I’ve always been fascinated with space and what planets on the surface look like. Weather patterns, mountain formations, various chemicals, and minerals do certain things with the weather and whatnot. This is what Exo One explores. While there’s a paper-thin story here about a spacecraft being discovered on Earth and NASA trying to use it to launch a crew to Jupiter, The vessel gets lost, I think, and you wind up bouncing around a dozen different planets trying to find your way back to Jupiter. It’s barely there, but it gives you a reason to keep going and provides an overall goal.
The controls take getting used to, and by the end of the game, I never quite cared for them. They seem overly complicated, but you essentially control the ship’s gravity and flight direction. You can roll on the ground to build up power (the orange glow in the center of the ball) and can lift off or smash down to the ground by increasing gravity. You do also have a double jump button, which comes in handy for fine-tuning your flight path. You want to stay in the air as much as possible, as this is your best form of movement. In the air, you can travel farther, as you will be traveling dozens of kilometers on each planet to get to the goal.
Each planet is completely different in the sense that some are covered in oceans, some have no ground, and some have more complicated terrain to get around. Some have little gravity, and some give your ship a bigger boost due to the increase in lightning in the area. You can boost your ship with various things, like flying into clouds, wind paths, particles, and various other boosters. These boosters are usually visible a few kilometers away, and you want to get to them. There are some instances in which navigating has become irritating and frustrating. A couple of planets have strong winds or will cut your controls completely. One planet had me just rolling along the ground for over 10 minutes, using the wind to guide me. The terrain itself seems almost randomly generated, and hills are your enemy. You want to boost downhills and release gravity, going up like a giant ramp. This is impossible in areas with strong winds, as they slow you down.
There are upgrades for your ship that are kind of spread around on some planets. These increase your glide and overall power, and they are helpful, but getting to them can mostly be a chore. Fine-tuning and aiming for a small spot is really frustrating. You can constantly turn around and try again, trying to gain just the right height to reach an upgrade. The enjoyment is the constant momentum you can create via rolling on the ground, boosters, and using clouds to gain altitude. Once you reach the goal, which will be a giant blue light in the sky, you warp to the next planet, and I love the variety. Not a single planet is the same, and soaring over large oceans or weird formations is just awesome. The visuals are fantastic, with great water effects, rain effects, and an overall amazing sense of speed.
There’s not much else to the game except to enjoy the scenery. There are no high scores, no hidden secrets, or anything of that nature. Think of this as a “walking simulator” but up in the sky. The only gameplay is maintaining your flight and fighting elements on some planets. It’s over in about two hours, but it’s a beautiful two hours. If you love exploring planets in games like Mass Effect, you’re going to enjoy this quite a bit.
Space rock operas aren’t something you see in gaming much, and The Artful Escape is a visual and auditory treat for the senses. You play a young boy who is living in the shadows of his late uncle, who was a famous folk singer in the town he lives in. He feels forced to follow in his footsteps when he is actually a metalhead at heart. You are sent on an acid trip of a space rock opera through a universe of weird space creatures and worlds. You meet a man named Lightman (voiced by Carl Weathers of Rocky and The Predator fame), who is the most famous person in this universe and shreds like no other. He wants to help you overcome your fear of being yourself, and you go on a journey together to impress the tastemaker, who is the ultimate deciding creature in this universe.
Don’t think too much into the story, as it’s mostly filler for just a sidescrolling walking simulator with light rhythm mechanics. You always move to the right and can hold down a button to shred your guitar. It sounds awesome, and I never got tired of hearing the licks repeat. Each planet has its own licks, but the visual flair and usefulness of these are never explained, and despite being able to just hold down the button and shred while you slide down slopes, jump over platforms, and bounce on things, sometimes the background interacts and the background music will swell as you jump and shred. It’s cool when it does and sometimes gives me goosebumps because the music is so good, but 75% of the time I was just holding down the button, not sure when it would trigger an interaction.
At the end of each stage, you come across a boss of sorts that displays a Simon Says-style rhythm pattern. There’s zero challenge here, as you don’t need to memorize anything as you can play as the buttons appear. You also don’t get penalized for messing up, and that note just starts over. I found this mechanic fairly pointless and just filler, as some of these sessions are only a few notes long. It sounded and looked cool, but that was it. There’s pretty much zero gameplay here. The sidescrolling and shredding are literally an excuse to turn this story into a game. I also loved the art. There are crazy creature designs and lots of vaporwave aesthetics going on, with a multitude of lights and colors all over the place. Sadly, that’s all the game really offers. While the voice acting is also good, the dialog isn’t anything exciting, and I didn’t care at all about any of the characters. The game is so short that you don’t get any time to really invest in these characters.
