a forest and mountain pass to get to a village with a local accompanying you. This is also where most of the story unfolds and becomes more interesting.
I have a lot of things to complain about with this game and the series as a whole, but the story is still good enough to keep me trucking along and putting up with the repetitive, drawn-out nonsense the game dishes out. Not to mention the several times the game crashed and my progress was set back to my last save. The game itself is just ugly to look at and looks like a slightly updated Dreamcast game in only a few ways. The gameplay style is just too dated, frustrating, and unnecessary to get the story across. I would have rather had cutscenes and just QTEs in between than these weird gameplay “ideas” thrown in. Sure, the game is much larger in scope, but it’s still a linear maze of remembering street and building names and participating in fights.
Overall, Shenmue II is both beautiful and terrible at the same time. It’s a game out of time and should have either been less than the sum of its parts or just a 3D anime feature-length movie. As a game, it just doesn’t need to really exist, especially being so dated even at the time of release. It suffers from all the same issues as the first game, and even as an HD port, it still doesn’t look or play well. It’s a very niche game that many gamers will not even get 1/4 through before turning it off for good. It requires an immense amount of patience, time, and forgiveness to enjoy, and sometimes that’s just too much to ask for a game.
Conclusion
As it stands, this Shenmue HD port is either good or bad, depending on your stance on the series. It’s great to get a piece of gaming history playable on modern consoles, but there are so many flaws with both games and the port itself that it’s hard to justify it to anyone except really curious people and hardcore fans. The games are both full of crashes, bugs, and glitches, and they look hideous with no effort put into the game engine at all.
I have a weird disposition toward the entire Shenmue series. I really want to love it, but the problem is that the game is so flawed and so strange that it almost feels like a chore to complete. The first game was tolerable as it was fairly short, and the age made it more forgiving, but Shenmue II has no excuse. It was on a new generation of consoles, and I have literally never played a sequel in a series that was a copy and paste of the last game.
The game picks off exactly where the last one took off, with Ryo heading to Hong Kong, and as soon as I saw the first cutscene, I sighed, rolled my eyes, and did an entire facepalm. I expected the game to look fairly newer, have a new UI, better controls, and an all-new look, but we got a literal engine port from the Dreamcast with just new areas to explore and a story that’s four times longer than the original (the original Xbox game had four discs!).
As I got off the boat, I really realized it was the exact same game as Ryo controls, just as poorly. The gameplay is exactly the same as the T, and I buckled in for a long ride. The first third of the game has Ryo running around talking to people, gathering clues, meeting a few new faces, and trying to continue to find Lan Di and avenge his father’s death. At least more stories are explained, and we find out what every mystery in the first game means. To be honest, the first third of the game isn’t all that bad; yes, it’s more Shenmue I stuff, but it’s easy and straightforward for the most part. Once I got to the second third of the game, things got tedious, frustrating, and a little annoying. This series, for some reason, loves having Ryo work and be miserable when it comes to progress. Twice, I was stuck having to work on the most boring and tedious mini-game I have ever played to earn enough money to move on. You can earn $10 a crate by helping someone move them from one side of the room to another, and it’s all about QTEs with the directional buttons. You usually never earn more than $60 as there isn’t enough time allotted for more work, and gambling is usually risky and out of the question altogether. The game favors the AI more than you, so you can easily blow all your cash and have to play that mini-game six or seven times over to earn it back again.
Outside of the awful mini-games, the second third of the game has Ryo running around inside buildings that are built like mazes with hallways that all look the same. It’s not as easy as using the elevator, as you will have to use the stairs to go up, use that elevator to go further down, then use the stairs again to go down further. In between are free battles, QTE events, and the occasional boss fight. It’s so tedious and frustrating as there are little dialog quips that are in between repetitive gameplay sections that can’t be skipped and just add to what makes the entire game annoying to play.
