This might sound weird, but throughout my life works of art I've connected the most with have been those I had major doubts about going in. Works that look bad or sound weird from their elevator pitch that do end up being great in the end are those I tend to remember and cherish more than works that promise to be great and just deliver on that, no strings attached. The other kind of thing I usually end up loving the most is the kind that's bold and tries something new and totally pulls it off. If a show has a weird premise or a game is built on some weird gimmick, but then the end-product turns out to be great – those are the kind of products I go back to more often than any other. I guess respect is something I often need to feel connected to something.

When Elden Ring's gameplay was revealed, I was incredibly disappointed. Sure the visuals looked great, but in terms of design a lot of the areas and enemies they've shown off have felt straight out of Dark Souls III or Bloodborne; the combat looked exactly like FromSoft's previous games, down to animations ripped directly from DS3; in general, this didn't feel like anything all that 'new'. The big new thing was the open world, but the descriptions given about this part of the game in particular were scarce and pretty secretive. Really, from reveal to release, I imagined this game to be Big Dark Souls with a new NPC summoning system and a crouch button.

And the crazy thing is, on a basic level – that’s all this game is, but just saying “It’s Dark Souls IV but big” and just leaving it at that would be selling the game insultingly short.

What I didn’t expect is just how well the Soulsborne formula maps onto accepted and expected open-world design. Going through dungeons and forests, fighting weirdly horrific goons, opening chests and battling with the occasional boss here and there – isn’t that just what you usually do in these games? Well, not exactly, having a whole-ass continent to roam around does change things a lot in terms of balancing, discovery, the sheer time needed to go from one big piece of content to another, but it’s still incredible how essentially unchanged the structure is from older Soulsbornes to Elden Ring. If anything, having an open world now feels like the logical next step in the evolution of these games: the feeling of venturing into the deep to fight the evil transformed into the freedom of conquering a whole world. From an adventurer surviving dingy caves and sewers, the Soulsborne player has been transformed into a hero surviving a war for the throne, or at least swording their way through the war’s remnants. Now you feel like you’re on an epic odyssey with a whole world of stuff to find at your own pace, with the quality of stuff generally being the same or better than what was found in FromSoft’s previous outings. And now your journey feels truly never-ending, like there's not even a set in stone final boss or a certain number of fights or dungeons you'll have to go through to reach the end. With how the map reveals itself only a small piece at a time, and how the minimalist UI facilitates real immersion into The Lands Between, for most of my playthrough of this game I legitimately didn't know when will it finally roll credits, and I was digging every minute.

It’s not like nothing has been lost or changed in this transition, though. It’s undeniable that Elden Ring can be a lot easier than, say, Bloodborne, because in that game a challenge was a brick wall that you would either be broken by, or break yourself. But in Elden Ring, a lot of the time most challenges can just be put on the list of things you’ll have to do later, and after you’ll complete all the easier tasks and gain some levels and upgrade your equipment, the initial challenge would be much easier, if not just easy, period. That’s exactly what happened to me with Radahn: after trying to kill him for an hour and a half straight, I just thought “Ok, this isn’t even mandatory, and it kinda sucks, I’m probably underleveled for this guy. I’ll come back later”. And after like 15 hours of gameplay off-Caelid, I came back and pretty much walked all over Radahn’s fight. It wasn’t a steamroll or anything, but using the freedom to essentially skip the fight made it worse for me, and I struggle to say whether this was my fault. A shame, too, ‘cause Radahn is one of the coolest bosses in FromSoft history, and his moveset makes him really fun to fight.

