Despite being a combination of two things I hate in video games, roguelikes and cards, my Eternal Optimist (Dumbass) status led me to giving this a shot. It looks pretty cool, actually! People say it "goes places"!

The problem is, when a game "goes places," those Places should be better than where you're Going From.

The first part of the game, like pretty much all games of this type, comes down to trial-and-error, and hoping to get a random loadout that breaks the game and allows you to overcome the enemy player's horseshit. Get a high-damage card with the 3-attack sigil and it's ogre for the bad guy. Then, you get to the second part of the game, which consists of the card game from the first part, but with a very boring art style, meant to evoke the Pokemon TCG game boy game.

At this point I lost interest, and the plot about creepypasta haunted games or whatever the fuck wasn't interesting to me, either. I love when games insert random FMV segments (you know I'm looking forward to Alan Wake 2), but this wasn't even a particularly good implementation of it. And from what I've heard, the third part of the game is even worse. I will never know.

4/10 - One third of the game is alright, and one bonus point for neat integration of DualSense features in the PS5 version.

Skillfully revealing itself as more than the sum of its influences over the course a playthrough, Bomb Rush is masterful. A snappy, gorgeously designed and lovingly detailed ode to some of the other greatest games of all time, while standing shoulder to shoulder, and often exceeding them. At first I was unsure about the story and how it linearly trotted along, but as the world opened up, characters were introduced, and I realized the sheer amount of STUFF that is in this game, I was won over. Hours and hours spent working on getting new characters, none of it feels wasted exploring the multilayered city of New Amsterdam. A new classic, the ultimate idle hands time waster. The perfect Jet Set Radio 3.

My review of the base game is here.

Annihilation Line is really just more of the same, for better and for worse. Taking place midway through the base game's campaign, it resets your skill points and inventory (though with an accelerated XP curve and an allotment of points to start with) so it's best to play this after completing the main game. If you play it where it actually slots in, it would be weird to start fresh, end it at max level, and then go back to the final third of the base game.

A particularly strange decision here is the continued presence of ballistic ammo. You very rarely find non-plasma weapons, and you're almost exclusively fighting Terminators in this anyway. The small/medium caliber ammo only serves to clog your inventory.

The story is the high point here. Your character goes on a mission with The One, The Only, THE Kyle Reese (as seen in the background of Steve1989MREInfo videos) that ties into the first movie in some pretty interesting ways that non-Termheads wouldn't recognize. It also has an explanation for one of the most common questions about the franchise, though it's somewhat obfuscated by the lack of the movie actors' likenesses. Look, that last sentence will make sense after you've played it.

I had a good time with this, just like the main game. Takes around 4-5 hours if you fully explore the environments. Normally retails for $15, occasionally goes on sale on PSN and Steam for $9. Recommended.

A very pleasant little adventure game. It's a bit twee for my liking, specifically in the dialogue, but it's not Borderlands-style reddit meme crap or anything.

The biggest issue is the camera. You don't have direct control, and it loves to freak out when jumping or flying, making it impossible to see where you're actually going.

Still, I had a good time with it. But please, indie developers, every game doesn't have to have fishing.

7/10

I didn't have high hopes for Exoprimal, honestly. It seemed like some sort of generic Overwatch wannabe from early trailers, and there was very little buzz around it, launching to zero fanfare. But hey, I figured, I have Game Pass, I'll try it.

Those motherfuckers at Capcom don't miss.

The basic premise is that you're an exosuit pilot who's tossed back in time and across dimensions by an evil AI in order to gather combat data. He acts as the "DM" for your missions, spawning in dinosaurs and determining objectives. There are two teams of 5 players doing this simultaneously, and you're racing to finish all of your objectives first. These can be simply killing a certain number of certain types of dinosaurs, holding an area, defending a VTOL craft, etc.

After all of your main objectives are done, you enter the final mission. There are two types of these: PVE and PVP. In PVE, you're just racing again like in the first segment. I don't like these because if you fall behind there's nothing you can really do to catch up. If you finish within 20 seconds of the enemy team, it counts as a victory for both, though. Everybody wins! But not really. You know you lost.

PVP finales have more variety. The best, and most common, mode is one where you're escorting a glowing cube to an end point, sort of a Payload thing where both sides have their own object to push. The enemy cube can also be destroyed, and players need to stand near it to repair it before it can resume down the path. It's an interesting risk-reward system as you decide if you want to stick with your own cube, or go try to kill some of the enemies or damage their cube.

There's another finale where you run around collecting batteries, which is the worst one, as it's not really even worth engaging with the other team's players. You're better off focusing solely on grabbing the batteries.

