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Unicorn Overlord Review - A Rare Beast

Thu, 03/14/2024 - 04:34

There are few gaming experiences more engrossing, engaging, and satisfying than a quality strategy-RPG. They offer the joy of building up a little ragtag army, bit by bit, into a gang of storied warriors with precision-specialized skills; the tension of seeing what sort of wrenches the next combat stage will throw into the mix; the utter thrill of eking out a victory with a wild strategy--or having an army that works so well together that they lay waste to all before them. Unicorn Overlord, the latest collaboration between developer Vanillaware and publisher Atlus, seeks its place among strategy-RPG royals--and, despite a few small missteps, lays claim to an honorable spot among its peers.

In its narrative, Prince Alain was spirited off to a faraway island a decade ago as his mother, the queen, was deposed from her throne by the wicked tyrant General Valmore and the Zenoiran Empire. Now, the Empire has all but conquered the continent of Fevrith, and an older Alain sets out to reclaim his throne and liberate the populace from their oppressors, all while bolstering the ranks of his Resistance army. But a mystery lies at the heart of everything: How did the Zenoiran Empire conquer all of the kingdoms so easily? Is there a much darker power at play?

The visuals in Unicorn Overlord dazzle right from the opening cutscene, with Vanillaware's well-loved 2D art bringing a detailed fantasy realm to life. There are a great many characters and environments throughout so there's plenty of variety to the eye candy--but even if that hadn't been the case, it would be hard to draw your eyes away from the attractive character designs, exquisite backgrounds, and weighty battle animations that are there. Occasionally, things can get a bit cluttered and confusing--some parts of the UI are messy to navigate--but after a while, it becomes no big deal.

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Contra: Operation Galuga Review - Corps Run

Wed, 03/13/2024 - 02:41

More than almost any other game from its era, Contra made its name on being brutally difficult: a legacy with an impact that can still be felt today. Even cultural touchstones like the Konami Code owe at least some of their fame to the Contra series--after all, half the reason we memorized that particular sequence of button presses was to get extra lives for our battle against the alien hordes. With Contra: Operation Galuga, WayForward had a peculiar challenge: Sand off the rough edges of the original Contra to make it tolerable to modern audiences without losing the mystique that owes so much to its absurd difficulty. Thanks to some smart improvements, it's found an enjoyable balance, although it's not enough to elevate Galuga to greatness.

This is a retelling of the first game, which means that once again you're Contra operatives Bill and Lance dispatched to the island of Galuga to get to the bottom of strange goings-on there. After a slightly too-wordy introduction in Story mode, you're dropped right into the run-and-gun action, and despite looking and feeling very similar to the first game, the differences will quickly become apparent to series veterans. To start, you have a double jump by default, as well as a dash maneuver that can be used on the ground or in mid-air. Together, these make you much more nimble at dodging enemy fire, allow more room for error when crossing chasms, and turn combat into a quicker, more acrobatic experience.

Despite borrowing the most iconic weapons from the first three games--the Machine Gun, Spread, Laser, Flame Thrower, Homing, and Crush weapons--your arsenal has gotten an upgrade, too. Each signifies a considerable power boost from your default gun by itself, but each can also be upgraded by stacking another weapon pick-up on top of it. Picking up another Homing power-up when you already have Homing equipped makes it a Homing Lv 2, for example. Sometimes this extends the range or breadth of the weapon, like in the case of the Spread and Flame Thrower, while other times it can change a weapon's behavior more significantly. An upgraded Laser will ricochet off targets, while the upgraded Crush changes the weapon from an explosive missile to a firearm that opens small black holes that do continuous damage. And in a welcome quality-of-life tweak, picking up a new weapon will automatically replace a blank weapon slot if you have one. I spent half the game manually switching out of habit before I realized that little nice-to-have.

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Disney Dreamlight Valley Review - Great Game, Grueling Grind

Fri, 03/08/2024 - 08:16

I was a bit apprehensive before playing Disney Dreamlight Valley. Although I've been a huge fan of Disney's animated films since I was a kid, developer Gameloft is primarily known for developing mobile titles, some of which have egregious microtransaction systems, such as Disney Magic Kingdoms. After playing Disney Dreamlight Valley for roughly 30 hours, I realized that it wasn't microtransactions that I had to be concerned about, as there were no paywalls or progress-blocking instances that required me to pay cash. The more prevalent issues with the game were the extremely grindy progression system and restrictions coming from the real-time systems.

