I'm not one to blindly want 'More' from something, and I actually quite like endings.

Racing games are my one exception though. With them, I love 'more'. I'll take anything, dude. Courses, cars, characters, music, whatever. With racing games I tend to rack up triple-quadruple digit hour counts with ease, because they're what I play to get my mind going when I need to draft a story or a review or yet another piece of Honkai Star Rail fanfiction. 'More', then, benefits me in multiple ways.

And what game was begging for more than Mario Kart 8? A game so excellent it's borderline ubiquitous and so popular that describing it is a waste of words. MK, after all, did make Kart Racers into an accepted subgenre.

The Booster Course Pass, then, is more. More courses and more characters. There's really not much of a need to say much else, honestly. Quality is consistent with the base game and its own DLCs (back on the Wii U), though I would've liked more anti-gravity tracks personally. And hey, there's an added bonus of having Tour tracks, meaning you don't need to play a bad mobile game to experience some otherwise stellar course design.

Really, in an age where DLC tends be to deceptive, marketed vaguely/not at all or just plain bad, this pass stands out for being decidedly upfront. The developers promised to double the amount of courses in MK8 and they did that with no catches, and even threw in 8 new playable characters to boot - though I exclusively play Daisy, so they're moot to me.

I don't have a funny signoff for this one. I really like racing games, dude.

Despite my love for it, I don't have much to say about this one in depth.

Feels like stepping back in time to 2016-2017 where every game was obsessed with setpieces, and given the game started development under Platinum it's not unlikely some older DNA bled into this game.
Granted, unlike AAA titles from the 2010s and Platinum's mediocre back catalogue, setpieces are used cleverly in GBFR and they don't ever repeat.
The first turret section is the last, and the one time it reuses the rising lava gimmick setpiece it's as a ludonarrative character capstone to make you go "OH SHIT".

The story is, at its core, the most quintessential JRPG-ass JRPG ever made, which fits given it's a Granblue Fantasy game and its parent title is mostly the same. It's a breath of fresh air in its simplicity, not shooting for the moon but instead the familiar horizon and all of its hits land because of it.
In an era where Naoki Yoshida and other big JRPG franchises are ashamed of sincerity and keep making edgy ~subversive~ bullshit, it's doubly nice to see something sincere without being an obvious 'tribute game' like the other side of the Modern JRPG Coin.
If you've ever seen a Shonen Jump movie you'll be familiar with GBFR's format: It's not an adaptation of Granblue's story, it's an original work sandwiched between existing arcs with a cast of fan favourites and wholly new supporting cast. Arguably it works better for games than movies, for while the One Piece movie villains are boring as hell I think Lilith might be in my top 5 Granblue characters alongside Vira, Apollonia, Shalem and Belial. Yes, I'm gay, what made it obvious.
There isn't much to spoil because it's so straightforward, and while I think simply calling it "good" defeats the purpose of even having a backloggd, it is. The emotional beats land, it doesn't waste any time, it managed to turn FF1's "go kill these primals" plot into an excellent GBF title, Narmaya is there. Perfect all around.

Gameplay is the star of the show though and wow. It's like a mirror into a world where Platinum Games regularly make titles that aren't garbage.
Their influence is clear, aye, but with GBFR having 19 characters it's opted to sprinkle mechanics onto each of them to keep it fresh.
You're baited into assuming this is yet another piece of licensed Platinum slop by Djeeta/Gran's boring Dynasty Warriors-esque combo mechanic only to stumble into Narmaya's infinite stance combos, dodge cancellable iai draw attacks, and butterfly stacking mechanic.
Or Siegfried, who plays like Hi Fi Rush and actually made me better at that game due to having a rigid but reliable timing mechanic that can actually be dodge offset.
Or Secret Character, who has a devil trigger.
Or Lancelot, whose attacks are centered around mashing and also gave me a minor RSI which still hurts a few days later.

Trash mob fights are almost always you and your party trouncing them while dodging ranged attacks. Fine enough, but the boss battles are the star of the show and their focus in the postgame is why you'll see other reference Monster Hunter. There's an excellent blend of mechanics and spectacle on display here that, again, puts other character action games to shame.
If you've ever played FFXIV you'll likely be right at home dodging AoEs and yelling at your party for something that so very easily could've been negated. God, I hate Siegfried mains who refuse to use his hyper armor.
They're all very lovely to look at, and towards the end of the story the spectacle starts approaching levels heretofore unseen in the character action genre besides Bayonetta (the one good Platinum duology). The final boss was just... Mwah.

On the presentation side, Cygames have long since been the kings of gacha presentation and with GBFR they're expanding that to the action RPG genre. Everything about this game is beautiful. Areas, outfits, characters, Narmaya's narmaya's, music, you name it.
The music deserves special attention though. Tsutomu Narita is one of the greatest game composers of our time and he's applying his decade of composing for GBF mobile to this game. The returning compositions are gorgeous yes, but the new ones for the original fights are jaw dropping and the final boss theme had me pause the game just to let it wash over me. It is some divine work, I hope they keep Zero (a 13 minute prog metal song) when Lucillius debuts in the next update.

Post-game is an amazing encapsulation of the browser game and I'm frankly astounded they managed to keep the experience intact but without the gacha/live service stuff. You grind to build up weapons, buff grids and other stuff ad nauseaum while tackling harder and harder fights that you meet with stronger and stronger characters.
Characters tend to really come into their niche here; you can get by with flailing before post-game, but if you're a Zeta main and you can't land your timed hits you gotta go play Percival or something. Buffs go from being useful accruements to utter gamechangers and I swear to fucking god if I run into another Cagliostro who's afraid of Phantasmagoria I'm gonna flip.
In short: The Monster Hunter comparisons are valid.

All in all... Psh, I really do wish I had more to say. I had the time of my life playing this game, man. I haven't loved a JRPG this much since Yakuza 7, and it's a nice reminder of what the genre can be like when it's not helmed by Naoki Yoshida's eternal shame at having made JRPGs in the past or endless nostalgia bait.

I wish Lilith was real. Happy that Maggie Robertson got to voice act in a game that wasn't terrible.

Clickbait intro: Game so bad it makes notorious diehard videogame preservationist pray that it's lost to the sands of time.

You know, I had about 1400~ words of an incomplete real review typed up for this one, but I tabbed back in to keep playing and just.

Man.

I try to be fair to the games I play, even if they're ass. I like to sit with them, ponder them on my morning walks, look into their creation. I believe that all art contains a variable amount of love and that love should be, if not appreciated, at least acknowledged. I think games are art, and my desire to treat them the same way I've treated music for decades is what made me create this Backloggd account in the first place.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands makes me wish I reneged on that personal promise.

It's difficult to describe this term using language, because the game just feels like pure hate. So much of it is steeped in contempt for someone or something that it actually borders on staggering.

If you care enough about videogames to even use Backloggd you probably already know about Borderlands Humor so I'm not gonna devote a mini essay to it. I'm also not gonna pretend I never liked Borderlands; up until around 2018 Borderlands 2 was a game I'd replay yearly.

Borderlands humor now grates on me in my old age, but the jokes at least have setup and punchlines even if those punchlines are of debatable... everything.

Wonderlands' jokes confound me, because oftentimes the punchline is "a thing exists". It has all the same energy of your debatably conservative uncle nudging you with his elbow at a wedding party and saying "Polish people, right?" except it's some quip about tabletop game/player stereotypes that the writer found by going on Tumblr and sifting through the TTRPG tags.
At least 95% of the dialogue in this game is jokes like this, or orphaned punchlines that feel as though they're responding to a nonexistent setup.
The other 5% is... Dated. Borderlands humor gets even more dated as each entry comes out and betrays the sad, unmoving time capsule that the directors live in, but Wonderlands is somehow worse than the prior entry because it feels like it came fresh out of 2012. I only played Portal 2 a month or so ago and this game could've been its contemporary.

I know riffing on a Gearbox title for not being funny is a bit redundant, it's like riffing on Gears of War for having cover or riffing on Skyrim for having dragon shouts or riffing on Halo for having Spartans or riffing on Baldur's Gate 3 for being bad. But I dunno, this game came out in 2022 and it's somehow a step backwards from everything before it. It boggles the mind. Even as I type this I find myself endlessly confused, wondering who they used as focus testers that anything in this game writing-wise got approval.

I think the sticking point for me is that this game is very ostensibly a parody of tabletop games and tabletop gamers, but there's a bit too much venom for me to really call it a parody. Many of the TTRPG related jokes feel mean-spirited and cheap, not unlike the Saints Row reboot. These don't feel like jokes for tabletop players, they feel like jokes about tabletop players.
The ones that aren't mean feel very... "How do you do, fellow kids?", to the point where even calling them "Reddit-like" is inaccurate

The spiel about games and love up above wasn't just a fillerbuster, it's something I genuinely have been pondering this entire time.

Wonderlands doesn't feel like it was made with any love.

I question who or what the target audience for this game looks like because just from observing the text, I get the feeling it just fucking hates everybody? It clearly has no love for tabletop players given both them and their hobby are the butt of the joke, it has no love for Borderlands players either because its parent series is barely present and is only wheeled out to keep the player awake, and it clearly has no love for sensible people because it forces you to listen to Ashly Burch's ulcer-bustingly racist Tiny Tina voice for a full game's runtime.

What really confounds me is just how desperate the game is, though.

In 2013, they already did this game. It was a DLC for Borderlands 2 titled "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep" and it was... Okay, I suppose. I'm not the biggest fan of BL2's DLC for numerous reasons, but it was this game down a T except with like... Not even better writing, it had writing to begin with.
I harp on the jokes so much because that's basically all this game has, besides Will Arnett phoning in a performance to get a paycheck now that the Arrested Development and Bojack Horseman mines dried up.
There's a story which, prior to playing the game, I'd seen hyped up as "Better than BL3's". After playing it, I wondered if I'd bought a secret copy that lacked any plot, because there basically isn't on.

Wonderlands does have gameplay which, as is the running theme here, is just BL3's but infinitely worse. God I miss Moze. What were they even cooking here? Were BL fans begging for less interesting gameplay?

All in all, I am struggling to come up with a meaningful conclusion here, or even say anything nice. Saying "it's just bad" is boring, and something any goblin with a keyboard can tell you over in the Steam reviews, but... It's just bad, dude. I got this game for £12 and I'm genuinely regretting not using it to get a nice haul from Greggs. A pack of sausage rolls for the fridge, a Mexican chicken oval bite for the evening and a packet of their spicy chicken bites for lunch... Mmm.

Some people, usually Bloodborne fans for some reason, will tell you that they wish they could wipe their memory and play a game for the first time all over again.

I wish I could wipe this game from my memory.

Which, given the next Honkai Star Rail update is all about memory, sure does feel prophetic.

I'm aware that I already sold all my credibility down the river by going to bat (hehe) for Honkai Star Rail, and if you somehow still trust me, I'm here to write a cheque for the rest of my credibility.

I enjoyed Palworld. I’m not crazy about it, it doesn’t consume my every thought like Honkai Star Rail still does a month later and it’s not got me ruminating on the merits of nostalgia and the pitfalls of longrunning franchises the way Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth has, but it’s kept my interest and I don’t hate it.

Unfortunately this means I’m now honorbound to write a fair review of it. Tsk.

I like Open World Survival Craft games. You might know OWSCs by their biggest examples: Ark Survival Devolved, The Forest, Rust, DayZ, Subnautica, Lego Fortnite, and Breath of the Wild. I like them so much that I am just a pernicky miserable cunt about the entire genre. Oh god. I am so miserable about these games. I love them so much, but they are so painfully derivative. They are so painfully samey. They all want to be one of the games I listed up above.

