Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Release Date: 11/10/2020

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99

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Oh boy, right when you think Assassin’s Creed can’t get any bigger or better. Valhalla is by far the best game in the series, but it does still have many problems that have plagued the series in the last few entries. Over the 70 hours I spent in the game, I felt satisfied and had a lot of fun in the game, and never was it boring, but there are parts that still feel like a chore and the game is still very bloated despite the fat trimming from Odyssey.

If you couldn’t guess already, Valhalla is set around when the Vikings invaded England and tried to take down the Anglo-Saxons and their Christian faith. The game thankfully has unique characters again, interesting dialog, and a plot to actually care about, well minus the real-world stuff with Layla. You play as either a male or female Eivor who is your hero in this game and is set to build up the village of Ravensthorpe, stop The Order of the Ancients, as well as a plot revolving around your brother Sigurd being sucked into the Christian craziness as he thinks he’s a God.

The main gameplay loop in Valhalla is an alliance map that allows you to pledge yourself to territories throughout England to gain their trust to eventually take down the evil King Alfred. There are about a dozen territories to conquer, but each has a mini-sub plot in which you have to deal with that kingdom’s troubles. The characters are rather interesting and I grew to care about them thanks to the sharper writing over Odyssey’s dull cookie-cutter banter and annoying accents. Getting to pledge to these kingdoms usually ends in storming a keep or castle and putting that king back in power or helping him hold it. One plot involved a murder mystery, and another involved a king’s son who didn’t want to step up to the throne, and some of the kings are dying and you must secure the throne. It may sound repetitive, but actually, with each area being different with a unique plot I always looked forward to the next one.

Of course, while that’s the larger scope of the objective of this game, and it’s a welcome new breath of fresh air for the series, you also have the smaller gameplay loops within such as of course the RPG elements that have been scaled back and also seem pointless. Now instead of actual levels, you have a power level that increases and gives you two skills points every time you level up. There is a new skill tree/web that gives you stat increases and unlocks some new abilities, but the auto-assign works just fine here as the level cap is 340 and by the time you get there you will have unlocked pretty much every important skill. On top of this, the loot system is now gone in favor of unique armors, weapons, and abilities that must be found in the world and are hidden. While this does feel more Assassin’s Creed-like it’s still a chore to go around finding these dozens of armors and weapons throughout the world. They usually aren’t too hard to find, and some of them can be fun, like the Assassins Bureus that are back.

The only way to do other things like customize your ship, upgrade your armor and weapons, etc, is to find chests throughout the world called Wealth and these give you supplies to upgrade your own village. You use this to unlock new facilities. This can also feel like a grind, but over the first twenty hours, you will eventually unlock all the important buildings. Traveling around England is done by horseback mostly and sailing on rivers, more on that later. Just like any AC game exploring the world is a lot of fun. The world is about one-third the size of Odyssey so it’s less overwhelming, but still too big honestly. AC worlds have become too large and bloated for their own good and it just ends up being mostly padding and filler, however, completing the main story and finding all of the Order members isn’t as much of a chore as in Odyssey. Sure, there are power levels set in each area, but I was able to complete these underpowered if I kept my armor and weapons upgraded. Thankfully that’s what is great about the armor and weapons being unique. You can technically stick with the default stuff and just upgrade it over time and ignore everything in the game. Even upgrading your village is mostly optional.

When it comes to combat the game shines and feels great. The combat system is the same as Odyssey, but tweaked and feels better this time around with some brutal combat. Beheadings, slicing off arms, exploding bodies, etc. While the death animations get old fast, each weapon has a few unique one of its own. At least you get the hidden blade in this game and can one-hit assassinate guards regardless of power level. This is a huge positive change as stealth in Odyseey took a back seat. Any guard that is more powerful you get a quick-time event that determines whether you can one-hit kill them or not. This can also be turned off in the options so every enemy is a one-hit kill just like good ‘ol Assassin’s Creed game should be. This allows the satisfying leapfrogging and double assassinations of enemies around camps and makes clearing some out faster.

