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Assassin’s Creed II – 13 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/23/2022
Posted in: Mac, Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Switch, Xbox 360, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal/Virtuos

Release Date: 2/17/2022


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Assassin’s Creed II is by far one of the biggest sequels in video game history. When it came out everyone was blown away by the scope and ambition put into this game. It made the first game feel like a concept demo. It felt like just the core of the first game was present and so much was built on top of that game. The world was five times as big, there were new mission types, cinematic story missions, and tons of overall additions and improvements, however, the game did suffer on its own for various reasons.

This game starts the epic saga of Ezio Auditore De Firenze. One of the most iconic video game characters of all time. It was a surprise that Ubisoft scrapped Altair and his story so quickly, but we are greeted with 15th century Italy and various historical characters that appeared during that time such as Catarina Sforza, and Leonardo Di Vinci, and Machiavelli. The story itself is fairly easy to follow and has a few twists, but most of all have a really surprising ending. Ezio works his way up as an assassin knocking down templars to retrieve the Apple of Eden and keep it from the templar’s hands. The main villain, Rodrigo Borgia, is a nasty snake and overall all the characters are well written and I wound up really liking most of them.

First off, the overall way you maneuver has been improved slightly, but more things have been added. While you can swan dive into haystacks and climb ladders, the entire game has been built with parkour free-running in mind. You can climb every building and stay off the streets by staying on the rooftops. Overall, the system was impressive back in the day, but it has a lot of quality of life issues. The overall parkouring feels too sticky. Ezio will jump around like a rabbit sometimes so fine-tuning your turns is difficult to forget any type of mid-jump changes. Once you get close to a wall or object Ezio will climb and quick button presses just aren’t responsive. I would start climbing a wall and then try to tap the descent button, but instead, he would just fall to the ground. Other instances had guards chasing me while I was trying to round a corner and Ezio would cling to the wall and get stuck or jump onto the wall or object nearby instead. This can get incredibly frustrating as the system just doesn’t allow fine tuning or sudden changes.

That’s not to say the parkour system is bad. When you have a good line of sight it works well or you just want to climb broadly over a building. There were other instances in which precise jumping became a chore during Assassins Tomb missions. There is a fast walk button and holding down the run button together allows Ezio to scale things quickly. If you are holding that run button after each jump Ezio will just go in that direction whether there’s something to grab on to or not. For small jumps across beams, I had to let go of the run button after each jump to re-align myself for the next jump. Quickly parkouring around just isn’t possible due to this finicky system.

Some other frustrations stem from combat. Firstly, the system is mostly the same as the first game as it can be easy due to the whole system being a parry-fest. You can whack away at enemies, but instead, just hold the block button and parry when enemies strike and it’s a one-hit-kill city. Once I acquired my wrist blades I didn’t even use my sword anymore and never once used my secondary dagger weapons. This is a flaw in the combat itself and needs serious overhauling. It makes open combat boring and sometimes too easy. What is challenging, and annoying, is trying to lose guards and become anonymous. Sure you can blend into crowds, benches, and haystacks, and you can now hire prostitutes or mercenaries to distract guards and get them off your tail, but the combat plus finicky parkour system makes losing guards incredibly frustrating. You have to lose their line of sight by rounding corners or jumping off buildings and if you can get far enough away it will create a search radius. You can hide in that radius or continue escaping. There is an anonymity meter and once it’s solid red every guard will recognize you and it’s a frustrating mess of finding a town crier to bribe and take 50% of the meter away.

With those two major things out of the way that leaves content itself. The sad thing about all this new content is that it’s meaningless in the end. There are no rewards for any of it except for achievements or completion’s sake. There are 73 viewpoints to find which are actually fun as most of these are climbing puzzles on their own. Now it does still feel like overkill as each viewpoint only reveals the surrounding buildings and not much else. I felt there were just too many. There are races, assassin contracts, courier missions, and fights. These are boring and pointless and just there to add in filler. You can really tell this is where the Ubisoft plague of too much crap to do in a game starts. The only rewarding side content is The Truth puzzles. There are 20 hidden glyphs throughout the game and finding them will grant you puzzles to solve. These get increasingly hard, absurdly hard in fact, in which the clues become obtuse and impossible to decipher. However, what’s revealed is a cool video.

