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.
Like so many countless games before it, Battlefield V tries to install the terror of war into the player with bombastic action sequences and dramatic, tense moments while bringing a visually stunning experience to the player’s home. Battlefield V does most of this well, but clearly, not enough time was given after Battlefield 1 to really flesh out the experience and make it something memorable.
The campaign follows the same design choice as BF1 with short War Stories, this time only 5, following various parts of the theater of WWII, from Norwegian tundras to the deserts of Africa. I really loved this idea in BF1, as it was a fresh take on a military campaign that was never done before. Here, the game follows this formula too closely and doesn’t evolve it at all. With pre-rendered cut-scenes shoved in, the game does little to offer interesting characters this time around or settings. The “open-ended” level design approach is abused here and detracts from the action that BF1 brought by forcing the player to use stealth in every single story.
I don’t want to run around a massive map trying to accomplish three objectives by infiltrating a small village or guard post by disabling alarms and stealth killing people just so I don’t have to fight it out. It makes for a more generic feeling, as there are few scripted events in this game. This happens in every story, with the first four abusing it the most. The best part of BFV is the raw shooting, as the weapons handle beautifully and are a riot to use as the authentic, accurate WWII weapons we have become accustomed to really don’t feel like arcadey pop guns anymore.
The last war story is actually the best of them all, and I would have liked to see more of that one. You play as a German Commando, which is usually never done in these games, using a Tiger tank to fend off the Americans in one last stand in Germany. The characters are actually great, and the intensity is fantastic. I really felt the heat of war, and something about being on the losing side makes it that much more intense. The other stories aren’t as interesting and feel pretty bland outside of this final story.
Multiplayer has been expanded upon, but it is generally the same as before, with just a few modes added. 64-player Grand Conquest is probably the best here alongside Team Deathmatch, as the battles are intense and the tug-of-war aspect of these modes is addictive. Sadly, it just hasn’t changed much and rides too hard on the unique feeling BF1 brought fans and doesn’t carve its own path, which is surprising as this is a WWII shooter and not WWI. Maybe the uniqueness of the BF1 reboot forced DICE to bring out their creative effort, and after that, they just felt too safe bringing nearly everything back.
The visuals are absolutely stunning and somehow top BF1 with amazing lighting, textures, and animations, and the sound is superb. This is probably one of the best-looking games of this generation, and you will need a hefty rig to run it right. Overall, Battlefield V is a fantastic WWII shooter that, while smoothing over the ideas of the last game, just doesn’t deliver the fun that counterbalances the authenticity of the era it tries to emulate. With a lackluster campaign and only the final chapter being interesting, and multiplayer that hasn’t changed an awful lot, DICE has got to bring something amazing with the next game, or gamers will quickly become fatigued with the franchise that has long stood its ground in a crowded military shooter era.
When a game as big as Call of Duty 4 gets remastered, it takes you down a serious memory lane. I remember watching the E3 reveal video of the “All Ghillied Up” level and being blown away. The cinematic gameplay and delivery of CoD4 were unheard of back in the day and helped push that generation of consoles forward. It was a groundbreaking game, despite where the series has gone over the years. Each level was carefully laid out with memorable moments and varied gameplay that most first-person shooters didn’t do 10 years ago, and that’s just the campaign. The multiplayer rewrote how first-person shooter online play should be.
That sound you hear when you hit an opponent and the X that appears in your crosshairs when you nail them? That was all Call of Duty. Being able to earn ranks and upgrade your weapons over time? That was Call of Duty. The maps were fantastically designed, and the weapons felt amazing to shoot. The movement was fluid, the pacing was perfect, and the opening scene on the ship is something I will never forget. Take all of that, fast-forward 10 years, and then stick the game in a current-generation engine, and you have a game that holds up and is better than any recent Call of Duty game.