Disney Dreamlight Valley begins just as my character was whisked away into a magical fantasy kingdom. Approached by Merlin, it was revealed that a curse known as the Forgetting turned the once-whimsical land into a realm of despair and darkness. Merlin provides a tutorial through the basic mechanics such as removing obstacles called Night Roots and using tools like the pickaxe, shovel, and fishing pole.

At first, I was worried since regular tasks like mining ores with the pickaxe or removing clumps of roots quickly drained my character's stamina. My initial concerns were quickly assuaged, as stamina is regularly refilled whenever I leveled up, ate food, or spent just a few seconds in my character's home.

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Balatro Review - One More Blind

Fri, 03/08/2024 - 07:29

Poker has endured as a popular and immensely enjoyable card game because of how malleable it is. The purest form of poker is predominantly played in your hand, with you deciding on cards to discard and redraw in the hopes of creating a better hand than your opponents. Texas Hold'Em, by far the most popular variation on poker, eschews these rules by giving all players five shared cards on the table, and two cards in their hand to try and outwit other players with. A small change like this has a dramatic impact on how the game ultimately plays out, inviting the assumption that other small tweaks might have similar effects. Balatro operates directly in this space. It creates distinct scenarios through both deck building and randomization that force you to think about poker hands differently during short, captivating runs in its roguelite structure. It injects new life into the fundamental rules of poker without requiring any previous knowledge of the game, feeling deftly balanced for both newcomers and experts of the card game alike.

Balatro is deceptively straightforward. Each round you play features a blind, which here is a total score you need to beat in order to progress. Each card has its own chip value, while different poker hands add on multipliers to the total score you hand tallies to. Play better hands with better cards, and you'll progress from the small blind to the big blind and ultimately a boss blind before the ante is raised and you're challenged to repeat the process with more challenging totals to topple. You're limited to a certain number of hands you can play during each round, as well as a limited amount of discard opportunities that let you toss away cards you don't want to use. A handy glossary makes the action approachable even if you're unfamiliar with the basics of poker, and the means to progress through each round aren't fundamentally rooted in a deep understanding of the odd differences between each hand.

Knowing the odds of different poker hands and why you might want to pursue simple straights and flushes over the combination of the two will probably help initially in earlier rounds, but as you go on, Balatro exposes its random roguelite elements to great effect. Joker cards are Balatro's big modifiers, offering a suite of effects that can quickly define a build that will ultimately influence the theme of your run. The combination of a joker that adds multipliers for playing Club cards with another that rewards the use of only face cards (Kings, Queens, and Jacks) can turn otherwise simple flushes or straights into incredibly high-scoring hands--a strategy you may need to progress through more challenging blinds. Other jokers can be delightfully chaotic, like one that randomizes its multiplier each time you play a hand or another that consumes other joker cards and adds their value to its overall multiplier. The game quickly starts encouraging you to strategize around the jokers that you're given access to (each new one you purchase gets added to the pool of potential reappearances) and adjusting the hands you play around them in order to progress, making each run feel distinct in spite of the simple mechanics underpinning them.

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WWE 2K24 Review - Long-Term Booking

Thu, 03/07/2024 - 11:14

The WWE 2K series has had a multi-year arc not unlike something you'd see watching WWE's shows on TV. Its 2020 installment was so broken, poorly received, and ultimately meme-ified that the team actually took a year off to fix its jobber-esque series--a rare sight in the world of annualized video games. But since then, it's been on the rise, getting pushed like a WWE superstar to the top of the card, and though WWE 2K24 doesn't yet finish the story, it seems like it's well on the path of cementing a new legacy for itself.

WWE 2K24 adds appreciable, albeit not revolutionary, improvements to last year's solid foundation across the board. The in-ring action is paramount, and WWE 2K24 thankfully builds on the already-excellent mechanics in that regard. There's more fluidity to chaining moves together, and it feels like, at any point in which your character has the upper hand, you can reliably emulate the escalation of a real-life match, with a deep assortment of move sets depending on where you are in the ring. An intuitive control scheme lets you set up a rival sitting atop the turnbuckle, staggered on the ropes, or lying on their back in the middle of the ring for an ankle lock with similar ease. The game simply always feels great to control.

Pairing those contextual attacks with a deep move set for every wrestler in which the left stick and face buttons combine to create excellent variety, 2K24 feels like it rolls out much of what made 2K23 already fun in my hands, but with a few new touches that I enjoy. This includes top-rope maneuvers onto a group of opponents rather than just one; Super Finishers, like Rhea Ripley's belt-winning Riptide from the second rope at last year's WrestleMania; and the ability to throw weapons. These are subtler changes than the complete overhaul the series received when it emerged from its darkest days a few years ago, but they're each welcome to the game and help further emulate the real-life product.

