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Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles – 12 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/15/2019

Posted in: Nintendo, PlayStation 3, Retro Consoles, Sony Consoles, Wii. Tagged: capcom, cavia, exclusive, first person shooter, fps, light gun, Nintendo, rail shooter, resident evil, shooter, the umbrella chronicles, wii. Leave a comment

Publisher: Capcom

Developer: Cavia, Inc.

Release Date: 11/13/2007

Available On

Resident Evil is less known for its light-gun arcade games, as these are held in public places that are niche hangout spots. The Wii with its remote and Zapper attachment is just begging to be used as a light-gun, and many of these games followed, and Capcom jumped on the bandwagon. Umbrella Chronicles is one of the more solid light-gun games on Wii, but it must be played co-op or you’re not going to have a good time.

The game has four chapters, with each one following bits and pieces from Resident Evil 0, 1, and 3: Nemesis, respectively, with the final chapter being an exclusively unique section just for this game. Each chapter has three or four sub-chapters and a few side chapters that are shorter and feature an alternate perspective featuring Ada Wong, Albert Wesker, and one Umbrella operative, Hunk. Story-wise, don’t expect to get a comprehensive telling of the Resident Evil series, as the pre-rendered cutscenes are chopped up and it’s not very cohesive or easy to understand. This is more for people who have played the older games before.

Outside of that, the shooting itself is rather solid. There are over a dozen weapons in the game, with your side pistol having unlimited ammo and various other guns like submachines, shotguns, rocket launchers, and handcannons making up the majority of the arsenal, but the ammo for these guns is extremely limited, and that’s the first downfall of this game. Why make an action game based on survival horror and keep the ammo count low? The pistol does very little damage, and you just forget about beating a boss with it. Ammo is incredibly scarce and requires you to have a partner, as some scenarios and waves just can’t be defeated with only the pistol. Hordes of enemies, sometimes over a dozen, will spawn in front of you, and popping them with 8–10 shots each with a pistol is just not feasible. With a second player, it’s possible, but solo is not. After chapter 3, I had to resort to a partner because it just gets too hard and too demanding for one player.

There are a good variety of enemies in the game, with some not appearing until the final chapter, and the bosses are all unique and incredibly challenging and require great reflexes, aim, and actual skill. Bosses are recycled from previous games, but fighting them in a 3D environment is pretty awesome. Some bosses have multiple stages, but these repeat in a cycle and can even include quick-time events that require button presses or a quick waggle. Quick-time events are peppered throughout the game and thankfully not abused, but they don’t appear on-screen long enough, and the waggle ones won’t trigger unless you start waggling the second they appear on the screen. This can lead to frustrating deaths.

Speaking of deaths, if you find a health spray, this acts as an extra life and can resurrect you on the spot, but without one, you start at the last checkpoint. There are herbs lying around for health, ammo, grenades, and barrels just begging to be blown up to take out large groups. This is one of the most difficult light-gun games I have ever played, and sadly, it’s impossible to finish solo without having unlocked the infinite ammo. The first two chapters have a nice difficulty scale, and it just ramps up way too hard on chapters 3 and 4. There’s also an issue with the game feeling too repetitive and not having enough variety, like vehicle scenes similar to other light-gun games. It relies too much on just shooting the same enemies ad nauseum.

Let’s talk about production values. Capcom is never one to skimp on a Resident Evil game, usually, and while Umbrella Chronicles looks fine, it shows it doesn’t push the Wii in the right direction. It looks like a GameCube game at best, with muddy low-resolution textures, but somehow there’s still a slowdown when too much is going on. It really could have looked better, even on the Wii, as there are better-looking games on the system, but what’s here is fine. The menus are pretty ugly, with not much going on, and everything looks so blurry and low-res. I need to redact my GameCube comparison from earlier; it’s more like a Dreamcast port, to be honest.

Overall, Umbrella Chronicles is a decent light-gun game that requires a second player or you won’t get very far. The boss fights are bombastic and fun, and each is unique, but the same enemies repeat over and over, and the scenarios don’t change. You’re just running down hallways or open areas and blasting enemies. The game goes on way longer than it needs to, with each chapter taking about 30-45 minutes to complete if you include the bonus missions. There is a lack of variety when it comes to other stuff to do to make this game even more exciting to play. The extras aren’t worth unlocking as they require S ranks in each chapter, most of the time, and after finishing this game once, there’s no real reason to go back.