While the campaign only lasts about 4 hours or so, there’s so much variety. From the stealth missions in Pripyat to using the AC-130 and bombing the crap out of Russian ultranationalists and even running away from choppers in vehicles, There’s various terrain, weapons, and pacing to make the campaign feel far from boring. While the story is generic and barely interesting, the gameplay isn’t. You play as two separate military teams from the US Marine Corps and the SAS. “Soap” MacTavish and Jackson are your two guys, and while it doesn’t really matter gameplay-wise, Captain Price is actually quite a memorable character as he has interesting dialog, cracks jokes, and has such a unique appearance. It seems silly, but Call of Duty 4 was the only game in the series that had anything really interesting or memorable going on.
The multiplayer here is not only groundbreaking but also super addictive and fun. There are several different game modes, but my favorite has always been Team Deathmatch. The maps are perfectly designed and make it easy to remember every nook and cranny. Upgrading weapons and ranking up is so fun in this game, and you could literally spend dozens and dozens of hours just in the multiplayer alone. Despite how much time you spend on the online portion, I just wish the campaign was longer. It’s such an overlooked part of the game and trumps any future Call of Duty campaign.
The visuals have been massively upgraded to the point where current hardware will have a hard time rendering them. The textures look beautiful and have been painstakingly redone to make this game look like it was released yesterday. Lighting, physics, sound, and models have all been redone to look current, and it looks amazing. So much so that you need at least 8GB of VRAM just to see all the textures in glorious detail and at least GTX1060 to get the game off the ground at 1080p.
Overall, Modern Warfare Remastered is a snippet of a game that pushed the first-person military shooter in a new direction, but it also shows just how far downhill the series has fallen. Carefully planned-out campaigns and memorable maps are long gone for this tired franchise, but at least we have an upgraded version of one of the best shooters of the last decade.
The Batman Arkham series is probably the best superhero video game series ever created. Arkham Asylum really paved new ground for action games in general, from the narrative, combat, and puzzle-solving aspects to even stealth mechanics. Arkham City built an open world on top of this with crazy Riddler puzzles, many side missions, and a deeper, more exciting world to explore, so where could the game go from there? A prequel, of course, and after the Arkham City series, fatigue started to settle in as it was a long, tough game.
So, here we are with Arkham Origins, the Batman game no one wanted or asked for. It’s also not developed by Rocksteady, so a lot of people became wary of the game, including the original voice actors being replaced by younger-sounding ones. This game is set only a couple of years after Batman becomes who he is and hasn’t met The Joker yet. The Gotham PD has labeled him as a wanted criminal, and Bruce Wayne is young and full of anger. It’s nice to see Batman become a little more flawed and feel more fragile than before, but it doesn’t last long, and I really wanted more depth for these younger characters.
Origins is kind of open-world and is more like a snippet copied and pasted straight out of City, which I felt was too safe. The world is devoid of life, kind of boring to explore, and there’s not much to do outside of a few side missions and solving tower puzzles to unlock fast travel locations, which is also kind of pointless. The meat of the game is the story missions, and they are quite a bit of fun here and there. As I stated earlier, the game plays too safe, so the memorable cinematic moments from previous games are pretty much gone. You literally go from one room to the next, jumping around, beating up bad guys, doing the occasionally flawed stealth mission, and then having a boss fight.
The combat system is really starting to feel stale here; while it’s really good, bouncing from baddie to baddie and stringing up combos and doing instant counters, it just feels too repetitive. You can use your gadgets to get an advantage, but just mashing the attack button and countering works just fine, so the gadgets felt kind of useless, and I never felt in such dire straits that I was clinging to pixels of health and barely getting out of fights. The stealth areas also feel stale as swinging around the tops of gargoyles and waiting for the right moment to swoop in on an enemy, take them down, and scramble back up is a tiring formula, and again, using Bat gadgets felt kind of useless as no matter what you use, the enemies are alerted and their patrol patterns are disrupted, making it a cat and mouse game of open opportunities.