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The Outlast Trials Review - Immersion Therapy

Tue, 03/05/2024 - 07:16

One of the hardest reviews I've ever had to write was for Outlast 2. The game was so unnerving that it was hard to psych myself up enough to play it sometimes. The Outlast Trials, Red Barrels' first game since then, doesn't consistently reach those same heights, but it is memorably scary at times, and when it's not frightening, it's plenty rewarding in other ways. Taking a single-player horror series like Outlast and repurposing it as a four-player PvE game sounds like the kind of publisher-mandated live-service experiment too many teams have been tasked with lately. But as an indie team, Red Barrels seems to have steered its own course, and that may be why The Outlast Trials still feels like Outlast rather than a cynical project bearing the name.

The Outlast Trials is set in the Cold War, where you'll customize your figurative guinea pig for a lengthy series of vicious experiments within the Murkoff Facility. The game's opening moments, along with the lore, paint a scene so gruesome and wicked that'll be familiar to series veterans, but disquieting to those new to the Outlast universe.. After training to become sleeper agents who are psychologically deconstructed, tormented, and then brainwashed, you're eventually let back out into the free world awaiting your activation as a secret weapon. The context of your overarching mission is at least as dark as anything this team has done before--and it's set its bar quite high previously.

In practice, these experiments play out on various large maps like a police station, a courthouse, a carnival, and more. Each one is propped up as a facsimile of the real thing as you run through the Murkoff-made mazes like a lab rat. This involves many signature Outlast elements, none more emblematic than carefully crawling through the dark in first-person while desperately seeking salvation--or at least batteries--before your night vision runs out of juice.

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Penny's Big Breakaway Review - If It Ain't Broke

Sat, 02/24/2024 - 01:39

Penny's Big Breakaway is a loving homage to a somewhat awkward period in gaming history. The early days of 3D mascot platformers were defined by garish saturated colors, exaggerated character designs, and a variety of gimmicks as the genre found its footing in this new environment. Penny's Big Breakaway fits right into that legacy, like a lost gem that just got a shiny new remaster. But while its stylized look will probably be an acquired taste, it makes good use of its gimmick to avoid some pitfalls of the era it emulates.

The story revolves around Penny, an aspiring yo-yo performer who goes to a talent show audition put on by a stodgy Emperor. Along the way, her toy prop fuses with a creature, becoming a sort of sentient and voracious pet. The creature grants her all sorts of special abilities but also causes trouble at the talent show, angering the Emperor and putting her on the run from his army of penguin goons. Her "big break" turned into a breakaway, get it?

That sets the stage, so to speak, for a few different elements. For one, it sets the expectation that stages will be propulsive with constant movement. You're a wanted fugitive! As a result, stages aren't wide open worlds to explore so much as they are courses to navigate, often with great speed, as you stunt and trick your way past traps and obstacles. You can occasionally pause to catch your breath or find a collectible, but for the most part, each stage has you running from Point A to Point B as fast as you can.

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Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Review - Destiny's Child

Fri, 02/23/2024 - 01:00

In the final moments of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Cloud finds himself at Destiny's Crossroads. Sephiroth has torn a hole in the fabric of reality, and a thrashing gateway into an unknown future beckons. It's a daunting prospect that is made even more so when Aerith says the next step in their journey will involve "changing more than fate itself." This was a statement of intent from developer Square Enix that suggested its retelling of one of the most beloved stories in video game history may not play out how fans expect, or perhaps want. It's a moment in which characters and players alike share in the unsettling nature of uncertainty. Before they step through the gateway, Tifa asks Aerith, "What will we find on the other side?" to which she replies, "Freedom. Boundless, terrifying freedom." And she was right.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is a game about a struggle between fate and freedom, but also the delicate balance between authorship and agency. Through gameplay systems that encourage exploration, Rebirth empowers players to discover the world around them and chart their path through it. And through its story, it presents a compelling narrative about the destructive impact of exploiting natural resources, as well as the human causes and consequences of radical environmentalism. But it's a story that, ultimately, is defined and destined to end in very specific ways, for better or for worse. The equilibrium between contrasting ideologies is rarely perfect, and that's evident in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, a game that is rewarding for the dozens of hours it enables agency, but is frustrating in the few hours that author the series' future.