Once you get past that third of the game, the last third is the exact opposite of the rest of the game. It’s a 2-hour-long cutscene that lets you interact every so often via dialog or by running down a few paths, QTEs, and more dialog. Let that sink in for a minute. A 2-hour-long cutscene. All you’re doing is going through a forest and mountain pass to get to a village with a local accompanying you. This is also where most of the story unfolds and becomes more interesting.
I have a lot of things to complain about with this game and the series as a whole, but the story is still good enough to keep me trucking along and putting up with the repetitive, drawn-out nonsense the game dishes out. Not to mention the several times the game crashed and my progress was set back to my last save. The game itself is just ugly to look at and looks like a slightly updated Dreamcast game in only a few ways. The gameplay style is just too dated, frustrating, and unnecessary to get the story across. I would have rather had cutscenes and just QTEs in between than these weird gameplay “ideas” thrown in. Sure, the game is much larger in scope, but it’s still a linear maze of remembering street and building names and participating in fights.
Overall, Shenmue II is both beautiful and terrible at the same time. It’s a game out of time and should have either been less than the sum of its parts or just a 3D anime feature-length movie. As a game, it just doesn’t need to really exist, especially being so dated even at the time of release. It suffers from all the same issues as the first game, and even as an HD port, it still doesn’t look or play well. It’s a very niche game that many gamers will not even get 1/4 through before turning it off for good. It requires an immense amount of patience, time, and forgiveness to enjoy, and sometimes that’s just too much to ask for a game.
Shenmue is one of those games I never got a chance to play and have wanted to all these years. You always hear people talking about it; it pops up in “Best of” videos and “Worst of” videos, especially for the Dreamcast system itself. Shenmue was a beast all on its own back in the day, as no one had tried these gameplay ideas before. Sure, it’s an adventure game on the surface, but it’s also a life simulator, fighting game, and mini-game extravaganza all in one. It’s weird, beautiful, ugly, and frustrating all at the same time, and yet somehow it all kind of works.
You play as a high school boy named Ryo Hazuki. He gets home one day, and his father dies while fighting a Chinese man named Lhan Di. He steals something called the Dragon Mirror, and you must somehow get it back. The weird thing about the story is that the end goal never really matters, but all the stuff in-between. What is this dragon mirror, and why does Ryo need to get it back? It’s really never explained except something about fulfilling a prophecy and the end times will come if Di keeps it… I don’t know; the story is so unbelievable and weird.
The game starts out like any other adventure game as you wake up in your room and commence rummaging around the house, pulling open drawers, finding items, and trying to figure out where to go. Thankfully, that’s something Shenmue does, as I rarely didn’t know what to do or where to go. After setting foot in the village, I watched a few cutscenes, knocked on about a dozen doors, and kept going through the town, figuring out where to go. Eventually, I ended up in the main city, where half of the game takes place. The first few hours have Ryo running around asking questions to get clues, then going to that person or place for either a cutscene or more clues. This continuous cycle of clue-finding felt satisfying as I met some interesting characters and felt connected to the world of Shenmue.
Sadly, there’s a huge, disappointingly frustrating factor about all of these events: they are time-sensitive. You have to wait for in-game time to pass before certain events unfold. That wouldn’t be so bad, but you can’t skip time, so I literally went and did other things like chores, cooking, or playing a different game while time passed. Sometimes it would take almost 45 minutes for time to pass where I needed it to be, then a small cutscene would play out, and then it’s back to waiting again once I find the next clue that requires more waiting. It would also be fine if there were things to do, but outside of a few real Sega arcade games and collecting Gotcha prizes, there are no side quests or anything to do. It’s so incredibly boring to sit and wait through all of this, and if you miss your time frame, you have to wait again. Waiting also goes for catching the bus to the harbor and working a real forklift job.
Oh my God, yes, the infamous forklift section of the game. This literally took up an entire 4 hours of the game. You work 8-5 for 5 in-game days driving a forklift from one end of the harbor and loading boxes into a warehouse. It’s both beautifully addictive and stupidly frustrating and annoying. All of this means that the Mad Angels, a drug cartel in the game, will pick on you because you’re new and you can obtain information from them after every fight. Not to mention the annoying forklift race at the beginning of each day on the same track. Man, it’s so stupid and frustrating, and I both loved it and hated it.