Finally, sailing has taken a backseat and ship battles are now gone. Instead, you get river raids which allow you to sail around the rivers and basically raid villages for wealth that is used to upgrade your village, again these are completely optional. They are fun for a while and are fairly easy to get some resources. There are various other activities in the world like aligning runes, stacking stones, and Mysteries which are mini-side events that happen in the world that can be completed in seconds or minutes and they can be pretty entertaining. They also give you XP so it’s a great way to level up if you want to complete the Order story tree. Over time you will naturally level up by completing territory pledges in the game to around level 280 which is recommended for the ending. After this and up to 340 is optional to complete the Order tree as there is one Zealot that is level 340 and I was able to beat him at 315 with ease by the end of the game.

The game itself looks fantastic despite the Anvil engine being poorly optimized and requiring too high of system requirements for what is seen. There’s no ray-tracing or DLSS and yet the game requires a 3000 series Nvidia GPU? It looks slightly better than Odyssey so I don’t understand this. On my overclocked 2080 I still had FPS drops on the Very High settings. On my 1660ti I had to keep everything around High and still dropped below 30 FPS in some areas. It’s just an engine that needs an overhaul and needs to run better. I also ran into crashes and glitches even almost a year after release. Despite all of this, the game’s art style captures medieval England and each area looks beautiful with sweeping vistas and mountains. The soundtrack is also one of the best in the series to date and I regularly listen to it outside of the game. It’s just amazing and well put together.

This game won’t change your mind if you hate Assassin’s Creed, but if you’ve been on the fence for a while I suggest jumping in here. It strips down the RPG elements a lot and feels more like a traditional AC game just bigger and with most things being optional. I had a lot of fun hunting down the Order members and finding gear and weapons. However, the real-world stuff with Layla just needs to go. Outside of the beginning scene you only go back towards the end of the game and it’s just so uninteresting and there’s so little of this that you forget what happened in the previous game. The endings that involve “ancient high-tech” and the Animus should just go away as we only care about the historical parts of the game. I even noticed that the scenes with Layla look extremely dated like they were made a decade ago with the last low-resolution textures that should be on an Xbox 360 with lower poly models and worse lighting effects. It seemed tacked on or just planned years ahead of time and they clipped it into this game to make it fit the story.

Overall, Valhalla is a fun game and a well-made AC game. It does feel bloated with too much optional stuff to find around the world, but it’s just optional and you aren’t forced to find it like in Odyssey. I was able to complete both main storylines easily and the RPG elements scale nicely with the story and can even be turned off. The game looks and sounds amazing despite the poorly optimized engine, and the story was actually good with well-written dialog and characters I cared about. There were unique assassinations even! However, the series still needs to scale back and just go back to the way AC was in the past. One single story had a beginning and end with some optional content thrown in. It takes 50 hours just to complete the main story after completing all pledges, and then another 20 hours to level up enough to finish the Order storyline. Over 100 hours in to actually get 100% completion, possibly even 120, and that doesn’t include the DLC that can take 15-20 hours to easily 100% those! It’s stupidly bloated and feels insane, but thankfully it’s just optional. AC in general just doesn’t have the interesting gameplay loop for grinding and it was never supposed to be an RPG. These elements feel shoehorned in as an excuse to make the world bigger and extend gameplay time. The series has never needed any of these.

Publisher: Focus Home Interactive

Developer: Streum On Studio

Release Date: 06/01/2021

MSRP: $39.99

Rating: Mature

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I love the Warhammer series a lot. My first introduction was a small figure I was given as a gift in junior high back in 2003. I had a friend who was really into the series and painted the figures and was all in. My parents couldn’t afford the figures so I turned to video games. My first experience was Dawn of War. One of the best RTS games ever made. Then…that was it. I then played Dawn of War II and then Space Marine, but was still fascinated by the lore, art style, and designs. This comes across well in Hired Gun. The game is oozing with style and tons of steampunk design. Weird mutilated bodies everywhere that are full of strange tech, gross underground sewers, and tons of violence and gore. The game looks amazing, but that’s probably the best thing about the game.

It was advertised as Doom set in the Warhammer universe and this it is not. When you start the game you pick your avatar and difficulty and you are off with just a revolver. Right away you take in the amazing art and visual design the series is known for. Then within a few minutes, you can start shooting and moving and that’s when everything falls apart. Now, at first, the gunplay seems fun. It’s fast-paced, punchy, and the guns feel pretty good to shoot. Then at the end of the first level, you are already tired of it because there’s nothing else to do. Every single level is shoot everything that moves through poorly designed levels. Now the art is nice, but the actual design and layout of the levels are terrible. Tons of endless corridors to nowhere, hidden treasure chests that are not interesting enough to find, credits, and places to jump around and wall run on. Yes, it’s fast-paced and feels pretty good, but it’s so boring.

