After watching Rings of Power with my girlfriend, I decided I should check out the source material so of course I did the sensible thing and tried out Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. (The actual reason is it was free on Amazon/Twitch Prime like a month or two ago and I figured why not)

First off, a neat thing I truly didn’t expect is that you can kinda-sorta play the game as a woman? It lets you select a skin for Talion and most of them just put him in different types of armor (normal guy armor, evil guy armor, elf guy armor, etc) but then one of them is just a woman named Lithariel? It’s purely cosmetic (no audio/dialogue changes) and only in the gameplay segments (cutscenes switch back to generic Talion), but it’s kinda neat that it’s available at all. Being able to be a cool lady with a sword instead of generic gruff white dude #75 was a big plus for me.

But, uh, other than that I didn’t have a great time? The movement feels mushy (on keyboard and mouse, maybe controller would feel better?) and I felt like I was constantly fighting the camera for control. I also didn’t care much for the combat. I’ve never really been a big fan of the Batman Arkham game style combat and this is pretty directly that with some bits added on. But then this one it feels like I don’t get to decide who I’m actually targeting so I just kind of flailed between targets. I pretty frequently caught myself thinking that I wish this felt more like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey because I love how that game feels for runnin’ around, climbin’ stuff, and stabbin’ dudes. Maybe that’s an unfair comparison since AC:O was several years later but it constantly came to mind for me.

I’m largely ambivalent on Lord of the Rings in general so this game is kind of not targeted towards me but the narrative (as far as I saw in my 3-ish hours of playtime) didn’t really do anything for me. Talion is a kinda boring sad dad, Celebrimbor trying to regain his memories doesn’t do much for me either (maybe because I already know some of his deal and the game seems to assume I wouldn’t know anything), and having missions where I had to go hang out with Gollum felt like fan service aimed at completely different people. It’s not necessarily a bad thing (well, maybe the Talion stuff is, that’s dreadfully dull) but it left me without much to really latch onto here. If the story had been intriguing enough maybe I’d feel compelled to stick through the mushy controls for a while longer to see what’s up with the rest of it.

A few months ago, when I was playing the rest of Fallout 4, I got to Nuka-World, found out that the premise of it is helping some raider gangs to build a bigger/better slave empire and I just kind of checked out of it. The game offers a quest to kill all the raiders instead of helping them, I did it, and my reward was the previously-enslaved NPCs glitching out and taking all their clothes off and then nothing else meaningful happened. I moved on with life. But now I felt a draw to go back. Maybe I missed out on something. Maybe within the rancid outer layer is a core that has something special. Maybe there is something here to point to that makes this awful DLC 'worth it.'

Dear reader, I am sad to say there is no such thing.

The Nuka-World DLC was made in response to fans at launch saying that they wanted more content with raiders and so Bethesda planned this out as a way to spend time with them and to add more depth to raider factions than what there was in the base game. And, see, that is a pitch I can get behind. Because in every Fallout game, from the isometric beginnings to the first-person present, the raiders are pretty much just murder junkies (and occasionally cannibals). They exist to fill a gap in the enemy progression and nothing more. Bethesda needed an enemy tougher than the random mutated bugs and critters but not as strong as the Super Mutants. And the raiders fill that gap. Fleshy bags of XP and loot that are pure evil that come from nowhere for you to freely murder the shit out of them without as much as a second thought as to who they are or why you're murdering them. The raiders are humans of pure function. So, the idea that you might actually get to sit down and talk to them and find out what's up with the raiders and why they are the way they are... yeah, sure, I'd like to see someone take a crack at that because no one really has so far.

Unfortunately, this DLC is a full product and not just a pitch. In practice, Nuka-World is a big map for you to go to with plenty of locations to explore and some very bare bones narrative to send you from one point of interest to the next. You arrive, are appointed leader of all the raiders and then you are almost immediately sent out to clear out the rest of the theme park of the various non-raider monsters and robots that have somehow completely confounded three rather large gangs. Each gang has a leader that you get one meaningful conversation with but even these are pretty disappointing. Instead of making raiders with depth, they just made different flavors of raider with fun coats of paint. Instead of generic murder junkies, you now have the Disciples (Original Flavor™ Murder Junkies), The Operators (Money-hungry Murder Junkies), and The Pack (Furry Murder Junkies). But that's kinda it. It's not like you get much background about who any of them are or where they come from or why they decided to be murder junkies. And after those initial conversations? They have nothing meaningful to say and will only send you on some classic Bethesda Radiant Quests to go murder people or enslave them. Cool.