While the events of Remake were confined to Midgar and largely linear, Rebirth pushes back the borders to let players explore new horizons on their terms. Across 60-plus hours, Cloud, Aerith, Tifa, Barrett, and a few other party members follow in the footsteps of the mysterious pale-skinned and dark-robed individuals briefly encountered in Remake. Although they are largely incapable of communicating beyond pained groans, they are nonetheless key to tracking down Sephiroth and stopping him from destroying the world. Their slow onward march is what plots the group's course through the game's various locales.

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Skull And Bones Review - Dead In The Water

Thu, 02/22/2024 - 04:25

Skull and Bones doesn't make a good first impression. Given its troubled development, this isn't the least bit surprising; it's tough to approach Ubisoft's latest without a heavy dose of trepidation. Nonetheless, after six separate delays, several scrapped concepts, and 11 years in development hell, the game's opening hours fail to put Skull and Bones' best foot forward, instead indulging in its very worst aspects. The gradual prevalence of combat does marginally improve things, particularly once your options open up and you're able to tinker with your ship and its various weaponry, but this isn't enough to save it from the dregs of mediocrity. Forget about scurvy; this swashbuckling adventure is beset with a severe case of live-service insipidity.

Skull and Bones' tutorial preamble kicks things off by making sure you know how to talk to NPCs and cut down trees. If your idea of pirating on the high seas revolves around the kind of resource-gathering found in most survival games, then you're in luck. In truth, this aspect isn't quite as egregious as it sounds, even if mining rocks and chopping down trees makes little sense when you're confined to the deck of a pirate ship. The main issue is that this is the first example of the game's insistence on making you perform menial busywork. There is some on-foot stuff, but landlubbers be damned, this simply amounts to chatting to vendors and quest-givers, with the occasional buried treasure thrown in for good measure. Skull and Bones might exist because of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, but the only similarities between the two pirating games occur in their naval combat.

It's difficult to discuss this aspect of the game without delving into comparisons with Black Flag, despite the 11-year gap between the two titles. Unleashing a volley of cannonballs into the starboard of an enemy ship is the strongest part of Skull and Bones' seafaring ventures, but it still strips away much of what made Black Flag such a fantastic experience. That game was a power fantasy with a kinetic rhythm to its combat. There was never a moment of downtime as you utilized your ship's broadside cannons, mortar, flaming barrels, and swivel cannons to pepper the enemy with a constant barrage of naval fireworks, outmaneuvering towering Man O' Wars by dropping and raising the sails on a dime to produce some exhilarating moments. Skull and Bones contains more depth than Black Flag, with multiple ships to sail and a bevy of customization options letting you outfit your vessel with rockets, ballistas, fire-spewing contraptions, and more, but it's nowhere near as fun.

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Pacific Drive Review - Road Trippy

Wed, 02/21/2024 - 02:00

In my personal life, I loathe driving, but video games have a way of making it more fun. Rarely does a video game make driving as engaging and enjoyable as Pacific Drive does, even though it can be much more challenging than any real-life drive I've ever taken. With a ton of gameplay depth, an intoxicating atmosphere, and a New Weird story I obsessed over, the debut game from Ironwood Studios dazzled me even though it occasionally left me stranded in the breakdown lane.

In both story and gameplay terms, I've not played a game much like Pacific Drive before. Stuck in a mysterious section of the Pacific Northwest called the Olympic Exclusion Zone (OEZ) that's been closed off for years due to science-defying activity, you're meant to find a way out of a region known to swallow almost anyone who enters it. You'll do this in roguelite runs in which you drive a station wagon through a semi-randomly generated level or series of levels, collect crafting gear and other vital resources, and then race against a storm to get to a spacetime-disrupting "gateway" that propels you back to the safety of an abandoned auto shop, where you'll deposit your resources and use them to improve your vehicle and character for subsequent runs.

For more than 20 hours, this formula never wore out its welcome with me, despite some truly grueling situations that sometimes felt insurmountable. By way of great attention to detail and depth, Pacific Drive becomes a challenge early on and consistently raises the bar even as you markedly improve your car. It feels like it unfolds--as do many roguelites--to the cadence of two steps forward, one step back.

