They made the best game ever made AGAIN.

Quickly my reservations about a remake were silenced when I was back in the shoes of Leon S. Kennedy, roundhouse kicking and shotgunning to my heart’s content. They took the best action movie in gaming and gave it a new burst of adrenaline. The knife, a Resident Evil staple, becomes your best friend when you parry a fucking chainsaw. You have more mobility and more tools, but enemies are more unrelenting and the action even more sweaty and frantic. It offers moment after moment of heart pumping, addictive gunplay and I just stood amazed that Capcom has done it again. It shouldn’t feel so good but it just does.

It hasn’t even changed that much! The presentation is absolutely gorgeous and it’s one of the best looking games to come out so far. Everything is mad detailed and the gun porn has been pushed to the max. I paused and used photo mode when reloading a rifle and each round is rendered as it’s being loaded in. That’s impeccable detail. All the characters have had a glow up and everyone is super hot. The story is better and characters that were lacking in the original like Ashley and Luis are better! They gave Luis a backstory! Is this better than the original!??

The only reason I won’t put it higher on my best of 2023 list is because it is after all a remake. Resident Evil 4 is vital, and pure gameplay bliss, and a necessary remake or not, it’s explosively fun.

For me 2023 was the year of the retro revival. Resident Evil 4 Remake did very little to shake up the formula of the original masterpiece and it’s all the better for it. Armored Core 6 absolutely plays like a game from the PS2 era with its mission structure and how it delivers the story. There’s something refreshing about bloat-free and gameplay-forward gaming experiences of old. Then there was Metroid Prime Remastered, a totally faithful-to-the-original remake on Switch. It was my opportunity to play it after first trying it on the GameCube and immediately not getting it. It was a headache game. I was confused.

Now I’m old enough to appreciate the lush world and exploration of Prime. It does little to hold your hand, the map usually being your best friend, and you have to rely on the environment for the rest. Again, the gameplay and level design is “dated.” But the level design is so tightly made and absolutely one of the best adventures I’ve had in a long time. The similarities to Dark Souls are interesting to note. The levels are segmented but connected via a large overworld, you have to save in certain spots and respawn enemies if you do. It can be gruelingly difficult as you explore with Samus, low on missiles, and desperately looking for a save station.

What’s insane is how perfectly they translate Metroid’s formula into 3D. Consider me a big fan of Metroid Prime now and I wonder if we will get the sequels on Switch. Retro has made magic happen with this remaster and it looks stunning on the Switch. I in fact made the decision to buy the OLED model only hours into Prime, and it was a very worthwhile purchase.

My only gripe is the huge amount of back tracking I had to do towards the end of the game. I hung my head in defeat when I realized I had not collected several of the relics necessary for the end game despite me being in the rooms they are hidden away in. The lack of fast travel is admittedly painful and morph balling my way through basically the entire world to collect the crap I missed was truthfully a chore. But that’s on me, really.

A joy wall to wall. Every time I pick it up I notice something new in the animations. It is just so well polished and the levels are endlessly fun. If I’m not loving a level or segment it’s usually over pretty fast. In fact I really only have small nitpicks that ultimately don’t matter too much like why is Yoshi easy mode? Fantastic game and very much worth game of the year because it has revitalized 2D Mario, which has become achingly stale. The last decade of 2D Mario was so gosh darn bland and boring, and Wonder absolutely shakes it up.

It was a gift from my lovely wife when I told her I was suffering from choice paralysis on what game to buy. She picked a good one.

Going back to this to get all the achievements for both the main game and Separate Ways only reinforced the problems I already had. Its overlength and pacing problems coupled with the insane amount of RNG makes something I normally love (speedrunning RE games) into an arduous nightmare. I still did it, because I have Brain Problems, but I'm not going to do it again on PS5 like I did for RE2 and 3.

As a quick aside, it is hilarious that the 10 dollar DLC is longer than REmak3. Too bad Ada's voice actor is somehow even worse in it.

When making a game where you spend a lot of time shooting at things, it's important that the shooting feels good. Most games seem to forget this, but it was apparently Teyon's #1 priority when making Robocop: Rogue City, perhaps the closest thing to a F.E.A.R. 1 successor... That I've played, anyway. Most firefights result in an absolutely insane amount of debris, sparks, dust, and human body parts flying in every direction. Despite using Murphy's iconic Auto-9 exclusively for 90% of the game, it never got boring as a result. The people don't need ray tracing, we need every environment to explode like it's the lobby in The Matrix!