Another issue I have is that enemies spawn at random places and there’s no pattern. You run around an arena shooting everything in sight and when you go pick something up an enemy dropped another is shooting you from behind even though everyone came out of the same door on the opposite side of the room. It can lead to cheap deaths as you get a shield to protect your health and you can buy stims to revive you if you die. There are grenades that can clear crowds, but overall the layout of the levels just doesn’t help. I can jump around everywhere but what’s the point if everyone spawns randomly.

Some levels mix up arenas where you are locked in a room and heavy metal music plays until everything is dead, and then there are just endless linear hallways where you mow down more enemies. Enemies splatter and gib in Unreal Tournament-style glory, but they are not interesting to look at or fight. Everything dies in a few hits and each weapon seemed to do the same damage except for when it came to distance. The game shoehorns an RPG system into the game that feels completely pointless and useless. There are charms, armor, tokens, and various other bits that can be collected, but they can’t be equipped until your next mission. So, why bother with an RPG system if it can only be accessed between missions? Once you finish a mission you’re rated (who cares). You can then complete side missions for greater challenges and better loot, but no thank you. The main missions are drab enough as it is.

Once you complete a mission you can then chose what loot to keep and the rest is sold. Once you arrive at the main hub there are various vendors that allow you to buy and sell weapons and then also bionics on you and your dog. Yes, you get a dog companion that attacks for you, but that’s it. The bionics are bought with credits and you can acquire various powers that kind of help a bit, but mostly you’ll just shoot everything. This is the main gameplay loop. Shoot everything through levels with nothing in between, fight an occasional boss, and build up your arsenal and bionics. The gameplay itself isn’t just boring but so is the story. Now, I’m no Warhammer guru, but with previous games, you kind of get some lore thrown at your real quick to understand your surroundings, but here you just fight this gang and that gang and work for this person. There’s no context. The voice acting is okay, but there’s no reason to care.

Overall, Necromunda had potential and it was squandered with a forced loot system, boring story and gameplay loop, and terribly designed levels. I love the visuals and the lore behind the series, but this game just doesn’t do it justice. If it was a straight-up linear corridor shooter with more thought put into the weapons, enemies, and level design it would have been better. Also, the whole looter shooter thing needs to stop at some point. No one can get it right and it’s widely overused. Sometimes less is more and Necromunda proves that.

Publisher: Capcom

Developer: Capcom

Release Date: 05/07/2021

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99

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I will come right out and admit that I never finished Resident Evil 7. The game was just scary for me, but I plan and go through it now that I have finished this game. Resident Evil Village is the direct sequel of RE7 where you play as Ethan Winters trying to save his daughter Rose that was taken by Mother Miranda. You end up in a strange village full of new evil villains and a bunch of places to explore.

The entire game is played in the first person again, and the game’s settings and scare factor is set right off the bat. You end up in a seemingly abandoned village and eventually you end up running away from Lycans. I don’t want to spoil too much of the story, but giving away details about each area, but I will describe them. You spend a good bit inside the village acquiring your first couple of weapons and learning the layout and controls. As you meet villagers and try and escape the Lycans you end up in Lady Dimitriscu’s castle, one of the only areas that have been shown in great lengths for months leading up to the game’s release. This is where you learn to explore, solve a few puzzles, and understand that the entire game revolves around exploring an area and acquiring a key or item that unlocks the next part. This may involve a mini-boss or onslaughts of enemies. 

Lady D’s castle has her three daughters chasing you and they end up becoming mini-bosses. Lady D stalks you through the castle eventually like Mr. X or Nemesis in previous games. You spend too much time in one room she will come through the door in her 9′ glorious beauty. She’s a fantastic character, as all of them in this game are, but sadly there are only two cut-scenes with her and you don’t get to know her well enough before you finish her off and move on to the next area. There are three more areas that end up being the boss’s lairs. A marsh, a machine factory, and an old mansion. Each area is unique and a blast to explore, but the scare factor in this game is kind of weak. The game gets scary only in certain areas and the good majority of the game is just eerie atmosphere, but not so much creepy. Sadly, a lot of the environment is static and enemies don’t respawn so the game feels tenser in areas especially with a lot of enemies around.