Okay so it's a total whiff on the narrative end. But a theme park! Surely this is some cool locations with fun aesthetics! It's not just bombed out buildings or military bases or what! It's rollercoasters and fun houses and a zoo for some reason! And this all just... largely didn't do anything for me. The little bit of interest I had in it the aesthetic wore off fast, though, because this DLC has a lot of stuff in it and it makes you go to almost all of it. I recommend turning the volume slider for dialogue all the way down because the constantly looping theme park PA system messages about buying overpriced maps or how such-and-such a ride is out of order get old the third time they loop and get very old the eighteenth time they loop.

The one nice thing I can say about this is that they brought the Hubologists back and I think that's fun. I don't know how the religion from the West Coast games ended up in the Commonwealth but I'm not asking questions. They dose you with radiation and will give you way more lore than all three raider gangs combined before their heads all explode in a the best quest of the entire DLC.

Total ass DLC that is a huge missed opportunity because they just wanted to give you more. More locations to look at, more garbage to loot, more functional mechanical horseshit to wade through. As if the base game somehow didn't have enough. What the hell.

This game is... fine. I guess. So much has been said about it, I feel like I shouldn't carry on too long about it. Like, yeah, Lara is a pretty terrible archaeologist. She does all the usual archaeologist stuff of traveling to a foreign place and stealing all their cultural objects but then, on top of that, she also shoots whoever happens to be living there and destroys entire ancient buildings, like, come on girl, what are you even doing.

The main plot feels so empty for a lot of it. The vast majority of the game is just "rescue Lara's friend(s)" and it constantly finds new reasons why you can't quite get to them yet or whatever. Pretty much everything interesting about the plot is developed via the collectible journals which sure is an interesting choice.

The puzzle solving and platforming aspects were mostly fine? It got pretty janky in some spots and the majority of my deaths were trying to make a jump and Lara not grabbing or the camera turning her mid-air and making me fall to my death but when it works it's completely competent, I guess.

Speaking of completely competent: The shooting. I liked the combat early on when encounters were very small-scale (with usually only 3-5 enemies) but once it gave me the assault rifle and grenade launcher, every fight was like a dozen dudes and it got very boring very quickly. At first I had thought this was a response to that half-joking criticism people like to level at Uncharted where they say that Nathan Drake is a mass murderer with how much dude-shootin' he does but it turns out, no, they were just slowly escalating the encounter size until I had a proper arsenal. At one point it took away all the weapons except the bow and that was awesome!! I really liked that part!! More of that, please!!

I feel like collectibles in games can be somewhat controversial but I kind of liked some of what this game did? The journals are where a lot of character and plot development actually happens (which is maybe an indictment of the actual main plot of the game) and the artifacts give nice little tidbits of actual history (that I really wish were longer). But those two gave me enough that I made sure to get all of both of those before I finished the game. There's a ton of other collectibles too, though, and those definitely feel like a waste of my time for the sake of padding out the game. The GPS Caches, for example, give a minuscule amount of experience but there is approximately eight trillion of them in each zone to find.

Lara and Sam are definitely gay, right? Sam calls Lara 'sweetie' several times and in basically every cutscene they're in, they're holding hands or putting their arms around each other and I'm choosing to read that as romantic because it being a game about a woman rescuing her girlfriend is a thousand times more interesting to me.

Fuck QTEs, always and forever. It took me, like, three QTEs to get tired of mashing a button to do a thing. And in the prologue/tutorial section, the QTEs weren't displaying properly so I had to watch Lara's skull get crushed by a boulder like eight times before the game decided to tell me what button I needed to be pushing. Luckily it seemed to just be like that for the first couple because if the whole game had been that then I never would've finished this. Not just from QTE frustration but also because I got real tired real quick of seeing all the brutal and gruesome shit they do to Lara here. From what I understand, they tone it down in the sequels which is good, but oh my god it's so awful here. Truly hate it.

And one last thing: fuck the bright white flashes that you get from almost every menu option at a campfire. I had to close my eyes every time I clicked to buy an upgrade or unlock a skill or fast travel cause that shit is so uncomfortable. Fuck off, don't do that, what the hell.

Anyway. It was funny to play this after having watched the 2018 Tomb Raider movie because that takes some of this game's plot (Queen Himiko, Yamatai, some other proper nouns) so every time I recognized something I could be like "wow cool reference to a movie that came out 5 years later".

Very middling game that was a generally okay way to spend 13 hours. I feel like at a different time I could have more venom for this game and the way it's indicative of the design tendencies of AAA games but I just don't have that in me right now because all I wanted was a cool place to runny jumpy collect things and rescue cute girlfriend and that is basically what I got.