So what we get is a three-hour adventure with great visuals and music but boring gameplay mechanics that only enhance the game in rare moments. I also found the engine poorly optimized, as even on high-end hardware, the game dipped well below 60FPS in some areas with lots of lighting effects going on. Turning everything down to low didn’t help much, so this is clearly an optimization issue. With that said, The Artful Escape is great for metalheads who want to chill out for a few hours and enjoy the visual treat, but otherwise, you aren’t missing much here. This is sadly just another adventure game where the developers think it’s cute or revolutionary to forgo any gameplay and solely focus on the visuals and music, but they forget this is a game first.
You play a woman named Marianne, who is a psychic medium. You start out the game in your foster father’s funeral home, and this is where the game introduces basic mechanics that you will use throughout the rest of the game. It starts out very confusing at first, and honestly, the story is just barely coherent enough to keep up with, but it constantly loses you in spots and then plays catch-up again. The game clearly relies more on characters and atmosphere than storytelling, as there’s no context to keep you engaged, no really long opening scene, just some dialogue that explains who Marianne is and what she can do. Within the first 10 minutes of the game, you will start to experience the scary stuff. Shadows on walls, strange sounds, and the “other side” look very reminiscent of Silent Hill in both concept and design.
This is an adventure game with very little action. It’s mostly basic puzzle solving and object finding. You walk around areas, reading notes and signs, listening to spirit echos in objects, and picking up objects that will be used at a later point. Thankfully, none of this was overbearing or focused too much on. It all felt pretty balanced and was light enough that the exploration and atmosphere mostly stayed center stage. The various locales are fantastically designed and beautiful to look at. The “other side” was mostly created for puzzle-solving scenarios, as you end up going back and forth between the two at the same time. See, this is Bloober Team’s biggest project and something that’s been in development since 2012. They needed the hardware to render two worlds at once via split-screen. This really does tax your system, as frames can drop by almost half in some areas even with DLSS enabled.
As you play the game, these main elements are switched up constantly, and to be honest, it’s really well-paced and feels just right. Some areas I was mostly exploring in the real world, then I would split off into the other side, and then there are some areas that have mirrors that allow you to go back and forth at will. These areas are the most puzzle-intensive, but never difficult. With that being said, the game is very easy, and only one small section of the game has any form of combat. The horror elements in the game are well done, and I love the monster designs. There is a creature that does stalk you throughout the entire game in certain areas, and these result in having to sneak around areas with barriers and hold your breath. The voice acting is superb, and the performances are great. Everything in the game just sucks you in, and I honestly didn’t stop playing until I finished the game.
I also never got lost or couldn’t figure something out on my own. The game is very linear, and as long as you wander around, examining everything that has a white dot on it, you will find your way around. Since the game mostly focuses on the story, there are times I get confused, but you get caught up with the cryptic stuff during the main cutscenes, and in the end, the game was satisfying and had a nice conclusion. The game can be finished in about 6–8 hours, and there’s no replay value, sadly. Sure, there are items to collect throughout the game, but I found pretty much everything in my first run-through. There are also no multiple endings, so the game will end exactly the same no matter what you do.
The game really has to be praised in the sound department as well. There are a lot of creepy ambient sounds and noises, and the voice acting for the monsters is just amazing. Despite the game being just about exploration, object hunting, and basic puzzle-solving, I never felt bored or wished the game gave me more. If the story and characters weren’t so interesting, I’d probably complain about this, as I’d want more gameplay, but we don’t always need complicated combat systems or deep RPG elements in every game. Bloober Team’s games tend to be a bit rough around the edges, but The Medium is rock-solid and shows they can make AAA titles with the best of them. I wish the game was optimized a little better, but with a fantastic story and characters and gameplay that feels just right, as well as great pacing, I can’t complain much.
