Publisher: 2K Games

Developer: Hangar 13

Release Date: 05/19/2020

Available On

I remember Mafia back in the early days of the PS2 era. I also remember not really understanding it because I was 12 years old and probably shouldn’t have been playing a Mafia game. I also remember the game being as hard as nails, but that’s about it. 18 years later, Mafia is a classic and a surprising choice for a full-on remake. The game takes you through a story of the 1930s mafia motif as you follow Don Salieri’s family and, particularly, the story of Tommy Angelo. A simple cab driver just happens to be in the right, or wrong, place at the right time and gets inducted into the family. You and your pals Sam and Paulie go through the ebb and flow of a Don losing turf in a fantastical Chicago, Lost Heaven, and trying to gain the turf back from a rival mafia family.

The story and characters are the best part of the game and, honestly, the only reason to stick around. While the game looks and feels like 2020, it’s still structured like 2002. You see a cut scene, play out a mission, and that repeats about 15 times. The missions are at least somewhat varied, from running on foot to long shootouts to being a getaway driver. Sometimes there’s stealth involved with sabotage, espionage, and subterfuge. I was entertained throughout the entire game, but I kept feeling like I was playing an old game with a new coat of pain. While the controls work, the animations are fine, and the cover shooting is awesome, it just feels like an older game in the way it’s structured. I also felt the large open world of Lost Heaven was wasted, as the game is linear in design despite this open city. There are zero side missions or activities to complete, and the open city just acts as a living, breathing hub for you to drive around in during missions. It’s honestly a huge waste, as side missions could have been added in.

When it comes to driving, the game feels great. There are simulation and arcade modes with automatic and manual transmissions, and you also must drive on the road and follow the rules or get pulled over and cited. This was a super awesome concept back in 2002, but today it feels pointless as you can speed if you don’t see a blue blip on your map nearby. Until I understood that I got pulled over only twice early on and used my speed limiter, Once you figure all of this out, the whole “traffic law simulation” gimmick is completely out the window. You can get wanted rating stars and lose the cops like in any open-world crime game as well, but that’s literally it for the world. Shooting feels fine with a decent cover system, and peeking over and blind fire all work well, but the shooting feels loose and ancient. It has this wonky feel to it that I can’t quite put my finger on, but it still retains the stench of a 2002 third-person shooter, and while not game-breaking by any means, it’s still noticeable and just feels a bit off. The PS2-era difficulty spikes are also present, as more than a few shots will kill you. You can find pills laying around sometimes, but overall, you have to use the cover and play whack-a-mole or you will die fast.

My biggest gripe is these difficulty spikes. I will play a few fun missions, and then I get thrown into a huge shootout level with wave after wave of enemies, and I will die numerous times. The same goes for overly long chase scenes. One crash, and I would lose my chase and have to start all over again. This is more of that 2002 stench that just lingers in the air around all the 2020 glitz and glamour. Sneaking is fine as well, as you can perform takedown moves, and those missions weren’t insanely long and the levels were easy to navigate. This simple mission structure is also a piece of 2002 that Hanger 13 just couldn’t shake. I would have loved a whole new shooting system and some more stuff to do in Lost Heaven. See, the issue here lies in absolutely zero reasons to go back. There’s a “free ride” mode, but you just drive around doing nothing in the city. Again, that was fun and exciting in 2002, but today it’s a snooze fest.

Overall, the visuals are fantastic, with great lighting effects, animations, and terrific voice acting. Lost Heaven looks like a living, breathing world, but you’re just shuffled from mission to mission, unfolding a well-written story with likable characters, only to have zero reason to go back afterward. With nothing to do inside the open world and having silly collectibles distract you from mission objectives, as well as lingering issues from the original game, there’s just too much 2002 mixing with the 2020 stuff that makes things connect weird. It’s a fun ride the first time around, but after that, there’s no reason to revisit.