Right off the bat, I really appreciate that they're tried to have an actual Plot with Characters this time around whereas the last one was just a collection of people doing things until credits rolled. I'm not going to say that any of that narrative work they do here is really impressive but it was a big step up from TR2013.

One of my immediate impressions of this game was seeing how much they had expanded the crafting systems and feeling extremely exhausted. There's just so much stuff. Weapon upgrades and inventory upgrades and like eight types of ammo, and now there's like a dozen different crafting ingredients. The few times I had to seek out specific materials to craft a specific upgrade I wanted was truly miserable. Sometimes doing something simpler is better. Even if the crafting TR2013 was a bit light, I think I prefer that to whatever you want to call what they've done here.

I think it's interesting that instead of doing usual open world "climb a thing to reveal a bunch of icons" they do "find three different things to reveal everything." On the one hand, it's a good idea because it means I can find one map and then go grab those collectibles (or whatever) and it helps to make map clutter more manageable. But on the other hand, it means I was backtracking through places multiple times over which can be very tedious and annoying when it's the more scripted climbing sequences that the main story has you do.

And shoutouts to them for mostly fixing the platforming breaking and killing me. The vast majority of the game was totally fine until I got the finale and suddenly it was doing the same shit again, spinning the camera around right as I jump or Lara just randomly let go of things for no reason and, like, tripled my deathcount in twenty minutes.

I still feel largely ambivalent about the combat here. Shooting people is whatever. I like that they seemed to make stealth a more viable option (even though there's still a lot of forced combat encounters that don't let you stealth). And I do genuinely like doing the stealth in this game! It's very satisfying to do a Death From Above and be some Predator murder machine. That said, it does feel like they made the stealth for it to fail. The way it hides or obscures some information you'd need to be able to stealth through an encounter means that shootouts are nearly inevitable.

Speaking of combat, they expanded the skill tree a bunch and added a lot more skills for dodging and countering and doing finishers and, you know what? No thank you, I don't think I will. I will simply circle strafe around the enemies and dump bullets into them like a normal person.

There's this thing the game does whenever you come upon something that tells you about what people in the past believed about the world. You find artifacts and notes and such that talk about how people encountered something they didn't know how to explain and would turn to spiritualism to try and explain it. For example, late in the game, there is one of the puzzle tombs in a big cavern that a note says must obviously be a pathway to hell and Lara kind of laughs and points out that, no, it's just a big cavern. And then there are notes in the tomb from a woman who was set to be exorcized and she explains that she understands that she isn't possessed and just has Weird Brain Stuff going on but the people around here attribute it to demons. The writing around this stuff makes it feel like the game thinks this sort of thing is quaint? Like, "oh how cute of these centuries-old people try to explain things! But we know better now because we have science!" Which is a really strange attitude to have towards belief in the supernatural when your game has an immortal man and an undying army and a magic crystal in it!! Your game is extremely supernatural, just like the one that came before it!! Maybe don't be so dismissive towards actual beliefs people held when you're going to turn around and say "okay but here's some stuff we made up that is Totally Real and has no scientific explanation!" I think it's weird and kind of hacky writing.

'C' as a default keybind sucks ass, I hate using it and I don't know anyone who likes it. And putting something relatively important on it is bad. PC gaming is so cursed because there's so many options for keybinds and yet game devs love to make terrible choices around them.

Also, while I'm wrapping this up with minor complaints, it sucks that they tied weird bonuses to the outfits. I want to wear the cute outfits and instead I had to wear whatever had the best bonus available. I want to play dress-up, I do not want to have to think.

Overall solid improvement over the first game. Still a great 'no thoughts, head empty' collectathon game for me.

Edit: Realizing a day later that I didn't write anything about the actual story and I have some Thoughts about it so it's getting an addendum on the end. It's a MacGuffin chase as Lara tries to work through her feelings about her dad mixed with a really boring white savior narrative because golly those poor natives just don't know how to defend themselves anymore!! It kinda sucks and lot of the writing is vapid. They do so little to actually convince me that the magic crystal at the end is important for something and until the final cutscene it's not even clear why Lara wants other than "well, dad wanted to find it" so the ending feels like it comes out of nowhere. I think they could've had something with Lara dealing with her relationship to her father (he was never around and she resented him for that for a while, his mother died and he withheld lots of details around that, he was generally very closed off, and then he suddenly killed himself while she watched). It's the only really interesting thing going on here and they devote so little time to it. Hard to keep me interested in the narrative for large swathes of this. They could've at least thrown me a bone and let Lara kiss Sophia or something. The end (plus the Blood Ties DLC) sets up some interesting extended family and conspiracy stuff that I imagine will be what the third game is about so I'm mildly hopeful that there'll be something there but really I should probably lower my expectations.