Reviewed On

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter – 13 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/03/2019

Posted in: Microsoft, PC Reviews, PlayStation 2, Retro Consoles, Sony, Xbox, Xbox 360. Tagged: advanced warfighter, first person shooter, fps, ghost recon, grin, military, red storm, shooter, tom clancy's, ubisoft. Leave a comment

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Grin

Release Date: 05/03/2006

Available On

Ghost Recon has always been a part of my childhood, as it was one of my dad’s favorite games. While we only had the inferior PS2 versions, they were kind of fun to play and really challenging. The slow pace of crawling through enemy territory and deciding the best way to take them all out without dying after 3 shots could sometimes be quite rewarding, especially since this is what the series was popular for. GRAW carries this over to the PC version specifically, while the Xbox 360 version is faster-paced. I personally think this is a much inferior version, and the slower pace feels dated and boring.

After so many Ghost Recon games, it was exciting to get a new game in the series on the brink of brand new technology. While the PC version sure looks great, it uses a slightly different engine and is from a first-person perspective rather than a third, like the Xbox 360 version. Everything just feels completely different, such as enemies not staying tagged with the orange diamonds, and this became a real big problem. You get a drone in this game, but it’s tied to a tactical map rather than viewing it in real-time overhead. You can use basic commands to send squad members to an area and take out enemies, but you’re so blind, and the angle of the camera for the map is really strange and distorts your perspective. Many times my men died because I didn’t know what was ahead, and unless you play at a snail’s pace, you’re going to die a lot.

That also goes for your character. Two or three shots and you die, and the checkpoints are so infrequent and spread apart that it leads to many frustrations. The PC version should have a manual quick save feature, but it doesn’t. The character walks like a geriatric on a crutch or sprints as fast as a turtle. The maps are bland and void of any type of action or ambiance. Just plain walls, silos, warehouses, and blown-up cars. Once I did get a few bad guys tagged, I would send my guys out, but they strayed too far and the tags disappeared, which is really pointless. Just on the training map alone, I died maybe 6 or 7 times because it’s just so hard to see what’s coming up on a large open map. I need something like, I don’t know, my drone’s tags to stay up and I see where every bad guy is and either skip some or avoid certain areas.

At least giving commands is rather simple, as using the mouse wheel or number row tells your guys to stop, follow, attack, or carry out commands set on the map. However, the AI is weird, as sometimes my guys would pop people I never even saw and then not engage on tagged targets I told them to attack. They would just stand there and stare, sometimes get shot up, and tell me that the target wasn’t reachable. With all of this combined, this makes for a buggy and frustrating mess of a game that doesn’t exist on the Xbox 360 version. The snail’s pace alone isn’t fun, is boring and bland, and takes away all the character and amazing pace of the console version. Why Ubisoft tried to make the PC slower is beyond me, as I wanted the 360 version, maybe with better visuals. Even the art style is completely different, despite most of the maps and missions being the same.

Overall, GRAW on PC is a huge letdown, as Ubisoft thinks we want a slower, more boring game. It feels more like Rainbow Six than Ghost Recon, and it carries with it too many of the issues from past Ghost Recon games. Get rid of the slow pace and animations, make the AI better, and stop making up crawl around a massive map trying to pick off targets. It’s just not fun at all. Some people may love this, such as those who actually like boring tactical shooters that play at a crawl, but GRAW on PC just doesn’t cut it and shouldn’t exist when a superior version exists on Xbox 360.

Reviewed On

Keyboard & Mouse

Too Human – 11 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/01/2019

Posted in: Microsoft, Retro Consoles, Xbox 360. Tagged: action, hack and slash, Microsoft, silicon knights, too human, Xbox 360. Leave a comment

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Developer: Silicon Knights

Release Date: 08/19/2008

Available Exclusively On

What do you do with one of the most infamously bad games of the seventh-generation consoles? Well, you play it, of course! Why would I play such a masochistic game? For curiosity sake, which is why most people play terrible games anyway, Too Human is a hack-and-slash-style game comprised of Norse mythology and mostly a lot of problems.

You play as the Norse god Baldur, whose purpose in this game is completely unclear as the story is lost, pointless, and full of so many plot holes. Something about trying to find out about the death of his wife and the Aesir trying to kill Loki, and they literally never explain why. With the game only having four chapters and being 6 hours long, there’s not enough time to establish a good story and characters. Now, before I go on a long rant about what’s bad about this game, as there’s more bad than good, let’s at least talk about what is actually good. For starters, the combat system is an interesting idea with the right analog stick being used for attacks, kind of like a twin-stick shooter. The issue with this is that you have to rely on a completely brain-dead camera with presets that never really work. It’s unresponsive and sluggish, and the number of combo attacks can be counted on one hand. Aerial combat is out of the question, as timing pop-ups is nearly impossible, but that’s still not the worst problem. Gun combat works well enough, and you have to rely on it quite a bit because the melee combat is mostly broken, but more on that later.

