I tried. By god, I tried!

I've never enjoyed Mario RPG. As a kid, I found it simultaneously infuriating and tedious, and as an adult... My opinion hasn't changed.

You could say this is "baby's first JRPG" but I don't think it's even good for that, as even though most of it is brain-dead easy, it also features bizarre difficulty spikes, and starves you of MP early on. It's one of the most bizarrely balanced games I've ever seen. Also, you have to exhaust every character's dialogue like it's a damn Souls game, or you can miss essential items.

Thankfully, Nintendo took the elements of this that worked and made the excellent Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi games. So, I guess this gets one extra point for its influence and another extra point for the little dances the characters do on the level up screen.

4/10

P.S. sorry Geno fans but he sucks ass and always has. Generic nothing of a character. Mallow 4ever

An interesting experiment, as the Yakuza series hasn't had a DLC expansion like this before. It also feels like the setup for a contingency plan, in case they would have to abandon Yagami due to Talent Agency shenanigans and focus on Kaito instead. The counter-argument to that would be that this side-story (a Gaiden, if you will) wraps up Kaito's story. The counter-counter-argument to that is that Kiryu has had at least 3 endings to his story so far, and he's still around.

I found this a little underwhelming, partly because Judgment has its own identity, while The Kaito Files feels like a standard Yakuza game. Kaito's fighting styles are just Kiryu's Brawler and Beast modes from Y0 with a few new moves, and the plot contains almost all of the Yakuza stalwarts: shady CEOs involved in real estate fraud, running around Kamurocho with the child of a woman from your past, and climactic duels where both men cast off their shirts dramatically. The writer of this also definitely watched Breaking Bad.

It's still good, and the shorter length isn't really a detriment, though it does feel a bit less immersive as a result. It should have had its own business minigame about running Higashi's arcades.

8/10

When making a game where you spend a lot of time shooting at things, it's important that the shooting feels good. Most games seem to forget this, but it was apparently Teyon's #1 priority when making Robocop: Rogue City, perhaps the closest thing to a F.E.A.R. 1 successor... That I've played, anyway. Most firefights result in an absolutely insane amount of debris, sparks, dust, and human body parts flying in every direction. Despite using Murphy's iconic Auto-9 exclusively for 90% of the game, it never got boring as a result. The people don't need ray tracing, we need every environment to explode like it's the lobby in The Matrix!

Really, making a RoboCop game is a pretty hard thing to do. After all, he used One gun, and walked in the same manner and pace of an elderly man with severe constipation. Here, you can pick up guns dropped by enemies, though they're usually not worth using except for the grenade and rocket launchers, and you can upgrade the Auto-9 by inserting chips you find in OCP chests onto PCB boards that you get throughout the game. These can have effects ranging from turning it into a full-auto machine pistol (useless), splitting the bullets to make it more devastating in close quarters (situationally useful), to increased gore effects (essential). One time I shot a guy and all of his limbs flew off and left him looking like the Black Knight. That's worth a full star right there.

The game does somewhat break Robo-Canon by also giving Murph a dash move, as well as letting him "sprint", which is really more like a light jog. But (bangs gavel) I'll allow it! Considering the size of some of these maps, forcing the player to walk everywhere would be cruel and unusual punishment. Nobody would do that, right? Just as an aside, in my review of Terminator: Resistance, I had mentioned that the Terminator mode felt like a dry run for this game. I am happy to report that Robocop features the exact same grab/throw that they put in that Terminator mode. It is always funny.

Speaking of things carried over from Terminator, the basic structure here is the same: Go from your home base (the police station, in this case) to large hub levels that split into smaller areas for side quests, and then complete discrete linear levels before heading back. The immersive sim-like elements return, though I felt they were under-utilized here. I maxed out Psychology, but I never got a psych dialogue check after the first couple of missions. I only had one Engineering check, and it seemed like it made no difference. Most of your skills here are combat-based, so it's disappointing that the 2 or 3 that could give you alternate ways to complete objectives went almost entirely unused.

