When I started up Outcast: A New Beginning, I thought it was another remake of Outcast, the 1999 game beloved by those of us who still think of weird stucco-like peaks when we hear the word "voxels". I thought it was strange that they were doing another remake after Outcast: Second Contact (not to be confused with the remaster Outcast 1.1), but hey, we might be getting a second remake of Resident Evil 1 in the next few years. It turns out that A New Beginning is, in fact, a sequel, and it was originally titled Outcast 2 before being changed, presumably because they figured most people would not want to do homework by playing a 15-year old game.

I was under this impression until a few hours into the game, because early on, it sure seems like a remake. In short, Outcast is the closest thing to a Benjamin Sisko Simulator, wherein you play as a human guy on an alien planet, blessed by its extradimensional gods and designated as their divine savior. The general beats appeared the same, and I saw areas that looked like places in the first game. Eventually, it shows its hand and makes it very clear that this is some time after the first game, but your character, NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE, FROM THE MEAN STREETS OF CINCINNATI, has had his memories erased.

This is an interesting way of onboarding new players, as NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE is just as clueless about what's going on as you are. And you will be, because the Talan, native inhabitants of Adelpha, LOVE to talk to you about anything on their mind. They constantly use words of their language and, though there is a glossary you can pop up by pulling a trigger during conversations, for quite a while you'll just be going with the flow. Sure, the dolo-tai guardians got reverted before they could activate the daoka and now their haagen-dasz is in sankra. Whatever, dude.

This barrage of nonsense, along with the game's very strange tone (veering wildly between sardonic humor, outright silliness, and sincere sci-fi), doesn't make a good first impression. I was pretty iffy on it for a while, but eventually you unlock the two things that make the game really fun: Traversal options and weapon modules. You have a jetpack that can be upgraded, both to let you zoom around at high speeds and great height, and a Just Cause-style wingsuit to cover greater distances over the air. Your guns, a pistol and rifle, can both be customized with various modules that either alter stats or completely change their method of operation. Think Gunstar Heroes for the best comparison. Turn your pistol into a shotgun that heals when it kills enemies, or turn your rifle into a sniper rifle that attaches mines to enemies it shoots. You also unlock various melee moves that I didn't use much, but make it clear that somebody involved in this game's development really liked Vanquish.

So playing the game is fun, but what do you actually DO in Outcast? Talk to aliens, mostly. Your main goal for the majority of the game is freeing the 7 villages on this big-ass map from human control, so you do missions for them that often intersect. This place needs booze from this other place, and the booze village needs bombs from the desert village, and so on. It becomes a pretty interesting interconnected ecosystem, and many parts of it can be done out of order or without being directed to do so. I was just putzing around temples collecting tablets for no real reason, and then when I got to the mission that required them, NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE was just like "oh yeah I already have that." This sort of Emergent Questing can break sometimes, as I occasionally had a character talking about something that wasn't currently happening, but it's novel.

Outcast 2's biggest downfall is the shift in focus into an Open World Map Vomit game. I'm sure it's to make it more accessible to Gamers in general, but I don't think they're going to be getting a lot of new people in the door with this game's $70 price tag. The first game was a pretty unique action-adventure game, where you mostly focused on crippling the enemy's supply lines and weakening them, rather than powering yourself up, so 2 being dumbed-down is kind of a bummer. The quality of the activities in the game are variable: clearing bases and outposts are fine, because the combat is fun. Opening Essence Shrines to upgrade your max health is okay, as they have you follow a little ball around and the traversal is fun. Orym Trails, which are mostly the same thing, suck ass because there are 50 of them and they only give you a paltry amount of upgrade resource. Gork Eruptions are also fine, you just kill a few enemies near the Gork and then you collect the Gork to feed to The Gork. He's a weird guy in a cage, don't worry about it.