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Helldivers 2 Review - Starship Bloopers

Fri, 02/16/2024 - 09:00

It's a bold swing to dramatically change a formula that you know is working, but the gamble has paid off for Arrowhead Game Studios. Helldivers 2 opts for an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective as opposed to the original game's top-down view, making for a shooter that pulls you closer into the thick of its frenetic combat. This shift brings Helldivers 2's gameplay better in line with its ludicrous narrative tone, managing to create memorably explosive firefights despite the repetitive enemy types and map designs. Helldivers 2 is an incredible game--it sets out to be a rambunctious and entertaining shooter and hits that target with military precision.

Helldivers 2 sees you step into the patriotic boots of the titular fighting force, lowly grunts on the frontlines of an intergalactic war in defense of Super Earth. Missions take place on randomly generated planets, ranging from ice-covered tundras to lush jungles. You and your squad have a set amount of time to complete your main objective and any optional assignments, needing to successfully extract to bring any collected goodies back with you. Though you're armed with the usual weapons of war found in shooters (primary and secondary weapons, grenades, and healing syringes), your main means of dealing big damage and supporting your squad are the stratagems you can call in, such as powerful machine guns or explosive air strikes.

Stratagems make you a juggernaut of destruction, allowing you to call in absurdly powerful weapons to devastate anything in your path. Having the right one on hand can save a mission, but Helldivers 2 never punishes you for what you choose to bring into a fight--if you have a favorite, chances are it will always be useful in some capacity. They never make the game too easy, either--limited uses and timers restrict just how often you can call in the big guns, encouraging you to rely on your allies while you wait for your stratagems to recharge. Plus, there are a lot of enemies to fight in each mission, swarming you at a moment's notice. Calling in an airstrike and getting a 15-enemy kill streak feels amazing, but it doesn't change that once it's over there could still be another 20 enemies to clean up. The stratagems only get you so far--at some point, you have to get good at shooting with the normal weapons too, incentivizing you to improve and not just rely on a series of explosive hardware.

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Mario Vs. Donkey Kong Review - Silly Gorilla, Mini-Marios Are For Kids

Thu, 02/15/2024 - 00:00

The original Mario Vs. Donkey Kong on Game Boy Advance was a victim of its own success. A successor to the stellar and underrated Game Boy version of Donkey Kong, it brought back many of the same puzzle-platforming mechanics with adorable mini-Mario toys serving as stage collectibles and story MacGuffins. But the minis ultimately became the stars of the sub-series and took over its identity. We've received a steady stream of Lemmings-like spin-offs since then, centered mostly around guiding minis through trap-filled stages. While those games were charming enough, they never quite recaptured the magic of Donkey Kong on Game Boy or Mario Vs. Donkey Kong on GBA. Thanks to a combination of quality-of-life improvements and visual flair that showcase what made those older games special, this Switch remake gives that original design ethos a new lease on life.

The minis are the impetus for the story, though, which begins when Donkey Kong spots the little clockwork toys and gets an insatiable appetite for them. He invades the Mario toy factory and steals all he can get his mitts on, and Mario--apparently concerned about his licensed merch--chases after the ape to recover them. Donkey Kong isn't the villain, per se, but more like a childlike, not-too-bright antagonist in an old cereal commercial.

The puzzle-platforming stages have Mario traversing through a series of traps and enemies to reach a mini-Mario in a vending capsule. You can collect a series of colored packages, carefully tucked away in hard-to-reach places, as a bonus in each stage. Once you've completed a series of six themed stages recovering the minis, there's a follow-the-leader stage where you guide them to the exit, attempting not to lose any along the way, and having them collect alphabet blocks (spelling "TOY," naturally). Then there's a boss stage against Donkey Kong, and the more minis you successfully guided in the previous stage, the more pips of health you have for the battle. Rinse, repeat. It's a nice little loop that allows each stage's goals to feed into the others.

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Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden Review - Ghostbusters

Tue, 02/13/2024 - 04:00

It can't be a coincidence that Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is launching just a day before Valentine's Day. As its title suggests, the latest game from Life is Strange developer Don't Nod is brimming with ghost hunting and spooky happenings. Yet, at its core, it's also a surprisingly tender love story about life, death, and sacrifice. This isn't the most well-trodden path for an action-RPG, and that's just one of a few key areas where Banishers is atypical for its genre. Between outbursts of stiff, run-of-the-mill action, it's the quieter moments where the game comes into its own. Like Vampyr, one of the studio's previous games, delving into various characters' lives and making tough choices with far-reaching consequences are what make the game memorable.