Branching story paths return, and I found those to be executed better than in Terminator. The mayoral race that you can influence doesn't matter much, but you have 3 or 4 long-running questlines with side characters. Plot-wise, this takes place "between RoboCop 2 and 3," according to Teyon, probably for licensing reasons, because this feels more like a finale. There are references to the Kanemitsu Corp, but it also retcons several things about 3. The main villain is the supposed brother of Emil Antonowsky, who was last seen melting before getting splattered by a car. Wendell, a very funny name for a villain, looks like Alan Rickman dressed in RE8 Chris Redfield's outfit. And hey, you're never gonna believe this, but OCP is up to some shady shit!

The game features the likenesses of Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, and Robert DoQui (Sgt. Reed), with Weller also providing his voice. He does a great job, sounding like no time has passed since he shot Robocop 2. He injects the sometimes-flat writing with the sort of dry, deadpan humor that Robocop requires. The rest of the voice acting is... Variable.

Alright, tech time: playing on PS5, performance mode was... Mostly okay. In larger areas, in big firefights, it could drop pretty severely, and in a couple of areas, with a LOT going on, I had hard crashes. However, it looks good, if blurry due to -- you guessed it! -- temporal AA and upscaling. The checkerboard upscaling is hella aggressive as well, as you can see the artifacting every time the camera cuts during conversations. In gameplay, it's not too bad. Apparently the XSX version is more stable, but I went with PS5 because I assumed they had more experience developing for PS. Xbox having the edge seems to be occurring more frequently now, though, so maybe the tide is turning...

If you're a big fan of RoboCop 1 and 2, as I am, I absolutely recommend Rogue City. Even if you're not, you can probably have some fun blasting Nuke-heads into tiny pieces and decorating walls with their guts. They didn't come quietly, so there was...

Trouble.

8/10

Worse than the first game, and not nearly as good as Miles Morales.

Gameplay here is mostly untouched from MM. It's fine, I guess. The story is where it really shits the bed. It spends the majority of its runtime spinning its wheels with Kraven's story. Kraven shows up in New Yawk (Greatest City In Da World Baybee Let's Go Mets Love Da Mets) and starts hunting supervillains. He's after Big Game: Scorpion. Rhino. Vulture. Black Cat. A Chinese guy. During all of this, we're introduced to Peter's best friend Harry Osborn, who was absent during the first game. It results in a relationship that feels forced, which isn't exactly helped by the fact that nobody looks like they did in the first game anymore. Peter is some sort of malformed Tom Holland with a hockey goon neck, MJ is now played by Connie Britton, and Harry is about to croon the Wii Shop titles to a bossa nova beat.

In the first game, alongside the major arcs of Doc Ock and Mr Negative, Peter at least faced off against most of the members of the Sinister Six. Iconic Spidey villains. Here, you're mostly beating up waves of faceless goons, because in this universe Kraven isn't a badass hunter, taking on dangerous prey solo in the Concrete Jungle... He brings a whole army with him. Pretty dumb, if you ask me. The character himself is played well, but I feel like that's a pretty substantial misreading of Kraven's entire character.

Speaking of things that seem like the antithesis of what people enjoy, I cannot stand that they added gliding in here. Swinging around is the most fun part of these games, and inserting a mechanic that lets you entirely bypass that is so wrong-headed that I can't understand how it made it into the final product. At worst, I feel like it's the sort of "toyetic" type of bullshit that would result in the Spider-Mobile, or the 4 million costume changes in Hack Fraud Dan Slott's run. At best, it's simply an acquiescence to the absolute nimrods who can't figure out how to use point launches and web zips to navigate areas without tall buildings. I never used it unless the game made me.

The side missions are also total chores. They're all a bunch of maudlin, weepy, emotionally manipulative bullshit that feels like they were written by a middle aged guy who just watched Jurassic Bark. The diversity also does feel pandering at points. I like Hailey as a character, but giving her a side mission where they show you that deaf people see emotions floating over other peoples heads like Sims was embarrassing.

