Binary Messiah - Reviews for Games, Books, Gadgets and more!

It’s hard with open world games to make you feel like you are part of it. There is so much sound involved in making you feel like you’re in a large city compared to a hallway in a ship. The sounds of the city are incredibly important in open-world games. You need a lot of ambience and many games don’t get it right. Cyberpunk sounds like a living breathing world and more so than most others have accomplished. More than just honking cars, people chattering, and footsteps. Cyberpunk 2077 feels alive and sounds like it too.

Hades is the new love child of Super Giant Games whose claim to faim was Bastion and Transistor. With a similar art and combat style, Hades is oozing with Greek mythology culture and art. The game has procedurally generated dungeons, but the RPG elements are addictive and you can’t stop coming back for more. The animations are beautiful, the voice acting is great, and it just feels so polished and fun.

Cyberpunk had some of the most diverse voice acting this year. Each actor really delivered the character home and the addition of Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand was a pleasure to listen to. Each character felt unique and individualized and what won me over was the sheer amount of them. That’s something that’s incredibly hard to pull off with this many characters and so many lines of dialog. CDPR could have just taken a shortcut like Bethesda and gotten a few actors to voice multiple characters, but they didn’t, and it paid off.

Naughty Dog knows how to push PlayStation hardware in ways no one dares or dreamed could be possible. The Last of Us II looks amazing on the PS4 Pro with highly detailed textures, amazing lighting, fantastic animations and motion capture, and it just overall looks impressive, almost next-gen. While there were a lot of other amazing games released this year with ray-tracing and other technology they weren’t as consistent with their impressive visuals as The Last of Us II was.

A cyberpunk setting has been done numerous times, but never in as much as detail as Cyberpunk 2077. From the amazingly detailed cybernetic enhancements on every character to the striking vehicles, advertisements, propaganda, and object clutter, there is so much beauty to look at here. Some may say it looks too realistic, but that’s the game’s thing. A fantasy future set in a realistic tone.

Man, oh, man where do I start? One of the most anticpated remasters of all time got completely bunked because corporate heads couldn’t agree on something. From the terrible new cut-scenes, to awful retexturing, no ultrawide screen support, poor framerate, and somehow the original being better than the remaster? A lot went wrong with Warcraft III and it just shows how Blizzard has gone downhill over the years in both terms of quality and workplace issues.

Cyberpunk is the definition of RPG. A dystopian cyberpunk settings, lots of stats and upgrades in forms of cyberware implants, tons of characters, a great story, a huge world to explore, and lots of armor, weapons, food, and other items. This is a memorable and deep RPG, probably one of the most memorable in a decade.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps is the perfect sequel. It adds enough stuff to the original to not bog it down or over complicate it in any way. It feels like a true sequel rather than an expansion or a few steps back. With another heartfelt story, a atypical use of light vs dark, and amazing controls. Wisps is a fantastic platformer that must be experience by everyone and just beat out its competition which is saying a lot.

Ghost of Tsushima is just a blast to play and I couldn’t put the game down. Its world is a delight to explore and the gameplay loop is addictive and a lot fun. It’s also mostly devoid of bugs which was an uncommon thing this year for major game releases. It has great characters, wonderful voice acting, and just looks downright beautiful,

This is actually quite a surprise. No Call of Duty winning this year? Black Ops shot itself in the foot by releasing a year too soon, but Deep Rock Galactic is a little indie game that took the industry by storm in a surprising way. The four player co-op shooter has you playing as Dwarves with unique abilities that allow for a great symbiosis between all the characters. It’s addictive, fresh, and not a Left 4 Dead clone.