Figure this would be as good a time as ever to make an updated “then vs now” review of Sonic Frontiers since the final batch of DLC has finally been released. Truth be told, my overall thoughts have fluctuated on this game, but only ever so slightly. It basically went from an 8.5/10, to an 8/10, back to an 8.5/10 after the Final Horizon update. Not much has changed on that front. I didn’t mention this in my prior review but to my complete and utter surprise, the director of this game, Morio Kishimoto, had then recently (before the game’s release) created a Twitter account and had been regularly interacting with fans. Not only that, he had been regularly asking for fan feedback on what he can do to improve his product and work. Forget about this being Sonic for a sec, when has a situation like this occurred for any AAA game studio? Let alone one overseas? Of course, everyone bombarded him with the typical “it should be more like Sonic Utopia” schlock which…bleh. But nevertheless, there was some genuine advice for improvement people on Twitter tossed around for Frontiers and (eventually hopefully) future iterations of this “open zone” concept, whether it be aesthetics, mechanics, etc. If anything, I’m just really glad Frontiers has become extremely successful. Maybe not so much in terms of critical reception (it’s decent, sitting at 71 on Metacritic last time I checked but I also stopped caring about Metacritic scores as I’ve often vehemently disagreed with a vast majority of the scores given out, whether for games I hate or games I love) but more so in terms of awards won, sales (currently the best-selling 3D Sonic game of all time), fan reception, and most surprising of all, it helped boost Sonic’s already dwindling popularity in Japan, something that was a personal goal of Kishimoto. I’m just really glad to see him happy that his hard work payed off. I may not be a fan of all of Kishimoto’s work mind you (for every Frontiers and Colors, you get a Lost World and Forces), but I can’t deny he’s a very hard-working leader that genuinely cares about Sonic and strives to improve in everything he does. One Way Dream is emblematic of this. So, I guess it’s time to go over not only my current thoughts on the game now that the quote unquote Honeymoon phase is over, but also each of the individual updates as they came out and how they affected the game as a whole, as there has been quite a few quality of life improvements in regards to these 3 updates.

As for the game itself, I still really enjoy it. Running around the open zone area, chaining moves together to seamlessly leap between grind rails, hills and springs never got tiring. The obstacle courses themselves aren’t anything spectacular (at least in regards to the beginning of the game anyway) but they’re also incredibly bite sized and require at least a fair degree of player control over automation so they’re overall pretty enjoyable. I’ve even started to enjoy the Cyberspace stages to a degree. Like, don’t get me wrong, they still aren’t great and they have loads of problems, but like most Sonic games I guess the fun comes in the form of working around or flat out abusing the jank to blast through the stage as quickly as possible. Still would play Gens and Colors any day of the week over these. Unleashed uhh…depends on the stage I guess because some stages are actually way more fun in Cyberspace. Still think the story is easily the best we’ve had in terms of any of the games, and the soundtrack is still utterly incredible man. Tomoya Ohtani did a fantastic job on everything here, I can’t think of a single song on this soundtrack that I DIDN’T enjoy. Even the cutscene music is great. There are definitely a lot of problems and faults but overall, I still have a great time with this game and it’s still some of the most fun I’ve had with a 3D Sonic game in a long while. While I’m looking forward to what they end up doing with this formula in the future, the official Sonic twitter account (I know it’s called X now but let’s be real nobody is calling it that LOL) announced that Frontiers would get multiple waves of content updates. A lot of it sounded vague and uninteresting (what even would be “new Koco”? Would it literally just be Koco with new funny hats on and that would be it?) but the addition of different challenge modes and new playable characters?? I don’t think we’ve had playable characters with substantially different abilities from Sonic in a 3D game since 2006 (there was Black Knight but even then, not really). Of course, these were all free content updates so I kept my expectations relatively low because of this, but to my surprise these free updates ended up offering WAY more substantial content than I ever could’ve known. Buckle down if you wanna keep reading because this review is gonna be a LOOOOOONG one:

We’ll start with the first update, the lightest one content wise. We got a photo mode, Juke Box, a Battle Rush mode, and a Cyberspace challenge mode alongside a slew of quality of life improvements that I’ll get to in a bit. The photo mode is…meh. Nothing special, but functional; does what it needs to do and that’s really about all I can say about it. From the teaser it made it look like we could have Sonic emote and pose like the Spiderman 2018 photo mode which would be incredibly funny if that were the case, but sadly we don’t get that. We get a few filters and a weirdly kinda restrictive camera, but despite that I’ve seen some really great pictures taken using this feature so I guess at the end of the day it works fine enough. The Cyberspace challenge mode and Battle Rush mode are where the true content lies anyway. Cyberspace challenge is, more or less, exactly like how the Egg Shuttle functions in Sonic Colors: a massive gauntlet of all the Cyberspace stages back to back, trying to beat each of them as fast as possible. Like Egg Shuttle, it’s a fun little side thing to do that I felt the game always should’ve had from day 1 so I’m glad to see it return here. Battle Rush is also a big gauntlet, but this time against every single common enemy, mini boss, and Titan from each island. Due to how limited Frontiers’ combat is I didn’t get a lot out of this, but some enemies I had to figure a roundabout way to take them down quickly for a good rank. It’s also nice that it allows you to refight the Titans as this wasn’t something you could normally do in the base game. Each mode grants you a little bonus upon S ranking each: for Cyberspace Challenge mode, it unlocks the ability to Power Boost in Cyberspace. While this admittedly is pretty cool, I didn’t feel a huge difference using this as the Power Boost in Cyberspace is still a lot slower than it is in the Open Zone (as is the regular boost). Battle Rush S ranks unlock Extreme difficulty, a mode where you can’t upgrade your stats and everything kills you in one hit. It’s a novel idea (basically the equivalent of a DMC Hell and Hell mode for Sonic) but it’s still not really THAT challenging and you don’t even get any acknowledgement for beating it. No achievements, no cosmetics, nothing. Pretty underwhelming if you ask me.

Lastly, we have Juke Box mode. I didn’t really know what to expect from this mode, at most I just kinda expected a spot on the islands where you can listen to every piece of music from the game. To my surprise, this ended up being like Sonic Generations, where you unlock a slew of tracks from across the Sonic franchise and can play any one of them while roaming around the Open Zone areas. There are jukebox notes scattered around the islands much like the memory tokens and collecting one unlocks a random song. I think it’s really cool how they managed to implement exploration elements with a silly extra such as this, and it also makes areas like Rhea Island a little less desolate as now there’s a few hidden notes to collect outside of the giant towers. It does certainly change up the atmosphere whenever you play a song from a different game; Seven Rings in Hand in particular goes hard on Ares Island. Also, shout out for putting all the island movement themes to collect as well, so we can play any of our favorite movements on any island we want instead of being stuck on the 7th movement at all times. On top of all of this, there were also a slew of quality of life improvements: one of which being that they finally, FINALLY fixed Elder Koco. Now you can exchange all of the koco you’ve collected all at once and put them into either speed or ring capacity instead of needing to do it one at a time, thank GOD bro that was agony. They’ve also added a button combination to instantly restart Cyberspace levels which is a great feature, and they’ve also allowed us to turn off the Starfall slot machine entirely. I personally think you could still HAVE the slot machine in the game without making it obtrusively slapped into the center of the screen, but whatever I guess, glad they gave us the option. A lot of these were problems that many people criticized and I was kinda surprised they even added these options at all. It really did show that the team was listening to feedback, and given Kishimoto’s statements at the time, it seems we were gonna get a lot more in the next update. Overall this first update was WAY more than I thought it was gonna be to my utter delight. If this was the direction the updates were taking, then the next couple of updates were really going to be something to look forward to.

The next update, as expected was even beefier; adding even more quality of life changes, new challenges and even a brand-new ability, one that Kishimoto himself had been teasing for quite a while now. Might as well get the Sonic’s Birthday stuff out of the way first as it’s the least impactful part of the update, you basically have Sonic in goofy birthday attire and the entire Starfall Islands are decorated like that one Pepto Bismol Walt Disney World cake castle from 1996. Everywhere you go, wrapping paper, streamers, balloons, presents as far as the eye can see. The Koco you collect and your trapped friends still within the haunting confines of their digital prison take the time to put on a cute lil party hat or two. Even the HUD is infected with colorful birthday noise. It’s not something I care for personally but it is pretty funny to look at. The best part about this cosmetic update is that it comes with a new music track that’s essentially a DJ mix of a variety of different Sonic songs not found in the Jukebox update which is pretty cool. I always appreciate Neo Green Hill when I hear it. No, the true meat of the update begins with the Action Chain challenges. Essentially, scattered around the islands are these challenges you activate where the goal is to essentially do as many things as you possibly can within a time limit: engaging with springs, rails and the platforming around the island, battling enemies, doing tricks, collecting rings, all while collecting yellow orbs to boost your score multiplier. It’s a pretty interesting side mode to participate in, and while it is fun, I do have some issues with it. First off: there absolutely did not need to be 10 of these things on each island minus Rhea, that is BEYOND overkill and at times kinda turns these little side challenges into a chore if you wanna do them all. Second, fighting minibosses breaks these challenges in half. If you can build up a decent score multiplier and rush over to a guardian and kill it, it’s pretty much a guaranteed S rank. Still though, I did end up liking the addition and I hope if it comes back for future entries they find ways to improve and innovate off of it. Of course, the challenges themselves are one thing, but if you manage to S rank all of them on every island, you unlock the Spindash. This is something that Kishimoto had teased for quite a while, we even found some leftover data that revealed in game tips about the Spindash back in update 1. Now that we finally have it, uh…I can definitely see why they locked this move behind S ranking all the Action Chain challenges because HOO boy.

The Spindash is completely bonkers broken in Frontiers. It’s like a mix between SA1’s Spindash (in terms of how high and far you can launch yourself with it) and Lost World’s Spindash (where it’s more of a second form of boost in a way). Essentially, it’s like the boost already in Frontiers, just objectively better in every way. It’s just as maneuverable with the ultra-tight turning Frontiers already has, it goes just as fast (if not faster), you can use it whenever you want while moving or standing still (you don’t even have to rev it up if you don’t want to), it has a hitbox and damages enemies, it consumes the boost gauge just like the boost, and the biggest feature of all? You aren’t constantly glued to the ground at all times. When you use the Spindash, you absolutely LAUNCH off of inclines and ramps. You get so much airtime and distance with this thing it’s borderline ridiculous. Now, normally I’m not really that engaged with the whole “fly through like half the stage by going off a ramp” mentality, but I feel it works here for a couple of reasons. Reason 1 is that being glued to the ground at all times was kind of a big problem Frontiers had in general and reaching things like memory tokens in unintended ways is pretty amusing. Reason 2 is that this is essentially an endgame unlockable: something you don’t have equipped by default and something you have to put the work into getting. As a crazy game breaking toy that the game essentially goes “ok you’ve won, have fun now”, I think I can allow it. The quality of life improvements further enhanced this by allowing a slider for air deacceleration and no deacceleration when boosting through the air. While I think this is fun to play around with, this sadly only applies to boost jumps and not your regular jump, which means moves like the drop dash are still affected and jumping after hitting a dash pad still kills your speed. Honestly, and this can apply for the next game too, all I want is the equivalent of the short hop from Gens, Colors, and Unleashed. The ability to keep your speed while lightly jumping to clear small gaps feels immeasurably good to pull off, I dunno why they ever got rid of this ability to begin with.

