The Far Cry Elden Ring-ification of Breath of the Wild with a smattering of end-of-chapter Fortnite and New Funky Mode.

While BotW was content to let players roam free in a sprawling world, Tears of the Kingdom reins in this freedom considerably and hides the guardrails from the player with horse blinders. Link is still welcome to run around Hyrule at will, but the primary storyline holds the keys which allow actual exploratory liberation. My first dozen hours completely ignored Lookout Landing, leaving me without critical tools like the paraglider and towers. That was the most challenging TotK ever got, and the most it (unintentionally) forced me to think outside the box. I dragged gliders to the tops of hills labouriously, I used a horse and cart, I made elaborate vehicles simply to get around. I scrounged for rockets, fans, batteries, and air balloons to ascend to sky islands, making it to a few of the lower ones with great accomplishment. I committed to putting off the towers as long as I could, not realising they were an outright necessity. Seeing how this additional layer of the map functioned demystified it severely, rendering a challenge into a stepping stone for parcels of content.

The depths, like the skies above, are filled with potential. Many of its spaces are similarly wide open to encourage blind exploration with vehicles. Only there is nearly no purpose to any of it. Lightroots are a checkbox which dismantle the most compelling part of the depths -- their darkness. The depths are a place you visit to grab zonaite or amiibo armour and leave. As the Fire Temple is within the depths, and it being the first I tackled, I falsely believed there would be more dungeons strewn about below, simply a part of the world rather than instanced away from it. Sadly, it is the exception.

The other temples are obfuscated and inaccessible without their related storylines, which is itself fine (the temples are impossible to progress through without their associated power anyways) but this leaves the world feeling more boxed in, a selection of rooms in an overly-long hallway. A spare few rooms complement each other, most of them do not. The walls of the rooms must be thick. Whether it is shrines, side quests, or temples, the developers yet again seemingly have no way of knowing what abilities the player might have, what puzzles they have encountered, what skills they remember. All that they know is that in the Fire Temple, you have a Goron. In the Water Temple, you have Zora armour. The positive is, of course, that these things can thus be tackled in any order without a fear of missing out on anything. The downside is that there is never anything more to a shrine, a temple, or anything than what the player encounters the first go around. There is no impetus to return to a location when you have a better tool, or a wider knowledge of how the game's mechanics work. You show up, experience the room, and leave. With 300 map pins at your disposal, and similar issues arising in BotW, there's a sense that the developers chickened out near the end, too afraid to let the player (gasp) backtrack or (gasp) miss out.

Ironically enough, the lack of FOMO is what I miss most. When I was towerlessly exploring with a hodgepodge of trash scavenged from around the world, I felt free. I felt clever! When I discovered the intended mode of play, however, I felt I was putting a square peg in a square hole. There's a crystal that needs to be moved to a far away island? Before, I might have made a horror of Octoballoons and Korok Fronds with Fans and Springs to get it where it needed to go. When the Fruit of Knowledge was consumed, I saw the parts for the prebuilt Fanplane were right next to the Crystal. There's a breakable wall in a dungeon? Bomb Flowers or a hammer are right there. It is incredibly safe. It is a pair of horse blinders that you can decorate as you please. Go ahead and make your mech, you are still on the straight and narrow path.

TotK tries to bring back the linearity of Zeldas past within the BotW framework, but it ignores that the linearity was speckled with a weave of areas which expanded alongside your arsenal, rather than shrinking. Everything here is incongruous, a smörgåsbord of cool set pieces that simply don't go together. There is too much content (Elden Ring) that is too self-contained (end of chapter Fortnite) and too afraid that you will not experience it (New Funky Mode).

Did I have fun? Yes. But I had to make it myself.

Took so long to put this out that the next update is already live, but I was writing this because I really gotta hand it to Mihoyo. Reading back my review for the game upon release I was obviously a hair away from shit talking this thing if I so much as sniffed that it was getting worse. The good news is that - generally speaking - that hasn't happened.

Don't get me wrong, they haven't all been base hits, but they've steadily improved on all the things I liked best about this game upon release. The characters are more interesting than they've ever been, and while I'll still object to the visual design of some of these characters (Jade? come on now), they've continually dropped characters with mechanics that make them genuinely fun to play despite sticking to the two-skills-per-character rule. I have more fun playing my tank than I've had playing most characters in other turn-based games.

I think I feel some obligation to be a little more moderate in my praise because I know plenty of people who will tell you that this is competing with the best games of the year, or that it's "the most generous gacha game", and while I don't think it's quite there yet for me, I can at least understand where a lot of the praise is coming from, because Hoyoverse aren't being lazy with this one. I've been surprised by the amount of times they've dropped a ridiculously high effort cutscene for a quest with virtually no impact on the main story, by the amount of minigames they've added, by the ways they use new enemy mechanics to switch things up, with the fact that the companion quests can tell stories that I found genuinely compelling. There's no "for a gacha game" here, my shock is solely because I recently gave Genshin Impact another spin and I just can't believe this is the same company. A lot of love has gone into this thing and as time goes on I'm only having more fun mixing and matching characters and farming up to improve new ones. The important note here is that I'm the person who will deliberately avoid levelling good characters to be different, so there's a lot of room for people to complain about a stale meta or what-have-you that I'm simply not capable of touching on.