They really looked at their action-adventure video game and said "Okay but what if it was Gone Home?" and I love that so much. I'm not a Tomb Raider lorehead but this was still fun to run through. I think the writing itself is not 100% there but it's still a well-paced lil story about the Croft family.

It's.. interesting that this seems like a move to try and separate Lara Croft from her family's wealth and history... but also not too much. It really reminds me of of the 2018 Tomb Raider movie where Lara starts off trying to distance herself from her wealthy, privileged life (which I think is cool and they should've committed to) but then at the end she just accepts it anyway. If Tomb Raider gets rebooted again or something, I wish they'd just do away with the whole "hyper-rich family of Egyptologists" because it just comes with way too much baggage.

Yeah, I don't know about this one. Part of it is definitely feel burnt out on this specific type of game after powering through TR 2013 and Rise (2015) one after another but also... this game has some horrid vibes to it.

It's like they want to recognize the missteps of the previous two games (and the whole franchise before that) but also they're just doing the exact same things. Lara is still a white savior parachuting into a place to save the poor defenseless locals. And she's still doing it by destroying ruins, setting fire to things, and stealing artifacts. How can you criticize the antagonists for doing that shit when your solution is "Well I need to go and do it before they do because it's okay when I do it." What sort of mental gymnastics must Lara be doing to justify this? And the thing is, the game seems wholly uninterested in actually digging in to that.

There's the scene after a huge flood hits the village they're in where Lara is talking about how she needs to go save everyone and how she's the only one who can do it and Jonah gets up in her face about it. How does she know that? How can she just leave this place without helping people who are literally dying right in front of her? Why is it her responsibility to go save everyone? And it seemed like the game was going somewhere with it, maybe Lara might actually have to reckon with the consequences of her actions. And then about 90 seconds later Jonah basically says "Actually, you know what, you're right Lara, you do need to go save everyone." Truly the writers want to have their cake and eat it too.

And in some truly "we don't actually understand what is problematic or insensitive about this" shit, Lara can just dress up in tradition indigenous garb in order to get, like, xp bonuses or whatever. Lara, honey, stick to the tank tops and khakis.

The other big(ish) problem I'm having is that the visuals are very cluttered. It's the amazon rainforest, so of course they, but then it's so hard to parse things, especially in the fast action platforming sequences. I've already had multiple deaths because I couldn't see the spikes or whatever deathtrap I needed to quickly dodge out of the way of.

The slight changes they made to the UI and menus all feel worse. Navigating any of it is just slightly more annoying that, when combined with Everything Else about this game, it's just too much to put up with.

Also, you're really gonna introduce Abigaile Ortiz and try to convince me that that woman is straight? fuck outta here

And it just doesn't run great on my old pos computer. Which shouldn't be too much of surprise but the other two ran well enough that it wasn't an issue so I was feeling hopeful about this one.

Maybe some day I'll come back to this but I can't imagine it would be for anything beyond "no thoughts, head empty, open world collectables" type game.

I played Apex at launch for a handful of weeks, throughout "Season 0" and into the beginning of Season 1, and ever since then I had this itch in the back of my mind to go back to it because it's very fun and I really enjoy the cast of characters they've built. Finally, upon adding the goth trans mommy I decided that this character is laser targeted at me, specifically, and I had to jump back in. I played for a few days and had fun despite being terrible at it. And then one day I didn't play but I still felt this itch as I was getting ready for bed that night that maybe I should pop on real quick to check the dailies and that was when I knew I had to uninstall. It's just not how I want to engage with games - even ones that I really enjoy playing! I don't want to be thinking about daily quests and weeklies and what tier of the battle pass I'm at vs. what tier/rewards I want to get to. I've got enough Brain Problems going on, I don't need a video game to take advantage of me and make me feel worse. So, despite how much I do genuinely enjoy the movement and the gunplay and even the whole battle royale mode, I have to quit playing this because I can't stand the way the bits around the edge make me feel. Maybe if I were playing this with friends instead of solo and it had a more social element to it then I'd be willing to go back and play more. But I guess until then, I'm done with this game? Kind of a disappointing and depressing way to quit a game but I gotta do what's best for myself, y'know?

Catalyst is a 10/10 character tho, love her to death.