Anyway, when the Symbiote stuff actually starts, about 3/4 into the game, it gets pretty good. But hey, too little, too late. I would like to give a shoutout to the always-great Tony Todd, who voices Venom, and does a fantastic job. He sounds like I always imagined Venom would sound when I read the comics. Did you know he was the adult Jake Sisko in the Star Track: Deep Space Nine episode "The Visitor"? Now you do!

There has been a trend with Sony's first-party games feeling like DLC expansions to the previous games in their series. Even when I really like them, like GOW Ragnarok, it's hard to shake the feeling that there's nothing particularly "current-gen" about it. That was somewhat excusable before, but 3 years into the current gen, aping their own portal tech from Ratchet and Clank doesn't really cut it.

Now-obligatory TAA report: It's here, of course, and it blurs everything, of course. What did you expect? MSAA? Hahahah. C'mon. This isn't a Yakuza game.

I am interested in the setup for Spiders 3, which is about as predictable as possible, but I really hope we see a leap forward with Wolverine. Or they could make another Ratchet and Clank. I would prefer that.

5/10

Mario is BACK! Nintendo is BACK! In the midst of the final dying gasps of their accursed Switch, they've decided to make good games again!

There isn't really a whole lot to say here, honestly, but that's a good thing. Rock-solid 2d platforming at 60fps, with a very pleasing, clean aesthetic. I hadn't expected the Wonder Flower aspect to be as prevalent as it is, either. There's some wacky gimmick in every level, and it keeps things feeling fresh all the way through.

The badge system mostly functions as a handicap, and I think if you're familiar with platforming games you're better off not using them except when necessary, as they can trivialize many areas when the game doesn't provide a lot of challenge to begin with.

Minor complaints: the "Search Party" levels are awful, but there are only 4 or 5 of them. The talking flowers can also be grating. It's fine when they comment on what's actually happening, and those can be pretty funny, but I don't need to hear them repeat "HI!" and "I BELIEVE IN YOU" or their many variations on "well, THAT just happened!!!".

Excellent game, and so far frontrunner for my GOTY. But it's about to get some stiff competition...

CI shoving Deck 13 (the only developer so far who has understood how to actually make a soulslike) off to create a generic action-RPG and handing this over to some new studio is one of the most baffling decisions possible.

This has some interesting ideas, at least, which puts it above copy-pasted "I saw a thing from Bloodborne and I clapped" slop like Lies of Peepee Poopoo, but the actual gameplay is worse. The dual worlds gimmick is cool, but tedious in practice (as it almost always is), and that's true of many of its innovations. The ability to place your own "bonfires" with limited resources is interesting, but often feels mandatory as otherwise there are very long stretches with no rest points. Fromsoft eventually figured out that boss runs are annoying as hell, and fixed that in Elden Ring, but they're in full effect here.

Bosses are fairly underwhelming, too. Most of the challenge here actually comes from the huge amounts of enemies ganking you while others fire ranged attacks at your dumb ass. Bosses are relatively slow, with attacks that are easy to parry. Speaking of, what the hell's up with this whole "blocking causes chip damage that's recovered by damaging the enemy" thing? It was in Lies of Penis too, which is a strange coincidence.

By the way, add this to the pile of console games that look terrible due to temporal anti-aliasing. I swear to christ, whoever invented this awful shit that turns every game into a blurry, smeary mess is going in the Contraption when I'm in power. Performance was adequate, about the same as Elden Ring was on PS5.

Anyway, one of the default classes is a "warwolf" which gives this an extra half star.

Please come back, Deck 13. We desperately need a Surge 3.

4/10

They did it. After 6 years (has it ONLY been 6??) of obscenely long games, they made a new Assassin's Creed that can be completed by people who aren't suffering from crippling depression. A nice 20-hour full completion. That's the stuff!

The game? It's alright! A throwback to the first one (still one of the best, if you ask me), it retains a few elements of the Origins Era games: You have your scouting eagle, and a few too many unnecessary equipment slots. There are numbers on your swords and daggers, but they don't really matter much, and you're not picking up loot anyway. There are skill trees, but they contain about 20 skills total instead of the absolutely insane, byzantine webs of Odyssey and Valhalla. It also retains Valhalla's strange obsession with barred doors/windows, and throwing objects through gaps to open them.

