The List!
Detailed Impressions 01-12
Detailed Impressions 13-26
Detailed Impressions 27-xx
13. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - 14 Hours
And so begins my journey through the Metal Gear series! Having played the majority of them only once over the course of the past 15 years it seemed like a fun idea to run through them all in chronological order to see for myself how the story fits together. With Snake Eater being the fan favorite of the series, it's hard to view it with an objective eye. But I have to say, maybe I'm just shit at the game, but I find the gameplay remarkably uneven. Some of the mechanics involving soft or hard presses of the face buttons feel like an anachronism of a fortunately bygone era. Specifically, keeping an enemy in a hold without accidentally slicing his throat felt like an impossibility. The bigger offense , however, is that the camo index is entirely unintuitive for the jungle areas. What's the difference between 70 or 80 or 95% camouflage? It's impossible to tell whether an enemy will actually see you or not until it's too late. And after being spotted in a patch of grass, there's really nothing to be done at that point except shoot it out or run away, neither of which is satisfying in a game that enforces stealth like this one does. Being aware of the Sorrow encounter, shooting my way out of situations was a non-starter in my mind. So that left me with alternatively scrambling for a crawl space to hide under, and subsequently twiddling my thumbs for upwards of 90 seconds until the alert dissipated (leading me to reach for my smart phone to browse GAF until it did) or run out in the open and let the enemies shoot me down so I could start back at the most recent checkpoint, which ALSO takes longer than it should. Snake is built like a tank and can take dozens of bullets before going down, so if one were so inclined you could probably sprint through a majority of the game with little worry. Simply put, this feels like a failure of game and/or level design. Oh how I longed for a simple "Restart Checkpoint" option to save myself equal parts time and frustration! Fortunately, this became less and less of a problem as the game went on and removed itself from forest scenery. Sneaking around the Shagohod base was the highlight of the game and I had little trouble maintaining stealth there in spite of the increased enemy count. In contrast to the uneven gameplay, the story throughout is a delight. Starting from the excellent title sequence and theme song, I loved how the game was styled as a classic James Bond movie. Eva as the Bond girl, Boss as the personal antagonist, all framed against a US vs Russia political intrigue backdrop. The balance of the narrative breaks in between sections of gameplay is nothing short of masterful, never getting bogged down in verbosity or delusions of grandeur like MGS4 so frequently does. It's a testament to the story and the 2nd half of the game that by the climax my frustrations in the early game felt like a distant memory. Still, those frustrations exist and while Snake Eater is unequivocally an excellent game, it is not the flawless masterpiece that I remembered it as.
14. INK - 1.7 Hours
Essentially an N+ clone with a Splatoon twist. Each level starts completely invisible, but making contact with a surface splatters paint on it, revealing the path to the goal bit by bit. This twist on what would otherwise be well-trodden mechanics gives INK a slight puzzle game bend, focusing less on hair-pulling difficulty than its influences do. It's still challenging of course, but it never crosses the line into frustration like so many others in the genre. The perfect bundle fodder game, just the right amount of short and good.
15. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops - 11 Hours
It's interesting how much this feels like budget MGS. The small self-contained levels lead to missions beaten in 5 or 10 minutes going stealth, or just a minute or two if you blast your way through. Level design is very basic and geometric. The story seems kinda like fan-service; Metal Gear, check. Government conspiracy, check. Reference to previous MGS games to hook fans, check. The canonical status of this game is up for debate and I understand why. The gameplay is basic MGS, more reminiscent of MGS1 & 2 than 3. And while the simplicity is charming in a way, everything else in the story and presentation is done better elsewhere, making recommending this to anyone besides the most die-hard Metal Gear fans a tough sell.
16. Far Cry Primal - 14.5 Hours
A change in setting that puts away the guns in favor of clubs and arrows and ferocious animal sidekicks. It's enough to breath a little life into FarCry's tried and true formula, there are moments that happen while in between outposts with different animal, enemy and a friendly AI interacting with each other that makes the world feel like its own living thing that you're only a small part of, but those moments are merely facades quickly seen through with a more cursory look. Everything presented here is so mechanically shallow it feels more like a concept or demo unnecessarily stretched to fill an entire games' amount of content, rather than a tight and refined experience like Blood Dragon was. The lack of depth in narrative, character customization, combat, side quests and animal taming and commanding results in an initially entertaining game that quickly becomes only superficially different from its predecessors and struggles to support the scope of an entire game.