There is a lot of loot in this game, and some of it is quite good, as well as blueprints you can pick up to create the most powerful armor in the game. Each armor piece has a unique look, and that was at least nice, but it’s lost in the pile of crap this game has. Let’s also talk about these cyberspace sections that are 100% useless and have no meaning in the game. You will find a well here and there that connects you to a vibrant and foilage-lush “cyberspace,” which is used for only one purpose, and that’s to waste your time. In these tiny rooms, all you do is push open a door or lift something to open up something in the “real world.” Why bother? Why can’t I just do it in the real world? Cyberspace is also never explained as to why it even exists or its purpose. Sometimes the cyberspace would only hold a treasure spire that had health orbs. All of that for just a couple of health obs. It’s one of the most pointless features in a game I have ever seen.

Let’s get back to combat. I can’t think of any more positive things about this game. While a right stick-oriented combat system could work, it just doesn’t here. The fundamentals of hack-and-slash Diablo-style combat are just completely broken. Outside of the easiest enemies that die in one hit, you can never get your combat momentum up enough to make large combos. Anything above those one-hit enemies requires a dozen hits for starters, all the way up to enemies that require parts of their bodies to be targeted and taken down. This becomes a problem when you’re swarmed with enemies with zero-hit feedback and you have to take each one down one at a time. You could pop them all up into the air, but taking them down this way takes forever, as air combat is practically useless, as explained earlier. Sometimes the animations don’t connect, and sometimes Baldur just stands in one spot, spinning his weapon around despite me telling him to move. This leads to the largest issue of the entire game: death after death. I died 127 times in 6 hours, and this causes a long death animation to play out in which a Valkyrie comes down from the sky and picks you up…just to restart in the same spot, but nothing else resets. What’s the point of death, then? I died on the final boss maybe 30+ times, and each time I went through a 30-45 second death animation just to spawn in the same spot. It’s absolutely frustrating and has no purpose.

When it comes to leveling up and upgrading, that’s also pointless. You get skill points to spend, but the tree is so useless and poorly designed that you must unlock a previous item before getting to the next. It’s just one line straight down, and you can’t really skip around. Each skill can hold 10 points, and it needs 5 before moving on to the next one. I only got to level 27 before the game ended, so there’s not enough time to unlock all the skills. No matter how much I leveled up or how good my armor or weapons were, I took the same amount of damage and dealt the same amount of damage. Never did I surpass a certain enemy and only take 2 hits instead of 7 after acquiring a much more powerful weapon. Enemies level up with you so that the same enemy from level 2 takes the same amount of hits at level 20. Speaking of enemies, they are repetitive, dull, brainless, and repeat hundreds of times ad nauseum. It’s a borefest.

To wrap all of this up, the entire game is just broken, frustrating, and boring. The audio constantly cuts out, and the death animation song bit gets stuck through the whole game. During the final boss fight, I had zero audio except Baldur’s grunts and that death song repeating randomly and cutting out. The level design is abysmal at best, with bland generic corridors literally copied and pasted through a level. There’s no variation or break in the patterns. Bosses are laughably easy or frustratingly difficult, such as the last boss in the game. 90 minutes to kill her just because of how little my level 27 hammer did against her. I literally shaved pixels off with each hit, and it’s broken up into four stages. Even if you exclude the 10 minutes worth of death animations, it still takes way too long because of the poor difficulty balancing. Let’s also not forget the awful characters, poor dialog, and a story that makes about as much sense as a car with square wheels.

Even the game runs poorly, with massive frame drops in the menus, no less, and muddy textures. There’s hardly anything redeeming about this game except that you can play co-op and share the misery with a friend. Too Human died for a good reason and remains my least favorite Xbox 360 exclusive to date. Do yourself a favor and play something much better.

Vane

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/29/2019

Posted in: PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified. Tagged: adventure, friend and foe, vane. Leave a comment

Publisher: Friend & Foe

Developer: Friend & Foe

Release Date: 01/15/19 (PS4), 07/22/19 (PC)

Available On

Sony is well known for their “artsy-fartsy” games that started way back on the PS1 with titles such as Intelligent Qube and Vib-Ribbon. Later games such as Echochrome and Unfinished Swan pushed this further as indie-friendly games that are all about art and vision rather than sales. Vane is another game in this…vain! It sadly misses the mark on what these other art house games do.

You play as a girl who can turn into a crow, and you start out flying around a valley. The direction of what to do is unclear, just like in the story itself. Most of these artsy games have some clear story through visual or audio representation, and by the end, you get the message, but Vane doesn’t have either of these. We open up with the girl delivering a gold something to a large crow elder in a storm, and she gets shunned away and gets eaten by the storm. As we fly around as the crow, we are attracted to shiny objects in the distance on windmills, and these release gold leaves, and more crows follow you to the centerpiece windmill that requires enough crows to release a gold ball.