The Blair Witch Project was a movie that scared the living crap out of me as a child and is still scary to this day. The mockumentary-style film was done very well and was so convincing that my own mother thought the movie was real lost footage for the longest time. The iconic effigy of the stickman, the child handprints standing in the corner, the cabin in the woods with the basement—all of it is in this game. You play Ellis Lynch, who is a sheriff in the town where the Black Hills Forest lies. You are trying to find a lost or kidnapped boy named Peter Shannon. Ellis ends up fighting his own demons and becoming another victim of the witch and the forest.
The game starts out easy enough and scare-free. You get introduced to the game mechanics, and the walking simulator begins. Within the first 20 minutes, the first scares start, and you are already lost in the forest. Throughout the entire game, you have a canine companion named Bullet, who is used to sniffing out clues when you find items in the forest to progress further to find Peter. You get a few tools, such as an older camcorder, a flashlight, a cell phone, and a walkie-talkie. These are all used in the game for scares and jumps, and they’re used really well. You can hail Bullet and call him towards you or have him seek to find the next area to explore, but this stops about halfway through the game. A weird “combat” mechanic is introduced and only used a few times by shining your flashlight on ghosts or demons that run around and circle you. Bullets will growl in their direction, and if you don’t flash them to death quickly, they will kill you. It’s only been used a few times, and I felt it was scary the first time, then underwhelming thereafter.
Most of the game is comprised of walking around, collecting photos, breaking effigies, and finding tapes. The camcorder is well used here as it is both a gameplay tool and used for story purposes. Red tapes allow you to manipulate time by rewinding events so they open passages or leave items around Ellis. It’s not super hard to figure out as each clip is less than 20 seconds, and it’s very obvious what the game wants you to pause on. The blue tapes just add story context, but the camera is used later in the game as a way to see hidden objects such as trails and enemies, as your flashlight eventually becomes useless. The game isn’t an open world, but the areas are large, and you will spend each section solving some sort of puzzle, but exploring the game is downright frightening. Bloober did a phenomenal job scaring you with real terror and fright. They use the unknown as a fear factor, and you never know what’s lurking in the woods. You feel isolated, alone, and scared, and for the longest time, I didn’t’ want to play the game because I was really scared. One scene in the middle of the game with Ellis trying to clear a path in a sawmill and running around the area in the dark with the only lights that make you feel safe, even for a few seconds, die on you and go out makes the terror that much better.
However, as the story progressed, I didn’t understand what was going on at all. There were scenes where Ellis was having flashbacks of war, but it never stated he was in one, at least not that I remembered. He’s obviously struggling with depression and PTSD, as he’s constantly fighting with his wife on the phone and has a record of going crazy. I just never understood how the forest worked or how the Blair Witch was incorporated into all of this. It’s obvious the 90’s film’s influence is present with a campsite that has the tent the crew used in the film with the flannel shirt. The cabin at the end of the game is almost a spitting image and is the scariest part of the game, but this section drags on way too long, lasting 45 minutes. I was running down endless hallways with my camera, and the story pretty much stopped here. I didn’t learn anything new about Ellis or the Witch or what was going on. It was just random events that we already know and jump scares. Having to creep around parts of the house to avoid enemies was scary, and using the phone’s messages to tell you not to look up or writing that said look away was sending chills up my spine, but this endless rat’s maze is one of Bloober’s largest problems in their design. Both Observer and Layers of Fear suffered from the endless hallway syndrome with no story progression and random events.
When it was all said and done, the game had an amazing atmosphere and should be played during October, a sleepover, or something. It’s very entertaining, the puzzles are very light, and there are tons of scares here for most people. I would have liked a better story, stronger characters, and more explanation of the witch, the forest, and the entire legend overall. The game has a very short ending in about 4 hours, and there are zero reasons to go back outside of scaring new friends. The game looks really good with great lighting effects, but it has an overall stiffness to it that I didn’t like. Bullet’s AI is dumb as dirt, as it actually broke my game a few times, requiring restarts as he couldn’t find a certain path or would blip out of existence and break the game. The game is also horribly optimized and runs poorly on PCs, even with high-end hardware. There is also no ultrawide screen support. Overall, the game is a fun and scary afternoon, but don’t expect a good story or anything like that.
Rage was all the…well, rage back in the day on PC. It featured “super textures” and fantastic gunplay that hadn’t been seen since Doom II or Quake 3 and various other claims from id Software. Upon release, it was a lifeless husk of bugs and glitches, and the only thing that was actually any good was the enemies and shooting itself. The open world was wasted and devoid of life and forget about the story as it was hardly there at all. Fast forward a decade later and we get Rage 2 developed by Avalanche Software known for the Just Cause series. What did we get? Well, a game that’s playing catch up as this should have been the game the first wasn’t. If this released 10 years ago it would have been a smash hit, but today it feels dated and well, still lifeless.