I also felt the stealth arenas just weren’t set up as nicely as previous games and lacked something unique about each area. Even the level design is kind of whatever, with recycled content from previous games and absolutely nothing new to make this game stand out from the rest. I lost interest in finding data packs in each level, and the overall atmosphere of the game just feels dusty and dried out here.
Let’s talk about bugs and glitches. Even after all this time, there are bugs that caused my PC to completely crash, requiring a hard reset, texture glitches that require game configuration file edits, and FPS drops out the wazoo even on a top-of-the-line PC. It’s unacceptable, and the game almost became unplayable. The game also looks dated using City’s engine, but somehow not as good-looking. Textures are blurry in spots, and the animations are a little wonky here and there. The entire game just doesn’t feel as polished as the last two.
That’s not to say Origins is a bad game; it’s just unnecessary. Stuck between console generation cycles and being released too soon after City was just a huge mistake. The story is interesting enough to keep playing, but it doesn’t stand out and just feels like a massive expansion to City rather than a prequel.
Far Cry is one of the many Ubisoft franchises that has been infected with sequelitis and “Ubisoftitis” specifically. For the last few years, their open-world games have suffered from the same stale structure and layout, and they have had a hard time finding their own personalities. Far Cry 5 is one of the first Ubisoft games in a while that has evolved a little and hasn’t quite carved its own nook in its portfolio, but it knocked out quite a few chunks to get started. It feels more RPG, and the activities and missions unfold more organically, with total freedom for the player to go about doing what they want, while some activities and missions are constantly revolving and moving a bit.
You play Sheriff Deputy Rook, who gets a call to head to a small county in Montana that is overrun by a religious cult. Things go south when your helicopter is shot down and you are taken prisoner along with your State Marshall partner. Joseph Seed is your main villain, and like all Far Cry games, he’s the main focus of the game, and he’s a great character. While not quite as good as Far Cry 3, Ubisoft unloaded their full-blown crazy bag here and made some insanely sick characters.
The main goal of Far Cry 5 is to take out Joseph’s three siblings, who have taken over a third of the map each. These story missions unfold by obtaining notoriety with each sibling as you finish missions and activities. There are three-story segments per sibling that are unlocked, and you are warped to a story area. These are some of the best parts of the games, as each sibling has their own unique way of controlling the people and has their own sick and twisted techniques. The final mission for each sibling requires you to destroy their bunker, and while this gets tedious, it’s only done three times in the whole game.
All missions require gunning Peggies down, but some side missions include freeing prisoners from roaming vans, solving Prepper Stash puzzles where you have to figure out how to get into a building or cave, stunt devil activities, and not to mention the all-new Far Cry Arcade, which has various levels scattered around the world displayed as arcade machines or posters. The level is a short variation that includes objectives that are fast-paced and insane.
While there are a lot of fun activities and missions, such as fishing and small item hunting, it just isn’t quite enough to completely clear the stale air that Far Cry has created over the last few years. I loved the villains and characters, and the shooting is solid with a massive open world, but there are other issues such as each weapon feeling the same, grinding for cash is a chore, and perk unlocks come at a snail’s pace. You can buy gold bars with real-world cash to quicken the weapon and outfit purchases, so this is probably why it’s a grind.
For the most part, I stuck with the same four guns throughout the entire game, as I never really found a huge difference between them, and around 10 hours in, I started skipping the side activities and gunning for the end of the story. While the world is fun to explore and there is a lot to do and complete, it all starts feeling the same after so long. The game is nowhere near bad, but just repetitive and requires a lot of patience and dedication to complete, but outside the main story, there’s really no drive to.
Far Cry is at its best here, and the formula has been perfected. I honestly can’t see where else this series can go. Open-world first-person shooters are notorious for getting stale quickly, and unless they have an amazing story and characters, there’s no reason to stick around for too long. The arcade mode may keep you coming back if you really love the shooting in this game, but the main story has so much to offer that I rarely dabbled in arcade mode. Overall, the game is well worth a purchase, but if you haven’t liked Far Cry in the past, then this game won’t really change your mind.