I still think that there's too much to nitpick for this game to become one of the undeniable greats that converts the haters - the fact that there's a gacha here will always work against it, to point out the biggest issue - but I think there are hooks everywhere if you have any interest in finding them. I was unemployed for the past four months and still managed to snag multiple shiny new characters (with no resources saved up) so you shouldn't feel like you're being locked out of something special by keeping the wallet closed.

https://i.imgur.com/yTJ0wkT.png

Losing all my gamer cred by going to bat for a gacha game

I have a tendency to describe things as “confident” - it gets scrubbed out of a lot of early drafts of my reviews, one of those words I’ve gotta stop falling back on lest it lose meaning. It’s a shortcut to describing a more nebulous sensation - a potpourri of smaller factors coming together, instilling the notion that the creators genuinely enjoy what they’re making and don’t need any extra tricks to win over the audience.

Honkai: Star Rail is surprisingly confident.

I’m not sure if it’s the result of them being 4-5 games deep into the series (depends on who’s counting) or the result of their last game being bigger than God. Maybe it’s that the game is already such an obvious improvement over Genshin in so many ways.

Most obvious are the shifts in setting and plot structure - HSR trades a single, sprawling world for a planet-hopping space opera, and it’s clear that this works better with miHoYo’s style of storytelling. Genshin's scattershot subplots had a tendency to overplay their hand and lacked any real stakes, while HSR’s compartmentalization - assigning each planet its own story - allows for a more focused approach that lends plot beats much greater credibility. It’s almost certainly made easier due to the smaller “zones” comprising each planet in HSR: There’s no need to accommodate a Genshin player’s decision to fuck off and pick mushrooms on a different continent mid-climax if there’s nothing for them to forage. The broader plot is mostly miHoYo playing the hits authored by better works of fiction - sometimes, though, the tune is catchy enough that you don't mind the cover band.

miHoYo is still hooked on giving 1 page of character development for each 10 they devote to overexplaining very simple plot events, but that character development does a better job of placing each person within the world they inhabit. They still write the most annoying children on the planet, but there are good stories for the adults of HSR. Among the dry, white bread story beats Bronya gets during the main plot of the first world, it’s easy to skim right over characters like Natasha, the first character I’ve encountered from miHoYo that feels like they actually believe something. It’s not groundbreaking stuff, but it did catch me off guard - her story is one of planting trees whose shade you may never enjoy, and the whole thing is stained with regret in a way that made Midgar Jarilo-VI feel larger than the player's screen. It’s reflective of a shift towards “maybe character exploration shouldn’t be locked behind so much time and effort” that ends up making the cast of HSR a lot more interesting to listen to than Genshin’s 100-strong cadre of schmoozers. It’s not a perfect success - miHoYo still wants you to roll for these characters, so there’s a limit to their flexibility - but it’s a step in the right direction.

On top of trading out the open world, HSR also gives up Genshin’s real-time action for turn-based combat. You’re still matching elements to an enemy’s weakness, otherwise there’s very little in common with HSR’s older cousin. Playing this, it’s obvious that miHoYo has a much better understanding of how turn-based combat should work than they do for real-time action. Character abilities in Genshin long suffered from a lack of mechanical complexity, with “skill expression” for most team lineups taking the form of rotating through the characters and mashing their skills as quickly as possible before rotating back to your carry. The turn-based nature of HSR asks you to think much more carefully about how your party interacts with one another, because your enemies will get a turn and you will have to respond to them. The restriction of weapons (“Light Cones”) to certain archetypes limits creativity, but I’m not too bothered by that when there are so many other ways to change up your party. The character kits are fine, too, and efficient use requires some thought - there’s nothing on the level of playing baseball inside a fighting game but I’ve been having a lot of fun accompanying my tiny mahjong goblin on the road to nuking entire teams.

I’ve already spent too long talking about a gacha game, so let me sneak one last thing in before I wrap this up - “Trailblaze Power”. Genshin players know it as resin, it’s the currency that regenerates with time and is used to claim valuable rewards. The good news is that you’re no longer going to be sitting on your hands for three real-life days waiting for the right dungeon to come around just so you can farm the one item you need. Just roll up to whatever portal gives you the resource you need, and do it when you have the time, no need to wait for a specific weekday. The bad news is that you’ll probably feel short on currency far more frequently than you ever did before, since you’re never going to have that forced downtime. I think it’s a favorable change. I’m not going to schedule my life around Genshin dungeons.