Banishers begins with dual protagonists Antea Duarte and Red Mac Raith arriving on the sandy shores of the fictional island of New Eden, Massachusetts. It's 1695, and the pair of eponymous banishers are hired spirit hunters entrusted with dispelling the ghosts and specters that still linger in our plane of existence, trapped between the living and the afterlife. New Eden, you see, has been afflicted with a malevolent curse. Hauntings are frequent, the weather is perpetually cold and dreary, crops are dying, livestock has perished, and the island's settlers are in desperate need of help. With so many lingering effects, this is no simple curse, and while attempting to banish a particularly powerful spirit, Antea is tragically killed as Red is plunged into the freezing depths of the ocean and left for dead.

Upon waking up on the opposite side of the island, the grief-stricken Red is soon reunited with his fallen lover. Antea is now one of the ghostly apparitions she would previously hunt, forcing her to wrestle with the fact that she's become the one thing she hates. From this point on, you can swap between both characters on the fly. You're then thrust into making the first of many choices you'll have to consider as you're asked to swear an important oath. Will you accept Antea's fate and ascend her soul, letting her move on to the afterlife, or sacrifice the living in order to resurrect her? Initially, I picked the former, for as much as I wanted to revive Antea, killing the settlers who asked for help never sat right with me. Morally speaking, it also seemed like a pretty clear-cut choice. Then I started meeting New Eden's denizens, gradually delving into their lives and uncovering their darkest secrets, and my stance started to change.

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Ultros Review - Toil And Soil

Mon, 02/12/2024 - 19:01

With an increasing number of them to choose from, it has become even more challenging for new metroidvania games to stand out. Those that have in recent memory all managed to establish either a distinct and enticing look to them, such as Hollow Knight, or refined a set of familiar mechanics that reinvigorates the entire formula again like last month's Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Ultros aspires to be spoken about in the company of these games and earns that right through an exciting blend of satisfying platforming and slick, fast combat, but also the ways in which it breaks away from the traditional mold of the metroidvania formula. It's these elements that make it truly stand out, even if some of its experimentation with form and format doesn't stick the landing.

You awake aboard a ship floating in space, unaware of how or why you're aboard, before quickly coming into contact with a variety of other alien species all carving out their own versions of idyllic life aboard the craft. A ghostly apparition that guides you through the opening moments of the game explains that there's a security measure in place to keep an all-powerful deity from escaping its sarcophagus, the very ship you've found yourself aboard, and that you'll need to sever the connection of eight beings to the system to ultimately be free. It's not long after that Ultros establishes itself as a pseudo-roguelite, with a time-looping mechanic underpinning your progression and exploration throughout the entire adventure.

These roguelite elements don't function how you might expect them to based on genre staples, however. For example, when you die, you're sent back to your last save point instead of restarting in a new loop, which firmly reminds you that Ultros is first and foremost a metroidvania at its core. Initially, a new loop is only started after you perform pivotal actions around the world, and only after you return to a central hub where the entire world is reset again. You do still have a significant portion of your progress reset, including all of your upgrades and inventory items, as well as losing your primary weapon and utility robot that stores all your other permanent mechanical upgrades. Having the latter two revoked each new loop is initially jarring as not being able to attack or double jump at the start of a loop feels foreign after a few hours utilizing both, but it does serve a purpose if you want to explore Ultros' world with a more passive approach, opening up alternative avenues to investigate if you manage to figure out how to get around. It quickly becomes trivial to reacquire these vital pieces of gear, too, with each new loop offering shorter routes to them that let you get going again quickly and avoiding a sense of frustration after making important story progress.

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Granblue Fantasy: Relink Review - Smooth Sky Sailing

Thu, 02/08/2024 - 07:53

Cygames has been building the Granblue Fantasy series for a decade, first with a mobile gacha-style action-RPG, then with spin-offs ranging from an anime series to a pair of 2D fighting games. Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a return to those RPG roots that attempts to retell the original story to a new audience. For the most part, the game succeeds by trimming the tale into a lean, roughly 20-hour experience, but the transition is not without its stumbles.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink follows The Captain--either Gran (male) or Djeeta (female), depending on your choice--who is the leader of a group of skybound adventurers looking for the island of Estalucia. Captain is linked via life force to Lyria, a girl with the ability to commune with Primal Beasts, who are essentially the gods of the world.

The two travel with a band of warriors, each with backstories that can be explored throughout the game. There are five constant companions: Katalina is Lyria's sworn protector, Io is the resident mage, Rackam helms the Grandcypher airship, Eugen is a former mercenary turned good guy, and Rosetta is the mysterious femme fatale. You can add more members to the party, but while they can spice up battle plans through new party compositions, they don't have as much impact on the overall story as the core group.