The final “big” addition this update introduced are the new Koco. Like I said before, I didn’t’ really know what to expect when this feature was teased because…well, what was I even SUPPOSED to think? They gave us nothing to work with at all. However, to my utter shock, these new Koco ended up being the best part of all of update 2. Yeah, INCLUDING the Spindash. These new Koco are big bois with fancy getup and costumes, and when you collect them and turn them into the Elder Koco, it expands your boost gauge stamina. While this feature is kinda negated by just cylooping an infinity symbol and having temporary infinite boost, it’s still a cool upgrade that I’m surprised they didn’t already put into the game prior. That’s not even the best part though, as to get to these Koco, you need to complete the huge platforming challenge tied to them, similar to the platforming challenges already scattered around the island. The difference being that these platforming challenges are way harder to clear in comparison. Some are a reaction-based test, some have tricky moving platforms over the edge of the map, some are miniature puzzles in a way that you need to figure out to progress, some have massive wall running sections with tons of spiked balls and hazards to avoid with strict timing. I had a REALLY fun time acing these, in fact I found them so fun I often ended up going through them again even after I collected the Koco. IMO this is honestly how the platforming challenges should’ve been throughout the game, or at the very least they should’ve thrown them in there from the start and mix them with the ones already in the game. I love a good challenge and while I didn’t find these hard or anything, they definitely had me engaged throughout. Easily the best part of the new update. Aside from the air deacceleration, the only other QOL changes they added were actually also pretty substantial. You got things like disabling the cinematic camera for your skill tree moves, which I didn’t really mind so I kept them on, but then you have the ability to disable the music distortion when boosting in the Cyberspace stages which I was super happy to see added (which, by the way, was a suggestion I offered to a Sonic affiliated person on Twitter back when update 1 dropped. You’re welcome 😉). They also added an island progression screen, showcasing everything you’ve completed on each island and what % you have that specific island complete. It counts everything, from side stories, island puzzles, Cyberspace portals, and yes, even memory tokens. It’s essentially something only added for 100% completion nuts such as myself, and as I’ve already 100%ed everything prior, seeing those completion screens light up was truly worthwhile. What’s more, if you do end up 100%ing every island, you even get a special cosmetic reward for doing so (Sonic gets a crown. That’s about it. It’s literally exactly like Kingdom Hearts and I love it for that)! The extent to how beefy update 2 was, even in comparison to update 1 was nothing short of impressive. All that was left was the final content update, later dubbed “The Final Horizon”. All that was left to do was wait.

And so now here we are, the third and final major content update for Sonic Frontiers. Might as well start talking about the DLC of which this entire Backloggd page is about, right? This DLC is a major rehaul of all of Ouranos Island, as many felt the ending to Frontiers was lackluster and rushed (which I certainly do agree). This update content wise is absolutely monstrous. If you thought the previous 2 updates were content packed, you haven’t seen ANYTHING yet my friend. This DLC, on average, took me about 10 hours to beat, roughly 15 (give or take) to fully 100% it. The fact that this content update (which, I must reiterate, is 100% free btw) managed to be WAY longer in length than freaking Sonic Forces, a paid 3D Sonic game, is mind boggling. There’s so much to do and talk about that I should probably break down the different topics in order from what I feel is the most important downwards. Let’s start with the new playable characters: again, considering this was a free content update I didn’t expect much from them, I mostly just kinda expected a reskinned Sonic with some new moves sprinkled here and there, but no, they did it. They actually COOKED here. I was flabbergasted when playing this DLC man, you have no idea. For the record, I’ve never been against Sonic’s friends being playable again in a 3D space, it’s just that more so every time they’ve tried to implement different playstyles they’ve almost all failed so spectacularly. With this game, I can thankfully say we’re on the right track now.

I’ll start with Amy first, as she was by far my favorite to play as out of the 3 which is just ABSURD. I can’t believe I’m saying this but they actually made Amy, AMY of all characters, fun to play as in a 3D Sonic game!!!!! I just can’t believe it, I really can’t. Gone are the days of a painfully slow character with boring level design, limited movement and a laughably worthless antagonist chasing after you, and gone are the days of an even SLOWER character with pitiful combat, a momentum killing double jump, and a pointless invisibility technique; all of that garbage is now behind us thankfully. Amy in Frontiers is not only speedy like Sonic (all of them are in fact) but her aerial mobility is second to none. She jumps super high, has a triple jump and can glide after the 3rd jump using her tarot cards. Moreover, this glide also carries your momentum, so you can cross tremendous distances if you were already going fast beforehand. And if THAT weren’t enough, she has a bounce stomp like Sonic, with the difference being this one sends you WAY higher into the air and slows your fall. The amount of height and aerial control you have while playing as her is just absurd and it feels extremely good to just jump around as her. If there’s anything I don’t like about her, though, it’s her combat. All of her attacks are performed using her tarot cards, which feels weird. Like, I’m fine with her tarot card glide and all that, but having her attack using her cards instead of her hammer (which is only used for the quick cyloop equivalent) is a decision I still don’t fully understand. That’s not even really what I don’t like about her though, it’s more so the fact that her combat style was just not designed for this game’s enemies; or at least, not the enemies in The Final Horizon update specifically. Her attacks at a glance are more so constructed to deal with multiple enemies at once, whether it be her multi-homing attack or her card spin attack. Even with her poison debuff parry she still isn’t as good at dealing damage as the other characters. If it weren’t for Sonic’s superior combat arsenal and quick Cyloop, I’d go as far to say Amy would be my favorite character to play as in Frontiers as a whole, which, again, is just crazy to me.

Next up is Tails, and while he is very fun to play he can be a bit of a mixed bag in some areas. His flight is, unfortunately, not as good as it was in SA1. There’s a little delay at the beginning of the flight (though it is cool looking) and it only goes up to a set height depending on what elevation you start the flight at. It still feels good to fly around overall but I do wish we could get the SA1 flight in an open zone environment, that would be pretty cool. His main form of attack is, perhaps unintentionally very humorous. He just sorta chucks wrenches at you. Very angrily. Just add in the metal pipe sound effect for further improvements (thank you to whoever made that a mod btw). The attack functions similarly to the dummy ring bombs from Sonic 06, except these are so much better in every way. For one, throwing them from a standstill feels far less slow and clunky in comparison, you’re not forced into a poorly handled first person view, it has a clear arc with how you throw it, you can throw it just as fast while airborne, you can even effectively block projectiles with it (which is a challenge you do on one of the new platforming challenges). You can later nab an upgrade later to charge the attack and send it flying, creating a cluster of wrenches that not only deals multihit damage to enemies but also acts as a platform to jump on. He has his combat purpose as a fairly mobile flying character with ranged attacks to poke at enemies from a distance. So far, he is fairly fun to play as, though nothing spectacular. However, by unlocking the max ring boost from his skill tree, Tails uses the Cyclone from SA2 and completely breaks the game in half. I’m not even kidding you, this thing is utterly ridiculously broken (in a good way). Perhaps this is why they limited Tails’ flight the way they did, as this grants the ability to freely fly and gain altitude as you see fit, all at incredible speeds. Combine this with infinite boost and you can pretty much skip almost every single one of Tails’ platforming sections with a couple of exceptions. He even gets to use the thing as a laser cannon attack. If only Tails had this version of the Cyclone then maybe the mech stages in SA2 wouldn’t have sucked nearly as much. Unsurprisingly this thing is a blast to just fly around the island. Yeah yeah, it’s broken and kinda throws challenge out the window but again, I’ll allow it. It just FEELS good to fly around the island at mach speed.

Finally, we have Knuckles. He’s certainly still rougher than the rest of them, but he unfortunately isn’t the best of them. He can glide and climb walls as you would expect but both of these aspects to his character come with a big asterisk at the end. Like for instance, yeah, he can “climb walls” but unfortunately only context sensitive walls. He can climb the green surfaced walls that Sonic can, and he can also climb exclusive red walls that only he can climb. That’s about it. With that being said, just like Sonic’s wall running his climbing controls very good and it’s very fast but I still wish you could climb any surface that you’d normally slide down on. He can also glide but the gliding feels all sorts of wrong. He has a huge startup animation before he takes off and his steering is awful, SA2 gliding this ain’t. It’s not as bad as like, the gliding in 06 with how that one gets stuck on walls, is a set speed and loses altitude way too fast. This one, like Amy’s tarot card glide, keeps your speed depending on how fast you were going beforehand, and you can later nab an upgrade that allows him to glide much faster indefinitely without even losing altitude. I just don’t get the point of the delay or the bad turning. There is a funny tech you can do to somewhat alleviate the turning issue, however. If you mash the glide button repeatedly, you spam the startup animation and stay in place somewhat, and from there you can turn in the direction you want to travel in instantly. You can watch footage of me performing it here. That being said though, when it comes to combat there’s nobody else I would want to pick. His attacks at first might not look like the deal a ton of damage, but therein lies his debuff parry that lowers defenses. Combine that with his regular 3 hit combo, stomp and drill attack and enemy health bars in this game absolutely MELT, which is especially impressive considering how much they’ve beefed up the enemies in general in this DLC which I’ll get to later. In hindsight I should’ve expected Knuckles to be the strongest out of all of them but it is very satisfying nonetheless seeing these bullet sponge mini bosses drop like flies when using this guy. Even though he still has issues, I still managed to have some fun using him.

The structure of the Final Horizon is very interesting. Essentially, you start playing as the 3 new characters do a variety of things, whether that be the new puzzles scattered around the island, fighting WAY tougher minibosses, platforming challenges to find either Koco that give you a huge amount of XP to level up your skill tree, or Koco that reveal a large chunk of the map. There are objectives to find for each character but for the most part I explored what I could to upgrade and complete a variety of challenges. The platforming challenges themselves are REALLY well done, maybe a bit messy in terms of looks and aesthetic as they’re fairly obtrusive and blocky, but they essentially brought back the new Koco challenges and ran with the idea for every character. These were all a lot of fun and crafted some fun challenges around each character. The game swaps between each character automatically after a certain number of objectives have been completed. Sonic doesn’t really get any platforming challenges in the traditional sense like the other 3: instead, he gets a variety of new Cyberspace stages to play with and tower climbs that lead to Master Koco trials. I’ll get to the Cyberspace stages in a bit, I wanna first talk about the Towers because oh my LORD. They basically took the tower climbs in Rhea Island and cranked them up to 11. They’re way harder, way longer, and the platforming is even more satisfying than it was beforehand. I played on hard mode throughout the DLC (I heard that some level design elements change with easy and normal mode) and I loved every single one of these tower climbs, they were genuinely fantastic. This can apply to a good chunk of this DLC, but they really toned down the automation and fully expect you to do a lot of the platforming this time around. I will say though that they should’ve provided more safety nets on these towers for people who aren’t that good at Sonic games on easier difficulties, as once you fall off the tower you have to climb all the way back up from scratch. I personally didn’t mind this as I never really fell off apart from a couple of mistakes I made on the final tower. In any case, once you get up to the top of these towers, you need to participate in the Master Koco Trials. These are combat trials against a handful of supped up enemies that you need to complete within a time limit. They were fine, nothing outstanding but nothing too amazing either, just fun to have something new to do. The Tower climbs are really the true standout with Sonic if I’m being real. The Cyberspace stages also got a pretty big change. The Cyberspace stages in the DLC are remixed versions of Cyberspace stages already in the base game previously, with familiar layouts mixed with brand new design, new objectives, and some absolutely incredible music remixes. Like for instance in the remix of 1-7, you play with a ton of cars lined up everywhere for you to bounce on and the entire stage has moon gravity. Or you could play with a bomb on your head and you race against the clock to collect stopwatch icons to slow the countdown, race against a shadow clone of Tails, constantly pick up canisters of Rocket Boosts which works similarly to how boosting used to work (in that it kills enemies). Not all of them are winners, the one that has a speed gauge that increases the longer you boost and makes you explode if you Spindash wasn’t very fun, but these feel like more means of experimentation for future titles so I’m glad most of them are still very fun to go through. The lack of automation also applies to these levels, there’s a lot of ramps you can go off of by spindashing and to my shock even the loops aren’t automated! The camera does the whole fangame thing where it follows Sonic from behind which I’m not really a fan of but regardless it’s very weird to see non-automated loops in a 3D Sonic game. The side objectives are different too. Clearing with an ideal clear time is still a factor of course, but you also have the return of the numbered rings from Lost World and the silver moon medals from Forces. Thankfully the numbered rings aren’t as braindead as they were in Forces, as acquiring all of them in a row can be quite tricky at times. They’re spaced out in an out of order sequence on a series of tight platforming that often you need to go a real roundabout way of getting, and in the case of 4-H, they’re spaced throughout the ENTIRE stage, meaning if you miss even one, you need to restart the entire level again for another attempt. The silver moon medals are also much more challenging to get than Forces, though their structure is more similar to that game, being relatively close together and needing to be collected quickly. There are also objectives where you need to rescue animal buddies but these SUUUUCK. You need to locate them, pick them up piggyback style, and carry them over to the marked area to “rescue” them. Not only are your movement options gone when you do this, which means the jank controls of Cyberspace don’t really lend these objectives any favors ESPECIALLY when platforming over bottomless pits across small boxes, but it completely snaps the pace of the stage in half. I really don’t wanna see these types of missions come back again, I’ve had my fill.