Outcast 2's SECOND biggest downfall is the performance. I would have rated this higher if not for the huge amount of glitches I saw during my playtime, as well as massive framerate problems. Within a few minutes, I switched to the 30fps mode because it was running anywhere between 30 and 60, with zero consistency, and it actually started to make me feel sick. The game also seems to have a memory leak or something, because during extended sessions it would start hitching more and more frequently, eventually hitching every time I jumped. Restarting the game fixed this, but yikes. Other glitches were all over the place, usually audio-related, but sometimes bouncy plants would be un-bounceable, making certain platforming challenges impossible. These were all fixed by just reloading a save, and you can save anywhere, so it wasn't a big deal. But this was on XSX, so I would say unless you have a really good PC that can brute force it into running well (because I doubt it's properly optimized on PC either) it's probably best to wait until the PS5 Pro comes out and play it there.

Your enjoyment of Outcast 2 will depend on how much you can tolerate this specific brand of jank. Personally, I don't mind it. It's not like Bethesda jank, where they're just too lazy to fix their shit that's been broken for decades. These are small, scrappy teams doing their best to realize their vision. Does this mean there are like 3 total models for the aliens, and some of them are voiced by the same people with comical "Witness Protection" pitch-shifting effects? Hell yes.

Get used to it, baby, this is all we're gonna have soon.

7/10

This was a weird era for shooters. They had progressed past the "boomer shooter" template, but in the wake of Half-Life, many developers didn't really know what to do if they wanted to create something focused purely on action. Returning to monke was viewed as unacceptable -- we're living in a Three-Dimensional World now, soldier, the People demand a Cinematic Experience. As a result, many shooters from 2000-2006 feel like they're being pulled between two extremes and tearing apart in the process. In a pre-CoD2 time, a select few games managed to straddle this dichotomy (F.E.A.R. is one such example, Return to Castle Wolfenstein another) but the vast majority are worse off because of this. Black is one of them.

Described as "gun porn" by the developers, in one of the earliest recorded examples of "Extreme Cringe," Black was meant to show off the Power of Firearms, make you feel like a God with an AK-47, raining destruction against any of those who dare stand in your way. In practice, it's an underwhelming shooter with worse gunplay than Goldeneye, except it makes you look at the guns a lot. Yes, it has detailed reloading animations. It also released in 2006, when this wasn't really impressive anymore. It's not the developers' fault that this came out couple of months after CoD2, a better game in (almost) every single respect... But it sure doesn't help. They want you to look at these guns. They REQUIRE that you look at the guns. Every time you switch weapons, you chamber a round for no reason. Every time you reload, an incredibly obnoxious depth-of-field effect obscures the rest of the screen (I think this game in particular is the reason I hate DoF and turn it off whenever possible).

Despite this, the guns. Feel. WEAK. Enemies can take an ungodly amount of damage before dying, which is probably why every gun's magazine holds about double the amount of ammo that it should. You can riddle a guy with bullets like he's Kenny and you're ED-209, and he'll eventually go down after expending half of your AK's 60-round mag. You have grenades, but your character has a wrist that would get you called slurs in PE. The prevailing tactic seems to be to shoot the copious red barrels and other explosive objects strewn around, rather than shooting at the enemies themselves. Those explosives, and the destructible environmental elements, also dry up pretty quickly into the meager 4 hour campaign. The game is also completely bloodless, adding to the lack of impact, which is extra strange. It feels like it's a T rated game in every respect except for guys yelling the Fuck Word on your radio.

The controls also suck, of course. It has a bizarre control scheme, naturally, because that wasn't standardized yet, but at least it's fully customizable. The strangest part is that you have "cycle weapon forward/backward" buttons despite only being able to hold 2 at a time anyway. The aiming is as bad as you would expect from a console shooter of this era where you click the right stick to zoom in (not ADS). It's easy to talk shit about Left Trigger, Right Trigger controls, but it's vastly superior to this crap that we were dealing with in the Before Times.

The one thing I will praise in Black is the audio. It's the sole saving grace. The guns do sound loud as shit, and the music (from Chris Tilton and Michael Giacchino, composer for Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow and director of Werewolf by Night) is excellent. Until BF Bad Company came along, this was the best guns had ever sounded in a video game. So they had that crown for 2 years.

