UsTwo’s next game is a small adventure game where you play as a girl named Alba, who is trying to save the local wildlife reserve from corporate hotel moguls. You run around the island trying to gain 50 signatures on a petition to give to the mayor in hopes it will stop the construction. The main gameplay loop of the game is taking photos of 62 different animals on the island via your phone and scanning them with an app. Other objectives include picking up trash, restoring birdhouses and feeders, and rescuing animals from toxic chemicals.
The island is broken up into small areas, so it’s easier to navigate and find where you need to go. Side quests have a green arrow, and the main objectives have gold ones on the map. The entire game is broken up into three days, and you will complete most of the game within two hours fairly easily. Sadly, most of the game is running back and forth between areas with very little to actually do. Picking up trash and fixing items is about all there is to do here. You can also replace photos on info boards, but most everything is done during the main story, as you will come across every area at some point. You can talk to most of the townsfolk, but they have nothing important to say except to waste your time as per NPC regulations. They don’t even offer side quests, which feel odd.
I did enjoy taking photos of the animals, as tracking them was a lot of fun, but sometimes there is just one bird you can’t find somewhere to complete a side objective, and it’s quite irritating and frustrating. While the idea of respecting nature and animals is a great message to get across in a game, I felt nothing for the characters as there wasn’t enough time to do any world-building. For most of the game, you’re just trying to get the 50 signatures, and nothing really happens until the last 20 minutes of the game. For such a large island, I felt there could have been more to do with maybe some mini-games or more side objectives. Even adding more animals that aren’t 90% birds would have been nice as well. Animals are categorized as rarities, but I don’t see how this has any bearing as there’s no point or rating system for finding these animals. Hell, there isn’t even an achievement for finding all the animals in the game!
The game at least looks really pretty, and the low-poly art style with bright, vivid colors is great. The game has good lighting effects, and the sound effects of animals everywhere are a nice touch. Alba controls well as she runs around the island, and I didn’t run into any bugs or crashes of any kind. However, on my iPhone 12 Pro Max, I still ran into frequent slowdowns, especially when zooming in on the phone. This phone is more than capable of running this game at 60FPS, but it needs better optimization. You will end up seeing what the entire game offers in the first 30 minutes of the game, but that’s not to say this game is boring. Two hours is probably just the right length, to be honest, as any more would overstay its welcome due to the lack of things to do. I highly recommend this game to young players for the message it delivers and to any gamer for just a relaxing and chill game.
When I first saw Builder’s Journey, the first thing that popped into my mind was Monument Valley. It looks similar with a bright and colorful art style, no voice acting, and a story told through actions. It features small, spinnable tower-like levels that only take a couple of minutes to solve. The game is imaginative and a nice departure from the typical movie license LEGO games we get from Traveler’s Tales. It’s relaxing, fun, and feels like you’re using Legos to get around these levels to reach your destination.
You play as a boy and his father, who are essentially trying to take down some evil company the dad works for. The game is so short that there isn’t time for a feel-good story or emotions to set in, but the game at least tries. You pick up Lego pieces and set them down on the round pegs like you would in real life. You hold the pick-up button to let go, and that’s about it. You can spin the level a little bit, but the great thing about this game is that there’s no preset design you need to follow. You get a few pieces, and the puzzle is to figure out how to put them together with the limited pegs in the level to get your characters across. Each character has two orange platform pieces that you use for them to hop around on. Sometimes you need to build something, but the game gets tough towards the end.
Puzzles towards the end involve two screens in which you need to either place blocks a certain way or get blocks to the other screen in a certain way. Each area has maybe five puzzles before the next idea is brought in. One idea is using race track-type pieces with curves and straights to get across on a roller skate. Another idea is using blocks to grow more if you put them down. It’s all very imaginative, and it never gets boring or old. The game has a “just one more puzzle” feel to it. You get breaks in between with a scripted puzzle that just requires putting a few pieces together, but it’s a nice break. I did have issues placing and dropping blocks as the camera would be at a weird angle. The blocks do snap over the pegs they need to go in, but sometimes I just couldn’t get them positioned right, which required fiddly placement.
There were a few occasions in which where to go in the level wasn’t obvious or my character wouldn’t start hopping across the level because a certain block was too high or too far away, and I couldn’t figure out which one. The levels that take this kind of trial and error are frustrating and ruin the pacing, but thankfully there were only a few. I also feel that this game could have been made without the Lego branding. While it feels and looks charming, generic blocks would have worked just as well too. There’s nothing that the Lego branding brings to this game to make it feel unique.