The guardian minibosses have been ridiculously beefed up this time. Not only do they hit way harder and attack in much faster, more erratic intervals with brand new attack patterns to boot (Spider Tank and Caterpillar don’t even get their gimmicky sections anymore), but they’re way tankier too. Even with a maxed-out Sonic it took kind of a while to down some of these guardians. The changes to these minibosses are not necessarily the most gracefully handled thing out there though, a lot of them are kind of a goofy mess to fight, particularly the ones that just sorta sit there and vomit projectiles at you endlessly, but Ninja+ was great fun, Tower+ is bonkers crazy and zips around like a bat out of hell, Ghost has brand new fights with the different platforming structures around it (I particularly liked the one where you need to traverse a maze to get to its pillars), I even enjoyed fighting Tank+ for as messy as it was. I also appreciated that they made the Starfall event actually kinda fun this time! Instead of a slot machine blocking your screen and the only reward you get being purple coins, the starfall items are instead replaced with Koco, and Red and Blue seeds of defense, and picking one up gives you a TON of them at once, making this event a must do to instantly max out a character of your choice, or at least getting close to maxing them out. I also enjoyed the story being told here, Sonic using the Master Koco trials to turn his Cyber corruption into a form of power, while his friends end up feeling what he felt throughout the entire game. I particularly enjoyed the side story interactions where they end up explaining a lot of the architecture of the Starfall Islands and what they were used for, and even explained things that didn’t really need to be explained. I particularly found it humorous that the floating rails, springs and platforms in the open zone aren’t really there at all and Sonic is only hallucinating them due to being high on Cyberspace. I guess the only major things left to talk about are the final Master King Koco challenge and the true final boss. You wanna talk about a major difficulty spike? Look no further than the Master King Koco challenge. You need to fight against every Titan boss in the game back to back (minus Supreme for obvious reasons), with a max of 400 rings and no way to refill it, level 1 stats, and the only way to parry their attacks is with a perfect parry (which for this and the final boss on hard mode, is a frame 4 parry window instead of the infinite hold to parry we’ve had prior). This challenge was simply too much for so many people. Even on easier difficulties where the parry window is a lot wider, a lot of people couldn’t even finish this mode. While I was able to beat it on hard mode eventually (I even did a flawless run on hard mode before writing this review), I can definitely see why this game never had a tighter window to parry attacks. Particularly with these Titan fights, their attacks just aren’t well telegraphed to be able to react in a split second at all. Wyvern is especially bad with this. It twirls around in so many different ways before attacking and some attacks just sorta…happen in an instant; and to make matters worse, parrying is the ONLY WAY to deal damage to this guy. I think there should be a compromise if future games are going to have combat systems with a parry: shrink the parry window down to be tight, but not like…frame 4 tight lmao (the one on easy mode for instance would be fine for a regular parry), and for those who hit a perfect parry get rewarded with the slowdown that comes afterwards. IDK, just spitballing ideas here.

All that’s left is the true final boss. The thing this entire DLC has been slowly building up to. You’ve completed all the trials, awakened a new hidden power within Sonic, all of your friends have gathered the Chaos Emeralds, and after a brief match with Supreme (sadly was not changed), The End itself comes down, transforms the Titan into an eldritch multiarmed abomination, Sonic awakens his hidden power, and the true fight begins...

The true final boss is a mess in so many different ways. The camera is probably the worst it’s ever been, CONSTANTLY getting obscured by the trees that are in front of the fight, actively blocking your view of the energy orbs you need to parry. The boss is also weirdly unintuitive (what makes this funny to me is that 100%ing everything in the DLC unlocks…hints on how to beat the final boss). You need to sever the cord from the Titan in order to deal damage and prevent it from regening health, but in order to reach the cord you need to use the dodge button to retarget onto the cord and sever it, which is never really explained properly. In order to go into phase 2 you need to cyloop the center of Supreme’s body when it gets knocked down (not really hinted at what you need to do there either). There’s an attack that drains almost all of your rings if you get hit by too many energy spheres (also not explained well). And on top of all of this there’s still so many more instances of unpolished jank that I haven’t even covered with my brief explanation of this boss fight.

…this is now my favorite final boss out in the entire Sonic franchise.

Yeah bet you didn’t see that coming huh? Despite the moments of irritation and jankiness, I loved the HECK out of this final fight. The anime spectacle is off the charts once again (seriously how do they make Super Sonic so COOL bro he’s literally that guy), the perfect parry actually makes deflecting its attacks engaging because this time the attacks are designed AROUND the frame 4 parry, there’s a decent amount of challenge fighting it, the atmosphere is immaculate and the transformed Supreme is genuinely pretty creepy (especially the way it swats you away, then afterwards you see this massive 4 legged creature towering over the trees scuttling towards you, pretty unnerving for a Sonic game. You even get kinda but not really blood just like in Unleashed!), once I figured it out I had a lot of fun, and the ending afterwards finally concluded Frontiers with a nice little bow on top. I also adore the music during this fight, both the orchestral rendition (though it doesn’t really sound like real orchestra, the beginning of that track gives me straight goosebumps every time I hear it) and the godly Kellin Quinn rendition of I’m Here (though I do wish there was more screaming). Maybe I’m a sucker for spectacle considering how terrible pretty much every Sonic final boss prior to this was (though the Ikaruga shootemup was pretty good), but I don’t care. It’s gonna take quite a lot to top this.

The update as a whole wasn’t perfect, by a LONG shot lmao. The pop in still isn’t fixed (in fact it’s now noticeable in Cyberspace), there are some quirks I had with the minibosses, playable characters and the final boss, and the update as a whole was still rushed to an extent (the characters don’t even move their mouths anymore during the character interaction side stories), but I still had a blast with what I played. I know I also keep mentioning the music, but I’m just gonna come out and say it: this is Tomoya Ohtani’s best work and it’s not even close. From the new character themes, to the boss music, to the open zone themes, to some of the cyberspace soundtrack (there are a lot of composers that work on those to be fair, along with a bunch of other tracks not listed here), there’s so much variety and it’s all incredible. Sonic’s Second Wind theme in particular speaks volumes to not only how immensely talented of a composer he is, but also just to how much he GETS Sonic on a thematic level. Bless you Tomoya Ohtani, and I hope you continue to improve and deliver incredible music for years to come. Now that it’s almost certain they’re innovating and improving on this open zone concept, I can finally say something I haven’t said in years:

I’m excited to see what the next 3D Sonic game will turn out to be.

Ah, Segasonic. This is a title I’ve always wanted to try out but never really got to do so, at least until now. Considering how it’s basically impossible as this arcade system was a 1993 (afaik) Japan exclusive arcade system and was not really available to access in the US, I had to resort to emulation for this one using MAME. Setting it up was a bit of a confusing hassle but the game worked fine otherwise. My biggest gripe are the controls, mainly because I don’t really have any good alternatives for a tracking ball. I just ended up using a controller. It worked fine enough but the controls in this game are ridiculously finicky and overly sensitive. I don’t really know how they compare to the trackball and if it’s much better on original hardware but I had to make do for now; still, didn’t really make playing through this game impossible by any means, just way more irritating than it probably could’ve been compared to using original hardware, but I guess I’ll never know. If anyone played this game using the original arcade hardware with the trackball I’d love to hear your experiences compared to controller emulation.

In any case, the main goal of this arcade experience is simple: reach the goal while collecting rings to stay alive. Rings overall can give you more wiggle room when you fall down a pit and can restore your HP little by little if you get hit, and collecting enough gets you a bonus at the end of a stage. SegaSonic even allows up to 3 people to play together simultaneously (though obviously I went solo for this one), this game being the very first introduction to Ray the Flying Squirrel and Mighty the Armadillo. The main level design consists mostly of linear obstacle course dodging in an isometric format (like 3D Blast but with actual gameplay), frantically dodging traps and pitfalls that pop up with little warning given the limited camera visibility. It’s a very fast paced and twitchy experience that, while fun, mostly just has the end goal of wanting to suck the quarters from your pocket. It’s pretty unforgiving and trial and error in nature; the levels themselves are only one act with no boss encounters to be seen anywhere so the game is really short, but the hazards that constantly spring up are enough to fill the level with quite a few ball busting moments (the ending sequence has a section where if you don’t make it to the end in time, you’re forced to restart the entire game. No continues allowed. Pretty harsh if you ask me). Some of the later levels are pretty bad with stop and go spike trap hazards and there’s not a whole lot of variety as most levels basically consist of “run away from the thing chasing you” repeatedly but for what it is it’s…fine, I guess. Not really something I would want to come back to. Music isn’t super memorable either, though I gotta say the sprite work and animation in this game is absolutely phenomenal. This game looks so gorgeous in motion and the character expressions and little animation quirks are a huge visual treat, it’s definitely this game’s biggest strength. The voice samples in this game on the other hand are extraordinarily annoying. I swear to god, take a shot every time you hear Sonic scream at the top of his lungs, you will barely be able to function properly by the time your session with the game has finished. I dunno what made SegaSonic think I would want to listen to the constant barrage of Sonic going ”WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!” every waking second but it would be borderline comical if it weren’t so irritating.

Also I dunno how anyone else feels about this subject, but I don’t really like how Sonic is portrayed here. He gets captured bizarrely easily and he’s more of a cartoony “lab rat” kind of character trying to escape this giant death trap maze being tossed and flung around in every direction. Idk, I much prefer when he’s as the typical free spirit superpowered hedgehog we usually see take down Eggman with ease, but again, this is a one off Arcade experience. Story isn’t really the strong point here, and that’s fine I suppose, just a weird nitpick I had. Game’s fine. Nothing special but glad I got to experience it. There’s no reason why this isn’t more readily available in Sonic collections, I feel SEGA could easily make this work with a bit of retooling and reintroduce it to a new audience.

”Welcome to the family, son!”

In almost a complete 180 from the previous game (heck I would even argue the previous GAMES), Resident Evil 7 is a true return to form (and yes, I did appreciate the subtitle being what the franchise is called in Japan, and the Japanese subtitle being vice versa), going full force back into its survival horror routes aiming to bring a much more grounded slower paced yet still extremely tense experience than previously. This acts as a starting point for sort of a soft reboot of the franchise, distancing itself from any of the events of the previous games and starting from scratch with a much simpler story, a new setting, new threat, new protagonist and new characters. I feel this is the best way to take this franchise because to be honest, where the hell would you even go after 6’s over the top showcase of apocalyptic circumstances and global conspiracy theories? You go back to one house, in one location, with a limited selection of characters and antagonists, of course. Ethan Winters is more or less just an average person in crazy town, doing whatever it takes to stay alive and rescue his wife Mia. Admittedly his sort of “average everyman” motif is sorta muddled with him spewing out dorky one liners every so often and having his hand amputated and still attached like it’s nothing, but I found those moments fairly humorous if anything so it’s whatever. Bros got hands of steel.

The game’s structure is more or less similar to the classic Resident Evil titles, just in a first person perspective. You have limited (though upgradable) inventory, item boxes to store what you don’t need, items to collect and use to solve puzzles around the house, areas of the house needing to be unlocked to return to later, limited ammunition and enemies roaming the house that you shouldn’t waste too many resources into, the whole deal. Since this is in first person however, it allows itself to be not only more immersive (I’d imagine VR only accentuates this), but it also allows for more interesting combat design. You can even do silly things like block canceling to speed up animations such as applying the first aid med. The molded, while freaky looking, are sadly limited in terms of enemy variety. You have standard and upgraded mold enemies, the 4 legged crawling ones that are probably the most irritating to deal with (especially on Madhouse), and fat molded that are extremely tough to take down and projectile vomit at you, but there’s nothing else outside of that. You have giant insects later on when you visit the old house but those are more so an obstacle you need to get past rather than tangible enemies that you either run from or consider wasting resources to clear them out. The real stars of the show are the Baker family of course. They’re loud, disturbing, and honestly just all around pretty freaky. Jack of course steals the show with the opening sequence and how he roams the house searching for you. I do think though that while they are intimidating, I feel their sequences are too short to be truly stress inducing. Jack only stalks you at the beginning of the game (and there’s many ways to avoid him) and after his first boss fight he disappears for the rest of the game. He’s not really as effective as Mr X in RE2make I feel. Marguerite isn’t as intimidating as Jack and her section is even shorter (though her boss is a lot more tense and unnerving to compensate). You don’t even interact with Lucas in person at all. Still though, they definitely inject a lot of variety into an already creepy game. I also honestly liked the section near the end of the game where you play as Mia and have to explore the ruins of an abandoned shipwrecked mold infested ship and stock up supplies to try and save Ethan. It has issues sure but I found this part of the game to be almost as tense as the main game, just in a different way.