After this, Criterion went back to making racing games, which they're actually good at. Developers of Black went over to Codemasters and made a spiritual sequel, Bodycount. I remember it being pretty average, which is at least better than Black. Contemporary reviews loved this game. I never understood why. At least now I was able to get some enjoyment from the ridiculously pretentious opening cutscene, which is simply credits in the lower left of a black screen.

If you have a hankering to play a mid-2000s shooter with a focus on bombastic gunplay and a prominently-featured SPAS-12, make the right decision:

Play F.E.A.R.

2/10

I've had Solar Ash sitting here installed on my xbox for probably... 2 years? Even though I liked the look of it, I didn't feel motivated to play it, as it's a sequel (? prequel?) to Hyper Light Drifter. I also liked the look of HLD, but it was an absolute snooze to play... And yet I was idly sifting through my installed games, saw this, and looked it up on HowLongToBeat. Yes, I'll play a 6 hour game!

If I had known that this was essentially Shadow of the Colossus + Outer Wilds + Rail grinding, I wouldn't have taken this long to try it. That's a recipe for Larry bait! You put that shit under a cardboard box being held up by a stick, and I'm gonna be trapped within 20 seconds!

The gameplay loop is pretty simple: You wander around little hubs, destroying goop by hitting weak points in quick succession, and each one killed reveals a weak point on a big monster roaming around the area. Once you've killed all the goops, you can kill the colossus. You grapple onto them and do the same thing, hitting the designated spots on the way to their main weak point, and if you're too slow you have to restart. On occasion this can be frustrating, mostly due to the camera whipping around like a maniac while zoomed out about 400 miles away from your character. It usually works fine. You don't have much wiggle room in most cases, but there's no real penalty for getting knocked off, as areas are full of health pickups. There are also small enemies scattered around, which are never more than minor annoyances. This is fine, I guess, as it avoids the Prince of Persia Problem™ for the most part.

A really weird mechanic that I don't quite understand is how you pick up Plasma throughout the game, which is used to increase your max health. Your max health also decreases by 1 every time you beat a colossus, for story reasons. By the halfway point, I had a huge stock of plasma so after every boss I just had to top up to max health again. It's kinda just strange busywork, and I'm not sure what the point of it is. It would make sense if you could use the plasma to upgrade other abilities or something, but nah, just max health. Alright.

Anyway, if you're doing to do a riff on SotC it's important to nail the Vibes. Solar Ash got it. While it doesn't feature the same desperate loneliness and total lack of anything approaching humanity as SotC, it's much more similar to a Souls game. Your character is part of a crew that was sent to collapse a black hole that's threatening a nearby planet, and everyone here is either dead or insane. Interactions with NPCs range from tragic to darkly comic, but all of them are pitiable in their own ways. The end "twist" can be seen coming from about... 5 minutes into the game, but who cares, it all looks cool.

8/10

I would say that this has me looking forward to Hyper Light Breaker, but upon further research I have found that it is apparently going to be a roguelike. So, uh... I'll always have Solar Ash.

Mercenaries holds a certain vaunted status among a very particular group of people. Remembered for its bombast and freedom, exemplified by its subtitle "Playground of Destruction," its main claim to fame was being able to call in vehicles, weapons, and airstrikes wherever you are. Helldivers 2 owes a lot to Mercenaries in that respect.

However, the part nobody wants to talk about is how obscenely dull the game is otherwise. Missions are the most boring "go here, plant C4, defend this point" slop imaginable, to the point where they almost feel like they were procedurally generated. Side activities are populated almost entirely by checkpoint "races." Environments are shockingly barren, gunplay feels bad, and it features the most insane crosshair placement I've seen in any game that doesn't have "Halo" in its title. This game feels like it was made by aliens. The dialogue is unnatural and the controls are completely batshit (you also drive vehicles by pressing A to accelerate and X to brake).