Most interesting is how it's janky in almost exactly the same ways as the original games. The platforming can be just as clunky as in 1/2/Bro, when Origins had mostly solved that and featured a marked increase in fluidity. This is probably a result of making the climbing more deliberate again, as opposed to "hold up and A" that the accursed Revelations introduced via its Hookblade (remember -- the hookblade consists of two parts: the hook, and the blade). It still works pretty well overall, but there were definitely parts where I was wondering what in the holy fuck Basim was doing.

The throwbacks to AC1 don't end with the traversal, either. Throwing knives are still insanely OP. Guards are still complete idiots who won't notice if you stab someone 2 feet to their left. You can still hide in hay bales or... Whatever those booth things are, whistle at guards, and kill them one by one, stuffing that cart full of so many bodies that you could smell it from a mile away. All of these things are stupid in a way that I enjoy.

Basim's story is fine. You're out to kill the Order of the Ancients, which I guess are a precursor to the Templars, or an allied faction, or something. You are mentored by an Assassin voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo, who has always had a distinctive, gravelly voice, but in 2023 she sounds like the AI from Godard's Alphaville. You investigate the various members of the Order, and can do so with a surprising degree of freedom, and work your way to the Big Cheese. Progression is gated by certain events, but it's essentially divided into halves, and you can go back and forth between investigation targets at your leisure.

Anyway, at the end, it links into the overall Assassin's Creed Lore, whatever the hell that is at this point. I've completely lost track of it, and I don't even know what happened here. There are no modern day segments, but there are holograms of ancient aliems, and Basim's dreams being haunted by some stupid fuckin mummy that's also related to them, I guess, and then you get a [MOVIE TITLE REDACTED] montage at the end for something that was hilariously obvious.

It don't matter. None of that matters.

Quick note on performance: On XSX, there were mild frame pacing issues throughout most of the game. It wasn't enough to be a major problem, except in a few places: there are some areas where the game outright chugs. It seemed like it happened mostly in more complex indoor areas, oddly, but for whatever reason, Damascus Prison and especially the Postal Bureau were slideshows at points. I heard the Postal Bureau played their whole album at Riot Fest, by the way.

If you've been missing the old AssCreeds, something that I'm sure none of us thought would happen during the dog days of Unity and Syndicate, Mirage is for you! It's hard to believe the series is only 15 years old, because it feels like an eternity since I heard some underpaid voice actor screaming "MAHNEY, MAHNEY, MAHNEYYYY". I hope that guy's doing fine, wherever he is.

7/10

I'm not a huge fan of how Netherrealms' games play. The focus on dial-a-combos makes them often feel sluggish and unresponsive, made worse by the historically bad "feet planted, leaning and swiping" animations. NR has been improving both of these substantially over their past few games, and I gotta say, MK1 feels pretty good!

It's still reliant on those damn combos, unfortunately, but it feels like you can link more regular moves together than you could previously. I'm not a fighting game expert though, damn sure not part of the "FGC", and hopefully I never will be. But to me, a layman, the person these games are ostensibly aimed toward, it's a massive improvement.

Anyway, on to the main reason to play NR games: the single-player content. Unlike Capcom, who view it as an afterthought most of the time (and, when actually attempting a substantial SP mode, create absolute dogshit like SF6's godawful World Tour mode), Ed Boon n Crew always make sure to have a campaign plus a lil extra in store for those of us who do not have any interest in getting our shit pushed in by a hyper-caffeinated 16 year old from Brazil. MK1's campaign, in my estimation, is the best they've ever done.

There are people who don't like the last act of it. To those people, I ask: Are you stupid? Were you unaware of the very concept of this game? Because, to me, in a game (and series, at this point) entirely about timeline fuckery, it makes total sense. They shouldn't do it again, but it's fine here.