The game is on the shorter side thankfully (I thiiiiink my first playthrough clocked in a bit over 10 hours or so) which is a godsend compared to the 48 hours to complete RE6’s campaign. The game also looks great, there are some funny quirks that come with early RE engine titles like the sometimes odd facial expressions but overall the detail and character models/animations are really well done, and the overall visuals and atmosphere are really well done. This game was also recently enhanced on Series X, and I ended up playing with the raytracing option at 4K 60fps. Aside from some weird freezing issues which I presume to be a bug, the game ran silky smooth throughout without a hitch. Maybe I can return and do a 120fps run afterwards. I thoroughly enjoyed myself with this one, so much so that I actually went out of my way to beat Madhouse difficulty and to my surprise, there were a LOT of changes made that made this entirely different. You can’t run from Jack anymore so you need to hide a lot more which makes his encounters a lot more tense, the molded take and deal a lot more damage, saves and checkpoints are limited, and item placements are rearranged as well. I had to actively change up my strategy as to how I went playing this game, but I enjoyed doing so. It was a fun challenge, something that I don’t think is more so the INTENDED way of experiencing RE7, but rather a unique way of playing through it. There’s also a slew of extra DLC content with additional campaigns and extra game modes to play as well, as well as all the coins and mr everywhere heads to find. I literally couldn’t put the game down for a long while until I eventually had to in order to move on to RE8, but I would gladly go back to this game again. Maybe in the future I’ll do a 100% run and get everything there is to get. Time will tell I suppose.

This game is decidedly, very groovy.

For the record, I just found out that the fat zombies in this game are called “whoppers” and I cannot think of a more stupid, ridiculous yet perfect name for them even if I tried.

Resident Evil 6. The 6th time we’ve learned that the Residents are in fact, Evil. More or less. I do have some faint memories of this game, mainly from seeing commercials about it on tv back when it released, and reading the…less than flattering reviews on top of that. I didn’t have any interest in picking it up as I was only 13 years old and I wasn’t really wanting to get into the franchise any time soon. I didn’t mention this in the RE5 review even though in hindsight, I probably should’ve, but this series has quite noticeably been moving away from its survival horror roots at this point in time. It started with RE4’s focus on more action and B-movie camp, and RE5 took it a step further, but good lord if you think these 2 games were too focused on action you haven’t seen RE6.

I’m not really gonna bother with the story as I was fairly uninvested throughout. Not that the story is bad or anything, it’s…whatever. It takes itself seriously again like RE5 but it is at the very least somewhat entertaining, but man the pacing and set pieces are absurd. Literally nobody in this game is allowed to just relax, the instant that characters think they have a moment to breathe, BOOM, explosions, BOOM, they’re hanging off a helicopter holding on for dear life, BOOM, something bursts in to chase after them. It’s just constant nonstop stimulation all the time. I did like the voice acting though, Mathew Mercer does a good job playing Leon and this is probably Roger’s best performance as Chris Redfield to date, it’s really good. The game looks really nice at the very least, especially for a late 360 title. Runs pretty smoothly as well so not much to complain about on that front. I also really like the UI; at least, for the main menu anyway. That part where you select a campaign from the list of characters and each campaign selected has a specific silhouette on an alleyway wall, illuminated by a flash of lightning showcasing what the main threat of each campaign is (zombies lumbering in the distance for Leon, the mutated J’avos transforming for Chris, Ustanak twitching and flailing its mechanical claw for Jake, a spider for Ada which I guess symbolizes how each of these campaigns are tied to her in a massive sprawling web which, not so coincidentally is a main theme of the title screen and box art) is a really cool detail, kinda eerie in a way. Idk why I gush so much about stuff like that it’s just pretty cool, it’s something they didn’t have to do but they did and it works well. The actual campaigns though? That’s…another story…

If anything else before I start dogpiling this game, I do think it’s necessary to mention that, to my surprise the mechanics of RE6 actually have a surprisingly fair bit of nuance to them. They’re more or less similar to what we’ve seen in RE4 and 5, you can still pop an enemy in the head or kneecap em and melee followup to lay on massive damage and crowd control. This time, tank controls are gone entirely, you can move and shoot at the same time, and now melee attacks have their own dedicated button. You don’t need to use them exclusively for a prompted follow up, you can straight up kick and punch enemies on your own, and doing this can also lead to the standard melee stagger followup. In fact there’s a wide variety of melee attacks to perform this time around. You can baseball slide and shoulder bash enemies while running, you can stealth kill takedown enemies from behind, you can deliver an instant kill if an enemy gets staggered next to a wall, you can stomp a downed enemy like in RE5 and doing so near the head results in an instant kill, etc. There’s definitely a lot of variety in what you can perform, and each character has unique takedown animations as well (Chris’s melee attacks are super meaty). You can also use the melee button to straight up parry attacks but it’s wildly inconsistent. It’s only something you can do contextually via a prompt, and not every attack can be parried. It’s no RE4make knife parry that’s for certain. The thing is, with all this melee variety, melee attacks now cost stamina so you need to consider how often you perform these melee attacks before you get winded. You can also do this quick shot move by pressing the left and right trigger simultaneously. Doing so will automatically snap you to a target and perform a single gunshot from whatever gun you happen to be wielding, and landing the shot will almost guarantee that an enemy will be staggered/stunned for a melee follow up. Not only is this maneuver extremely effective with stuff like the standard handguns or machine guns, but when using stuff like sniper rifles or shotguns in close range it almost always guarantees an instant kill. This sounds extremely overpowered, and it kinda is, but they actually thought ahead and considered this because quick shots use up the stamina gauge, and a melee followup ALSO costs stamina, so you can’t just mindlessly spam them repeatedly. At the very least, whatever I end up saying about RE6 later on, it’s definitely competent on a mechanical level, which is already way WAY more than I can already say for games like, The Evil Within 1 or the og RE3. There are other hidden mechanics that the game doesn’t necessarily teach you about either: you can press the A button just as you get knocked down from an attack to instantly get back up on your feet, restoring even one peg of your health bar instantly refills your stamina gauge, you can even dodge roll to avoid attacks which…in hindsight would’ve been nice to know during certain boss encounters. Side note though, I don’t like how healing items are handled in this game. You can still combine green herbs to make stronger effects but now you need to basically unload the herbs in your uh…pill bottle I guess. For instance, if you use the max health restoring combination of a red and green herb, you get 6 green herb pills, you put them in your pill storage, and can use them later on. Each pill restores one peg of health, and while it’s neat having the ability to heal yourself mid combat on top of restoring your stamina with each pill, I miss the instant access to healing herbs usually provided. Sure you can use a button combination to instantly use the herbs in your inventory and get the pills in your storage, but needing to pop them to restore your health isn’t as effective as the instant burst of healing that herbs provided previous games, especially considering that you can’t pause the game to use them from your menu because the game doesn’t pause in real time due to coop.

…oh yeah, coop is back I guess. I didn’t bother playing this game with coop this time, I just went solo. It wouldn’t really matter anyway considering coop is way WAY less fun than it is in RE5, for a multitude of reasons. Probably the biggest reasons being you can’t spam commands frequently and scream at each other constantly. The funniest thing coop introduces is the ability to praise or give thanks to your partner with a thumbs up gesture and it’s the goofiest looking action I’ve ever seen. The arm looks so limp and detached from the body, it’s like someone animated it by dragging it across the space using a mouse in real time. Unnatural looking doesn’t even begin to cover it. This also applies to weapon swapping, getting to other weapons and items in your inventory is super easy but your characters arms spaz out in such a crazy matter when you cycle between multiple larger weapons at once, but I’m getting off topic here. Back to coop, your AI partner is…ok I guess. It genuinely feels like they don’t contribute much to combat encounters at all, you do most of the heavy lifting in that department. But at the same time it’s not like they’re completely dead weight as they have infinite health and can’t be killed by normal means. They’re also annoying because they never once pick up items like skill points or ammunition, not that it matters since you can’t trade items back and forth like you can with RE5, but the skill points? Come on man, at the very LEAST you should exert some effort for these things. In general though, with a couple of exceptions, coop feels like a complete afterthought. A lot of times the most you get out of it is tossing your partner across a gap so they can open the way up for you to join you and that’s really about it. Nothing much else comes from it. It feels like they added it here out of obligation, RE5 did it and that was successful so why not do it again.

The entire RE6 as a cohesive whole is certainly…something alright. I mentioned a lot of the intricate nuances the combat mechanics have, and while they are nice, the gameplay never feels anywhere near as satisfying as RE4 and even RE5. It feels like a poor man’s imitation despite having a lot to it mechanically. Enemies are mostly bullet sponges and crowd control against these enemies is limited for a couple of reasons. For one, unlike RE4 and 5, and as far as I’m aware, there aren’t any invincibility frames when performing a melee followup attack on a staggered enemy; meaning you can get damaged and interrupted when performing this action. There’s also the deal about melee followups being a limited action with stamina as well but that’s a separate problem. For another, crowd control items (grenades, remote bombs, flashbangs, etc) are extremely rare to come across, so your standard firearm arsenal is mostly all you have. The game also loves to spam pretty obnoxious enemies that you can’t really defend against, like the J’avo with firearms that, if they take down one health peg, will knock you down on your back every single time and it’s incredibly irritating. Most enemies are pretty annoying too. There’s a good variety to be had and they even brought back classic zombies which is cool, but the rest I can definitely live without. The regenerator knock offs that instant kill you weren’t very enjoyable to deal with, and the…sigh…WHOPPERS aren’t really fun either. But this is all just one piece of the misery puzzle in RE6, it’s now time to discuss…the campaigns themselves.

Let’s just make it perfectly clear: this is not a good Resident Evil game. As an action game it’s…fine, I guess, but as I stated before it’s moved so far away from what RE originally was it’s ridiculous. This game is not even trying to be scary anymore, it’s just constant, nonstop, bombastic action 24/7, 365. There isn’t even any files to read to get information on lore, you instead find these medallions hidden throughout the game and read up on character and story files in a separate menu because they don’t WANT you to stop and read things, we gotta get a move on!! There’s 4 campaigns to choose from, initially you’re only allowed to choose from 3 while Ada is the final unlockable campaign only available after beating the first 3, while I guess they removed this requirement in the PC version. I still ended up playing Ada last anyway for consistency’s sake. Much like Sonic Adventure, each campaign has a different gameplay “theme” to it, so to speak. Sadly, just like Sonic Adventure, these campaigns vary greatly in quality. I got my warning signs blaring as early as finishing Leon’s campaign. I clocked in a good 12.7 hours finishing the entire campaign of RE5, while Leon’s campaign alone surpassed it with about 13-14 hours put in. This was bad enough as is, but then I looked and realized I still had 3 more campaigns to go through and I audibly went “oooooh nooooooooooo”. Each campaign is…more or less about the same length as a typical Resident Evil game, which is absurd. Things get very very tiring very fast, by the end of the game that original 12.7 hours or RE5 were now utterly dwarfed by Resident Evil 6’s utterly mind boggling 45 HOUR PLAYTIME. Look, I don’t care how good you think your shooty shooty bang bang action game is; it should not, I repeat, should NOT be the length of a Kingdom Hearts game. These campaigns get exhausting after a while, the extremely linear hallway level design, lack of puzzles (the only exceptions being in Ada’s campaign and even then they feel so slapdashed it’s not even funny), the constant barrage of explosions that happen so frequently you become basically as numb to them as you would in a Michael Bay film, the campaigns do not understand how to properly keep a playthrough engaging for an entire session. There’s also a fair bit of recycling too, as if you encounter another set of characters in one campaign and you face the same enemy or scenario (like Sherry meeting Chris and both needing to disable the giant anti air cannons while being hounded by giant monsters), then when you play the other campaign you need to eventually do that section again due to the circumstances.