The good thing is, that is pretty much the worst example of this game’s structure working against it that I had personally experienced. Other than that, I actually found this whole “go do something else if you don’t like this” thing to be a really enjoyable part of my journey. If I thought that I was underleveled for an area (like with Caelid, to which I arrived like 40 levels too early through a shortcut), or that the optional boss I’ve been fighting sucked ass and I didn’t want to fight them at all, or that I just wanted to go someplace else for no reason – I had that choice, and it didn’t seem to impede my enjoyment of Elden Ring all too often. In fact, this game kinda introduced the fun of being overpowered in a Soulsborne to me in a way I wasn’t expecting. When I realized literally halfway through my playthrough that there was a whole subsection of Limgrave below the main zone, I was way overleveled for most of it, so I was plowing through enemies in Castle Morne like it was nobody's business. But at this point my character had killed several demi-gods, as well as numerous knights and sorcerers, amassed an arsenal of powerful weapons, and was on their way to conquer The Lands Between capital. So why would this person have any issues with fighting through a castle overtaken by it’s former slaves? Why would they struggle with the local Misbegotten chief, or his underlings, or Castle Morne’s footsoldiers? They are clearly not on the level of danger I’ve seen already, so why would they be any trouble? In a weird way, Elden Ring’s ability to make you an unstoppable force of nature purely because of a lack of level scaling was an additional marker of progress, just like the prowess I’ve shown in killing the main bosses or going through the main dungeons and areas. Now more than ever a FromSoft’s Soulsborne feels like an RPG, where being overpowered one minute and nigh on powerless the next is the norm, and while not all From Software fans will appreciate this (clearly), I enjoyed this part of the game a lot. You may say that challenge is the core of these games, but I really thought that Elden Ring wasn’t about the challenge anymore; now challenge shares the spot-light with a few other elements, both mechanical and not.

And really, this game felt pretty even for me in terms of what elements were core to it. The game is incredible visually, both from a technical and art-design perspective, with a lot of awe and epicness being facilitated by the visuals alone. The mechanics are tighter and more varied than ever, with ‘trying out different builds and weapons’ being one of the most fun things you can do in Elden Ring, with any variation of weapon, spell, Ash of War and consumable being fun and valid. The lore is more upfront and engaging than in any previous Soulsborne, now finally being explicitly about politics (instead of using politics as a soapbox), a struggle between ambitious people fighting for their ideals, as well as a struggle between higher powers vying for control of this world and it’s inhabitants' lives.

It’s been said a thousand times before, but Elden Ring feels like the logical conclusion of most everything FromSoft has done up to that point. It doesn’t just reuse ideas and concepts from it’s predecessors, but carefully utilizes them, transformed and/or upgraded, to craft a new experience that, despite sharing 90% of it’s DNA with it’s ancestors, feels nothing like the games that came before. As it turns out, a developer using years of experience to craft something new out of the best parts of their previous works can only make for a genuine masterpiece and one of the best games of all time. Haters seething, Tarnished – Rising.











P.S.
That Malenia, Blade of Miquella sure does suck huh guys, also have you seen that some bosses are kinda like other bosses from DS3 and Bloodborne? 0/10 game

P.P.S.
I forgot to mention that, but I think that the reuse of content was handled really well in ER for the most part. I liked how the soldiers were given different equipment and coupled with some different enemies depending on the area, it really did make the world more lived-in and believeable. I also liked how some bosses sorta tie your journey together, or bring cohesion to it. Like, The Ulcerated Tree Spirit -- that thing was a bitch to get through when I met him in Fringefolk Hero's Grave, but after that each encounter with him was like meeting an old friend, I swear to god. Helps too that his moveset is fun and exciting, at least in open spaces. And fighting him like 6 different times, each time in a different part of my quest, gave me yet another idea of how far I've come each time we've met. The same kinda goes for the cave dungeon bosses like the cats, it just feels good to bumb into a challenge you've beaten already from time to time, just to see if you can still do it, I dunno. On the other hand, there are definitely bosses that I hate or enjoy much less than I would've if they weren't repeated. The biggest example is Astel having a bigger badder version in some dingy cave, but others include all of the dragons aside from Placidusax, the wyrms after you kill your first one, Loretta, and all the bosses where the boss is just a regular enemy, but now there's two of them, and one or both have a stupid gimmick.