And Palworld is no exception. It is perhaps the worst offender. Breath of the Elden Fort is horrifically derivative. It yoinks from, in order of noticing: Pokemon, Breath of the Wild, ARK: Survival Devolved, Elden Ring, Jump Force, Fortnite, Factorio, Xenoblade, and probably a ton of other games I missed due to simple human error.
It is a game where the first NPC you meet wears copyright-safe Monster Hunter armour while holding an M1014 shotgun, while a tower from ARK lights up the skyline alongside the tree Yggdrasil.
The opening moments are set in an environment I can only describe as "Nintendo hired that man", and the first boss looks like a Vtuber concept that was left stillborn on the marketing floor.
On the way to this boss, you will almost assuredly run into a Xenoblade World Boss that's 30 levels higher than you, and be greeted by numerous Xenoblade area prompts that’re then accompanied by DMCA-dodging versions of the BOTW discovery jingle.

It is, in nearly every sense of the phrase, a 'fake game'. Something one would see for 15-20 seconds during a Law & Order episode, an animation kitbashed by underpaid new-hires whose only animation credit will be that episode. By all rights, under every star and every law and every creed and every culture, this game should be terrible.

And it's not. It should be, but the matrix glitched and instead it's... I try not to make snap judgments about early access games, but I'm gonna make an exception here:

Assuming the development doesn't fuck up massively like what happened to Starbound or MASS Builder, this will probably be the greatest OWSC game ever made.

Much like with Honkai Star Rail, I need to gripe about other OWSC games to really illustrate what Palworld does well, though fortunately it's easier here.

The opening hours of most OWSC games are what I call the "copper phase". Whether it's copper or some other resource, the overarching goal of the copper phase in each OWSC is to, after starting with literally nothing, build up a base and acquire the resource which allows you to progress on the technology tree - often while acquiring millions of wood and stone in the process.
This is a remarkably simple part of the OWSC, and the vast majority of them fuck it up. Seriously, my Steam library is a wasteland of games I binned for fucking up the copper phase.
This might seem harsh, but there's a good reason for this: The copper phase is essentially the game's cover letter. It's fine to not play the entire hand here, but in those opening hours an OWSC NEEDS to show off what it's all about here. It's why I left Valheim to die, but V Rising gets a pass. There might be a conversation to be had about intentionally slowing the pacing, yes, but we’re so long into this genre’s history that fumbling this part is unforgivable.

Palworld’s copper phase is obscenely difficult to quantify, and… I don’t think it even has one.

Rather uniquely for the genre, Palworld acknowledges that automation games are just OWSC titles but for autistic people (me), and cribs a few elements from them. As a result, you’ll get access to wood/stone/ingots/not-Pokemon materials relatively early. You can get acceptable weapons within about an hour or two of play depending on how much you explore, and there’s not much in the way of shortages.

The roadblock, then, is not the resources. It’s processing the resources. In other automation games, you use machines and conveyor belts. In Palworld, you use not-Pokemon. And there are not-Pokemon everywhere. Capturing them is almost always a net plus, because it gives the same resources as a kill and is one more cog for your machine.

Immediately, within an hour of play, it’s obvious this solves an incredible amount of OWSC issues. Other players aren’t explicitly needed to facilitate a smooth gameplay experience because not-Pokemon fill a lot of the boring downtime that comes from creating a ton of resources.
You’ll have to cook some berries manually very early on, but once you get a not-Pokemon capable of cooking it’s fire and forget. Pun not intended.
I mentioned wood and stone in passing here and it’s clear the developers are experienced in OWSC games, because two of the earliest facility unlocks are an endless supply of each resource that’re best harvested by - you guessed it - not-Pokemon.
Some things, primarily player-centric upgrades, are best made by the player, but even on this front most of the not-Pokemon capable of work will come over to speed it up.
And hey, for some not-Pokemon there’s not even any need to hunt them - they can be ranched, and will be handled by not-Pokemon capable of farming.

A lot of other OWSC games, even the good ones, often can’t decide whether they’re meant to be a base maintenance simulator or an exploration game. I’d go out on a limb and say that this is one of the few OWSC games where the Open World, the Survival and the Crafting feel congruous.

Now, you may be thinking that these observations based on an hour’s play may fall apart later, and so did I. Even other OWSC games that nail the first hour drop off later.

Palworld doesn’t.

It’s… almost scary in how much the devs have done their homework.

Not-Pokemon drops aside, there aren’t actually that many overworld resources, and they’re leveraged in such a way that there’s always a need for more. The facilities and craftables soon scale up, meaning you’ll always need something. You’ll always need not-Pokemon to process things. Frequently, you’ll unlock a facility and think “Why would I ever need this?” only to stumble on something in the overworld that benefits from it. Trust me, you’ll need heaters and coolers.

I’ve mentioned the not-Pokemon a lot, and if it isn’t obvious yet: They’re scarily well integrated into the gameplay loop. Like in actual Pokemon you have a limit to how many can fit in your team, and each base you construct has an ever-growing limit of workers, but owing to what I said above there’s an eternal need to keep some not-Pokemon around, even if they’re seemingly awful.
Even when my level was reaching the 30s, I still made it a point to catch the low level deer not-Pokemon because my orbiter bases absolutely needed woodcutters. My boxes are full of the generic sheep, cat and chicken not-Pokemon because there is an omnipresent need for wool, versatile labour and eggs to cook food. When my friends and I make expeditions across the map, we frequently take detours just to catch a few not-Pokemon we could use back at base.

More importantly, though, the not-Pokemon solve a lot of issues endemic to the OWSC genre.

Like crafting.

Oh my goodness, I don’t think I can play this genre anymore. Palworld ruined me with crafting alone.

Perhaps my biggest grievance about this genre is how even many of the greatest titles will see you sitting at a bench holding E or Space for about an hour while listening to an endless series of TING-TING as metal bars/tools/torches/whatever are crafted.
Palworld has this too… For about 20 minutes? After that, the not-Pokemon can take over for you. The option is there to do it yourself, if you’re insane, but the game clearly wants you to just queue up the 500 arrows/berries/whatever you need and then go play the fucking game, and it’s mercifully not as indepth as automation games. Again, the game is pushing you to play it.

I find it telling that later unlocks on the tech tree do indeed turn the game into a lite version of the automation genre, though how far you lean into it depends on how cruel you’re willing to be.

That said, there is a pretty prominent issue with regards to not-Pokemon distribution. The default starting point has everything one could ever want within trebuchet-firing distance, but many of the alternate start points are lacking. Which sucks, because many of those alternate starts are absolutely phenomenal for base construction thanks to flat planes and open spaces. They’re useful for satellite bases I guess.

That said, while I do admire Palworld pushing you to play the game, there is a part of the game that I just view with utter scorn:

Boss battles.

For most of Palworld’s runtime, the combat is sufficient. Incredibly basic third person shooter shit with a pet summon on hand, but nothing more. It doesn’t have to be, because overworld encounters are fairly brief kill-or-be-killed affairs that end as quickly as they began.
Boss battles, however, are long. They have beefy health pools, deadly attacks and weak spots that only marginally increase the damage taken.
They’re unfortunately required for progression, and while in most games I often put off boss battles for the sake of enjoying what’s in front of me, in this game I only beelined for them to get them out of the way. Now, the game is EA, that could change, but I think it betrays how little I expect it to change that I’m even griping about it in the first place.

As for the game world… On a mechanical level it’s fine enough, the distribution of not-Pokemon means exploration rarely feels wasted and there’s enough chests/statues/whatever dotted around that I don’t think I ever felt like I was just walking through dead air.
On a geographical and visual level though, it’s utterly banal. I’m very much an “exploration is its own reward” type person, I don’t think an open world needs to have tons of trinkets and loot for it to be meaningful. It’s why, despite hating the game to its core, I liked Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule.

Palworld, for as much as it wants to be Hyrule, is nowhere near it. It’s a series of bog standard environments with the occasional eyebrow raising piece of geometry lying around. The snowy regions look nice, sure, but that’s my inherent bias towards arctic/winter regions coming out in full force. It’s a visually sterile game that meets a bare minimum of beauty but never goes above it.
Even the not-Pokemon abide by this, being decently okay designs that at least have the benefit of having distinct silhouettes, but aren’t really inspiring. I don’t think a machine made these designs, but if they did there’d probably be more creative sauce on display.

Now, I told myself I wouldn’t gripe about anything that’s likely to get changed later on, and until now I’ve held to that fairly well. This once, though, I’m going to let myself kvetch:

Base building in Palworld is predicated upon Palboxes, placeable constructions that erect a large circular AoE around them which facilitates the management of not-Pokemon and their labour.

This is fine conceptually, but the AoEs are too small even on flatter areas with no obstructions and likewise many of the structures are too large. Ostensibly this is to facilitate satellite bases, but limit increases on base count aren’t given out freely and they’re best used for things like mineral processing or batch cooking. There’s a strange gap between smaller things like furnaces, cooking stations and egg incubators and absolutely monolithic facilities like ranches and uh… ‘daycares’.

All in all, Palworld is… Fine.

That might seem anticlimactic after the mostly glowing praise it just got, but it’s still an OWSC. ‘Fine’ within that genre makes it one of the best, but genres don’t exist in a vacuum compared to other games. This isn’t going to make anyone’s GOTY list and to be entirely honest I’ll be surprised if it even meets the honourable mentions for my 2024 top 10.

Food metaphors in reviews are old hat, overdone like crazy, but considering the nature of this game, I consider the next lines to be acceptable:

Palworld is fast food gaming.

And sometimes, I don’t really want a home cooked meal with meat from my local premium butcher, I just want a Big Mac.

The words "confused direction" often pop up in my review outlines and they almost never makes the jump from draft to final copy. I dunno, much like "too wordy" or "nonsensical", I feel accusing a game of not knowing what it wants to be is a weirdly infantilizing complaint that often says more about the writer than the game they're talking about. In shorter terms: It's not a wise thing to say because there's a 90% chance it just makes you look like an idiot.

But for the longest time I did feel like MH Rise and its expansion had a very confused direction. Coming on the heels of MH Generations Ultimate (a mega compilation and the final sendoff to Old Monster Hunter) and MH World (the game that expanded the franchise's obscene popularity past the borders of East Asia), it struck me as an odd game because it was too much like World for me to call it a New-Old MH game but it also felt a bit too Portable for me to say that they were backstepping from World.
This only got worse with Sunbreak, which featured a much more relaxed Master/G Rank compared to World's sharper scaling yet also introduced muuuuuuuuuch more moveset complexity via switch scrolls and cooler switch skills which harkened back to the previous game. The end result was an experience that, while I didn't hate, left me so bothered that I kinda just left the game to rot for a while.

There's also the matter of Rise's difficulty to consider. 'Difficulty' in a very skill-based game is always a nebulous topic, as it's extremely hard to gauge properly. People who struggle for one reason or another tend to have bloated ideas of what constitutes 'hard', petulent scrubs tend to assume anything they struggle with is 'bad design', and people who're too good often get so far from their bad days that anything they stomp is 'too easy'. I'm in the latter camp, though I try not to assume everyone else is on my level.
Rise is an easy game. There's just not much else to say. I've played it in co-op with a fantastic variety of people and very few of them struggle without some extrinsic modifier being applied (motor issues, dyspraxia, whatever) and even those people learn to love the silkbinds and pray. The mere act of getting hit becomes a non-issue thanks to wirefalls and the name of the game for each moveset is 'safe' these days. Having a close-knit community helps on this front, as World tends to make the same people who stomp Rise struggle, which is a decent gauge for me personally.

Now, up until very recently, I assumed all of these elements were at odds with one another and rarely questioned it.