If I had to rank which ones I liked more than others, I’d say Chris is my favorite, followed by Ada, then Leon, then Jake. Chris is essentially the Call of Duty campaign, the most gunplay and action out of any of the other campaign. However, with here, I think it works. With RE6 trying to make a hard shift towards action, having a gameplay style that embraces this shift at the very least fits and works well enough. Ada has some interesting setpieces and boss fights (the section with Carla in the ship was actually pretty disturbing and weird and the boss wasn’t too bad either). Leon wasn’t…very good. He had a great variety of locations, I liked the atmosphere of the college campus and the cemetery but the bosses were terrible (especially Simmons, both the final encounter and his…flesh dinosaur form) and it just feels like the game was trying to be something it wasn’t. It starts out attempting to be creepy and build an atmosphere but by the 1/4 point it just gives up and resorts to more boring action schlock. Jake’s campaign is the absolute bottom of the barrel. There’s a lot of tedium that exists in all the typical RE6 campaigns but it also comes with a heaping dose forced unfitting gameplay variety!!! There’s a section where you need to stealth past the main monster Ustanak, who chases you throughout the entire campaign much like Nemesis, there’s a really miserable section where you need to find certain keys lodged in this open ended area in the middle of a snowstorm complete with ice physics, there’s a section where Sherry is basically naked (both figuratively AND literally) and needs to stealth kill enemies to get past doors without any of her equipment, this campaign legit could not make up its mind on what it wanted to be. It’s a whole lot of everything, but that everything ended up being nothing, which is a shame because I legit thought it was really cool seeing Sherry Birkin again after RE2 concluded but it’s a shame her campaign with Jake is the worst in the entire game.

I have to reiterate again, this game is absolutely exhausting, between the flawed constant gunplay and campaigns that took forever and a half to finally end, Resident Evil 6 is just a drag to get through. In the end, it was mainly a necessary evil (haha) I had to endure to get to the games I was truly looking forward to, 7 and 8. I can’t even remember any sort of memorable dialogue from this game, in every other RE game I can think of (besides maybe 3, that one sucks lol), I could point out at least one or 2 cheesy lines to remember from my experience, but here? Nope. Nothing. I didn’t viscerally hate what I experienced but that’s also probably the nicest thing I can say about it. Word of advice: unless you’re an RPG, do not under any circumstances make your game last over 40 hours to simply beat. Period. That is all.

actually I change my mind, Jake replying “what are you, mental?” to Sherry asking him to move in was kinda funny I’ll give you that

The first Resident Evil game without Shinji Mikami’s involvement must’ve been a heck of a daunting task for Capcom to put together. Honestly, I can’t really blame them for defaulting to just repeating the successful formula RE4 pioneered beforehand. If I were a more cynical person, I would cry foul at how “grr they’re just rehashing what worked beforehand lazy devs” but I’m not that kind of person. If anything, more RE4 styled action can never be a bad thing in the end right?

The main standout selling point of RE5 this time is coop. I’m not really much of a coop guy personally; most coop games I’ve played I’ve either tolerated at best (Dead Space 3), or basically thought it was one of the worst experiences I could ever have with a game (Dead Island). But that’s the thing: with these examples, I played the game solo, not with a friend. While I don’t think the games would exponentially get better with a friend (and I’m certain that’s the case for Dead Island), coop games offer 2 different experiences that I will likely never get to fully experience myself unless I play these games multiple times, both with a friend and without. With this one I wanted to experience it with a friend, so quick shoutout to my friend Inedicalibis for helping me out with my playthrough of RE5. For the record, he was also suffering through pretty bad stick drift and his aim was still top notch so props to him. He also knew pretty much all the ins and out of this game so not only did he help me discover some fun exploits and a ton of the medallions scattered around everywhere, he also basically has a lot of stuff in his inventory: every type of gun you could imagine and he donned a goofy looking costume for Sheva that stayed on the entire game.

RE5 is, for lack of a better term, exactly what it advertises itself to be. It’s RE4 again, but with coop. A lot of things I stated in my RE4 review apply to here because it’s more or less the exact same mechanically. You get an ability to stomp a downed enemy sometimes but that’s about it. The main difference is that instead of a useless handicap chained to you at all times, your partner is also fully capable of defending themselves and performing melee followups just like Chris. The coop is what makes or breaks this game; with it, I feel it’s about as fun as RE4. Double tag team meleeing an enemy to death and watch him flying is incredibly humorous, strategically calling out who gets what weapon priority to deal with specific enemies, it’s still tense and the combat keeps you on your toes as you dart back and forth avoiding enemies, rushing to save your downed partner at the last second, it’s all here and accounted for. There’s a surprising amount of enemies with instant kill attacks or enemies that deal a lot of damage, likely for the sake of coop, but I feel this adds to the frantic nature of gameplay even more. You can even give commands to each other and this is just a ridiculously funny addition due to how you can incessantly spam them. Whether it be shouting “cmon!!!” over and over to a slow monster lumbering its way towards you, spamming “thanks” while your partner fumbles about their inventory swapping items or giving you healing items, shouting an encouraging “GO!!!” to the boat driver as he tries to escort you out of a village area, and when you’re at a door that requires both of you to unlock it, you can frequently tell your partner to hurry in a dramatic fashion and they get to hear it all no matter what. It’s simply glorious.

This is all playing with a friend mind you. If I had played this solo, I’m unsure if I would’ve had just as good of a time here. The locations you go through aren’t as memorable as RE4 I feel. Off the top of my head I can remember the giant temple with booby traps where you fight a mind controlled Jill Valentine, the inside of a volcano, and the African village where you start the game out on. RE4 simply had a stronger variety of locations and events: the giant robot Salazar statue and the castle in general, the decrypted Ganado village in the forest, the lake with the giant monster, I feel everything was a lot more memorable in that game. Thankfully QTEs in this game can be completely disabled (though I decided to enable them here as I feel I’m annoyed with them a lot less when I’m playing with a friend). The story as a whole is noticeably less campy and more serious so I feel it also wasn’t as memorable but I feel the campiness came more so in the gameplay department if anything else, I had a big smile on my face throughout a good chunk of my playthrough. Shoutouts in particular in the section with Lickers trapped behind glass doors, and my friend telling me “ok we gotta be VERY quiet here”, and the first thing he did was violently kick the door to the next area down. Absolute fit of laughter during that inevitable game over screen.

The visuals look decent enough for an Xbox 360 title, it’s mainly the color pallet I’m not a fan of. It’s basically during the “piss filter” era of games where so many titles looked saturated and washed out. The models, environments and animations are a step up from 4. The voice acting is also pretty good, Roger Craig Smith will personally always be my favorite Chris Redfield (Sonic bias aside), and oh my god, Wesker’s voice actor chews up the scene so hard it’s unreal. A big shame he isn’t gonna be in the remakes.

Overall, RE5 was a lot of fun, though if I had to make a suggestion, I’d highly recommend playing it with a friend. I don’t think I would have as much fun playing this solo. It doesn’t offer a WHOLE bunch new, but why try and fix what ain’t broke, right?


“…GIVE ME AN EGG”

Guess this a better time than ever to do a second log for a game I’ve put thousands of hours into huh.

There’s a lot to like about Smash Ultimate I feel. Like, a LOT. The enormous character roster for starters, there’s so much attention to detail packed in and it’s absolutely insane that they just up and got every fighter from every previous Smash game EVER to return, all in one package. I know the game is well over 4 years old at this point, but it’s still surreal looking back at how enormous this character roster is, and with a few major exceptions, the character balance is pretty decent as well. I do have a couple of gripes about how the echo fighters are handled, and certain spots on the roster in general (Byleth does not deserve to be here sorry), but it’s still very impressive nonetheless. The pace of matches is incredibly quick, not quite Melee speed again but it’s much MUCH better than Smash 4. In fact, there’s a lot of mechanical changes that I honestly hope continuously make a return from this game to potential future entries, like the ability to dash cancel into tilt attacks for instance. I especially get a kick out of the dramatic zoom in after dealing a finishing blow on the last stock.

And yet…despite all these improvements, Smash Ultimate still manages to completely bork aspects that were perfectly fine beforehand. What in God’s name did they do to the platforms in this game? It’s so much more irritating to drop through them. I’ve never had an issue with platforms in any other Smash game, only this one. The removal of the ability to cross past a shielding opponent while dashing also sucks, removes a lot of interesting mix up potential. And of course, despite being an incredibly fast paced game, Smash Ultimate is absolutely throttled by the ridiculous amount of input lag, apparently it’s by far the most amount of input lag in any Smash game and I genuinely don’t understand why this is the way it is. It’s doable of course, it’s not game ruining by any means, but it’s still very problematic.

While I do have problems with the main gameplay, the other modes Ultimate contains are even more problematic in comparison. The game is back to being as content packed as previous titles but a lot of this content feels so much lesser. I do like the new Classic mode though, every fighter gets a unique route with different fights referencing the games they originate from, even if the one black hole minigame never really changes. It’s a true highlight and probably my favorite iteration of Classic mode in all the Smash games. Everything else though? Bleeeeh. All of the charm of All Star mode is completely sapped away as it’s now just a reskinned Multiman Smash mode. Master and Crazy orders are gone, no target smash mode, home run contest had to be added into the game via an update. The stage builder is far more robust and creative than the one on Wii U (which was already pretty great too) so that’s nice; though I don’t really get why the game allows touch screen controls for Stage Builder but it completely removed the ability to doodle on the pictures you took from Smash 4 and replaced the feature with a bunch of tacky filters. But a lot of the downgrades come, ironically, in the new mode the game introduces: Spirits.

So the trophies are completely gone and like…I kiiiiiinda understand why. Modeling thousands upon thousands of 3D models with an immense amount of variety is extremely time consuming, I get it. But I’m sorry, the replacement for this system was just not it. Spirits are, essentially, glorified stickers from Brawl, giving your character stat boosts and specific perks. Spirit Battles where the Spirit you face mimicks the Spirit that’s attached to it in a specific way as a reference to the original game is probably the biggest compliment I can give this system. There’s just no satisfaction in collecting these things, it’s so hollow and soulless, even worse considering they didn’t even bother to add flavor text to the Spirits you collect. Earning them as a reward in Classic mode feels so much less rewarding than trophies, and you can’t even have the fun game modes that trophies came with like that coin shooting game in Brawl, or the Trophy Rush in 4. You can’t even rearrange Spirits and take funny pictures like you could with 4.

However, the biggest offense with Spirits comes with the official story mode Ultimate contains: World of Light. Though if I’m being honest, “story mode” is really pushing it. The intro cutscene is incredibly cool and sets the tone really well, but afterwards any attempt at storytelling disappears into nothingness. Afterwards it’s the same drawn out routine of Spirit Battle after Spirit Battle, rinse and repeat for around 20 or so hours and that’s all she wrote. There’s some interesting boss fights both new and returning from previously, but there’s nothing to this mode at all, it’s a slog to get through. Subspace Emissary this ain’t, and I didn’t even LIKE Subspace Emissary in the first place.

However, I feel the biggest, most unforgivable offense Ultimate has ever put out is its sorry excuse for an online mode. It is bar none the worst online mode in any Smash game, and considering I’m also talking about Brawl in this conversation, that is admittedly very impressive they managed to mess up this astronomically bad. So for starters, the connection issues still run rampant as Nintendo’s online infrastructure is a complete and utter joke to put it lightly. Lag and stutter are incredibly frequent, and considering that this game already has a baked in problem with input lag outside of online this leads to an absolutely miserable experience, and oftentimes I got kicked from searching for a match because the game straight up failed to connect with another person’s console, and because of that I also got PUNISHED for it by the game not allowing me to play online battles at all because of how bad the connection was. Being punished for something that the game is flat out incompetent in dealing with is one thing, but trust me, that’s not even the half of it. You know how in the previous game they separated the more “hardcore” mode from the casual mode (For Glory and For Fun)? In this game however, you chose a sort of “preference” to the format you want and the game attempts to “match” you with other people with the same preference. This is already bad enough as is, but what makes it worse is that the game almost NEVER matches you with the format you want. You can prefer no items battlefield 3 stocks 5 minute timer all you want, but the game will still insist on matching you with people who have items out the wazoo piling everywhere and who have the final smash meter turned on. This is why Elite Smash doesn’t feel special, because you can just cheese your way to Elite Smash by tricking people into being matched into your items on final smash enabled one stock garbage. We had a perfectly functional (if flawed) setup in the previous game man, what happened here?? And if this wasn’t bad enough even STILL, all of the interactivity that For Glory brought with it (due to NNIDs and the name tags) is stripped as well, leaving each new encounter with a random to be a hollow unfulfilling sterile experience. I understand removing the ability to change name tags as that was heavily abused for trash talk and, even really obscene offensive toxicity to be hurled at you, but with this removed I feel like even though I’m fighting another human on the other side, it doesn’t FEEL like I am. The smash tag system is also a really lame replacement but that’s going into me missing Miiverse more than anything else lol. Even with that aside, why also remove the ability to…taunt? Was that really an issue that needed to be addressed as well? There’s also no opportunity to swap characters either; once you pick one, you’re stuck with it for the entirety that you’re matched with a person. Again, all of these problems were kinda already addressed in the previous game, why fix what isn’t broken?? I do really like online arenas, but the limited capacity really hurts it in the long run. Online in general is just a complete disaster, almost nothing positive I can say about it which is astounding. I dunno how you manage to take a feature that has historically sucked across every Smash game and make it astronomically worse, but lo and behold, Smash Ultimate found a way.