I don't have much to say about this game other than that I was surprised at how demonized it is now that I've actually played it. Sure, it doesn't have an ounce of horror to it (aside maybe from the fish boys in the sewer), and it's probably terrible as a remake, but I think the shift to action from REmake 2 was pulled off well, and REmake 3 honestly is a better game that REmake 2 in terms of anything that isn't horror or exploration. I really liked the dodge and the punch, - it feels great to pull them off, and the difficulty with doing so seems fair. I also really liked the story, which does a much better job of being a fun and campy RE plot with a lot of human drama and relatable characters to meet. Jill is a super fun protagonist to play as, and Carlos is da best boy. The bossfights are incredible (especially compared to the single allright-ish bossfight of REmake 2), again, doing a good job of balancing different tones, with Nemesis being both a dumb JRPG monster that does laps around you like a werewolf or grows into a tentacle monster or some shit, and feeling genuinely kinda scary. The balancing in 3 is also super neat: on the harder difficulties you won't be "running out of ammo" nessessarily, but you're still encouraged to stand in place and not waste any shots, especially when you get to the Hunters or when Dogs start swarming you. Also, there are a lot of QOF improvements with things like UI, shot feedback, item pickups, etc.

This game probably is kinda rushed, which is why it's not everything REmake 2 was and more, - which it totally could've been, even if they wanted to make it a nice little 90s blockbuster, but since I've never played the original RE3 and have played way too much of the RE2's remake, I'm happy with this game the way it is. And to mirror my sentiments after replaying that, I feel more and more like if they do plan on doing a RE4 remake, it has a pretty good chance of turning out good, or even great. Capcom, of course, is a chaos-fueled kabal of Jarred Leto's Jokers, so you never know, huh

When judging a piece of media, I think it’s important to meet whatever it is you’re judging where it’s at. One of the most frustrating things in media critique space for me is how often will the critiquers either misunderstand the intent of a work, misrepresent it’s budget and scope, or mismanage their expectations of it going in, and then proceed to levy criticisms at this work that, essentially, have nothing to do with reality. Like when people say that New-Vegas is a shitty game because it has shitty combat, or that Minecraft is dumb because “there’s no point”.

With Cult of the Lamb my only real expectations from playing the demo back in June were that it was going to sound and look amazing, and (puts on a satanic cowboy hat) by golly – they did it! (the hat runs away). You’ve heard this a million times by now since the visuals pop out like crazy, but the art-style Massive Monster were going for was realised almost perfectly, and I really dug the soundtrack. Sure, the theme for the first dungeon is the only real memorable one out of the four that’s there, but the rest are bopping too, and other tracks like the ones playing in the village or in the other NPC areas are really nice and soothing.

The combat is also pretty awesome, even though after the demo I wasn’t expecting much from that department. The sheer agility Da Lamb always has is amazing, with you being able to dodge roll-animation cancel out of any action besides casting spells (which gives you I-frames anyway). The weapon selection is not the best, but each one feels different from another in pretty substantial ways, and adds variety to your base moveset. With a dagger you’ll be zipping around as fast as you can doing small damage quickly, with a hammer you’ll be carefully weighing every opportunity to strike vs every opportunity to eat a fireball to a face, and an axe allows you to do massive damage twice if you roll after every slow-ish attack you make to negate recovery time. Spells also work nicely, though I wish there were more opportunities for you to use them in combat; right now they feel constrained. Overall, it’s kind of one of my favourite melee combat systems of any roguelike I’ve played so far, which I guess is not high praise given that most are either about shooting or are turn-based, but still.

But honestly, my favourite part of this has to be the tone. Yeah, probably sounds weird, but I’m a big sucker for disparate ideas, emotions and influences coming together in a way that reconciles and harmonises them, instead of keeping them separate. Cult of the Lamb could’ve easily been a straight-forward cute action-game where the fucked up Eldrich Horror shit was downplayed or not done with enough effort, but this game works because it’s authentically both cute and horrifying all the time in almost equal measure. It could’ve been as bland and annoying as Happy Tree Friends, where a story about cute animals doing cute stuff was just sometimes interrupted by gore, but the different tones just click in the best way possible.

Unfortunately, Cult of the Lamb game is perfectly willing and able to hook you in and get your mind racing from your earliest minutes with just the premise alone, which, to put it mildly, gave me expectations.

So what’s the premise? You’re a cute little lamb being dragged off to an altar to be slaughtered for the sake of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, before a mysterious god, locked in chains in some ethereal dimension, gives you his power and recruits you as his servant, giving you the task of starting your own cult of other cute animals and killing off the gods that tried to kill you. And gameplay-wise, what you’re looking on with this one is a whole ensemble-cast of genres: action-rogue-like, farming sim, management game, and adventure game, with mini-games thrown in.