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Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Review - Loot World Order

Tue, 02/06/2024 - 10:12

The tightrope to walk when writing a review is assessing a game for what it is, not what you wished it would be. Though some wished Rocksteady would make a game more like its Batman Arkham series, it's not fair to critique Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League for being something other than that. Instead, one must examine it for what it is: a game-as-a-service looter shooter applied to an all-star roster of DC Comics heroes and villains. You zip about a city, shoot aliens, get gear, and repeat. And, as it turns out, that game isn't very good.

In Suicide Squad, teams of one to four players step into the boots of DC Comics' wise-cracking villains Harley Quinn, Deadshot, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang. Designed in a similar vein as Crystal Dynamics' Avengers and WB Montreal's Gotham Knights, Suicide Squad is an open-world game littered with proper nouns like Afflictions, Boosts, and Shield Harvesting, buried in colorful resources, and intensely focused on having players chase better and better loot such as guns, shields, and melee weapons as it (and the all-important endgame) goes on. The intent is to keep players invested for months to come, and the game isn't shy about that.

Suicide Squad's premise--in which the titular foursome must battle the typical good guys as they've been taken over by Brainiac--would've made a hell of a comic book, and though it should work as a game just as seamlessly given how well superhero fare can translate to games, it sometimes struggles to do so given how it bizarrely moves past would-be major events with the spectacle of an office party.

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Silent Hill: The Short Message Review - In My Restless Dreams, I Flee That Town

Fri, 02/02/2024 - 09:53

Content warning: This review discusses Silent Hill: The Short Message's story, which includes references to self-harm.

As a lifelong horror fan and longtime horror critic, I didn't expect to review a free Silent Hill game that launched, PT-style, just a few minutes after it was revealed. And I certainly didn't expect it to be as forgettable as it is. After more than a decade away from consoles, Silent Hill: The Short Message revives the series as the first of several games over the next few years. I sincerely hope future installments in the franchise can rekindle the long-absent magic because The Short Message doesn’t do that. In more ways than one, it's not the playable teaser Silent Hill fans hoped for.

Silent Hill: The Short Message is a first-person horror game built on the idea of a time loop in which its tormented main character is trapped. If that sounds familiar, wait until you play it. The game is blatantly inspired by PT (or "Playable Teaser"), Hideo Kojima's guerrilla demo for the never-released Silent Hill title he was once working on. The Short Message is not Konami running back PT's story without its director. It's a brand-new entry into the series meant to be something of a jumping-on point for players uninitiated with the previously hibernating horror series. It's neither tied to any past entry, nor a teaser for a future installment.

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Persona 3 Reload Review - Burn Your Dread

Wed, 01/31/2024 - 00:00

Persona 3 is often called the darkest entry in its series, and within two minutes of starting it becomes clear why. Persona 3 Reload, remake of the 2006 classic, opens just like its previous versions: with a distressed young girl slumping to the floor as she attempts to work up enough nerve to place a gun against her temple. It's a shocking scene, made even more distressing when our protagonist is greeted by that same girl as he walks into his new school dorm. Her disposition does not betray what she was presumably doing just moments before, as she greets him in a charming, albeit slightly alarmed, manner. Yet, like Persona 3 as a whole, there's more to the situation than both we as players, and the protagonist, can see.

Beyond a grim exterior is a beautiful balancing act--one that carefully weighs tension and relief, love and loss, mystery and resolution, and that aforementioned macabre nature against an unrelenting light. It's only fitting, then, that nearly 20 years later, developer Atlus has chosen to revisit Persona 3 in an effort to rebalance its gameplay as masterfully as its themes. Persona 3 Reload triumphs in doing this, delivering an unforgettable and emotionally resonant story alongside improved visuals and brilliantly re-strategized combat. While not quite as transformative as its name might imply, Reload successfully modernizes the Persona series' greatest and most relatable story.

Junpei, Yukari, Koromaru, and the protagonist unleash an All-Out Attack.

In true Persona fashion, our story begins with an unnamed protagonist transferring to a new high school: Gekkoukan High. While both the school and the seaside city of Tatsumi Port Island feel relatively unassuming at first, it doesn't take long for him to discover the Dark Hour--an eerie and nearly undetectable period of time that exists just after midnight in which murderous shadows are unleashed upon the world. Soon after, he learns that his fellow dorm mates are actually members of the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad (SEES), a secretive school organization hellbent on fighting those shadows using the power of persona.