The story missions themselves are mostly varied with various tasks such as assassinations, tailing, fights, horseback riding, and the occasional scripted mission. I really liked the story and characters enough to stick around and wound up completing all viewpoints, The Truth puzzles, and finding all the codex pages which max out your health. I do need to mention the various gadgets you get which are mostly useless. Poison darts can make enemies go berserk and attack each other, but you also have smoke bombs, throwing knives, a pistol, and that’s about it. I mostly used the throwing knives to take out rooftop guards and smoke bombs were great to get away from large groups of enemies to become anonymous. In fact, they’re required to reduce frustration.

The visual upgrade for The Ezio Collection is minimal. There aren’t any actual improvements outside of some draw distance gain, anti-aliasing, and texture filtering. The lighting is slightly improved as well, but not by much. The game runs incredibly well through with no slowdown, but I did run into a few crashes and glitches. I wish we got a full remaster or remake, but what’s here is fine. It’s crazy how well this plays so many years later and just shows how far ahead the game was at the time. There are a lot of quality-of-life improvements that need to be done and most of the core mechanics have frustrations you will need to forgive or workaround, but the story and characters are worth sticking around for. There is also a lot of bloated side content that has no meaning or rewards including fully upgrading your villa which literally just generates more income and isn’t used for anything besides dying armor, buying weapons, and armor itself. The assassin and templar tombs are a lot of fun as well.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/14/2022
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S. Leave a comment

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer: Eidos Montreal

Release Date: 10/21/2021


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Even if you aren’t a fan of the movies I want to say right now that the game is based more off of the comics and original takes on the characters. I’m actually glad Eidos Montreal went this route. The game features a new story and even if you don’t like Guardians of the Galaxy you should enjoy this game as just a pure action-adventure romp. The game is chock-full of humor, clever writing, a great story, and fantastic visuals.

You play solely as Star-Lord the leader of the Guardians. The game’s length is something I want to mention first as it’s fairly long. Running at least 15 hours and there’s honestly not much in terms of venturing off with side quests or anything. This is a very linear game with small side paths that lead to components for upgrades or extra skins, but that’s about it. You start off the game with a story-heavy intro. Tons of licensed 80’s rock music, and right away you can see there’s a lot of care and detail put into this game. Fantastic voice work, great sound effects, and tons of great artwork. The game consists of two main parts. Exploring planets on a linear path that includes light puzzle elements – barely that to be honest – and some platforming. Then there’s the combat which this game relies heavily upon and uses as filler.

Let’s just get the combat out of the way here. As I stated earlier, you only play as Star-Lord and you can order your other three teammates around. When you start out you slowly acquire up to four different abilities for each member including yourself and these are acquired with ability points earned through combat. I feel this is meaningless in the end and felt tacked on as there’s not much strategy involved in combat. You can shoot your pistols until your heat meter fills up and then time the gauge in the green to offload the heat for a burst shot. Then you can mash a melee button as well. Honestly. Star-Lord is fairly weak by himself and I heavily relied on spamming the abilities of my teammates. Even my own abilities were fairly weak in comparison. Drax is a heavy tank while Gemora is like a ninja and can jump around slicing enemies. Groot is eventually upgraded as a healer towards the end of the game, but in the meantime, he can hold enemies in place. Rocket uses explosives and focuses on AoE damage.

This all sounds fine on paper, but in the heat of combat, the different abilities don’t do enough that is different to mean much. I usually just relied on a couple of abilities from each member, mostly AoE-type abilities for maximum damage, and stuck with those through the entire game. I only really used my own pistol barrage ability as well as it was the most useful. Enemies come in usually only three varieties. Easy to kill, medium damage and health, and larger enemies with multiple health bars. The enemies mostly repeat on their respective planets, and then there are the same Promise enemies over and over again. There are a few boss fights thrown in, but they aren’t anything unique or special.