Really, making a RoboCop game is a pretty hard thing to do. After all, he used One gun, and walked in the same manner and pace of an elderly man with severe constipation. Here, you can pick up guns dropped by enemies, though they're usually not worth using except for the grenade and rocket launchers, and you can upgrade the Auto-9 by inserting chips you find in OCP chests onto PCB boards that you get throughout the game. These can have effects ranging from turning it into a full-auto machine pistol (useless), splitting the bullets to make it more devastating in close quarters (situationally useful), to increased gore effects (essential). One time I shot a guy and all of his limbs flew off and left him looking like the Black Knight. That's worth a full star right there.

The game does somewhat break Robo-Canon by also giving Murph a dash move, as well as letting him "sprint", which is really more like a light jog. But (bangs gavel) I'll allow it! Considering the size of some of these maps, forcing the player to walk everywhere would be cruel and unusual punishment. Nobody would do that, right? Just as an aside, in my review of Terminator: Resistance, I had mentioned that the Terminator mode felt like a dry run for this game. I am happy to report that Robocop features the exact same grab/throw that they put in that Terminator mode. It is always funny.

Speaking of things carried over from Terminator, the basic structure here is the same: Go from your home base (the police station, in this case) to large hub levels that split into smaller areas for side quests, and then complete discrete linear levels before heading back. The immersive sim-like elements return, though I felt they were under-utilized here. I maxed out Psychology, but I never got a psych dialogue check after the first couple of missions. I only had one Engineering check, and it seemed like it made no difference. Most of your skills here are combat-based, so it's disappointing that the 2 or 3 that could give you alternate ways to complete objectives went almost entirely unused.

Branching story paths return, and I found those to be executed better than in Terminator. The mayoral race that you can influence doesn't matter much, but you have 3 or 4 long-running questlines with side characters. Plot-wise, this takes place "between RoboCop 2 and 3," according to Teyon, probably for licensing reasons, because this feels more like a finale. There are references to the Kanemitsu Corp, but it also retcons several things about 3. The main villain is the supposed brother of Emil Antonowsky, who was last seen melting before getting splattered by a car. Wendell, a very funny name for a villain, looks like Alan Rickman dressed in RE8 Chris Redfield's outfit. And hey, you're never gonna believe this, but OCP is up to some shady shit!

The game features the likenesses of Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, and Robert DoQui (Sgt. Reed), with Weller also providing his voice. He does a great job, sounding like no time has passed since he shot Robocop 2. He injects the sometimes-flat writing with the sort of dry, deadpan humor that Robocop requires. The rest of the voice acting is... Variable.

Alright, tech time: playing on PS5, performance mode was... Mostly okay. In larger areas, in big firefights, it could drop pretty severely, and in a couple of areas, with a LOT going on, I had hard crashes. However, it looks good, if blurry due to -- you guessed it! -- temporal AA and upscaling. The checkerboard upscaling is hella aggressive as well, as you can see the artifacting every time the camera cuts during conversations. In gameplay, it's not too bad. Apparently the XSX version is more stable, but I went with PS5 because I assumed they had more experience developing for PS. Xbox having the edge seems to be occurring more frequently now, though, so maybe the tide is turning...

If you're a big fan of RoboCop 1 and 2, as I am, I absolutely recommend Rogue City. Even if you're not, you can probably have some fun blasting Nuke-heads into tiny pieces and decorating walls with their guts. They didn't come quietly, so there was...

Trouble.

8/10

Didn't love it quite as much as the first, but part of that is probably more that the novelty's passed. Sigil 1 introduced a whole new mood, aesthetic, and gimmicks for Doom—it's often pitch black with enemies only visible by their silhouettes, it's hellish and dark and tricky in ways only a WAD released 30 years later can be, it's got those eye switch puzzles.

Sigil 2 refines the same ideas, but none of it's really new this time. Just a master going back to a design he created and refining it further. Another entry in the Sigil episode, really. And, like the first, a must play for the Doomheads out there.

Thief is methodically mapping space from the shadows. Thief is exploring an architecture of absurd, arcane labyrinths. Thief is rotoscoped & roughly layered 90s FMVs scored with industrial beats.