As this ball is released, you are taken prisoner, and somehow you must free more crows, and the gold stuff turns you into a little girl that can walk around. This second area is the last time you will use your flying skills, as the entire back half of the game sees you just walking around and rolling a giant gold ball around. So that’s the entirety of the game. There’s no point to it all, and the ending doesn’t answer anything either. There are a few push-pull puzzles with the giant ball, as you need to find more girls to use your scream powers to rewind time in a large enough area to recreate bridges. After that, it’s more stuff with the gold and no explanation as to what it’s used for, who are these crow elders, and why are we bringing this gold ball to the top of a tower? Nothing; there’s no investment for the 2 hours of your life you will never get back.

If you’re going to do an artsy game, at least give us a story at the bare minimum. Journey did this wonderfully and was memorable because of the visuals, music, and visual story it told. The problems don’t end there with Vane; however, there are glitches and bugs that require restarts, such as physics issues in which I would get stuck on something or the giant gold ball would roll in the wrong direction and not be retrievable. One time, my crow wouldn’t transform into a girl and required a manual restart.

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At least the visuals are nice, with an abstract fractal typesetting and some great lighting and well-designed characters, but it’s all for naught if there’s nothing to care about in the game. Vane is a sadly missed opportunity, with too much emphasis on visuals and less on something the player needs to strive for. We know these girls are desperate to save something, but what? It’s never clear and is not really worth the time to play through.

Reviewed On

Xbox One S Controller

Watch Dogs 2

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/23/2019

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Unsupported, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox One. Tagged: adventure, hacker, montreal, open world, ubisoft, watch dogs 2. Leave a comment

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Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Release Date: 11/15/2016

Available On

Do you trust your government? Do you trust your social media outlets? Do you trust anyone with money or power? That’s what Watch Dogs 2 constantly asks you as you play through the campaign. You play as a hacker named Marcus who is trying to take over what Aiden Pierce did in the first Watch Dogs and take down the corporate conglomerate Blume and their ctOS 2.0 system that is continuously monitoring the people’s every move and step to a creepy factor.

Watch Dogs 2, now set in San Francisco instead of Chicago, is a gorgeous open-world game full of many activities as well as side missions to complete next to the main campaign. There are also collectibles and various shops in which you can deck Marcus out in cool hip threads. But that’s not what I want to talk about first. Let’s first talk about this whole “hack anything” gameplay feature that Ubisoft bragged about for Watch Dogs 1 and didn’t deliver. Your main weapon is your cell phone, and when you move the camera, a white line will connect to everything around you, from cars to electrical boxes to people, and let you either control it or the citizen’s cell phones in various ways. Steal cash from their bank account, burn their phone up (and kill them in the process), set the police or gangs on them, and even listen in on texts and audio calls. It’s really neat and works much better than the first game, and it’s integral for combat when going into restricted areas, which are about 90% of every mission’s contents.

When you get to a restricted area, it can be as small as a house or as large as a rocket-building facility or even a boat. You can either go in guns blazing, which is impossible early on as the better weapons are really expensive to buy, or you must unlock weapon slots. Your main tools are your RC jumper car and your RC helicopter. The RC Copter comes in halfway through the campaign, but you get the car immediately, and you can complete entire missions with this thing without ever having to walk in. Set up just outside the restricted boundaries and control your RC car through vents and doors, have it hack laptops, and even distract guards by making their cell phone ring so you can roll on by. The RC car has physical capabilities that the copter cannot, such as picking up items and physically hacking certain things that require access to the main objectives.

The RC helicopter is great for scouting and remotely hacking things that don’t require physical interaction. Now, there are some missions in which Marcus must physically hack into something himself and these can get a little tough. You don’t last very long in this game by shooting, and you die after a few shots. It’s better to maybe call in the mafia on a guard and have them shoot it out and thin the herd a bit, or use the cameras around the building and maybe rig electrical boxes and have guards go out that way. Sometimes I would just remotely have a car rampage its way through an area, which is a lot of fun. There are so many ways to complete objectives, and it’s basically a fun sandbox of hacking and shooting. The RC car and RC copter are a godsend, as some facilities are just too difficult for Marcus to enter without dying constantly.

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Then there are a few missions where you just hack your way through via scripted puzzles which are a blast. Making people suffer or humiliating them through various hacking scenarios is just so much fun, and I always wanted more. Outside of these missions, scenarios are how you escape from the cops, and that’s a whole thing. You do have a cooldown timer when you are caught, and once you hide long enough, everyone will break off, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. In the city, running from the cops requires either hiding away from the streets or ducking down in a car. I would sometimes duck down in a car, and when a cop car strolled by, I would hack their car and kick it in reverse before they spotted me. It’s really cool to see so many ways to play around with the game, from having cranes lift you hundreds of feet into the air and onto a building to using a forklift to deliver an explosive canister to a group of guards and have them blow up.