You play as The Ranger named Walker. There’s something about The Authority trying to wipe out humanity and a General Cross is the big bad guy. There are three major players who have main missions for you to ultimately bring about Project Dagger which is to eliminate the machines and genetic monsters roaming the Earth. Yeah, it’s very paper-thin, and the story still barely exists. Some of the main missions have slightly entertaining scripted events, but that’s about it. The voice acting is solid, but the characters are one-dimensional and don’t grow or mature, and you literally have no reason to care for any of them ever.
That brings us to the actual meat of the game, and that’s the shooting. Yes, Rage 2 feels and plays really well. The shooting is satisfying and bombastic, and there’s a wonderful arsenal of weapons to find and unlock, as well as abilities. Yes, I said to find. The weapons aren’t just handed to you. You have to find out where they are, explore the world, and find the Arks that contain these weapons. It’s a neat idea and rather satisfying once you find them, but I played 75% of the game with just the assault rifle and shotgun. That’s not a good thing, either. There was no urgency to get new weapons until I finally got tired of the same two and needed more weapons for harder enemies. Each area has a level from 1 to 10, and this is based on how much armor enemies have, or their faction, and boss health bars.
Once you do start shooting around, the game is a blast. Each weapon has an alt-fire mode, such as the shotgun having an air blast that knocks enemies off their feet. The Fire Revolver has ammo that sticks, and then you can snap your fingers and blow them up. The rocket launcher will lock on to enemies, and then the pulse cannon has a manual cooldown mode. I never got all the weapons, to be honest. There just wasn’t any need to, but what I did get was pretty cool. Even the BFG 9000 was an absolute blast to use but was rarely needed. You have abilities that are also supposed to be found, but I honestly rarely ever used them, as the weapons were enough. I had a shield, a dash, and a push, but that was it. Some abilities are passive, but the overdrive ability is the most useful. This unlocks a third alt-fire for each weapon, but you aren’t invincible or anything like that. You just do more damage. For projectiles, you get wing sticks, which are honestly completely useless despite being a staple weapon in the first game, and grenades. You also get three injectables for health, overdrive, and to recharge your abilities faster. Once you die, you get a defibrillation quick-time event to gain some health back one time until the next death. So, with all of this combined, there is a decent amount of stuff in the core shooting mechanic. It’s solid, but it’s sad that you don’t get the weapons in a way that makes them meaningful or makes you want them.
Once you’re ready to drive around the Wasteland, there’s not much to do outside of small side missions. These are all basically the same, with different names. You essentially kill everything in each outpost, and there are things to find inside them. Containers with cash or filtrite, which is used for upgrades, datapads, and Ark chests, which hold upgrades for mods and vehicles, These are peppered all throughout the game and honestly make up the bulk of the playtime. If you only told the main story, it would be over in about 10 hours. The issue is that after completing maybe 60–70% of the other stuff in the world, I stopped caring. You just run in and shoot everything, collect stuff, and move on to the next one. There’s no incentive to do this once you’ve fully upgraded everything. You need cash to buy ammo, mods, etc. from shops, but filtrite is used for weapon and ability upgrades, and that is taken from enemies. The only really interesting side missions were the Mutant Crusher nests. These are giant bosses, but they are all the same. In fact, every boss in the game is the same. Just blast it to death or blast it until it’s vulnerable, and then blast it some more. It’s very one-note with the action, and the game heavily relies on it rather than using the action in smart and inventive ways.
I also had no incentive to acquire all the vehicles in the game, so what’s the point? Your main vehicle, the Phoenix, is just fine, as it has a gatling gun and homing missiles, and it does the job. Some vehicles are just for fun, such as a giant monster truck and a hovercraft, but honestly, there’s not much out there in the world. There are a few towns, but these are all static and lifeless. There are no interesting characters, as NPCs repeat often, and the dialog is uninteresting. There’s just no reason to care about anything in this game, and most players won’t stick around long enough past the main story. It just grows incredibly repetitive, and you just go on autopilot, driving from one side of the mission to another, just checking them off of your map. One question mark to the next, blasting everything, and then doing it again for 50+ hours. Again, the shooting is solid, but you can only do it in this fashion for so long. It works in games like Doom because it makes the world around it adjust to the constant shooting. I honestly wish Rage 2 was a linear story-driven shooter, and then it would have worked really well. Rage just doesn’t do open-world gameplay right. That was the major flaw in the first game, as it was a pointless, open world devoid of anything. Shooting caravans every so often doesn’t justify an open world. It’s also way too big for its own good. It can take over half an hour just to drive from one side to the other. It’s part of the reason why it took me an entire year and a half to finish this game. It’s daunting and feels like a chore rather than something I can’t wait to see, like The Elder Scrolls or Fallout, which have interesting open worlds stuffed full of lore and interesting things.