The Black Parade, a fan campaign mod for the now 25 year old Thief: The Dark Project, brings Thief into the present as an act of alternate-history building. Within the tight restrictions of the Dark Engine, this imagines what Thief could be given decades of further contemplation, or in this case, seven years of development led by famed modder Skacky.

The Black Parade echoes iconic levels: here is a mansion, or a sprawling, vertical city, a rain-swept church, a plague stricken derelict district. But everything is now denser, more honeycombed, more varied. At times you’ll be lost, but they’ve paid special attention to every room’s volume, materials, light and colour, so that your mental map is as rich as your potential targets.

Thief separates itself from other Im-Sims by refusing to be an everything-game (Deus-Ex). You are a thief. You can’t fight for shit. You can jump from carpet to carpet and knock someone out if you’re good, but you can’t do much about two guards on your tail. Thief is narrowly designed to do one thing. The Black Parade knows this and is as close to Thief 3 (5?) that we’ll ever get.

An ambitious combination of first person shooter and Metroid-like backtracking exploration. Only let down by it being such an early rendition of the idea. Its ideas are a bit half baked owing to it being a trailblazer rather than an iterator. I feel like someone revisiting this idea of a run and gun metroidvania could make something truly great today.

But, man, what's here is still pretty darn good. There's really nothing else like it. The Egyptian setting is still unique today, the sprite work still totally beautiful, the core metroidvania-lite design rarely touched on in the FPS genre.

If you play it, play it on normal. The original game didn't have any difficulty settings so the highest ones here were added in just for the port. The game isn't exactly designed around them and the developer doesn't recommend them for a first time player. Go ahead on normal. It's a little breezy, but that's OK. It's really fun to blast apart some mummies and whatnot.

One of the highest budget cultural products from Finland (that's right, not just for a video game). One of the best looking and most visually polished games of the year. An incredible, gigantic, impossibly extravagant presentation funded with a blank check from Epic Games in some attempt to push installs of their game launcher.

And, yet, nonetheless an extremely personal feeling work for Sam Lake and the rest of Remedy. it's a rare work that can pull off this feat. Like when David Lynch was given a big check for Twin Peaks: The Return, somehow the scope has been blown out while retaining the authorship that makes the work unique.

There's complaints I can levy here—Saga's mechanics, such as the "Case Board" where story information is organized and presented, and "Profiling" where the player clicks buttons until the game tells them where to go next, are frankly way less developed and less interesting than Wake's—but it really doesn't matter that much when we're getting a sequel to Alan Wake. A sequel that isn't just good, but great and feels like it's finally executing on everything Remedy's been building toward since Wake, from presentation to its mechanics to its storytelling. They finally figured out how to make Wake's "writing" a fully featured game mechanic. I'll take some half-assed "you talk to an NPC and then immediately put what they said on a mood board" stuff in return for that.

A combination of Journey, Death Stranding, and Grow Home, but not as compelling as any of them.

You climb a mountain, playing as a character draped in a poncho of some sort (they did not bother to give it cloth physics so your arms just clip through it). You are accompanied by a small blobular creature, although you cannot play the harmonica for it. You climb by alternating the triggers. This is a veritable gumbo of influences.

Why are you climbing this mountain? You find out in the last 10 minutes of the game. There are many very long letters scattered throughout the levels, but I stopped reading them when I realized they were nothing but "w o r l d b u i l d i n g," aka padding when writers can't create a strong narrative or interesting dialogue. Other collectables include cairns, murals, and altars. None of them do anything, as far as I can tell. You can put rocks on the cairns, light up the murals, and spin the altars, and... That's it. More padding, hooray!

The actual gameplay is fine. There's no challenge to speak of, as you're always tethered by a rope when climbing. To my knowledge, you can't die, because the rope will automatically tether when you grab onto something, and you can't run off ledges when untethered. There is a stamina meter, but you can recover it at any time while climbing, and you're given 3 extra pitons to act as placeable checkpoints during any given climbing segment. These are often short, with plentiful (and mandatory, as they refresh your tether length) full checkpoints, and I didn't even need to monitor my stamina outside of one part near the end.

Jusant is pleasant enough. It's a fairly nice-looking game, and executed pretty well. You're just better off playing any of the games it cribbed from.

6/10