There are a million other gripes I could list as well, like how the costume changing feature lags and takes forever to render what costume you want to select (still isn’t fixed), how Sonic is horribly underrepresented with no new fighter additions, terrible stage selection, and the same boring repetitive moveset he’s had since his rushed introduction in Brawl despite being the longest running 3rd party veteran Smash has had, but I’ll end it here. Make no mistake, I do like this game. I play it a…rather unhealthy amount and I even play it competitively and have entered a couple of tournaments, but the amount of dumb irritating and questionable changes really do bring this game down. I dunno if what the next Smash game will be, IF there will be a next Smash game at all (pretty sure there will be one lol), but at this point…I wouldn’t mind wanting to see a new one come out soon.

I guess the fun of the original NiGHTS gameplay worked on me well enough, therefore I was immediately interested in trying out the sequel to see what that entailed. I had no prior expectations going into it, haven’t even really heard much on impressions. Some people have found it worse than the original, some people found it better. That being said right off the bat, I did have some weird emulation issues, mainly during cutscenes as characters jump and teleported in weird locations, and characters often stopped moving as if the camera weren’t viewing them during said cutscenes, but otherwise the game ran fairly well at 60.

Gotta say though, right off the bat, the game makes a MUCH better first impression than the first NiGHTS. The prominent focus on story means there’s a better opportunity to explain what’s going on and establishing the world you’re in, the controls are just as tight and responsive as before, and lo and behold, you get an actual proper fully fledged TUTORIAL, to, yknow, EXPLAIN WHAT THE CONTROLS ARE AND WHAT THE OBJECTIVES ARE. It’s almost as if, JUST almost as if, actually explaining how to play the game makes the player then want to properly delve into the whole package as a result. Crazy how that works yeah?

In any case, NiGHTS Journey of Dreams is…odd. The best way I can describe it is that it’s a more campaign focused game than the original NiGHTS, having more of a pronounced story focus and narrative to boot. The main campaign (or campaigns I should say, playing as 2 different children like before; Helen and Will) is broken up into several missions instead of being a single stage each. I guess Sonic Team really had a hard on for this mission structure, Secret Rings had it, Black Knight had it, Unleashed Wii had it (though that was Dimps but the point still stands) and now this. The missions usually vary, but the first missions will always revolve around playing the main stage as normal and fighting the boss at the end of it, like the original game; then afterwards you’ll usually be tasked with flying through rings to get a long chain going, a few random minigames, and the final mission has you fighting a harder version of the boss you’ve already fought prior. Now while this system works fine enough, it does tend to get repetitive after a while, as you end up doing the same set of missions for every world you visit. And frankly, needing to fight the boss twice for each world gets very exhausting. The game does attempt to spice things up by having quite a few different unique side missions and minigames (especially prevalent in Will’s campaign), and for the most part they’re all fine and good. What bums me out though are the first missions of each world. Essentially the closest link (haha get it) to the original NiGHTS into Dreams stages, being a single stage with laps to loop around, collectables to get, enemies, stage hazards and gimmicks, ranking system, the whole deal. Unfortunately the score attack element that made the original game satisfying to master is not here. The main objective this time is to chase a bird holding a key, and once you get it, you fly over to the “cage” you were in and bust it open. Rinse and repeat 3 times (thankfully not 4 times) and fight the boss. You can’t really fly past the container so any semblance of the frantic score attack nature the original had is gone, compounded by the much MUCH more lenient ranking system. It’s a different take on the traditional NiGHTS formula for sure, and while it works, I just wish we could have our cake and eat it too. These sections are still fun enough in their own way I suppose. The game also tries to do what the first game did in that you need to get at least a C rank on every mission to unlock the true final stage, but what that really entails is that you play through the final stage all over again (of which beforehand you’ve already done twice with both characters) with no changes aside from new story cutscenes and dialogue, you fight Reala again, and you fight the final boss again (of which you’ve also already done twice). That really wasn’t needed, I feel like they could’ve at least changed the level and obstacle layout of the final stage or given us a new final boss with Wizeman or SOMETHING.

As for the bosses themselves they’re still a mixed bag. Some are actually pretty decent (Cerberus, Reala and Wiseman were a lot of fun) but others were just kinda whatever and some were still completely terrible. I know everyone likes to rag on Bomamba, and while her fight was awkward as hell, Chamelan was by far the worst of the worst. It almost felt completely luck based at times, I went from getting a time over 3 times in a row to killing the boss in like 15 seconds, it’s not very fun at all. An improvement over the original game’s bosses but that’s…not exactly saying much.

The story is a mixed bag for many, but I actually found it to be enjoyable. Not great or anything, but it was charming and fun to watch everything play through. I liked NiGHTS’ bond with the children as a standout highlight; and speaking of which, the children in this game are MUCH more interesting characters than Claris and Elliot, although that’s mainly due to these characters having actual dialogue and personalities and whatnot, but yeah. I felt like I connected with Helen’s story with her and her mother more than Will’s but both were great. The mocap is dated af, the voice acting is a little hokey and the game can sometimes be a little too on the nose when trying to showcase the dream world environments (“HEY HELEN, ARE YOU AWARE THAT THIS DREAM WORLD IS A REPRESENTATION OF YOUR FRAGILE HEART WHICH IS WHY EVERYTHING YOU SEE IS MADE OF GLASS????”), but otherwise I liked what I saw. To be honest NiGHTS’ voice was not at all what I expected them to sound like, but the more I think about it I don’t really know WHAT I expected them to sound like in the first place so I guess it’s whatever. Owl was…fine but he wasn’t anything more than an exposition machine, though NiGHTS constantly playfully teasing him was pretty amusing

While I did end up enjoying the children in context of the story, there is one mission structure I’ve neglected to mention for a reason. During certain points, you have missions (primarily in Helen’s campaign, Will gets like 1 and that’s it) where you take control of the children themselves and try to reunite with NiGHTS. Controlling the children in the original game always seemed kinda pointless to me. It was mainly a fallback tool if you ran out of time when playing as NiGHTS and nothing more. While I appreciate the attempt to make the children themselves more involved and have this kind of mechanic be more fleshed out, this was NOT the way to do it. The standalone children missions have you doing some of the most bland, BASIC puzzle platforming I have ever seen, oftentimes in a maze like environment with a time limit. You can run and jump and uh…that’s about it. Your movement speed is lackadaisical and the stages themselves drag on for an agonizing 8-10 minutes or so. The only defense you have against enemies are the typical blue orb collectables you pick up (you just kinda chuck em at the enemy and hit em like twice in order to down them). These were by far the lowest points of the entire game. There’s just nothing standout about these missions at all and they snap the pace of the game clean in 2 every time you have to play them. I don’t mind controlling the kids in like, say, the hub world or even when you need to free NiGHTS at the beginning of the main first missions, but this was just not it sorry to say.

The presentation is really well done. The models are pretty good for Wii standard and the music is very good as well (was pleased to hear Gate of your Dream again, love that track. Also Jun Senoue went HARD on the final Reala fight geez). The CGI is absolutely breathtaking compared to…whatever the original tried to accomplish. The mocap is a bit awkward as I mentioned prior though, and idk if this is a hot take or not, but I felt like the environments in this game were a lot less colorful and surreal compared to the original game. I felt that’s something they could’ve taken a step further. While I do still prefer the score attack arcady nature of the original, this is still a fairly enjoyable title. The highs aren’t as high, but this game does have different strengths in different areas that help it stand out.

And uhh, nope. Shleep are still creepy. Still hate them 😃

NiGHTS Into Dreams makes quite possibly the worst first impression I’ve ever seen a video game make in my entire life. Right when you start the game you get…nothing. No explanation of the story, no explanation of mechanics, or controls, or objectives, or…anything really. You’re just sorta dropped into the level and expected to figure things out yourself. And even when you get to playing you’re just assaulted with so much visual clutter on screen, all these collectables, icons, different elements that you have no idea what they even do or what their purpose is. I wasn’t just confused, I was STARTLED at how this game first presented itself. Even when you look into the “how to play” section (which btw is basically the only story explanation you’re gonna get in this game, it’s not very well handled at all), it still didn’t properly explain a lot of the finer stuff you had to do in order to do well at the game. I legitimately had to look up an online guide to figure out what I was even supposed to be doing to progress and do well in the stages.

From what I can best surmise, you start out every level in NiGHTS by controlling the kid (either Claris or Elliot) in a 3D environment. Aside from nabbing some collectables at the start and being a backup failsafe if you run out of time as NiGHTS I don’t really see the point of this even being in the game, you only really have a basic jump and the levels themselves don’t take advantage of platforming elements. The real meat of the game is when you reach the lone altar in the stage and take control of NiGHTS, switching to a 2D perspective. The main gist basically amounts to…collecting stuff. Flying through hoops, getting collectables, you need a certain amount of blue orbs to break open the main objective of each “lap”, these giant containers. Repeat this process 4 times (though each lap is different in both course layout and the obstacles/gimmicks you encounter), fight the boss at the very end, and that’s really about it. At first, I didn’t hate what I was doing, but I wasn’t super invested in it either. Kinda just felt like collecting stuff for the sake of collecting stuff, again not bad but not really that interesting. It didn’t help that the visuals and the overall environment, while thematically super creative and imaginative, ended up making a lot of elements like items and ESPECIALLY enemies just sorta blend into the background. I didn’t even know wtf the stunt rings did until I looked it up. While the capsules are your main objective, the biggest other objective NiGHTS tasks you with is getting the highest score you can possibly get. Everything contributes to your score, items, enemies, the rings, the capsule. Generally though, the biggest point contributor in NiGHTS comes from getting chain combos, collecting stuff super fast back to back from each other in rapid succession. The more you do this, the higher the chain you get and the higher your score will be. It helped in getting better scores than I was getting but it still wasn’t enough I felt. I did eventually figure out that I could completely bypass the altar and repeat the lap as many times as I wanted to maximize the amount of points I receive per lap, which did end up boosting my scores significantly. Combine all of this and NiGHTS eventually started to “click” with me. It’s a very trial and error sort of affair, needing to memorize where any of the collectables are each lap (since the 2D planes tend to have a lot of vertical space and the camera only goes so far), and needing to deal with the inherent gimmick each level presents, but once I finally understood what I was supposed to be doing, the game finally started to become kinda enjoyable. It’s incredibly arcady in nature, and there’s a lot of fun risk and reward elements present with this kind of design: do you think you can risk it to go against the clock and go another lap to get some more points? Are you able to meticulously use your dash to chain items that would otherwise be somewhat out of reach? I did end up vibing with the general game flow in the end, but I must stress again, that’s AFTER I took the time to look up what the game wanted from me. if I have to look up an internet guide just to get a solid grasp on what I should even be doing or what any of the game’s mechanics even are? That is a major problem.

The bosses on the other hand don’t get any excuse, they SUUUUUUCK no matter what. It didn’t really matter if I knew how to fight them or not, they’re incredibly clunky, irritating to go against, and not really intuitive in the slightest. The only ones I didn’t really have a big problem with are the fat balloon lady (Puffy) and the final boss (Wizeman). The final boss is arguably way better than every other boss fight in this game and that’s only because it’s an obstacle dodging fest. Again, I really dig their creative designs and the idea of beating the boss as fast as possible to get a huge multiplier boost to score an even better rank at the end of the stage is a cool idea, it’s just…yknow…too bad they forgot to make any of them actually fun.