Shenmue is one of those games I never got a chance to play and have wanted to all these years. You always hear people talking about it; it pops up in “Best of” videos and “Worst of” videos, especially for the Dreamcast system itself. Shenmue was a beast all on its own back in the day, as no one had tried these gameplay ideas before. Sure, it’s an adventure game on the surface, but it’s also a life simulator, fighting game, and mini-game extravaganza all in one. It’s weird, beautiful, ugly, and frustrating all at the same time, and yet somehow it all kind of works.
You play as a high school boy named Ryo Hazuki. He gets home one day, and his father dies while fighting a Chinese man named Lhan Di. He steals something called the Dragon Mirror, and you must somehow get it back. The weird thing about the story is that the end goal never really matters, but all the stuff in-between. What is this dragon mirror, and why does Ryo need to get it back? It’s really never explained except something about fulfilling a prophecy and the end times will come if Di keeps it… I don’t know; the story is so unbelievable and weird.
The game starts out like any other adventure game as you wake up in your room and commence rummaging around the house, pulling open drawers, finding items, and trying to figure out where to go. Thankfully, that’s something Shenmue does, as I rarely didn’t know what to do or where to go. After setting foot in the village, I watched a few cutscenes, knocked on about a dozen doors, and kept going through the town, figuring out where to go. Eventually, I ended up in the main city, where half of the game takes place. The first few hours have Ryo running around asking questions to get clues, then going to that person or place for either a cutscene or more clues. This continuous cycle of clue-finding felt satisfying as I met some interesting characters and felt connected to the world of Shenmue.
Sadly, there’s a huge, disappointingly frustrating factor about all of these events: they are time-sensitive. You have to wait for in-game time to pass before certain events unfold. That wouldn’t be so bad, but you can’t skip time, so I literally went and did other things like chores, cooking, or playing a different game while time passed. Sometimes it would take almost 45 minutes for time to pass where I needed it to be, then a small cutscene would play out, and then it’s back to waiting again once I find the next clue that requires more waiting. It would also be fine if there were things to do, but outside of a few real Sega arcade games and collecting Gotcha prizes, there are no side quests or anything to do. It’s so incredibly boring to sit and wait through all of this, and if you miss your time frame, you have to wait again. Waiting also goes for catching the bus to the harbor and working a real forklift job.
Oh my God, yes, the infamous forklift section of the game. This literally took up an entire 4 hours of the game. You work 8-5 for 5 in-game days driving a forklift from one end of the harbor and loading boxes into a warehouse. It’s both beautifully addictive and stupidly frustrating and annoying. All of this means that the Mad Angels, a drug cartel in the game, will pick on you because you’re new and you can obtain information from them after every fight. Not to mention the annoying forklift race at the beginning of each day on the same track. Man, it’s so stupid and frustrating, and I both loved it and hated it.
After the forklift section, there are a few more fights, and the game is done. The fighting itself is surprisingly impressive, with responsive controls, fast and fluid animations, and plenty of combos. Outside of the free battles, there are QTE battles, which can be hard, and the reaction time they give you is literally milliseconds. The visuals of the game haven’t been updated all that much. There are newer lighting effects and better shadows, and the characters have smoothed over textures, but overall it still looks like a 20-year-old game. There are still plenty of bugs and glitches, such as being stuck in first-person mode after driving the forklift, hard crashes, and objects disappearing completely.
The music is annoying and repetitive, with only one short track per area, and it just isn’t very good. The voice acting is awful, and even the Japanese voice track is questionable sometimes. The audio in general still sounds compressed and really bad, and the game is just really rough around the edges. So why should you play it? It’s a weird piece of gaming history on a system that died faster than it could blink. The characters are interesting, and the various activities are fun, but the long waiting and various missteps keep Shenmue from being a fantastic game.