However, I've been getting back into writing fiction lately. Honkai Star Rail still has me in a vice grip, sorry, it's why my reviews have been so sparse. When I write fiction and get stalled by a scene, I have what I call the '30 minute rule': I take a break to do something - go for a walk, play a quick mission in a game, make dinner, etc etc - and come back. If my break didn't help me work out the scene, I annihilate it and try again.

Rise has been, for the last couple weeks, my 30 minute game, and in treating it this way I've come to a realization:

The aforementioned elements aren't at odds with one another. Quite the contrary, they're exceptionally harmonious.

I realize now that trying to pigeonhole Rise as either Old MH or World 2 is reductive, and also a total non-starter. Rather, I'd argue Rise is a symbiotic fusion of the two. World allowed itself to run longer and flashier because as a console game the developers were allowed to assume the player would be seated for quite some time. Rise, having launched on the Switch, instead makes the assumption that it'll be played in no longer than 30 minute intervals. It is, in a sense, an attempt to bring the spectacle and involved movesets of World to the format and demographic that initially propped the franchise up. Neither Old nor World, but something unique.

Playing both of them concurrently really peels the bandage off there.

World is a console game first and foremost. The effort involved in tracking, locating and hunting a monster is amplified massively compared to other MH games, especially once Iceborne kicks in. The 'meta' for Iceborne thus became damage centric, because even perfect play leads to relatively longer hunts. This isn't really a bad thing, but I'll dig into that discourse if I ever review World. Which, given Rise has swept most of my friend circles and I can't stop thinking about Stelle kissing March 7th, isn't likely anytime soon.

Rise, as a portable game, is operating under assumption you'll bust it out for 15-20 minutes while on the way to your soul-crushing office job and tailors things accordingly. Unless you're truly dogshit (and hey, everyone can get better), the ballpark for hunts IME is about 7-20 minutes, and it bends over backwards to hand you the tools to facilitate them. It's still 'the Monster Hunter experience', it's just been compressed a little.
There's this saying among older MH players that the series is actually turn based, and I'd concur. Using that metaphor; pre-Rise games are traditional ally-enemy-ally-enemy-ally-enemy turn based like in Dragon Quest. Rise is more like a Turn Order game (think FFX, Trails or Honkai Star Rail, Octopath Traveler or whatever) where characters still take turns but there's an incredible amount of benefit to be gained from ensuring they either can't take turns, or can take successive turns.

Hardcore MiraMiraOTW Followers might remember that, back when I discussed Wild Hearts last year, that review was more akin to someone writing out why they broke up with their ex and why their new wife is so cool.
Truthfully, I never really did discard a lot of those confused feelings about the hunting genre, but they've been replaced by me simply refusing to acknowledge it exists.

As I alluded to up above, I've gotten good at MH. I've gotten really good at MH. I'm pretty much the only person who never carts when I play in multiplayer and I'm at the point now where the word "damage window" means nothing to me, because if I really want to land an Impact Crater or Perfect Rush, I'm going to. In replaying the game lately I found myself not actually upgrading my gear all that often because until the Afflicted/Risen monsters show up, a few levels of Attack Boost are extraneous when you're pretty much Batman beating up thugs in Arkham.

The downside to this, which I hope to extrapolate on if I ever finish that highly negative MGR review, is that the illusion of the 'hunting genre' has slipped through my fingers. It is a mirage that I got to lounge in for a while before it evaporated. 'Prep' is just refilling my consumables or making a new weapon, and honestly it's something I only do if I ever take too long on a fight. The number of fights I'm not confident in is rapidly dropping, and once I stop being afraid of Chaotic Gore Magala it'll be down to 2 - neither of which are even in Rise.

In its place, I find... A singleplayer replacement for fighting games.

I liked FGs a lot once upon a time, but nowadays I don't enjoy PVP and find the eternally shifting nature of live service FGs unappealing, yet I still yearn for a game where practice, knowledge and repetition produce tangible results in the outcome of fights.
More than anything, MH and its clones have filled that niche. Yes, I can whomp Shagaru Magala silly, but I could do it better. I could do it faster. I could hit 100% of my Impact Craters rather than 99% of them. 10 minutes is good, but it could be lower. 2 Mega Potions used is admirable, but 0 is ideal. So on, so forth.

Also, as a very brief aside, this might have the best new-monster lineup of the entire franchise, and the returning lineup is nuts too. Announcing Seregios and Shagaru Magala alongside the utter beauty that is Malzeno is a flex most developers would kill to be able to pull off. Everything here is gorgeous, and honestly if I wasn't hellbent on keeping a divide between my personal and literary sides, I'd put out an open offer for me to carry you through Magnamalo, Malzeno or any of the Magalas.

I do have two major complaints though, both of which combined have knocked a star off.

The first is that, put bluntly, the distribution of Switch Skills is very much a case of "all weapons are equal, but some are more equal than others". Every weapon gets roughly the same about of skills and silkbinds, but whether they're good or not is a whole other kettle of crabs and Sunbreak letting you have two Switch Skill loadouts basically shone a spotlight on it.
Take Longsword, Sword & Shield or Hammer, for instance. They get a collection of incredibly useful, versatile additionsthat turn excellent weapons into mythical weapons. There aren't any bad choices with them and with Sunbreak they essentially allow you to carry two entirely different weapons into battle.
...But then there's weapons like the Lance and Greatsword, whose additions are middling at best. So much so that a lot of the time it's hard to justify ever switching off of the defaults. Yeah, Greatsword gets a cool new fast-damaging combo set, but it's still a weapon focused around powerful strikes which now takes much longer to hit its True Charged Slash.

Don't get me wrong, these weapons aren't bad because MH is perhaps the one series that's managed weapon balance properly, but the difference in attention is noticeable if you play a wide spread.

The second issue is less egregious, but really annoying to me specifically:

Most of the arrangements for returning monsters aren't great. Rise's initial theming draws from the classical Japanese of MHP3rd's Yukumo, and the soundtrack thus uses more traditional instruments when rearranging. The end result is while the arrangements are impressive, many of the songs with the most impact - Zinogre's, Astalos' and Valstrax's most noticeably - have lost some oomph. I'm frankly glad Glavenus didn't come back, I couldn't stand to hear my favourite non-Elder theme get crushed.
This may seem like nitpicking, but to me music is a huge part of the MH package. At least 40% of the reason why Shara Ishvalda is my favourite G-Rank capstone is because its theme has such an incredible amount of otherworldly energy to it that the monster ends up feeling more demonic than the monsters which explicitly have demonic theming. Likewise with Shagaru Magala and Shantien.

But anyway, let me stop burying the lede for a moment.

This is less of a review and more me preaching the importance of engaging with things on their own merits. The entire crux of why I disliked Risebreak at first was simply me trying to make it seem congrous with two other games, and steadfastly refusing to engage with the game on its own merits. In refusing to just see "MH Rise", I ended up with a stance that, on further inspection, was completely nonsensical.
Sure, sequels by their nature draw comparisons to past games in the franchise, but in iterative franchises I feel the forest often gets lost for the trees, you know? MH Rise is a Monster Hunter title, yes, but if World was allowed to stand on its own two feet, why not extend that mercy to Rise? If GU is allowed to be considered its own game when it's just a compilation toybox, why insist Rise has to be either it or World?
I sure wish Xenoblade fans would learn this lesson about XBC3.

Anyway, totally irrelevant trivia for you: This review took 29 minutes to write.

This has to be the funniest marketing gimmick ever made. Honestly. It makes the Hatsune Miku Dominos promotion or the Saint's Row 4 ultimate edition seem tame.

For starters, it's just a copy of Portal with an RTX Remix injector bundled on. It comes with the dev menu. If you want to play Portal 1 for free you can get this, push Alt+X and disable everything. [This ended up not being true, I forgot that I owned Portal 1.]

But if you want to actually experience the shitshow that is Portal With RTX, you can also just open the menu and undo the shitty DLSS upscaler preset the game comes with. Setting it to any of the normal presets massively boosts performance. Yes, the default settings are an attempt to convey to laymen that their RTX card isn't good enough and they need a better one.

As for the actual game, it's a fascinating look into the minds of people obsessed with 'graphics' as a concept to such an extent that it becomes a detriment.

Portal With RTX looks terrible. Just absolute dogshit. I think whoever signed off on this should be forced to do a Drama course in University using only Garry's Mod models and lighting.

The original Portal has a very intentional, meticulously refined aesthetic. It is very bright, cold, and unwelcoming. Almost nothing in Aperture is rounded, with most of the geometry being angular brutalist walls and panels that look about as inviting as a field of landmines. It's very obvious just from 5-10 minutes of Portal that nothing lives in Aperture and nobody has been there in ages. Later on, you literally pull back the curtain of the testing chambers and run through back corridors, maintenance shafts and warehouses which completely turn the aesthetic on its head... By design. Intent. Yes, that's the word we're focusing on: 'Intent'.

Because Portal With RTX takes a sledgehammer to that meticuously crafted aesthetic. Chambers are now much darker, being lit up by overtuned light sources cast by either the few ambient lights, the lights bolted onto doors, or the red buttons. The latter in particular bathe everything in a sickening red glow that's so overdone it makes many Garry's Mod maps seem like professional work. There isn't really much of a difference now between the chambers and the lategame areas as a result.

But.

But.

There's a worse problem.

Whenever I talk about game design to people I'm friends with, I will more likely than not bring up Valve's amazing ability to signpost things without explicitly having a character say "go here", or having a big flashing arrow on the HUD telling you where to go. Most of the time they'll simply have lights, a literal sign, or clever lighting to guide you. Portal 1 in particular was great for this.
Portal With RTX is horrible. The 'modern' lighting gives equal importance to everything, and in a game where the lighting was handcrafted, this means player guidance is at an all time low. I cannot imagine this being your first experience with Portal, or Valve games.
Now, I'm a Portal autist, if you put a gun to my head and told me to run this game blindfolded, I'd be done before you had the gun loaded. For someone whose first experience with Portal is this game, though? They're in for a world of hurt, because in some chambers the lighting is so bad that it can be difficult to see cubes or doors at first. The later areas are sometimes pitch black, which is an awful statement to make about a mod for a game where nothing is pitch black BY DESIGN.

When I say "This is just Portal 1 with an RTX injector", there's no word of a lie there...

...Which means the developer commentary is still there. Yes, you can listen to the minds at Valve Software elucidate you as to how they very intentionally, carefully and almost neurotically tailored every single aspect of this game to perfection, all while playing a mod that's about as carefully created as AI art.

And you know what? AI art is a good comparison, because this feels like AI art. There's no regard for design, or consistency, or that magical keyword intent. Just a manic, soul-destroying fixation on 'looking good'. Beauty doesn't have to mean anything to these people, it just has to look good at a cursory glance. Spiritually, there's no difference between this... """product""", and going onto Midjourney and typing "portal realistic". This is very clearly a product made by and targeted at an audience for whom the word 'better' automatically means 'prettier'.

I was neutral on raytracing before actually getting a card capable of it, not really caring for the whole debate. I found devout shooters of it to be annoying, and devout haters of it to be wasting their time on what I perceived as the little brother to PhysX and HairWorks - two of Nvidia's other gimmicks that everyone replicated with ease.
After this, and seeing how ineffectual it is in Cyberpunk 2077/Mechwarrior 5/Resident Evil 4? Raytracing is a scam, dude. You can do better shit with Reshade, and it's free.

The original Portal is ten dollars. On sale, it usually becomes a dollar. Go play that instead.

Uhhh, no. Sorry. I just can't do this one anymore.

I can usually tell a game is losing me when I stop to take breaks every 10-15 minutes and it was a really bad sign that I was taking them every 5 minutes playing this one as early as late Chapter 1.