Every other aspect of NiGHTS is really well done. The dream world’s aesthetics are super creative and the visuals are top notch for the Saturn, even if the FMV cutscenes are…positively hideous to put it mildly. The music is really good too, I feel like I could drift off listening to the stage select theme all day. The arcady nature of the gameplay, when it eventually clicked with me, was a decent bit of fun! The game is also really short so it never felt like my time was wasted. However, the awful boss fights and the fact that the game doesn’t explain…anything really are pretty big negatives, especially for someone JUST getting into these games for the first time. Still though, I did end up appreciating my playthrough of NiGHTS Into Dreams in the end, and I guess that’s all I could really ask for.

Sorry to say but those sheep enemies in the first world still creep me tf out. They aren’t giant like they are in All Stars Racing Transformed but I still genuinely hate looking at them, kill them all in a massive fire immediately.

Much like Bayonetta 3, I had initially put off playing and finishing this game for a while, though unlike 3 it wasn't for the same reasons. For some bizarre reason, my Hori Split Pads were having issues where the X button was...stuck or something? I have no clue what was going on but it kept holding itself down and skipping cutscenes without my input and it was very frustrating, particularly since this time I REALLY wanted to see the cutscenes for good reason.

Bayonetta Origins is a delightful and incredibly charming game; dare I say it has a lot to offer for just about anyone willing to pick up and play it. For newcomers, you get a great story and a fun game with a fantastic visual style. For Bayo veterans such as myself, this game almost feels like a semi apology for the dumpster fire that was Bayonetta 3's story. I say semi because it doesn't necessarily attempt to fix what 3 broke per say (the Jeanne side story kinda does that though), but there's so much more attention to detail to the lore than there has ever been prior. There's a lot of neat explanations of abilities and techniques the franchise has introduced that they didn't NEED to elaborate on, but it's still cool they did. I genuinely hope the people who worked on this game’s story stick around for future mainline entries. The story itself is really great too, the bond between Cereza and Cheshire grows and the dynamic is fun to watch, there's a big underlying message of how demons are only "meant to be tools of destruction; never companions" that I thought was cool to see. Little Cereza in general is just so charming and likable, there's a great amount of self doubt she powers through before becoming more confident in herself. Surprisingly the ridiculous over the top action one would expect from Bayonetta (especially during the story) is still here, but it's moved towards the very end more so, and because the rest of the experience is notably toned down I feel this works so much more in its favor. It allows for a better build up and that ending spectacle filled sequence felt so much more EARNED because of it. Some have already pointed it out, but the storybook narration styled cutscenes do wonders for this game's story, it makes even the more mundane scenes and standard character interactions that much more fun to watch.

The gameplay is rather lax, which I also feel is to its benefit. You control both Cereza and Chesire at the same time, Cereza on the left side of the controller, Cheshire on the right, working together with each other to solve puzzles and fight enemies. Of course in combat, predictably Cheshire does most of the heavy lifting; striking enemies, dealing killing blows, swapping between different elemental abilities, etc. Cereza mainly binds enemies to prevent them from moving or attacking, but what I really appreciate is how binding enemies combined with a charged attack creates a hugely effective combo strike, there's a lot of synergy you can work with especially as you unlock new skills and abilities. It's not particularly deep but it doesn't need to be, and there's no ranking system either so even if you mess up a lot in combat it doesn't feel like a demoralizing punishment, your main goal is to just power through each encounter efficiently. There's a ton of enemy variety and while I'm not particularly a fan of needing to swap to an elemental form to deal with a different elementally powered enemy, combat in general was still fun so that's about all I can ask for. The game's structure is fairly metroidmania in nature, needing different abilities to access different areas and secrets. Though backtracking is pretty minimal if it's even needed at all, since the game constantly guides you to the next objective in a linear fashion. Still though, going after secrets is still worth it in the end as more skills unlocked is always appreciated. The game wasn't particularly difficult or overly easy, it was very comfortable from beginning to end (I only died like, twice I think throughout the entire campaign and both are due to mistakes I had made), and even if it isn't for you, the game offers a slew of accessibility options to toggle. The 30fps target is extremely consistent and the game visually, as I stated before, is phenomenal. The music is really pleasant too, and there are even a few remixes of past Bayo music that I managed to spot and geek out over.

I don't really understand the whole fuss over this being full price either, I saw it a LOT online about how "hrrng game not worth $60 because...reasons". It's content packed, incredibly polished, and most importantly it's just fun. If you're already a Bayo fan or if you're getting into the series for the first time, this is an easy recommend.

I personally hate eggs, for a multitude of reasons. The bland gross taste combined with the lumpiness is just a pure recipe for gag reflex central. Everyone else in my family absolutely loves eggs, except for me. I’m always seen as an odd one out. There are a couple exceptions where I don’t mind eggs, when they’re mixed with other ingredients to create something new entirely (like a cake for instance), or in Japanese restaurants where they mix very tiny pieces of egg in with fried rice so you don’t really notice the taste much at all. Anywhere else, I despise eggs. Always have, likely always will.

On a completely unrelated note, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg sucks.

In all seriousness, I had been interested in trying out this title for a while. Been eyeing it ever since I was informally introduced to the series with the first 2 All Stars Racing games, and of course it being made by Sonic Team themselves was a key factor as well. I haven’t really heard any sort of overwhelming positive or negative feedback so I approached it with an open mind. I really didn’t know what quite to expect, but…man, this game really just goes from like, 100 to 0 in an instant. Actually, not even that, because 100 implies it was really good in the first place, it’s more like…50-45ish to 0.

If anything, the idea behind Billy Hatcher is very unique. It’s a standard 3D platformer with the catch that you need to use a separate object (in this case, an egg) in order to perform a lot of different actions. Without an egg, Billy has almost no mobility outside of a basic jump and ledge grab, and no means to attack either. With an egg, he can dash, dash jump, bounce jump for extra height, roll into enemies to flatten them and even ground pound. You collect fruit throughout the stage to strengthen the egg and make it bigger; when it’s maxed out you can even hatch it revealing an assortment of helpful items depending on the egg, ranging from 1ups, to temporary powerups, to small animal buddies with elemental abilities. To also give some credit, Billy himself with the egg controls pretty good! At least with general moving around, it’s surprisingly precise and I honestly didn’t think it would be.

This is where my gameplay praises end.

Billy Hatcher up until this point is simply mediocre at best. The egg mechanics, while they sound unique, never really amount to anything special. You just end up doing things you would normally do in a 3D platformer, basic jumping and combat, except with an egg this time. Nothing new or interesting is accomplished by this. Now I feel this could’ve been improved by, say, giving the egg even MORE mobility and utility and maybe even giving Billy himself some additional moves to provide different reasons and situations you would use egg-less Billy over egg-carrying Billy, but no. Aside from one or two one off instances of needing to grab onto tiny hooks or ledges, there’s basically no reason to not have an egg at all times. That leads into a multitude of issues with the egg itself; there’s almost no sense of satisfying flow with any of the egg’s actions. Dashing and jumping to enter a roll that’s entirely physics based feels decent enough, but jumping afterward brings you to a COMPLETE dead stop. This is effective when exiting a roll and trying not to fall off a tiny platform, but it KILLS the pacing when you just wanna blaze through a stage as fast as you can. You just end up mashing the dash button over and over again. Jumping feels sluggish, and because Billy spins horizontally around the egg, there’s a very high chance that, when you’re jumping with the egg to make it to a higher area, the egg makes it, but you don’t. Meaning now you either need to find another egg for another attempt at getting back up to that area, or you have to sit there and wait for the egg to respawn to try again. I can’t even begin to tell you how often this happened to me, it’s very frustrating but I was more so…baffled that this issue is even in the game in the first place. Like, they HAD to have known this was a problem during development, right? Right???

Any other action that requires an egg is either hitting switches to open doors (extremely riveting), riding on very tight rails which can be very finnicky to get working right, or jumping through hoops. The hoops in this game function either like jump pads or the dash rings from modern Sonic games, propelling you in a specific direction. The problem is that roughly 50% of Billy Hatcher’s level design consists of jumping onto higher areas (aka the most braindead BASIC platforming fundamentals to ever exist), and then afterwards watching as the myriad of repeated dash rings holds your hand and drags you through the level by themselves; in other words, a huge chunk of Billy Hatcher is absolutely plagued by a combination of boring lackluster level design and a ridiculous amount of automation. There are some areas where you need to guide a physics based rolling Billy through a downhill obstacle course to survive, but they aren’t that spectacular and they’re few and far between. The hatching mechanic I mentioned earlier snaps the pacing in half even further, because you need to come to a dead stop, press the R trigger, watch a cutscene play out (2 cutscenes if it’s an animal friend), and then continue on as normal. You will never have any idea of how the powerups even work until you go to the gallery and view them after beating the stage they’re in. The animal buddies are primarily used in combat and puzzle solving, which I guess leads not so nicely into the other topic.

I said previously that Billy Hatcher’s levels are 50% boring design and automation. Wanna know what the other 50% is? Combat. A LOT of it. The game, for some reason, has a really big fixation on combat. Much like Sonic Heroes, enemies come in many different varieties with different attacks and strategies and even rock health bars. The combat in this game, however, is woefully underdeveloped. You have like, 4 attacks. You can roll into enemies and squish them flat, shoot the egg as a boomerang projectile, ground pound a group of enemies while airborne, and even dunking the egg into them like Lebron James. That’s about it. Collecting fruit throughout the level strengthens your egg; the bigger it gets, the stronger it is. Though even with a small starting egg, nothing really stands a chance against Billy. Combat in turn ends up being insanely repetitive, just the same group of enemies repeated over and over and over again, and you needing to deal with them in the exact same fashion every single time. There are some enemies that have attacks that damage your egg and make them hard to hit, but all that really amounts to is waiting until they finish their stupid animation for them to become more vulnerable, the bee enemies getting the worst of it. Rolling into enemies is by far the quickest way to deal with them, and this was only somewhat satisfying the first 3 times I did this. Afterwards it’s just a chore, and oftentimes the game absolutely LOVES to gate progression in a level until all the enemies are taken care of, some even spawning in waves! I was so tired, so utterly SICK of this game’s overreliance on splattering enemies everywhere for the sake of “content” that I actively tried to avoid enemies whenever possible, which, again, isn’t really that feasible to do when the game gates progression because you didn’t move the left stick into all the bad guys enough!!! Do it some more!!! This game’s ranking system almost entirely is built upon hatching eggs for bonus points (not fun to do) and combat, except to get a good score you basically need to either use the boomerang attack and knock a ton of enemies into each other for a continuous combo, or you need to use the pile driving ground pound and flatten a ton of enemies at once, or both. Again, my main problem is that it’s too simple and not at all satisfying to do (especially with the case of the boomerang attack, it’s so awkward to hit multiple enemies with), which subsequently means that I didn’t care about the ranking system at all. I got like, one S rank, that was enough for me. The “””puzzles””” in this game, if you can even call them that, are nothing remarkable in the slightest. You either hit switches or hatch animal buddies to put out elemental hazards. Did you know that fire melts ice? Or that water puts out fire? Congratulations, you have successfully completed all puzzles in Billy Hatcher. The game also has bosses but to call them underwhelming would be the biggest understatement of the century. You just wait until they attack and expose their weak points, then awkwardly roll an egg around inside their hitbox, rinse and repeat. The camera makes these even worse, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get there, one thing at a time please.