After the forklift section, there are a few more fights, and the game is done. The fighting itself is surprisingly impressive, with responsive controls, fast and fluid animations, and plenty of combos. Outside of the free battles, there are QTE battles, which can be hard, and the reaction time they give you is literally milliseconds. The visuals of the game haven’t been updated all that much. There are newer lighting effects and better shadows, and the characters have smoothed over textures, but overall it still looks like a 20-year-old game. There are still plenty of bugs and glitches, such as being stuck in first-person mode after driving the forklift, hard crashes, and objects disappearing completely.
The music is annoying and repetitive, with only one short track per area, and it just isn’t very good. The voice acting is awful, and even the Japanese voice track is questionable sometimes. The audio in general still sounds compressed and really bad, and the game is just really rough around the edges. So why should you play it? It’s a weird piece of gaming history on a system that died faster than it could blink. The characters are interesting, and the various activities are fun, but the long waiting and various missteps keep Shenmue from being a fantastic game.
We Happy Few is a stealth action game in the vein of BioShock. The premise is actually really interesting and fresh. The game takes place post-World War II, in which the Nazis won the war and took over Britain. The citizens must take a drug called Joy that makes them see everything for what it isn’t: a cheery, delightful, and stress-free world. You play Arthur Hastings, who is a reporter who decides not to take his joy one day. People quickly catch on and start chasing you, and this is when the game starts kicking in.
We Happy Few isn’t exactly an open-world game, but there are large areas you can explore and various missions to partake in. Outside of the main quests, there are side quests. There are also two types of areas to explore. The first is outside the cities where downers are kept, and you must make sure you look trashy like they do and are off your joy. Just make sure you don’t take anything from them or run, and you should be fine. When you are in the cities, you don’t really have to take Joy, but you can’t run, jump, sneak, or do anything crazy, or everyone will catch on. It’s not as simple as this, though, as there are a lot of variables in the stealth mechanics that make the game very frustrating. There are various gadgets that can sniff you out and detect you are off your joy, and doctors roam the streets sniffing you out. You also can’t run and sneak around here either, or you will be swarmed and killed. There is also a curfew, so being out at night is a huge disadvantage, as everyone will come after you and kill you.
Sadly, other variables make this further compounded with frustrations, as you can’t skip time at night and can only do this sleeping in your own bed in your secret hideout in each area. Not to mention this is kind of a survival game with crafting involved, so many mission items must be crafted or obtained elsewhere, and it can seriously halt progress. Combat kind of takes a backseat, as you are really at a disadvantage here, as most of the time you are overwhelmed with too many people to handle. Sneaking around is a must, and being able to see footsteps through walls helps, but sometimes the game is just so overwhelmingly repetitive and has flawed AI that I died dozens of times throughout the game trying to figure everything out.
There are plenty of gadgets to craft to help you out, including weapons, distractors, healing items, and buffs, but most ingredients needed for healing are really rare, and you won’t find better blueprints until late in the game. I mainly relied on sneaking up behind people and choking them out or distracting them with glass bottles. If you get caught, you can run and hide in various places until the enemies lose interest, but sometimes this doesn’t always work. Some enemies won’t go back to their patrols, and I was stuck darting out and hiding somewhere else. I felt no matter what I did, I was always too hindered by the game’s mechanics, felt suffocated, and was always frustrated. The game rarely felt fun.
If I died, there would be weird checkpoint placements, sometimes putting me several objectives behind and requiring long stretches of repetitive nonsense. Sometimes I would be put back at night and would have to run through enemies to get to where I needed to be. I appreciate the number of gadgets and ways to sneak around objectives, but sometimes the easiest was always the quickest way through by just running through everything.
Once again, combat consists of just swinging things around and blocking until the enemy dies. It’s clunky and not very fun, but it works in a pinch. As you progress, you can level your character and add new skills and abilities, which wound up being really helpful, but then I would always have more materials to craft for things I couldn’t make than ones for blueprints I had. I was always overburdened, throwing stuff out that I could never use.