It’s sad that the combat because a dance of spamming the same abilities from your teammates and running around to stay alive. The fact that you yourself do so little damage is really odd. There are a few other contexts thrown in like a bar under larger enemies’ health bar that determines when they are weak. If you spam enough attacks in a row you can then do an instant kill. There are also a few environmental items that you can order teammates to toss around, but it’s very underdeveloped and relies too heavily on these fundamentally useless abilities. The fact that there is so much combat in the game can make it feel like it’s dragging on far too long and is just there for filler. I much preferred the story elements and more exploration areas than the combat.

The exploration is mostly just running around and listening to the banter of the Guardians but also light puzzles in which you must match the correct teammate’s ability with the right obstacle. Gemora can slice things open, Drax can punch through walls, Groot can create bridges, and Rocket can hack panels. There are four weapon elements you acquire such as lightning, ice, fire, and a grapple ability that are used here as well, but it’s not rocket science. Again, another idea that is undercooked and felt like filler. I mostly enjoyed the choices you have to make during the story which determines which allies help you during the final events of the game, and the overall voice work and writing are clever, sharp, and really funny. I just wish the rest of the game had the same care attached to it.

That’s not to say it’s downright bad. The controls are responsive, the animations are smooth and look great, and the combat does work. It’s not clunky or a chore to use it’s just full of underwhelming features. The various planets you explore are fantastic looking and really draw you in and make you feel like you’re in the comics. There are intermissions in between in which you are on the Milano ship and can walk around and explore. There are also easter eggs and lore scattered throughout the game for hardcore fans too. However, the biggest element of all is this enough to warrant sitting through 15-17 hours? If you aren’t a huge Marvel, Guardians of the Galaxy, or comic book hero fan then no. I feel like almost 5 hours could have been cut with less combat thrown in and the story does go on and on. It’s supposed to as you get a solid beginning middle and end. There’s enough run time here to really get you to connect with each character. I didn’t finish the game and have no clue about anyone or care about anything like most video game stories these days. It was daring for Eidos Montreal to really push the story run time and allow you to grow with these characters and it paid off.

Overall, with weak and repetitive combat, mostly useless abilities that don’t allow for any type of strategy, and a weak attempt at environmental puzzle-solving the only saving grace here are the visuals, story, characters, and voice acting. I played this game all the way through because I wanted to see and hear more. It was highly entertaining, but every time I went through a chapter full of nothing but combat I grumbled and just wanted these parts over with. I then enjoyed exploring various planets but got annoyed with the poor attempt at puzzles. If the combat was cut way down and the puzzles were cut out we would have had a perfect run time of maybe 10 hours and the weakest parts less apparent.

Norco

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/04/2022
Posted in: Mac, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification. Leave a comment

Publisher: Raw Fury

Developer: Geography of Robots

Release Date: 03/24/2022



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Adventure games seem to be making a comeback which is a great thing. My fondest memories of PC games are adventure games with The Longest Journey being my favorite of all time. They are basically interactive novels with visuals, and sometimes voice acting, to help illustrate the story. Norco is one of the better modern adventure games of late but still fails in a few spots.

The story itself has moments of clarity, but like most text-heavy adventure games of late, it becomes a convoluted mess with few characters to care about and a disappointing ending. You play as two different characters – a mother and a daughter. You play as the mother, Catherine, in the past playing events that lead up to the present daughter’s events. The daughter is chasing her mother’s ghosts and trying to recover belongings that a corporation took from her. These belongings are supposed to have answers as to why this corporation targeted your family. The whole game is set in a 20-minutes-into-the-future borderline post-apocalyptic New Orleans. There isn’t too much world-building, but a lot of poetic metaphoric dialogue that a lot of games right now think is clever and interesting, but just compounds the fact that a more normal cohesive story is what makes adventure games memorable.

There are a few moments where you might enter a combat mini-game, but these are far and few between and it seems almost impossible to fail these. Various typical adventure game elements are lightly sprinkled throughout like inventory items, backtracking, and code memorization, but surprisingly no puzzles really. A lot of important clues and context will be shown in green during dialog and talking to your party can give you hints which is helpful. I rarely couldn’t figure out where to go. The explorable areas are just still images that you can move your mouse around and click on things to interact with. The entire game is from a first-person perspective. There is a small mini-map in the corner that lets you click around to various “rooms” you’ve unlocked and then there’s a larger map to jump around to the main areas.