17. XCOM: Enemy Within - 40 Hours
I was pleased to see how this expansion to Enemy Unknown simply made the whole game bigger without making it feel different. More maps, more missions, more enemies, entirely new classes and ways to customize your soldiers, new weapons, new currencies. Enemy Within adds so much to the game and does so seamlessly, feeling neither tacked on nor beyond the vision of the original Enemy Unknown. While there may be some issues with the pacing or the presentation, the focus, as always is the gameplay and XCOM's best-in-genre turn-based combat is made only better here. Coupled with a wide array of gameplay and difficulty toggles means everyone can get exactly the experience that suits them.
18. Tom Clancy's The Division - 31 Hours
I'll get the positives out of the way by saying the core gameplay is really, really good! Shooting, running, going in and out of cover, using special abilities etc etc all feel satisfying. Hovering in some middle ground between Gears of War and Borderlands, this is a third person shooter with a good foundation and above average mechanics. However the house they built up around it is a complete disappointment. The short version is: it's just another run of the mill Ubisoft game, this time with co-op. A large map overflowing with icons to run towards, outposts to capture, doodads to collect, bars to fill, loot with arbitrary colors to equip. All busywork hiding how mediocre and shallow The Division really is. Uninteresting AI and engagements means the excellent TPS mechanics are rarely put to good use. The gating of progression means leveling feels less like I'm becoming stronger, and more like I'm struggling to keep up with the pace of the enemies' strength. The guns are boring, too; damage numbers getting bigger doesn't make a difference if I'm still killing enemies the same way I was before. The setting of the game draws comparisons to The Last of Us but the narrative more closely channels Crackdown. Characters, locations, motivations, all completely forgettable. The UI is obtrusive. The list goes on. But the bottom line is the game lacks any heart or soul in its overall design and fails to provide any real entertainment, getting by on above average player control and little else. Play with friends or not at all.
19. Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) - 4.75 Hours
Never Alone, a relatively simple side-scrolling platformer, is also a fable or fairy tale, and a documentary, as much as it is a video game. The setting, themes, and characters are all pulled from the stories of indigenous Alaskan Inuits. The whole package is culturally rich and vibrant, including short live-action passages about the different inspirations and legends incorporated into the game, as told by the Alaskan natives themselves. These short videos are interesting and entertaining in their own right, which is a blessing because the actual gameplay is a bit of a mixed bag. At a basic level, the game reminds me of Donkey Kong Country 2. You have two playable characters, each with different abilities, that can be switched between on a whim. One can push and pull and carry objects, along with use a weapon to break apart ice or other debris blocking your path. The other can run up walls, jump higher, swim faster, and learns one or two more invaluable techniques in the second half of the game. The abilities and differences feel more organic than a pony-tailed chimpanzee that can float through the air, and the game does a good job of offering up situations where both characters have to leverage their different abilities to proceed forward. Animations look great and bring the characters to life where otherwise they might come across as shallow. My biggest complaint is probably the controls. Mario or Sonic this ain't. There seems to be some input lag that makes the characters feel a little hefty, and while I wouldn't describe the game as "floaty," there was one point where I found myself comparing the game to Little Big Planet in how it controlled. There's nothing demanding or exact enough in the game where the controls are ever a problem, but making things snappier would have dulled some of the tedium that started to show through the game's simplicity towards the end. The 'Foxtales' DLC cleverly sidesteps these problems by making most of the puzzles underwater, eliminating platforming almost entirely. The new take on the gameplay in the DLC was actually very refreshing, feeling more inspired than a majority of the main campaign and a welcome addition to the whole package. Overall, Never Alone proves to be a unique and enjoyable experience, albeit not a perfect one.