With all that being considered, I don’t think it’s physically possible to not be excited for what’s to come when you get going. Sadly though, while being a well-made game I was glad to play through, I don’t think Cult of the Lamb really delivers on any of it’s (admittedly implicit) promises.

The weakest part of this genre-mashing is definitely the rogue-like. It’s okay-ish with enemy and item variety (though all the fucking “Receive X-amount of blue hearts” items are definitely annoying to have), but like I’ve said, the weapon variety is sorely lacking. This game basically went the West of Dead route, – having a small number of weapon types that have a few variations that apply a unique status effect. Specifically, Cult of the Lamb has 5 main weapon types and 6 variations, including “Godly”, which just gives you basic weapons, but they’re stronger now! That’s not even to mention that only one of those status-effect variations is really useful – the poison one. The rest could be interesting, but they…just don’t seem to work? I mean, they technically do, but the chance for effects like “Heal after killing an enemy” or “Posses a slain foe” seem so small that I’ve seldom encountered them even a few times during all of the runs I’ve picked them up on. “Critical damage” weapon variations are better, but even then, they just don’t seem to make a tangible difference. The same goes for spells – there are like 4 or 5 types of spells you can get, but all the same status-effect special editions, which are almost exactly as boring and meaningless as those of the weapons.

The management/farm sim part of this game is not the best either. It doesn’t take even a few hours before you’ve found enough cultists, unlocked all the OP rituals and built enough infrastructure before your sect is almost entirely self-sufficient, automated, and fully taken care of, and you only need to actively visit to, bizarrely, cook food, take care of dead bodies and unclog the outhouses, which I guess my cultists are not able to take care of themselves. In fact, they’re so dependant on Da Lamb that they will piss, shit and cry forever, until their Messiah comes to bury the body they’re just vomiting on when walking by, or to unclog the toilets they abandoned to shit in behind the temple instead, or to eat some fucking grass instread of starving to death. Kind of off-topic, but the funny thing about shit in this game, in particular, is that it’s given tons of attention: there are a few dishes you can make that will instantly make a cultist shit themselves in public after eating, there are quests you can do for your cultists where you make them or their brethren eat literall bowls of poo, and there is a whole-ass Janitor Station that allows your flock to (finally) wipe after going № 2, but even that doesn’t give them the ability to flush after visiting an outhouse. Sad!

Especially sad given that your cultists can die and go to hell for all you care – you’re literally given no real gameplay incentive to take care of them. They can dissent and leave, they can die of illness or old age constantly, but who cares? What you need to progress the game is just to have a certain number of guys in your cult, which is not hard to do considering how easy it is to find new recruits or to quell the rumblings of the old. Just keep the bare minimum standard of living up and you’ll do fine.

That’s not even to speak of the fact that there is little to no personalization or characterization involved with your Sheep-Believers. You can change what animal they are when recruiting, change the colour of their skin and give them a name, but it’s still hard to even remember them, let alone get attached. Even when you have pink unicorns with bloody horns and people with white Cthulhu heads named “Dickn’balls” running around your camp, from that far away they all begin to blend together, and they don’t have any interesting behaviour to call upon when trying to tell them apart. There was definitely an attempt to give some traits to your guys, but there are like 8 possible traits your cultist may have, all inconsequential and all completely unrelated to their behaviour on camp or how they respond to your actions. Sure, some might get sad for a minute about the fact that a fellow cult-member died, but this, in reality, doesn’t affect shit, and you always forget who has what even after seeing it a dozen times, not to mention that a lot of these minute set-backs can be mitigated by upgrading your cult to automatically value stuff like cannibalism or human sacrifice.

Speaking of cult upgrades: they kinda suck. It is fun, at the beginning, to declare a fast because of your religious value of hard work and humility, then to sacrifice an old guy to your god because of how much your cult loves ritualistic homicide and the olds being eaten, only to then give them mushrooms and do whatever the fuck you want for a whole day, but this whole Ritual and Doctrine system is really unbalanced. At first I thought that the Doctrines were mutually exclusive or at least synergetic, meaning that having a doctrine of hard work will somehow connect with a doctrine of “big money and house good”, but no – every one of the five doctrine trees can be fully upgraded all at once, and it’s not even hard to do. In the beginning every new doctrine/commandment stone I’ve unlocked was a real reward for a series of challenges, but quickly I’ve amassed so much that I’ve upgraded my cult in every way possible, with no feeling like that was an actual achievement. Again – this game is like 20-ish hours long, and in terms of progression fizzles out at 12 or so. That is super upsetting, because just making every new level of all the upgrade trees cost a bit more would make this system a thousand times more satisfying.

