Like watching a car crash.

Open Roads had a very rocky development, and it's not hard to tell. Announced about four years ago at The Game Awards and three years after the studio's then-latest release of Tacoma, Open Roads ran into some trouble when it came out that Steve Gaynor was a microtyrant who was forcing employees out of his company. In a true success story for the industry, he'd only been abusing his power over his subordinates to humiliate and demean them (specifically focusing his ire on the women at his company), and not to sexually harass them — please, hold your applause for the man until the end. The news broke that this dipshit and his stupid haircut had been responsible for turning over nearly the entire workforce of Fullbright over the course of just two years, and Gaynor stepped down ahead of the story coming out. He said he was very very sorry for his behavior and that he wouldn't do it again, but also that he wasn’t sorry enough to surrender the company name. Open Roads is now credited to "The Open Roads Team", comprised of the couple of employees who were left in the wake of his reign and whoever else they could bring on to save the project from a shallow grave. The game released just a few days ago to a remarkably small audience and a middling reception, and it isn't difficult to see why.

Open Roads fucking sucks.

It's a game that's very obsessed with detail, yet is remarkably uninterested in its story. When the game let me open up a trash can and pick out every single piece of garbage individually to examine it in a 3D model viewer, I got the feeling that I wasn't going to enjoy this. The models themselves are all very intricate and detailed, each one of them complete with their own bespoke labels, and fine print, and they're all very lovingly put together, and I absolutely would not have noticed nor cared about any of this if a core component of the game wasn't picking up random objects and looking at them. There's a reason that movies don't feature characters picking up every loose object on the set and holding them up to camera, and that's because it's not particularly interesting to do that. I feel like I have to explain this from first principles. What do we gain by doing this? What do we gain from having the player pick up loose items and stare at them? What does that accomplish that just dressing the set with static objects wouldn't? It certainly makes the game last longer, because you need to pick up every piece of random bullshit in the hopes of finding the ones that advance you to the next section, but there's no appeal in doing that. It's busywork. So little worldbuilding actually happens by digging through these items; you'll be picking through erasers and pencils and plates, all such boring, domestic objects that don't have any character to them whatsoever. You can pick up some push pins and look at them. They're normal fucking push pins. You can pick up a fork and look at it. It's a normal fucking fork. You can pick up a comb and look at it. It's a normal fucking comb. What are we doing? Why? Is there something about allowing me to pick these objects up and look at them that does anything that leaving them in the scenery for me to look at wouldn't? Could we at least do something interesting with them? Express some personality through them? Give us a reason to investigate them? Anything, so long as it could give this a point.

Tonally, this is all over the place. Tess being kind of mood swing-y makes sense — she's fifteen, and nobody seems keen on telling her fucking anything on the grounds of it being "too complicated", despite one of the core conflicts of the game being completely resolved in a literal three minute talk at the end — but Opal falls into this pattern as well. Tess will go way, way too far in making an accusation or just trying to come up with something that would hurt her mom, and Opal will respond in kind, and then the pair of them will act like nothing ever happened. One sequence has them blow up on one another, refuse to say another word until the end of the car ride, and then resume quipping and bantering not even thirty seconds later. It takes more time for you to eat the fucking burger that Opal buys you at the motel than it does for the only two principle characters in this story to have a ground-shattering fight and then completely resolve it. The store description boasts that Tess and Opal’s relationship has “never been easy” when it so obviously is. If I had said so much as a fraction of the shit Tess says to my own mom, I would have demolished our relationship. Instead, it’s all glossed over, all just Buffyspeak for the pile. If wry quips were currency, Tess and Opal wouldn't have to sell the house.

The game can't ever decide whether it's time to floor it or slam the brakes, and instead has you constantly whipping back and forth between long segments of doing fucking nothing besides wandering around to rotate ashtrays and then blasting forward with story development that you barely even have time to register as happening before it's over. Your grandfather died, but he wasn't actually your grandfather, but he was a jewel thief, but he was your grandfather, but he might still be alive, but he tried to turn himself in, but who cares, but maybe your professional gambler father can enlighten you, but roll credits. Christ. We spend 90% of the runtime walking around and investigating literal fucking garbage and then cram way too much of this incredibly boring story into not enough time to tell it. This isn't even an Open Roads problem, but Open Roads is a symptom; so many games have fucking atrocious pacing. I've started celebrating anything that can get to credits without rushing or dragging. At least this has the decency to be over in an hour and a half, despite the fact that it does nothing with that time.

Would you believe me if I told you that this controlled badly? For a game this simple, just about every control scheme has something completely broken about it. If you're playing on a gamepad (the optimal way to play), menus are often incredibly sticky and require a few button presses before they actually register that you want to move your cursor up or down. Getting from New Game to Continue on the main menu took four down presses to move the selection box down once. Objects that you can interact with are what I can only describe as "sticky"; moving your reticle near them will drastically decrease your sensitivity and pull your view towards the item like a magnet, ensuring that you can easily pick up the item without having to fiddle with getting the reticle placement just right. This, in theory, is a great idea. In practice, the fact that so many fucking items in the game can be interacted with means that your view is constantly being dragged around, making it feel like you're fighting with the controls when you're trying to look up from a desk to the exit door. You can't move your camera freely unless you're staring off into empty space, because your reticle keeps getting caught on objects and making it incredibly difficult for you to look away from them. It should not be this frustrating simply trying to look around a room.

Doing this on a mouse is where the fun really begins, though. I don't know what happened with my copy of the game, because I can't imagine that this happened to anyone else and they didn't see fit to mention it; it's obviously a bug, but it's also really funny that it made to the final release. Mouselook, for some ungodly reason, is locked to eight directions. It also "snaps" when you move it around, jumping from one point to another rather than smoothly gliding between them. I thought it had something to do with the controller being plugged in, but it persisted through both unplugging the gamepad and restarting the PC. I can't really explain how bad this is through text, so I've graciously provided you with a video so that you won't have to experience it for yourself. Nobody should know these horrors, but I do. You should not be made to carry this burden.

I feel bad giving it this low of a score, because I usually prefer to reserve the half-stars for works that are actively harmful. The kind of thing that does damage. But there is absolutely nothing that I like here. I detest the writing, I detest playing it, I detest the way that it looks, I can't fucking stand it. This game radiates a horrid energy that enters me in waves and saps my will. The writers have almost never worked on anything else in their lives and one of the lead art directors made Dream Daddy. We're not dealing with heavy hitters of the industry, here. These are people who are uniquely underqualified coming in to try and salvage an extant work tainted by employee abuse because throwing out the name and starting over would be bad for brand recognition.