20. NOT A HERO - 4.5 Hours
This indie side-scroller has you traversing all manner of large multi-floor urban buildings with a singular purpose: taking a bite out of crime. You play the hired hand of a giant rabbit running for political office and spend 21 levels blowing up and killing gangs, crime lords, weed growing operations and everything in between to boost the rabbit's favorability rating. The game is fast-paced and mechanically simple, taking inspiration from Hotline Miami. Death is aplenty here, with the game having a large focus on trial-and-error, instant-restart gameplay. The main problem with NOT A HERO arises from an over-reliance on memorizing levels and enemy placement. You see, when reloading, you are forced to cease all movement and leave yourself wide open, often times leading to a sword-carrying enemy closing in and instantly killing you. Not being able to move while reloading feels artificially limiting and leads to playing overly cautious, never sure when you might get unfairly caught with your pants down. Where Hotline Miami rewards improvisation, NOT A HERO almost condemns it, particularly in the later levels where the amount, combination, and speed of enemies will require an almost predetermined plan of attack. This isn't inherently a bad thing, but to me it feels restrictive. Difficulty is kind of all over the place. The game spends the first third of its length being disappointingly easy and the last third being the wrong kind of difficult, and the difference is staggering. There's something for everyone here and conversely, something for everyone to find too hard or too easy. The game incorporates an entirely optional challenge system for each level with 3 sub-goals to complete. Some are easy, some are brutally difficult. What I don't understand is why they couldn't have kept all the really difficult bits gated behind the optional challenges, rather than making the final levels themselves innately frustratingly difficult. I enjoy hard, challenging games, but NOT A HERO's final stretch felt too cheap to be rewarding and leaves a bitter aftertaste on what is otherwise a competent and fun game.
21. SquareCells - 9 Hours
From the mastermind behind the Hexcells series comes that series' cousin/half-brother SquareCells. The ruleset is almost entirely the same, with the only obvious difference being the switch from a hex grid to a square one. SquareCells is more of a lateral move rather than being notably better or inferior to its predecessors. The experience overall feels more well-rounded, offering a more masterful learning curve than any of the Hexcells games do, and while the difficulty tops out *just* below what Hexcells ultimately achieves (not necessarily a bad thing, mind), it benefits from puzzles that feel less myopic. In Hexcells you frequently find yourself stuck on a single portion of a puzzle, unable to solve the rest until you work your way across the board in a (mostly) linear fashion. Conversely, SquareCells puzzles have you looking at the grid in totality, where solving one section of the puzzle can more frequently effect the possible solutions on the other side of the grid. This ultimately makes the puzzle solving feel more organic and less like you are hunting for The One True Solution as in Hexcells. The game engrossed me completely just like Hexcells did when I first discovered it, and I would highly, highly recommend it to any fans of logic-based puzzles.
22. Dark Souls 3 - 78 Hours
At long last, Dark Souls 1 receives the sequel it deserves. Every inch of this game is so refined, so carefully constructed it manages to outshine the original. No Lost Izalith's or Beds of Chaos to be found here. Dark Souls 3 manages to recapture the sense of wonder and discovery that made the series so infectious, and enriches the lore and player experience by directly referencing and expanding upon known characters and locations instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water and reinventing the wheel the way Dark Souls 2 did. My list of complaints is short: Continually branching pathways made the end game feel less focused. I would have preferred the game be more front-loaded with different paths, and then funnel down to the critical path as you near the end instead of the other way around. I guess it's the way Dark Souls has always done it, but the final 25% of the game felt very scatterbrained, yet still impeccably designed. Secondly, the grinding required for the covenants is absurd. Your total invasions will have to number in the multiple hundreds to collect every spell and ring the game has to offer, which is far more than should be expected of any normal player. It discourages end game play for me, knowing how distant those rewards are. Those are relatively minor quibbles though for what is otherwise the most fully-realized Souls game to date and an instant classic.
