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Archive Post
Game 32 - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Remastered [PS4] ★★★
I have mixed feelings about this remaster of Modern Warfare. On the one hand, it's a great port. It looks pretty nice and runs great. On the other hand, it's aged pretty poorly. It shows some flashes of what made the game brilliant 9 years ago, in that the in-game tutorial/difficulty setter has yet to be bettered, and the "drop in" from satellite footage at the start of some levels is
still an impressive and awesome effect. But the enemy AI is shite, the difficulty is all over the place, and there's simply not a lot to it. I appreciate that this is perhaps the most influential game in a decade, but what was once an incredible take on a millitary shooter is now just so... ordinary. Shame, because I hadn't played it since then and it definitely didn't hold up as well as I was expecting, but it should still be worth it for the classic-flavour multiplayer.
Game 33 - Grow Home [PS4] ★★★
I've tried Grow Home a handful of times before but bounced off it. The ropey performance on PS4, coupled with the barebones presentation and physics jank just gave it a real amateur, "early access" vibe. That's all still present, but this time I coupled it with a Spotify playlist and it transformed the game into a relaxing, tactile experience with a super-chill atmosphere. Once you get used to the camera-based controls, the act of scrambling around the floating rocks in Grow Home is endlessly satisfying. The glimmering crystals you spot in seemingly impossible positions all become obtainable through BUD's godlike climbing abilities. They're optional, but you get some really useful powerups to aid your traversal if you find them, and the contrast between how moved before and after each makes them feel really liberating. It's short, but it's a feelgood time that's perfect to play through on a Saturday morning.
Game 34 - God of War III Remastered [PS4] ★★
Good grief, this does not hold up well on a repeat playthrough. The PS3 version was, at the time, a riotous spectacle of solid action, with incredible visuals at an impossible scale. This remaster, though, ugh. It's a competent port, for sure. The unwavering 1080/60 delivery looks great. The combat was still pretty fun and it has some cool enemy design. But for all the gruesome vengeance Kratos enacts on the road to Mount Olympus, the most graphic butchery you'll see is in the script. Every line is lazy, every character without motivation. It opens with a panning shot of the gods, all lined up and smirking like a team of Saturday morning cartoon villains, and proceeds to somehow go
downhill from there, with utter contempt for both the source material and the player's intelligence. They ended the second game with the (shocking?) revelation that Zeus was Kratos' father, and the characters in this jaw at Kratos like he's been a thorn in their side since he was a toddler. Hercules bellows, in some of the greatest writing of our time, "You were always Zeus' favourite!" while trying to kill his recently-revealed brother, as Hera warns "Now, you boys play nice..." from the arena's stands. Stellar. Then in the closing scenes, which honestly must drag on for like a million hours, you're fed pretty much every line of dialogue in the game again as Kratos takes care of his weekly battle with his inner demons. The game cuts back to Pandora saying "hope is what makes us strong!" no less than twice in 10 minutes, before a closing conversation with Athena reveals that, Kratos, the hope was inside you all along! You just have to believe!
u havin' a fuckin' laugh, mate?
Game 35 - Evolve: Stage 2 [PC] ★★
Not so much a game I've beat, but a game I'm done with, now that Turtle Rock have announced they are too. Evolve was a troubled game from the start, and not for the reasons the developers think. They have pointed to the "micro"transaction fuckery 2K enforced on them as the reason it was stillborn, but in truth, the problem was with the game itself. Evolve can at times be incredible. Being hunted in a 4v1 situation is both exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure, and it has some good ideas on the hunter side with the monster scaring birds or being able to create custom weakpoints on it with the sniper. But the sad thing is, the fun moments are so few and far between that it's simply not a game worth bothering with. Either the monster gets found right away and they're killed before they had a chance, or the hunters spend 25 minutes chasing it in circles before either side loses in a clusterfuck of a final battle. You seldom have control of what role you play, the downtime between matches is way too long, and all the combat feels imprecise and ineffective. A great game in theory, but the more time spent playing it the harder it became to enjoy. Going Free to Play couldn't save it, and now nothing ever will.
Game 36 - Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice[PC] ★★★
Another solid entry into the Ace Attorney saga, but not among the best of the series. Spirit of Justice suffers from leaning a little too hard into the supernatural spirit-medium stuff. It simply presents too many narrative backdoors, and in the last case in particular, it became almost impossible to keep a track of what the hell was going on. If a mystery story is a game between the reader and the author, then this is basically cheating. I'm
almost entirely sure that the resolution of the final case is a massive plot hole, where the very bit of information that resolves the greater story arc should also have exonerated the true killer, but I can't say it with full conviction because it genuinely lost me in spirit medium fuckery. Spirit of Justice also has to pay lip-service to far too many legacy systems, from perceiving a witness' tells and forensic testing, to emotional therapy and psyche-locks. That they introduce a
new gimmick on top of all this just (a seance that lets you witness the victim's final moments) just seems crazy. Still, the writing is mostly excellent, there are some real memorable moments, and the animation is as great as ever. That fourth case is a real howler, though. Like, worst-in-the-whole-series bad. It should never have made it through the localisation.