Despite the fact that this is intended as something of a follow-up to Gone Home, there's almost nobody left from that project who's still working on this one. This isn't a successor project so much as it is an imitation, all of the gaps smoothed over with drywall mud from Annapurna helping to pull in nearly three hundred fucking contractors to get this out. What compelled them to go ahead with releasing this? Open Roads is the ship of Theseus. Clearly everybody who knew what they were doing when they were still under the Fullbright banner is gone with no intention of coming back, and the ones with a clue who survived Gaynor's reign don't have enough of a voice under the fucking mountain of outside artists and developers being brought in to push this out the door.

Open Roads is a game that clearly has talented people on board, but is helmed by a team lead (or leads, plural) who have no clue what do to with them. There’s so much wasted potential here. It sucks to see all of these people wriggle out from under the thumb of an abusive manager just to immediately be put beneath the thumb of a new manager who’s incompetent, instead. I can’t write here what I hope happens to Steve Gaynor. I do hope that whoever’s left from Fullbright can leave Annapurna behind and make something better than their oldest work, because I know they’re capable of it. They just need a leader who isn’t a fucking moron.

Hey, mom!

They’ve got the sauce!

It’s not enough of the sauce, and it takes a little while before they actually start doling the sauce out, but by God, they’ve got the sauce! Undertale Yellow actually gets it, and what a triumph that is. It manages to avoid a lot of the pitfalls which plague fangames and have resulted in them getting such a broadly negative perception as being lesser forms of media, and it does so with an impressive amount of finesse. There are more than a couple of misfires here, and it can’t manage to be something that meets nor succeeds the original Undertale, but they’ve got the sauce. It’s a very big swing to take, and just about as big a hit.

What I appreciate most about Undertale Yellow is the sheer amount of restraint that the developers showcase. You only see Toriel for a grand total of about two minutes before she’s out of the game for good, and Mettaton, Alphys, and Asgore are mentioned a few times; apart from that, the only returning character who actually sticks around for most of the runtime is Flowey, and he acts differently enough that a large part of the narrative is trying to figure out what angle he’s playing at. There’s no Sans. He doesn’t even get namedropped! What? Can you imagine releasing an Undertale fangame and not bringing up Sans? When I got to the Snowdin Town bridge and released that Sans wasn’t going to show his face, I got pumped. It’s brave. A group far less confident in themselves would have just made this a second lap through the extant Underground, going on a little adventure to essentially experience Undertale all over again in a world where you could just play Undertale again if that was what you wanted to do.

The first impressions when the game starts branching off of Undertale aren’t especially strong. The first original NPC that you meet in the Ruins — Darv or Darm or Darl, whatever his name is — very much looks like someone’s Adventure Time self-insert that they drew to be Marceline the Vampire Queen’s boyfriend. Picture me retching as I type this. His character isn’t particularly good, mostly just muttering about some betrayal from long past and talking about how he wants to be left alone, and the game seems to agree with me in this respect; he drops off the face of the earth for the remainder of the runtime, only showing up again at the very end to make sure that the player hasn’t forgotten about him. The other new characters are significantly better: Martlet is a strong and obvious standout among the rest of the cast, North Star and his posse aren’t as consistent in their designs nor personalities but are still good, and Ceroba seems a lot like someone’s fursona but not in an especially bad way. I ended up liking more of the principle cast than I didn’t, so they’re definitely doing something right on the design and writing front.

The average enemy encounter is fine; there’s nothing especially interesting about most of them, though some do offer a couple of interesting gimmicks. Making the “floor slippery” so that the soul glides around or the music enemies blasting you with waveforms that you need to dodge are cute. Most of the boss fights don’t offer anything especially interesting, though. While Pacifist Ceroba does manage to get a few interesting gimmicks going in the form of giving the player the Big Shot, the overwhelming majority of the boss fights are just clicking Spare over and over and over again; your ACT commands often do nothing besides give the same line of flavor text every time you select them, which is a fairly boring way to handle these big encounters. I found the Guardener to be the best fight simply because it required you to hack away at vines blocking your options which then led into an ACT chain, giving you some freedom in the form of selecting which of your options you want to be available to you first. El Bailador is fine, turning the game into a rhythm section for a few minutes, but it doesn’t do much for me. So many of these fights are just about dodging bullets and slamming Mercy over and over again, and that’s never really been the draw of Undertale.

Similarly ranging from alright to forgettable are the music tracks. There’s nothing truly offensive here, and there are a couple that I like, but it's important for us to remember that Toby Fox was a composer long before he was a game designer. I can still hum the melodies to just about every track from Undertale, but I don’t think I could do the same for a single song from Undertale Yellow — at least, not from the ones that don’t lift one of Toby’s leitmotifs. While I do admire the developers’ willingness to get out from under the Undertale narrative trappings of returning characters walking in like sitcom guest stars for the audience to whoop and applaud to, I can’t extend the same praise to their composing. Ceroba’s fight plays a remix of Hopes and Dreams that the game absolutely hasn’t earned, and it took me right out of a battle that I was digging up until then. There are quite a few instances of obvious musical recycling in places where they don’t belong, and the songs that are wholly original don’t interest me much. They're far from anything terrible, but they feel a bit lazy in a game where there isn’t much else that does.

Undertale Yellow is ultimately a good fangame, and that is perhaps deserving of more celebration than anything else. It is very clearly made by a team of passionate and creative people, and I don’t think that their time spent on this would have been better spent on an original IP, instead. With that said, I would prefer for the next thing that this team releases to be something entirely of their own design; with all of the eyes that they’ve got on them now, I’m sure they’ve cultivated an audience that would be glad to see more.

And the sprites look too good. It’s all wrong. Part of the appeal of Undertale is that it looks like hot shit.

This is what they were crunching for?

The Callisto Protocol is a man drowning. He’s been swept out by the tides deeper than he can swim, and now I feel compelled to go and be the one who drags him back to shore. I’m not looking forward to it as I swim out there. This always ends badly. I know he’ll kick, and flail, and panic, and drag me under with him. But something compels me. I dip beneath the waves, gliding on the current. Every kick is met only with more water, never ground; it’s been a while since either of us has been able to touch bottom. I get to the man. All of the dread that I felt swimming up to him — the growing pit in my stomach warning me that he’d kill us both — fades as I get a hold of him. He’s calm. He doesn’t fight. He wants to be rescued, and he's coherent enough to tell me as much. So much worry on my end, and for nothing. We’re both going home, and my doubts were unfounded. The two of us make our way back to the shallows, and my heart swells. Nobody’s gonna believe this. I get to be the one who brings back the guy that everyone thought couldn't be saved.