It’s especially upsetting because Cult of the Lamb partially exists in two whole genres known for how long or potentially infinite they are, and it fails to live up to both of them in terms of the breath and the depth of it’s content. Cult of the Lamb is a well-done game, and given that it’s a game made by a total of about 20 core developers, it is kind of amazing how great it turned out to be. But playing it I just kept thinking “what if that was a bit more developed”, or “what if this was expanded upon”, or “what if they changed this”, while enjoying or even loving the stuff that’s already there. That’s the worst kind of great game – one that promises to be even better and just fails to deliver in a million tiny ways.

Maybe I’m just being petty or entitled, but I can’t stress enough how fun and addictive Cult of the Lamb has been. It’s just a shame that the ambitions or the budget of the team didn’t allow for it to grow into something more than a game that I will mostly only remember the visuals of a month from now.

I hate to shelve yet another game this year, but Pacific Drive’s somber tone, air of mystery and gameplay loop were fun at first, and quickly lost their charm and became tedious.

As far as gameplay goes, the real standout thing here is the tactility. Manual control is everything in Pacific Drive: you have to manually toggle the wipers, transmission, and the headlights, regularly refuel your car, recharge its battery and repair/replace every part of your station wagon’s outer shell. The replacements do have a tangible effect on gameplay, as well. A new set of wheels, or even just one of your old wheels getting loose or punctured have an effect on your car’s handling that is very much felt. The same tactility applies to out-of-the-car gameplay, too, though to a much lesser degree. You’re taught to disassemble everything and anything you come across in the Zone, but not every thing is interactable - far from it. Most doors are permanently locked, most anomalies are basically untouchable, and most of the tech in the zone is affixed to the floor.

The issue of limited freedom in general is the one you notice pretty much right away. The first minutes of Pacific Drive see you drive a car you can’t exit or modify, then you’re led through a string of highly directed tutorials where simple actions get introduced one at a time in a very limited environment. You literally are not able to do stuff like siphon fuel from a roadside wrecked car until you’re specifically told to by Oppy, at which point you’re finally allowed to do this very simple thing. This feeling of “there’s nothing to do until the game decides it’s time” persists well into the middle portion of your playthrough, at which point all illusions thoroughly break down and the game becomes predictable and simply boring. You settle into a routine: unlock some new recipes, repair/replace parts of the car, get on the road, go to a place, gather three thingamajigs to start a visually impressive but transparently non-threatening and directed sequence of doing a warthog escape through a portal, OR go through a gate on the other side of the area to do the previous routine in another place. Gathering supplies, avoiding anomalies and maintaining your car doesn’t change quickly enough: by the time I got to Mid-Zone I’ve already taken like 6 identical drives through the Outer layer, so it’s hard to be impressed by or interested in anything anymore. You know?

It’s a shame because I genuinely was starting to become invested in these kooky scientists’ past and present struggles, and if anything, the narrative and character work in this game are surprisingly decent. Too bad all you do is drive to a place and grind for new car parts!

Tentative 6/10, might change in the future

For a game in its genre, BRC isn't the most deep and replayable. I also do wish that the levels were more consistent, and that some mechanics were a bit deeper. At the same time, who fucking cares?

This game knows what it wants to do and just did it. It's a fun Y2K-styled ride through a set of colourful levels, where the mid-air poses are dramatic and the beats are FUNKY. It was a blast to go through, with barely any drag, and with a lot of memorable moments. More than a month away from beating it, I still sometimes get the itch to reinstall it and just go through the adventure once again. Or just 100% my save file, I dunno.

Fuck Sega! The JSR remake looks generic as fuck! All hail Team Reptile, blessed be thy skates, ever-lasting be thy trick chains.