Shenmue II
I have a weird disposition toward the entire Shenmue series. I really want to love it, but the problem is that the game is so flawed and so strange that it almost feels like a chore to complete. The first game was tolerable as it was fairly short, and the age made it more forgiving, but Shenmue II has no excuse. It was on a new generation of consoles, and I have literally never played a sequel in a series that was a copy and paste of the last game.
The game picks off exactly where the last one took off, with Ryo heading to Hong Kong, and as soon as I saw the first cutscene, I sighed, rolled my eyes, and did an entire facepalm. I expected the game to look fairly newer, have a new UI, better controls, and an all-new look, but we got a literal engine port from the Dreamcast with just new areas to explore and a story that’s four times longer than the original (the original Xbox game had four discs!).
As I got off the boat, I really realized it was the exact same game as Ryo controls, just as poorly. The gameplay is exactly the same to the T, and I buckled in for a long ride. The first third of the game has Ryo running around talking to people, gathering clues, meeting a few new faces, and trying to continue to find Lan Di and avenge his father’s death. At least more stories are explained, and we find out what every mystery in the first game means. To be honest, the first third of the game isn’t all that bad; yes, it’s more Shenmue I stuff, but it’s easy and straightforward for the most part. Once I got to the second third of the game, things got tedious, frustrating, and a little annoying. This series, for some reason, loves having Ryo work and be miserable when it comes to progress. Twice I was stuck having to work on the most boring and tedious mini-game I have ever played to earn enough money to move on. You can earn $10 a crate by helping someone move them from one side of the room to another, and it’s all about QTEs with the directional buttons. You usually never earn more than $60 as there isn’t enough time allotted for more work, and gambling is usually risky and out of the question altogether. The game favors the AI more than you, so you can easily blow all your cash and have to play that mini-game six or seven times over to earn it back again.
Outside of the awful mini-games, the second third of the game has Ryo running around inside buildings that are built like mazes with hallways that all look the same. It’s not as easy as using the elevator, as you will have to use the stairs to go up, use that elevator to go further down, then use the stairs again to go down further. In between are free battles, QTE events, and the occasional boss fight. It’s so tedious and frustrating as there are little dialog quips that are in between repetitive gameplay sections that can’t be skipped and just add to what makes the entire game annoying to play.
Once you get past that third of the game, the last third is the exact opposite of the rest of the game. It’s a 2-hour-long cutscene that lets you interact every so often via dialog or by running down a few paths, QTEs, and more dialog. Let that sink in for a minute. A 2-hour-long cutscene. All you’re doing is going through a forest and mountain pass to get to a village with a local accompanying you. This is also where most of the story unfolds and becomes more interesting.
I have a lot of things to complain about with this game and the series as a whole, but the story is still good enough to keep me trucking along and putting up with the repetitive, drawn-out nonsense the game dishes out. Not to mention the several times the game crashed and my progress was set back to my last save. The game itself is just ugly to look at and looks like a slightly updated Dreamcast game in only a few ways. The gameplay style is just too dated, frustrating, and unnecessary to get the story across. I would have rather had cutscenes and just QTEs in between than these weird gameplay “ideas” thrown in. Sure, the game is much larger in scope, but it’s still a linear maze of remembering street and building names and participating in fights.
Overall, Shenmue II is both beautiful and terrible at the same time. It’s a game out of time and should have either been less than the sum of its parts or just a 3D anime feature-length movie. As a game, it just doesn’t need to really exist, especially being so dated even at the time of release. It suffers from all the same issues as the first game, and even as an HD port, it still doesn’t look or play well. It’s a very niche game that many gamers will not even get 1/4 through before turning it off for good. It requires an immense amount of patience, time, and forgiveness to enjoy, and sometimes that’s just too much to ask for a game.