The thing is, you could look at all of this stuff, and how it's an original Xbox/PS2 game, and think, "oh, it's just a very early open world game."

This came out in 2005.

TWO THOUSAND AND FIVE. The same year Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory came out. Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay had been out for a year. For more apples-to-apples comparisons, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction also released in 2005, and GTA San Andreas had come out a few months earlier. The Xbox 360 would arrive in November of 2005. This is just straight-up embarrassing.

Mercenaries did have one interesting concept, with the "Deck of 52" system. There were 52 enemies that were "high value targets" and could be captured to get extra money. It was sort of the precursor to the Nemesis system from the Mordor games, in a way, but most of them don't really stand out, and they're essentially just another collectible.

The legacy of Mercenaries, or at least the idealized version of what it represented, would thankfully be carried on by the Just Cause series, the worst entry in which is still far more fun to play than this. There was a Mercenaries 2, released in 2008, and I remember liking it. It was completely busted, and got a lot of flack for that, but I still remember it being much more enjoyable than the first game's utter slog.

3/10

thank you phil spencor for letting me play this shit game in 4k resolution on my x box series x you are a great man dedicated gtoo game presvertaion and i like thatyou wor e a bttletoads shirtgbnnnnn

Not feeling it. I've generally liked Vanillaware's output, but Unicorn Overlord has been boring me to tears. The one thing you can usually always count on in their games is inventive visuals, and yet this is nothing but the most Generic Fantasy you can imagine.

Switching from an almost entirely narrative-based game, 13 Sentinels, to one where the narrative seems to be an afterthought at best might work if the story had any interesting hooks whatsoever. The battles seem fine, I guess, but there's nothing in here that compels me to press on. Oh boy, more knights rambling on in faux Olde Timey talk, giving me flashbacks to the drudgery of Final Fantasy Tactics. No thanks.

Biggest disappointment of 2024, even if I only found out it existed a couple of months ago. Not enough huge jugs, either.

It finally happened! Almost an entire decade after Rocksteady released the execrable Arkham Knight, one of the worst games of the previous console generation, they're here with Suicide Squad. This is their comeback! An opportunity to restore their tarnished reputation, to be back in the good graces of Video Gamers worldwide, and-- Oh, oh whait wha oh shit. fuckl

[Note: I completed the main story and did a few of the missions after that. More on that later.]

Alright. You all know what the deal is here. This is a "live service," whatever the hell that actually means, looter-shooter. This caused a lot of backlash as soon as it was announced, and I'm here to say that it brings me no pleasure to tell you... It's good. In certain circumstances, anyway.

The game definitely makes a bad first impression. It begins with a pointless in media res segment, where you're forced to play as all 4 members of the Squad in sequence. The opening cutscenes feel awkward, like the rhythm is off. This becomes a lot better as you go, and I actually felt the characters were done pretty well. It's nice to have a proper King Shark for once.

The combat and traversal are fun, as long as you don't play as Harley Quinn. I mained Captain Boomerang, and he's incredibly engaging to use, once you figure out that the tutorial tells you how to play him wrong (don't teleport through the air, throw it at walls/floors then Dash to keep up speed). I was zipping around and blasting fools with shotguns throughout the entire game, and it never got old. Specifically, I appreciated that this game avoids the standard looter-shooter problem of making enemies damage sponges. King Shark is also pretty fun, as he has Hulk: Ultimate Destruction/Prototype style charge jumps. Deadshot has a jetpack, and is kinda boring, but functional. From achievement statistics, most people played as him. Unsurprising, but at that point if they're bored, it's on them.

Then you have Harley. She has a grapple and a sorta Spider-Man swing, but the grapple requires a ledge, and the swing has a long cooldown so you can usually only do 2 before having to land or grapple again. After trying her for a few missions, I refused to play as her anymore. There is probably some trick to making her not suck, but I never found it, and you're disincentivized to play multiple characters anyway. The ones you're not using do not gain any XP, for some reason. You would think they'd get maybe 25% of your total, to keep them from falling behind, but nope! Occasionally missions will mark a character as "psyched up", making them stronger and rewarding them with extra XP, and I switched to those characters when this happened. Still, at the end, when Boomer was level 30 (max), Deadshot and King Shark were around 10 and Harley was at 7 or so.