I said in my Yakuza 6 review that I'd had a really specific desire for that game going into it, and that I'd soured on that concept as my fondness for Yakuza 6 grew. Yeah, well, Gaiden is that concept executed to a T and it's just not good.

Gaiden is comprised of 3 entirely different and tonally different games, which means playing the actual end result can feel like attending a work meeting on the same night you're going to a rave.

The first of Gaiden's three games is just... Good. It's a story about Kiryu living in a world that's not only left him behind, but relegated him to the existential equivalent of a dog bed. Forced to strut around the territory of his former greatest foes as a lap dog, not so much a legendary Yakuza but an Assassin's Creed protagonist surrounded by markers. His time in the sun is over, and only fools clinging to ancient tradition recognize him. Despite people attesting otherwise, he's a nobody.
Opposing him is Shishido, also a man left behind by the times. While Kiryu was left behind and accepted redundancy willingly, Shishido gives himself over to impotent rage as he slowly realizes the world he wants to live in ended in the 90s, and that the status he covets became extinct when the police cracked down on Yakuza. Their conflict ends in a reprise of Yakuza 5's finale, only this time it actually means something rather than being the end result of a Kudzu plot.
And man, Kiryu's writing in this game is excellent. He's much more bitter, and given to snark. He reacts with annoyance to Shishido trauma dumping on him and his attitude towards most of the villains is to groan and complain that they're getting in his way. He's very much a tired old man who just doesn't care anymore.
There's also some excellent writing given to Masaru Watase, already one of Yakuza's better NPCs, that excellently compounds the whole feeling of "This is how the Yakuza died", though it's tucked in at the end rather abruptly.

This is a good game, I really enjoyed all 45 minutes of screentime it got.

The second game is this game's initial form: A Yakuza 7 DLC. This game's core 'purpose' is to help fit a certain plot twist from that game into the franchise's timeline better, and it really shows because despite any pretense this is just 6 hours of buildup to an 'explanation' that nobody really wanted or needed, and there's about five minutes at the end that sum up why Kiryu is in the next game.
This 'game' tends to manifest as what I can only describe as the developers stretching out a side story for 6 hours. 7's whackiness is haphazardly injected into a Kiryu-format game and the results are gauche at best. Kiryu gets a new style called Agent because the developers really want him to feel like Yagami, and with Agent comes four cool spy gadgets he can use alongside the style. Dragon style returns as Yakuza style.
And... Look, I've only tasted a few hours of the Lost Judgment fruit, but that game makes me feel like I'm playing Devil May Cry. THIS game makes me feel like I'm misremembering Devil May Cry after a concussion. I already don't like Kiryu's Dragon Engine combat, and Gaiden doubles down on it in extremely unfortunate ways. That Agent's attacks are all two-hits for one button press is profoundly annoying too.

The last game, and the one that sponges up 99% of the screentime is... Every other Yakuza game!

That's right folks, the guys at SEGA have decided to send off their posterboy by plonking him in a terminally unserious and deeply masturbatory videogame. Every five minutes, maybe less, this game references something from Kiryu's past, and it does so in extremely hamfisted and wince-inducing ways. I'd argue it's even childish. Hey, you remember the castle from Yakuza 2? What about tigers? You like Pocket Circuit, right? Do you remember Nishitani from 0? What about Yakuza 5's final boss? The finale of Yakuza 1 was cool, right? There's some boys from Judgment too!

On and on and on and on and ON. It just never stops. I'd argue the three big Tojo boys walking into the sunset near the end is the least egregious example.

It betrays a total disregard for the narrative confidence that Yakuza 6 had. Whether they were unsure what to do or afraid of focusing on Game #1 again, the developers opted for the most self-indulgent game possible. It's very... Hm. Hmm. It feels like this game was written with the Western fanbase in, so deeply unserious and jokey is it. Sure there are serious bits, but Gaiden defies the law most RGG games have lived by wherein the comedic silly stuff is reserved for side content or one-off gags and the main story is deathly serious.

It bleeds into the narrative, too. The big bads threaten Kiryu's orphans so often it starts feeling like a really annoying Arrested Development joke. The first time was impactful, second alarming, third boring, fourth annoying... It kept going.

I also just... Ugh. God.

I fucking hate Nishitani III.

I wanted to give RGG Studios the benefit of the doubt and that they'd give him nuance later on, but no. Nishitani III is an openly bisexual big bad and they've went way too hard on every single bad stereotype for queer villains. He's openly a sadistic rapist (implicitly or explicitly depends on the dialogue), shows off how bad he is using dialogue laden with kink analogues and innuendos, is easily the most effeminate Yakuza big bad, and in general just has a veneer of homophobic sleaze to him that rubbed me the wrong way.

He's gross in ways I would've expected from 90s-very early 2010s media, and he behaves like a character the devs would've apologized for if that was true, but this game came out this year. For a franchise that's gotten better about depicting everything over time, it's an alarming step back.

Also, as a much pettier and minor gripe: The music in this one isn't that great. Deadly Struggle, Psycho's Anthem, Un Altro Appassionato and Cold Fire are excellent. The rest aren't very impactful. My love language for games is adding the OST to my iTunes regardless of whether or not I go back and listen to them, and even the Yakuza games I dislike (Judgment, 2) still ended up there. Gaiden didn't.

Lastly... Eesh. That dub work huh.

In truth, it's mostly decent. Not cataclysmically bad as a lot of doomposters and Twitter engagement farmers will have you think.

But the two most important dub voices, Kiryu and Shishido, are BAD. YongYea is incapable of delivering the right amounts of snark, bitterness and introspectiveness that define Kiryu, which is especially bad in a game where Takaya Kuroda is giving some of his best and most impactful work. He flubs a lot of the minor dialogue, and most of the finale, and while Kiryu is bored for most of the game, even in his vulnerable/supportive moments he just sounds like he wants to be home eating KFC gravy out of a cereal bowl. There's an incredibly heartfelt, crushing scene near the end which is amazing both for its place in Kiryu's arc and for justifying why people need to play Yakuza 3 and 6 to completion, and... Yeah, YongYea fucks it up. Sorry. That's why you don't hire GamerGaters to VA!

Likewise, Matt Bushell's depiction of Shishido feels alarmingly juvenile. It has the same energy of someone reading edgy manga lines into their mic, which is actually more offensive to me than YongYea's work. Yasukaze Motomiya brings an incredible depth to Shishido, allowing his bitterness and self-loathing to appear through the holes in his ironclad facade at all the right moments. His feral roars, heartbroken declarations and tired defeat in the finale are some of the franchise's best work, and... Matt Bushell just sounds bored. There's no sauce, no nuance, no passion to his work.
Other characters are fine like Holly Chou's depiction of Akame or James Burns' fantastic work as Watase, but they mean nothing when the two most prominent characters are so poorly voiced.

All in all, I'm just mad at this game for making me look like a fool. I've been saying "The worst RGG title is a 7/10 at worst" for years, and with this game being a 4/10 I now look like a clown.

4/10 I wish Akame was r- Oh, right. She is.

Being Scottish and having strong opinions and preferences regarding firearms is a bit like someone from Qatar having strong opinions and preferences regarding natural disasters, but I was raised in media that extols the beauty and elegance of these things while also growing up far from areas where they're a problem. What can I say? Splinter Cell made me love the Five-Seven and MGS made me adore a whole host of weapons. Even now I still use PSG-1s where I can.

Most gun-centric media gets a bit odd, often focusing on ultraviolence or realism in ways that get drab and boring. H3VR instead posits itself as something more akin to a fishing sim. Indeed, target shooting is as calming as catch-and release fishing, and I often find myself booting this game up just to select a random weapon and plink at targets for half an hour or so.

Content is a bit bare: There are a variety of scenes that exist just to do target shooting/sandbox screwing around, some experimental modes that haven't been touched in years, and an arcade mode where you advance through rounds, spend tokens on gear, and try to keep steady while unpinning a grenade and being shot at by 12 Sosigs.
Oh yes, there are no humanoid targets. None. The lead dev hates them and doesn't want them in, so everything available is either inanimate or a literal hot dog. If you're like me and VR gets a bit too real sometimes, it's nice to hop in and shoot things that don't have an uncomfortably real silhouette.

Honestly though, the game doesn't really need content. Mechanics are the name of the game and the developer's particular firearm autism means guns are simulated down to the wire. Sure, this means a lot of guns are functionally identical, but every now and then you'll come across a little quirk - a hidden fire selector, the safety automatically engaging without a magazine in, a manual mag release - that betrays just how deep the simulation goes. Handling and reloading everything on display is blissful, yet simple enough that it's easy to see marked noticeable improvement through repeat sesssions. I used to fumble all of my reloads, but now I can reload light machine guns as though they were humble assault rifles. Revolvers are my favourite, admittedly - I love to reload during a battle.

As an Early Access game H3VR is basically complete, though the full release is several horizons away. Meaningful content tends to come at a glacial pace as the developer often hyperfixates on meaningless mechanics that're only added for the sake of it. Even a few years after they were finished, doors and windows are only on one specific map. Oftentimes the meaningful additions are just more of the same; Weapons, maps, that sort of things. I will concede that the latest map - The Institution, a massive sprawling hub with tons of new enemy and environment types - is amazing, but it's also the most substantial add in years.

Still, maybe for another game this would matter, but H3VR is upfront with what it is. It doesn't matter that the developer wastes time when the game came out swinging, and the core is almost entirely complete.

And hey, if there's anything missing that you want, the game has a thriving mod community. I set my announcer to GLaDOS and now have to fight off cold sweats whenever I do well.

10/10 I'd probably hate this if I were American.

[This one is cobbled together from my review notes and also the 500~ Discord messages I exchanged about the game with some friends, so it’s a bit scatterbrained compared to my usual fare.]

When talking about games in a longrunning franchise, certain phrases tend to pop up around controversial entries.

“This game was one step forward, two steps back” and its variants.

Judgment confounded and still very much confounds me because it’s a step in every direction at once, with its directions seemingly mapped to someone’s rhythm game dance mat.

The premise of this game is simple: Dispense with the Yakuza franchise’s typical crime plots, machismo drama and half-naked rooftop brawls and replace it with a detective story that gradually branches out into a conspiracy tale. In the same vein, Kiryu takes a vacation from the series and is replaced by Takayuki Yagami, a guy who frequently calls to mind Geoff Keighley in that Yagami too is a relatively uncharismatic and drab man surrounded by the most interesting people on Earth. Rather than fighting with epic, powerful brawling moves, Yagami is a more agile and crafty fighter which is ludonarratively in touch with what I assume must be a frequent need to evade the authorities for chatting up high schoolers.

Right off the gate, the most immediately tangible difference between this game and its parent series is that Judgment has opted for a return to the quasi-noir style of Yakuza 2 - albeit if you play the current gen version you’ll have to fucking squint to notice it. It’s most obvious with Yagami’s constant internal narrations and an overarching feeling that you are but a cog in a machine you can’t really comprehend. Furthering this is that the Yakuza are no longer cool, noble modern heroes. They’re petty, lying criminals with no regard for civilians and a nasty habit of letting ambitions cloud judgement - pun not intended.

Yakuza games north of 2 have an awful tendency to drop about 50 NPCs on you in the first few chapters and only 10 will matter, and with Judgment they’ve bucked this trend in favour of sticking to a very small pool of characters. If you start with the franchise here you won’t get inundated with keywords, but it does expect you to remember who everyone is.