Conclusion
As it stands, this Shenmue HD port is either good or bad, depending on your stance on the series. It’s great to get a piece of gaming history playable on modern consoles, but there are so many flaws with both games and the port itself that it’s hard to justify it to anyone except really curious people and hardcore fans. The games are both full of crashes, bugs, and glitches, and they look hideous with no effort put into the game engine at all.
I have a weird disposition toward the entire Shenmue series. I really want to love it, but the problem is that the game is so flawed and so strange that it almost feels like a chore to complete. The first game was tolerable as it was fairly short, and the age made it more forgiving, but Shenmue II has no excuse. It was on a new generation of consoles, and I have literally never played a sequel in a series that was a copy and paste of the last game.
The game picks off exactly where the last one took off, with Ryo heading to Hong Kong, and as soon as I saw the first cutscene, I sighed, rolled my eyes, and did an entire facepalm. I expected the game to look fairly newer, have a new UI, better controls, and an all-new look, but we got a literal engine port from the Dreamcast with just new areas to explore and a story that’s four times longer than the original (the original Xbox game had four discs!).
As I got off the boat, I really realized it was the exact same game as Ryo controls, just as poorly. The gameplay is exactly the same as the T, and I buckled in for a long ride. The first third of the game has Ryo running around talking to people, gathering clues, meeting a few new faces, and trying to continue to find Lan Di and avenge his father’s death. At least more stories are explained, and we find out what every mystery in the first game means. To be honest, the first third of the game isn’t all that bad; yes, it’s more Shenmue I stuff, but it’s easy and straightforward for the most part. Once I got to the second third of the game, things got tedious, frustrating, and a little annoying. This series, for some reason, loves having Ryo work and be miserable when it comes to progress. Twice, I was stuck having to work on the most boring and tedious mini-game I have ever played to earn enough money to move on. You can earn $10 a crate by helping someone move them from one side of the room to another, and it’s all about QTEs with the directional buttons. You usually never earn more than $60 as there isn’t enough time allotted for more work, and gambling is usually risky and out of the question altogether. The game favors the AI more than you, so you can easily blow all your cash and have to play that mini-game six or seven times over to earn it back again.
Outside of the awful mini-games, the second third of the game has Ryo running around inside buildings that are built like mazes with hallways that all look the same. It’s not as easy as using the elevator, as you will have to use the stairs to go up, use that elevator to go further down, then use the stairs again to go down further. In between are free battles, QTE events, and the occasional boss fight. It’s so tedious and frustrating as there are little dialog quips that are in between repetitive gameplay sections that can’t be skipped and just add to what makes the entire game annoying to play.
Once you get past that third of the game, the last third is the exact opposite of the rest of the game. It’s a 2-hour-long cutscene that lets you interact every so often via dialog or by running down a few paths, QTEs, and more dialog. Let that sink in for a minute. A 2-hour-long cutscene. All you’re doing is going through a forest and mountain pass to get to a village with a local accompanying you. This is also where most of the story unfolds and becomes more interesting.
I have a lot of things to complain about with this game and the series as a whole, but the story is still good enough to keep me trucking along and putting up with the repetitive, drawn-out nonsense the game dishes out. Not to mention the several times the game crashed and my progress was set back to my last save. The game itself is just ugly to look at and looks like a slightly updated Dreamcast game in only a few ways. The gameplay style is just too dated, frustrating, and unnecessary to get the story across. I would have rather had cutscenes and just QTEs in between than these weird gameplay “ideas” thrown in. Sure, the game is much larger in scope, but it’s still a linear maze of remembering street and building names and participating in fights.
Overall, Shenmue II is both beautiful and terrible at the same time. It’s a game out of time and should have either been less than the sum of its parts or just a 3D anime feature-length movie. As a game, it just doesn’t need to really exist, especially being so dated even at the time of release. It suffers from all the same issues as the first game, and even as an HD port, it still doesn’t look or play well. It’s a very niche game that many gamers will not even get 1/4 through before turning it off for good. It requires an immense amount of patience, time, and forgiveness to enjoy, and sometimes that’s just too much to ask for a game.