That’s basically it for the entire game. It ends in 90 minutes, as it was originally designed for iOS devices with 5–10 minute pick-up-and-play sessions. There is an RTX option for PC, which is super weird for this kind of game, and it looks okay, but why cut your frames in half for a game like this? There are only a few levels that use light that uses RTX, so it feels kind of pointless. Other than that, the game looks great, and the physics are also good. I highly recommend this game if you want a zen-like, relaxing puzzle game to kill a couple of hours. It’s not memorable, but it sure is fun.
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, 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, but 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. At first, the gunplay seemed fun. It’s fast-paced and 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 a shoot of 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 to pick something up, an enemy drops another, 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 they are.
Once you complete a mission, you can choose 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, as well as bionics for you and your dog. Yes, you get a dog companion that attacks 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; 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, but it was squandered with a forced loot system, a 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 were 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.
I will come right out and admit that I never finished Resident Evil 7. The game was just scary for me, but I plan to go through it now that I have finished the game. Resident Evil Village is the direct sequel to RE7, where you play Ethan Winters trying to save his daughter Rose, who 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 are 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 by giving away details about each area, but I will describe them. You spend a good bit of time inside the village, acquiring your first couple of weapons and learning the layout and controls. As you meet villagers and try to 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 the onslaught 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. If 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 cutscenes 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 majority of the game is just an eerie atmosphere, but not so creepy. Sadly, a lot of the environment is static and enemies don’t respawn, so the game feels tenser in some 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 in 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, some of which are upgraded over others. You buy things with Lei, of which the majority are acquired by selling crystals, 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 was 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 throughout 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, 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 bobblehead 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 that are 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 stinks 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 respective 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.
Little Nightmares was a creepy platformer with a minimal story and narrative. The game was mostly all about atmosphere and puzzle-solving. These games cropped up after Limbo was a smash hit, and games like Inside also followed. The only downside to these games is that they tend to not shape any kind of narrative or world-building. There are a lot of interesting things to look at, and clearly, the setting you are in is a curious thing to want to know about. Little Nightmares II puts you in the shoes of a paper bag-wearing kid who is running from something, but you never know what. Throughout the entire game, you go from location to location, not knowing what your end goal is, and even after finishing the game, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of everything.
The game starts out by giving you simple controls such as jumping and picking up objects using the physics engine. You won’t be doing this very often except to use weapons occasionally and throw an object at a button to open a door. The atmosphere sets in right away with your character running through a forest, trying to avoid bear traps, and traversing fallen bridges. Once you get to a certain area, you meet your first main monster, and then you are introduced to combat. I really don’t want to call it that, as all you do is pick up an ax and swing it, but it’s completely based on physics. Usually, you will use an ax to break down walls, but you will use it to fight enemies at the school level, and it’s all about timing. The ax is very heavy, and your character can’t move it very fast, but it works.
The first area is rather short but pretty cinematic, and things will slow down greatly as the game goes on. After a few areas, you will notice the game adds a lot of puzzle-solving, most of which don’t require much thinking. There are a few physics-based puzzles, and halfway through, you meet a companion that requires some puzzle-solving with two people, but the ease of the puzzles is to keep the pace going. You don’t want to spend too long in any one area. I felt the chase from enemies and puzzle-solving were well balanced. Several screens will go by of just platforming, maybe just empty screens of scene-setting, but I do want to talk about these monsters. The game is very creepy, and the main monsters basically chase you throughout the entire area you are in. The school has a teacher that can stretch her neck out and chase you through vents and under tables. The hospital has a doctor who can walk on ceilings. They show up in some scenes, but not every area has you killing this main villain; the most important part for you is escaping.
There is some frustration with the game, and that’s a lot of trial and error. Some scenes wanted to get across the screen via a certain path, but I got caught by the villain numerous times before figuring out how to do it. There were also control issues with climbing things in which my character got stuck, or I didn’t understand that jumping across a ravine to hang on to my character’s hand was going to be an issue. In several areas, I had to restart the screen over and over until I walked across that beam just right or didn’t get caught. Thankfully, you just restarted that screen, and it helps keep the pace going. I just wish there was more story to be told or something else to hold on to rather than the next creepy monster or setting.
The game looks great visually, with a lot of nice art, but technically, it’s not super impressive. Textures look muddy up close, and some objects don’t have the highest poly count. The animations are great, however, and the controls are good; there’s just that annoyance with the game’s physics. It’s also pretty short, as it can be finished in about 5 hours, and I honestly wanted more. The creature designs are so fantastically creepy and unique, and the game skims the line between gory and just plain dark and creepy. It’s never a gorefest, but it feels like it could be. There are animal guts, but not humans; there are body parts everywhere, but they’re mannequins. It’s a fun line to walk down, and it’s done just right here.