So, we just get a boring, empty world with static towns and blast everything to death with a paper-thin story, uninteresting characters, and weapons that are hidden and locked away with no incentive to go get them except out of sheer boredom. That’s not good. Despite all of this, though, the game is fairly entertaining for a good 30 or so hours until you explore most of the map and finish the story, and I was just done. There’s a good core here that Rage 3 should keep and ditch the open world entirely. I liked the enemy design; the graphics are phenomenal and look amazing, but this isn’t it, guys. The series still needs a lot of work and fine-tuning to become a top-notch FPS.
Bullet time. While The Matrix made it popular in pop culture, Max Payne started it all in the video game realm. You play a cop, Max Payne, who is framed for the murder of another NYPD cop. Your wife and newborn child were also murdered, and you are trying to get revenge on the people who did it. The story isn’t anything amazing, but Max Payne’s voice actor and the well-done writing keep you hooked long enough to find out what happened behind the scenes. The game is told in a comic noir graphic-novel style, and it suits the game well. The cut scenes are imaginative and different, and they don’t look cheap or like the developers were trying to take shortcuts.
Outside of the story, the gameplay is all about shooting, because that’s literally it. Max runs around with various weapons, such as Barrettas, Ingrams, shotguns, grenade launchers, Molotov cocktails, grenades, and assault rifles, to mow down the Mafia and corrupt cops. Bullet time is the main gameplay element here, and when activated, Max does a jump dodge in the direction you move, and you can see him dodging bullets in real-time. This is actually a mechanic you must master, as most situations require you to use it to stay alive. You can’t stand in one spot, or you will be dead in a few hits, and there’s no cover system. I had to quicksave every 2-3 minutes as well because the game is so difficult. It’s cool to jump dodge around a corner, but once Max lands, there’s a delay in him getting up, and you are completely vulnerable to gunfire. I had to make sure I jump dodged behind cover or across a hallway so I wouldn’t die the second the bullet time finished. You can also activate bullet time and just run your meter down so you can run and gun with it too.
There are very few scenarios in which you do more than press buttons. One scene has Max driving a crate crane around an area, but it’s nothing special, and there are some interactive objects that trigger comic-cut scenes, but 95% of the game is just shooting. The weapons themselves feel good, and I felt I had to switch up weapons depending on the situation to make my life easier. The locales are varied, but they are a bit too stale and boring for my taste. They don’t quite capture the noir feeling of the comic-cut scenes, but there is one level early on called Ragna Rock, which was a gothic cult house that reminded me a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, so that’s a good thing. The game really does feel like a first-generation PS2/Xbox game, but it’s very polished. The game flows nicely, but the difficulty is all over the place; you will die dozens and dozens of times in this game.
The visuals are clean and look nice even 20 years later. I installed a texture upgrade patch and some other things to make the game upscale to 4K nicely and play on modern hardware, and it looks pretty good. Even in the original, the facial textures are nice and very realistic, and the aesthetic of the game stands out over most shooters of its time. The voice acting is great, and I finished the game in about 7 hours. After you finish it, there’s literally nothing else to do, as the multiplayer mode was scrapped. It’s a fantastic single-player game that holds up well even today, despite its insane difficulty and unbalanced gameplay. The story isn’t anything special, but Max is a great character to dive into, and it makes for a fun evening.
The superhero video game renaissance all started with Batman. After the Hollywood superhero films grew up and became an epic universe taking over the entire industry, the video game versions feel a little more nuanced and personable. Rocksteady really hit it off with the Batman: Arkham series, and the game just got better from there. Telltale took the storytelling of superhero comics and turned it into an epic original story.