I've been trying to wrap my head around Sable for more than a week, but the reality here is simple: Sable is a wonderful game that offers an experience unlike any other game (yes, even unlike BotW), but in it's current state (october 2021) basically every part of it is undercut to a dramatic degree by all the bugs and just plain oversights it has. The game looks great - until a graphical or an animation glitch smacks you in the face. The bike is the best bike ever - until it gets stuck in a whirlgig or is unable to reach you even on the flattest of plains. Climbing is simple but challenging - until some walls or objects don't have collision programmed in. The story is simple but effective - until you occasionally sequence-break or you can't progress a quest because of some bug rearing out. The UI is amazing - until it's rendered unusable by, once again, a dumb glitch getting in the way of your fun. The only thing I really liked here unequivocally is the lore, which felt very "a western writer came up with an anime concept but also was inspired by classic sci-fi"-esque.

It bears repeating that Sable is a great game you all should check out - for it's looks, for it's feels, for it's dialogs, for the VIBE. But since this is a first game made by a small team over the course of way too little development time, you really shouldn't try it. Not yet, at least.

Judging from the open beta, this game has the potential to be one of the greatest PVP multiplayer FPS still (a)live, but some little and big things might prevent it from truly making it to the big leagues, or, at least, from staying there too long.

The biggest reason for that is that the content on offer is a bit one-note, with a gameplay that requires a lot of teamwork to be successful. The only two distinct modes are a capture-defense type, and that mode where you get coins from killing people that you then bank at a special terminal. Plus a tournament version of one of those.

And they are great, don't get me wrong. The much-praised gunplay is fun and the equipment allows for a wide range of strategies, the destruction is fantastic, and the presentation holding it all together is solid. That's all true.

But the thing is, the carry potential is a bit too small, meaning that if you're up against even a somewhat well-coordinated team, and your two guys are mongrels who don't push objectives or just aren't that good at shooting or throwing barrels yet, you are almost guaranteed to lose. The winner-takes-all nature of Quick Cash, plus a lack of an overtime (the timer runs over a bit if the objective is contested) or sudden death (everyone respawns in the last throws of a match) mechanics, means that defending your cash-out requires some careful planning and consideration, as losing the objective in the last 20-30 seconds of a match might mean that you'd just have to watch helplessly as your wiped-out team is defeated and the winner does, indeed, take it all with little resistance. And again, it'd be exceedingly hard to avoid being on the losing side of this particular interaction if your team isn't going for objectives, wasting time taking long roundabouts, doesn't consist of two full members, or doesn't exist at all. Because yes, I've had plenty of times where I've been connected to a match with a full team but one or two members left before seeing the game through to the end, and even been connected to a match in-progress where my team was entirely empty before my arrival. This is actually the biggest weirdo freak thing The Finals does: often you will start or end your match with an incomplete squad, but rarely do the empty slots get filled in.

That issue is further exacerbated with the lack-luster communication features on offer. There is no chat at all, no way to quickly ask for healing or denote traps or strategic destruction points, and the "request revive" button only makes your downed character icon emanate a faint glow, which I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of players don't know the meaning of. The objectives in this game aren't difficult, but aren't always immediately intuitive, and the nuances of destruction mechanics, plus the nature of "Specializations" and different types of grenades, really make some matches frustrating when your team isn't pushing the limited ping system to the max or aren't playing as a team.

The other big mode, Bank It, is a bit more forgiving: your goal is to kill your opponents, collect the coins that splurge out of them, and bank them at designated and time-limited points on the map. Bank It is great for casual solo-play because the issue of players being too enamored with the gunplay to push objectives is not as persistent -- you are supposed to focus on killing. The problem of "poorly coordinating teams of lemmings vs sweaty CoD vets" is also somewhat alleviated here, since coins drop from everyone on death, meaning that it's possible to lose your teammates in a skirmish, collect their death doubloons and skedaddle without the deaths or the skedaddling being an outright setback. The destruction shines in the main capture-defense mode, but the main combat loop gets it's full spotlight right here.

The only issue with Bank It is purely one of balancing. Simply put, light builds with a sword or a silent pistol are guaranteed to do better than heavies and mediums, due to lacking mobility of the former and support-based gameplay of the ladder. It's clear that the classes and their general kit were based around the more defense-focused modes, but the light is built as a disruptor, with their abundant mobility options and small hitboxes, which makes them a powerhouse in a mode where speed and evasion is everything.