23. OlliOlli2: Welcome to Olliwood - 3 Hours
What a pleasant surprise this was. Combines the arcade stylings of Tony Hawk without sacrificing the technical leanings of the SKATE series and put into a side-scrolling Trials-like package. No checkpoints, no timers, each level has to be completed in one go without bailing. Every level has 5 goals just like Tony Hawk but those are only necessary to unlock the "pro" version of the level; you can still progress just by reaching the end of the previous level. I appreciate that the game tackled the difficulty in this way. I was able to enjoy myself and get 90% of the way through the "amateur" levels just by button mashing, mostly. The last few require more precise timing with landings and grinding to maintain speed, which was fine, but the pro levels delve deep into requiring specific trick combos and very granular knowledge of levels and mechanics. That wasn't really for me, but it's great that it's there, and it's even better that I could get what I feel was a complete experience without having to jump into that specific deep end of the game play. Score-chasing abounds, and the instant restarts are a very welcome facilitator of that. A great time for anyone looking for a pick-up-and-play arcade style game, and might even be the next great skateboarding game that no one seems to talk about.
24. Valkyria Chronicles - 42 Hours
Though it predates it by four years, I find Valkyria Chronicles most easily compared to XCOM. Essentially they are both squad-based,
turn-based, strategy games. But the approach to story is notably different between the two. Where XCOM is largely hands-off, letting the larger story of alien invasion unfold organically, Valkyria Chronicles tells a very inflated story about war and the individual squad you command. So much time is spent fleshing out characters and events through narrative that the strategy portion of the game starts to feel secondary in importance to the overall experience. Which is fine, since literally all of the dialog is fully voiced, lending heavily to the game's presentation,
and considering the game's strategy and combat elements are rather robust and the difficulty curve spot on. I never once felt like I was being inundated or overwhelmed with different mechanics or complex scenarios, and conversely never felt like the game was going 'too easy' on me. Indeed, if it weren't for the pacing of the game, I'd be happy with twice as many levels to play. Unfortunately for all Valkyria Chronicles accomplishments, it all seems to go by at a snail's pace. Some streamlining of the combat, specifically in regards to how enemy turns and player movement is handled, and a reduction in the micromanagement of buying and equipping upgrades could have easily shaved 5-10 hours off the total play time without sacrificing content and made for an overall more enjoyable experience. It's still a very good game at the end of the day, but the poor pacing is enough of an issue for me to stop short of saying it's great, and puts me off wanting to revisit the game in the future.
25. Resident Evil Revelations 2 - 18.75 Hours
Taking the most inspiration from RE5, Revelations 2 adds a few wrinkles to the modern Resident Evil formula, feeling familiar without overtly rehashing previous titles in the franchise. The structure and episodic nature of the plot is a natural evolution of the intertwining narratives presented in RE2 and RE6 and suits the game wonderfully. Combat manages to strike a fair balance by being action-oriented but severely resource limited (at least on higher difficulty). Enemy counts are overall lower than the last few main installments of the franchise, and yet I found it more common to be counting bullets by the single digits than having a healthy reserve of supplies, leading to every encounter being important, every shot making a difference. When all's said and done it's obviously not a main entry in the franchise, ultimately coming across as a bit of a "side story" instead of something integral to the Resident Evil universe. But while it doesn't reinvent the wheel, fans of the franchise will still find plenty to enjoy.
26. Resident Evil 2 - 4.5 Hours
The more I consider it, the clearer it becomes that this is my favorite Resident Evil. REmake certainly gives it a run for its money, but the design here is impeccable. No muss, no fuss, just a lean, mean zombie-killing machine. Paramount to its success, in my opinion, is the game's ability to make you feel like what you're experiencing is a small part of a larger whole. The story being split between Leon and Claire's campaign suggests the epidemic is bigger than any individual person. The pacing of the game, smartly abandoning the police station around the halfway point, gives the proceedings a bit of fluidity, the sense that everything is happening
around you rather than explicitly
to you. These things go a long way to draw you into the world and make you feel insignificant, putting the 'horror' in survival horror. The 'survival' part seems almost rudimentary in comparison these days: just enough ammo to kill most but not all enemies, save rooms spread out intermittently, and enough running back and forth unlocking rooms with different keys to make you wonder why no one compares these games to Metroidvanias. It's practically a formula now! But the truth is, the layout of the police station, the carefully metered drip feed of resources, the balance of risk versus reward, every facet of Resident Evil 2 is so masterfully crafted it remains a blueprint for survival horror games and a high-water mark of the franchise to this day