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Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth Review - The Things Money Can't Buy

Wed, 01/24/2024 - 02:00

On paper, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth has everything I could possibly ask for in a game from RGG Studio: Kasuga Ichiban from the 2020 RPG Yakuza: Like A Dragon co-leading with series legend Kazuma Kiryu--two characters I love dearly fighting alongside one of the most memorable supporting casts in recent years. It's the best of both Yakuza worlds coming together for a story about life, legacy, and the daunting realities of the world we live in--but, more than anything, atonement and the various forms it can take. It also comes with greatly improved RPG systems that nail the tactical joy of turn-based combat while upholding Yakuza's identity in remarkable ways. And in splitting its time in Hawaii with Yokohama, you get two robust and detailed locations to explore new and old ideas through the biggest suite of side activities the series has had thus far.

For all its comedic absurdity and optional diversions, Infinite Wealth brings its heavier themes into focus--at times--with the kind of dramatic storytelling the franchise has mastered over the years. It's unfortunate to say, however, that the main story loses the thread along the way. By putting unearned emphasis on its least interesting aspects and meandering for much of its runtime, the compelling narrative ambitions it sets up are largely left unfulfilled. That's tough to grapple with for what's supposed to be a monumental passing of the torch between the two beloved leads and one last hurrah for one whose life we've seen unfold across nearly two decades' worth of games. And so, instead, Infinite Wealth becomes a game about individual moments--moments of bittersweet reflection, moments of heartfelt camaraderie, and moments of hype that uplift legendary characters even higher. These are moments that remind you the Yakuza franchise is much bigger than any one game. Even when Infinite Wealth's overarching plotline comes up short in crucial ways, those moments still make it worth playing.

Things kick off with a strong opening that puts the realities of normal adult life front and center, almost as if RGG held a mirror up to my face and made a prologue chapter based on some of the things I've been through. More than just being real and relevant to the average person, this also tees up a powerful theme about the struggles of reintegrating with society after a life of crime, which has frequently been explored in the series from different perspectives. In Infinite Wealth, the theme is used to show Ichiban's struggles, as someone who embodies everything good about being the naive goofball with fists of iron and a heart of gold, and as a person driven by the ideals established in his previous game. Furthermore, the recurring theme of public opinion and internet virality dictating reality sharply foreshadows how Infinite Wealth steeps itself in modern social commentary.

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Tekken 8 Review - The Heat Of Battle

Wed, 01/24/2024 - 01:00

Tekken 8's greatest challenge is building on a fighting game experience that has been refined to close to perfection over the course of eight-plus years, without feeling like it retreading old ground or needlessly upending the foundation laid by its predecessor. Thankfully, it's a challenge that developer Bandai Namco meets by introducing an improved fighting system focused on aggression, an impressive roster of 32 fighters, and one of the most rock-solid online experiences I've ever seen in a fighting game.

The main draw of Tekken 8 is the Heat system, which represents a new wrinkle to an already-satisfying set of brawling mechanics. Certain moves in each fighter's repertoire emit a burst of white energy on contact which, in turn, activates an aura of that same energy around the character's limbs. While in this state, characters can inflict more damage when blocked, gain access to a quick Heat Dash or powerful Heat Smash, and receive a few unique perks depending on the character. Claudio, for example, gets access to enhanced and powerful Starburst attacks while Heat is active, while Leroy can add time to his Heat meter whenever he uses one of his unique parry or reversal attacks, which keeps him powered up for longer. Heat can only be activated once per match, and it's only active for a short period of time, which promotes more aggressive tactics. Although it can be easy to think of this as a comeback mechanic, it has much more strategic utility and versatility which can mean it's used for an aggressive offense or a Hail Mary.

This makes every battle feel like a slugfest, which I find to be a refreshing change of pace for the franchise. Tekken has always been good at getting the adrenaline pumping during a match through the basics of trading fists, but the swings in momentum that a perfectly timed Heat activation can cause significantly amp up the excitement for both players and spectators. Importantly, the new Heat system doesn't pave the way to mindless mashing of buttons to brute force the aggression. While it's certainly possible to win a bout or two by smashing buttons, players who prefer to wait for the opportune moment to strike will often come out on top, and in brutal and cinematic style, they may just need to make some adjustments to account for the unpredictability of mashers. The new Heat System offers a lot to new and returning Tekken players, and the threat of a drastic turn in the tide of a battle at the touch of a single button press makes for tense moments and satisfying flourishes when successful.

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