Between the repetitive uninspired combat and platforming being both so unbelievably simple and entirely automated, there’s just…nothing Billy Hatcher’s levels have to offer. Nothing. You’ve seen all that the game has to offer within the first couple of worlds and everything else is just a repeat of the same content over and over again. The first mission is to help hatch elder chickens from golden eggs, and the second is to get to the boss to fight it, and it’s like this for every single world. The worlds themselves have their own unique gimmicks that at the very least ATTEMPT to try and alleviate the monotony and spice things up, such as the cannons in Pirates Island, or how the game attempts to somewhat help the automation issue by introducing hoops that are trapeze swings and rotating jump hoops you need to time to get the best angle in Circus Park, but it’s just not enough. Towards the final traditional world, Sand Ruins, I almost somewhat was ready to go easier on the game with how quickly it allowed you to finish it. It was still too long for its own good, but I was willing to cut it some slack…until the game decided to go “nah actually you need more emblems (this game’s equivalent to Power Stars) to get to the final world go back and get some more lol”. The game up to that point was only painfully mediocre, though it was slowly starting to test my patience the more I played, but now? All goodwill had been thrown out the window, like an omelet left in the fridge for far too long. The other missions the game has to offer are some of the most uninspired rehashing of the same exact level design with the most mundane of extra mission tasks. “KILL ALL DA ENEMIES! GET TO THIS POINT IN A SPECIFIC AMOUNT OF TIME! GET DA BLUE COINS!” There are some missions that are more unique, but I didn’t care anymore. This game never seemed to know when to finally stop, and the repetition of the boring level design and gameplay only deepened my disdain for this title. The final world, the Giant Palace, was just a massive hodgepodge of brand new gimmicks that, while they would be welcomed in any other world to try and add some interesting variety and make the egg gameplay at least SLIGHTLY more engaging, feel like a desperate attempt to shovel all the ideas the developers thought of to put in the main game at first, to instead later run out of time and put them in the final stage of the game. The final boss admittedly goes kinda hard in terms of spectacle, you straight up face this giant evil crow coated in darkness and get superpowered enough to catch his energy projectiles and throw them back at him, but at that point it was too little too late. I was just simply done. Exhausted. Drained. Slightly dumbfounded even. I thought it was fairly mediocre at first, but after fully playing it, NEVER would I have expected Billy Hatcher to be THIS horrendous, THIS drawn out, this AGONIZINGLY boring. I couldn’t even get anything out of the story, it’s so barebones and juvenile there’s nothing to it at all. There’s a surplus of extra missions to play, optional hidden gold coins to collect that unlock other SEGA characters such as Sonic to hatch as animal buddies in neat little cameos, and there’s even a full-blown party mode, but I don’t care anymore. Enough was simply enough. I haven’t even mentioned the large amount of other forms of irritation, the camera is genuinely atrocious. It moves so ridiculously slow, it’s inverted on all sides, and as the cherry on top of the cake, it moves constantly and NEVER ONCE focuses on what you want it to focus on. For boss fights especially, it’s a complete crapshoot trying to get the camera to not leave the boss off screen.

Not every aspect is terrible, but at this point it’s like trying to prop up a giant dumpster full of broken glass with a couple of tasty breadsticks. The visuals are colorful, the character models and environments look pretty good, and the soundtrack was really really catchy. Of course, that’s to be expected when you have legends like Tomoya Ohtani and Mariko Nanba on board, a lot of it was laid back, whimsical and fit the theme really well, but there’s a select few tracks that’s full of big band and jazz that wouldn’t be out of place in Sonic Lost World, the boss fight theme being my personal favorite. But again, these alongside the unique concept are all I can possibly salvage out of this abysmal slog. I wouldn’t personally be against another attempt at a new Billy Hatcher title mind you, but there needs to be some MAJOR overhauls for it to work well if you ask me. I’m genuinely stunned at how bad this game ended up being in the end. Chalk that one up to another typical Yuji Naka L I suppose. The Yuji Naka hater mindset never ceases.

Long story short, if you’re thinking about playing this, do yourself a favor and Cock-a-doodle-don’t.

Did that terrible pun make you groan out of disgust? Good. You have now officially had a taste of the Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg experience. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Scorn is one of the premiere examples of a "not for me" kind of game I can possibly think of. It's a game with the main focus of artistry over gameplay, and yet...despite not really getting into these types of games, I still managed to stick with it throughout the very end, even managed to 100% it. But why?

To tell you the truth, I'm not exactly sure myself, but something about this game made me genuinely curious and made me want to see where this game went. That being said I have absolutely no comment about the story, there's no dialogue whatsoever and the game never explains anything and instead requires you to either piece things together or come up with your own interpretation of what's going on. The real strength of Scorn lies in its environmental design, inspired wholesale by H.R. Giger. The dim, biomechanical structures with contraptions seemingly made of flesh and bone work wonders for the eerie oppressive atmosphere that permeates throughout the game, additionally helped by the fact that the game looks fantastic detail and resolution wise. It's by far the biggest highlight of the game, the main objective seemingly to gross you out and make you extremely uncomfortable at every turn. Other than just walking forward, there are quite a few puzzles to solve in order to progress, and aside from a couple of overly cryptic examples at both the beginning and end, I thought the puzzles were relatively solid all around. Combat is quite possibly the biggest issue many have with Scorn, and to be fair, it isn't great. The starting piston gun has awkward range and needs to recharge constantly, it's far too clunky to be a reliable weapon. The other weapons do a much better job at taking care of enemies, but ammo is extremely limited. It's a combat system that seems to be "intentionally" bad/clunky, which is personally one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to horror games, but here, honestly I didn't mind it. It's not exactly graceful by any means and it sucks when going against specific stupidly tanky enemies, but I got used to it fairly quickly. I've played far FAR worse combat systems than this in other horror games that actively drag down the overall experience (see also, Silent Hill 2), and as not very good as this was, I was able to circumvent the awkwardness somewhat, by figuring out the effective range and using the unlimited sprint I had to my benefit. It also helps that combat in general is really only a thing you deal with 4/5th of the way through the game anyway so it's very abrupt. Scorn in general does get a little same-y and repetitive but the biggest saving grace about it is that it's a very short game, my full playthrough only lasting around a little over 6 hours. If this game were like, 15 or so hours long, I would start to have major issues, but thankfully Scorn knows exactly what it wants to do and how long it wants to be. I didn't feel like my time was wasted, and while I still don't personally vibe with it, it was overall a very interesting experience that I'm glad I ended up playing at least once.

I’ve been meaning to play and finish this one a while back, but alas, a plethora of other games caught my attention per usual (that and, yknow, college). After finally finishing the game a few days ago, I don’t really have a lot to talk about. I know I say this a lot and end up typing like 13 paragraphs anyway but this time I mean it, A Hat in Time is a very “what you see is what you get” type of game, a 3D collectathon platformer inspired by a slew of different games, Mario and Banjo being the obvious ones. As someone who is a fan of platformers, I of course quite enjoyed this one. The movement is satisfying enough with the sprint hat and diving + jumping acting as not only a horizontal burst of movement, but slightly vertical too, there’s all sorts of collectables to nab outside of the hourglass pieces, the game’s got a great sense of humor and witty writing, the level themes are pretty imaginative, even the boss fights aren’t too bad. The different hat abilities you eventually obtain are mostly superfluous I would say. Aside from the sprint hat which I had on me roughly 99% of the time, and the hat that made the intangible platforms turn solid for the other 1%, the rest of the hats were only there for me to get more optional collectables and not much else. The badge system is also weird, like it’s meant to give you extra perks and smaller scale abilities, but then you have something like the grappling hook which you NEED to equip basically at all times lest you be gated off from progressing. There are other smaller issues as well, Hat Kid doesn’t really have much in the way of air control, so say you messed up a jump slightly or just jumped in an awkward direction, there’s no real way to correct it. The camera is genuinely atrocious though, this thing loves to get stuck in geometry constantly and zooms in so close to Hat Kid so many times it’s ridiculous. I’d say overall though my biggest problem with Hat in Time is that a lot of it feels…aimless structure wise. Like, the opening level Mafia Town is a giant hub that isn’t really all too interesting to explore, but you aren’t really compelled to do so considering there are clear objectives you need to reach. The next level, however, is Dead Bird Studios where the gameplay structure is far more linear point A to point B, which is something I can be much more invested in. Later on, you get to Subcon Forest which feels even MORE aimless and gigantic than Mafia Town, and the stuff you do within it doesn’t really feel all that fun or interesting at all aside from Vanessa’s Manor. Then afterwards, the “final” level Alpine Skyline, which feels like a mixture between Dead Bird Studios and Subcon Forest. The beginning portions of each act are by far the worst in the entire game, unengaging meandering and riding on ziplines for god knows how long, but then the game introduces platforming gauntlet challenges at the very end of each act, which does make up for it somewhat. Despite these issues, Hat in Time is still a solid platformer that I feel almost anyone can jump into and have fun with, structural and mechanical issues aside.

Back to back releases of remakes of iconic horror game classics is a great time to be in I tell ya.

This is unfortunately one of those games where I don’t really have much to say for an arbitrary review, this was just a good time all around just like the other REmakes. Admittedly I do wish the remake kept more of the cheesy B movie tone the original had, and while it is still there somewhat (Leon in particular is still filled to the brim with sassy quips and one liners, especially when he lands melee attacks), it’s overall toned down a bit. However, I feel the remake more than makes up for it in terms of sheer atmosphere and mechanical/story changes. A lot of the irritating elements the original had (instant death QTEs, the minecart section) have been either completely reworked or flat out removed. I do still kinda prefer how the original’s aiming mechanics work (I just feel it’s more precise for the kind of game RE4 wants to be) compared to just smacking RE4 mechanics on the typical REmake control scheme, but it still works great regardless and still maintains RE4’s signature frantic panic inducing gameplay, constantly keeping you on your toes as you scramble to deal with like several enemies in a tight room or arena all at once. The ability to straight up parry attacks is amazing and absolutely would’ve fit right at home in the original if they thought of the idea, it’s so ridiculous and over the top but it works (yes of course you can parry chainsaws with a knife, Leon is simply built different). The downside is that for some reason there’s knife durability so now you gotta waste time repairing it when it breaks or when it takes damage. I don’t even understand why they did this as the game throws so many disposable knifes for you to use, I must’ve stockpiled like 5-6 of them on hardcore mode. Other than that, it’s more or less similar to how the original worked mechanically, getting and combining treasures is still satisfying, rearranging items in your attache case is still decent fun to tinker around with, RE4 is still somewhat fresh off my mind so I did have a better frame of reference to make comparisons. Even the dumb trinkets you got from the shooting range now have functional purpose. They didn’t have to do that, but they did and I’m glad they did.

The boss fights are a mixed bag unfortunately. Some are actually vastly improved compared to the original (the Krauser fight especially), others are…more or less the exact same, some ended up being a bit worse. I swear the Ramón boss was so much easier in the original than it was here, idk.

If we’re gonna talk Ashley though then good LORD talk about an improvement. She is so much better than she ever was in the original, both mechanically AND as a character. For starters, Ashley doesn’t have a health bar anymore (unfathomably based), she gets “incapacitated” when she gets hit, the next hit afterwards being a game over, which means you not only have ample amount of time to get her back up on her feet and essentially up to “full health” again, but it also means you no longer need to waste resources into restoring her health or increasing it, it’s all reserved for you. Second, she now has 2 different commands, one where she backs up away from Leon so he can have an easier time taking care of enemies, and one where she sticks close to Leon so she has a better time avoiding enemies, rather than a binary “stop and go” system. Third, it’s basically impossible to accidentally shoot her now, as Leon puts his gun down in front of Ashley and Ashley herself ducks and moves out of the way when you point your weapon in her general proximity. The only time you’re able to shoot her by accident is when she’s getting carried away, and even then I found it way harder to do so than I did in the original. And on top of ALL OF THIS, you’re still able to command her to hide in lockers when there’s a huge arena fight that’s about to break out. She’s so much less of a deadweight handicap than she ever was in the original, and for the first time I actually didn’t mind when Ashley tagged along, instead of dreading every instance of it in the original. Her solo gameplay section in the remake is actually so much better as well, it’s genuinely tense and eerie and heart pounding compared to the OG. And if we’re talking about her in the story, she’s so SO much better here than the constant barrage of “LEOOOON HAAAAAAALP” that permeated the original. I genuinely liked her relationship with Leon as it developed over the course of the game, it was genuinely kinda sweet seeing her getting worried if Leon was hurt, eventually wanting to fight alongside Leon someday, it was great stuff. Luis was really great too. Like, what the story lacks in cheesy campiness, I feel it makes up for it by making these characters feel more like characters, which is nice.

Overall while I do prefer this over the original, I still have no problem with returning to the original any time soon. I really do appreciate how both games offer different enough experiences so that one isn’t seen as a complete upgrade over the other making the other version obsolete (Dead Space remake for example). I still prefer RE2make for the general setting and the incredibly tense nature of a persistent stalker, but RE4make is still incredibly solid nonetheless.

Also the merchant is still the best character. Bro just comes out of nowhere, helps you out, sells you guns, never elaborates, leaves. What a chad.