This, unfortunately, works against it. The worst sin a detective/murder mystery story can carry is being predictable. And Judgment is very predictable. Having a smaller cast means the suspect can only logically be someone within that cast, and the game makes no attempt to throw the player off or surprise them, as characters frequently interject to shoot down any suspects that aren’t the suspect. As a result, I’d figured out the killer’s identity by the middle of the game and their motive just shortly after. It’s not great, and the insistence on padding out a relatively unengaging conspiracy plot means the back half of this game drags.
I will admit, though, that there’s a good chance it was only obvious to me because I’m very attuned to the unspoken languages used in detective media, Yakuza games and games as a whole. In an RGG Studios game, the big bad is going to be someone who was face-scanned from a real actor. That’s just a fact, and it narrows the list down to four people.

As a detective story, the game also fails because there’s not a lot of actual detecting going on. Most plot beats are sussed out via pure instinct, and the trailing/investigation stuff often doesn’t actually matter due to the story progressing once Yagami makes a wild connection that Kaito calls ridiculous but ultimately ends up being right. Chapter 9 is AWFUL for this! Yagami essentially solves the entire plot barring two loose ends, and though everyone rightfully calls it out as absurd, Yagami is right.

Fortunately! There is a silver lining to this: The cast is exceptional, and despite the actual story being banal drudgery it is hard carried by excellent character dynamics, fantastic development for the main players, and a wonderful ability to pace out interpersonal reveals. I don’t like Yagami himself, but the supporting cast are phenomenal and the dynamic between the ever-growing members of his detective agency is worth the price of admission. Kaito might be RGG Studios’ best supporting man.

This is also the start of RGG Studios respecting the player’s time, so there are now optional
intermissions between long exposition dumps. While the story already drags, these excel in keeping things from feeling too suffocating - though the last couple hours are egregious even by franchise standards. On the ‘two steps forward’ front, the story manages to avoid the sins of past Yakuza games (4 and 5 especially) by knowing when to slam the brakes… Except in Chapter 7, which might be the most unwieldy exposition dump in the series. Other scenes go on longer, yes, but Chapter 7’s is so hamfisted it might as well be a pig.

There’s just one problem. A really really big problem. A problem so big that I can’t forgive it, even when I can forgive the obvious killer and the plodding middle third and the frankly weird left-turns the story makes near the end.

This was Toshihiro Nagoshi’s last big hurrah as a writer for RGG Studios and it unfortunately shows. With 0, 6, and 7 he took a backseat role which saw the writing quality rise dramatically, but the games he was a proper lead on tend to have some problems with the writing of women and Japan’s various minorities - Korean and Chinese primarily. It’s rather telling that the first mainline Yakuza after his stepping back from the role contains women in prominent roles and a direct addressing of the franchise’s prior treatment of Korean and Chinese migrants.

Judgment unfortunately maintains the spirit of his earlier work, and the game is suffocatingly misogynistic. Every female character in this story is either a plot device, revolves around the affections of men, or is someone for Yagami to prey on. It pains me to say it after the series managed to pull itself out of the misogyny pit, but Judgment is worse about women than Yakuza 1 was. Special mention goes to Mafuyu, whose entire character can be summed up as “Yagami’s ex” and she never evolves beyond this.
It is both hilarious and depressing, then, that this is the only RGG title to make an overt commentary on misogyny. Halfway through the game, you play as Saori - An assistant at Yagami’s old law office - and go through the hostess minigame from Yakuza 0/Kiwami 2… Which the game uses to comment on the misogyny faced by hostesses and indeed any woman faced on the streets of Japan.

This is tone-deaf in a million ways, yeah, but it stands out especially for being an uncomfortable commentary in a game that itself is incredibly misogynistic. Furthermore, for as much as I love the post-Nagoshi RGG games, they still include the skeevy and relatively unpleasant hostess minigames with absolutely zero sense of self-awareness. In another game series this would’ve been fine, but in a franchise with a still-growing black mark it has all the grace of a pigeon trying to do taijutsu.

Ah, speaking of clumsy martial arts, now is a fantastic time to discuss the gameplay.

I like the gameplay, but it’s not good, really. It’s a significant shakeup for the series, focusing less on brawling and more on acrobatics. Almost none of Yagami’s moves are reused, and for the first time in years we have a protagonist with a 110% unique fighting style - two of them, even!

And… One of them sucks. Badly. Really badly. Yagami has access to Crane (wide kicking attacks for crowds) and Tiger (Open-palm karate attacks for single target fights), and Crane is an utter waste of space. It gets no upgrades and its supposed use case is also perfectly doable by the versatile, powerful, hard hitting and exceptionally fast Tiger style - which also gets infinitely stronger as the game goes on. There’s some occasional uses for Crane as a combo extender, but normal melee attacks in this game do so little damage that this isn’t a meaningful use.

Instead, Judgment is focused on powerful single hits. Yagami can jump over enemies and bounce off of walls as preludes to exceptionally strong heavy hits, and Tiger style gets both the Tiger Drop from Kiryu’s games and Bruce Lee’s one-inch punch. The primary focus of combat in Judgment is scrabbling around to get an enemy on the backfoot before you hit them really hard. Truthfully? I like it. Kenzan and Ishin both added ‘new things’ but were ostensibly just skins for the standard brawling Yakuza combat. Playing as Yagami feels much more tense, as though he’s outmatched and has to basically cheat to survive. It’s telling that his hardest fight is against a guy who fights mostly the same.

But it is ultimately a messy and undercooked system that’s enjoyable in spite of its mechanics rather than because of them. People have mercifully reassured me that Lost Judgment is better about this, opting to become “Yakuza DMC” rather than a half-finished mod for Kiwami 2. As a small aside, I need to harp on the game for just how bad the hyperarmor problem is. Even mooks on the street are able to resist several blows which makes the early game feel like wading through mud.

There is one aspect I’ll praise without caveats though:

THE DUB.

I’m blessed/cursed with enough passive Japanese knowledge to know what constitutes a ‘bad’ performance in that language, even if the specifics are harder to articulate because I’m hardly conversational let alone fluent. The JP track in this game is very… Stilted. Yagami’s VA isn’t putting his heart into it and is fulfilling every bad stereotype about getting TV actors to do VA roles without much prep, and the side characters are a massive mixed bag. Again, I’m assured that Lost Judgment fixes this.

The dub, though? Goddamn. Everyone is putting in work. Greg Chun and Crispin Freeman act their hearts out during the various Yagami/Kaito dynamic scenes. Steve Blum returns to larger videogames as Higashi and kills it, reminding everyone why he was so prolific once upon a time. The venerable Fred Tatasciore appears as Kyohei Hamura and utterly owns the role, providing an infinitely better antagonistic presence than the actual antagonist, and Cherami Leigh manages to salvage Mafuyu’s drab character with an excellent performance. I was really fond of Keith Silverstein’s role as Satoshi Shioya, too, and was sad he was such an underused character.

I’m a big fan of Yakuza 7’s dub and likewise think it’s superior to the JP track, but with Judgment I am infinitely more confident in making that declaration. It’s frankly a shame that the series’ dubbing legacy is tarnished thanks to Gaiden’s utterly lackluster efforts. Here’s hoping Infinite Wealth is better.

In the end… God, I really did want to like this one. It’s so cool and the cast is so wonderful that it actually makes me kind of sad to have my review be so glum, but there’s just too much shit I can’t excuse even for a franchise that demands you put up with some shit in the process of experiencing it.

Kaito is my best friend.

It’d be so easy for me to just give this a 0.5 star and have my review be “Haha, gacha game”. Nobody would care at all and 99% of people wouldn’t begrudge it.

That 1% is, unfortunately, me.

Look, I am Mihoyo’s foulest hater. I gave Honkai Impact 3rd a chance and hated it because, even putting aside a lot of the straight up barefaced plagiarism that game carries out, it was just a bad game that felt like someone trying to remember the combat parts of Crash of the Titans.
Genshin Impact was even worse, being the world’s first AAA skinner box that shamefully ripped off beats from Breath of the Wild to sell anime archetypes to children and teenagers. I hate, hate, hate Genshin Impact. Endlessly empty overworlds that occasionally reward you for self-harming by feeding you “storylines” that are just characters saying prophecies, politics and keywords ad nauseam were grotesquely fused with floaty, unpleasant gameplay where “player expression” caps out at smashing through your characters and hitting the skill and/or ultimate buttons until things die.
Any pretext of having ‘characters’ is also thrown out into the gutter, because outside of time-limited FOMO events you’ll be hard pressed to find a Genshin character with a real personality or even a goal. I wonder if people only remember Yae Miko because you can ‘get’ her character without playing an event that hasn’t been rerun since Covid quarantine.

So, you can imagine that I was extremely cynical about Honkai Star Rail. My view of it was that Mihoyo, not content to defile the character action and open world genres, had opted to shit out a turn-based game as well. And for the longest time, this game was my punching bag. Whenever it appeared during an event or festival I’d always say something like “more like honkai shit rail lmao” in my group chat, and whenever I saw fanart of the characters I’d gripe at how awful 90% of the designs are. Lastly, do you know how horrifying it was to find out HSR would be an interstellar adventure? From a studio that struggled to make me or anyone else give a shit about a single planet in Genshin? Madness. Utter madness.

But I was bored on Christmas day. Preternaturally bored. I don’t really know what came over me, but I got the urge to download this game.

And… I’m still playing it.

I’d even go out on a limb and say it’s good.

From here on out, I’m going to compare this game to Genshin almost every other sentence. Sorry, but there’s really no other way to highlight just how well this game does certain things without bringing up the studio’s awful last game.

Anyway, upon booting up HSR, two things immediately caught me off guard.

Number 1: The dub isn’t terrible. Genshin’s is infamously wooden and embodies every bad trend with English dubs. The women almost exclusively talk in either a Peppy Girl Voice, that same breathy detached voice that’s often only heard on amateur VA voice reels, or they’re using a flat Regal Voice that results in characters like Raiden Shogun and Rosaria - two ontological opposites - sounding identical. The men aren’t much better. Honkai’s dub, however, is surprisingly robust. I could probably tell you who each character is just from hearing a single line, because the direction being given to the VAs is phenomenal and it results in characters managing to shine through just voice alone. The nicest thing I can say about Honkai’s dubwork is that if a character sounds bored, I often assume it’s intentional.

Number 2: The characters are written - at all. Genshin’s characters have a bad habit of being the exact same template but copy-pasted over to another region. There’s really not much difference between Jean, Candace, Ningguang, and the Raiden Shogun when broken down to their base narrative components, and every region has a Cool Guy, a Sad Guy and a suspiciously forward underage girl. HSR has less characters overall, but it bothers to actually write them out and give them arcs.
Silver Wolf and Kafka only appear for 20 minutes in the intro before fucking off until a later patch, but their dynamic is excellent and they themselves have so much personality that I’m still thinking of them hours later.
Don’t get me wrong, HSR is not going to give you intricate Yakuza-esque plots, but I was gripped by the Jarilo-VI cast’s struggles to survive in a world that was entombed in multiple senses of the world, and the utter tragedy occurring between Hanya and Xueyi beats out some of dynamics I’ve seen in many actual JRPGs.

Both of these apply through the entire game (as at the time of writing), but that they’re immediately obvious from the prologue is what got me hooked.

Don’t get me wrong though, it’s not all perfect. The actual plots tend to be straightforward, and the game’s insistence on giving you 5 minute quests with 15 minute exposition dumps calls to mind Final Fantasy XIV in all the wrong ways, not to mention that who gets characterization and when often feels like it’s decided by dice roll.
I love Natasha, the caring but deeply exhausted leader of Jarilo-VI’s underground vigilante police force. In a cast of mostly younger adults she stands out as a tired middle-aged woman who initially keeps going because she thinks she has to in order to ensure there’s a world for the next generation to even inhabit, and she ends up feeling a bit aimless/overwhelmed when that mission ends up succeeding.
But she’s mostly ignored in favour of Bronya, Seele and Serval, all of whom I enjoy yet sadly sponge up most of the screen time. Bronya especially tends to have her character arc reiterated to the audience every other cutscene, though unlike Genshin characters or FFXIV’s Y’shtola, her arc actually resolves.

Towards the end of the first planet, it dawned on me that I was enjoying the writing because the writers had very clearly taken the right lessons from Genshin. Rather than force the player into an endless hamster wheel to maybe see the characters progress, the characters are just front and center in the story and they’re utilized extremely well.
Sure, I can cynically say that they only made the characters likeable to hype you up for their banner reruns, but at least I can tell the banner characters apart based on personality. I’ll pull for Seele because I like the headstrong, illiterate moron who is clearly in puppy love with Bronya. Not because I need a Quantum - The Hunt character.

The real star of the show, though, is the gameplay. I often scorn the idea of gacha games having “good gameplay” as the sentiment is often echoed by whales/longterm players who’re experiencing an entirely different game in practice, but HSR really caught me offguard on that front.
It’s all very simple: Enemies have big icons above their head stating which element they’re weak to, and you build teams to deplete their weakness gauge so you can stun them and do big damage. Each character has a basic attack, a skill (which costs a skill point), an ultimate attack and a passive - along with an overworld ability.
There’s a tendency in games like this to have earlier characters be incredibly simple and without any depth, which is a trend HSR bucks right out the gate. The protagonist, Dan Heng and March 7th (the first three freebies you get) all have their own mechanics and roles, so tightly designed that they’re perfectly usable in harder content with a standard level of investment. Power creep is still a thing of course - I got Ruan Mei, a very recent addition, in one of my first pulls and she can just take turns away from enemies - but so far the game avoids that nasty trend every other gacha has where early character skills are a single paragraph and later ones are entire pages.
Characters all have Paths, which is HSR for ‘Role’, but each character applies the concept of their path differently which thankfully avoids homogeny. Two of my main units, Sampo and Pela, are Nihility characters - debuff centric. Pela is focused on removing positive buffs and makes enemies infinitely more vulnerable to other debuffs like those conferred by her ult. Sampo, meanwhile, is a Damage Over Time character. All of his attacks have a chance to inflict a Wind DoT and his ult does less damage than others in exchange for massively cranking up the damage enemies take from the DoT effect.

Praise also has to be given to the game for lacking any duds as of the time of writing. I’ve frequently taken breaks from the story to get some leveling resources because every character I currently possess has a scenario in which I end up using them, and though I’ve yet to get the character I want from the permanent banner (which the game dumps tickets for on you), every character I have gotten from that banner has been used in a serious capacity since I got them.

Overall, though, the game leverages its extremely simple gameplay to put you through some absolute ringers. The core mechanics are simple so the fights can be… well, not? Bosses and even elite enemies come with mechanics that can throw careless players for a loop, some of which I’d even describe as MMO-esque. The earlier parts of the game can seem simple enough to just blitz with a high-damage team, but eventually enemies start using taunts/lock-ons/stuns and other debuffs to force you to think carefully. Really, it’s this variety in enemy mechanics that results in the above praise: Even Asta, a relatively boring character, has incredible mileage in any fight where making the party take turns faster is a boon.

If I had to illustrate the differences succinctly, I’d point to Healers. In Genshin they’re superfluous if you’re at all good at the game, because it’s trivially easy to avoid damage and infinitely better to just bring DPS characters that’ll help you end fights faster. That is not the case in HSR. You can delay turns with Ruan Mei and Asta all you like, but enemies are going to attack. You are going to take damage at some point, and the need to either dispel or negate these inevitabilities is the driving force behind much more indepth team building. I got through several arcs of Genshin just fine using the same team that only ever saw a change when Raiden Shogun dropped, but in HSR I have three separate teams that I’m still constantly tweaking.

As for the world, HSR completely dunks Genshin’s poor attempt at an open world out the airlock and trades it for comparatively linear pseudo-dungeons and slightly wider hub areas. It’s all very ascetic in comparison; Amber doesn’t appear to tell you to fuck off and gather wheat at all during the intro, you just hold Forward and hit things between cutscenes. This is all to its benefit though, both because it allows individual area plots to work at all (Genshin could never have done the Overworld/Underworld thing well) and it allows each area to have a very strong visual identity, which means I can actually tell areas apart. It’s impressive that both halves of Jarilo-VI feel like they belong on the same planet given that every continent on Tevyat feels like it fell out of a difference 4/10 gacha game.
Oh and the fucking music. I’ll give Genshin credit on one front: The boss music is stellar all the way through. HSR, being an actual interstellar experience, is similarly out of the world but on all fronts. I couldn’t tell you dick about Genshin’s overworld/dungeon music but I still hum the Jarilo Underworld theme even when far away from the game. To say nothing of the cheesy over the top vocal track that plays during Jarilo VI’s emotional climax.

I also haven't seen many people mention it, but the side material in this game is excellent. The protagonist is given plenty of time to shine, and while the writing cribs ideas from Disco Elysium it knows full well it's never going to be a masterwork and instead opts to tell good jokes and write good characters. I talked to a trash can once, and it was brilliant.

Looking back at all the praise I’ve given the game, I do feel the need to clarify one thing: This game isn’t really exceptional. It’s just good, and among gacha games that automatically makes it the best. I have a lot of fondness for the game, its world, its lore and especially its cast, but there isn’t anything here you can’t get elsewhere. Yakuza: Like a Dragon has it all and is a one time payment! Same with Dragon Quest 11.

If you’ve read this far you’re likely wondering how the actual gacha/live service elements are, and they’re … not bad. Not good, because they never can be, but among its peers this is one of the least egregious ones - not quite GBF or King’s Raid good, though. Tickets and pull currency are handed out willy nilly compared to Genshin’s equivalents and while there are dailies & a battle pass, actually filling them out is trivial work and can often be done in minutes.
Genshin’s Resin system returns as Trailblaze Power, but to this game’s credit all of the dungeons/boss refights/elite enemies/whatever are available on a permanent basis - though the boss refights are limited to 3 a day.
Which… does actually lead into my biggest complaint about the game, and the one that’ll probably influence whether I keep going in the future:

There’s not enough Trailblaze Power.

And- Look, alright, I’m not gonna be mad that a game is making me put it down, but you need so much Trailblaze Power to progress at a meaningful pace. The onboarding process and early tiers of the battle pass (which accrue naturally) will give you tons of refills, but that’s a well that began running dry after I beat Jarilo-VI and made me hesitant for the future. It’s not actually much of an issue in Genshin due to how few party members you ‘need’, but this game’s better combat intrinsically leads to more grinding, which you’ll hit walls in constantly due to lack of Trailblaze Power.

All in all, I'm thoroughly charmed by this little game. I’m probably going to keep playing it in the downtime between bigger games and bigger writing pieces, but this is still a Mihoyo gacha game. If you had issues with Genshin and they revolved around character availability and the like, this game doesn’t fix them at all. It’s best to stay away, and likewise if you have compulsive spending issues or an addictive personality absolutely stay away - this game pads out banners with junk weapons, and it knows what it’s doing.

I wish Natasha was real.

Whenever I get reminded this game came out in 2012 I'm always a little stunned. Stunned because the passage of time is terrifying, and because games have been ripping off XCOM EU's formula for ages. Shadowrun Returns dropped only a year later and pinched it wholesale, right down to having blue/orange movement. If I tried to rhyme off every game that borrowed from XCOM EU I'd be here until 2025's first review.

And, to be honest, why shouldn't they pinch mechanics from this game?

Gaming's history is littered with attempts to dredge ~the classics~ out from the murky waters of memory and doll them up for a brand new younger audience, whose attention spans are increasingly being fried each year. The majority of these attempts are abject failures, either not selling well or selling morbillions but discarding the franchise's identity like wet underwear and losing their soul alongside it. Hell, this game's developers have tried it ad nauseaum.

XCOM EU is the cake that Firaxis actually got to fucking eat. It is a remake of the original X-COM game but with the hyphen surgically removed (congrats on the bottom surgery) and a whole host of lipsticks and eyeshadows to pretty up the pig for a new audience. And I gotta tell you, the pig is gorgeous. I don't envy whoever pitched this to 2K, notoriously soulless goons that they are: "Hey man, let's take this influential but niche cult classic and remake it for a modern audience, it'll sell millions!".

It did.

This game's premise is extremely familiar to anyone still alive. You are in charge of an agency that has to simultaneously convince everyone on Earth that the deadly force lowering the population is a valid threat while also protecting them long enough to actually have a population left to sign the tax breaks. Yeah that's right, you're a COVID relief agency, welcome back to hell.

Jokes aside, the premise is simple. Aliens are invading, you need help from world governments to get money and staff, so go kill some aliens to make them like you. Also try not to cause the human race to go into a thanatophobic death spiral that ends with their surrender - which is the canon ending by the way.

There were a fuckton of games trying to hit that 'casual strategy' niche in the early 2010s, and I'd say the reason EU succeded and they didn't is... It manages to blend casual-friendly and accessible controls with both decent presentation and actual strategic depth. Your units start with an assault rifle, a pistol, two action points, a grenade and can spend two AP to move without taking an action. Later on you get more options, sure, but not many.

Where EU really shines is in how you can use those options, though. Take the humble grenade; kinda sucks, low damage, nukes all loot from an enemy, might set off environmental explosives and kill your Sergeant-rank medic. But it's guaranteed damage in a game where the dice are rolling every other action, and it can bust open firing lines that're blocked by the environment. The moment Young Mira realized this game was great? Realizing I could resolve what looked to be a Code Black (total party kill) by blowing a hole in a warehouse wall, which let my Heavy shoot a rocket in.
And sure, the pistol line of weapons seems utterly worthless given their low damage... Until you learn you can capture aliens for tasty buffs/rewards, and suddenly a way to do nonlethal damage even on a crit seems delicious. Echoing the famous comment from CoD4, switching to your pistol is faster than reload since the mere act of swapping consumes no AP but reloading does.
Really, compared to this game's infinite imitators and even its own sequel (which really doubles down on the RPG elements, the expansion triples down), EU is oddly reserved when it comes to actions. It becomes apparent when you compare the maps, for a lot of EU's maps are claustrophobi urban slug fights where it's difficult to outrange enemies and thus the need to take actions carefully is omnipresent. The only time the game ever goes a bit hard on giving you too many actions is if you train up a Support and give them Psionics.

And man, we need to talk about units. Each unit in EU spawns with a randomized nationality, voice, gender, and name. Simple, but due to the repetitive and stressful nature of the missions they undertake, it's really easy to form attachments to these compilations of random entries and be sad when they die, or relieved when they merely go into bleedout rather than instantly drop dead. It was a fantastic way to bridge the gap between casuals and oldheads by giving them something to discuss, a community builder that more than likely led to the still-blooming XCOM modding community.
You can even name them after your friends! Don't do it if you're really protective of them like me!

On the presentation front, too, this game looks fantastic despite the camera being WAY above ground. I only ever remember it's a 2012 title when I see the models up close, because the lightning and environments are exceptional. Even when- No, ESPECIALLY when they're being blown up, set aflame, and destroyed by 95% chance to hit shots that miss! Almost every mission occurs at night too, which makes this perhaps the only game to really flex UE3's great lighting capabilities - albeit, that made this and the sequel a nightmare to run on contemporary midrange hardware.

...

What, why are you looking at me? What have- Sigh.

Fine.

Alright. Enough praise. Let's talk about the three big issues. The three really big issues. They're bad. They're really bad. They're why I don't come back to this very often, but I do 2-3 playthroughs of the sequel every year.

First of all, there's what I call the Overwatch issue. No, it has nothing to do with the bad Blizzard shooter. 'Overwatch' in XCOM is an ability any unit can use that ends their turn and makes them take a free shot at anything that moves during the enemy turn. This seems innocent, right? And it is to most players, but... Look, the core loop of each mission is walking into fog of war (unrevealed areas) and dealing with what comes out. Equipment is expensive to replace, there's no monetary replacement for training, and units die permanently... So the ideal strategy for nearly every mission is to use blue movement and Overwatch. Over and over. Over and over.
This issue comes first because it's one both the wider community and the developers actually agreed on. This game's expansion takes baby steps to address it, and the entire core of the formula was reworked for 2 to encourage players to stop being timid. Overwatch only gets more effective as classes level up; especially Sniper and Support who get endless buffs to it, and even rookies can get some kills with it if they equip any Aim boosting items.

The second issue branches off from this: XCOM EU, even with the expansion, is a very rigid and formulaic game. Good for a first playthrough, but on subsequent playthroughs it's very easy to... Solve the game, for lack of better words. There is always an ideal order, there are always ideal tactics, there are always ideal levelup perks to take, etc etc. The one thing all of EU's imitators/followups did right that the game itself didn't is giving most things a use.
I gushed over all the options available earlier, right? But when you repeat this game, there's always a best choice, and not even situationally. Snipers are never going to take Snapshot and most of Assault's perks are useless, you can just hug one side and be perfect.
Again, XCOM 2 solved this by giving each of the 4 base classes what amounts to subclasses. Its progenitor has no such luck. There are, indeed, dump options.
This is really obvious with the research and facility build options, too. I can't be too harsh though, because this is Firaxis' biggest problem as a studio: Experimentation is pointless, for these games tend to be Rubik's Cubes meant to be solved and even now in 2023 I'm amazed War of the Chosen bucked the trend.

Lastly, a combination of these two issues, is something harder to articulate without first talking about the sequel. XCOM 2's approach to balance is more focused on components. Individual enemies aren't very threatening, but combined with other enemies there start to be major problems. ADVENT officers are pathetic by themselves, but if they mark one of your units and anyone else is nearby, kiss that fucking unit goodbye. Likewise, your soldiers complement each other really well but it is fantastically hard to solo with any one class because of this. There's an effort made to encourage the player to invest in a variety of units, not just their A Team.
XCOM EU/EW is more individualist in comparison. There are a lot of enemies on Legend that, by themselves, can be run enders like Chryssalids or Mutons or Sectopods. Likewise, your units will likely snowball into unkillable embodiments of death that can kill endless enemies by themselves while the rest of your team sponge XP and twiddle their thumbs. Snipers were notorious for this in EU and the EW nerf bat didn't do much. There's not much synergy going on across the board, which is best embodied by the Support class (Specialist in XCOM 2): In 2 it utterly excels at aiding the entire team via either direct buffs or by hacking enemy emplacements/machines to reduce the overall threat in a mission. In EU it's best used as a self sustaining Overwatch machine that very occasionally stabilizes a dying unit. You could spec into team buffs, but they're inferior to simply becoming a turret made of meat.

If you've never played Enemy Unknown before, don't let my griping dissuade you. It is absolutely worth a full playthrough or two. Even if you're not all that into it, it could be nice to see a bit of gaming history; as I've alluded to throughout this entire review, so many games ripped off Enemy Unknown. I literally just got done with a 2023 release that was basically a homage to it. There's a reason everyone rejoiced when Jake Solomon announced he was coming back for 2, after all.

And hey, Happy New Year, folks! Here's to more 5s and less 1s, you know? Have a good one.

I'm always profoundly weary of expensive videogames that allegedly sold millions of copies yet never once entered my sightlines beyond intrusive advertisements on mobile Youtube and a stray nomination at Geoff Keighley's masturbatory advertisement ses- sorry, The Game Awards. In the same way morality disappears as desire for wealth increases, wealth itself increases the negativity associated with 'nobody talks about it'. Nobody talks about Brigador and that's fine, but nobody talks about this game that apparently grossed 7 million players and that's alarming.

In my quest to find out anything about this game, I came across a multitude of reviews and pretty much all of them say the same thing:

"It's mid, but it's pretty."

Now, I like mid, so this was a decent sell for me. It was only £3 on a site I frequent too, so I figured why not?

Anyway, this game is bad, and it's ugly.

GT feels like someone lay under the mattress while 2010s game trends were being conceived and then scooped up the leftovers with a bucket. A somewhat promising if drab opening cutscene immediately dumps you into a flavourless combat arena where you hammer left mouse button to throw energy blasts at Slenderman until they go into a weakened state and you perform a DOOM 2016 glory kill on them to regenerate health.

This is every single combat encounter in the game.

There are lots of them.

Immediately, frame 1, right at the starting gun, the first thing GT did to earn my ire was not have any feedback on anything. I'm something of a mid-open-world conossieur, you could say. A lot of those games get by just by making the base combat and movement feel stellar, and in GT everything is like existing in a world made of sand. Your main 'weapon' is energy blasts with unsatisfying impact sounds and an excess of particle effects, and while the hand signs used to carry them out are cute, the entire act of 'fighting' in this game is kinesthetically unsatisfying. Same for the movement, it's like playing Mirror's Edge on morphine. You do unlock two other elemental blasts later, but the same issues apply.

After a series of gormless, unsatisfying combat sequences, you're told that you can stealth and soon you get The Far Cry Bow in all of its glory. I take it that this game has aspirations of being a stealth-action game, but I don't think the devs did their research here. Far Cry, Horizon, Cyberpunk, RAGE 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Batman Arkham, blah blah these games all had outposts. Setpieces. Encounters you could approach from multiple angles. Cyberpunk was dropping entire immersive sim levels in the world as sidequest dungeons. This game? Doesn't have any of that. Stealth is superfluous and arguably detrimental to any sane player, who I assume wants this game over as fast as possible and thus will shun the slow approach. Just huck your elemental blasts and talismans for that DOOM glory kill.

No really, it is a DOOM glory kill. You've heard of games being "best-of" compilations, GT is a worst-of. Soon after all of the above you're given a 1-2-3 punch of Ubisoft towers, pointless puzzles that do nothing but further break up already bad pacing (though there is a skip button), and the standard open world side quest/collectable padding. The entire time, you have TWO voices in the player seat that're making quips about everything.

I'm also not entirely sure if it's just a PC port issue, but this game was horrific to look at. Even with upscalers disabled and true anti-aliasing forced via Nvidia control panel, everything seemed to be smeared in a thick layer of goopy dry vaseline and the reflections had the kind of artifacting/ghosting I expect from using AMD's older upscaler. Everything about 10 feet from the camera was blurry and when it rained it was profoundly hard to make anything out. It feels like an early PS4/XB1 game, around that time developers were finally making games that weren't ports but massively struggling to feel out what the hardware was capable of.

This isn't helped by the art direction being profoundly uninspired. I'm sure this game is fascinating if you're one of those people who thinks Tokyo is a place that was made up for Shin Megami Tensei, but having played enough SMT and Yakuza to last me a lifetime, GT offered nothing other games haven't done better. If you want a photorealistic Tokyo, Yakuza has that. If you want to see Tokyo get fucked up, SMT has that. GT does neither concept well, and despite the premise the design of both the supernatural phenomena and the yokai are boring. You'll be lucky to see a supernatural event that is anything more than "normal place covered in black ink".

There is a story here, but it's more flaccid and atrophied than half of the girls I know, and it borders on an excuse plot. The sidequests are far more engaging, and considering they're still bad that's almost impressive.

At times I wonder if this game was made out of spite. For a team like this - who would later go on to release the phenomenal Hi-Fi Rush - and a publisher with this much money, I can't think of any other explanation.

I'll admit to not being very enthused by this game when it initially landed in Early Access, both because my older self is uncomfortable with any game that's inherently sympathetic to law enforcement and because the initial serving of Ready Or Not was... Sour. Uncomfortable racial caricatures, eyebrow-raising dialogue, potential right-wing dogwhistles and an odd eagerness to let you go full police brutality on people were what awaited me, which is a far cry from SWAT 4. This isn't getting into the massive technical or balance issues.

101 people before me have said it, but SWAT 4's legacy is less of a cop game and more of a horror game. It knew just how much literally everyone hated cops and weaponized it, creating alienating and hostile environments where everything could be a threat yet told you outright that you weren't supposed to react as you would in other FPS games. The core difference between SWAT 4 and its contemporaries is that perfect play in SWAT 4 meant taking as few actions as possible and ideally walking out with 0 kills.

So you can imagine why RoN's first public version made me grit my teeth and back away. I was content to file it away in the vast wastes of my Steam library and up until now I'd succeeded, but I was bored in the evening and my IRLs insisted it was "quite good no" [sic], so with fuck all else to do and an alarmingly low amount of alcohol in the fridge for a Scottish household, I decided to join them and binge the entire thing in one massive session.

What immediately stands out in the 1.0 version is how a lot of the more obvious copaganda elements are gone, as are the problematic stuff which is most noticeable in the dialogue. It's a relief that I can play the game without worrying I'm going to run into an ulcer bustingly racist comment/accent. The developers also evidently busted out their old copies of SWAT 4, played it to completion and now the game is hellbent on keeping you from firing your weapon at a living person.
Lower caliber weapons offer you the mercy of allowing you to hit someone in the extremities for a non-lethal takedown, but bringing 7.62 Assault Rifle or a Shotgun to a gas station holdup will almost always end in severed limbs and penalties for unauthorized use of deadly force. Call me old, but the first time I accidentally decapitated someone with a stray 12 gauge shot actually made me feel a bit ill, and from then on I've exclusively used an MP5 and a Glock 19.

Where this game deviates from SWAT 4 is that it's very clearly trying to dig into the player's sense of morality to make the need for restraint sting, for lack of a better word. I'm still undecided as to how copaganda this game is on a scale from 3-10 (it will never be below 3, because cops are still sympathetic as the protagonists), but there's something to be admired in how the game will bring you face-to-face with pedophiles, human traffickers, school shooters and libertarians and still demand you keep your team on a short leash, follow the ROE, and try to minimize casualties. In typing that out, I realize that regardless of this game's status (or not) as copaganda, it's very clearly in love with an almost romantic idea of ~equal justice~ that's at odds with the fact you're playing as a cop, a breed of 'person' that in real life views justice as an obstacle to killing people. If you view all fiction as a fantasy of some kind, RoN is a fantasy land where cops actually behave like the image they try to put forward.

I've seen a surprise amount of (admittedly lowkey) debate about whether or not the game handles its subject matter with any grace, and for once I'm not 100% on where my own stance lies. I'd say that the game doesn't actually handle the subject matter... at all. The horrors I mentioned up above are grotesque, yes, but they're portrayed very manner-of-factly. There are no dramatic, heartbreaking violins or horrifying cutscenes in the buildup to the school shooting mission, it's just another mission. The horror comes from carrying out those routine behaviours - skulking around, identifying corpses, trying to subdue suspects nonlethally, praying the person on the floor is just hiding and not dead - in a school. They're depicted, sure, but it feels to me that the game is more about letting you take away your own feelings from the more emotionally challenging missions rather than going out of its way to make you feel a specific way.

I will say that the one exception to this is the swatting level which is, for lack of any better phrases, extremely over the top. It's the second level and comes after you besieging a gas station that's being held up, so I assume the developers wanted to keep the stakes high. The end result is that a 'simple' swapping also features gangsters, a crypto-mining operation, and the implication that the swatting victim partakes in a child trafficking ring. The use of unfortunate streamer stereotypes just makes it feel even more out of place, as if the game is trying to console new players who might fuck up and start firing like crazy. "It's okay, you just hit crypto miners and pedophiles!" or something like that. It's all so garishly out of place with the rest of the game.