The Enemy Within follows right after the end of the first game, with Bruce having defeated Lady Arkham, The Penguin, and Catwoman. The Enemy Within feels more epic, has a larger overarching story, and has more villains in place. We get Bane, Riddler, Harley Quinn, The Joker, and Mr. Freeze all wrapped up in one big Batman package. The story from Telltale is one of the most unique and interesting I have seen in the Batman universe to date. It feels tightly knit and has resolution at the end instead of spiraling out of control into a million different spin-offs. Main characters can die, and Batman can even break his own code if you choose.
This game is probably one of the only Telltale adventure games that cuts out all the fat from the choices part of the game. Even the dialogue option has meaning and makes a difference towards the end goal. There are larger moments that can turn the story around and fewer twists and surprises in this game, but the overall story is a slow burn rather than starting and stopping as in the first game. Some episodes are slower-paced, sometimes too slow, and this game really has too few action sequences and mini-games for my taste. I like the story, but some of the cut scenes can be nearly 20 minutes long with very little input. Again, this is another “interactive movie” with very little gameplay outside of some quick-time events and even less puzzle solving.
What we get is an origin story that doesn’t go too far back. We get to see how The Joker became insane and hated Batman, how Harley became a psycho herself, and how the relationship between Batman and Catwoman grows or falls apart depending on how you play. We also get to see how Riddler became the way he did, and one thing I need to point out is that this game feels more like it can happen in today’s world. Less magic and fantasy stuff from the villains. Everything looks and feels like it can be explained somehow in today’s world, which I love. All the villains are just normal humans with a slight scientific twist to them.
I will say we don’t really get a backstory on Bane or Mr. Freeze. Mr. Freeze isn’t used all that much, and Bane is just an annoying bully through the whole thing. We do get a new entity called The Agency, which is an original faction used in the game to counterbalance The Pact (all the villains), and it’s up to you to decide how The Agency is towards Batman. Amanda Waller is a love-or-hate kind of character and mostly one-dimensional, but we get to see Lucius Fox’s daughter Tiffany, and the game eventually plays into the psychological aspect of Joker and Batman’s relationship like the comics do.
At the end of the day, we really feel like we know Batman, Alfred, Joker, and Harley all too well. Telltale did an amazing job of getting you inside their heads and making you really feel like you’re controlling Bruce’s fate and story. While the game is too light on gameplay and a little slow-paced, I couldn’t stop playing as I wanted to see what happened next. I really weighed my choices and felt that at the end, everything from the first game to the end of this one was satisfying and meaningful. This is clearly the best Batman game to play if you want an amazing story.
The Shadows Edition adds some enhanced visuals, better textures, lighting, and a noir style that I played the game in that makes everything black and white except certain colors like red, green, and various accents of the character’s iconic colors. The game’s upgrades look great, and I didn’t run into any bugs like I usually do with Telltale games.
It was a brave move to move the Halo franchise away from Master Chief’s point of view. After the success of ODST, Bungie continued this move with a prequel to the original game and how Cortana was discovered. You play as a ragtag team of elite soldiers, and you play as the Noble Six. The funny thing about Noble Six is that he is basically a nobody, and you witness the deaths and heroisms of your fellow squadmates and search for the last hope of humanity.
The game plays and feels exactly like Halo 3, which is a good thing. The game has many of the same weapons and power-ups as Halo 3 as well. The game has a decent length of nine levels, and the progression is well done. Each level takes place in a new area, so I never felt bored like I did in ODST. From outdoor areas with sweeping vistas to tight and controlled corridors, The game is fast-paced, hectic, and a lot of fun. I felt it was less difficult than previous games and much more balanced. I was able to quickly get a feel for my favorite weapons and the ebb and flow of the gunplay and enemies.
Again, the same enemies in Halo 3 exist here, and with the introduction of the Brutes from Halo 3, they make for a formidable foe and some of the toughest in the game. There are a few flying creatures, and I found there was less vehicle combat in this game than in any others in the series. Most of the game is on foot, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Most objectives will require you to activate or defend something, and this was typical for FPS games back in the day, but it never felt old. Halo has this magical formula of great AI, enemy balance, and knowing when and where to use each weapon. You know what situations call for which weapons, and when you see the weapon, you go for it, and when the situation flips, you know when to drop it and go for another. I know in tight corridors I want a shotgun, so I drop the pistol and pick up an energy rifle, as a scoped weapon is useless. When I run out of ammo, I know there is an alien equivalent lying around, which is great.