The story is enough to push me through the frustrations; the dialog was witty and the voice acting was superb, but I just felt there was something missing. There just wasn’t enough of it between long stretches of repetitive gameplay to make it worthwhile in the end. It’s a very interesting world, and I felt it got lost in the survival stealth aspect of the game. I wanted to explore more freely, but I was on a time limit; I couldn’t run and climb where I wanted, and doing anything besides being a good citizen got me caught and took five minutes to become not wanted.
Artistically, the game shines and has great-looking art and designs that look similar to BioShock, but it’s technically dated. The game looks almost last-gen and is poorly optimized, with framerate dropping below 60FPS on an overclocked GTX 1070. It’s not going to make your GPU sweat; it just confuses your drivers.
Overall, We Happy Few is a great idea that isn’t executed as smoothly as it could have been. The story, dialog, atmosphere, and characters are there, but they are held back by repetitive gameplay, boring exploration, and pointless side quests.
That game company is a really talented bunch. With Journey and Flow under their belt, they are known for making artistically stunning games on Sony’s consoles. When Flower was released on PS3, it amazed gamers around the world with its gorgeous visuals and music. It’s a very simple game, but that’s okay for what it does.
You control a single flower petal and ride the wind to help other flowers bloom and remove gloom and grayness from the world around you. You can control the speed of the petals, and the novelty came from using the PS3’s SixAxis controller to move the petals around. On the Vita, you can use the gyroscope or hold the rear touchpad. I honestly don’t like the controls and feel it is very difficult to control at low or high speeds. I always missed a set of petals in a run and had to turn around and go back, breaking the magic and flow of the game.
It was like this constantly throughout the entire game. Once I felt the game had jumped from petal set to petal set only to let me go and lose focus of the current run. As the game progressed, this became more complicated as you avoided falling electrical towers that would shock you and send you flying backward. It’s a beautiful game to behold, even on Vita, but the frustrating controls and mechanics bring it down quite a bit.
Flower also has some underlying environmental message that feels hypocritical. The game goes from green grasses to dark and dreary in a few levels, only to have you restore color to the city (which clearly represents Los Angeles), so I don’t have any idea what the story is or what the message is about.
There are about seven levels, not including the credit level, which was interesting. Flower is a PlayStation classic and should be played just for its beauty and unique gameplay that no other game can touch. The music is amazing, and I really felt sucked into the game only to be ripped out again by bad controls.
Skateboarding games have always been one of my favorite genres. They’re intense, require an insane amount of skills and coordination, and are just so much fun to play. I started all the way back to the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and ended at Skate 3. From there, the genre pretty much died, but Olli revived the series a bit, and I fell in love with the first game.
The second is no different, and that’s both good and bad. On the plus side, the game feels smoother, there are more tricks, the entire game is more responsive, and there are more modes and new levels and themes. The downside is that it’s pretty much the same game with no real evolution of the series.
Career mode is where you will spend most of your time. Here you have six different goals, varying in tricks, scores, and special spots. Using the left analog stick, you can push down and then up to pop the board up and flick it around to do tricks. Holding it down over a rail will allow you to grind. To properly land a trick, you must press X right before landing, or they will all be sloppy. This trick system is similar to Skate’s and is a great evolution of the button combo system.
Sadly, you can’t do grabs, and there’s no vert skating. Half-pipe rounds would have been fun, and it’s sad that the sequel doesn’t really add all that much. There are two other modes, which are trick spot and just a leaderboard tracker. They’re fun but aren’t really different from the career mode.
The game looks nice with fun music, awesome 2D scenes, and a great Hollywood/Los Angeles theme, and it’s just super smooth. With all that said, OlliOlli 2 is a great entry for newcomers and veterans who will find enough new stuff in the career mode to consider a purchase.