The best part about the game is the art and abstract character design. There is some weird imagery here and I really enjoyed the pixel art. The entire game gives off a great sense of atmosphere and foreboding helplessness. You meet weird characters, an occult, strange objects, and overall the game just pulls off a great sci-fi setting, but just the setting. As the game progresses the entire reason why you’re doing any of this is lost and it just devolves into just abstract poetry and makes no sense. Sometimes things seemed normal and there was decent character building, but it just wasn’t enough to push it to that top-tier adventure game level. I still didn’t care about anyone in the game enough as right when things seemed to pick up the game dropped the ball with more abstract poetry, weird imagery, and unanswered questions.

Overall, Norco has great art and super weird characters and settings, but the overall story is just a convoluted mess that devolves into poetic abstractness that seems to be plaguing adventure titles today. I love fantastical stories, but please make them make sense. Poetry isn’t making your game more clever, deep, or interesting. It just takes away from a cohesive narrative and likable characters.

The Alien Cube

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 03/31/2022
Posted in: PC Reviews, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification. Leave a comment

Publisher: Alessandro Guzzo

Developer: Alessandro Guzzo

Release Date: 10/21/2021


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I absolutely love Lovecraftian horror. There’s something about it that’s so incredibly mysterious and still leaves it that way after the story is told. There isn’t much in terms of monsters or jump scares, but mostly just really weird imagery, atmosphere, and psychological effects on characters. The Alien Cube nails the atmosphere and strange landscapes and imagery, but sadly, not much else.

You start out in a forest where you find a weird cube that crash-landed from the sky. It’s obviously extraterrestrial, but after getting this cube it’s just one weird trippy event after another. There is a weird occult after the cube and you’re trying to keep it from them, but also following clues left by your uncle. That’s it as far as story. Most of it is told through journal entries, but don’t expect deep lore, character development, or world-building here. This is straight-up your typical “walking simulator” with just decent graphics and strange imagery.

There are different environments you’ll end up in from indoors to outdoors. There aren’t any puzzles here, but there are roadblocks that require you to find an item to advance such as bolt cutters to break a lock, a shovel to clear a path, an axe to chop down a path, etc. These items usually aren’t hidden at all so there isn’t a challenge to this game either. It’s really just a rollercoaster of weird images. There is some minor backtracking such as visiting areas from before just to pass through them, and it’s hard to die. There are a few areas that require you to make it to a certain other area before you freeze to death, and there is one long swimming session towards the end, but nothing crazy. You will run into monsters here, but these are scripted chase scenes and unless you stop to take in the sights, you can’t really die.

The sad part about this game is it doesn’t break the Lovecraftian video game stereotypes. Usually, they’re clunky, void of any type of cohesive or interesting story, no character development, and just really weird imagery. The Alien Cube doesn’t help this any. I still feel Dark Corners of the Earth is the best Cthulhu-based game so far and hasn’t been beaten. While it’s clunky by today’s standards, it’s a much longer adventure and actually has somewhat of a story. Outside of just walking forward forever, the graphics are rather decent using the CryEngine, but not on a level we’ve seen in the past. Most of the game is very dark and foggy. It can also be finished in less than three hours.

Overall, The Alien Cube is a decent Cthulhu game but doesn’t do anything we haven’t already seen. Thanks to its short length it’s an enjoyable rollercoaster of weird imagery, but nothing more. Without any type of combat, hiding, or puzzle solving there’s not much of a game here either.

Undertale – 7 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 03/07/2022
Posted in: Linux, Mac, Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Switch, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Toby Fox

Developer: Toby Fox

Release Date: 09/15/2015


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Undertale took the gaming industry by storm. Its Earthbound-inspired humor, innovative combat system, and fun characters drew huge crowds and garnered great sales. The 16-bit RPG was short in length but large in spirit. It’s hard to make you really like a game and remember it in less than five hours, but Toby Fox managed to do it.