Reach just really isn’t much different than Halo 3 or any game before or after it. It’s a solid game with one of the better campaigns in the series, and the multiplayer is rock solid. With this being a spin-off, you’re expected to see asset flips and familiar gameplay, but the shift from Master Chief is what makes it feel a little fresh. With the update for The Master Chief Collection, the game has better visuals, runs at 60+ FPS, and supports ultrawide screens, mice, keyboards, and current-generation hardware. It looks dated, but clean, and feels like a modern shooter does on a PC. I didn’t run into any crashes or major glitches, so it’s a solid port.
I don’t have much else to say other than that it’s a good Halo game. The ending is solid, albeit sad, and sets you up for the main trilogy. I loved Halo 3, so being able to get back into that era of Halo was great, and the upgrades make this a no-brainer for any Halo or FPS fan. If you don’t like Halo, this game will not change your mind at all, as it’s about as rudimentary for the series as it gets, and the story is a little on the light side compared to other games in the series. I didn’t care for any of the characters, and if you aren’t familiar with the future timeline, it won’t make much sense to you.
Do you trust your government? Do you trust your social media outlets? Do you trust anyone with money or power? That’s what Watch Dogs 2 constantly asks you as you play through the campaign. You play as a hacker named Marcus who is trying to take over what Aiden Pierce did in the first Watch Dogs and take down the corporate conglomerate Blume and their ctOS 2.0 system that is continuously monitoring the people’s every move and step to a creepy factor.
Watch Dogs 2, now set in San Francisco instead of Chicago, is a gorgeous open-world game full of many activities as well as side missions to complete next to the main campaign. There are also collectibles and various shops in which you can deck Marcus out in cool hip threads. But that’s not what I want to talk about first. Let’s first talk about this whole “hack anything” gameplay feature that Ubisoft bragged about for Watch Dogs 1 and didn’t deliver. Your main weapon is your cell phone, and when you move the camera, a white line will connect to everything around you, from cars to electrical boxes to people, and let you either control it or the citizen’s cell phones in various ways. Steal cash from their bank account, burn their phone up (and kill them in the process), set the police or gangs on them, and even listen in on texts and audio calls. It’s really neat and works much better than the first game, and it’s integral for combat when going into restricted areas, which are about 90% of every mission’s contents.
When you get to a restricted area, it can be as small as a house or as large as a rocket-building facility or even a boat. You can either go in guns blazing, which is impossible early on as the better weapons are really expensive to buy, or you must unlock weapon slots. Your main tools are your RC jumper car and your RC helicopter. The RC Copter comes in halfway through the campaign, but you get the car immediately, and you can complete entire missions with this thing without ever having to walk in. Set up just outside the restricted boundaries and control your RC car through vents and doors, have it hack laptops, and even distract guards by making their cell phone ring so you can roll on by. The RC car has physical capabilities that the copter cannot, such as picking up items and physically hacking certain things that require access to the main objectives.
The RC helicopter is great for scouting and remotely hacking things that don’t require physical interaction. Now, there are some missions in which Marcus must physically hack into something himself and these can get a little tough. You don’t last very long in this game by shooting, and you die after a few shots. It’s better to maybe call in the mafia on a guard and have them shoot it out and thin the herd a bit, or use the cameras around the building and maybe rig electrical boxes and have guards go out that way. Sometimes I would just remotely have a car rampage its way through an area, which is a lot of fun. There are so many ways to complete objectives, and it’s basically a fun sandbox of hacking and shooting. The RC car and RC copter are a godsend, as some facilities are just too difficult for Marcus to enter without dying constantly.
Then there are a few missions where you just hack your way through via scripted puzzles which are a blast. Making people suffer or humiliating them through various hacking scenarios is just so much fun, and I always wanted more. Outside of these missions, scenarios are how you escape from the cops, and that’s a whole thing. You do have a cooldown timer when you are caught, and once you hide long enough, everyone will break off, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. In the city, running from the cops requires either hiding away from the streets or ducking down in a car. I would sometimes duck down in a car, and when a cop car strolled by, I would hack their car and kick it in reverse before they spotted me. It’s really cool to see so many ways to play around with the game, from having cranes lift you hundreds of feet into the air and onto a building to using a forklift to deliver an explosive canister to a group of guards and have them blow up.