Overall, these issues aren't game-breaking or essential; I can easily envision a one-day patch that fixes the balancing issues, ads more relevant ping options and gives them shortcuts, as well as making them more contextually adaptable, and does away with small annoyances like not being able to customise your weapons from the equipment tab. And it's also entirely possible that as early as this year or the first months of 2024 we will see more maps, a traditional deathmatch mode and a singles option for match-making.

But I do worry that some of these changes won't come soon enough, and that The Finals might struggle to maintain or even gain any meaningful momentum. This game is fantastic, it's fresh, and it's visual style and iconography have a potential to become absolutely...well, iconic. All I hope for is that it actually happens.

3.5 stars for the state the game is in as of this last Beta; might go way up if the devs play their cards right

P.S.
Apparently the game uses AI text-to-speech for barks and announcer lines, which explains why the announcers sound so stilted and weird. Fuck that! Hope that's adressed with the damn day-one patch!

UPD:
I just read some more interviews and lurked a bit on Reddit and y'know what, make this game 3 stars. Embark is both run and funded as if it were a AAA studio yet the fans argue that AI-voiceover was something the devs needed to do in order for this game to exist and have a brisk development pace, which is the view Embark tacitly supports. And that's obviously bullshit.

A wonderful little game that makes you feel like a little kid just exploring around on a camping trip and having fun. I was grinning ear to ear like 70 % of my playthrough, and this cellphone call at the end made me tear up at how genuinely happy I was at that moment, and of course flying down the mountain was amazing. This game feels amazing, in general, and my only wish for it would be that I wanted to just spend more time in A Short Hike's world, seeing the sights, and talking to all these funny guys roaming about. I hope this developer makes something like A Short Hike again someday, because we definitely need more games like it in our lives

This War of Mine is an example of a title that, for all it's cheapo visuals and animations, repetitive content and lack of a lot of interesting or unique mechanics, still manages to deliver a powerfull message using the medium of videogames.

This game is surprisingly gripping: once you start out, your shelter is a bitch, with nothing but piles of rubble and an empty fridge. But you always have something to do, and taking care of your survivors is very addicting. After you make tools, beds, a stove for coocking, a radio for listening to news, you need to take care of food, fuel, meds, even the emotional well-being of the characters. And it's amazing how This War of Mine uses it's mechanics to not only deliver the central message, but make you personally invested in lives of people you're watching over.

But with the "classic mode", it is very easy to fall into a routine, and you eventually start viewing these people trying to survive a genocide(?) as little more than chores. It felt genuinely awful the first time I had to steal food and scraps from an old couple, and this sadness also reflected on my characters. But a few runs in you become numb to it, to the point where my mind was more occupied with gaming the system and planning how I can be the most despicable human ever for the least penalties. You start thinking: "So I have a few spare bottles of alcohol, which means I can send my guy with the biggest backpack into a family house, murder everyone there, take all their stuff, and after he returns I can make him drink away the pain and he'll be back in shape in a few days. Nice!".

But I think the devs knew about this issue, which is why they later added character-driven narrative scenarios with the Stories DLC(s). In every scenario, there are only a few characters you have control over, and you have specific objectives and character motivations to work through in your playthrough. In Fading Embers, the protagonist is Anja, a granddaugther of a local artist, who died shortly before the war, and who's collection of valuable art pieces Anja now looks over. As a whole, Fading Embers is focused on national cultural heritage and what it means to different people, and the whole point of this scenario, besides surviving, is preserving as much art as possible before you can get it to safety. And the game is pretty carefully balanced here, to the point where there are a lot of risks and conciderations, but you're not forced to act out of character. I really liked it, because while the base-game offered a lot of emotional gameplay, Fading Embers, and all other Stories, offered more context and a cast of believable characters to ease your immersion into this world.

And This War of Mine's biggest strenght is definitely it's immersivness. It does require you to turn on your empathy a little too much at times, but for what it's worth, this game is a unique and a powerfull experience when it works. And when it doesn't...well, I can forgive that.