We make it from the depths to a point where the ocean reaches our shins, at which point the man panics and submerges my head in about two feet of water until we both die. I knew I should have let the fucker drown.

What we’re looking at here is a bad start that leads into a remarkably strong middle, hitting an impressive stride just in time to trip and break both legs three hours before the finish line. But that middle section is good. It’s really good. It’s so good that I was ready to come in here and lord a massively inflated score over the heads of all of the doubters who didn’t get it. Reality hits hard when it hits, though, and there’s no denying that The Callisto Protocol just runs out at the end. It runs out of ideas, it runs out of money, it runs out of employee morale — it runs dry and it runs empty until the engine shears itself in half.

This is pretty, but a game "being pretty" hasn't impressed me for fifteen years now. Everything since the early-mid 2010s has given me this shrug-your-shoulders feeling of "yeah, I guess it looks good" and spurred little in me beyond that. I know it's a tired truism to trot out — "art direction is more important that graphical fidelity!", as if we don't all know that already — but even games from that era that were trying to look as realistic as the latest titles don't read as being all that different to me today. Honestly, I think the face-scan mocap shit that's everywhere in AAA games these days looks kind of bad; they're all sitting deep in that uncanny valley where everyone's head looks like it's got a video of the actor's face wrapped around it. Even with (perhaps due to an overreliance upon) all of the tech in place, some of these animations look incredibly bad. Here's a shot of Josh Duhamel's character screaming in agony as he gets an implant stuffed in his neck that hurts so bad that he has a heart attack and dies. It's silly. This is not an expression of pain. He's making a YouTube thumbnail face. Fuck, the source of that image is a YouTube thumbnail.

So, yes, this is all very technically impressive, but in practice it's all just bloom and haze and fog and I can't fucking see any of it because someone turned all the lights off. None of this sparks joy. Everything is gray and bland and devoid of life. There's nothing that even remotely scratches at iconic Dead Space setpieces like the Church of Unitology or the cryopod rooms, because the art direction on display is kind of shit. It's a just-so approximation of enough of Dead Space's elements to provoke familiarity, but it's off in a way that betrays the fact that Visceral was a team made up of a lot more people than just Glen Schofield. He isn't Visceral, and this isn't a spiritual successor to Dead Space. It's a spiritual regression.

But as desperately as this wants to stay latched to the teat of Dead Space, it isn't open to those who want the game to be Dead Space. This is a melee-focused system based around dodging, combos, and environment kills; Dead Space is a shooter based around positioning, dismemberment, and, uh, also environment kills. You've gotta meet The Callisto Protocol on its own terms; playing it like Dead Space is a losing position. You should be doing this for everything you consume, by the way. Don't try and cram a work you don't like into a box that doesn't fit it. Play the game that they designed, not the one you wish they'd designed. It took a little readjusting over the course of the entire opening hour of The Callisto Protocol, but I eventually came to understand what it was going for, how it wanted to be played. And I liked it.

Actually, I really liked it.

Combat is simple, but raw enough to be really satisfying once you get the loops figured out. Each fight will take place either as a gauntlet of enemies that pour out one after the other, or as group battles where you'll be caught between three or four monsters at a time. It's a game of dodging, waiting out the combos, finding an opportunity to strike, and then going all-out until you're forced to stop. Weave around a three-hit combo, dole out one of your own that takes the arm off of a monster, get whipped around by another, block his strike, take his legs out, get shoved, pop one with the new space you've been given; it's a wonderful little system that isn't hard to come to grips with, but is punishing enough to mean that eating a bad hit or two will send you back to your last checkpoint. The added complexity comes in the form of your GRP (pronounced as "grip") and your guns, though you'll be rocking with the starting magnum for the vast majority of the game. The GRP can pick up enemies and hazards to toss them around, and your guns are your combo enders. You can also open with gunfire if you've got some distance on the monsters; they've gotta come to you, so you can filter a group down a chokepoint and take one of them out before you're forced to rely on the melee to take you the rest of the way. Combo-ender gunshots can sever limbs, decapitate enemies, force staggers to open up rushdown opportunities, and generally just act as a major force-multiplier to make sure a crowd of monsters is never unmanageable. If you're thinking that this sounds like it's not really a system primed for a horror game, you'd be right. The Callisto Protocol sucks dick at being a horror game. As an action game, though — much like big brother Dead Space — I thought it was great.

Eventually, you'll progress to a point in the narrative where hitting the monsters for long enough will make worms rupture from their body. These worms need to be shot within a fairly tight window of time, or else they'll cause the monster in question to undergo a transformation that makes them bigger, stronger, and faster. You really do not want to let the worms make the monsters evolve. In theory, this is an interesting escalation — you can't afford to drag fights out the way that you could earlier — but as we've seen throughout this write-up, theory is distinct from practice.

In practice, the worms will always erupt from the same place; the generic guys who smack you around will have them erupt from their guts, and the spitters will have them erupt from their heads. These are the primary enemy types that you'll be fighting against for the overwhelming majority of your playthrough, so combat encounters go from frenetic punch-ups where you're desperately trying to make the right call to something that's solved by a flowchart: three or four hits always followed by a gut shot or a head shot, rinse and repeat. There's basically no reason to ever open up by firing your gun now that enemies can heal by evolving, which leaves you the options to fling the enemies with your gravity glove and hurt them a little bit, or to swing at them with the baton. The baton expends no resources, is fast, is always guaranteed to connect, is a safe option, and will open up enemies for the instakill gut/head shot in no time at all. So many tools, and no reason to use any of them besides the fucking stick. Everything was useful only two hours prior, so being boxed in to what's obviously an optimal strategy to repeat on every single monster serves only to squander a system that was working just fine before.