There’s a lot of action in this game and it ramps up as the game moves on. Just like Resident Evil 4, you can expand your cache storage and buy weapons from The Duke. He sets up shop in each area you explore and has a central hub that you eventually get to. There are many weapons to buy with some that are upgraded over others. You buy things with Lei which the majority is acquired by selling crystals and gems and various rare treasures. Large enemies, bosses, and mini-bosses all drop these crystals. You can buy upgrades for weapons as well as parts just like in RE4. Duke has some limited ammo and explosives you can buy, but you can also craft items by finding parts laying around everywhere. This includes crafting ammo, explosives, and health. At some points, you must make every shot count, but I never ran out of ammo completely and got myself into a bad situation. 

One issue I did have with the game is the confusing level design. You have to backtrack a lot and in some areas, I ran around for 20 or more minutes trying to remember my way back to a particular area because I found the key to move on from there. It got frustrating and the machine factory is an absolute chore to navigate. Nothing but endless hallways and dead-end rooms. Once you do find the key or door you need it’s rather satisfying and there’s a constant sense of progression through the whole game. Bosses aren’t very hard, but they just require you to stay on your toes and learn their patterns and you must aim carefully. 

The visuals in RE8 are pretty damn good and they look great on PC. Sadly, the ray-tracing effects are minimal and not worth the halved frame rate even on my RTX 2080 in 1440p. I noticed no difference with it on or off. The lighting looks great and the textures are well detailed and it runs well on any system. However, as I mentioned earlier, the environment is very static and there’s not much interaction or dynamic things to look at. The game is also very linear despite the areas being quite large to explore. It’s just a bunch of twisting hallways and the village isn’t all that big. There are some extra things you can do like shoot all the bobble-head goats, find all the treasures, and defeat optional mini-bosses for treasures, but most people will probably look past all of this. The sound design is amazing with some really creepy sounds both loud and quaint. Being in the large mansion and anticipating something coming around in dead silence was great and Lady D’s castle is haunting. You expect something to come around every corner. 

Resident Evil Village is an evolution of the series mixing RE4‘s gameplay and RE7‘s first-person shooter goodness. I do have to say that Ethan Winters sucks as a character and I hate him. He’s horribly written and I wanted to spend more time with the main villains, but alas, here we are. It’s sad we don’t get to see more of Lady D or anyone else for that matter except when you have short encounters with them in their respected areas. RE8 is a lot more accessible than RE7, and many people will probably finish this game. The difficulty is just right, it looks and sounds good, and it’s just a blast to play through. The scare factor is all over the place, the main areas can be labyrinthine in design, and the extra modes after you finish have varied mileage.

Publisher: Sega

Developer: Ryu ga Gotoku Studios

Release Date: 11/10/2020

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99

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You play as Ichiban Kasuga. A naive young yakuza member who ends up in politics of his yakuza family and then later the entire country of Japan’s government. The story is incredibly well written and directed, and I was hooked from beginning to end, at least the story and characters. I love the characters here as they have tons of heart, soul, and personality that make you want to see them through to the end of their journey. The first three chapters of the game are pretty much story and character building. In fact, I didn’t really get to do anything outside of watching cut scenes for the first three hours of the game. I just ran to spots that triggered them and I watched this complex web of characters build their story up, and I wasn’t upset as I was glued to my screen the whole time.

This is the first time I’ve finished a Yakuza game and a rare completion of a JRPG. Usually, JRPGs have great stories and characters, but something within the game keeps me from finishing it. Be it unfair and insane difficulty, too much grinding or late-game issues pop up like needing to quest for something very specific and it makes the progression grind to a halt. Like a Dragon is the first in the series to play like a JRPG and not an action game. The story is fantastic and the characters are well written and memorable, but that’s probably the strongest thing going for the game, and it’s the reason why I slumped through the late game issues to see it through to the end.