So here's the main issue. Completing the campaign results in a sorta non-ending, with an admonition to complete all these extra missions, repeating them over and over on higher difficulties, presumably to unlock the True Ending. And I'm not doing that shit. I suppose this is the "Live Service" aspect, as it is attempting to be a Forever Game, while we all know the servers for this are going to be shut off in a year. Until that point, it's really just a standard open-world game. Yes, it requires being online, ostensibly, but several times I just jumped back into the game from Quick Resume on the XSX, which usually disconnects online games, and it still worked. You can also pause the game at any time, which is nice.

A quick note on performance: Not good. It's kinda all over the place, but I will give it a bit of slack because there's often a whole bunch of bullshit exploding everywhere. I don't think it ever dropped to sub-30 FPS, but it definitely came close a few times.

I was fully prepared to give this a 7/10 until I reached the end and its Hamster Wheel of Mediocrity. So, unfortunately, I gotta drop this down to a 6. As long as you play as the true hero of Metropolis, Digger Harkness. Or Nanaue.

5 if you play Deadshot and 4 if you play Harley.

A Mercenaries-like game with the movement and shooting of MGSV, all in service of a persistent galactic war against Starship Troopers-style bugs and Terminators? Yes, please! More Jello, mom!

I'm not sure exactly how we got here from the top-down Helldivers 1, which I found to be fairly rote, with the emphasis on friendly fire being more frustrating than funny due to its perspective. When the trailer for this came out, it gave me flashbacks to Risk of Rain 2, one of the worst games I've played in recent memory. Thankfully, Arrowhead actually put some time into learning how third-person shooters work, and the gameplay loop is satisfying...

As long as you're using the right equipment.

See, the number one problem with the game now is balancing. There are like 3 actually viable weapons, and 4 or 5 viable stratagems (supply drops summoned by inputting a dpad code like you're playing DDR, and they can be extra weapons, like anti-tank rockets, emplacements/sentries, or artillery bombardments) at the time of writing. Most are useless at higher difficulties. Many of the stats shown on weapons and items are outright false.

This isn't a huge deal, as I'm sure it'll be fixed soon, now that they've ironed out the server issues that plagued the game at launch, and it is an entirely PvE game anyway. But it does go against the "use what you think is fun" mantra when I'm basically forced to use a Breaker and Railgun because the higher difficulties spam giant armored bugs at you and armor penetration doesn't seem entirely functional. I do find the Robutts much more fun to fight, anyway.

I'm having a great time with this. It seems there's much more that will be added soon, including mechs, and I'm interested to see where this goes considering the ongoing storyline aspect of it.

[DISCLAIMER: I have only played this with random people, with voice chat off. Sony's insistence on enabling the Dualsense mic by default, with little notification to the player, always results in a ton of godawful noise if you have voice chat on. Also, the only person I know that would play this with me refuses to buy it because he's busy with Crisis On Infinite Aeriths. I'm out here spreading Democracy by myself. And I'm loving every minute of it.

UPDATE: Score (8/10) removed because the recent patch has completely fucked things up. Will update this and add rating again when the dust settles because this might be another Evil Dead situation.

UPDATE 4/30/24 - Settling on a 5/10 for now, as the developers continually tinker with things, often making them worse. Maybe instead of releasing a new battle pass that has One useful item in it every month they should focus on fixing the goddamn bugs that only get more prevalent with every patch.

Combat has been somewhat improved from the first game, but this is still an absolute slog. After heading to Dondoko Island and having a good time turning it into a 5-star resort, I came crashing back down when I returned to Hawaii and realized I still have like 60 hours of this bull shit left.