You play as a human who wakes up in an underground world run by demons. These demons need one more human soul to break the barrier between our world and theirs. It’s a simple story, but it’s the characters you meet along the way that make up for the overall lacking scope of the game. Sadly. there’s no deep lore, no real backstories to any characters, but the here and now is well done and the dialog is sharp, witty, and fun. The game mocks standard JRPGs and Zelda games all the way through. The beginning tutorial dungeon doesn’t wait to get around to it. Pushing boulders onto blocks just to have one that’s sentient and makes the task harder for you. A lot of different puzzle-solving elements are found anywhere else in the game, but puzzles do exist and they can be quite challenging.

The combat system is the most unique aspect of Undertale. You can attack, but the entire system is mini-game-focused. There is a meter on-screen and you need to press the attack button when it’s in the center. Different weapons move this bar faster or have multiple hits. The enemy attacks are all skill-based. It’s essentially your own fault if you die. The center of the screen shows a white box and your heart is the object that you need to move around to essentially dodge various bullet-hell style mini-games. Spirling projectiles, daggers, flames, you name it. There are several dozen various attacks and each enemy and boss is unique with their own. The game’s other system is its moral system and you can be a pacifist and not kill a single enemy thanks to the Act command. You can try and figure out how to weaken the enemy through charm or talking and spare it via the Mercy command. If the enemy’s name is yellow you can automatically spare it. This is an interesting concept and leads to two different endings based on whether you’re a pacifist or not. If you choose that route you don’t get any XP to level and just get gold which can be used to buy better armor and weapons.

There are a few towns you can visit to shop, but a funny tidbit is you can’t sell anything in the game and the shop owners comment they don’t want your junk. There is one town you can sell at, however, so make sure you save all your old items to score big towards the end of the game. There are also a few side quests you can complete, but these are cryptic and require holding on to certain items throughout the game. The tip here is to save everything in your box near the save points. Don’t drop anything. When you’re not fighting you can solve puzzles, as stated earlier, and these range from mini-games to various switch-based puzzles. Backtracking is thankfully minimal unless you want a certain item at a shop that you couldn’t afford previously.

The sheer variety of the gameplay is astounding. Not a single battle is the same and not any boss battle plays out the same. Sometimes you have to fight, sometimes having a specific item makes the fight easier or ends it instantly. Levels aren’t labyrinthine and difficult to navigate and random battles are minimal as leveling up isn’t quite necessary. At the end of the game, I was level 12 and had the most powerful armor and weapon. Due to the variety and constant changing in the way the game is played it never gets dull or boring. I played through the entire game in one sitting because I wanted to see the ending and the game was just so fun and interesting. I can’t remember the last time I sat through an RPG like this and was this hooked.

The visuals are incredibly charming. They are clearly inspired by Earthbound and each character has a whacky 90s 16-bit era style to them that I adore. The soundtrack is also amazing and I listen to it often outside of the game. Toby Fox did an amazing job with this game and it’s something you only get once in a lifetime. There hasn’t been this unique Western JRPG 16-bit clone that I can remember. Undertale is the perfect RPG. No grinding, fun characters, great writing, charming visuals, fantastic music, and constantly changing gameplay with a unique battle system that has never been done before. If I were to pick something to gripe about it would be the cryptic nature of the items you need to find or hold on to as there are no hints as to needing said item at all. You just end up with a character asking for something or maybe accidentally using an item during a boss fight and having it do something.

Halo Infinite

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 01/25/2022
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S. Leave a comment

Publisher: Xbox Game Studios

Developer: 343 Industries

Release Date: 12/08/2021


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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 leveling 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 instances instead 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 the 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, 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 use 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 of course get more vehicles as well. All are here from the past, but you can also fast travel to FOB that you must liberate to unlock vehicles 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 anyways.

The visuals are really good. While not groundbreaking the open world looks great albeit the same throughout. It’s just dirt and trees through 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 actually, and Xbox One X is passable. The best way to play is on Series X or PC for sure. However, no matter which console you are on you will get 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 works in the game and just plopped it into this open world. I will admit 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.