You would never think of Halo and real-time strategy; the two might not mix all that well. Halo Wars was a huge deal when it was first released, as it was a huge risk. It was the first time anyone but Bungie touched the Halo franchise, and many were skeptical. To my own surprise, the game checks most of the good RTS games off the list, but being the first time in this category, it does have its issues.
The first issue is the story. The 15 missions are accompanied by pretty pre-rendered cutscenes we have grown to love from the series, with great voice acting and stellar music. You play as Sgt. Forge, who is assigned to the Spirit of Fire and must destroy an ancient world that is full of an unstoppable army built by an ancient race. The Covenant wants these weapons, and they capture a human scientist named Anders, as the machines can only be activated by human touch. It’s not the best story, and it really fills a minute gap in the Halo timeline and doesn’t really mean all that much.
When it comes to actually playing the game, you are greeted with RTS basics, and I mean the minimum basics, as the game never moves on past that. Most RTS games require you to find and acquire resources to build an army to defeat the enemy. Halo Wars has only one resource, and this is in the form of generic supplies. You can find crates along the ground, but you must build supply pads on your base, and this is the first thing you do on every single mission. Second, your base has limited slots for buildings, and this is where the game breaks down a little. I would have 3–4 supply pads upgraded to advanced ones, and it still takes forever to get enough resources to steadily upgrade all my buildings and troops. A solid 25–30 minutes is needed just to maintain an army to defeat most enemies on a map and even longer to get all the upgrades.
It’s a frustrating battle of nursing your resources, with most time spent waiting for them to accumulate, which is not fun and quite boring. Nearly every mission where I was given a base had my guys just standing there for 20 minutes so I could research as much as possible for only what I needed for that map. The armory is used to research technology only, and this comes in the form of +10 to population, Spirit of Fire strikes, more troops per unit, etc. After you acquire all the research here, which is only a couple of tiers, the building is useless, and you can recycle it and build another supply pad. The barracks are used for only two ground troops and for researching their upgrades. The Air Depot has three different air types, and the Vehicle Depot has a few things as well. It’s very basic, with only the core Halo units you have seen in the console games. It covers every discipline well, and they all do their job fine, but some units require over a thousand supplies, and this can take up to 1-2 minutes to accumulate just for one unit. So instead of being able to send out drones to acquire a mass amount of supplies, everything is essentially rigged to a timer, which makes things not very fun.
The population cap is 40, and that’s not many troops considering some larger units can take up to six population slots. Once you get them out and fighting, it looks pretty awesome and feels just like a Halo game with familiar enemies and sounds. The Spirit of Fire attacks can give you a leg up, but they don’t feel as powerful as they should. A MAC attack or carpet bomb, even fully upgraded, may do 1/8 to 1/4 damage to an enemy base. You would expect for the long cooldown time that you can wipe out all of or most of a base and larger enemy units. It’s so incredibly unbalanced and frustrating that I always felt I never had an advantage, no matter how well I played. Even when you get multiple bases, it doesn’t help outside of giving you quicker access to troops and more supply pads. With the pop cap at 40, you would think more bases would mean a larger population increase.
Missions are at least varied, with some escorts, defense, offense, and various others. One frustrating mission had me on a ship fending off a flood with a timed sweep that killed everything in sight. It took almost 45 minutes just to clear everything off the ship. Another mission had me station vehicles at five different spots to blow open a large base shield. I had to constantly go back and forth, defending them and clearing spots to put them down. There are not enough troops to leave with each vehicle due to the low population cap. Every troop is essential.
With all that said, Halo Wars has the units, looks, and sound down for a great RTS game, but it’s so rudimentary, unbalanced, and boring, with the majority of your time spent waiting for things to build and cool down. There’s a lot of mission variety, but it won’t matter as the rest of the game plagues these missions. The story is also nothing memorable and doesn’t mean much in the Halo universe. I really can’t recommend this to RTS fans or Halo fans unless you’re curious.
A mysterious girl in a red cloak sets sail on a strange SteamPunk-inspired machine to always move to the right. It’s never clear what your purpose is or why you’re going on this short two-hour journey, but you’re doing it, and it’s quite interesting.