The third finale involves one player grabbing a hammer, the team killing dinos to charge it up, and then using the hammer to break through barriers until both teams eventually meet in the middle. This is a cool mode but it can be infuriating if you're stuck with a teammate who does not know what to do, and doesn't know how to drop the hammer. I can't entirely blame them, as it's a bit unintuitive (to break the barrier you use the interact prompt, not the "smash hammer" ability) but boy it made it mad a couple of times.

Anyway, I thought it was important to mention all of these mission types, because of the one big issue I have with this game. And it's a huge problem, one that will no doubt cause most players to simply quit playing before they even see most of them.

See... Mission types, and the new dinosaurs that come with them, are gated by story progress. Story missions are inserted when matchmaking at certain points, I believe based on player level. It doesn't tell you that you're going into one, and it's really cool when it happens. The integration of story elements into an otherwise regular multiplayer game is an interesting idea, and probably the sort of thing the developers of Blizzard should have done with Overwatch 2, if they weren't busy doing sex crimes or whatever the hell they're up to. But this means that for the first few hours or so you're going to see repeating missions/maps. I don't know why they decided it should take that long before you hit your first milestone, but... They did. After that, you'll be seeing story missions and new content at a pretty regular pace.

These later story missions are worth seeing, too. Some of them are simply absurd, with literal tidal waves of raptors coming at you, or bosses that function like large-scale MMO raids. The one downside is that there's no "vote to skip cutscene" functionality, as you can get these missions at any point after you've finished them, and the introductions can be a bit long-winded.

After finishing the story, I was informed that I can play a horde mode. That's cool, because the parts like that were my favorite bits of the game! Anyway, it's not in there yet. Owned. I guess they want to give everyone time to finish the story, because at the time of this writing, it's only 8 days away.

One last note: the in-game monetization is almost zero. There’s a battle pass, full of skins that look like shit. Everything else can be bought with coins or found in chests you get from leveling up.

The RNG also seems very generous because I already have most legendary skins. I was getting legendaries in about 1/3 of the chests I got, and coins are not in short supply.

If you have game pass, check Exoprimal out! Put some podcasts on and get through that initial grind, and you'll likely have a really good time. If you're on Playstation, uhhh... I'm not sure about spending 60 bux on this. But if it hits 40 and players are still around, I'd say that's worth it. I hope it does stick around and get some significant updates. Or maybe it'll be like Rumbleverse and get shut down in 4 months. RIP...

UPDATE 8/1/2023: the Savage Gauntlet mode added is NOT a horde mode, but essentially an extra-difficult version of one of the regular missions, without the whole enemy team element. Why this game about mowing down hordes of dinosaurs does not have a HORDE MODE is completely baffling to me, but I guess this means I'm done with it for a while. Thanks for the good times, Exoprimal, I wish you the best of luck! You're gonna need it.

You shoot a bunch of Nazis. The MP40 and the Kar98k remain some of the best guns in WWII games for a reason. The levels are large and fun to explore because this is before FPS games just became hallway and setpiece simulators. You shoot a bunch of Nazis.

Great gag at the end of this game where they say BJ's doing some R&R and then it cuts to him shooting up a bunch of Nazis.

Probably the best Wolfenstein game?

my favorite thing about playing these 8 bit era titles is seeing how little game design has advanced in the ~35 years since. the formula for turn based rpgs, and console rpgs in general sort of, was pretty well established here - in its simplest, crudest, purest form - and really hasn’t been altered too drastically in the intervening years. in some ways these games have actually become less sophisticated over time, from a design standpoint; mostly in the name of user friendliness. i played this alongside ff16 where every destination is simply given to you and marked plainly on the map so there is literally no opportunity for the player to find themselves lost or confused. and while i’m having quite a lot of fun with that game, it’s a far less rigorous experience that this, where your path has to be sussed out for yourself through thorough investigation/exploration, never holding your hand at any point. their loops do impart a similar feeling, tho; clearly coming out of the same lineage despite the technical/mechanical gulf between them. getting some new weapon/item, grinding it on your way to the next town/cave/shrine/whatever where you get another new item that opens up another destination and so on. basically what it all boils down to is powering up your character so you have an easier time killing guys; ff16 may be a sophisticated modern action game and here all you’re doing is waiting your turn to hit the attack button, but the core experience was remarkably similar to me. there are ways in which the game shows its age obviously - random encounters are about 2x too frequent (altho i do think this is crucial to the game feeling as big as it does tbh, i took a jaunt around the map once i finished it and the enemies had been extinguished and it took me a couple of minutes maybe) and i wish the offensive options were more varied; after a certain point your best bet is to just spam the attack command in every single encounter until they’re dead - but for the most part i was struck at how not-antiquated it felt in spite of its aged trappings. i’ll admit the narrative and aesthetic are relatively generic tolkien-esque fantasy stuff and probably won’t make much of an impression on modern audiences, outside of toriyama’s enemy designs which are beautiful and lively from end to end, but that’s true of most games in the genre if we’re being real. anyone who’s semi-seriously interested in rpgs and can put up with a few age-related annoyances should consider trying this out at least just to see the genre bursting through in a nearly-fully actualized way