TimeShift – 15 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 01/16/2022
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox 360. Leave a comment

Publisher: Sierra Entertainment

Developer: Saber Interactive

Release Date: 10/30/2007


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I remember renting this at BlockBuster back when it was released. TimeShift didn’t receive the hottest reviews, but it looked good for the time. Fast forward all these years later and I didn’t remember a single thing about the game except the cool rain effects you only see at the beginning and end levels. The story is stupid and non-existent. I have no idea what’s going on.  Sadly, this was an issue with many shooters during the HD era of gaming. They didn’t bring an identity like Doom, Quake, Half-Life, or other games before it. They were ugly, boring, and felt so generic. Nothing could capitalize on the success of Gears of War at the time. It was an unstoppable juggernaut and every studio wanted a piece of that gray shooter pie, but they ALL failed. That’s the sad thing. Gears of War still stands as the best shooter of that generation next to Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.

You play as some dude in a suit that can manipulate time. Wow sounds great right? It’s not. Instead of giving you enemies that require a certain strategy or an ability to defeat or even puzzles the game haphazardly throws boring, dumb, and generic soldiers at you and you only have to use the time abilities because you die in a few hits, and there is just way too many of them at once. You will die a lot in this game so quick saving is a must. Running through the open levels seems promising enough. The game shows some great visuals on a technical level anyways, some giant robot creatures, lots of allies running around, and a cityscape you must navigate through. This seems not too bad at first until you’re dumped into the next area. It’s just the same boring gray levels with boring generic warehouses throughout the entire game. Even the weapons and shooting can’t save this one.

While the weapons look and are designed in interesting ways they all feel the same. There’s no weight, no recoil, and the enemies don’t really react to hits either in a satisfying way. There are generic assault rifles, shotguns, pistols, and rocket launchers, but the more interesting weapons shoot plasma balls, explosives darts, a machine pistol with a flamethrower as a secondary fire, and a lightning-type gun. These just don’t feel good to shoot and there was no reason to even use half of them. I went through most of the game with the assault rifle, shotgun, explosive dart gun, and plasma ball gun. That’s it. I didn’t need any of the others as the game gave me no reason to need them. The enemies barely vary with some with shields and a few with time warp abilities themselves but are easy if you use yours. You just mow through enemy wave after wave flipping switches and solve what barely qualifies as puzzles.

Some situations require you to use your time abilities to solve some puzzles, but these are little more than flipping this switch and using the reverse time ability to ride the elevator. Hit this switch and jump on the train and reverse time back into the depot. Stop time to walk through the fan blades. Just stupid boring stuff like that. There are a couple of missions in which you are on a turret, and you can man a turret against waves every so often, but it’s just the typical run and hide behind containers to recharge your health and time bar and jump back out and kill more baddies. It doesn’t feel fun, it doesn’t look fun, and there’s not even a cool story to make it worth playing through. The game gives you a few pre-rendered cut-scenes with a few lines of dialog going on about a scientist and a dude you must stop and it’s so spread out and so razer thin that you won’t care.

Sadly, I even remember back in the day that multiplayer doesn’t even redeem this turd. Despite a few cool guns and graphical effects, this is nothing more than a game that will waste your time. It’s a product of a bygone era of developers trying to get a grasp on HD gaming and the gameplay feels like a shooter from 2000, not 2007. I only recommend anyone who is incredibly bored and wants to waste 6 hours of their time wondering what shooters in the mid-2000s were like.

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 11/17/2021
Posted in: Linux, Mac, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Switch. Leave a comment

Publisher: Graffiti Games

Developer: Snoozy Kazoo

Release Date: 04/22/2021 – 11/12/2021 (Physical)


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The title is very intriguing and unlike most game titles. Another game title based on a crime, Grand Theft Auto, is the single biggest video game franchise in history, so how does a white-collar crime-based game compare? Well, there are no data sheets or graphing in this game, but this is a 2D isometric Zelda clone where you are trying to stop a corrupt onion mayor from pushing his greed onto the vegetable people.