That’s what the game is mostly made up of, with some side activities such as races, hacking events, real-time co-op side missions, and situations in which another player enters your area and you must find them with your hacker vision before they steal your followers. Outside of this, the story is great, with memorable characters that I really cared about thanks to the amazing voice acting and well-written dialog. The cut scenes kept me pushing through this game for an entire week, and I didn’t want to put it down. The game uses fake groups that represent real-life corporations such as Nudle (Google) and Nvite (Facebook), and the overall social media trend is being used to manipulate the public. It really makes you think about what’s going on in the world today, and I have to commend Ubisoft for making real-world problems like racism, sexism, and various social issues present in the game to wake up gamers.

The game also looks fantastic, with very realistic San Francisco such as the Golden Gate Bridge, the famous Hairpin Street, and various monuments and buildings. The game, however, suffers from a poorly optimized engine with even two GPU generations ahead of what’s required, struggling to keep up at max settings at 4K. MSAA anti-aliasing cripples anything but multiple GPU setups, and I constantly would go from 90FPS and dip into the 30s during driving scenes or climbing buildings for no apparent reason. Despite all of this, the game looks fantastic.

Overall, Watch Dogs 2 is a sandbox of hacking and shooting with so many fun scenarios and ways to complete them. The story, characters, and dialog are all well written and keep you coming for more, and using real-world problems to deliver this story is a plus. Despite the poorly optimized engine, the game looks amazing, and the rebuilt San Francisco is a blast. I just didn’t care much for the tedious activities and collecting spray cans and hacker points to max out my research. It just felt incredibly tedious.

Reviewed On

Keyboard & Mouse

Alan Wake – 7 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/17/2019

Posted in: Microsoft, PC Reviews, Retro Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Xbox 360. Tagged: alan wake, horror, Microsoft, remedy, scary, third person shooter, tps. Leave a comment

Publisher: Remedy Entertainment/Microsoft Game Studios

Developer: Remedy Entertainment/Nordic Studios

Release Date: 02/16/2012 (PC), 05/18/2010 (X360)

Available On

I always come back to Alan Wake every few years because it’s just such a good game. Great combat, storytelling, varied gameplay, well-written characters, and an overall solid experience. Almost a decade after the original release, I went ahead and played through the PC version again, and it’s held up surprisingly well. Despite its graphical age, it feels like it could have been released yesterday.

You play Alan Wake, who is a writer who takes a vacation to the Pacific Northwest in Washington and stays at a cabin in Cauldron Lake. Alan has a scuffle with his wife and wakes up—not really himself or anything around him for that matter. Without spoiling too much, the story revolves around darkness and always wondering whether what’s happening to Alan is real or if it’s all in his head, as you will see major story landings in which this question comes up. Even at the end of the game, this is never really answered, and maybe it’s best to leave the player guessing a little.

The story is well told and might take a couple of playthroughs to get everything, but it does keep you pushing through the 6-hour story until the end. Characters such as Barry, Alice, Sheriff Wheeler, and even the doctors and radio station host are all just so well written and memorable. Other story tidbits include finding manuscript pages, watching live-action episodes of “Night Springs,” clearly inspired by “The Twilight Zone,” and finding radio station bits by finding radios. It’s nice to see the story unfold outside of cutscenes, and it really gives you an insight into what’s going on in Bright Falls outside of what Alan is doing. The whole premise of Alan Wake feels special to me, as I originally played it while living in Southern California and not really caring where it was set. Almost ten years later I now live in the PNW just outside Snoqualiamie, WA where the setting was inspired. It’s awesome to personally experience this setting and then come back to the game; I appreciated it so much more.

The main gameplay elements here are your flashlight and guns. Light plays a huge role in this game, as the story is centered around it, and your flashlight is a weapon. You can boost the flashlight beam, and a circle will get smaller on enemies, and once the circle is gone and you beam away from the darkness, they become vulnerable and can be shot with the gun. There are easy and hard enemies, a few fast ones, and inanimate objects that become enemies later on in the game, such as boss fights with harvesters, cranes, trucks, and barrels. It’s interesting how the combat is designed, and you have to be afraid of everything around you, even birds! The use of the flashlight and guns is just so well done, with great controls, and the guns feel satisfying to shoot. You always have to be on your toes, and every gunfight is never the same with limited ammo, no flashlight, and sometimes tons of ammo to make you feel powerful. There are even lights in the environment you can use to take the car down, such as spotlights, floodlights, and headlights on cars in the few driving sequences.

The game, however, is extremely linear, and you rarely get to stray off the beaten path. These are only seen in the car sequences, where you can stop at a house or two to find collectibles and then continue on. Despite this, the heavily scripted events are fun, there’s so much variety, and the pacing is spot on. Going from chaotic dark forests to a New York apartment and then to the psych ward and even a cafe is a nice touch. It lets you breathe.