A game that bravely asks the question "what if Vampire Survivors had an aesthetic that was more appealing to Alexa, specifically, and also all the characters were like cool women and witches and stuff". And, well, it turns out the answer to that question is that it'd hold my attention about as long as Vampire Survivors did. I dunno, it's just kinda boring to play! I'm just not really feeling any strong draw to do more runs. I did a couple and it was whatever. If I needed something to play while listening to a podcast there's about dozen other games I'd go back to before this one (or another entry in whatever this genre is called). It seems Fine if you're into this genre, I guess.

I finished this like a month ago and forgot to log it here so I'm gonna do my best to jot down some notes about it but I have almost certainly forgotten things so this "review" is going to be even more of a jumbled mess of my thoughts than my usual ""reviews"" are.

First off, this story bangs. It sucks, it fucks, it whips ass, it's incredible. Jack and his polycule do it their way. I love how it makes Jack & co. strangers to this world but you are also a stranger to it! Love that good title with double meaning bullshit. I do feel like I missed out a bit because I haven't palyed FF1, so not all the connections hit with their full force but the game does more than enough work to give context so all the big reveals land. It ends up being a really powerful ending!

I do wish we had more moments that we had gotten to know the party members as individual characters. They very occasionally get some lines of dialogue but it's really not much to give them the depth that I like to get from RPGs. Also, Sophia and Neon should have gotten together. Known woman-kisser Alexa Lily thinks the women should kiss, more news at 11.

It's a little mechanically odd, especially when you get into the loot and all the systems around it. I never kept an individual piece equipped for more than a mission or two because I got so much stuff so fast that I was always finding gear that was straight-up better all the time. So it meant dismantling stuff for materials only matters as a way to de-clutter the inventory screens and the blacksmith was almost entirely useless. If I had gotten into the post-game mission grind then it's obvious that I would've engaged with these systems more but as someone that was just hear for the story it was all so wildly unnecessary. It's just this weird situation where I can see all these systems in place—for the loot, the Job Affinity, even some of the more advanced combat mechanics—but I really have little to no need to mess with them at all because I just played through the story on normal difficulty and then stopped when the credits rolled. I can still look at them and appreciate the work that went into designing it and I can get a pretty good idea of how it all fits together but it does leave this weird feeling where I spent hours and hours in this game and all of it largely ignoring big parts of it.

Speaking of the items, this game commits the cardinal sin of loot games where they change my appearance but I can't put something in a cosmetic slot. Let me where a cool hat regardless of what the stats are! I desperately need to look cool while I punch goblins but your game doesn't allow for that!! Fucked up thing to do in to us in 2022.

I will never think of fistbumps the same way ever again.

Astos is one of the boys of all time. I need to soak him in water and wring him dry like a dirty washcloth. I need to squeeze him like a stressball. I need to neatly fold him up and keep him in my pocket. He is a lovely little gremlin and I would die for him.

the video game is good and the haters are wrong

The extremely sick art style does a lot of work to carry this game. The whole aesthetic style is powerful and pretty unique. The lore and world also make the game worth checking out because I just haven't seen something quite like this in a game before. The gameplay does leave a bit to be desired though. It's solidly serviceable but truly nothing to write home about. By the end of the game a lot of the combat and platforming was more annoying than anything and I just wanted to be done so I rushed to the end a bit which is quite probably why I ended up getting what I assume is the 'bad' ending.

As far as narrative picross games go, this one is okay. The puzzles themselves never got particularly hard which, for a picross sicko like me, is a little disappointing but I understand they probably want normal people to be able to complete the game too. I just wish there was one of these that really challenged me there.

The writing is trying to be charming but it really didn't do anything for me. I didn't think it was bad or annoying or anything, it just didn't hook me. Inoffensive but I had hoped for better.

Sometimes the actual critical path of where you need to go to keep doing puzzles is very unclear and so I ended up doing a lot of wandering around and not knowing what I needed to interact with to make the story continue.

Not the best narrative picross I've played but it's such a small genre that it's hard for me to be too hard on this game.

Adorable art, lovely music, charming writing, and overall a very comfy lil picross vn about witches. Only takes about an hour to play, strong recommendation from me!!

An actual criticism about the game: there's a point where it starts to talk about privilege and how it changes what peoples lives are but then shies away from actually saying anything in favor of being Cute™ and Wholesome™ which is a bit disappointing. Like, I dunno, maybe I shouldn't expect a small vn like this to have Big Things to say about life like that but also maybe don't invoke it if you're going to immediately step back from it, y'know.