The wacky substories are fun as ever, but the main plot is legitimately the worst in Yakuza history. It's nothing but a bizarre series of sitcom-like coincidences strung together, with Ichiban already Flanderized in his second starring appearance. Kazuma got cancer because a forklift crashed into some radioactive waste? WHAT the FUCK are you TALKING ABOUT?!?!?

Anyway, I decided to do all the Sujimon stuff instead, and once that was finished, put this thing away so I can play a JRPG from people who know what they're doing.

Marked as "shelved" because I might buy this when it's 10 dollars in about 6 months and try to finish it. Unlikely, though. I am looking forward to either Akiyama Gaiden or Judgment 3: Kaito Goes Coconuts. Please, God, save me from these terrible Yakuza RPGs.

4/10. 1 point is for Dondoko Island, where you can give alcohol to children. Another point is for the Sujimon League, and the final two points are for Chitose's prominent jiggle physics.

For whatever reason, it is apparently a long-standing tradition that Prince of Persia games, despite being mostly known and well-regarded for platforming, must feature combat. From the very first game, it's been an aspect shoehorned in that is always to the game's detriment. At best, it's simply There and unobtrusive (Two Thrones, '08) and at worst, there's way too much of it and it's not fun anyway (Warrior Within). This one goes in the "at worst" pile.

The Lost Crown takes heavy inspiration from character-action games, with launchers, midair combos, parries, etc. It's not a terrible idea, except that by filling every area full of ass holes that are constantly shooting things at you from offscreen, the already sometimes-tedious navigation is made even more irritating. It's bad enough that some areas have almost no fast travel points, forcing you to jump through mazes of spikes every time you want to go anywhere. The game also has the now-standard for the genre reverse difficulty curve, where early on enemies are damage sponges that delete your life bar in 2 hits, but by about a third through the game nothing poses a legitimate threat anymore.

This is interesting to me, because the game Lost Crown takes the most inspiration from is clearly Blasphemous. You can obtain a bunch of equippable amulets that function similarly to the figurines in Blasphemous (though dumbed-down and without the interesting synergies), it has health potions that refresh at save points, and bosses are often teleporting around and shooting lasers all over the damn place.

But The Lost Crown has one glaring issue in particular, and it's inexcusable for a search action game: exploration often feels like a waste of time. So many secret areas I found just led to dead ends with a couple of stupid-ass crystals in them. Oh boy! I can use these to upgrade amulets, except there are only 3 or 4 of them actually worth using. And they take several hundred crystals to upgrade, while most of these Secret Areas give you like... 30. You can get that many from killing 2 or 3 enemies. Sure, in Metroid you might just find a missile tank or something, but hey, at least then you can hold more missiles! These crystals stopped doing jack crap about halfway through the game! Or you might find a lame recolor skin after suffering through a particularly harrowing platforming sequence. Because everyone wants a lilac-colored Sargon, apparently. Every time this happened, it felt like the game had spat in my eye and kicked me in the nuts, and it really destroyed my enjoyment overall.

The platforming mostly works fine, though it can glitch out, like the rest of the game. In particular, air-dashing onto the corner of a ledge often makes Sargon get stuck on it for a second, jittering around like he's in Jacob's Ladder. Oh, and those other glitches? Be prepared for softlocks, missing geometry, Sargon floating around on the ground unable to jump, and more. This thing needed a bit longer in the oven.

The plot is pretty stupid. Sargon's fellow Immortals act like total dipshits for most of the game. I'm not sure why every PoP since Sands of Time has to be about Time, with the exception of the unfairly maligned 2008 reboot, but there is some cool stuff in here. There's a weird little old man who sounds like Richard Ayoade. That's neat.

I feel like people are cutting this game a lot of slack because it's a Ubisoft game that's not a 200 hour map-vomit clusterfuck. And, to its credit, it does have two great quality of life ideas that every game in the genre should have: the ability to take screenshots that then appear on the map, and indications of where nearby save stations are. It's too bad that everything else here misses the mark.

Hey, not everything can be as good as Touhou Luna Nights.

5/10