Overall, Alan Wake is one of the best games of the Xbox 360 generation, with fantastic character dialogue, an interesting story, and fun gunplay with variety in level design and great pacing. The PC version adds DirectX 10 lighting and features such as ultra-widescreen support, a FOV slider, slightly better textures, and character models. Overall though, the textures still look really muddy, even during its release, and there are obvious LOD and draw distance issues with pop-in that the PC didn’t need to experience.

Reviewed On

Keyboard & Mouse

Super Mario Odyssey

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/16/2019

Posted in: Nintendo Consoles, Switch. Tagged: Nintendo, odyssey, platformer, super mario, Switch. Leave a comment

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Nintendo

Release Date: 10/27/2017

Available Exclusively On

Nintendo always has a knack for making one huge innovation to their franchises per console cycle, and the Switch is no exception. Odyssey is a well-crafted game, taking many years of experience and gameplay honing to create one of the best video game experiences in the last decade. Odyssey is massive, with dozens of hours of content and a variety of things to do.

Like all Mario games, there’s not much of a story, just your typical Bowser kidnapping Princess Peach story again with no cut scenes or anything else, but that’s fine as Mario is all about the gameplay. The main gameplay hook in this Mario game is his hat. He can throw it to take control of enemies, for combat, and to get out-of-reach items. The hat works so naturally and feels great to use that I never had any issues. Once you arrive in the Cap Kingdom, you will be leaping and bounding similarly to Super Mario Galaxy in the way Mario moves and jumps. Taking control of certain enemies gives you special combat abilities or allows you to access certain areas Mario can’t. It’s so much fun, and I always looked forward to the next thing I could control.

Another element is the new 2D levels. These are hidden throughout the game and give you moons that are needed to power up your Odyssey ship to get to Bowser. There are 880 moons in the world. I know it’s a monster of a task, but it’s so much fun. Your first playthrough allows you to get the first batch, and then after you beat the game, there are meteor rocks that you can smash in each world, and they send the rest of the moons flying. Anyways, these 2D levels are just like the 8-bit games with Mario wrapped around the 3D world, jumping and hopping along.

Mario can also swim, fly (with controller enemies), and pretty much do anything you can imagine, as the game is so varied and there’s so much to see and do. Not one world is alike, and each one has new things to do and discover. Mario can also change his hats and outfits this time around by buying them with coins or using special world-specific coins. Some outfits are needed to access bonus areas. These bonus areas are actually the most fun and challenging, but well worth it for the moons.

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There are boss fights with Bowser minions, the Boonals, which are evil bunnies. The boss fights are really easy, and so is Bowser at the end of the game. It’s clear that the game doesn’t rely on bosses for challenges, as some bonus areas had me stuck for over an hour, restarting until I got all the jumps right. Thankfully, most of the game is a perfect challenge, and some of the challenges are just figuring out how to get to the next moon or bonus area. Some are in plain sight, while others require you to think a little bit and do certain things. There are music note challenges as well as scarecrow timer challenges. All of these things combined make for an exciting game that is incredibly hard to put down.

I really can’t find anything negative to say except that all you do is collect moons, and there’s no other end goal. There are at least a few fast travel points in each world, so even that isn’t a problem. The visuals are fantastic, and the entire game just feels alive with character and personality. It’s hard to hate a game made this well, 30 years of perfection really shows with zero control issues, framerate problems, or anything else. No matter how you slice it, this is essentially a perfect game. The amount of variety just boggles my mind, and I don’t know how the developers managed to make every bonus area, challenge, and world completely unique, especially to house 880 moons.

Overall, Super Mario Odyssey is a must-have for Switch fans and a good reason to buy one. There is no other platform that offers this kind of gaming perfection other than Nintendo. They are masters of video games, and it shows in every one of their unique main titles.

Rogue Trooper Redux

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/07/2019

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Switch, Xbox One. Tagged: eidos, hd, rebellion, redux, remaster, rogue trooper, square enix. Leave a comment

Publisher: Sold Out

Developer: Rebellion

Release Date: 10/17/2017

Available On

When playing Rogue Trooper, I kept asking myself, “Why?” to everything. Why is there no plot? Why was this game even considered good enough to remaster? Why did this game exist in the first place? It’s not all bad, definitely playable, and has some challenging gameplay, but it could have been so much more, right? Well, meet Rebellion! Famous for some of the most mediocre games in the early to mid-2000s that weren’t horrible but barely passable and very forgettable. I played the original on PC back in 2009, and it wasn’t all that great back then either.

You play as a GI named Rogue (how original), who is a blue alien dude stuck in the middle of a war with a race called the Norts. There’s your story; have a nice day! I’m not kidding at all. This game has more plot holes than a screen door, and it boggles my mind as to why they even bothered. These GIs are immune to every poison known to exist, okay? But why? Then there is a single poison that was found to work, and the Norts want to mass-produce it to wipe out the GIs. Again, why? There are no answers, just lines of dialog that need a lot of backstories to explain what is even going on. The characters are paper-thin, don’t have much screen time, and the voice acting is atrocious. So the only reason to play Rogue Trooper is for the shooting, and that’s average at best.