I want to be clear and say that HSR is not the product of a completely new formula - many concepts, ideas, and even characters have been tried and tested in miHoYo’s previous games. If you developed a distaste for Genshin on a fundamental level, this is not going to win you over. But as someone whose complaints with Genshin were largely problems with the structure and ankle-deep plot, I’m pleased to say that I came into this game wearing my hater goggles and I’m drafting this review after hitting player level 31 in a single weekend, having found very little in the way of disappointments. I think it’s fine to find the style, gameplay, plot, or monetization off-putting, because it’s not top of the class in any of these fields. It’s an improvement in almost every way over its predecessor, though, and I won't lie - I can't help but smile at a pleasant surprise from the developer I was most skeptical of. Maybe I’ll come back later and find something to be sour about (especially as more content is added), but I want it to be known that I’m cautiously optimistic for now - high 6 to a low 7/10.

Edit: Did a lite review one year later, available here. In short, aside from some boring story beats in the Luofu and the occasional bad puzzle, it's improved in every way that matters

An immensely, immensely cynical attempt at putting Overwatch back into the hype cycle by calling an arbitrary patch Overwatch 2 has at last concluded with the only remaining selling point — the long-promised PvE content — being cancelled. There is now significantly less of a reason for this to even be called a sequel, and it was already a tenuous prospect from the outset.

Overwatch was a game that started out middling and got progressively worse over the years. Overwatch 2 picks up from the lowest point Overwatch ever fell to and drives itself deeper into the ground than previously thought possible. The enforcement of stale metas, content droughts, heavier microtransactions, season passes, a community as welcoming as an acid bath, the fact that this is developed and produced by one of the most blatantly evil companies in video games; all of these have been exceedingly well-documented and complained about for years up until this point. Even then, staring down every single flaw that this game had, there were still players holding out for the hope that they'd get to have a single player/co-op campaign as the advertisements had promised.

It won't be coming.

Years of allegedly active development have resulted in nothing but thin air. Contrary to Blizzard's most famous bit of vaporware, Starcraft Ghost, you could actually buy this one before it got a number stapled to the end of the title. Anyone who picked this up in the hopes of getting what was promised later down the line will not be getting the product that they were told they'd get. You could say that these people were foolish for buying the mere promise of something to come later, and I would agree. I can also, however, clown the fuck out of Blizzard for fumbling what by all rights should have been one of the biggest IPs in gaming today and creating something whose legacy is going to be little more than the endless Blender porn animations of its cast.

Buckle down for the retrospectives and video essays that are going to start flooding in about this to try to explain why Overwatch failed as hard as it did. I imagine you're going to start seeing a lot of takes from a lot of people all speculating on what the exact, singular reason was, be it Blizzard's floundering reputation, or the death of the pro scene, or the moneymen deciding that more and more corners needed to be cut.

Allow me to share my theory, though: every story of "why you stopped playing Overwatch" is always the same, and it's never because someone decided they'd had enough fun and hung it up while their opinion was still high. This game is seemingly designed to make people flame out. Someone on your team fucks up hard enough, or you fuck up hard enough, or an enemy player pulls out some unbalanced trick that'll be patched in a week, and you rage and you quit and you never pick it up again. Overwatch is a game with no unity between players, with no community, because Blizzard has devolved into a company which tailors all of its experiences towards glory-seeking leaderboard watchers and nobody else. It's never enough to succeed, to win; you have to dominate, to be the absolute best, to be the first in the world to ever do it.

Look at the way that World of Warcraft has warped itself over the years from being an open and free journey into rote and optimized mechanical rotations, with bosses and dungeons literally designed under the assumption that you'll be playing with plug-ins that tell you exactly where to stand and what button to press at a given time. Overwatch followed a similar trajectory as its life went on, though perhaps made even worse by the fact that they were made compulsory; can't have too many tanks on one team, that's not allowed. Can't have more than one person playing a specific character, that's busted. Can't have a team without tanks or healers, so you're forced to play one if nobody else will. It's one of the worst and most obvious implementations of a forced meta I've ever seen in a game, and it's all in service of a competitive scene that no longer exists for pub players who think they're going to be scouted anyway.

If you're playing with friends and want to try an off-meta strategy, you are literally forbidden by the game's mechanics from drifting too far away from an intended vision of what your team comp ought to look like. God help you if you're in a public lobby and you decide to pick anything other than the highest winrate, highest complexity, most glorious and flashy characters that are available to you. You will be flamed into either submission or a shouting match if anyone on your team becomes suspicious that you aren't playing optimally. Everything has to be optimal. It's all about optimization. And why shouldn't that be what the players expect? It's the idea that Blizzard forces on them. Of course they're going to be toxic shitheads who cry and shout and scream when they perceive the game not being played perfectly.

They learned it by watching you.

My original review was removed. I guess my message wasn't clear enough when I told Activision/Blizzard to eat my ass.

This is a bad game made by a bad company. It is basically an update of the original (as it completely replaces it) and serves no purpose but trying to hide the rampant system of abuse taking place within the company by throwing the media coverage back onto this. I can't even call them allegations because they've been proven. . If you enjoy the game that's fine, but it is simply just a watered down form of the original that doesn't update, improve or innovate it in any meaningful way and is simply a distraction for a larger issue.

Eat my ass, Activision/Blizzard