Once you get past a certain point in the story, honestly I can’t say anything as every little detail could be a major spoiler, you finally get let loose in the world. However, with this being a JRPG let’s talk about combat first. The game is played in a turned-based style, but characters move around on their own in the arenas. Depending on your job you have various skills that can cause major damage, and this is super important and the core of the entire game. While base attacks are fine early on in the game, they don’t do much later on and you start relying on skills that all use MP whether they’re physical or magic-based. Each attack has a type such as magic, slashing, piercing (guns), bashing, or blunt (physical) attacks. Some attacks might have elemental attributes attached to them, but you really must balance your team. You need characters that can heal, do large AoE damage, and lots of damage to single enemies. It’s important you have a class that can do one of each of those things as it’s key to winning battles.

Early on in the game, the difficulty feels perfect. There were some challenges, I had to use strategy, and really focus on ranking up my character’s jobs and learn enemy weaknesses. This is also a key point in the battle system. Like a Dragon mocks or makes fun of other games like Pokemon. Early on you come across someone similar to Professor Oak and the entire scene plays out like the beginning of every Pokemon game. It’s pretty funny. The point of this is you acquire a bestiary of each enemy type and when you fight in battle and discover a weakness it will appear over the character when you select that attack. This is vital to winning boss fights and harder battles late game or just in general.

Ranking up your job is more important than leveling up your character honestly. This determines your max health, how powerful your attacks are, and learning new attacks. You get more powerful attacks as you rank up, but the downside is once you change a job you start from the bottom on that job. So you have to grind that job to level it up, and late-game this is incredibly tedious, but more on the late-game problems later. There are thankfully no random battles, but enemies walk around outside that can be avoided. When you fight enemies the environment is also important as smaller areas are great for attacks that do AoE damage and it allows you to wipe out enemies faster in bigger groups. 

Outside of combat, there are a ton of mini-games like in every Yakuza game. Karaoke, classic Sega arcade games in Club Sega, crane games, driving ranges, go-karts, and many others. They’re fun at first, but there’s not really any reason to do these mini-games outside of acquiring items. Items are also an important part to combat as the most powerful armor and weapons are almost unobtainable until you can start raking in serious cash at the Battle Arena in chapter 12 and fighting the more powerful enemies late game. You can also upgrade Ichiban’s weapons (only his weapons can be upgraded) and well as craft new items, but honestly, this is only needed if you can’t afford to buy them. There are no unique weapons or armor that can be crafted exclusively, at least that I noticed, and once I started raking in serious cash in the millions I just bought everything and crafting became pointless towards the end of the game.

There are shops and restaurants scattered everywhere and I didn’t pay attention to these too much until late game. Restaurants can fully restore your health and MP, and bulking up on recovery items become super important late game as well. I didn’t really use many of these until then as the game felt perfectly balanced, and the right strategies can keep you alive. There are a couple of pawnshops that allow you to sell items, and this is how you make most of your money early on in the game. You start out digging for Yen under vending machines and eventually start earning a small amount of money to buy recovery items and cheap gear. There are also sub-stories like in every Yakuza game that is shown as chat icons on the map. These give you items and cash and are mostly pointless once you get the late game, and the stories aren’t interesting at all. You also have extra side missions that can get you larger amounts of cash called Hero Quests. This is mostly for completionists in the end, but the entire reason this is a JRPG is that Ichiban can see enemies as monsters with different uniforms. It’s “in his head because he feels life is like Dragon Quest“. It’s super silly and a lame excuse to make a realistic game have a fantasy twist, but what other excuse were the developers going to use? 

As you progress through the first eleven chapters hopping around taxis to fast travel to spots, unraveling the story, ranking up your jobs, leveling characters, acquiring new armor and weapons and items, and all this sounds like a normal JRPG affair, but then chapter twelve comes and knocks you on your ass. This is when most people will probably quit the game as it turns into a completely different beast and the way you play must change. This is the worst part about the game, and I don’t see how this was necessary. The game had a perfect flow and difficulty level leading up to this chapter. The first sign hits you when you must acquire 3 million Yen for a specific reason in the story. By now you probably have a couple hundred thousand yen at the most. How am I going to get this much money as street thugs don’t really payout and I can only sell so much? Well, the first stupid idea was that there are specific things you need to do to get this money and they don’t tell you. First, you have a watch in your inventory that’s worth one million yen. You need to sell that and then there is a specific Hero Quest you must complete that gives you two million yen. You need to take ten photos of a statue hidden throughout the city. What a serious pain in the ass. I knew right here that the game was going to be a chore from here on out. Then to make matters worse, the last statue is hidden behind insanely difficult enemies out of nowhere. They were many 8 levels above me, but that wasn’t a problem before. I had to grind for a couple of hours just to beat them to take that photo. Such nonsense!