Game 37 - Hacknet[PC] ★★★★★
An absolutely glorious experience. Hacknet takes the framework of Uplink, removes all of the ballaches, adds a pretty convincing command-line interface, and wraps it all up in an engaging storyline. All while a thumping electronica soundtrack (that is honestly just as good as Hotline Miami's) keeps you hyped as fuck. It's Hollywood-style hacking, but it complements it with enough cyber-sleuthing that it feels continually rewarding. Even though most of the systems you break into only require use of a small handful of tools, when you get in there there's enough narrative threads and personal files that you always feel you're on to something new. Two huge highlights in the story will make you feel terrified and heartbroken, before an adrenaline-fuelled revenge-hack finale leaves you feeling like a total badass while the credits roll. I
am Zero Cool, motherfucker.
Game 38 - Titanfall 2 [PS4] ★★★★★
Sit up and take notice, Titanfall 2's single-player campaign is something
really special. It's very reminiscent of Portal in that it feels like it's been meticulously edited to trim out all the filler and deliver the most pure, fun experience it can. It will often introduce new (and sometimes completely unexpected) gameplay systems just because they're cool and enjoyable, then throw them away in time for the next chapter, where you'll be doing something completely different. It's a highly varied campaign as a result, and plays at a breathtaking pace. One of the key moments is an
incredible surprise, delivered with such perfect confidence, that I couldn't help grinning like a lunatic. Genuinely amazing. All this is to say nothing of it's fantastic multiplayer, which layers some interesting twists on unlocks and progression on top of an excellent core to drive players towards trying new things, and feeling empowered like no other shooter out there. Titanfall 2 feels like a landmark game. It tries to shake up the genre, to feel different and shift the focus back towards the player feeling great, and it pays off. It makes you feel like an utter badass every minute it's running, and you owe it to yourself to pick it up.
Game 39 - Shadow Warrior 2 [PC] ★★★
The first Shadow Warrior completely passed me by, so I wasn't sure what to expect from this. It makes a fantastic first impression, with its I-don't-give-a-fuck attitude and hyperactive gameplay, you zip around like a ninja fucking up everyone's shit, but everything slowly begins to grate, and then outright annoy. The heavy Diablo inspirations are apparent almost immediately. You start in your hub world, accept a quest, then head to some procedurally-generated dungeons to breeze through endless minions, with occasional tough groups (with random modifiers) popping up to slow your progress and give you a chance for a better loot drop. Around 2 hours in, you can be forgiven for getting excited about what the game has in store, but unfortunately, that's pretty much it. The puerile jokes stop being funny (apart from one
Of Mice and Men reference at the ending that caught me completely off guard), the tasks and environments become really repetitive, and it all just starts feeling really empty. All style, no substance isn't
quite accurate, because the base gameplay feels great, but it's close. Shadow Warrior 2 is a fun loot'n'shoot game that sadly outstays its welcome.
Game 40 - Hitman [PC] ★★★★
I don't know enough about the Hitman franchise to say whether or not this is the best in the series, but it's an excellent example of episodic content done right, and it provides a series of fun playgrounds for you to stealth around in and steal people's outfits. The confusingly-named
Hitman (meaning "this year's Hitman game") provides you with six small-scale open word locales with 2 or more targets that you must assassinate in any way you damn well please to progress its story. It feeds you a selection of opportunities to allow you to be extra stylish or sneaky, but when it comes down to it, as long as they're dead and you're not, it doesn't matter what you choose. While the areas are a little more constrained than your typical open world affair, they're very densely packed with little touches and a helping of challenges and contracts that is, quite frankly,
beyond generous. And that's before adding the user-created contacts into the mix. The episodic structure and genius addition of one-shot, time-limited elusive targets also gave the game a kind of continued relevancy that helped spur discussion around it. We were all in it together, basically. It falls just short of earning top marks due to its overbearing always-online requirement (particularly bad due to some server instabilities during busier days), incomprehensible story and AI that is absolutely dumb as shit. I get that the latter is probably intentional to make the game more forgiving, but when it's just as viable to shoot them with a silenced pistol and quickly pocket your weapon, putting the effort in to doing it
right just doesn't feel as rewarding as it should. Still, Hitman is a game that is worth anyone's time. Full to the brim with neat touches and some dark laughs that just sort of fall out of the gameplay. If you're only getting around to it now, you've missed out on some of what made it truly special, but you should hopefully see enough flashes of brilliance that you're there with the rest of us for the next season.
Game 41 - Owlboy [PC] ★★★★
One of the most gorgeously-presented games I've ever seen, Owlboy was a real treat to behold from beginning to end. It's a 2D "platform" adventure (platform in quotes because you spend 99.9% of the game freely flying around) with the kind of pixel art we probably could have expected to be commonplace if we'd delayed the jump to 3D games by a generation. Owlboy tells the story of Otus, a half-boy half-owl mute that sets off on an adventure with his buddy Getty to uncover ancient owl relics and save their sky-village from sky-pirates. Otus recruits other friends along the way that he can team up with to use new abilities and get to previously inaccessible areas and repeat. It's never surprising, but there's a sweetness to it all that's incredibly comforting. It took 10 years to come out, but it has the production values to show for it, with excellent animation, smart writing, and an utterly majestic score. It's just a little bit of a shame that, for all the SNES-era memories and nostalgia the game evokes, the gameplay itself wasn't more memorable.