Rogue has a gun that is “smart,” as well as his backpack and helmet. He installs chips that are cut out of dead comrades, and it gives his equipment an AI. That’s a pretty neat idea, and it’s the only thing in this game that seemed to have been fully fleshed out. Rogue gathers salvage from dead bodies and piles and uses these to craft ammo, new weapons, and upgrades. You don’t pick up any ammo in the game, as you can only craft it. You do have a pistol on hand that has infinite ammo in case you run out, but there’s the constant challenge of keeping your supply up and looting dead bodies. There are a few on-rails levels to mix things up, so the game isn’t boring ever, and the challenge is quite nice as standing out in the open for too long will get you dead and there’s a halfway decent cover system in place.

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Rogue can also equip a silencer to his machine gun and sniper rifle, as well as use a decoy and attraction tool, but I never actually used these. The game even has a stealth mechanic in place, but after I got the silencer, I didn’t bother sneaking around, as sniper shots are one-hit kills. You can also place your Gunnar as a turret so it can cover doors that get unlocked, but again, this seemed like a wasted mechanic as the game isn’t quite sure if it wanted to be a tactical stealth game or a run-and-gun shooter. This game is a living, breathing embodiment of early to mid-2000s third-person shooters, and it hasn’t aged very well. Extremely linear level design, awkward animations, barely manageable aiming, and lots of on-rails and scripted events.

At least the game had a marginal graphics update and looks decent enough, but you can still see the age of the game behind the shiny new surface. There’s also a multiplayer mode that is basically pointless since no one is playing this online and never really did, and the entire game can be beaten in just 4 hours. There’s absolutely no reason to go back, either. So I go back to my original question: why? Why should you play a dated 15-year-old game in 2019? Maybe to experience a type of shooter that was incredibly popular at the height of the PS2 era? Maybe you have curious memories of this game and want to relive them. The answer is that you’re not missing out on anything if you skip this, and you don’t gain anything from playing it. Thankfully, it’s dirt cheap, and I can only recommend this to the curious.

Reviewed On

Shadow of the Colossus

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/05/2019

Posted in: PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Retro Consoles, Sony, Sony Consoles. Tagged: bluepoint games, hd, japan studio, playstation, playstation 4, ps4, remake, remaster, shadow of the colossus, Sony, team ico. Leave a comment

Publisher: SIE

Developer: Bluepoint Games

Release Date: 02/06/2018

Available On

The PlayStation is well known for its artsy games and games that push the boundaries of the medium. Team Ico already did this with Ico for the PlayStation 2, and then again with Shadow of the Colossus. Pushing the PS2 beyond its limits, they were able to create a huge world with massive colossi that must be wrangled and toppled in hopes of saving a nameless girl from an endless sleep. You play as a boy only known as Wander, and with your trusty sword, bow, and horse Agro, you follow the light from your sword to each colossus to figure out how to take them down.

Each colossus is a puzzle unto itself that requires using the environment, wits, skill, and thinking. One colossus may require agitating it and having it expose a weak point at which you use your bow to make a graspable part low enough to reach. You then climb the colossus, with some being climbing puzzles, and stab each weak point while they buck and try to toss you off. You can hang on by holding R2 and using X to jump. It’s not as easy as it sounds, as letting go of R2 can drop you to your death or make you start a climbing puzzle all over again. The controls have slightly improved with the remaster, but the animations are irritating and sluggish, and towards the end of the game, the frustration really starts to set in.

While the game doesn’t run at 10FPS like in the PS2 version, trying to do more advanced combat and relying on quick controls is not possible, and it gets really frustrating at around Colossus 12 or 13. One colossus is a small bull that must be chased off a cliff to knock off its armor, and then jumping on it just right from that cliff to land on its back is no easy feat. The issue here is that Wander just doesn’t have the agility to dodge attacks, as no matter how much I rolled or jumped, the bull always hit me. I missed the cliff jump the first time, and I died before making it back up to try again. Wander’s get-up animations are incredibly slow, with around 7 seconds passing before he gets up. Some colossi can hit you again and kill you quickly if you don’t know what to do. Outside of combat, the animations to jump around and grab on are wonky, as long climbing puzzles towards the end have to restart if you so much as get a jump at the wrong angle. You can adjust Wander mid-jump so he will go in that direction until he hits the ground.

Outside of taking down these massive colossi, there’s literally nothing else to do. This large open world is completely void of life outside of some birds, and it’s my biggest gripe about this game. As beautiful as it is, I wanted more, as the story in itself is pretty bare-bones and vague in terms of what’s going on, even towards the end. I feel like this world could have been fully lived in with lore and people, whether they’re alive or dead. It takes around 10 minutes to get to each colossus, and that time is spent controlling Agro, who has sluggish animations and terrible controls, and staring at a barren wasteland. I understand it’s cursed, but it could have been more.