It just gets worse from here. Chapter seven had you complete one of two long dungeons in the game. It was challenging, but not impossible. This dungeon is the only way to grind up until now. However, once you get to a new small city you unlock the battle arena, and this is your main way to level grind by climbing floors and beating waves of enemies. You will be here for probably 6-8 hours minimum. At this point in chapter twelve, you come across a boss fight that cranks the difficulty up to nearly unfair and impossible. I had to grind 15 levels just to get a fair advantage. This boss just absorbs so much damage and throwing all my powerful attacks at him still kicked my ass. I died and retried nearly a dozen times before I almost gave up. I’d grind five or six levels and try again until I could finally do it. I chewed through recovery items like crazy trying to get through this chokepoint in the game. Sadly, it never lets up after this. From here on out every single boss is a serious chore and does massive damage no matter what you do. This is what I have in JRPGs and why I rarely ever finish them.

So, you will then need to grind consistently before each major story point which you are warned about. You need to be at least level 65 by the final boss and man is it a serious pain. You shouldn’t have to want to quit a game because the developers decided the game needs more playtime by chapter twelve. Let’s make you do over a dozen hours of grinding just to finish the game? It’s stupid and insane and completely unfair. They had the difficulty balanced out perfectly before and I was happily enjoying the game. The only reason I kept going is I wanted to see the ending and how everything comes together. The story is that good, but if it weren’t I would have quit at this point. You’re basically grinding the battle arena and the one dungeon trying to acquire new gear and rank up your job to get more powerful attacks. I highly recommend being around level 70-75 before tackling the final boss, but at that point your 25 levels away from maxing out your character.

The game at least has amazing voice acting (in Japanese of course), and the graphics are pretty good technically, but pretty boring on an artistic level. These are hyper-realistic graphics and the only artistic flair is the enemy designs. I enjoyed the music as well, but in the end, the last few chapters will test your patience. The mini-games are fun, the sub-stories are boring and repetitive, and the post-chapter twelve grinding is an absolute chore and really hurts the game. However, if you can prevail, get through the grinding, and learn the strategy of balancing your parties jobs you will get through an incredible and memorable story with great characters.

Publisher: CD Projekt Red Studio

Developer: CD Projekt Red Studio

Release Date: 12/10/2020

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99

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This is by far one of the most anticipated games in modern gaming history. I know I have been excited since its poorly chosen announcement date in 2012. Sadly, CDPR kind of dug its own grave from that date onward. The game is nothing like how it looked in its early concept videos and a lot of content is cut. Even if you look past all the bugs and launch woes, this is what’s going to stay long after the game has been patched up to a more playable state like it currently is as of this review. 

However, if you look underneath all the hype, hate, and sometimes unfair controversy there’s a great game here. The story and the atmosphere are the main reason why I stayed. You play as V. A vigilante/mercenary for hire who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets involved in a corporate terror plot that changes his/her life forever. The entire story revolves around a device you end up acquiring on a job and this device is the key to immortality. This device also has Johnny Silverhands, played by Keanu Reeves, and one of the reasons why the game got so much hype, who is a digital construct that is trying to take over your mind. I don’t want to spoil too much of the main story, but my favorite parts of the game were the side missions with the other characters like Panam, Judy, and Claire. These missions really develop a relationship and strong personality and are one of the shining points in Cyberpunk.

One of the first problems sets in early is with character customization. Ignore all the sexist homophobes who were mad about being able to make your characters transgender. The anatomy is off, first off, and doesn’t look right, and what’s the point? You can only see the genitalia in the player menu, it’s censored in mirrors, and the “sex scenes” are awkward and pointless. One of the core gameplay elements of the game is Brain Dances which are virtual scenes that you can manipulate during missions, or basically a half-assed detective mode. Some Brain Dances are “sex scenes” but I just think these were added to add controversy. On top of all this, you can’t change your character’s looks after the initial start of the game…just why?

The way to get around the game and various missions can be a bit messy, but the open world of Night City is gorgeous and has a fantastic atmosphere. There’s the main city itself, the outskirts which are like a desert-type environment, there are suburbs, and various other locales to actually make it feel like Los Angeles. You can walk, run, hijack cars, and fast travel at certain points once you discover them. Missions are found via random encounters on the street, phone calls, texts, and other means. I never got around to finishing all of them as the ones revolving around the side characters are the most interesting and the rest get kind of repetitive. Driving the actual cars is not my favorite as before the 1.2 patch they were just broken. They look absolutely amazing and have some insanely cool designs, but sadly they just don’t drive very well.

With this being a CDPR game there are RPG elements involved. There’s a skill tree, cyberware implants, and stats on weapons and armor. It’s pretty detailed, especially with all the wearable armor parts on every part of your body, but it’s also one of the most flawed areas. The skill tree is nice with many paths you can take such as melee, various gun types, stealth, and so on, but I felt a lot of abilities were useless and I just got them to unlock an area I needed. Skill trees tend to be very useless in many games these days, and sadly they aren’t any better here. When it comes to weapons they are incredibly unbalanced with sniper rifles doing one-shot kills no matter where you hit the target early on in the game and at low levels. Then you will get a pistol that will barely do any damage at a much higher level even if you have the skills that boost pistols. It’s improved in patches but still remains a problem. The bottom line is Cyberpunk 2077 is incredibly easy. While stealth is fun and is a good option for most missions, blasting through the game isn’t that hard. I rarely ever died as health items are everywhere and so is ammo. While shooting is fun and satisfying and the weapons feel good, the game is just way too easy.

You can then visit Ripper Docs to install implants that add bonuses and unique weapons to your body, but in the end, I rarely ever visited these and never filled all my slots as what’s the point? The game is so easy I never really needed much. Just a shotgun, sniper rifle, and an assault rifle or sub-machine gun of some kind. You can add mods to these weapons like sights, silencers, and various others that modify the stats, but the combat is so unbalanced and easy there’s really no point. Stealth missions mostly rely on your stealth skill tree stats and you can also hack stuff, but I also found this rarely useful as the game is just so easy you don’t need these small advantages that would turn the tide of a battle like in say something like Deus Ex. If I got busted I could easily wipe everyone out with my one-shit kill sniper rifle and hold onto this gun through the entire game.

That brings me to the other side of Cyberpunk’s gameplay loop. After about 10 hours you will have seen everything the game can do, and you will know whether you want to complete every single side mission and gig call or just plow through the storyline and call it a day. While I love Night City, there’s nothing to do inside of it. Sure, there are various shops, you can visit, and you can look at dildos and sex toys inside of windows, but that’s it. There are no side activities like mini-games, no property you can purchase for player homes, nothing like that. I felt like this large gorgeous city was wasted away as it’s just a conduit between missions. This is not a cyberpunk playground like many of the early trailers suggested.

In the end, don’t go into this game expecting a true “next-gen” title that raises the bar and changes games for how we play them today. A lot of people went into this game expecting some unreal level of detail, and not to mention in the visuals. While the game looks amazing it’s poorly optimized even on the latest PC hardware. Ray-tracing is pretty much pointless even on my 2080 the game would dip well below 30 FPS. The only saving grace for PC gamers is the DLSS option or playing on 1080p resolutions. On my i7 10700 and 1660ti setup, the game played fine in 1080p, but I still got dips here and there. It’s one of the most poorly optimized games I have played in recent years, and while recent patches made the game more stable, it doesn’t fix the crazy dips all over the game. It’s even worse on PS4 and Xbox One base models. So, go in expecting a fun story, fun, albeit easy, combat, interesting vehicles, and a cool cyberpunk city to run around in. Don’t go in expecting something revolutionary.

Publisher: Activision

Developer: Treyarch/Raven Software

Release Date: 11/13/2020

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99

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Well, well, well, here we are a year later with Treyarch’s installment of the series once again after a decent hiatus. Black Ops is back on the table with an entirely new reboot just like Modern Warfare was last year, but does it make as big of an impact? Well, most people will jump straight into the campaign first which is one of four modes that flesh out Cold War’s myriad of gameplay variations.

The campaign is set during the Cold War as if the title hasn’t clued you in at all. The game is specifically set in the early ’80s as you play as a band of special operatives ordered directly by U.S. President Ronald Reagan to stop a Russian terrorist from setting off a bunch of American nukes. The story is well-paced and the characters have potential, but here’s the main problem with Cold War – the story is only a few hours long and is probably the shortest Call of Duty campaign to date. It was over way before I wanted it to be as the slow burn was a nice pace over Modern Warfare’s fast-paced action, but that game had a much longer campaign and stronger characters that were, dare I say, pretty memorable and stood out. Cold War is set up differently and takes a different approach to the campaign in an almost 80’s spy type of way and I enjoyed those brief moments. You walk about a hideout and on the evidence board is your next mission, but also two of them that require you to solve decoding puzzles which were rather fun and neat. You need to find all the evidence pieces in the campaign to solve these and they were quite challenging. Once you do, you get a short side missions, nothing special, but those puzzles are one of many things that didn’t get enough time to mature.

There are bombastic scripted events like in every Call of Duty, but the quieter more subtle moments are just as enjoyable. There’s an intense open-ended level in a KGB base in Russia that has you playing as a double agent. It’s very tense as you have to decide how to plant evidence to get access to a vault. You can do it in many ways by sneaking around restricted areas and planting things, opening things, and the various cat and mouse of everyone being on to you, but not quite knowing it’s you yet. You have to stay one step ahead and the script is well written for this. I loved this level and that was the only one like it. The final level is a repetitive mess and feels too much like previous Black Ops campaigns that made no sense, but the campaign is enjoyable albeit just way too short and underdeveloped.

When it’s all said and done you’re going to uninstall the campaign and move on to Zombies and multiplayer. Let’s get into multiplayer first. I can’t stress enough that Cold War is more arcadey than Modern Warfare. Even in the campaign, the guns don’t have the same realistic weight, quick scoping is faster, and everything feels like it’s on fast-forward. The movement is about three times as fast, there are health bars above everyone’s heads, and there are scorestreaks instead of killstreaks. It seems like chaos coming from Modern Warfare, but it’s a nice alternative to a more serious and realistic game. The UI and menu are pretty much identical to Modern Warfare with a few tweaks so you can jump right in without having to relearn where everything is. Blueprints, attachments, load-outs, and all that are still here. It just feels a bit more streamlined and maybe some fat has been shaved off. Some will like it and some will hate it.

The actual playing of the multiplayer is standard Black Ops affair. The same modes from Modern Warfare carry over like Team Deathmatch, Domination, Kill Confirmed, etc. The maps are also just as hit or miss as Modern Warfare and take some getting used to. Not everyone will be fans of these maps as they were with Modern Warfare’s launch maps. The game is faster paced and more arcade like than Modern Warfare with enemies darting across the map at an alarming and almost too hard to target speed. Sliding is extended, shooting feels less weighty, and the overall scope of the game is just faster and lighter. This isn’t something I prefer. I like the more realistic physics and weight of Modern Warfare as it makes the game a bit more tactical and slower paced, but not necessarily easier mind you. I do like the era specific weapons like the M-16, M-79, M-60, and various other weapons that have been discontinued in today’s military practices.

Most people will probably come to Black Ops for its Zombies mode though. That’s the bread and butter of this series and it doesn’t disappoint here. I won’t delve too far into this mode, but the newest features are larger maps and a weapon rarity system similar to RPGs. You’re allowed to bring in your multiplayer loadouts the first time and I liked the larger areas with the many hidden secrets. I feel like this mode needs to broken off and expanded into its own game honestly. There is also the Dead Ops top down shooter mode which is a complete waste of time. It’s boring, repetitive, and feels half-baked. At this point Black Ops is running into the ridiculous amount of modes and heading into Mortal Kombat territory for half-baked mini-games and too many ideas at once.

With that said, Cold War isn’t as good as Modern Warfare. It doesn’t feel as polished or as well thought out and honestly feels rushed. I think another year and the game could have been better if not just as good, but as it stands, Modern Warfare is still the best game in the series to date. I love the faster-paced multiplayer, it was fun and exciting, but the maps are lackluster and left me wanting more. I also got bored of the multiplayer much faster than Modern Warfare. I honestly haven’t touched the game since the week of the game’s launch. I didn’t get that excited addictive feeling of wanting more. The campaign was actually a lot of fun and really interesting, but it felt rushed and half-finished and just wasn’t long enough. There are a lot of good ideas here that didn’t get a chance to flourish and that’s quite a shame.