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 do 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, really focus on ranking up my character’s jobs, and learning 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 that once you change jobs, 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 of 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 in the game. You can also upgrade Ichiban’s weapons (only his weapons can be upgraded) and 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 the late game. Restaurants can fully restore your health and MP, and bulking up on recovery items becomes super important late in the 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 are 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, you hop around taxis to fast-travel to spots, unravel the story, rank up your jobs, level characters, acquire 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 of 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 the 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, which is why I rarely ever finish them.
So, you will then need to grind consistently before each major story point that 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 needed more playtime by chapter twelve. Let’s make you do over a dozen hours of grinding just to finish the game. It’s stupid, 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 was because I wanted to see the ending and how everything came 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, you are 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 party’s jobs, you will get through an incredible and memorable story with great characters.
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.
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 than 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 reasons why I stayed. You play as V. A vigilante or 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 or 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 is that he 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 a strong personality and are one of the shining points in Cyberpunk.
One of the first problems that sets in early is 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 or 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 that Cyberpunk 2077 is incredibly easy. While stealth is fun and 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. 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 that 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 that you don’t need these small advantages that would turn the tide of a battle, like, say, 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, or anything 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, not to mention 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 at 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 have made the game more stable, they don’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.
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 two of them also 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 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 the 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 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 is 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 gameplay of the multiplayer is a 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 as 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 zombie 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 for the first time, and I liked the larger areas with the many hidden secrets. I feel like this mode needs to break off and expand 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 a 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 well thought out, and honestly, it 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.
I Am Dead is a curious object-hunting game about the ghost of a museum curator. That may sound boring on paper, but it’s quite charming, and the mini-stories within are nice enough to keep the game moving along. You discover you have died, of what is unknown, and you can see through objects like a ghost or “slice” objects. This is a game all about a no-clip camera! It’s pretty cool at first, as you can push the camera through an object to see what’s lying or hiding underneath. This is 100% a hidden object game with a larger budget. The goal of the game is to find a spirit that can take over, quieting the island of Shimerston as the volcano is about to erupt. You slowly learn of the island legend and the five main characters you need to try and convince to do the job.
There are five objects to find on each level. You spin around an area with smaller areas to click on, and then the object hunting begins. To know what you are hunting, you click on characters with bubbles, as you will recall their memory, and the main object they are talking about in that memory is what you will hunt. The stories are the most charming part of the game. They are super short but well written, and during these stories, they rotate some sort of weird globe to focus the picture. It’s pointless, but it’s something to do during all the talking. Once you know what object you need to find, you will get a hint if that object is in the area you clicked on by the icon popping up on the screen. It was never too difficult to figure out what the items were, but the optional Grenkins objects are a lot tougher. This is a side puzzle that requires you to rotate a certain object, like a shadow game, so only part of the camera clips through and it looks like the icon. If the Grenkin object is what you clicked on Sparky, your canine companion will bark, so you aren’t aimlessly rotating every object. There are additional, tougher objects to hunt if you can find the secret list. These are tiny objects hidden inside others, such as toys or bugs, and you only get descriptive hints as to what they might be.
To be honest, the game shows you all it can do in the first ten minutes, and outside of hunting for the main items, I collected Grenkins for two levels and stopped. It was just too much to endlessly rotate and hunt objects forever, as the main story was already asking for a lot. If you really love the gameplay mechanics here, then it’s for you, but after so long, I got tired of it and wanted to see the story progress. There is literally nothing else to do in the game outside of object hunting, as that is the sole mechanic. At least the areas are varied, and no single object is the same. You can finish the main story in about 4 hours, but if you collect everything, you might be here for over 10. The visuals are quite charming, with a flat pastel color and low-poly objects. It has a unique look, and each item is surprisingly detailed, both inside and out. There are hundreds of objects to examine, and it’s quite impressive that the developers went through all that effort. The voice acting is also quite good, and it helps seal the aesthetic.
Overall, I Am Dead is a fun object-hunting game for a few hours, but the story, in the end, doesn’t wow you or have a twist ending. It’s pretty predictable, and the extra puzzles aren’t worth your time as there is no reward outside of just doing them. The visuals are charming, and there is a lot of detail put into the objects you examine, but the entire game shows everything it can do in the first ten minutes and never evolves beyond that. If there was something more to this game than just clipping through objects for 4 hours until I found what I needed, I would stay longer, but this game is mostly for object hunting fanatics.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !