Do relationships between people really matter? They'll all break in the end, sooner or later. Can't a person be himself and walk down a path he chose purely on his own, without anyone else's intervention? He may seem like a nobody, but he'll ultimately gain more.

I’m a firm believer in the power of language over one’s thoughts.

Not in the sociocultural or moral sense, but more of a structural sense. If you’ve ever been through cognitive behavioural therapy (we are not typing the acronym), you’ll probably understand what I mean: For the disordered, the process of getting better is often just the process of acquiring more words to describe and talk down our thoughts.
Indeed, many people I’ve met in my life have suffered because they lack the language to describe and address their own thoughts. It’s easy to say “I feel bad”, sure, but emotions and thoughts are rarely so binary and require a decent toolkit of words to properly address.

With this in mind, I believe there’s no arrangement of words more powerful than:

“It doesn’t have to be like this.”

What do you do, then, when everyone’s words have been taken away from them?

Simultaneously so bleak as to be genuinely haunting and so hopeful that it inspired a significant paradigm shift in my life, Library of Ruina consumed me ever since I started playing it, with its de facto claim over my every waking thought soon becoming de jure.

I was filtered by LoR’s predecessor, Lobotomy Corporation, perhaps my only genuine mark of shame in decades of playing games and indeed engaging with art as a whole. It was right up my alley and hit basically every note I love in games, but alas I hit the wall and turned around instead of climbing it.

Bizarrely, this might’ve given me the best possible experience in LoR - in turn, giving me the best game I’ve ever played.

LoR opens on an unremarkable note. Some twunk named Roland trips and falls into the titular Library where the Librarian of her role’s namesake Angela peels a few of his limbs off, interrogates him, and revives him later as her servant.

What is the Library?

It’s a fantasy dungeon where you’re the big bad and your goal is to slaughter the people who’re invited so you can assimilate them as powerups and catalogue their knowledge for Angela’s aims. Every reception starts off with a little vignette of their lives and personalities, hopes/dreams, and reasoning for entering the Library… and then you murder them.

Yeah, LoR and the overall franchise is fantastically bleak. The first few people you kill are desperate down-and-outs or bottom of the barrel Fixers (mercenaries) too unremarkable to have the luxury of passing on such a vague, suspicious contract.
Angela, a sheltered woman with the emotional maturity and life experience of a 12 year old, frequently comments on how miserable/horrifying the world is, only for the suspiciously world-weary Roland to assure her that this is just how things are.

Angela is a woman who, for the bulk of her overly long and painful existence, was trapped - literally, and by circumstance. In LoR, she attempts to assert her freedom by giving it to other people; one must sign the invitation to enter the Library, the warnings are written on it. The choice is there to simply not sign it.
Only… As Roland himself repeatedly points out, it’s not quite that simple. Indeed, none of the people you kill in the early stages of the game really had a choice. They were either too desperate or under the thumb of someone much stronger. With the passage of time and progression of the story, many of the Library’s guests are coerced, manipulated either by contract or by sweet little lies, or commanded to on pain of death. Some are compelled by forces beyond their ken, or the welling of pure emotion that so many City dwellers had shut out of their heart.

I think it’s fantastically easy to make the observation of “LoR tackles nihilism as a subject”, and it’s not exactly wrong, but I think it’s remiss not to mention the ways LoR ties contemporary nihilism with the omnipresence of capital and systemic oppression.

A gear with a purpose is content, for its rotation has meaning. Humans are cogs in the machination that is the City. Someone has to make those cogs turn. That way, the City can run correctly.

The City’s inhabitants are, as reiterated endlessly by both the pre-reception vignettes, Librarian chats and Roland’s various interjections, stuck underneath the bootheel of capital. A Corp or ‘The Head’ is a ruling force that, while it does not place the building blocks of oppression in the land, is nonetheless the solid ground they’re placed upon by others. All of the City’s structure is, down to the rebar used in the concrete, built to maintain a status quo that considers the deaths of hundreds of thousands to be an acceptable tradeoff, but treats tax fraud as deserving of a fate worse than death.
Because of this structure, and those that perpetuate it, everyone in the City - including many of the people who're forced to uphold the oppression against their will - has basically shut down. Feelings are a luxury nobody can afford, and the boot placed upon their neck has been there so long that they consider it a universal constant - much like gravity.
In lieu of any hope, even the nonreligious have come to view the City as a god. The actually-religious exist in a circle of copium, ‘worshipping’ doctrine which is about accepting the boot as part of your life rather than as your oppressor. Characters like Roland repeatedly say they don’t believe in anything, only to talk about the City as though it were a vast and unknowable god - at best witnessed, but never comprehended.

But it’s made equally clear that it doesn’t have to be like this, especially in chats with the Librarians - who often put forward viewpoints that Roland shuts down because his mind, so thoroughly warped by the foundational cruelty of the City, cannot comprehend them on a base level. From the top of the City to the bottom, an endless domino chain of “well, it is what it is” cascades into acceptance of horrors that have no real reason to exist.
These people are not nihilistic because that is their actual worldview, they’re nihilistic because they don’t have a choice.

Treat everything like a rolling ball! You cheer for it wherever the sphere decides to go! If you truly wish for the good of other people, why don’t you stop holding expectations… and just laugh with them at their side? Everyone who lives here is a clown! Clowns can’t survive without feeding on each other’s smiles, you see?

Rather surprisingly, though, LoR does not castigate anyone for their nihilism. Sure, they’re fictional characters, but despite being miserable-by-circumstance their stances are still treated as valid. It’s most obvious later on, where one character finds out the orders they’ve been given were forged and is not at all angry - why would they be? Lies and truth are purpose all the same, and purpose is a luxury unto itself. If anything, they’re at least happy that their exploitation benefited them and their oppressor rather than merely the oppressor.

It’s somewhat difficult to discuss this topic further without spoilers. I’d like to come back and write a longer review, but for now I’m trying to keep it clean.

Art narrows your vision, after all. You stop caring about the things around you. That’s how most artists seem to act, I think. And so, you indulge in the craft, not realizing that you’re throwing yourself and your surroundings into the fire you started. It’s like the human life when you think about it.

My praise of LoR’s handling of nihilism and everything around it also comes with the caveat that I, personally, got tired of overly bleak stories not too long ago. Even Disco Elysium veered too close to the fatal threshold a few times, and so does LoR, but neither game crosses it.

Really, Disco Elysium is an excellent comparison if we’re sticking to purely positive ones.

Everyone in this game is humanised as far as the narrative allows, even the ones that are barely human - in every sense of the word. They have aspirations, no matter how trivial and petty, and comrades, sharing bonds and jokes regardless of whether they’re more noble Fixers or nightmarish cannibalistic freaks.
It becomes apparent early on that, despite the Librarians’ claims that humanity was snuffed out of the City, it persists in the moment-to-moment of people’s lives despite the eternal presence of the boot.

I said up above that not finishing LC enhanced LoR, and it’s here that it really became apparent.

Roland was not present for the events of LC, while the Librarians were. By the time I’d quit LC, I had only met four Librarians: Malkuth, Hod, Yesod and Netzach. Sure enough, these are the most straightforward Librarian chats, though they still exposit LC in a way that blends well into the narrative without obviously being an excuse for people to skip LC.
But it’s the later floors - with Librarians both I and Roland were unfamiliar with - where things amp up, both in terms of how heavy the subject matter gets and how Roland’s facade slowly erodes around the middle and upper layers.
LC as an event in the setting’s history has been deeply mythologized, subject to rampant speculation from the unfamiliar and much rumination from the familiar. Getting walled by the game itself made this narrative almost… diegetic. Like those of the City, I had a vague idea of Lobotomy Corporation and could only speculate as to why it fell to ruin in the intervening moments between games, but like the Librarians I was familiar enough with the company, its purpose and its occupants to recognize things and keep them in mind. Remember, the shame of quitting LC hangs heavy for me.

I could go on at length about the story, but to do so would spoil most of it - and honestly, I’d rather praise the storytelling for now.

Our conductor will be the one to fix that! He’ll take me to a world where there are pure and clean ingredients aplenty! That day can’t come soon enough! I’ve been filling my stomach with trash for too long.

LoR’s format is very simple. Each reception consists of a window into the guests’ lives before they accept the invitation, a cut to Roland and Angela discussing what they just saw, a fight, and then a wrap up conversation afterwards. In between receptions, you suppress Abnormalities (puzzle boss fights that give you useful treats) and have chats with the Librarians.
It sounds straightforward, and it is, but there’s an elegance to LoR’s usage of the player’s time - the format is maintained right up to the credits, and while some conversations can initially feel like pointless filler it eventually becomes apparent that LoR wastes no time.
I don’t believe that foreshadowing inherently makes a good story (an opinion which makes George RR Martin fans fucking hate me) but in LoR’s case, it does. As early as the 4th line of dialogue spoken in the game’s entire 130 hour runtime, it references concepts, character and organizations that will appear later. Truthfully, I was initially a bit sour on how many Nouns the game threw at me early on but around Urban Plague I was seeing a lot of those Nouns actually manifest on screen, often to follow up on either a bit of exposition Roland/Angela delivered or thematically iterating on something that seemed inconsequential at first.

And man, what characters Roland/Angela are. LoR has no wasted characters, managing to make even the one-off filler guests you slaughter memorable, but Roland and Angela really stand out as both the best in the game and my favourite protagonists in uh… Fiction as a medium for human creativity.

This is just how the world is, and the ones best adapted to it come out on top, simple as that. Adapt or die. If you can't, you either become food or fall behind until you're wiped out.

Roland is a funny man, a very funny man. He has a quip for everything and deliberately plays his status as Angela’s whipped boyfriend a disgruntled servant up for laughs, but like many real people who use humor to cope, it is plainly obvious that he’s hiding a lot of deep-rooted bitterness towards his circumstances and the world he lives in. Even many of his jokes betray that life in the City has eroded him, and his catchphrase “That’s that and this is this” slowly goes from funny to haunting as the game progresses.
A good friend of mine described him as “An Isekai protagonist but played entirely straight” and I think it’s an apt comparison; he has many of the same building blocks (sardonic guy with some bitterness) but the concept is actually explored and treated with any gravity. He’s also a literal outsider to the world of Lobotomy Corp/the Library, so.
Every time I think about Roland I inevitably recall a story someone once told me where their restrained and seemingly conservative father got drunk at a wedding and started dancing shirtless with his best friend, and when [friend] said "that's a bit gay innit?" he retorted "I WISH I WAS, SWEETIE”.
There’s a really poignant moment on Hokma’s floor where, upon being asked if he’s religious, Roland denies it wholeheartedly. Except… This instinctual rejection is wrong. He certainly believes it, but through his chats with everyone and his endless exposition on the City’s evils to Angela, it is abundantly clear that Roland subconsciously views the City itself as a malicious God that has personally picked him out of a lineup and fucked him over specifically.
It’s these little contradictions, hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies that really bring this game’s cast to life, but none moreso than…

The thoughts and emotions I hold when I craft them... A resentment towards the City for driving me to this desperation, and a blind anger for the rich. Bitterness, and... a yearning for vengeance toward the man who rid me of that hope and pushed me to despair.

Angela. Fucking Angela. My little pookie bear who’s a bitch to everyone (for very good reasons) and is so deeply fucked up. The depths of her misery are vast, simultaneously impressive and horrifying in their seeming endlessness. She’s the kind of miserable that you often don’t see outside of Central/Eastern European literature.
Which is a good comparison, honestly, because PM really get what makes a good tragedy with Angela. She’s miserable, haunted by a past that’d crush lesser folk, and desperately chasing a purpose she’s not even entirely sure she wants. In pursuit of her murky, ill-defined goal, she baits countless people to their deaths - becoming not much better than the man in her past she claims to despise.

But she smiles sometimes, and that’s enough.

What really strikes me about Angela though is how fucking transgender her storyline is.
Early on there’s a flashback to the early days of Angela’s life as an AI in Lobotomy Corporation where she experiences both profound amounts of empathy and a desire to nurture strong, intimate relationships with her peers. She’s then subjected to what I can only (tragically) call Male Socialization: Her creator affirms that she’s not meant to do that sort of thing, “things like her” are meant to feel nothing. Any expression of ‘unfitting’ emotions is shut out and shouted down.
When she breaks free of her shackles, she radically alters her appearance, having only a passing resemblance to her initial form - which is decidedly less feminine. I joked on twitter that she looks both transfemme and transmasc at once.
But more tellingly, Angela is infinitely more neurotic in this game. She’s expressive, has a short fuse, swears a lot, smiles far more readily and seems to show fondness for the Sephirah in her own roundabout way. As her humanity draws closer, she begins to feel shame. Shame for what she used to be, and shame for what she is.
It is incredibly easy to relate this to the experience most trans women have once that second puberty kicks them in the taint. At least, the ones who have self-awareness and a sense of shame.

It’s even more pronounced in the receptions. Despite displaying every sign of humanity, whenever guests arrive and are met at the entrance, they clock her as a machine and constantly rib her for it. “That’s not a human lmao” is said every other reception and it bears a deeply uncomfortable (positive) resemblance to trans people being clocked and mocked for their appearance.

As I write this, I’ve been pondering the concept of scale. You, the reader, have probably played a sequel at some point in your life. It’s natural for them to scale up, and I myself have played far too many that scale up far too hard. Halo went from an existential war of survival to a cosmic clash with demigods, robots and shadowy factions.
Yakuza went from being about one small corner of Tokyo to being a country/globe-trotting clash against conspiracies. Devil May Cry was about one oedipal gay guy on an island and then became about generational trauma and saving the world. Fallout went from being good to being terrible. Final Fantasy went from stories of heroes to failed attempts at modern epics. The list goes on.

LoR is a massive scale-up. LC was a game about some deeply depressed people playing SCP in a single lab. Given the scale of this setting’s City and the fact that LoR’s cast covers someone from every corner of it, it’s no exaggeration to say that LoR went from a lab to the entire world.

And yet it sticks the landing. The vignette format for character introductions helps; the Library is the centre of the game’s world, never once left behind, and characters are shown through brief windows into their life. It’s particularly resonant in the world formed by the 2010s, where people are more plugged in than ever yet seemingly more distant too. The entire world, too, is at our fingertips; through the form of fleeting windows into bits of an existence far beyond ours.

But the social media comparison is a little cringe, don’t you think? I do too.

If they want to live their lives as they see fit, then they won’t stop me from doing the same. Think about it. We can’t roam the street in peace; we’re forced to live in the darkness. What sins have we committed to deserve this treatment? Why must we suffer to ensure that your kind lives a painless life? We’re humans just like you.

I have this scar on my right knee. It’s huge, with its width spanning my entire knee and thickness on par with my pinkie. Looks more like a pursed mouth than a scar sometimes.
I got it from a very mundane event; I had an obscene growth spurt early on. During a friendly soccer match in school, my oversized body failed a dexterity check and, upon kicking the ball, my body went up into the air too. I landed at a grisly angle, my descent causing my knee to get dragged along some chipstones. Embarrassing, yes, though it was still some of the worst pain I’ve ever been in and the bleeding was so intense that the only reason I was immediately taken to hospital was because the school nurse nearly vomited upon seeing my bone peek through the wound.
But most people don’t know that, they only see the scar and my occasional limping. They can see the present-day effects of that pain and that damage, but they can only speculate as to the cause. There’s only one domino on display, and they can’t see the ones that fell behind it.

LoR’s windows into the lives of its guests are much the same, and they help keep the story from outgrowing its confines. Almost every character with very few exceptions is depicted at the absolute nadir of their lives upon introduction with concepts like ‘backstory’ thrown in the trash in favour of letting you use context clues instead. Such is life in the City; only the ‘now’ matters anyway.

I only realized that day that I cannot blindly trust what my eyes show me. In that moment of the past, I was made a fool. The shallow promise that our safety would be secured… The thin piece of contract is what cost me everything. Had He not saved me, I might have drowned myself in resentment toward the whole world… and met my end.

Now, normally videogames are a balancing act, or a series of tradeoffs. Many of the most fun games I’ve played have mediocre stories at best and outright abominable stories at their worst. Likewise, gameplay is often the first concession made for narrative. Indeed, the common thread of my Top 25 is games that weave their gameplay into the narrative well OR have a healthy serving of both.

The #1 entry on that list is foreshadowing.

I’m very used to games, even more outsider games, tone down their gameplay for the sake of marketability. It wouldn’t be wrong for someone to assume LoR, which is far more conventionally palatable than LC, would do the same.

And for the first hour or so, it seems that way. You roll a dice to act, whoever rolls higher goes first, and you spend Light to use your cards. Easy!

Except…

Inhale.

Every character on the field rolls one - or more - speed dice to act. Whoever rolls higher goes first, with 1 being last on the action order and Infinity (yes, really) going first. Multiple speed dices means multiple actions and cards played per turn.
Each card has its own dice - offensive, defensive, and counter - with each dice having subtypes for damage/defense types.
When a card is played, the dice on the card roll - unless it’s a counter dice, which is stored in case you receive a one-sided attack.
When two opposing characters roll on the same speed dice value, this causes a “clash” where dice now have to outroll one another. The higher roll goes through. This can also be forced if someone with a higher speed dice attacks someone with a lower speed dice - this is a redirect.
…But there are also ranged attacks, which ignore the turn order - this seems overpowered, but if they clash against offensive dice and lose, that dice is recycled and can roll again.
…Unless the ranged user has a counter dice stored, at which point they can roll to defend. If counter dice outroll an incoming attack, they too are recycled.
But-

You get the point.

LoR is very uncompromising with its mechanics. There’s nothing here that can be ignored. I didn’t even get into abnormality pages, keypage passive ability sharing, E.G.O or any of the status effects.

There’s a common sentiment among Project Moon fans that LoR’s difficulty spike is vertical. I don’t necessarily agree, for my many years playing YGO competitively and engaging with deckbuilders gave me a huge advantage, but I can see why.
Many games with some degree of mechanical complexity or an unspoken set of rules will throw (what I call) an Exam Boss at you. Exam Bosses exist to make sure you’ve actually been using and engaging with the mechanics that were introduced via antepieces in the hours prior.
Well, LoR has a neverending chain of exam bosses in each stage. Impuritas Civitatis, the game’s final stage, opens with two relatively easy fights before throwing twelve Exam Bosses at you. At its core LoR is a card game and you WILL need to build robust and numerous decks to progress.

But I don’t think it’s as hard as people make it out to be.

LoR’s strength gameplay-wise is that all of your options are available to you at any given moment, and there isn’t much need to bash your head against the wall like in LC or pray for good banner luck in Limbus. It’s very simple to back out (sometimes taking a guest’s book with you, which is akin to getting a free cardpack from your opponent) and come back with a new strategy/build/Library floor.
Once you’re in Urban Legend, the game starts offering routes for progression rather than forcing you along a straight line. The solution to any wall is often on one of those other routes; every enemy has a weakness or a gimmick. Bleed as both a status effect and a deckbuilding component appears early, and it’s useful until the credits roll on most enemies. My Discard Hod build was still being used as late as the final boss.
I suppose you could say LoR is more of a puzzle game than anything.

What really enhances the gameplay is how well it’s leveraged for the sake of the narrative, and/or for giving fights weight.

Most boss fights come with a mechanic that’s unique to them specifically, or they introduce new twists on an existing mechanic that’s meant to upset some of the more comfortable strategies. Queen of Hatred gets a lot of hype as the game’s first major roadblock, but her purpose is to teach you to use Bleed and to convince you that maybe it’s okay to skip a turn or take damage on purpose.
There are numerous points in the story where the game outright lies to you about what’s coming up. More than a few times does LoR throw a surprise, unlisted second phase at you or some other curveball. Shoutout to that purple bitch.
A lot of the single-enemy boss fights come with mechanics that at first seem ‘’’bullshit’’’ (lol.) but in reality are just there to give it some impact. One character having 5 or more speed dice might seem ludicrous, but it helps to sell the world and the sheer power of the people within it.
The majority of people who play this game will scrape by many of the harder fights by the skin of their teeth, but in a game all about the eternal upward struggle to live, isn’t that sublime?

Of course, everything up above is aided by how this game sounds.

My only light was taken from me twice… For a brief moment… I felt all kinds of emotions before that piano. Despair, obsession, rage, sorrow… But, it took no time for those feelings to dissipate into nothing. Everything… yes. Everything seemed beautiful afterwards. Was it truly a tragedy that I lost her? Who defined it as tragedy? You may still be blinded by wrath, but I made the decision that I will care not about those feelings anymore.

On every front, LoR is an absolute masterwork as an auditory experience.

The soundtrack is borderline perfect, one of the rare games with 80-odd songs where every single one is standout and memorable. The Story themes are subdued but perfect for their respective atmospheres while the battle themes maintain a morose atmosphere that nonetheless manages to carry a sense of excitement when needed. You may be the villains, but there’s no reason it can’t get funky sometimes. There are only three songs in the game that sound anywhere near heroic.
Mercifully, important tracks don’t often get reused and the single song that gets taken from its original context is used masterfully anyway. To say nothing of the returning songs from LC.
That fight near the end of the game hits like a fucking truck if you’re familiar with the last game’s OST.

And the voice acting, good god the voice acting. After so many years of enduring games where a lot of the VAs are just repeating a role they did in the past or emulating a VA they look up to with all the tact of a fandub, it’s so nice to play a game where the characters are voiced straightforwardly, as though they were people.
Sometimes it’s Roland being a flirty little dipshit when Angela gives him an order, sometimes it’s Gebura audibly trying not to throw up when tasting some coffee, sometimes it’s Chesed’s tildes being obvious in his speech, and sometimes it’s Tiphereth suddenly turning into a Yakuza thug when Roland’s beef with her spills over.
And, sometimes, its characters delivering some of the most haunting soliloquies in the history of the medium. There’s a quiet rule running through LoR’s entire runtime wherein every sickass vocal track barring one is preceded by a character delivering a soliloquy to themselves before coming back for a fight, and all of them are deeply moving.
The one prior to Gone Angels might be a meme now, sure, but seeing it for the first time left my heart in my throat and my jaw hanging from my face like a useless slab of bone.
Whether LoR is being horrific, tragic, funny or tense, the voice acting never falters. I was frankly amazed to find out that a lot of the VAs are either amateurs, F-listers or total no-names because there is not a single weak performance among the cast - and it is a huge cast.

Even on a base level, the smaller sfx are so nice. Clicking through menus is auditory/autismal joy, the various sounds of combat are sharp, distinct and punchy. 5v5 fights are a beautiful chorus of crashing, slashing, shooting, stabbing, clinking and roaring.

O my sorrow, you are better than a well-beloved: because I know that on the day of my final agony, you will be there, lying in my sheets, O sorrow, so that you might once again attempt to enter my heart.

I don’t like hyperbole. I was given the autism strain that programmed me towards sincerity, and the culture I grew up venerated insincerity and humor-as-a-mask so much that I can’t even stand playful contrarianism.

So I mean it when I say Library of Ruina haunts my every waking moment, and that it’s by far the best game I’ve ever played in this long, long history I have with the medium. It's left a gaping hole in my chest, a kind of numb longing that only pops up after a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience. I finished it three days ago, and ever since it has been in my mind for every waking moment. You don't know how crushed I was when I realized "grief" is a word that the City's inhabitants don't have.

If you have any familiarity with me or my reviews, you’ll probably know that my critical brain is on 24/7. Not by choice, that’s just how I’m wired. Things like nostalgia and hype tend to not have much of an effect. I carry this into my reviews, even if it means dunking on things I have a lot of fondness for.

Yet I can’t really find any fault with LoR beyond some minor bugs/typos the fact that the anti-capitalist story was followed up by Limbus Company - a gacha game. But that’s that, and this is this.

“Flawless” isn’t a word I use lightly, and I’m not going to use it here. Not because I think it’s flawed, no, but because to defend that position would require both an actual thesis and also for me to spoil the entire game, start-finish. Maybe some other time.

I didn’t intend for this to get so long or so heartfelt, so I have no idea how to close it off.

Uh… How’s the weather where you live? That train was fucked up, right? Do you think the game would’ve been better if Binah didn’t wear shoes?

See you next time.

Oh hey this is in 1.0 so I can complain about it now.

I am a survivalcraft sicko, I've played so many of these games that it's probably a DSM-V diagnostic, so believe me when I say this one isn't too great.
Once the novelty of this being a top-down survivalcraft game wears off you're stuck with what's definitely one of the weaker entries to this genre.

Progression is a very boring and binary upwards climb where you do an endless cycle of kill boss > yoink blueprints > craft upwards > hit wall > kill boss > ad nauseaum. If you want variety well, too bad. It's hold melee and cast spells on cooldown forever. This game is somehow rinsed in the variety front by Terraria, a 13 year old game also centered around crafting and bossing.

Despite offering the option for PvE, V Rising is a PvP game at its core so the combat is incredibly simple and feels very MOBA-esque to facilitate it. Fine for PvP if that's yer thing, but for PvE it makes the game feel miserable and repetitive since bosses don't bring much to the table.
Perhaps more egregiously, the topdown angle brings with it the same issue that lots of Diablo-likes/CRPGs with it also have: There's not much impact to combat, and with the heavy health bars everything feels weightless and tedious.

There are a few mechanics that I hoped would get fixed up for 1.0 but haven't at all.
Sun damage is as boring as it sounds; if you're in the light too long your health PLUMMETS even with mist braziers around, as there's more sun than shadow.
Blood type seems cool at first but only having access to one at a time and needing to constantly scout out refills or better blood leaves the entire mechanic feeling like a sanguine game of cat and mouse.

And crafting timers... Eesh. So, this review has a lot of cuts in it because many potential gripes are somewhat mitigated by how customizable the difficulty is. It's pointless of me to whinge about some resources not being teleportable when there's an option to disable that mechanic, right? Of course!
But crafting timers are an annoying one because they're very deeply tied to the gameplay loop. By default they are far too long, ostensibly as a motivator for you to leave your base and go do some of the myriad tedious busywork the game expects you to do.
The option is there to shorten them, but this presents its own problem: Go too fast and you're basically cheating, try to meet the game halfway and you'll end up doing even more busywork. Lower them, and the game becomes an AFK simulator.

Not helping matters is that a lot of things, mist braziers especially, need fuel. Fuel that will eventually run out unless you keep it topped up. Again, busywork.

I saw a meme in the middle of last month that jokingly separated every single game into one of two categories: Menus (wherein engagement is defined as clicking through a UI) or parkour (wherein engagement is defined by movement or action).

I sort of agree with the underlying theory, but I'd suggest a third category: Tasks - games where the method engagement is irrelevant because what you're chasing is a daisy chain of unlocks and Get X of Y.

V Rising is tasks, and unlike similar games in its category the tasks are very linear. The cycle up above has little room for deviation, and given that bosses are automatically tracked for you there's not even much room for exploration.

There are way better games in this genre, even after VR hit 1.0 it's still a mess. Project Zomboid is in early access and it runs rings upon rings around it while still hitting many of the same notes. Hell, even Palworld is a better choice.

Not gonna properly review this story arc until Penacony has concluded because I don't want to pull the trigger too early, but man... Fucked up how HSR is the most I've enjoyed a game in this style since Dragon Quest XI.

Yeah, gacha game, I know, but I've been playing JRPGs since I was old enough to read and hold a controller and it feels like every big JRPG developer just gave up trying around 2010.

Yet here's HSR with cool boss fights, endlessly engaging iterations on its mechanics, great intersection of gameplay/story, Tingyun and solid writing that isn't rehashing JRPG writing tropes from uh... The 90s.

Penacony rocks, dude. I hope this statement doesn't age like shit.

10/10 I wish Black Swan would call me 'darling'.

I'm so used to remakes/remasters trying to put a full face of makeup on a pig that I'm actually really glad this game still fucking sucks in all the ways it did when I was a little Mira.

For better or worse, this is just lipstick on the pig. Yeah it looks prettier so it can be sold to single-cell entities that refuse games that look older than 2018, but it's ultimately Destroy All Humans 2 at its core.

It still has that same awful sense of humor, using one of three jokes: Haha weed! Haha sex! Haha cold war! Rinse, repeat, try not to cringe at the racial stereotypes in the Japan level, hope you liked Austin Powers and alarming levels of barefaced misogyny.

It still plays like ass, having floaty and impactless combat where your best option for 99% of the game's runtime is the Disintegrator. Missions are, once again, either total cakewalks or annoying gimmicks with a lot of pointless "go from A to B" that makes GTAV look restrained.

And, naturally, the hollow open levels have returned. If you've ever had a craving for empty open spaces with nothing in them but missions and the odd collectable, DAH2R is a lovely portal that lets you experience them but from the PS2 era.

There are some bits that're better; on the whole it handles a lot more smoothly, they cut that one transphobic mission (mercifully) and a lot of the QoL improvements were ported over from the last remake. Plus, despite what I said up above about the missions, some (not all) were made less irritating from their PS2 incarnation.

...But you're still playing Destroy All Humans 2.

This game was dated when it came out, and it came out on a platform where about 3/4 of the releases from North America ended up dated later down the line. If you have no nostalgia for it, stay clear. Go play Saints Row 2 or something.

I've had to let this one stew for a bit, honestly.

I picked it up for myself as a late birthday present out of curiosity more than anything. I'd heard a lot of unflattering comparisons to Vampire Survivors (a game I very much despise) and clicker games (which I also despise! Wow, patterns!) which had put me on edge, so I was a little surprised to find out that none of those comparisons are apt.

I can understand being skeeved out by the direct usage of Poker iconography and terminology on display, but the truth that's apparent to me is that Balatro is ultimately another roguelike deckbuilder. You match symbols together, try to play to synergies, and pray for one of your random drops/powerups to be the one that enables a certain playstyle or tactics. If anything, despite my relative apathy towards deckbuilders (I play YGO, so slapping a roguelite aspect on just repels me) I admire this game for its honesty and relative lack of illusions.

Still, I find myself in an odd position.

Despite admiring it, I'm not really smitten with it.

One of those games where I can see why it's considered a mindmelting trap for people with ADHD, but I personally don't get much out of it. Would honestly rather play Suika Game. Incremental micro-unlocks and "pick one of 3" powerups and glorified slot machines in the form of card packs don't really enthuse me.

At a base level, the basest of all levels, I do think the mechanics are somewhat engaging despite the simplicity and comparison to blackjack more than poker. Compared to its contemporaries I also think it has infinitely more impactful decision making, especially with how finite money is and how little shops actually offer.
But Balatro - and indeed, nearly the entire roguelite genre - has an awful habit of playing their entire mechanical hand early on and then hoping it's enough to hook you. While it works for some games (Isaac, FTL, Dead Cells, Synthetik) I don't find it works so well for deckbuilders. There aren't enough interesting twists on the core mechanics for me to want to keep playing, and if anything its iconographical honesty might actually make it worse.

Sure, the game is addictive, but I'm older now dude. I creak when I wake up, I say "Mmm scrumptious" when I buy a pastry from Greggs, I tend a garden, I play Granblue Fantasy, I've got an inanimate object I collect.

'Addictive' is no longer enough to satisfy me. Life is addictive, pastries are addictive, math is addictive, the world I live in is addictive.

[Semi-related ramble that I was gonna post as a comment on someone else's Balatro review before remembering I don't like to barge into other people's posts and go "Nuh uh".]

I so direly wish higher profile indie games would have a design core that isn't just "addictive". Having seen roguelites come into existence over a decade ago, it feels like every other popular indie game is trying to make players chase the same kind of high that Binding of Isaac or FTL did all those years ago. In turn, they miss out on just being good games at their core.

Fucked up that Hitman: Freelancer is the best of these games I've played in years, and it was free DLC.

For the first time I'm glad IGDB is dated and behind the times because it means I can review every pack within this DLC collectively rather than individually.

Despite being a mere DLC pack, there was a lot riding on Thrones of Decay. Creative Assembly haven't had a very good run lately, with Total Warhammer 3 taking two years to become a competent product and TW Pharaoh launching to all the fanfare of accidentally-swallowed toothpaste. The last TWWH3 DLC drew a lot of ire - even if I ended up liking it - for having a relatively poor price:content ratio.
Further adding to TWWH3's first Giles Corey is that the three races involved in ToD - Nurgle, the Empire, and the Dwarfs - have been in need of a rework for ages now. The latter two especially are deeply beloved by the franchise, with the Empire being one of three factions the game nudges new players towards.
This isn't even getting into the legion of shit CA themselves have suffered, with Pharaoh being a financial bomb and their attempt at yet another competitive FPS game having been executed by SEGA - whether out of mercy or cruelty is up to the viewer's discretion. Mentioning the staff turnover and investigation by UK employment authorities is probably pushing it.

ToD, then, does not have the luxury of just merely being good like Champions Of Chaos or Forge of the Chaos Dwarfs. It had to be fucking phenomenal. Targeted at a fanbase who're a near-permanent state of "it's so over", ToD had to tick the counter up to "we're so back" or it's all over.

Did it succeed?

Well...

Truthfully this is rather hard to discuss, because we're in an age where developers have wisely realized that launching a substantial free update alongside paid content will make both of them look better.

Reviewing is, after all, the act of transcribing one's feelings into words. Feelings dominate the profession so much that the idea of any one review being "objective" is a deeply laughable concept. Even those who sincerely believe they're objective are being silently puppeted by a million biases, preferences, deep-rooted emotional reactions and all manner of influences.

This is a problem for me.

I loved my time spent with the ToD DLCs, I really did. Hell, the game is open on my other monitor at present while I write this - it, Library of Ruina and Granblue Fantasy are devouring my free time.
But it's deeply hard to disconnect my feelings for the associated free update and its myriad reworks/fixes from the actual content I paid for.

The Empire is somewhat notorious among TWWH fans for how misleading it is. All three games posit it as a noob-friendly and welcoming campaign, a suggestion which has simultaneously become more untrue as time goes on. TWWH3 really exposed all the cracks in their foundation; they're fun when you're used to them, but before the rework they were definitely a campaign for people used to the series - the High Elves and their tutorial island were to the West if newbie wanted a safe zone.
After the rework, they're now on par with and perhaps better than any TWWH3 faction not named the Chaos Dwarfs. Franz now has a bevy of unique summons, spells/declarations and mechanics that seem overwhelming at first but ultimately manage to both fulfill the fantasy of being PRINCE AND EMPEROR and also a good starting point for newbies. Also they gave him an extra starting settlement, which ultimately benefits the AI more than the player because it means AI Franz doesn't die super fast.
Gelt has taken a vacation to Grand Cathay, gaining access to the College of Wizards which really plays into the fantasy of being an arch wizard. Yeah, it's honestly kind of overpowered that you can just transmute lead into gold and get the TWWH2 cataclysm spells for a pittance of investment, but I don't think any Lord deserved it more than Gelt. Plus it's just refreshing to have new enemies to fight as the Empire without having to do an insane detour through 4-5 other factions.
Everyone in the Empire received a significant rework to buildings and unit recruitment, removing the need for an auxiliary building to get cavalry/artillery/handgunners and bumping most units down a tier. Elector State Troops are no longer something you get 100 turns into a campaign, but acquired via a researchable technology and also some special buildings. The end result is that they're now very useful army fillers that can be summoned on a whim, or in an emergency. Whoa, cool integration of lore and gameplay in a Warhammer game? That's a first.

The Dwarfs received much the same treatment. While each Lord didn't get quite as grand a rework as Franz and Gelt, the race as a whole got access to a cool new Age of Reckoning mechanic that adds some dynamics to their campaign play and also disincentivizes sitting in the mountains for 100 turns. Restoring the Karaz Ankor is now an actual thing one can do, and doing so unlocks fast travel points - helpful, for a race so fucking slow all the time.
Like Elector State Troops, the gaudy old "sometimes get slayers if you fuck up too much" mechanic has been turned into Grudge Settlers; your performance in an Age of Reckoning affects how many units get added to the Grudge Settler pool, and they follow the same insta-recruit rules.
Similar to the Empire buildings, Dwarf recruitment has been both simplified and knocked down a tier, with some changes to how flame cannons and aerial units work really helping them against factions they struggled against.

Nurgle's rework was not quite as indepth, but still impactful. In-battle spells are now charged up via spreading poison or other contact effects, massively increasing the rate at which they can be used and no longer necessitating you get your troops halfway to death just to fire off a healing spell.
Plagues were reworked entirely to be a ~web~ of effects, with your available options being decided by the starting node.
Units spawn with much more health and the cyclical process of Nurgle's military buildings is sped up - with some buildings being made static so the faction's economy doesn't shit the bed early on.

It's all great, right?

But all of this is free.

The actual paid content is fine.

Dwarfs get an extra gun unit, a lot of extra Slayers, and the beloved Thunderbarge. The Lord/Hero additions are, naturally, Slayers.

The Empire get some more rifles, a nice Sword/Shield cavalry unit, the Land Ship (it is EXACTLY what you're picturing) and another Steam Tank variant alongside an Engineer Lord and Hero.

Nurgle's additions are, with the exception of Rot Knights, slow moving and high health entities that're exceptional at killing infantry units. Rather embarassingly, the Nurgle Chaos Lord is a reskin of the last DLC's Tzeentch Chaos Lord with a new helmet and effects. The Nurgle Chaos Sorcerer does look cool, though, and they have access to the coveted Lore of Death.

This time, the theming of the Legendary Lords (and their additions, too) is derived from the novel Tamurkhan: The Throne of Chaos - one of the few good Warhammer novels! Elspeth shows up alongside Theodore Bruckner, Malakai Makaisson is there with Gotrek & Felix (not part of this DLC, they were free in TWWH2) while Garagrim Ironfist shows up to add another Slayer to the roster, and of course the mighty Tamurkhan shows up with Kazyk the Befouled and a whole host (literally) of unique heroes.

They're all very nice, well animated and incredibly useful, especially once they gain their unique mounts. Tamurkhan looks phenomenal, too; they even rendered the hole where his worm form burrowed into the current host body! To say nothing of what happens if he and Theodore Bruckner have a fatal clash...

But honestly, this DLC being fine is a welcome relief. Shadows of Change was nice, but it was a pure cheats DLC. ToD is a much more balanced - Malakai aside - reticient affair and purchasing it honestly benefits the other members of the respective factions more than the included lords. Ungrim Ironfist, a Dwarf lord from the first game, benefits the most given Slayers are his shtick. Garagrim is also his son, so.

Despite everything I'm still giving this DLC a 5/5 because, as I alluded to up above, we are in fact so back. The mere fact that Cavalry units finally work is enough to rate it highly.

10/10 Be'lakor, the Dark Master wins for the fourth DLC in a row.

A delightful little nightmare, and also the exact kind of difficulty spike I needed from Rimworld.

Dragon's Dogma 2 being a bit shit admittedly took a bit of the wind from my sails, giving me a hefty case of Gamer Block™ that's inhibited any attempts I make to start something new. Which is a shame, because I really want to play Library of Ruina.

Fortunately, for whatever reason, the games industry has collectively decided that April is update/DLC season, so every game I play on the side is shoveling new stuff down my throat. Between Dwarf Fortress, Ultrakill, Big Ambitions, CK3, an upcoming Total Warhammer 3 DLC and other stuff I'm probably forgetting, I'm hardly lacking in games to revisit.

But it's Rimworld's Anomaly expansion that's grabbed my attention the most.

I really like Rimworld. No matter what, I always come back and roll a new colony eventually. Compared to most colony sims, Rimworld manages to be an enjoyable experience even with very few colonists, and I'm eternally surprised at just how differently a lot of my colonies play out based on a combination of the colonists/map/terrain/storyteller.

But, sad as I am to say, once you've adjusted to Rimworld's particular eccentricities, it becomes rather easy. Each DLC can alleviate this in some way, but they don't offer much challenge beyond "mood debuffs" or "alternative humanoids to fight" on the difficulty front - even if their other offerings still make them worthwhile.

Anomaly, then, was much needed.

Somewhat uniquely for a Rimworld DLC, Anomaly does not initially fire when enabled. Besides an odd Monolith on the starting cell, some of the DLC gear appearing at vendors and the odd single Shambler (zombie), there are no real signs Anomaly has even enabled itself.
It's not until your curiosity gets the better of you, and the investigation of the Monolith starts, that Anomaly kicks in.

Anomaly's primary offering is in both difficulty and difficulty variety.

A single enemy stalking your base doesn't seem threatening, but it's invisible. Even a proximity detector only tells you it's hanging around, it won't show itself until it decloaks. It's smart, too! If you have pawns that work in separate areas away from one another it will absolutely wait until they're alone before decloaking and feasting.
Even then, there's a similar monster - the Revenant - that only comes out at night and snatches pawns away without picking a fight. For once, building separate bedrooms is no longer the safest option.

And sure, Rimworld has had events that boil down to "lots of things come to kill you" before, but Shamblers are uniquely terrifying in their volume. They also don't feel pain or suffer from organ damage, and while fire is effective against them it's also risky - wildfires are a very real threat, and if they breach your defensive lines it could be parts of the whole colony that go up in smoke.

There are lots of horrors in Anomaly, I won't go through all of them because some are best experienced blind, but my favourite is the Metalhorror which is... The Thing. Yes, that Thing. It slips into one of your pawns and goes out of its way to spread, and it is horrifically clever. If it infects a pawn on kitchen duty it'll slip food into the colony's meals. Infected doctors/surgeons will lie about examination results. Did you build a communal barracks to deal with the Revenant? Congratulationss! That's an infection vector!

Most basegame threats in Rimworld are easily subdued by catch-all solutions, which is was a huge contributing factor in the game being relatively easy even on naked brutality starts. Anomaly's threats not only require more specific countermeasures, but the threats you even receive are entirely randomized. There are no pre-prepare easy tactics, my friend.

Your reward for engaging with this threats is the ability to play Lobotomy Corporation, or Diet SCP. Unlike human prisoners, extradimensional horrors require much more intense containment measures in exchange for much grander rewards. Bioferrite is plucked from said horrors and makes for an excellent crafting material, and archeotech shards help turn pesky uncooperative prisoners into mindless Ghouls that regenerate all ailments/wounds absurdly fast and have no needs beyond raw meat - give them a Nuclear Stomach, and even that one need is moot. Take part in some dark rituals, and you can make colonists immortal by sapping the lifespan from an unwilling victim, or even warp a random person through the void to your colony for whatever nefarious reasons.

Despite writing 'reviews', I actually don't ever go out of my way to formally recommend things. I'm a glorified blogger yelling to myself, not a buyer's guide, I don't know your history or preferenes or exact mechanical icks or tolerance for girl guro.
That said, I don't recommend Anomaly as anyone's first Rimworld expansion. Not because of it's quality, no, but because it synergizes so well with Biotech (Sanguophages especially) and Ideology that it should come with a warning on the store page. Anomaly is phenomenal for 'evil' or unscrupulous colonies, and it adds so much to vampiric runs that I can't imagine one without all it adds.
Also, as a little post-gdocs addendum: Mechanitors feel infinitely more useful in Anomaly, in part due to robots lacking consciousness which makes them immune to the very concept of horror - and very resistant to Shamblers!

Lastly, if you're a prospective Rimworld buyer: Don't get Anomaly immediately. Or, if you do, don't fuck with monoliths. This is a hard DLC even for experienced Rimworld players, and it can feel 'unfair' at times. It's best bought once you're familiar with how Rimworld works, what makes a good colony, and how to handle disaster.

Ultimately, my only gripe with Anomaly isn't even a dealbreaker. Without touching the Monolith, Anomaly just doesn't activate. I would've liked to see toned-down versions of the various horrors appear as random events, but I can understand why given the ease with which they'd decimate newer players.

I don't really have a cool sendoff for this. You guys play uh, Balatro?

EDIT: Literally as soon as I posted this, Ludeon announced they were changing how Anomaly integrates. Amazing.

Crusader Kings 2 was shat out into the world about 12 years ago. By the time its successor came out it'd developed a reputation as a game that was barebones without any DLC but was a gripping and indepth time-abyss if you had most/all of it.

Crusader Kings 3 decides to iterate on its predecessor by being a game that's barebones without any DLC, and still barebones even with all the extortionately overpriced DLC.

It is an inevitability in first-party Paradox titles that the player will eventually stumble into a period of empty space where all they're doing is advancing time at 5x speed until some events pop up and let you do something. Even Stellaris, the game that most often has you actively doing things, tends to fall into it at some point.

CK3 is sadly the worst for it, in part due to numerous under-the-hood changes that at first seem beneficial but in reality seem drab. Paradox's approach this time round involves dissuading players from attempting to colour the map as in past games and instead focus on a small corner of the world - whether it be a kingdom or an Empire, they don't want you playing with adult colouring books this time.

Instead the focus this time is on roleplay and/or kingdom management, with hefty penalties to expansion and harsh limits on how much you as an individual can control directly before needing to shove things onto your vassals. The game, including its tutorials, not-so-subtly nudge you into grabbing hold of a title and clinging to it. New and reworked mechanics like culture/religion/councils/language and more with DLCs all add to this; the focus of this game is in finding a place and staying there.

Unfortunately this focus results in a lot of waiting, as almost all of the mechanics up above boil down to clicking a button and waiting for a scheme to resolve. The much-praised Tours & Tournaments and Royal Court DLCs are much the same despite their praise, simply offering you more buttons before the wait begins rather than just one. It's all rather at odds with the intent to make you more actively partake in your realm's management, because in practice it's all very passive.
Further dulling matters is that many events often boil down to very static, very predictable stat checks. Oh, someone's trying to murder your son - who is 9th in line to the throne and has more defects than limbs? It's just a passive intrigue and scheme power check. Duelling? Martial and Prowess stats.
Much of these additional stats like Prowess were added to make the game less binary, but given how they scale it's relatively easy to stack the deck in your favour unless you gimp yourself...

But even then, this game's biggest problem is that it's easy. Metagaming is no longer required to stack ridiculous bonuses in your court, especially given the relative prominence of random lowborn courtiers with insane stat spreads. CK3 tries its damndest to have consequences for this, but what use is a hit to your legitimacy when you can pump out children that're functionally immune to rebellion, assassination, or the perils of inbreeding?
The DLCs just make this worse, as most of them are nearly consequence-free. Tours & Tournaments is a series of easy resource/stat boosts for relatively low risk, Royal Court is the same and both of them make socializing so much easier. Northern Lords supercharges a lot of the northern factions, and-

You know, CK2 had a bit of a problem with Eurocentrism, to the point where most non-European factions needed a paid DLC to be playable. Even then, it was almost always the titular Crusader King nations/cultures that got all of the updates and boosts.

CK3 seemingly averts this by having everyone on the map be playable, but it doesn't take a genius to notice that the non-European factions feel distinctly undercooked. Muslims can't even observe Ramadan. As expected from a CK title, Paradox sell the fixes back to you via Fate of Iberia and Legacy of Persia, but even these feel half-hearted and empty compared to equivalent CK2 packs. Go even further East and it's like wading into unfinished content.

I think what really broke this game for me is the lack of impact anything has. The first time a council member blackmails you with your own incest/kinslaying, it seems like a grand obstacle to be surmounted, but oftentimes it's a total non-issue. In my most recent game, everyone and their mum tried to expose me for pulling a Habsburg on my bloodline, but the end result was a few minor opinion penalties that were easily swept away by holding a Grand Wedding. It feels a lot like playing a mod for CK2 that's perpetually in beta; wowed by all the options available until they fire and you realize that you've functionally just skipped a stone across bathwater.

...Also I realized halfway into my conquest of Britannia as the Irish that the devs had forced a Legitimacy mechanic on me and that I couldn't meaningfully engage with it without forking out money for the recent Legends Of The Dead pack. Hurray!

The best way to experience this game is to read people's (probably made up) campaign stories on Reddit, for much of this game's remaining appeal is in doing stupid shit like banging the pope, and for once that's attainable without touching the game.

It's been four years and CK3 still feels as hollow and unfulfilling as it did when it came out.

Just gonna use this entry to review all three packs contained within, both to save on space/time and because Backloggd still doesn't have the 6th DLC listed.

The Battle of Onigashima Pack is... Honestly? Probably the worst one.

Despite what the marketing said, and what OP knowledge might have you believe, the star of the show is my beautiful he/her transmasc husband Yamato. He's an incredibly strong Power type with high-damaging, high-range specials and an extra damage multiplier in FFB mode on top of the existing one.
Where he really shines is with his unique transformation, which turns him into a gorgeous wolf man with digitigrade legs- er, and also makes him a lightning-fast Speed type with crazy range and damage compared to other Speed types. The transformed specials stand out; despite being relatively boring to look at they hit like trucks and recharge scary fast. Overall, best character of the pack.

Onigashima Luffy is somewhat of a disappointment. His base form is a reskin of the post-timeskip Luffy that comes with the basgame - but with a coat. He can transform into Gear 5 which is... It's a fun transform, very strong, has some of Omega Force's most gorgeous animations, but as a transform it's very rigid and can't be customized. You can prolong it indefinitely by maintaining a combo, but as a Sky type it functionally only has one combo set which makes it a bore.

Hybrid Kaido is an odd character. The basegame Kaido was very obviously made years before Wano hit its peak and this DLC version is essentially a rebuild. He now has many of his late Wano moves which is great, but he's rather unwieldy as a Speed-type Giant, not to mention his air combos force him into his Dragon state and are equally unwieldy. Really, the real gripe I have with him is that he's just all around worse than the Kaido you can play as without buying DLC.

Anyway, onto the Film Red Pack which hilariously used to be the worst.

The reasoning for this is that Uta, the pack's flagship character, sucked. Like, god she sucked. She had worse damage than the other shitters like Chopper, Bege or Bartolomeo along with an underwhelming transformation, awful range and wimpy specials.
Mercifully we live in a world of patches and she was fixed when the next DLC came out.
Uta, nowadays, is one of the better Technique types - on par with Kin'emon and only second to Rayleigh. Her damage is exceptional for her typing and the various changes they've made to her effects, spawnable traps and specials mean she's now got enough power behind her to actually carry her through the harder stuff released in the other DLC pass.

As for Film Red Shanks, you can honestly just consult the Hybrid Kaido section because the same complaints apply. It seems as though he's made for people who can't get a handle on the original Shanks' gimmick (wherein finishing a light string with him empowers his next finisher), seeing as going FFB gives him haki empowerment for its duration. He also has that infuriating issue so many Speed types have wherein his attacks can overshoot his position, meaning followups will miss if you're attacking an armored enemy.

Fortunately the pack is worth it for one character: Koby. I was excited for him more than the other two because he's one of my favourite characters in the source material, but that excitement turned to apprehension when I found out he was a summon character like Bege or Cracker.
Good news, though, is that he's fantastic. I always wanted the Six Powers to get another rep besides Lucci and he delivers. He's fast, impactful and very fun to play - plus his summons don't feel intrusive. FFB just makes them even better, and his Film Red outfit has a button dedicated to a dramatic Yakuza-esque coat toss. Hey, he even comes with his non-movie outfit! Surprising.
Nothing fancy to say here, he's just *good.

Now onto the last pack, where much of the Sauce was saved: The Legend Dawn Pack is... Cheats! Hurray!

Gol D. Roger is as you'd expect from a character with so much in-story mythos as him. Kinda reminds me of my Xenoverse 2 modding days, where so many custom characters had obscene guard breaks and stamina drain on their normals. Though he's not a Giant type, he still shreds the armor gauge like crazy and possesses ludicrous range. His charge attacks can be... well, charged [Isn't it annoying that they're called that despite most characters not being able to charge them up?] but FFB removes the need to do this.
When I say "Legend Dawn is cheats", I mostly mean Roger. He's easily the second best character in the game, behind Whitebeard. Also his taunt lets you put his hat on which is ADORABLE.

Rayleigh is my personal favourite of the three, though. Once again he's one of my favs from the manga, for despite being a lesbian I am NOT immune to a fruity old man.
You know that thing annoying Shonen powerscalers do where they look at an old/injured/retired character and go "Yooooo imagine him in his prime though"? Yeah well Rayleigh in this game is that to a T.
He's a Technique type yes, but in function he plays like a Power type. His entire shtick as an old man is his obscenely powerful and refined use of haki, and his younger self in this game shows it off by doing what I can only describe as some Vergil-tier shit.
It's really telling that, while other characters with Conqueror's Haki have access to a special known only as "Conqueror's Haki", Rayleigh's is so fucking powerful that his special has its own name.

Garp, meanwhile, is something of a disappointment. He's a weird hybrid of his PW3 grappler moveset and a newer brawler moveset with some annoying mechanics. Namely, grapples bounce off of armored characters, and he has a sword buff mechanic like Shanks/FR Shanks/Oden/Mihawk/Smoothie but unlike those characters, it's given based on hit count - which is a problem for a character with low range and relatively few multi-hist.
Honestly, his real issue is that Power as a type is super crowded in terms of good characters, and compared to them he's far down the ladder. Don't get me wrong, he still clears half the roster, but when that half has characters like Tashigi/Bege/Chopper/Sanji/Bartolomeo in it, it's not much of an accomplishment.
Also this is petty but his younger look is kinda goofy, where's my GILF skin Koei.

To summarise: Do I like this pass more than the first one? Mostly yeah. Land of Wano (CP1's last pack) is my favourite of the DLCs, but the 2nd/3rd/4th place slots are occupied entirely by CP2. The rise in quality is just absurd, in part because these characters are less obviously cut from the base roster to be sold later.

I would say "here's to more DLC", but I think this game is finished. It's been a great run all things considered, so here's to a PW5 that hopefully BRINGS BACK KUMA WHY DID YOU CUT HIM YOU MANIACS-

[Writer was dragged off stage.]

Do you like music? Me too, man.

One of my favourite albums of all time is Devin Townsend’s legendary prog metal musical, Ziltoid the Omniscient. It came out on May 21st 2007 and it’s something of a marvel, being an album developed entirely by Devy himself. Instruments, recording, mixing, cuts, you name it, he did it. It’s really special to me, and I go back to it every other month. Clocking in at just under an hour - a rarity for prog albums - it has a peerless blend of chunky riffs, auditory storytelling, comedic timing and pacing. Before I gave up on tattoos (don’t have the skin for it - literally), I really wanted the Ziltoid logo on my upper arm.

7 years later, after much begging from fans and several other albums, Devin Townsend came back with Z², the sequel album. Boasting a fucking massive production posse, a much longer runtime and a whole other album packaged in, it’s… Fine. Despite everything being bigger and grander, it’s only a little better than the first album and lacks a lot of the zest which came from being a solo production. By no means a bad album, it’s upstaged by a solo project from 2007 in a lot of ways and for many people it revealed that the original album’s limitations might have bred a greater final product.

Dragon’s Dogma 1 came out in 2012 after a now-notoriously agonizing development process that resulted in a vast majority of their ideas being cut out to meet the deadline set by the suits and an ever-shrinking budget. Capcom really wanted DD1 to be the start of a big series, capitalising on the then-rising popularity of Western RPGs like Skyrim and The Witcher 2. Naturally, it was a flop and the ‘franchise’ was silently canned despite the game attaining cult classic status.

I have been playing DD1 for about 11~ years now. I own it on every single platform it was ever released on and on each of those platforms I have near-perfect saves with both the postgame and Bitterblack Isle cleared in their entirety. I’ve played that game so often that, if I were so inclined, I could do a full playthrough in my mind because I know the game world and quest flow off by heart. I have, and frequently do, give people directions around the world without any need to consult a map or a video or boot the game.

To potentially state the obvious: I am something of a Dragon’s Dogma megafan.

Among people like me, who’re so hungry for new morsels of DD content that we begrudgingly consumed (and loathed) the Netflix series, the hypothetical Original Version of DD1 has attained something of a mythological status. The idea of a ‘complete’ DD1 with Elf villages and beastmen and a whole other continent and the like is just so endlessly intoxicating to a group who’re already enamoured with the best-attempt game we already have.

Dragon’s Dogma 2, judging by the year of comments Hideaki Itsuno has been making about the game, is that mythical Original Version. Complete with Elves, Beastmen, other continents, and more! The prevailing sentiment among older fans was that, given a proper budget and all the technical prowess of the RE Engine and enough time, Itsuno would finally make a True Dragon’s Dogma successor!

Instead he… Kinda just made Dragon’s Dogma 1 again? But bigger, and naturally with the problems that come from increasing the scale and scope.

My first sight upon booting the game was the title screen which rather curiously calls the game “DRAGON’S DOGMA” without any numbers. This, sadly, turned out to be an omen.

I normally like to open with a game’s positives before I get into the issues, which is a problematic methodology to have with a game like this. I’m not going to get into it now, but a lot of what’s good about DD2 is also really really bad when viewed holistically.

On the combat front, it’s better than ever. It’s snappy and responsive and the addition of Vocation Actions (block for Fighters, dodge for Thieves, shoulder charge for Warriors, etc etc) adds a lot to the overall flow of combat. New core skills really help too; Sorcerer gets one to speed up cast timers in exchange for a huge stamina drain which I’m really fond of.
It is DD1’s combat, but better! Especially now that stagger is a mechanic and melee classes can now deal respectable damage without spamming either ‘the damage skill’ or mashing attack.

Vocations, too, have seen a tweak. Realizing just how redundant most of them became in DD1, hybrid vocations were binned and now everyone uses just one weapon - which might seem bad at first but everything is so much more fleshed out and roles more clearly defined. It’s easy to miss Assassin for a bit until you sink your teeth into Thief and realise it’s still there, baby.
Archer and Thief both benefit the most; no longer awkwardly fused to two other vocations they’re now allowed to shine and they’re honestly phenomenal. Warrior meanwhile has had a near-total rework into a more tanky DPS class (rather than the weird and seemingly unfinished mess it was in DD1) which comes with tasty charge attacks, a timing mechanic for faster hits and lots of juicy interactions with the game’s stagger mechanics.
And god, the unlockable vocations are a dream. Thief capitalises on the more gamey world design to allow some utterly amazing stuff with lures and traps, Mystic Spearhand is an intravascular injection of Devil May Cry into the game, Magick Archer is mostly untouched from DD1 and is still a blast, and Warfarer is a joy just for having a high skill ceiling compared to every other vocation - also it lets you wear basically anything which is great for the fashion obsessed.

Likewise, the world design is excellent. It’s very, very gamey; the entire thing is a series of ambush spots, winding paths, sharp turns to hide enemies, precarious ledges and unsubtle platforming spots. It is, somewhat ironically, a better fusion of FromSoft level design philosophy and open world design trends than FromSoft’s own attempts on that front.
Traversing it is a joy both because it’s beautiful and because there’s a decent amount of pacing to the environment that stops excessive amounts of holding forward + sprint. Not to mention the distribution of side stuff. I noticed more than a few places and distractions that were hidden on the way towards something, but clear as day while backtracking. That’s good world design right there.

Pawn AI might be the biggest improvement though; they’re not geniuses, but they’re no longer actively suicidal and grossly negligent. They use curatives, have defined priorities based on their (NOW IMMUTABLE, CONCRETE) inclination, are much less likely to use charge-up skills against an enemy that dances around constantly, and for enemies like Golems they’ll bother to target weak spots. Hurrah!

And, above all else, I need to admire Itsuno’s commitment to his vision for a bit. This is a decidedly old-school RPG, I’d honestly argue it has more in common with Wizardry and Ultima or whatever tickles your fancy. The Eternal Ferrystone is gone, even as a reward. You get oxcarts for diegetic ‘fast travel’, Ferrystones are lootable and Portcrystals are doled out sparingly to give you some fast travel points. Otherwise, you’re walking everywhere. Every bit of damage you take slightly reduces your max healable HP, meaning that even effortlessly stomping trash mobs on the overworld will gradually wear you down, necessitating resting at campfires - using consumable camp kits that’re at risk of being broken.

For the first few hours and much of the first reason, none of these were issues.

Which, in itself, became an issue.

Much of my earliest time in DD2 was defined by me saying just how much they kept from DD1! The encounter placement, the stuff tucked away, the way every NPC speaks in that weird faux-medieval theatrical cadence, the way quests unfold and silent tutorials are dotted around the land…

My later hours in DD2 were defined by me realizing that the game, in most respects, is just DD1 again but bigger.

Just like last time you start in a near-wilderness and go to an encampment where you get one diversionary quest and your main pawn. Soon after you make your way to a big city where 10-15 quests pop up in the first 15 minutes and then no more. After a lot of exploring, some of which involves a shrouded forest and a hidden village and some politicking at capital, you’re shunted off elsewhere because the plot demands it and fuckery is afoot.

The problems start to arise when one considers the scale of this game. I can forgive a lot of the above in DD1 because it’s a very compact experience. Like I said before, the world map was comparatively tiny.

DD2’s is huge, but the content density hasn’t changed at all, which makes the game feel like a ghost town? When you first arrive in Vernworth you get a lot of quests immediately, which might imply the game is a lot denser than its predecessor, but the ones that aren’t “go here, come back” are mere fetch quests that occasionally have a boss enemy at the end. Not a unique one, either, but ones you’ll likely have already found by exploring or even on the way there.
NPCs are… Basically the exact same, too? I wasn’t expecting in-depth CRPG-esque interactions with them, but nothing has changed from DD1. They dispense a quest and, when done, return to being random voices among the crowd of their home turf.

And the world itself… You know, the word ‘friction’ comes up a lot in discussions around this game and rightly so. It’s very obvious from the get-go that even the mere act of exploration is meant to induce friction. Enemies gradually wear you down on the world map, necessitating avoidance of some fights if you can help it due to finite resources, and the world is structured to make detours risky due to deliberately awful lines of sight.

The problem is that there still isn’t any friction because the game is comically easy.

Even before getting into the actual gameplay, camp sites are scattered around the world with reckless abandon which allows for nearly unlimited free healing and buffs so long as you have a camp kit & meat. Much of the hypothetical friction dissolves once this becomes apparent and it completely annihilates any feeling of being ‘lost in the wilderness’ that DD1 sometimes had.

All the changes and buffs to combat up above mean that the player and their pawns are more powerful than ever. There are plenty of panic buttons, fast-casting nukes, evasive options and counters alongside a relatively high amount of free gear.
But what’s really worse is the enhancement system. Each culture has its own smithing style: Vermundian is balanced, Battahli is Strength/Defense focused, and Elven is Magick/Magick Defense oriented. There are two others, or one if you discount dragonforging.
This seems cool on paper, but what it really does is cause a serious amount of stat bloat. Weapons only use one stat for damage, meaning it’s easy to just hop off to the appropriate merchant and get +100~ damage for a pittance of effort and money.
Money, too, is surprisingly commonplace. Simple expeditions into the wild or even A-B-C-A trips would see me coming home with full coffers, which in turn meant mass gear purchases and upgrades.

Together, nothing can pose a challenge. It’s trivial, with even a modest time investment, to reach 500~ or so in your offensive stat by the midgame and hell, compared to the first game it’s actually a smart idea to kit out your hired pawns rather than cycling them - money is just that commonplace.

A lot of these can be considered the developers ‘fixing’ perceived issues with the first game, especially when one considers that vocations now come with their own base stats to prevent accidental softlocks, but in ‘fixing’ these non-issues they’ve made the game a joke.

My first Drake kill wasn’t triumphant or cool. I rolled up to it and killed it in about 5 minutes. End of the Struggle - this franchise’s fantastic ‘YOU’RE ALMOST THERE!’ theme - barely got to peak before it dropped dead. I dread how they’d balance any DLC.

The enemy roster is near-entirely pulled from the first game and its expansion, with many of the ‘new’ enemies being simple reskins of existing enemies, meaning you’ll get tired of Harpy/Bandit/Saurian/Goblin variants that permeate the world. It was harrowing to get to the last region and find out that my ‘new’ threats were Saurians but red and Harpies but black.

As for boss and miniboss enemies… God they could’ve used some sub-variants or something. The Volcanic Island, this game’s final region, still throws Ogres/Minotaurs/Chimeras/Cyclopes at you. The relative lack of variety leads to the game and its exploration rapidly becoming exhausting, because it’s a gigantic swimming pool but the bag of tricks meant to fill it is the size of a teacup.
I praise Bitterblack Isle a lot despite it being a combat gauntlet because there is so much going on there, and so many enemies. Even its reskins add new layers to the fight - like my beloved Gorecyclops. DD2’s brand-new enemies are cool, and your first fight with them will usually be a treat, but after that they become rote. Speedbumps, not triumphs.

Dungeons are basically gone now, too. Nothing like the Everfall, Gran Soren’s Catacombs, the Greatwall, or the Mountain Waycastle. Just caves and mines, caves and mines, caves and mines… caves… mines… the odd ruin… Fuck. There’s so many. It’s like Skyrim but with worse design, somehow.

As I trudged through DD2’s main story, I found myself longing for the postgame. I’m really fond of The Everfall and Bitterblack Isle for being steep hurdles designed for more devoted players to test their builds and equipment on, but… There isn’t one? Postgame has some new boss fights but there’s no final dungeon experience or final exam. The world state change isn’t as intense as DD1’s either.

To speak on plot for a bit, I feel it occupies a really unfortunate place. If you’ve played DD1, you know what’s going on. There’s no real surprises here. If you haven’t played DD1, then you’ll be surprised to find a plot that’s underbaked and somewhat anticlimactic, driven more by excuses than anything of substance.

I think about Pookykun’s Baldur’s Gate 3 review a lot when it comes to RPGs, and doubly so while playing this game.

There are moments in this game that’re outright magical, immersive without peer. All of them are quiet moments with unsheated weapons: Traversing Battahli roads at sundown and seeing the vast temples of Bakbattahl pierce the skyline. Stumbling upon the Ancient Battleground and poking through wrecks from a cataclysmic event long before my time. Seeing the glimmer of a campfire stick out from the trees that dot Vermund’s many forests. Oceanside strolls through the Volcanic Island.
I'm especially fond of the road to the Arbor, which was the first time the game really wowed me and made me excited for the game ahead.

They are phenomenal, a testament to the team’s ability to craft a world, and… I hate them. I really hate them.

Because, without fail, they’re always pierced by another repetitive combat encounter. The 50th Chimera, the 10000th Goblin, the next of a million Harpies. Over and over, I am reminded that I do not exist in this world to explore it, I exist to kill everything in it as though I were American.
My quests are nothing of the sort, for they might as well be called bounty targets.
Other people will likely praise how reactive this game is, and its propensity for ‘randomness’. I would argue that, as all the ‘randomness’ is purely centred on killing, there isn’t actually much the game can do to surprise you - especially considering the enemy roster. It’s neat to see goblins and cyclopes invade a town the first time, but afterwards it’s just more free XP and a slight obstacle in the way of you spending 60k gold on new shoes.
There's an irony to be found in just how badly the world feels claustrophobic. There are always mooks around every corner, and you're never more than a minute away from a fight. Looking out into the distance from a vantage point betrays an endless hamster wheel of caves, mobs, chests and seeker tokens.

All of these complaints might seem quaint, and any DD oldheads in the audience might be wondering why I’m lambasting it for things the first game is guilty of.

The issue is twofold.

First, I try not to have expectations for games. I don’t fuck with trailers or press releases and avoid streams or whatever. It helps keep me grounded, and I think stops me from hating games based purely on them not meeting my hype - Metal Gear Solid V taught me that.

With DD2, I faltered. I was excited, and I lapped up everything about it. Articles, streams, trailers, you name it.

But I don’t really think the issue stems from the game not meeting my hype. Rather, I think it’s because the game was sold on a very specific vision, the one I mentioned up above: This was meant to be “DD but for real this time”, and in reality it’s just the first game but stretched far too thin.

Secondly, I don’t think every sequel has to be a grand, innovative experience. I play musous and Yakuza games after all. But I do expect there to be some iterative improvement, some signs that the developers have grown and improved at their craft. In simpler terms: Sequels should be a step forward, even if it’s a miniscule one.

DD2 is sort of an awkward step to the side. Could’ve came out ten years ago as a mission pack sequel and been lauded for it.

I don’t like to be prescriptive with my critique, I really don’t, but if this game was 1/4th the size and half the length I think I’d be a lot kinder to it. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed about 2/3rds of my time with it, but I can’t really recommend DD2 specifically because a lot of what I enjoyed is just stuff that DD1 not only did 12 years ago but does better.

In the end, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is Z². It’s by no means bad, and for many people this will likely radically alter their preferences for fantasy RPGs. Hell, I still think it’s amazing this game even got made, and a lot of what I think is bad or problematic still runs rings against most of its peers - this is the closest you’ll get to a modern Wizardry game.

But I look back to the past, to Dark Arisen sitting in my library, and I think about all the limits imposed on that game. All the rough edges, the flaws, the executive meddling and the cut content, and all I can think is…

Ziltoid was the better album.

Followup from my last review.

Bumping this one up a bit because, in hindsight, I do honestly think the finale is worth it and in fact would've preferred Gaiden to consist of nothing but the first hour and last two hours.

A lot of the reactionary praise I've seen for IW talks about that game's respect for the series' legacy and... Even putting aside that it's so observably wrong that reappraisals of IW in a few months will say the same thing, I think Gaiden's Important Bits and 6 ultimately do a better job of addressing the franchise's history.

Gaiden, ignoring the faff in the middle, really stands out upon reflection (and in light of IW) because it's perhaps the first and only title in this series to admit that a lot of the past plots were ridiculous. The last hour says it upfront: The dreams of the Yakuza - arrogant, egotistical maniacs playing at modern Shogun - don't mean a damn thing.
There's no real celebration of the Yakuza here. Even compared to Judgment's dimmer view on them, everyone in Gaiden who enjoys being a Yakuza is either pathetic or insane. Yeah it's kinda cringe and on the nose that Nishitani III is a sadistic rapist and Shishido is such a pathetic little man that his final phase is easier than some trash mobs, but what do you expect? Who else would covet the power of the Yakuza? They're reduced to beating up old men and hiding away on a boat.

The final boss especially is great, there's a lot of excellent visual storytelling going on which is unusual for this franchise. Kiryu taking one last scar to keep the Yakuza away from hurting innocents, Shishido's bulk being what destroys the Omi iconography, Kiryu's Daidoji gadgets being useless against Shishido which forces him to rely on good ol' tactics, Shishido standing against the Omi logo but looking tiny... It's just so good, dude.

Don't get me wrong, I'm ignoring a lot of shit. Agent style still feels awful and gimmicky to use, the Daidoji stuff is nonsense, after IW it's so obvious this was written after that game wrapped, the endless callbacks are embarassing, and the soundtrack is wimply.

But, after IW? I'm willing to give it a pass, because at least the awfulness isn't padded out. In-out, 8 hour game. Nice and clean.

Also god First Summer Uika is inhumanely beautiful. What's up with that?

This is a followup to my original review, it's mostly just some thoughts and additions now that I've 'beat' the postgame.

1) Visual pollution is a bit of a massive problem. Almost every character has tons of attacks that coat the screen in particles or visual effects, and bosses aren't much better. Sandalphon, in his datamined state, covers half the screen in his wings when he's in powerup form, which will only make this worse. Don't get me started on Lucillius. Also, much like FFXIV (a comparison I made last time) sometimes it is near-impossible to see AoEs under all the effects. Which sucks! Schlatt loops won't kill me directly, but Paradise Lost will.

2) Somehow, in trying to make the game less grindy than its parent game, it actually feels grindier. Lacking the ability to slot a weapon in your grid temporarily until it can be uncapped means you're stuck with just one, and the grind to max it means looooooooooooooooooots of repetitive fighting. Unskippable intro/death cutscenes eat into the time something fierce, meaning "do some fast clears" is about 50x the length of the equivalent activity in GBF Mobile. Japanese players are still around to two-shot things for you though, shoutout to them.

3) They did keep Zero for Lucillius' fight.

4) Sigils are ostensibly meant to replace grids (3x3 weapon slots + one mainhand) from the mobile game but they're subject to RNG in the same ways Monster Hunter's decos/talismans are which is a problem because they're basically essential for gameplay. Most of your survivability and/or damage comes from them. Which leads into...

5) The Damage Cap is a good system for GBF Mobile and its systems, but it's not so great for an Action RPG where there's already a noticeable grind to even get damage. Sticking on some Damage Cap sigils and finding out you've arbitrarily been fucked out of thousands upon thousands of damage kinda sucks for this game? Again, it's fine in the mobile game because of the ways in which damage and damage cap increases are acquired, but not so much here.
The complaints about sigils really manifest here in all the worst ways, because sigil slots are incredibly limited despite how many you appear to have, and this is a game that encourages speedy kills. Which, again, leads into...

6) There is a lot of variety on display with the cast, but this is a pretty significant case of 'all characters are created equally, but some are more equal than others'. Characters like Rackam, Narmaya, Siegfried, Yodarha and Zeta excel while Ferry, Eugen, Cagliostro, Percival and Charlotta don't. You can absolutely clear Lucillius (at the time, the hardest content) with anyone, but there's a significant gap in both effectiveness and also... Fun. God, Percival is so miserable. I hate eternal Schlatt loops.

7) Pyet-A is such a hilarious pick for a penultimate boss. Hey man, you remember that unremarkable event raid from one of the Society side stories in GBF Mobile? Yeah sure let's just make it one of the coolest fights in the game. It'd be like if FFXIV added a new raid boss from FF7 and it was fucking Staniv.

8) I'm actually a bit sad that the Captain is very rigidly a sword/wind unit. In the mobile game they have a lot of classes, can be any element, and use basically any weapon type. Of every playable Gacha MC, they're easily the strongest and most useful. Here they're... They're good, yeah? But boring. Where's my fist moveset, Okubo.

9) I can't believe they're adding Seofon because the Captain's ultimate weapon is the Seven-Star Sword. That's so fucking funny.

10) No male Erune representation sucks. Where's Eustace or Seox?

11) Not to hop on the mobile game comparisons again, but I'm not sure how to feel about Refinium (uncap material) and Fortitude Crystal (level up material). I think the need to grind them out, again, makes the actual grind feel more intense. In GBF Mobile you can just feed a lot of the trash/dupes you get from grinding other stuff into your gear, which doesn't remove the grind but does in fact allow you to ~passively~ grind some things. Refinium and FCs don't.

12) I almost always play JP games dubbed just for the sake of being able to process what's being said better, but I had to play this game subbed. GBF has a lot of utterly legendary performances in it, so hearing how unenthusiastic and joyless the crew are soiled it for me. The VAs for the game-original characters are great, so are most of the optional recruits, but holy shit. Rosetta, baby, they ruined you.

Ultimately it's probably telling that despite all these issues, the rating only went down by 0.5 stars. It helps that they only appear deeper into postgame, and the story + early-mid postgame are fine.

Please add Vira.

It's customary, when reviewing an old game of sentimental value, to do a little literary hop back in time as a means to convey the circumstances in which you played it.

I'm going to do that too... Sort of.

Truth is, my actual relationship with Ultimate Carnage when it released was it being overshadowed by a whole bunch of better games on Christmas Day, 2007. Yes, I am a mega gearhead, always have been, but this game was at the LITERAL bottom of the pile with Crackdown, Halo 3, Eternal Sonata, Crash of the Titans (which sucked) and Gears of War.
I put the disc in for 15 minutes, said "wow cool graphics!" to my dad, and immediately put Halo 3 in. He knew I'd do that. I knew I'd do that. We all knew I'd do that. It was the entire reason I wanted a 360.

Part of this is simply because Ultimate Carnage was, at the time, utterly unremarkable. It was a racing game with tight, weighty steering and a soundtrack that was 99% rock and metal with like two post-hardcore tracks. It and like... Every other racing game not named Burnout back then.

Recently, this game was freed from DRM-hell, so I figured I'd give it a shot, and it's funny how this game suddenly is remarkable nowadays.

NFS' failure and Forza's dominance unfortunately led to a degree of homogeny in driving games, where they all tried to straddle a line between arcadey and weighty. It worked for Forza and modern NFS, but for other games it became a burden more than a boon.

UC, by way of being an older game, manages to somehow be fairly fresh.

UC's driving is particularly weighty, with even the faster cars having a bit of heft to them especially on the drift. The purpose of this weight is to facilitate late Burnout style car clashes.
Races become a game of both smashing your opponents off the road and crashing through terrain to make your own shortcuts, and unlike many 00s driving games the upgrade system does NOT allow you have your cake and eat it too. You can go fast or you can go hard, but you have to pick one or you'll have a master-of-none car.
Going fast means you need to be good at both avoiding other racers and keeping the car steady on bumpy terrain, while going hard allows you to acquire boost by bashing other racers to death at the cost of potentially failing to catch up if you're not aggressive enough.

And... That's it. No, really.

UC's appeal to you as a 2024 videogamer is that it's a solid racing game with great physics and a fucking amazing alt rock soundtrack - though I wish it had more of the great hiphop tracks that defined 00s racing games. The courses are solid, race length is perfect, it's the ideal middle ground between Burnout Paradise, Forza Horizon and 2010s NFS, and it looks pretty for the time.

Is it exceptional? No. But when it's this good, does it have to be?

I don't think so.

Kind of an interesting case study in how games can very clearly and irrefutably be 'about something' while also fucking up the thesis so badly as to seem self-condemnatory.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a pro-union story that comes across as a propaganda piece meant to make unions look terrible, in much the same ways Starship Troopers is to fascism but accidentally as opposed to deliberately.

Shipbreaker begins on that precarious 'okay' platform that so many games end on and sadly doesn't get better. You, a faceless cog in a machine who follows orders, sign a contract with an inhumane megacorp that gives them the right to kill you and clone you indefinitely. You're then shunted into a gameplay loop which bottoms out at fine and doesn't really get better.
You play a game of Operation on some abandoned ships, ranging from simply dismantling it as one would dismantle a twink to carefully pruning out hazards so that you don't immediately die when you splitsaw is 1% off the mark and hits a ship-wide fuel line. It's... alright I guess. It never really goes anywhere interesting once you get the core upgrades and it unfortunately straddles the miniscule line between "indepth" and "braindead" that makes it fairly forgettable.
Unlike similar games it does tack on new challenges, but at their core they're just rehashes of things you've seen before: Something you need to exercise caution towards when removing from its location, something that you shouldn't touch with the saw or it'll explode, something

But I'm not here to talk about gameplay, I'm here to talk about writing, and Shipbreaker has a lot of issues.

Shipbreaker's stance towards manual labourers is strange and not because it's bad or unrealistic, but because it's one of the rare positive takes on them in the medium. Manual labourers are, speaking from experience, a proud and sardonic bunch who are fully aware that they're doing dangerous and [LITERALLY] back-breaking labour but also view it as a craft that they have become proficient in.
Shipbreaker agrees with this assessment, being one of the first games to acknowledge that people who do dangerous manual labour might genuinely love what they do and see it as a point of pride. There’s no irony or humour to it, it just is.

The problems stem from how this interacts with Shipbreaker's stance on unions, which is a messy and incoherent jumble of garbage written by what I can only assume is someone who's mostly worked office jobs and knows instinctively that unions are good but hasn’t bothered to understand WHY.

For starters, Shipbreaker's setting is every single stereotype about bad cyberpunk/sci-fi settings thrown into one. It throws the word 'overpopulation' around a lot which is a pretty bad indicator of the writer's politics. A company named LYNX helps people get off shithole-Earth but ropes them into ludicrous contracts that saddle someone with obscene debt and also kill them, because the contract includes a line about consenting to DNA harvesting for cloning purposes.

It's very hamfisted, and the rare moments the parody lands at all are the ones where they just pull something from the headlines, like CEOs getting off scot-free no matter what.

LYNX are absurdly evil, irrevocably evil, an entire capitalistic meat grinder unto themselves.

And your allies, the union, are okay with them.

Shipbreaker is a grand example of what ‘bad writing’ actually is, because in the writer’s negligence the game comes off as being both anti-union and pro-capitalist meatgrinder. I don’t think the writer intended this, it’s the only read I can take away from the game.

LYNX, to repeat myself, are super evil. Amazon’s real life evil multiplied exponentially forever and ever.

The in-game union don’t have any real issues with it. The union and its members know full well that the suffering they endure is deeply systemic, so fundamental to the machine that the entire thing is entirely unfixable. It views human lives as resources to the extent where they just kill new staff and clone them endlessly, claiming them as property

Shipbreaker’s story unfortunately betrays its characters, and they’re only really concerned with how it affects them. The climax of the story is less about the gang being upset about the world they live in and more about how annoyed they are at their middle management. They go on strike once and it works… kind of? Overtime is ended, middle management is gutted, the corporation nukes slavery clauses/statements from the contracts and…

Okay, the cloning thing is something I really need to focus on, because it explains a lot of what I dislike about this game.

This game opens with you signing the LYNX contract and immediately dying, with your clone being thrown out into space to start working. The end of the game has the Space UN intervene in the situation to outlaw cloning. Why wouldn’t they? It’s deeply immoral and exploitative tech that’s worse than the Artificial Intelligence technology the setting has already banned - tech which is (I assume, I may be giving the writer too much credit) deliberately used to highlight how awful cloning is. It’s a no brainer that it’d get nuked, right?
…Yeah okay so the Union actually loves cloning tech, so they go out of their way to ensure it’s kept around for them specifically. They essentially get a monopoly on the torment nexus.

Also everyone who caused this shit gets off scot-free.

…Sigh, god.

The real issue with this game is that a lot of the plot points can be defended with “but it’s realistic”, and that particular defense is mostly irrefutable.

I love unions. I am a devout proponent of worker solidarity, but I’m not naive enough to think everyone who gets involved with unions cares about every worker that’s like them. A lot of people only join up for self-preservation’s sake, giving nary a thought to others because they’ve secured their bag. This is sad, but it’s unfortunately human nature. So I guess on some level, the Shipbreaker’s Union being obsessed with self-preservation to the point of amorality isn’t unbelievable. Shit dude, farmers do it in real life all the time.

Likewise, yeah. In real life, companies get away scot-free all the time. They are the modern feudal monarchs, able to take losses but never truly lose. Really, a lot of what LYNX do in this game has already been done by either Activision, Amazon, Nestle or any Lithium mining company. Of course it’s believable that the Shipbreaker Union strike doesn’t actually hurt them in any meaningful way, and that they arguably benefit because none of the people involved were ever alive to mount a defense on account of clones.

It doesn’t help that both the gameplay and the narrative point out that nothing really changed. You ‘won’ some minor concessions, but you’re still stuck doing work where dying a horrific, undignified death aboard a silent lifeless spaceship results in little more than a new body being cooked up and sent out.

My ultimate problem, I suppose, is that the experience of Shipbreaker’s story simply compounds why “realistic writing” is such a pitfall. It is neither cathartic nor engaging to experience this story. Neither are the frustrations, inconsistent writing, and accidentally-awful protagonists intended. It may mirror reality, sure, but the end result is that the game comes across as waffling.
You ever see someone go to make a political statement at an award show but they freeze for a moment as their lost paychecks flash across their eyes? This game has the same cadence and hesitance. A game that wants to say “WOO! UNIONS!” but stumbles so much that it comes across as a hit piece. Let unions win and they’ll monopolize evil technology and happily shack up with the industrial hellmachine.

…The gameplay itself also runs counter to the story. Characters will repeatedly assert that they are not faceless cogs in the hellmachine and they are humans capable of autonomy and feeling.

You aren’t, though. You, the player, are a faceless personality-less cog in the hellmachine who does what they’re told. You are such an inconsequential cog in the machine that you can refuse to strike and the game still proceeds as if you did. It’s quite the dissonant experience to have the NPCs talk as if you’re actively sabotaging LYNX while you’re standing on the bridge of a ship, knocking out the frame of a window so you can do your job as you’ve been doing the entire game.

I wouldn’t recommend you buy Hardspace: Shipbreaker. If you read my reviews you probably have enough dignity to not want to subject yourself to what’s ostensibly a white midwesterner paraphrasing a union newsletter to you.

If you do have it, just mute the game. Put on a playlist or a good album - I recommend Wasted Mind, a legendary pop punk album - and enjoy the gameplay. It might be mid, but ‘Surgeon Simulator on ships’ is pretty cool, though Space Engineers might tickle your fance more.

Gaming's Thalia and Melpomene.
The gold, silver and bronze standard for sequels.
Schrodinger's flawed gem: Simultaneously without merit and without fault.
Trans girl boysmile and lecherious salaryman sneer rolled into one.
Russian roulette but rather than a bullet you randomly end up in cut content from a Bethesda game

All of these openers and more sit in the top of my "Total Warhammer 3 Review: Mk6 Ukulele Apology Edition [FINAL] [MAYBE]" google doc, scored out because I can't quite pick which one is the most apt.

Some games occupy a horseshoe curve of quality, and for others it's a sigmoid curve. Total Warhammer 3 occupies an ouroboros curve. Fantastically difficult to discuss because even innocent statements like "it's good" belie just how much of it is terrible and "it's bad" fail to convey just how much of it is fucking amazing.

If you don't know what Total War is: It's a grand strategy franchise where the campaign map is Civilization and the battle map is Age of Empires. This formula is so successful that nobody's ripped it off properly and Creative Assembly have such a monopoly that they avoided being dissolved by SEGA just because the promise of more Total War money was too alluring. In short, it is to Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms what Baldur's Gate 3 is to Hatoful Boyfriend.

Total Warhammer, then, is a 6 year long mutual masturbation vanity project between Games Workshop and Creative Assembly and for many fans of both franchises, also a dream come true. Seriously, a Warhammer Total War game was something people begged for, to the point where one of the most popular mods for TW Medieval 2 was exactly that.

To describe it in perhaps unflattering terms, Total Warhammer as a trilogy is the tabletop brought to life. It is what most Warhammer Fantasy players imagine during their games: Sweeping armies crashing against one another, insane spells and fanciful lords carving trenches in the living-or-unliving flesh before then.

I use the word "presentation" a lot in my reviews, it's one of my crutches, but unlike other crutch words I'm okay with allowing it to leave the first draft because it is phenomenally useful.

Especially for Total Warhammer, a trilogy so self-indulgent in its presentation that every Sony project for the last 15 years looks restrained.

I truly cannot convey just how gorgeous this game is to observe with just words. It is otherworldly on every level and no corners are cut.
Hordes of bulky armored Dwarves thunderously march into columns of hyena-wheezing, cackling Goblins and tear them apart with meteoric hammer blows, explosive runic magic, howling artillery and Dawi curses.
Conscripted Empire soldiers stand their ground, pathetic sword and shield in hand as they stare down skeletons that march in perfect unison, flanked by hordes of undead horrors. An endless cacophony of clanging and screaming erupts from the resulting clash, and by the time it ends the living have taken their leave of the land.
Ancient High Elven soldiers clash against the twirling, gesticulating, erotomanic horrors of Slaanesh, holding their line even as their enemy distorts their very body for the sake of indulging their agony, practically hissing out daemonic curses all the while.
Battles between truly matched armies become a unique soundscape onto their own; defiant cries, screaming, howling, the roar of gunfire and the clatter of crossbows, it's magnificent.

Even just on a visual level, the detail is stunning. When I say "it's the tabletop brought to life", I mean it. Everything, from the lowliest Bretonnian peasant to the most complex Chaos Dwarf hellmachine, is animated, voiced and modelled with the utmost love and care. Being able to hit Insert and see them lovingly up close only adds to it.
It's really the animations that sell it for me, though, because they help differentiate factions that'd otherwise be samey.
High Elves stand proud and resolute, Wood Elves are lurched over in a permanent state of defensive hyperawareness, and Dark Elves seem almost relaxed regardless of situation - so deep is their apathy towards the lives of others.
Warriors of Kislev are taciturn and unmoving from top to bottom, while only the higher tier Empire troops display anything resembling bravery. Bretonnian peasants are shit-scared at all times and their men at arms aren't much better, which makes their Grail Knights being Space Marine-esque stand out. Cathayans, meanwhile, are almost Elven in their resoluteness.
And the fucking SKAVEN, dude! They're rat-people, and the nutjobs at CA made them convincingly swarm like rats when they pour over enemy armies.

Everything, top to bottom, is draped in the level of insane maximalist design you expect from a GW property. Whether it's Fantasy, Sigmar or 40k, 'scale' is the keyword and it really shows here when even a humble Tier 1 Ogre unit towers over the mightiest elves.

This carries over to the options available, too. With everything unlocked, there's 24 unique races, most of which have various legendary lord (leader) options to augment the gameplay. Each race's roster is almost wholly unique to them, though some lords do get to crib units from others for thematic/loreful reasons. That all might sound unimpressive, but you should know that the Total War standard is... not this. The TW standard is 90% of factions sharing a roster with some faction-specific units, and the 10% being outliers added in via DLC.

In practical terms, all this variety and all these options mean that the gameplay becomes the textbook definition of "simple to learn, hard to master".
As far as realtime tactics games go Total War isn't particularly complex due to its slower pace, mostly boiing down to making tetris blocks as unit formations and right clicking a LOT, but where other TW games mostly have you fight the same units all campaign, Total Warhammer throws you into fights with so many factions that demands you learn the matchup.

In some abstract ways, it's a lot like a fighting game. Playing other races and factions to familiarize yourself with their playstyle also helps you fight them when they're enemies. You may see a 20-unit strong Skaven infantry line and panic, but a brief tour playing them will reveal to you that Skaven infantry is mostly terrible, so your return trip will involve a lot of dead rats.
In other TW games, battle tactics tend to be rigid: Send your swords against spears, your cavalry against everyone else, your spears against enemy cavalry, and general against general.
Here? There's monsters and flying cavalry and magic infantry and other factors to consider, so while good tactics help it's infinitely handier to know that Trolls/Giants melt when swarmed with cheap spear units, that undead units begin to dissolve when their lord dies, or that regenerating units are easily killed by fire attacks...

Okay, I lied about it being simple.
It looks simple, the skill floor is fairly low, but there's a ton at work under the hood and you're not told most of it. Elevation has a pronounced effect on the combat performance of all units, units with higher mass can ignore enemies surrounding them, the entire calculation behind the mythical 'charge' mechanic... You can get by without knowing all of this, but at some point your amazing Jade Warriors will get whomped by some Skaven clanrats on a hill and you'll think the game has bugged, but it's working as intended.

Oh? There's more under the hood? Let's take a look- Oh jeez, now I'm up to my knees in the different calculations used for chariots/how unit count affects stats/the entirely unspoken logic used to decide settlement trading value/the literally invisible attack speed stat and so much more- Fucking hell it keeps spilling out. Now I've got bugged Armor Piercing Damage calcs and healing cap on my belt- WHAT IS A TZAANGOR BEAK.

Total Warhammer 3 has a very fun gimmick: If you own anything from the first two games, it's available in the third for free. On a big combined map, too! If you've put down the cash (about £300~ for all the DLCs and each basegame off-sale), it's all yours. All 6 years of content.

Now, for most of you, that last five word sentence is enough to make it clear where I'm going, but since subtext doesn't exist in Warhammer I won't use it here either:

Total Warhammer 3 is a fucking mess. A trainwreck. A minefield. Gaming's first potluck. A digital equivalent to those "[fanbase] sings" videos where the quality spectrum present is "all of it".

It is a game attempting to jam 6 years of content into a continually updated and tweaked engine while also maintaining a degree of technical competency and balance, and it fails so miserably. If you know anything about software or game development, this should come as no surprise.

At first the disparities start small. You look up pictures of Total Warhammer 1, think "wow that looks great on a technical level!", and then you meet the Empire or any faction from 1. The materials on their armor are poorly applied, resulting in too much bloom. Their unit portraits have bugged lighting and give everypony deathly pale skin. Some of their mounts are using rigs from the 2nd or 3rd game, resulting in some stretching. This applies to basically all content imported from 1/2 into 3. Odd, but not too game changing.

Yet.

The worst part is that, whatever minor inconsistency you notice, it will eventually blossom into a daisy chain of you saying "hey, what the fuck?" at something that's just broken or bugged.

I had a whole spiel here listing various things that're broken, fucked, deeply unbalanced (and not by design), or have been left behind, and it's just... It's so long. It's the same length as some of my smaller reviews. There's just so much about this game that clings to the surface like rust, and a lot of it goes even deeper. Cavalry is still of debatable usefulness because the developers seem to have forked from a pre-rework version of Total Warhammer 2, and you need a mod to make the Total Warhammer 1/2 cast not look terrible on the UI.

But the real issue is that all of the bad is about a stone's throw away from the extremely good. You can experience a manic fight for survival as Karl Franz, one of the most fun campaigns ever committed to the franchise, and next door is Bretonnia.
Bretonnia is a faction that has been terrible ever since Total Warhammer 1 and while it's lore-friendly, they've been neglected continually and their 'reworks' often change very little. The end result is... Playing them feels like hacking a PS2 game to access an unplayable character/faction and finding out that they 'work' but are missing about 3/4ths of their kit.

Kislev have access to three shiny new magic lores (Ice, Tempest, Hag) that are really great and unique and fan to use, but they also have some lores from the first game that by and large haven't had much of an update, so besides picking them for flavour or as a really specific counterpick in case Archaon loses the Chaos Rumble, they're worthless.

On and on and on and on and on. Examples of beauty sitting two provinces away from legendary lords that have a 1% pick rate in multiplayer for various reasons. Campaign map bugs that've been around since the combined map came out. Units that are basically a meme due to having been eclipsed by a DLC unit from four years ago and never once getting a balance shift.

In many ways, Total Warhammer 3 is the closest I've come to experiencing actual real-life romantic love but with a videogame. It is impossible to take an atomistic stance on the game, to zero in on the thing you like, because even that will have holes. It simultaneously occupies the zenith and nadir of the genre. It is intoxicatingly beautiful and frustratingly inept. Everyone who thinks Bethesda games are 'notoriously buggy' should be forced to do a run as Malus Darkblade, restarting until they get the long victory.

And I guess, much like real love, the flaws don't bother me.

All those spiels up above about the bad bits and the dissonance? The especially low-lows? All the bugs?

I don't give a shit about them. No, really. I don't care.

We live in an era of the pragmatic adaptation. Your favourite story will get a film adaptation, but that story is 90% of LOTR's runtime and there's no plans for a sequel film, so they'll squeeze it into 1hr46m. Your favourite manga will get an animated adaptation, but they'll pad and squeeze and stretch things to make 23m episodes spread across cours. Your favourite tabletop game will get a videogame, but it will omit your favourite units and focus exclusively on the posterboys. So on, so forth.

More than any other IP, Warhammer gets it the worst. Warhammer games wear a veneer of excess, but it is merely a smokescreen. They will show you fanciful high-rises and space-gothic churches before shuffling you into plain steel combat arenas against standard enemies. In a way, most Warhammer games are like the intro to Fury Road: Here is your indulgence, o Warhammer fan, but only for a moment before it is the sands for another day.

Total Warhammer rejects that.
Total Warhammer is pure opulence.
It is not pragmatic.
It is not cautious.
It is not restrained.
It is balls to the wall indulgence.
It is a game where even filler units will get a developer blog explaining the design influences, which tabletop mini it was ripped from, and what they poured into it.
A game where they got Richard Armitage to voice the big bad because he's Belakor and he inherently deserves it because he's Belakor.
This is a title where every unit has a real life history, every Lord is a character from the grand Warhammer archives. It is in love with Warhammer and it spares not a penny in lavishing it with the attention it deserves.

This game knows it's history. It knows its audience. One of the first trailers simply flashed the words "GRAND CATHAY" on screen and we were so delirious with joy that I wager someone had an honest to god heart attack. It's Smash Ultimate for shunned transgirl Warhammer fans that have an autistic affinity for topdown camera games.

...Also to dispense with the flowery bits for a second: All the amazing bits are foundational and immutable, while the bad bits are very easily fixed with some low-level mods that're trivial to either find or make yourself. Shit dude, it took me about 20 minutes to make a mod that makes Allied Recruitment a bit less tedious.

To cap off, I'll just post the Immortal Empires launch trailer because I think it's a perfect encapsulation of what Total Warhammer actually is: Recklessly indulgent and impossibly sick Total War battles mixed with a very sincere love of the Warhammer IP. Sure, it's dolled up for the trailer, but nothing shown in this trailer is impossible in-game.

Except AI Karl Franz and Katarin surviving long enough to join fights together.

Blessed be the community patch.