Game 42 - Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare [PS4] ★★★★
Bad stuff out of the way first: the multiplayer in this game is not very good. As an entry in a series that I pretty much exclusively buy for multiplayer these days, Infinite Warfare was, surprisingly, an instant turnoff when I took it online. Where Black Ops III felt a little different and offered novelty for the first dozen hours, it faltered by ending up unsatisfying in the long term. IW's multiplayer is pretty much a direct copy of the previous title's, so you skip right past the newness and straight to the tedium. It also doesn't help that it's in such unflattering company, with Titanfall 2's fun-first approach and glorious freedom of movement making Call of Duty feel like a cheap pretender. All that being said, though, the surprisingly bad multiplayer is offset by the surprisingly excellent campaign, which certainly takes strides to shake up the formulaic delivery of the series. Rather than simply play chapter to chapter like a regular narrative, you instead have control of your own star cruiser, with the crew and side missions and main story missions that come with it. The beats of the game are more skewed towards a Mass Effect experience than an annual shovel of CoD, and it's way better for it. You have these bursts of downtime where you can take in some audio logs, explore the ship, and perform some light housekeeping duties, before gearing up and hitting a mission with your buddies. Side missions offer permanent perks as incentives, so you're even technically levelling up like a typical RPG. You also have a solid cast of characters throughout, with Ethan (a robot companion that is basically a more humanoid clone of TARS from Interstellar) being the real highlight, and although the enemy you're up against is
comically evil, it's not enough to ruin the game. The spaceflight controls for when you're flying your Jackal are a little... unexpected. It's not
bad, but I'm not sure it's good either. It controls more like a Call of Duty character that can fly in zero-g than a vehicle, so it feels a little weird at first, but the dogfights are pretty easy, so it's inconsequential in the end, and those sections actually work well to break up the on-foot shooting galleries. All in all, it's a really good campaign. It has some breathtaking imagery with its space setting, and at one point, has a moment of unfettered genius in where they set a mission and how that affects gameplay. The only real issue I can have with it is its brevity. It's
structured like a 25+ hour space-faring journey, but ultimately, has about as much
content as every other game in the series. You blaze through all the side missions in no time at all, and then you're on to the final showdown. In hindsight, it makes the once-great missions look a little more pedestrian. 20 or so boarding missions across the game with some fun twists here and there would have been brilliant, but only 4 where they never really get out of 2nd gear? Not looking so hot by comparison. Regardless, it's still an excellent, memorable shooter campaign that I honestly didn't think this series had in it anymore.
Game 43 - Infamous: First Light [PS4] ★★★★
While Infamous: First Light borrows heavily from it's big brother (Second Son), it is nonetheless a surprisingly accomplished little title. It's a prequel in which play as Fetch, the drug-addict young woman Delsin got his neon powers from in the main game, retelling her experience of how she went romping through Seattle in search of her brother. The game puts a lot of effort into showing you it has
'tude, and while it grates at first (compounded by the fact that I've never liked any of the characters in this series), by the end I'd warmed to pretty much everything and was loving its goofy charms. Gameplay is identical to Second Son, though obviously you're limited to just one power, but some structural changes are in place that just makes it a more fun experience. Once you have the freedom of the city, you can pretty much go anywhere and collect all the SP (ability points used to level up) in the game from the off, which are now (
finally) in the style of Crackdown's agility orbs. Each act of the game is book-ended by some Arkham-esque combat arenas to get you used to new powers (which, given the city parts are flashbacks, is stupidly explained each time as Fetch basically saying "oh, by the way, I can also do this"), and there's another, optional side of the game that has you go for high scores in these arenas to compare against the rest of the world. Add to this the ongoing challenges for doing random tasks in the open world, and it's pleasingly dense with fun things to do, despite its bite-sized length. Looks utterly gorgeous too.
Game 44 - Dark Souls III [PC] ★★★★★
Typical brilliance from Miyazaki and From Software, Dark Souls III represents the best of what the series has to offer. And it should, because this game throws back to past glories at will, while bringing along a number of improvements and little conveniences that make it feel like a Souls Greatest Hits at times. It's better optimised for playing at 60fps, it's easier to play co-operatively with friends, and the production values across the board just feel of a higher standard. The soundtrack in particular is something else. There's not really much else to elaborate on that wouldn't be simply describing the series: You die repeatedly along a series of intricately interconnected locales, battling demons and griefers through a punishing (yet utterly fair) combat system, with all your experience points and currency on the line all the time. It's not
perfect by any means. The online in particular bugs out much more frequently than it should, and some lower-level technical issues with the PC version make it prone to occasional freezes and whole-system lockups. But in spite of the janky online and the client being a ticking time bomb, I played through the whole thing in co-op, and wouldn't hesitate to recommend playing it that way, which is testament to how good the game behind it all is. So while, like I said, it's not perfect, it's the best Souls game there is. And that's close enough.