The visual upgrade is probably the most noticeable, as it looks amazing with flowing grass, Nvidia HairWorks on the colossi, HDR lighting, and high-resolution models and textures. On my 65″ LG OLED TV, it just pops up using the PS4 Pro. That’s also another thing; the game has framerate issues and doesn’t look as good on the original PS4, so the Pro is the way to go here.

Overall, Shadow of the Colossus is well worth a purchase for newcomers and anyone who played the previous two versions. The visual upgrade alone and higher framerate are well worth it, and I feel this is the version that the developers originally envisioned but just couldn’t pull off with the technology at the time. Shadow of the Colossus is a piece of gaming history. Pushing gaming conventions to their limits as well as an underpowered piece of hardware and a vision that was bigger than life, Shadow of the Colossus is a must-play for any PlayStation fan.

Reviewed On

Detroit: Become Human

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/05/2019

Posted in: PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified. Tagged: adventure, become human, david cage, detroit, quantic dream, Sony, story. Leave a comment

Publisher: SIE

Developer: Quantic Dream

Release Date: 05/18/2018

Available On

David Cage has been well known for fascinating stories that talk about the boundaries of the human mind and what humanity is capable of. Our destructive nature and so much emotion go into making us what we are. Detroit is easily his best work, with fantastic characters, tense scenes, and gripping dialog with moral choices that will test any gamer and really make them think and regret.

Detroit is a game about the fight between androids and humans. There’s always been a theory that eventually AI will surpass us and get the upper hand. Isaac Asimov wrote about it a lot and created stories in which he blurred the boundary between human emotion and algorithms. Detroit does an amazing job doing this with a well-crafted story and really questioning the absolute core of humanity and addressing problems that we are facing in the real world today with racism, classism, and prejudice. You play as three separate androids, and each has its own goal and path. Markus starts as an android serving an older, famous artist and lives in an upper-class society. Kara, who is a maid for an abusive drug-addicted father in the slums of Detroit, and Conner, who is a brand new prototype android that is used in investigations for the Detroit Police Department,.

Like all of David Cage’s games, each level is a scene in which you play a different character; the scenes rotate, and as you make your choices, you unlock new paths that involve hatred or love for your character or cause. The player walks their character around and can interact with some of the environment by manipulating objects via button commands (like all of David Cage’s games), and each scene is played out with quick-time events, and missing them can actually impact the storyline as well. It’s a very sensitive timeline, with different outcomes for each character. I honestly can’t get too in-depth with how my timeline went, but let’s just say none of my characters survived, and part of this is because the timeline/path system isn’t explained well enough.

As you make choices and either succeed or fail in quick-time events, characters around you will hate you or love you, and there are a few levels of this. If a character hates you too much and you try to really fix it towards the end and it feels like you’re succeeding, once you unlock that path, you can’t really change it. There is an arrow at the top-right screen that will point up or down when a choice is made, and small arrows are little movements and large arrows will sway in bigger increments, but we never know how far that is, as eventually, you will get a status update of how that character feels instead of a meter. It would be nice to know so if we go too far down a path, we can just keep going down that way instead of trying to change things and ultimately get an ending we don’t like or weren’t working towards. The story does feel very organic despite all of this, and I think it’s because of how many micro-choices you can make. However, no matter what choices you make, once down a certain path, you can’t fix it.

Outside of this core path system, there is more story than gameplay. The entire game is made up of quick-time events and nothing else. This is really a game where you enjoy the story more than the gameplay, but it works well here and has for all of David Cage’s games. I actually sat through the entire game and didn’t stop because of how interesting the story and characters were. There is a constant sense of urgency, fear, dread, and sadness; I even teared up towards the end of the game! You never quite know what your exact outcome will be, as I made some choices on the fly, and I realized if I had chosen another option, things would have turned out fairly badly. It really tests you as a person and how you think and feel, especially given how political the game gets.

Visually, the game is second to none. Outside of God of War, there is no other game in this generation that looks this good. The facial animations are incredibly realistic, with beautiful skin textures and minute details and twitches in faces that I have never seen in a game before. It just looks so amazing and is sadly overlooked. The voice acting is phenomenal thanks to the B-grade actors that were used here, and they’re actors that you say, “Hey! I know that guy from this movie!” but I don’t actually know the actor’s name.

In the end, Detroit: Become Human is one of the best games, storywise, I have played in the last 10 years. While it severely lacks in the gameplay department, it thrives in story, character, and fantastic visuals. I highly recommend this for all gamer types, as stories are the fundamentals of video games and are what make video games such a unique medium.