Reviewed On

Keyboard & Mouse

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Developer: EA DICE

Release Date: 06/07/2016

Also Available On

Mirror’s Edge is actually one of my favorite games of all time. It didn’t sell well, hence the near-decade hiatus, and a lot of gamers just didn’t get the game. It also had a lot of flaws, such as linear-level design, a paper-thin story, and awful combat. While Catalyst improves upon a lot of weaknesses from the first game, it also never addresses some as well. EA DICE really tried pushing the story further by showing us more of Faith’s past and how she’s tied to the KrugerSec conglomerate that’s brainwashing the entire country. Faith, along with the help of friends, must stop this evil police state and try to free the people. While this is good and all, the problem is that the world itself is sterile and boring, as are the characters. There’s no reason to really care outside of the somewhat entertaining story missions thrown at us. Icarus, Plastic, Noah, and various other characters just feel like cookie-cutter generic fill-ins for something that could be more.

This also goes for learning about the world. The majority of the game is actually filled with side missions, time trial runs, collecting things, and audio recordings. Here’s the problem with all of this: I just do not care one iota to do any of these. I spent a good ten hours trying to complete every mission as I went on, and then I just gave up. I don’t care about this world enough to bother spending more than the 8–10 hours the story missions give me. While the art style is faithful to the original with vibrant reds, blues, whites, and oranges, running around the city on top of glass just isn’t interesting. I’m glad there’s an open world here rather than linear-level design, but if it’s filled with boring filler content, just give me a better linear story mode. I don’t want to hack billboards to put my “ghost” on them for other players to see. I don’t want to create my own run trials for others to play. I have never cared less for an open world than in Catalyst. You pretty much see the entire city during the story missions, but after collecting the 100th chip, the 150th blue orb, and finishing at least two dozen trial runs and side missions, I just stopped caring. There’s no real reward for finishing all of these outside of “drops,” but you get to customize your ghost for players to see online.

Here’s something else to consider. I had this game installed on my PC for four years before finally finishing it. I wanted to complete the game as much as possible, but every time I booted it up and saw the dozens and dozens of icons on the maps and finished a few side missions, I turned it off. I have never had a game installed on my PC for that long without making frequent progress. I had a kid, went through three GPU generations, built two whole PCs, became a nurse, moved states, lost my father, and had a second kid on the way. All that happened between the release and finishing the game. The world is just plain boring, and the story isn’t interesting enough to warrant sticking around for most gamers. I really like Faith, as she’s a well-designed character, but her personality is very one-note, and she feels generic as well.

Let’s talk about what you can actually do in the game. The entire appeal of Mirror’s Edge is the parkour system. The first-person parkour system is a lot of fun and, honestly, the only saving grace for the entire franchise. You can run, jump, slide, double jump, zipline, and propel yourself around the buildings with grace. The new runner’s vision is a must, as this is a red line you follow, and the objects you need to use turn red. While running around and jumping around buildings is exciting, after 15 hours, you grow tired of it sometimes. Only the story missions provide something new to climb on or new environments to be in, as well as scripted events. The controls work for the most part, but it’s the combat that hasn’t improved much and is a real pain. I honestly wish they just nixed combat together for the series. You can do heavy and light attacks, but also while jumping off walls, off ledges onto enemies, and sliding into their legs. If they’re stunned, you can do quick three-hit combos, dodge and kick from behind, and all that jazz. It works, but it’s very frustrating when you confront more than two enemies at a time, and it’s not fun when you aren’t on the move. Most of the time, you can avoid enemies, and only a few instances require me to take them down, but combat isn’t fun at all. The guns are gone in this game, but the combat just feels clunky, heavy, slow, and cumbersome.

That’s pretty much all there is in the game. It looks fantastic as it pushed the Nvidia 10xx series cards to their limits when this game came out, and I remember my GTX 970 couldn’t run the game on Hyper settings at 60FPS. It just looks so good, but again, it is very sterile and boring to actually be in. The main missions provide entertainment for about 8–10 hours, but the extra side stuff is a pointless borefest. The parkour system combined with an open world just isn’t interesting enough to justify spending 50+ hours completing everything. Every area pretty much looks the same, and the characters are boring and generic. I feel the series needs a complete overhaul, if it even gets one. Due to poor sales of this game, we may be seeing the end of Faith. Stay for the story, and then don’t bother after that.

Reviewed On

Keyboard & Mouse

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Release Date: 02/15/2019

Available On

One of my biggest problems with Far Cry is that it’s too big. Every Ubisoft open-world game has become so large that it’s boring to explore. I’d rather have a smaller area with more interesting things to do. No longer does a large, open world impress people these days, as it’s nothing new. These games just keep getting larger and larger, but what you do inside has not evolved much. Running around taking out the same outpost 50 times, collecting things, hunting animals, upgrading stuff—it’s just so trite that I just don’t care for it anymore, and Ubisoft is the worst offender out there.