That’s what the game is mostly made up of, with some side activities such as races, hacking events, real-time co-op side missions, and situations in which another player enters your area and you must find them with your hacker vision before they steal your followers. Outside of this, the story is great, with memorable characters that I really cared about thanks to the amazing voice acting and well-written dialog. The cut scenes kept me pushing through this game for an entire week, and I didn’t want to put it down. The game uses fake groups that represent real-life corporations such as Nudle (Google) and Nvite (Facebook), and the overall social media trend is being used to manipulate the public. It really makes you think about what’s going on in the world today, and I have to commend Ubisoft for making real-world problems like racism, sexism, and various social issues present in the game to wake up gamers.
The game also looks fantastic, with very realistic San Francisco such as the Golden Gate Bridge, the famous Hairpin Street, and various monuments and buildings. The game, however, suffers from a poorly optimized engine with even two GPU generations ahead of what’s required, struggling to keep up at max settings at 4K. MSAA anti-aliasing cripples anything but multiple GPU setups, and I constantly would go from 90FPS and dip into the 30s during driving scenes or climbing buildings for no apparent reason. Despite all of this, the game looks fantastic.
Overall, Watch Dogs 2 is a sandbox of hacking and shooting with so many fun scenarios and ways to complete them. The story, characters, and dialog are all well written and keep you coming for more, and using real-world problems to deliver this story is a plus. Despite the poorly optimized engine, the game looks amazing, and the rebuilt San Francisco is a blast. I just didn’t care much for the tedious activities and collecting spray cans and hacker points to max out my research. It just felt incredibly tedious.
I love horror games set in space, as it’s probably the most unknown part of life that we know, the most isolated, and can be quite scary. Observation forgoes the aliens, monsters, and ghosts and literally gives us an enemy that is the unknown incarnate. You play as the AI of the space station observation, and you help out crew members trying to unravel the mystery as to why their space station broke down.
Playing as the AI itself is rather cool and something completely different in an adventure game like this. You control cameras in a couple dozen sectors of the station as well as a sphere that you can move around in freely. The sphere is not where you spend most of your time in the game, but rather flipping through cameras, downloading data, and solving puzzles. It sounds odd and confusing, but the game really opens up with fun puzzles and an incredibly tense atmosphere.
The entire goal of the game is to follow the objectives the humans give you, which can range from scanning systems to locking down hatches. You can download audio logs and scan documents found on walls throughout the ship for extra story insight, but it’s not as easy as that. Each module in the station has 2–3 cameras, and they have a limited viewing range. Most stuff comes from laptops, which require you to add them to your link list by pressing three random buttons that come up or turning on the power socket near them. These contain schematics to open doors, audio logs, and sometimes hints. Your SAMOS has a map of every module, and you can switch between cameras here as well as check various systems throughout the ship when an objective allows it.
It seems kind of lame on paper, but the execution of making what you can do as limited as the AI or a computer can be is just so fascinating to play with and explore. Being an AI that can see what goes on with these humans and you can’t do anything for them makes for some great tension and puts the entire story into another perspective that really hasn’t been explored all that much. I feel if this game were played normally as a human, it would have been boring, but whole new mechanics open up and require you to think differently. While the objectives change frequently and most things are only done once, they are fun puzzles that require a little bit of thinking and reflex. One of my favorite things was going out into the sphere and exploring the space station in space. It was such a cool moment to see that, as most games put you in a fighter jet, space just doesn’t look so big and empty. There’s very soft music and little ambiance, so it’s just you and the station in this big empty void with a planet below you. Subtle things like this can really boost a game’s cool factor.
The visuals are pretty good, but the animations are really awkward, animatronic-like, and kind of creepy. The voice acting is spot-on, as I felt the character’s pain and sadness through their voice, so it really hits home. My only big complaint is that the game is 4 hours long and the story has too much of a cliffhanger. The story itself has a lot of plot holes because we never know why the station was attacked, what these beings are, or why they want the people in the station. Without spoiling the story, the ending is just a big, “And that’s it?” but it does leave room for a possible sequel…maybe.
Overall, Observation is one of the standout games this year due to its tense atmosphere, great voice acting, and overall unique gameplay mechanics that really feel fresh. I wanted it to last longer and I wanted the story to be more fleshed out, but what we get is something really memorable and unique, but sadly, most people won’t play this because it’s an indie game and these don’t get pushed like they should.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…