The game starts out with a short opening of you, Turnip Boy, who hasn’t paid the property tax of his greenhouse and owes a lot of money to the money. He is wanted for tax evasion and must work off the debt by helping the mayor collect four items for an unknown reason. These four items make up the entirety of the game as well as four small dungeons. There is a small world to explore with collectible hats that can be obtained by helping veggies around the area. Each dungeon contains a final boss and an item the mayor needs.

Wandering around the village is easy enough and memorable thanks to landmarks and great level design. There are signposts that guide you to the general areas and the mayor will tell you what area you need to be in. There are plenty of NPCs to talk to that provide fairly funny dialog. Nothing that will make you cry, but some funny tidbits and real-world references from the last 5 years. You start the game out with nothing and eventually acquire a sword and a watering can. The can is used more than the sword, but mostly for puzzle solving. You can make green lilies grow and this activates bombs, melons, and various other items. You also get a portal pot that plants portals (a call back to Portal with the orange and blue colors) and an upgraded shovel sword (maybe a nod to Shovel Knight?) There are a few passive things you acquire like a hazmat suit, boots to kick blocks, and a few others. These are all recovered relatively quickly. Each dungeon takes maybe 30 minutes to complete and that includes getting to the dungeon itself. Boss fights are the hardest thing in the game and that’s not saying much. The combat is really easy and similar to older Zelda games, but there aren’t as many enemy types and their movements don’t vary much. There’s very little challenge in this game.

Bosses usually require you to use the last acquired item to beat it, just like in Zelda games, and then you get a heart and move on. Once you give the mayor his item he sends you onto your next quest. Inside these dungeons, you can help other NPCs and acquire hats or smaller passive items like keys to get further inside. I never really got lost anywhere and I thought exploring the game was rather fun. Sadly, due to the combat being so easy and the game so short, about 2-3 hours run time even if you do side quests, it’s no more than a short afternoon gaming affair. There’s nothing quite memorable about this game either other than the title itself and the art style which is beautiful and well done. It’s a mix of 16-bit visuals and modern cartoon art. The music is fantastic as well, but there’s just not enough of all of this. Turnip Boy’s dungeons are fun and well laid out, but they’re very short and I feel there’s so much more potential here, but it’s all cut short right when you feel the game is getting deeper.

There is a free DLC update that adds a rogue-lite train dungeon with a final boss, but if you aren’t fond of the combat you won’t care here. Unless you really want to spend several hours swinging your sword at stiff baddies then the final game will be enough. There are a few more objectives to complete and more hats to collect, but the main game isn’t long enough to make you love this game enough to want to spend more time in its world. What’s here is a ton of fun and it’s a visual and comical treat, but it feels more like a sample of what a longer game could be. The puzzles are solid, the gameplay mechanics are great, the combat is simple, but works, and there’s tons of humor here. It’s a fun time and worth a purchase, but don’t expect anything groundbreaking.

Psychonauts 2

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 09/10/2021
Posted in: Linux, Mac, Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S. Leave a comment

Publisher: Xbox Game Studios

Developer: Double Fine Productions

Release Date: 08/25/2021


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If you were really into gaming back in the mid-2000s then Psychonauts is 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 and had 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 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 shines 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 gaming. This is art in raw video game form and they just don’t make them like this, especially in the 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 which 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 won’t see what all the levels have to offer. This is an interactive art and there’s no denying 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 is well done. There are lots to collect and the platforming is top-notch, but the combat is a miss here due to being too easy and unbalanced life bars and bosses being damage sponges and nothing more. 

Assassin’s Creed Unity – 7 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 09/06/2021
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Release Date: 11/14/2014


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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 story just wasn’t appealing anymore. The game was starting to feel less unique and made from love and care and more just copy and paste and insert 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 achievement hunt. 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 as well. I finished the game at rank four and never found the game overly difficult combat-wise. You should never engage 8-10 enemies anyways 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, who 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 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 and bigger and more confusing to navigate. A new addition to assassination missions is side objectives that allow you to make the hit easier. There is usually one assistance and assassination opportunity that requires extra thinking and leg-work. 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 then 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 are 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 them. I did find 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 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 have the rig to run it, but don’t expect a next-gen revolution.