New Dawn is a direct sequel to Far Cry 5, in which you play as a nobody who has come across Hope County in its isolated post-nuclear world of Montana on a train of survivors and gets ambushed by the sisters Lou and Mickey. These are the antagonists of the game, and while they have a great personality and hit that Far Cry villain meter just right, their screen time is cut down to just a few scenes. The entire game is basically Far Cry 5, but more post-apocalyptic this time around. If you played that game, nothing has changed here outside of a new ranking and looting system that is forced upon the player to even progress in the story. It’s something that drove me insane through the entire game, and I always hit a progress wall because I had to stop and grind for material to unlock the next weapon bench level, which then unlocked the next weapon level, but to craft those weapons, I had to grind for different material. I mean, Christ! Do you see what I mean?

The game is broken down into four different levels, with the highest being an Elite rank. The enemies are ranked and are only immune to weapons of that rank as well. This is the stupidest system they could have used to try and make the game more interesting. I can use level two weapons on level three enemies, but I will die and dump tons of ammo into them, and I can’t carry enough even with my full ammo perks. The entire game can really only be played one way, to be honest. The main material to upgrade your main output, prosperity, is ethanol. This is acquired by liberating outposts. Oh jeez, liberating outposts? I wonder where I’ve done that before. Once you liberate the outpost, you get ethanol and a bonus if you don’t set off alarms or aren’t detected. I believe there are about a dozen outposts in the game, but the redundancy doesn’t end there. Once you liberate all the outposts, you need to re-liberate them! Yeah, what?! This is to put that rank system into play and let you take it on with the next level of enemies. Then you get even more ethanol, and the process repeats. You can’t even progress to Chapter 2 without upgrading all the stations at least once, which requires liberating all outposts. You can steal ethanol trucks, but it’s not enough to bother with.

Once you finally progress, you are at least using level two weapons, and I stuck with this for most of the game. However, I hit a wall at the end of the game as I couldn’t finish a mission without elite weapons. To do this, I had to liberate a few outposts, upgrade the station, and then grind for materials to get at least one elite weapon. To do this, I had to do expedition missions that are so boring and annoying, especially without a real co-op partner, to get the circuit boards that are needed for most elite weapons. That wasn’t enough, though! I needed to hunt the elite animal for its skin too! Just…the walls never ended, and it was just one after another after another. In between these walls, there’s really nothing to do outside of collecting materials all over the place. That’s literally it. The game is a borefest outside of the mildly entertaining story mode, as I did enjoy seeing the villains on the screen, including Joseph Seed.

The game map is also just too damn big. It’s smaller than Far Cry 5, but everything is spread so far apart that driving is a must, but I never even bothered flying anywhere as you have to grind to unlock flying vehicles. I feel like all the work I did in Far Cry 5 was reset after playing this game. The entertaining parts of Far Cry 5 are absent, like the arcade mode and the stuntman levels. There are a few side missions here to acquire allies, but they are mostly uninteresting. After I got just enough stuff to finish the game, I felt there was no point in continuing. The entire game is built around grinding to progress in the story, but once that’s done, what’s the point of finding everything? You can unlock perks for stealth kills and various other things that are mostly useless, like faster cooldown on mounted weapons. What’s the point of that? The game relies way too much on this material system to build up everything without it ever meaning anything after the story is finished.

Overall, New Dawn is worse than Far Cry 5, but taking out all the fun and wrapping the game around a grinding material hunting fest and smacking you will progression walls constantly. The map is too large and empty; there aren’t really any modes or things to do outside of looting materials; and the only really entertaining parts of the game don’t get much screen time. This feels like the most useless Far Cry game to date, as if it never existed, anyone would miss it. Even if you did play Far Cry 5, there’s no reason to even play this outside of sheer boredom. The shooting is still solid like always, and the visuals are amazing, but that means nothing when it’s inside of a boring, empty world that forces the player to play the game a certain way and then gives them the finger when the game is completely over.

Reviewed On

Keyboard & Mouse