Beyond the cinematic campaign, there's an Invasions mode that's a little bit like the single player in Soul Calibur. You move around areas in a board game fashion and have various encounters on each "space". It's fine, and much better than the randomly-generated Multiverse/Tower of Time stuff from mk11 and ij2. The Seasonal aspect of it is strange to me, though. For example, right now, all the seasonal skins are yellow and orange. Why would I want those for most characters, in a series where almost everyone is color-coded? Sub-Zero can't be orange, you freaks! How dare you?!

I will also say that the roster is pretty lackluster. I think making a ""reboot"" and relegating Sonya, Jax, and Kano to "kameo" assist characters is pretty shitty, while snoozefests like Reiko, Nitara, and Ashara are fully playable. But hey, don't worry, buy the Kombat Pack to get two evil Supermans!

I played some of the first Blasphemous, a game that's part search action and part soulslike, but not really committing to either. I found it directionless and lost interest fairly quickly.

Blasphemous 2 decided to go (almost) full Troid, and it's a far better game for it.

There are still minor Souls elements, though it can be argued (and I will!) that Souls games themselves aren't too far from search action games to begin with. It's really most apparent here with the healing flasks, and the various somewhat obtuse side quests you can find.

A neat twist on the familiar formula is that your weapons are what gate your progress for the first half the game, and you choose which one you want at the beginning, which will completely change your routing early on. It gives the game some nice replay value in that respect. I started with the big ball and chain, because it had a similar feel to a Casslebania whip, and I never switched off of it except when necessary. Combat feels fine, though sometimes enemies can stunlock you and it feels cheap. Those skelly-men with the candelabras are ass holes.

This becomes less of an issue as you progress, as it also features the classic SOTN inverse difficulty curve. By the end, if you're playing this Correctly, you're going to breeze through most of the bosses, with the exception of the second-to-last one, who's relatively tough. He took me a few tries, but it was mostly just annoying because he has an unskippable cutscene between phases. The last boss is piss-easy. I guess that's a Souls tradition.

A mechanic I really liked is that, in addition to rosary beads that increase your resistance to various elements, you have an "altarpiece" apparently worn on your character's back, and you collect figurines to place into it. These offer various expected buffs, but can also sync together if put in specific configurations to create unique effects, like stopping time when you use a healing flask.

Of course, I have to mention the game's art, which is incredible across the board. Some of the best pixel art I've ever seen, with lovingly detailed and gruesome death animations for every enemy type. My favorite one is the old witches, who after being clubbed to death, are torn apart by their own ravens for some reason. I also think it's really funny how the healing flask use animation is your character smashing it into his face. I guess that's on-brand.

By the way, I have absolutely no idea what's happening in the story of this game. It seems to assume you played through the first one and are deeply familiar with its Lore, because it has zero interest in explaining a single thing. Something about a Miracle, which I gathered was a Bad Thing like the eclipse in Berserk, or... I dunno. It don't matter. I'm not here to get theological, I'm just here to club skellingtons. And let me tell you, I clubbed HELLA skellingtons.

8/10

Hey, do you remember Jet Set Radio Future?

The folks at Team Reptile certainly do, that's for sure. The concept of "fine, we'll make our own -ABANDONED GAME FRANCHISE-, with blackjack, and hookers!" is a very risky proposition. Sometimes the new game can surpass its inspirations (Stardew Valley), and sometimes it falls flat on its fuckin' arse (Mighty No. 9). It's a fragile balancing act, as you want the new game to be reminiscent of the original, without being a carbon-copy ripoff. It should add some new mechanics or twists on the familiar formula, but not so much that it becomes unrecognizable.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, impressively, manages to contain the worst of both worlds.