played this on ios which i can’t recommend enough. as an idle game, it absolutely washes any of the free to play garbage the app store is flooded with these days. ofc it’s well suited to a more active and engaged style of play but the rudimentary battle system is great for zoning out while you grind for five minutes at a time, too. and with the quick save feature you don’t have to worry about losing your progress if you can’t make it back to the castle. the touchscreen joystick and menus, while a bit unpolished looking maybe, are smooth and intuitive and the fact that you can play it in portrait with one hand is a game changer for me. just a real joy to play on your phone; don’t imagine i would have stuck with it on another platform honestly

Everything that made Breath of the Wild great, but more. More quests, more NPCs, more unique areas to explore thanks to the sky and underground areas, more substantial temples and puzzles, more interesting shrines, more varied and versatile abilities.

I loved Breath of the Wild for its desolate atmosphere, but TotK is so full of More that BotW now almost feels like the dry run for the real deal.

There's plenty to say about TotK, but what's truly incredible is how anything you want to do just works. In my 180 hours I never once encountered a physics glitch. Never did something I build not operate the way I could predict.

I put a steering stick on a single fan and it wouldn't fly straight due to improper balancing. So I popped on a spear and some korok leaves as a makeshift tail and... it fucking worked. The added weight and air drag of these pieces made the single fan device balance and fly perfectly.

I put some springs on the bottom of a slab and attached wheels to the springs. The springs then acted as shock absorbers for the wheels.

A lesser game would have systems too rigid for this type of experimentation. A spring would just be a device that launches you in an arbitrary direction. In TotK, it's just a spring and it can be used in any way that would make sense in the real world.

It's insane. It all just works. And that crafting exists in a world so full of unique NPCs to talk to, quests to complete, unique items to find... It's hard to avoid calling TotK just plainly one of the best open world games ever made. The only reason I could pull myself away from it is was that I ran out of game to play.

Just played the story mode.

Not really sure how to evaluate the game, as I'm not much of a fighting game guy and was really just here to beat up on some AI and see the story. Even then, I struggled with a lot of the fights—this just isn't my genre!

But the presentation here is fantastic. It's a funny and engaging schlocky time travel story with some immediately compelling characters. Johnny Cage is, as always, my favorite, but everyone here gets a moment to shine. I like how every chapter of the story mode follows a different character's perspective; you're always bouncing around seeing different sides of the conflict. It's nice to go from the Johnny Cage chapter where he's a charming bozo to, say, the Sonya Blade chapter where you get to beat him up for being an annoying bozo.

Also, boy, can't really deny those transitions from cutscenes to gameplay. Really smooth every time.

like if resident evil was even dumber and every puzzle amounted to “kill 100 guys and then a boss.” so much to love about this; the gonzo gothic horror aesthetic is imaginative and engrossing and when it’s working, the combat feels fantastic. varied and dynamic enough to allow for some real creativity in your load out and play style. hack and slash isn’t really my genre and i was kinda expecting to slice through everybody without much friction, but no, this is often very challenging. boss encounters especially bear a striking resemblance to souls games, in their structure and level of difficulty. the lack of coherent narrative information (really had no idea why dante was on this island or what he was trying to do for most of it) in combination with the macabre fantasy environments gave me a distinct souls feeling, too; idk if miyazaki’s ever mentioned it but this feels like a clear precursor to those game to me. shame that there are some significant…limitations cause this could have been something truly great. biggest thing is the camera. most of the time it’s serviceable and keeps the field of view open enough that you’re able to keep track of things in combat. but then sometimes it doesn’t at all lol. some really egregious moments here. boss fights start on an angle where you can’t see what you’re supposed to be fighting. you’ll frequently dodge attacks only to land in some corner of the room where you can’t see anything. several times throughout the game i found myself standing still for minutes at a time firing grenades toward the screen having absolutely no clue what i’m aiming at. it’s absurd. this isn’t like the early resident evil games, either, where the fixed angles serve a real aesthetic and affective purpose and are essential to the whole project; this would clearly be a much better game with a modern camera system. platforming is also just a fucking chore my god. like i said it’s relatively serviceable most of the time but the unsuccessful moments really drag it down a ton. i don’t think the staccato level structure is to the game’s benefit, either. the castle is an amazing locale and it would have been cool to experience it as a cohesive, ever expanding structure a la the mansion in re1 but, while it is basically that, the constant breaks in the action don’t allow for that same feeling. wish there had been some sort of diegetic save system, so it wouldn’t need to be broken up quite so much. that’s not too big a deal tho i’m kinda asking for the game to be something that it’s not. the camera tho…that is a big deal. holds up remarkably well beyond this one aspect but it’s a very important one!