Where things really fall apart, however, is in the third act. Jacob, our protagonist, falls down a gutter or some shit into an underground area where all of the enemies are blind. They've got super-hearing, but they can't see. Firing a shot or swinging at one with your baton may as well spare you the ceremony of kicking off a fight and just reload your checkpoint the second you press the button; you'll get swarmed by too many monsters to deal with, and they'll chew through every resource you have before they kill you. What you have to do instead is pull a page from Joel Thelastofus's book and crouch-walk around while shivving these clicker expys to death. Unlike in The Last of Us, however, the shiv that you get has infinite uses, meaning that you can very easily just crouch-walk around and kill everything without alerting a single enemy. This is optimal. They don't hear you shivving them, even as Jacob grunts and growls and the monsters gurgle and shriek, and there's no reason to sneak past them; they still drop ammo and money and health packs just the same as everything else. If you could just blast your way through this section, it'd be over in thirty minutes; instead, you have to play the most boring stealth section ever devised by human hands and it takes upwards of two and a half hours.

You get back to the regular action combat in time for the game to end, but the damage is more than done at that point. You fight the exact same boss four times in the span of an hour, and his pattern is literally just doing right-hand swings. You hold left on the control stick and auto-dodge everything while shooting him once per dodge. It's so boring. I knew while I was going through the ridiculously long stealth segment that they were padding for time, but repeating the same boss fight four fucking times really gives it away to anyone who wasn't paying attention that they were running on empty. I went from itching for more in the middle act to wishing it would just hurry up and end by the start of the finale.

Jacob gets to the escape pods, meets a zombie warden who's managed to keep his personality (generic asshole), and then the zombie warden does the Resident Evil boss thing where he talks about having superior genetics and then turns into a big meat monster with glowing orange eyeball weakpoints. I'll take the opportunity now to point out that this game was written by two people. The lead writer has never worked on anything else in his entire life. There were five times as many employees dedicated to the face scanning as there were on the writing team. Remember that the facescanning looks like shit, so adjust your expectations for the quality of the writing accordingly. Whatever. Nobody was ever playing this for the story. It's still a weird choice for a game like this, though; with everything being told to you through audio logs and exposition from characters who have a clue what's going on, you'd think you'd want more hands on deck. Then again, the only thing anyone ever seems to say is "Jacob, go to [the place], I'll explain later", so you probably don't need to put too much effort into putting that together.

But my mind keeps wandering back to the thought that the people at Striking Distance were working twelve hour days, seven days a week — and for what? What about The Callisto Protocol demanded such brutal hours for such a long stretch of development? I can't find anything in the time leading up to the game's release that would indicate what was sucking up so many resources; all I've come up with are some vague gestures towards "new lighting techniques" and "haptic feedback", all incidentals that barely add much of anything to a work that's remarkably standard. This cost $160 million to Dead Space 2's 60 million and it looks and plays worse.

There’s an excellent game within The Callisto Protocol, and one that I imagine would have been able to flourish if made under the banner of someone who actually had a clue. Literally all it takes to turn this from mediocre to great is a better manager. Talented people were overworked and underpaid to make something that broadly isn’t good, but shines in parts; had they been treated properly and overseen by a real leader instead of an MBA meathead who stepped down the second shit got hot, they would have made something that could actually eat Dead Space’s lunch. Instead, we got this, and it’s begging for Dead Space’s scraps.

Glen Schofield can go fuck himself.

Affectionately referred to as the "Sonic's ass game" during development, Crash Bandicoot was not only inspired by the blue blur, but followed a similar trajectory. The first three Crash Bandicoot titles are great but were followed by a slew of sequels that progressively lost sight of what made them work, sullying Crash's legacy until a follow-up faithful to the mechanics and style of the original games restored a healthy amount of good will. Unfortunately, we won't get a Crash Bandicoot 5 from Toys for Bob, just like we probably won't get a Sonic Mania 2 with Headcannon involved, assuming either of those games are ever on the table to begin with.

Once again, I'm straying away from the point of the review before it even begins, but all this preamble is to say that I both love the original Crash games and lament what the series became. I also want to keep the comparison to Sonic going just a bit more, as I think I feel very similarly about Crash Bandicoot as I do about the first Sonic the Hedgehog.

They're competent platformers, both have some really excellent and precise platforming challenges sprinkled throughout, and they also make many, many mistakes. In Sonic's case, its most egregious sin was requiring the player to slow down too much to engage in platforming which resulted in the flow of the game being constantly interrupted, in addition to having traps and enemies placed in ways that further disrupted the rhythm. Crash Bandicoot's greatest sins were borne from the fine folks at Naughty Dog confusing challenging design with abject cruelty. Road to Nowhere is more easily completed by jumping onto the very narrow ropes on the side of the bridge and just running to the end than it is to engage with any part of its intended design, and that is nothing if not a microcosmic look at how Crash is tuned. This is only amplified if you commit to getting the true ending. Collecting the gems is in no way fun. It's an exercise in patience, and your reward for seeing it through is barely any different than if you just beat the game like normal. Again, just like Sonic (I'm being hyperbolic, it's much worse.)

I'm perhaps more willing to look past Crash's faults because I'm so sucked in by its vibes, which I would describe as exuding a certain sense of incompleteness. I'm not implying that the game is unfinished, of course, but compare it directly to its two Playstation sequels and you'll probably get a better idea of what I mean. Those games feel robust, designed with a clear understanding of what Crash is mechanically, narratively, and aesthetically. Crash Bandicoot contrasts that self-assured design with a distinct feeling of uncertainty, which is felt in how the game just kinda drops you in without much context, how far between story beats are, the way certain level gimmicks and ideas just don't really work out, and level design that at times feels like it was made by someone still learning their craft. In a lot of ways it feels to me like playing a demo. Like, here's your vertical slice, one small part of a greater whole that you lack context for. There's a mood to that and playing Crash Bandicoot to me has always felt like playing a really long demo.

This is my version of people talking about Wet Dry World's "negative emotional aura." It's just the crazed ramblings of someone who has thought too damn much about a video game from 1996.

I would like to end this review now.