In many respects, it's creatively bankrupt. Almost every area I entered resulted in me muttering, "oh, cmon..." because they're instantly recognizable as "we have JSRF at home." Versum Hill is Dogenzaka Hill, Brink Terminal is Shibuya Terminal, Mataan is a combination of Highway Zero and Benten-Cho, etc. Even your gang's hideout is damn near identical to the hideout in JSRF. However, these areas also look significantly worse than JSRF's due to how sparsely populated they are. They're far less dense to begin with, but also suffer from a bizarrely short draw distance that makes them look even worse. Sure, you can see a few people scattered around, often in cute little diorama-esque poses that reminded me of Katamari Damacy, but you can only see them when you get within like 20 feet of them. This feeling of lifelessness is made even worse by the lack of voice acting. Most of the characters have short "yeah." or "uhh" clips when they talk, and that's fine, but the absence of DJ Professor K type figure is very apparent. You get cutscenes introducing gangs or saying what's happening in the city, like the ones he would narrate, but with no voice they all fall flat.

On the flipside, everything new here actively makes the game worse. Instead of solely inline skates, you can traverse via skateboard or BMX. In general gameplay, this makes absolutely no difference. All 3 handle the same, and their only purpose is to get you into certain areas that require one of the three. This just means going back to one of the very sparingly-placed spots where you can switch characters (not marked on the map, by the way, and neither are fast-travel points) and backtracking over there, because sliding on skates can break glass floors, skateboards can grind on little fire hydrant things to raise them, and bikes can... open doors by standing in front of them. None of this is ever explained in-game, by the way. I think I was 90% done before I was aware of the skateboard thing.

Another major change is the graffiti system. Rather than being presented with motions you have to complete to throw up tags, you just do whatever you want. The motions you make determine what tag appears, but it's entirely cosmetic except for one achievement that requires unique tags in a level. That achievement is also bugged, by the way. Anyway, this also removes pretty much the only source of challenge that was present in JSRF. Spraying was The Game, and collecting paint cans so you would have enough when you reached the tag spot was pretty much the entire point. Now you have unlimited paint. You can paint the same spot over and over if you want. Who cares. Technically, it is possible to fail the tagging minigame, as there is a meter in the bottom left that depletes during it, but it's so slow that it's never going to happen. After all, for the aforementioned reason, you can just waggle the stick around with wild abandon and it makes absolutely no difference.

But hey, maybe they made tagging completely braindead because they had the INCREDIBLE idea to make cops even more annoying than they were in the games they're ripping off! And, even better, they added combat!!! For real, whoever came up with this idea is going in The Contraption and I will feel no remorse. Your character just kinda does some breakdance moves in the cops' general vicinity and then they get knocked away. There's zero sense of impact. You can hit them, jump, and do a tag minigame to, I think, do more damage to them, but it doesn't matter. You're better off simply ignoring them, because once the cops have showed up, they're not leaving. Pretty much every tag you do will raise your heat meter another level, accompanied by a cutscene showing you the Tools of the State coming to kill your ass and plant fentanyl on your corpse. You can clear your heat by going into a port-a-potty (guess what: not marked on the map!) but if you haven't finished an area it's pretty pointless because they're going to be on you again immediately.

But okay. Time for the positives: there are a couple of areas that I think Team Reptile did a good job. The character designs, when they're not aping JSRF yet again (Bel is Gum, Rave is Garam, etc), are pretty good. The story is decent, and I particularly liked the dream sequences. They're platforming levels in a surreal floating environment in the middle of a swirly void, echoing the final boss of JSRF. The gangs are another highlight. They're the only place that BRC approaches JSRF, with groups like The Franks (a gang of b-ballin' frankingsteins), Eclipse (hot ladies into astrology), and Demon Theory (guys dressed like oni).

The soundtrack is pretty good, too. There are a couple of tracks I found very annoying (I never want to hear Precious Thing or Hair Dun Nails Dun ever again), and for some reason there is no option to create playlists or mute certain songs, but for the most part it's a great selection.

That's about it! Finally, adding insult to injury, they announced a physical version abouuuut 2 weeks after the "digital-only" release. Normally this would really piss me off, but I guess I'm okay with it because there's no way in hell I'm going to buy this again. I want a Fresh Experience, not warmed-up leftovers. Somehow, Sunset Overdrive remains the most faithful successor to Jet Set Radio. Now, on to Lies of P...