Shenmue is one of those games I never got a chance to play and have wanted to all these years. You always hear people talking about it; it pops up in “Best of” videos and “Worst of” videos, especially for the Dreamcast system itself. Shenmue was a beast all on its own back in the day, as no one had tried these gameplay ideas before. Sure, it’s an adventure game on the surface, but it’s also a life simulator, fighting game, and mini-game extravaganza all in one. It’s weird, beautiful, ugly, and frustrating all at the same time, and yet somehow it all kind of works.
You play as a high school boy named Ryo Hazuki. He gets home one day, and his father dies while fighting a Chinese man named Lhan Di. He steals something called the Dragon Mirror, and you must somehow get it back. The weird thing about the story is that the end goal never really matters, but all the stuff in-between. What is this dragon mirror, and why does Ryo need to get it back? It’s really never explained except something about fulfilling a prophecy and the end times will come if Di keeps it… I don’t know; the story is so unbelievable and weird.
The game starts out like any other adventure game as you wake up in your room and commence rummaging around the house, pulling open drawers, finding items, and trying to figure out where to go. Thankfully, that’s something Shenmue does, as I rarely didn’t know what to do or where to go. After setting foot in the village, I watched a few cutscenes, knocked on about a dozen doors, and kept going through the town, figuring out where to go. Eventually, I ended up in the main city, where half of the game takes place. The first few hours have Ryo running around asking questions to get clues, then going to that person or place for either a cutscene or more clues. This continuous cycle of clue-finding felt satisfying as I met some interesting characters and felt connected to the world of Shenmue.
Sadly, there’s a huge, disappointingly frustrating factor about all of these events: they are time-sensitive. You have to wait for in-game time to pass before certain events unfold. That wouldn’t be so bad, but you can’t skip time, so I literally went and did other things like chores, cooking, or playing a different game while time passed. Sometimes it would take almost 45 minutes for time to pass where I needed it to be, then a small cutscene would play out, and then it’s back to waiting again once I find the next clue that requires more waiting. It would also be fine if there were things to do, but outside of a few real Sega arcade games and collecting Gotcha prizes, there are no side quests or anything to do. It’s so incredibly boring to sit and wait through all of this, and if you miss your time frame, you have to wait again. Waiting also goes for catching the bus to the harbor and working a real forklift job.
Oh my God, yes, the infamous forklift section of the game. This literally took up an entire 4 hours of the game. You work 8-5 for 5 in-game days driving a forklift from one end of the harbor and loading boxes into a warehouse. It’s both beautifully addictive and stupidly frustrating and annoying. All of this means that the Mad Angels, a drug cartel in the game, will pick on you because you’re new and you can obtain information from them after every fight. Not to mention the annoying forklift race at the beginning of each day on the same track. Man, it’s so stupid and frustrating, and I both loved it and hated it.
After the forklift section, there are a few more fights, and the game is done. The fighting itself is surprisingly impressive, with responsive controls, fast and fluid animations, and plenty of combos. Outside of the free battles, there are QTE battles, which can be hard, and the reaction time they give you is literally milliseconds. The visuals of the game haven’t been updated all that much. There are newer lighting effects and better shadows, and the characters have smoothed over textures, but overall it still looks like a 20-year-old game. There are still plenty of bugs and glitches, such as being stuck in first-person mode after driving the forklift, hard crashes, and objects disappearing completely.
The music is annoying and repetitive, with only one short track per area, and it just isn’t very good. The voice acting is awful, and even the Japanese voice track is questionable sometimes. The audio in general still sounds compressed and really bad, and the game is just really rough around the edges. So why should you play it? It’s a weird piece of gaming history on a system that died faster than it could blink. The characters are interesting, and the various activities are fun, but the long waiting and various missteps keep Shenmue from being a fantastic game.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Super, thank you