Your ship rolls instead of flies, but that’s okay. Inside the ship, there are several red buttons that do various tasks. The whole purpose of the game is to keep the ship moving by either hoisting your sails when there’s wind or using fuel and keeping the engine running. By the ignition button, there’s a steam release button and a brake. Behind the ship are buttons to suck up fuel on the road and a lift to insert objects into for fuel. The front of the ship has a pulley system, and there is a fire hose and repair torch. Most of these items you won’t get until you come across them on your journey. It’s pretty satisfying to micromanage something as simple as always stopping the machine to grab a box of fuel on the road and having a machine pull it in for you.
As you sail across the landscape, you will bump into a few puzzles. These require a little platforming mixed with figuring out how to get your ship through a door or across a lake. They are fairly simple, and after a little fiddling, you will figure out what to do. Outside of this, though, the game is void of anything. Once your ship is moving, there’s literally nothing to do, especially when you have full sails and don’t need to micromanage your engine. I was also annoyed that the music starts and stops so abruptly, and several minutes will go by of absolute silence.
The game looks beautiful with hand-drawn art, but it drives me crazy not knowing what the purpose of this game is, and I don’t like that. I’m all for minimalist game design, but developers who make you go on a journey with no background or story are just lazy and not cute or innovative. The various button-pressing mechanics are fun and a brand new concept I have never played before, but what’s the point at the end of two hours? Did I actually make a difference or accomplish something besides finding the credits?
Far: Lone Sails has very interesting gameplay mechanics, but it’s hard to recommend outside of sheer curiosity. Don’t expect a grandiose or heartfelt story here; just an interesting game to look at and button-pressing gameplay.
Playing as a ball of yarn isn’t a new concept. Nintendo first did it with Kirby’s Epic Yarn, and it was a charming blast. Coldwood tries its hand at crochet platforming, and it’s done fairly well. I can’t really explain the story much, as it really doesn’t exist. Yarny, the character, is on a journey to find various crocheted figures to attach to a photo album. Who this family is and the reasoning behind Yarny’s animation and coming to life are never explained. The entire idea doesn’t make any sense at all, but we’re here for the platforming.
The game has physics-based platforming and puzzle-solving. There’s a trail of red yarn behind you, and this is your lifeline. It can wrap around things, create bridges, and be used as a grappling hook. Simple puzzles involve hooking the yarn on points and creating bridges to drag objects up, while more complex ones involve wrapping the yarn in various ways to activate a pulley or open a door. It’s very interesting and unique, and there are so many different types of puzzles, but the problem relies on the mechanics around them.
The platforming is either heavy or too springy. Yarny will jump on an object and immediately bounce off of it in a forward motion only. It’s very hard to control this movement, especially when the camera doesn’t pan over quickly enough. The game is also hindered by poor pacing. I enjoyed running around pushing objects, pulling levers, and swinging around like a monkey, but once I got my groove and momentum, a big puzzle would halt my progress, interrupting the trance. I prefer just going forward and enjoying the scenery while swinging around and knocking things over, but once those puzzles started, I got frustrated.
Part of this has to do with most mechanics not being explained early on; the objects you need blend in too much with the background, or it’s very unclear that there’s a hook-off camera that you must jump to. Checkpoints are placed frequently, but some are misplaced, as I would have to repeat a long, easy section just to get to the one annoying jump or off-camera grapple and fall again and again. In some areas, I started over a dozen times just to get it right.
Outside of that, the game plays fine with 13 levels. You will be busy for a good 4-6 hours since some areas are really tough to get through. I loved the scripted moments, and some of the dangerous areas where Yarny runs from animals are pretty fun, but those big puzzles just really halted all the fun.
The game looks absolutely stunning, with realistic-looking textures and a huge variety of environments, including forests, tundras, toxic waste dumps, construction sites, and swamps. It’s incredible to look at and experience, and the music is great despite the same track repeating over and over through each level. It got irritating quickly.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Clearly you have been blocking everything you or haven't played the game at all. Maybe pay attention to the story…