I honestly had a much more enjoyable experience with Left Behind than the base game, mainly because due to the shorter timeframe, I feel as if Naughty Dog focused less on the long term game constraints of ammo management and constant push/pull between stealth and open action, and focused more on just inserting you in the moment. The narrative of Ellie's backstory alongside Riley is run parallel with Ellie's desperate search for supplies in the mall, and both manage to capture and display Ellie's emotions quite well. While there still are combat sequences, I especially like that there were plenty of supplies to create traps for enemies (and because you're playing as Ellie, no need to worry about running out of shivs for clickers), and that there were in fact a couple of instances where I could just bait the zombies into fighting the hunters for me, something that I wish was more present in the base game. Maybe the worst part is that the stealth can still be a little inconsistent at times, and there were a couple of instances where clickers still caught me just standing still with minimal noise or a hunter/runner somehow spotted me across the map, especially in the final confrontation. In particular, the final confrontation almost reminded me of how much of a slog combat in the main game felt (considering how concise and honestly well thought out the previous action sequences felt to me), but fortunately there are plenty of supplies as well as a deus ex machina to alleviate this sequence. Overall, Naughty Dog realizes that there is less time to make an impact in their DLC, and they deliver on their premise quite well due to these constraints.

i am NOT gonna sugarcoat it... we needed this exact game sooner or later in the hopes of filtering the garbage in the gamer(tm) community. Making compelling characters has been a forte of this series and this extends to the game's philosophy of giving a lot of weight to every cutscene death instead of falling into the trap of apocalyptic media treating side characters as livestock. Although this game does that in a very interesting way of grounding the main cast. 🏌️

The gameplay is raw and "making the best of your situation" type beat. The game somehow manages to squeeze an extra hour of content in order to realistically portray what ptsd does to a mf. That section's vibes were unmatched tbh. In short... dies from peak fiction

He really went and invented save slots, very cool Miyamoto. He is the true ruler of Hyrule cuz he rules. Aside from that cool fact, Legend of Zelda still holds water. It took me 10 minutes to realize I was playing a weird mod as Zelda herself, perhaps I am not the observant gamer Miyamoto wanted in order to find all the...secrets...! As well as the... other secrets...?! I just can't look over the fact I saved Zelda with Zelda. Onto the finer details, this game is very peculiar because there are a rupeellions number of items to collect in order to progress. Make sure to inspect the labyrinths thoroughly. Maybe one of the first games to raise the question "how does this goofball carry all this?" this is probably why all these punks are fixing to rob me after I get any Triforce shard and leave the house. It's on sight and I'm in the crosshair.

Among all Link carries are the classics. The boomerang flabbergasts its victims, the candle is a safety hazard. The gift-wrapped C4 I rigged to explode in the middle of my speech on "do twinks deserve more or less?". You actually need a PhD in "Where's Wally?" to guess which spots to explode and arson to collect the goodies. The game can be completed without a guide... unless you consider your heart one. Dawww. Fuck it we ball, I don't need a job, I don't need marriage, I certainly don't need a guide. The game certainly gets more bearable with the Master Sword, though. LeBron, scream if you love the Master Sword! Shoot, LeBron reportedly forgot to retrieve the raft before leaving the room. No, Google, I'm not feeling lucky. I'm getting by on skill alone, although I constantly forget to pick up my bow. In the pp sized sword we trust.

Speaking of this sword, it can shoot a beam at max health. I am more often not at full health, so it's just a fun fact at this point. When do the fun facts officially become... just facts? Look at Ganon btw brooo he ate cement when he was 6 😭 fuck it we ball again let me close the distance gap between us, we have a button to mash boys and girls. Ain't no shot I'm losing after going through so many bosses... by the by, wouldn't you know it, the enemy variety is quite high. I seem to always find the perfect time to attack at the wrong time, I bet the Darknut facing me as soon as I press the button to deal unavoidable damage to me doesn't know I just shouted at him to eat my Darknuts!! save me Aonuma, Aonuma!!, Aonuma....save me...

I think navigating the map is pretty fun, depending on the day. But 2 months ago, yesterday and today (yeah I played this game at a pretty conspicuous schedule.) it is fun. I wish the enemies didn't respawn, what does mortality mean in literature if not enjoying the time spent with those who may go? The fish stalker is enough. Although not easy to farm rupees with him I'm tellin you

I finally found him... the Iblis Trigger!

One might argue about Sonic 06 being the worst Sonic game out there, or even one of the worst games ever made, but as someone who just got into the series a while ago, I personally don't share that sentiment. It has a fair share of issues, like universally reused levels across the three different routes and a really bad camera, but as an actual game, I think it's playable enough.

That being said, I do need to mention that I played it exclusively on Xenia, so the infamous long loading screens did not affect my enjoyment at all, as they were cut short to about a tenth of their supposed normal time. There's really a lot of them and it's silly how you even find them randomly popping up in the middle of a level. So if you're playing on original hardware, bring a book for the trials in Sonic's and Silver's routes.

Sonic's campaign is the most normal out of the three, he retains most of his Sonic Adventure moveset, but with a worse spindash and special mach speed sections. These speed sections are pretty much the prototype to the boost segments in Generations, except the speed is incredibly overtuned here and you're likely to crash every other second or get sent across the stage with just a slight misstep. It's especially frustrating when the camera shifts back and forth like in the Crisis City tornado chase, because it completely messes up your inputs and steers you in the wrong direction despite going for the right way before it shifts. But I'm not just going to limit my issues with the camera to the mach speed segments, it stays problematic for the entire game. For starters, the camera controls are inverted and you can't change it in the options at all. While this might seem jarring to get used to at first, the real culprit when it comes to 06's camera, is especially how it automatically "fixes" itself during homing attacks. Every time you attack an enemy with it, the auto camera shifts away from the ground and gives you a front view on the enemy - this is especially horrible for airborne enemies, when you don't have solid ground beneath you. It's definitely one of the worst cameras I have ever seen in a game and it made platforming much more worse than it had to be.

Silver's playstyle is mostly centered around projectile-based attacks and he has no normal melee moves at all, the closest thing you'll get is his electric ground pound, which allows you to throw most of the enemies you electrify afterwards - something I realized in Silver's final level, because the game does NOT tell you about it. So if you play through his campaign without knowing about this, two issues arise. The first one is clearly the dependency on throwables in the nearby vicinity, most of the time these are crates, but more than often also barrels or the bullets of enemies. In many scenarios a few crates just respawn indefinitely at certain locations to supply you with enough stuff to throw at the bad guys, but there are a few times where it's really bothersome when they don't respawn. My favorite example for this is the escort mission near the end of Silver's campaign, where you have to bring an NPC from one side of the town to the other, but you only have a few barrels on the way at your disposal and it takes a long time for them to respawn and I'm sure some didn't even respawn at all. I still think it's pretty strange that the playable Silver can't pick up the tables and chairs on the plaza, as he could do it perfectly fine in his boss fight in Sonic's campaign. Now, putting the scarcity of throwables aside, another big point is how reliant you're on the auto-aim. In most cases it works fine when you throw it in the general direction of an enemy, but when you're fighting a good amount of them at once, the aiming gets messy and can't really decide which enemy to go for anymore. I also found it extremely difficult to get the homing shots to hit the screws of the big robots when they're on the ground, so I had to skip finishing them every now and then just because most og the crates I threw just bounced off the robots instead of going for the screws. Again, a little melee move to just deal that final blow would have changed so much already. That being said, ultimately Silver was a nice change of pace from Sonic (even if it meant considerably slower combat) and it was fun to skip a few sections by abusing the horribly broken levitation mechanic - try mashing A instead of holding it, and you can fly like 50% over the intended distance to access areas where you're definitely not supposed to be.

Shadow the Hedgehog is a great character, but he's also the character with the worst opening level, which caused me to postpone his campaign until after Silver's. For the most part he plays similar to Sonic, but trades the spindash for an extended aerial combo and... armed vehicles? There clearly still was some Shadow 05 inspiration left behind, except he doesn't have guns this time. Either way, Shadow's campaign is no marvel in gameplay design, as the stage recycling is very apparent in this route and I'd say about 90% of the content (including bosses) are taken from Sonic's Story. Gameplay aside, the story direction in this campaign is pretty interesting and I like the emphasis on Mephiles as a villain, he also has a very cool theme. Shadow's conflict here feels like a more refined version of Shadow 05 and I think Mephiles plays a large part in this, as Black Doom just had that cartoonish tone to him, which didn't make him as imposing as... Shadow's literal shadow. So that was nice.

To round it all off, the Last Story truly is the cherry on top after all the already established misery and one-ups it with arguably the single most nerve-wracking and unfair level in the entire game. The End of the World consists of several smaller sections, where you play as the entire cast back-to-back in order to reclaim the Chaos Emeralds. Conceptually this sounds like a great way to end the game, a best-of consisting of... entirely copy pasted segments from the main levels, randomly spawning and unfairly placed insta-kill black holes and a random blue-ish color filter slapped on everything, but at least the background track gets you pumped. It's just not a good level and especially the black holes make things way more frustrating than they should be, the fact that they can just randomly pop up in your face is awful too. You get the point. As for the final boss, it's unfortunately just a really unengaging fight, but atleast the ending is alright.

And of course you can't miss the soundtrack in a Sonic game: His World, The Water's Edge and Kingdom Valley are some of my top picks for 06. (Those vocals in the Kingdom Valley track remind my a lot of NieR Automata, pretty nice.) Just another all-around great soundtrack overall and I'm glad to see that even haters of this game can admit the OST is good at the very least.

Would I recommend Sonic 06 to a friend? Probably not, you're likely better off playing Project 06 when it's finished.
Did I have fun regardless? Yeah.

Dead on arrival.

Dear god, this game had a budget of $125 million. Immortals of Aveum is one of countless misfires in the gaming industry that makes me wonder if anyone with access to as much money as this has any idea what they're doing with all of it. You can see the underlying mentality of use-it-or-lose-it with regards to the budget — celebrity cast lists, particle effects so dense that you can't see through them, Unreal Engine 5 tech demo scenery — and how little it actually goes towards making a game that's fun to play or a world that's interesting to engage with. I was certain that this was a small-scale AA game that EA was publishing simply to make a little cash on the side; finding out that this is one of the most expensive games ever made just confuses me. It's a complete and utter squandering of basically everything that it had going for it. We're witnessing a gaming failson being created in real time. It's like Victor Frankenstein made a monster that emptied the family bank account on a timeshare scheme.

This might be the most poorly written piece of media I’ve ever sat through. I’m extending this beyond only video games. Immortals of Aveum is written the way that people who don’t like Marvel movies think Marvel movies are written. There is no moment that cannot go un-quipped, no revelation nor death so important as to prevent every nearby character from rolling their eyes and cracking a joke about it. This refusal to hold anything as sacred can work — most comedies pull this off just fine — but this game exists in that 2000s-era Adam Sandler dramedy hellsphere where, despite the fact that none of the characters are taking this seriously, it’s clear that the viewer is expected to. Immortals of Aveum wants to be a story about wildly differing people coming together in the face of adversity, a story about betrayal, a story about racism, about ancient world-ending prophecies and secret orders desperate to keep the balance. It also has a character say, verbatim, “he’s right behind me, isn’t he?”. He is, in fact, right behind them. Holy fuck. Michael Kirkbride is the lead writer.

Speaking of, every character is such a potty mouth. I know that’s the most Melvin thing imaginable to complain about, but it really does clash with everything that’s set up here. This feels like a PG-13 movie. The best comparison is that it’s an adaptation of a young adult novel that doesn’t actually exist, but it’s not a good adaptation, and the YA novel in question was written like Divergent instead of Hunger Games. This is some bootleg bootleg garbage. This is stepped-on Noughts and Crosses. Characters in this universe ought to be saying “crap” or some made-up fantasy curse like “stars and bolts!” instead of shouting “fuck” every other sentence. Everything and everyone is so flat that you can only reasonably conclude that it was written to appeal to children, but the constant swearing reminds you that they actually intended this for adults. The ESRB gave this an M rating, and I think it’s almost exclusively because of the strong language. There’s barely any blood — hell, barely any actual violence beyond shooting little flashes of magic at people. Harry Potter is more hardcore even in its earliest parts, when the cast is made up of fourth graders fighting ogres in the school bathroom. Michael Kirkbride is the lead writer.

I want to take a moment to complain about Devyn, who might be the most annoying character I’ve ever seen. I cannot fucking stand Devyn. He even spells his name like an asshole. They very clearly want you to be annoyed by Devyn — he’s a Claptrap figure of sorts, placed here by a cruel and uncaring god solely to torment you with his quips — and this is probably the greatest triumph that the writing can manage. In a world where nobody is the straight man and everybody seems desperate to be the one who gets to say something “funny” next, Devyn stands out for his ability to fuck up every single conversation by inserting himself directly into the middle of all of them. Some character will start complaining about the Immortals being isolationists who only care about themselves, and Devyn will cut them off to go on a John Oliver-esque rant for a straight minute to mock them. The player character sets up an uneasy alliance with a member of a discriminated race, and Devyn hops on the holo-orb to joke about how much he hates the entire filthy lot of them. The player character starts telling a story and Devyn fucking burps like a cartoon character to cut him off. God, fuck him. I’d say that I hope he dies, but the game actually pulls through and obliges me. The lead villain blows a hole through his chest like Piccolo and we’re expected not to instantly start rooting for him. People mourn Devyn. He’s the first name that our heroes drop when they give the villain the “and this is revenge for...” speech once he’s defeated. Michael Kirkbride is the lead writer.

Devyn is really only as annoying as he is because his actor is as annoying as he is. This is a common thread throughout the entire cast; all of the actors here are performing like this is their first time in front of a camera. Hell, I thought it was. Turns out that the entire cast is comprised of actual fucking screen actors who do this shit for a living, and none of them seem to have a clue what they’re doing. This is doubtless a directing problem — Gina Torres is delivering a career-low performance, far beneath even the worst projects she’s done elsewhere — and it seems like Ascendant believed they could just hire professional actors and tell them to "start acting" as their only point of reference for what they ought to be doing. Charles Halford as Rook crushes it, though, and I have to wonder if it’s solely because his character doesn’t look like a human being. They were apparently doing some weird hybrid face-scan/mocap setup where the actors would have their faces scanned while they were doing voiceover in a booth, and then their heads would get pasted onto the bodies of whoever was doing the mocap. There are scenes clearly intended for big emotions, or that expect the actors to at least raise their voices a little — when they see their friends die, when they give speeches on the battlefield — and they just can't seem to muster them for this. Everyone just talks. Nobody in Aveum has ever heard of an outside voice.

I've gone this long without mentioning the gameplay because it's about as much of an afterthought as this paragraph. You get three types of magic, creatively named Red, Blue, and Green, and Blue magic is so ridiculously good that you only use the other colors when the game forces you to. Blue magic is a semi-automatic rifle that gets a stacking percent damage bonus on critical hits, which are guaranteed on headshots and weak spots. It has virtually zero recoil, infinite range, hitscan, and does obscene damage obscenely quickly. Red magic is a slow shotgun that deals a solid chunk of damage but has low DPS, and Green magic is a projectile-based submachine gun with some homing capabilities that serves mostly as a shitty shotgun that misses more often than it hits. Since all of your basic magic has infinite ammo, there's little reason to do anything other than keep your Blue magic in your hand and spam bolts at enemies so far away that they're using their low LOD models. Consider binding your fire button to the scroll wheel to spare your index finger from a repetitive stress injury.

What I do like, however, is that there's actually some emphasis on platforming and exploration. While this isn't an especially interesting world to poke through, there are all sorts of goodies scattered throughout, and they're all more or less worth collecting. Grabbing lore notes will always reward you with XP even if you don't read them, and actually getting to them can be fun. You've got a double jump to start out with, which is already a plus, and you'll eventually graduate to a hookshot and a glide that you can use to get basically anywhere you want to be. Chaining air dashes and hookshots with your glides to get across a massive pit with a treasure chest at the end of it might be one of those gameplay systems that's inherently rewarding. Even though most of what you'll get for doing these mini challenges amounts to little more than a lump sum of XP or a buff to some of your damage numbers, it's the act of platforming around where the tiny kernel of fun is hidden.

There's really not much to say about Immortals of Aveum besides the fact that, were it not for being the worst-written thing I've ever seen in my fucking life, I would have completely forgotten about it in the two weeks it's taken me to type this out. I'd almost say that it's worth playing if only to see how ridiculously bad the characters are, but you're better off watching someone else play it on YouTube at that point, and you'd be watching it for way too long to get a laugh out of it. At least bad movies usually have the courtesy of ending in two hours, not eight. Part of the problem with "so bad it's good" games are the amount of time that they demand you invest in them, and then you've gotta reckon with the fact that you're putting in work for something that isn't going to be worth it. I don't regret playing Immortals of Aveum. That's faint praise, but it's all the praise I can give it. The studio isn't going to exist by this time next year. It's hardly worth thinking about beyond the thoughts I've already had. People probably won't even remember that this existed, and what a sad thought that is. Try not to think about what they could have done with that money instead.

What are we, some kind of Immortals of Aveum?

Bro hell nahw ong what the skibidi is this?? BLUD ichiban really think he's on the team! I have now officially spoiled the entire game with that statement, there's nothing else to look forward to. Rare sighting of the guy in actual beat'em up gameplay. Oh, would you look at that, those bozos are back. We haven't seen this Shindo guy in a hot minute, I might have forg- OH NO HE'S THE SWORDSPAMMER HAVE MERCY!! Come on Majima, do something silly, you about uppity as hell with that moveset you borrowed from Kiryu. That's the make or break part that could have saved this glorified hack's reputation.

It's cool to see some set pieces from the famous Like A Dragon series in glorified pixel art. Makes me think of famous quotes from the Yakuza series "wow, christmas! Just a week away! I am so happy with this information!" or so it goes. Maybe Ichiban doesn't feel so out of place kicking Nishiki's derrière, the whole concept is already transporting you into another Sega franchise. I must admit, it feels weird to wield a knife that doesn't break before one person's skull like in Yakuza. You guys gotta give the short runtime some rest man, it may be only 3 stages long and you're fighting the same type of ennemies throughout with a few generic bosses,

Oh, the first two bosses were caught lacking and took their first hit? Death penalty!! You can combo them both to death with the first hit of the combo string, repeated ad nauseam. Quite an unfortunate affair, but if you don't realise it for the first two fights, it means you can bypass safely to the final boss. Is it genius design in disguise? We'll never know if it was intentional. Imagine going to the hospital like this dawg I guess I'm now the supervillain. Makes me... extremely based. It's not like the moveset was particularly impressive to begin with, it's like AI art, if stuff is stolen it's not interesting! Nothing connects anyways. It's the game's fault, not mine.

This post was fact-checked by true Staminan XX addicts. Repost if you're a true XXX. This Staminan thing is so cool i wish stamina was real.

Attempting to pull the same trick a 2nd time, the shared Zero and X series are revived as ZX (tho in truth its much more Z than X). This time however comes with a significant shift in the (albeit somewhat simple) form of a metroidvania style map. As a party favor to all the 12 year old boys out there (me) this time around Mega Man doesnt absorb the powers of bosses but instead gains the forms of the “Mega Men” introduced in the Zero series.

So really, what this ends up feeling like is some sort of self-published tribute album where the idea of “Mega Man” is a title assumed by distinguished individuals, like Hattori Hanzo or Santa Claus. You get to “be” all your favorites, itemized and packaged into conveniently collectible floating cubes - its a really simplified premise but its also a really fun framework. Not only are bosses the sleekest theyve ever been but theres a reward for avoiding their crit spots to preserve the precious Mega Man cubes, and small changes like this feel like the right kinds of innovation on a really tried and really true formula for boss design.

The Pokemon games that take place in Sinnoh are actually way more interesting and weird than I remembered them being and I've quickly realised that so many of my conceptions about why the series can be awesome stems from them in particular. While each prior Pokemon game felt as if it was taking huge steps forward in a number of ways, whether it was adding a more defined narrative, balancing things out and giving the opportunity for a wider variety of strategies to approach the game, I really feel like Gen 4 is when this approach of just adding and reinventing a whole bunch of stuff really reached its peak and made for the most sprawling and bizarrely messy game in the franchise. While previous entries in the series felt like they had quite a number of weird quirks while pushing the game formula forward, it almost feels as if Platinum ends up defining itself based on the strange quirks that it's got going.

This isn't to say that the game hadn't refined itself in a number of ways as well however, with the biggest example being finally introducing the physical/special split to attacks, not only bringing more strategic variety and individuality into the team planning one can meaningfully do, but also actually making a bunch of Pokemon far more viable than they once were. This is obviously a huge improvement since the whole draw of catching a bunch of these cool little creatures is now given a more tangible benefit, as most of them are now useable since you can more effectively construct a team and loadout for more of them, rather than being resigned to the fact that some of them were just outright bad due to having a stat spread that wasn't compatible with its types etc. By making a much wider range of Pokemon now have interesting and viable strategies that you can utilise, it's made the journey as a whole feel far more engaging as a result, with a far larger quantity of these discoveries feeling rewarding in a way beyond the appeal of catching as many as possible.

The journey as a whole also continues feeling bigger and more exciting than previous games for reasons beyond the range of more viable options one can use, and a large reason for this is the way that the presence of Team Galactic is handled. Previous games had always struggled to find a good middle ground between focusing on the 2 sides of any Pokemon narrative, usually using the evil team of the region as almost window dressing to becoming Pokemon champion, with even Emerald having this plotline feel a tad rushed towards the end. In Platinum however, from the very start the game establishes the presence of some dark forces in the region and then constantly reminds the player of some sinister plan that's going on, with every encounter being tied to this as more elements are slowly revealed. It gives this sense of rising tension that lingers throughout the game, especially when so many elements of the plan feel as overtly destructive as they are. Rather than just be happy with the idea of the evil team occupying a building as being bad enough before the climax, you've got this clear sense about everything being extensively calculated and having some sort of reason behind it beyond "they're the bad guys so they just need to show up sometimes". The climax to this whole plotline is also framed as the most significant thing that you need to do within the game, finally scaling Mt Coronet and going to a whole new dimension briefly.

The reason this works so much better than Sky Pillar in Emerald as a final thing the player needs to do to thwart evil is the fact that this feels like it's been a constant presence and something that provided a constant sense of intrigue to the player. Mt Coronet is interesting in the way that it's almost the only cave-like area in the region, but it's so massive that it serves the same purpose as 3 to 4 regular sized ones, being unlocked slowly through HMs as the game progresses. It's always there, slowly having more of its secrets revealed, but always hanging more of its secrets over the player's head until this point in time, when the game reaches its boiling point, where you can finally get to the summit, and the ascent feels incredibly cinematic compared to what one would be used to in a Pokemon game. It's a great change of pace for the main champion plotline to almost feel like a bit of an afterthought towards the end and it's the kind of thing I wish would happen a bit more often, considering how much more potential and variety there is in this other type of plotline instead.

Despite my love for all that's written above, I still think that the most striking element of the game is the amount of pointless but neat detail and convoluted stuff there is. Of all the entries, this is the one that feels the most all over the place and almost against the player actually finding everything that it has to offer. There are so many weird and wonderful systems in place that are only used for such specific things, and they're all over the place. You've got time based Pokemon locations like the honey trees with an entire other pool of Pokemon you can get, you have the underground area, which leads to one of the most time consuming, yet cool way you obtain fossils in any of these games, you've got things tied to the day of the week, entire areas that are never mentioned and hidden pretty well, so many bits and pieces that are simultaneously inconvenient and really cool. I really love this though, as despite the fact that it makes the game have this additional layer of stuff to get through if you want to get close to completing as much as you can, it adds a lot more depth and intrigue to the world to have so many individual systems working in tandem. More than any of the other games, it feels like there was a lot of time spent into making this feel like a fully realised world before anything else, and it makes a lot of the inconveniences presented to the player feel far more acceptable.

With that said, game's not perfect either, with the 2 biggest examples being the amount of HMs and the fact that it's slow AF. I really don't care how many different traversal options you want to implement, essentially forcing the player to either carry around a HM slave or completely haemorrhage the moveset of half your team is absurd and counterintuitive to the game's draw of being able to craft your own special team and have an adventure with them. Gaining a new HM doesn't feel like a reward for accomplishing something, it just feels like another burden to put upon yourself if you want to further progress, basically reliving the problem with the first generation and its shoddy inventory, albeit to a less egregious extent this time around. The speed of the game is just generally
unforgivable and I know that I'd feel way less tolerant of it if I didn't play through the whole game on 1.75x speed to offset this, bit of a no brainer that it's nicer when the game doesn't feel like it takes 10 - 20 seconds to do anything. I also do find it a bit unfortunate that the more consistently silly and comedic writing wasn't quite as present here compared to gen 3, feeling a bit more clinical on the whole, but it's not a huge loss either, as it doesn't really distract from a lot of the core appeal that the game has.

On the whole, I think that Pokemon Platinum is really cool for the way that it really feels like the franchise at the point where it had the least inhibitions, both for better or for worse. It feels like so many bits and pieces that normally would've ended up on the cutting room floor just hung around instead and it ultimately makes for the most idiosyncratic of any mainline game in the series. Despite its issues, the strides that this made in terms of combat and exploration are still very welcome, and I don't think any region has gotten better than the way this one was designed either. It might not be my favourite in the series, as I feel like the gen 5 games kept a lot of this charm and approach while refining it to the point where it was just a bit less obtuse, but this is definitely worth a play regardless.

Remember when one of the devs of this tried dunking on Elden Ring when the similarly mediocre follow-up to this game came out and tried to say Elden Ring was shit? That was wild.

Anyways this game blows and many other people have went in detail as to why it does. There's an audience for this series so I can't say it's the worst thing. Game looks pretty nice, Forbidden west even more, but that's about it I can say positively about it. The concept of exploring a postapocalyptic world filled with robotic creatures sounds fun though, maybe they'll get the execution there at some point.