Praise must be hoisted upon the visuals and level design, by the way. Brightly lit areas are fucking terrifying because armed gunmen can be literally anywhere, and even the most open levels feel dense and claustrophobic. Darker levels and smaller levels are so much worse, with a flashlight or nightvision goggles only offering token reprieve from the shadows. They really leaned into the 'horror game' thing.

There is, unfortunately, one massive problem hanging over this game like a pendulum, arguably more damaging to it than any potential discussions of its subject matter:

The enemy AI.

If you've ever played Rainbow 6 Siege during peak hours, it's a lot like getting matched against a team of Siege addicts from the Midwest. They possess hyper-awareness, x-ray vision, a total lack of recoil, reaction times measured in nanoseconds, and accuracy that most actual drones would kill to have. Many a time have I lost a mission because someone sensed my tainted chakra and decided to become a bodhisattva for the sake of purifying me.

Through a wall.

With a glock.

Despite me wearing full plate armor and being behind a cabinet as well.

This game lacks a 'downed' state which really compounds my frustrations. My friends and I, despite our years of tactical shooter experience and general FPS capabilities, never finished a mission with the full team alive because the AI is capable of inhuman feats. This applies to all suspect types, too, so you can meet your end at the hands of a panicked D&D player with a Beretta within about a half-second of making eye contact, and then experience the same thing facing down trained security personnel at a millionaire's mansion.

I wouldn't mind this were it the endgame state, or only applied to special enemies (former military, perhaps?) but as it stands it's omnipresent behaviour and results in the game easily becoming an exercise in frustration. The AI roams a lot, too, which can make a lot of tactical gear feel useless. C2 gas is very good when it works, but good luck getting to use it. In general, while the experience is fine enough, the AI hasn't actually evolved from early access and still feels like it's meant to counter players in a game where doors don't exist.

All in all, I'd be lying if I told you I didn't enjoy my time with this game, but even in its much nicer release state there is a small pit in my stomach that turns sour when thinking about it. Despite everything this is a game where you play as cops out to stop a crime wave, and while it's dispensed with the EA version's 'degenerate America' stuff, it still sometimes toes the line in a way that reminds me of a child looking at their parent to see how much of their brattiness is within acceptable parameters, or a cat about to knock something off the shelf.

There are posters dotted around the police station that encourage officers to take the shot, featuring despondent cops who're lamenting that they hesitated. I think these illustrate the cognitive dissonance the game experiences, because you're likely to see one after a tutorial in which a narrator with a cheap microphone repeatedly tells you to shoot last, ask questions later.

Going back to things you loved in your youth is always an uncomfortable gamble, because there's a 50/50 chance you'll either find a brand new appreciation for it in your old age or you'll suck air through your teeth every five minutes and murmur "Ah, jeez." to yourself.

Portal 2 is a unique oddity for me in that the 50/50 chance rolled 100/100 and I had both experiences, sometimes consecutively and sometimes concurrently. It's not helped by me being on a bit of a Valve kick and this was at the end of my replay list, which really highlights its status as their most oddball game.

Before I begin, it's absolutely worth restating just how much of a massive chokehold Valve had on nerd culture in the 2000s and very early 2010s. Having grown up around nerds and spent the vast majority of my education studying IT, the word 'cake' made me flinch up until around 2015. Even had I not actually replayed this game, I could likely recite the entire script because near enough every single line had been parroted and warped into some bizarre facsimile of humor by one specific corner of nerd culture.
I am not going to pretend I'm above the people I'm dunking on, because as late as June this year I made gauche "Grabbin' pills!" references while playing Project Zomboid and my last L4D2 runthrough with a friend saw me play necromancer to a host of jokes older than my nephew. Some diseases don't get slept off I'm afraid.

This Valve Mania was a precursor to a lot of modern developer worship cults, and like those it left a not insignificant amount of people with a general unwillingness to approach Valve games as anything other than holy relics. I, again, was one of those people for a time.

And... Having replayed all of their other singleplayer games till now? I get it. Even with flaws that're apparent as an adult, all of their games have airtight pacing, design that's still barely matched by a lot of their contemporaries, amazing unspoken player guidance and a phenomenal blend of narrative and gameplay - in part due to having the former take a backseat 99% of the time.

Except Portal 2, which stands as an oddball among their SP catalogue because most of those don't apply.

The original Portal is as close to a perfect game as the medium gets, really. Its pacing is sanded to a monofilament point, it discards more obvious handholding/directions with gentle nudges and intuitive signposting, the story runs concurrent with the gameplay but never usurps it, the comedy is rapidfire and laden with jokes that betray a lot about the setting as a means to not do exposition, and a slow but methodical rollout of mechanics that keep the game interesting until the credits roll. Plus, shirking the trends that were already endemic at the time, the game was set in this cold, sterile and lifeless testing facility that somehow looked more inhumane than the endless greybrown corridors of early FPS games.

It was a huge hit, and as humans are unfortunately prone to doing, people just wanted more. More Portal, in our mouths, Mr. Valve. Please.

We got Portal 2, which isn't what I'd call more Portal.

The intro alone signals to an observant player just how different they are.

Portal 1’s is hilariously brief. You awaken in a featureless bedroom and wait a moment. There’s a brief spiel by GLaDOS introducing the game, she glitches out, a portal opens and boom. In general, Portal 1 is really short for how much impact it had on the world; Undertale clocks in at a longer runtime.

Portal 2’s is overlong. Like Portal 1 before it, you awaken in a featureless bedroom. The announcer asks you to walk around, look around, and adjust the camera up and down. Then the jokes start. And they don’t stop. Jokes, jokes, jokes… Then Wheatley appears and I stare at my monitor, dead-eyed and slack jawed, wondering how I found this funny a decade ago.

I could write a really, really long spiel going through this entire game and tearing into just how obnoxious it is in every chapter, but it’d be repetitive even by my standards and I don’t really talk in circles so much as I do ouroboroii. There’s also no need, because the problems that start in the first chapter are the same all the way until the credits.

In the early 2010s, English culture began exporting itself all over the world thanks to social media. This mostly manifested as what I refer to as Gervais-isms; snarky, observational comedy carried out by overly bitter and unmarriageable white English dudes where most of the actual ‘humour’ comes from how fast they talk. It’s the entire foundation of BBC Sherlock for instance.

While this trend thankfully died a violent death, it infected a lot of works in its death throes. Portal 2 was one of them, sadly.

I will admit my biases outright before continuing: I cannot stand Stephen Merchant on any level, especially as a comedian. The trio he formed with Ricky Gervais and Kar Pilkington was a blight on the world and eventually gave birth to Hello Ladies, which reads more like an incel manifesto (as that is Merchant’s usual wheelhouse) than a sitcom. So it colours my view on this game pretty heavily.

I encourage you to read through the list of GLaDOS’ lines from the first game. and really take them in. Portal 1’s sense of humour is subdued, oftentimes difficult to pick out from GLaDOS’ otherwise normal dialogue, and when it’s obvious the game just moves onto the next line without clearly telling you ‘this is a joke’. Your reward for clearing each puzzle is a brief interlude by GLaDOS and then another puzzle.

In Portal 2, your reward is jokes. Sometimes you don’t even get a puzzle as a reward, just an endlessly white, beige or brown corridor where you spend the vast majority of your time scanning the walls for a single patch of portal-compatible surfacing. The jokes themselves are not only far greater in number, but greater in length. Portal 1 is about 3~ hours long, Portal 2 is twice that. 2x the length, 2x the jokes? That’s a fine and understandable metric.

Portal 2 is 2x the length, 10x the jokes and it’s…

This document has sat in my drafts for like three days now, after that ellipsis my brain just stopped because I could not put my figure on why the jokes sucked beyond “it’s very MCU-ish”, but I think I know now after spending two days playing XCOM 2 and Ultrakill ad infinitum.

Portal 1 is designed around the assumption that you like Portal.

Portal 2 is designed around the assumption that you like Portal’s humor.

Only, the humour in Portal 2 is not the humour in Portal 1. Portal 2’s comedy is grandiose, over the top, and assumes you always want more of it. It’s why Wheatley says stuff like “We’re escaping, that is what’s happening, we are escaping!” [No, really] for a full 5 minutes as you move in a straight line while barely engaging with the mechanics except to build a metaphorical bridge with portal spawning more simplistic than the first game’s onboarding puzzles.

Honestly, I could single out Wheatley as the sole offender here, but pretty much every character with a speaking role and more than five lines goes past the Joke Event Horizon at some point. The best part of this game is the first third set in the Current Aperture, because Wheatley is a minor character and most of it is devoted to either good ol’ Portal Puzzlin’ or the intense psychosexual nightmare yuri occurring between GLaDOS and Chell.

The worst part, though, is the middle section. Old Aperture.

Old Aperture makes me feel like a rat scurrying about a maze, solving puzzles for cheese. Except I don’t get cheese, I get snippets from a show where JK Simmons rambles to himself while stuck in traffic. The maze itself is a grim, brutalist remake of Splatoon where you don’t so much “‘think with portals’ as you think with adult colouring books.
Portal 1 had this fantastically lonely, sterile atmosphere to it that’s completely thrown out for 2, and it was meant to be replaced by the overgrown, decrepit Aperture you see in the first third.
This in itself doesn’t really work because the underlying design of Aperture changed between games, so it’s less “here’s the facility you love from 1 but fucked up” and more “here’s a fucked up facility”. It also doesn’t work because you spend the bulk of the game in Old Aperture which is primarily sewage, concrete and industrial warehouses followed by a redux of New Aperture which shows off just how much the underlying design changed. Really, this feels like a sequel to a completely different game.

But back to the Old Aperture griping for a sec, there’s something to be said about how mask-off Portal 2 is about its aspirations in this area. It’s not really interested in actually being a sequel to Portal 1 so much as it is competing with every other FPS game that was popping up around this period and also Valve’s other big series Half-Life. This was the game to make the Half-Life connection 100% canon and it shows in the way ‘Narrative’ as a game design element is so much more prominent here - arguably moreso than in the other series.

Much of what is only subtextual in the first game becomes decidedly textual in Portal 2, often to the game’s detriment as it gets repetitive early. GLaDOS referring to your stay in the ‘relaxation vault’ as a detention is Portal 1’s first clue that Aperture kinda sucks, but in Portal 2 there’s an uncomfortable volume of “HEY APERTURE SUCKS” text that feels extremely redundant, especially in Old Aperture. Yeah, the JK Simmons bits are mildly amusing, but they’re also excessive - for lack of a better word. “Aperture made testing products out of stuff that gives you lung cancer” is a bit unnecessary for a series where the first hour gives you instant kill sewage pools and GLaDOS reading off a health disclaimer that suggests the end-of-level fields can melt your teeth.

I focus so much on the non-gameplay stuff because the gameplay front is… Odd, very odd, and I’ve been putting it off on purpose.
Portal 2 has an incredible amount of mechanics in the pot: Portals, buttons, light bridges, laser redirection, aerial faith plates, speed gel, bounce gel, gel that creates portal surface, gravity bridges, reverse gravity bridges, and probably something I’ve forgotten.

They aren’t very well leveraged, and the way they’re contributes to the game feeling like three overlong setpieces as opposed to a Portal game. The first third gives you a portal gun, light bridges, lasers and aerial faith plates. You go through tests that feel like a glorified tutorial on them, get 1-2 tests where you really have to apply that knowledge, and then the act ends.
You’re then shunted into Old Aperture, where the three gels come into play. As before, you go through some glorified tutorials, get two tests to apply that knowledge, repeat.
The last third is no different.

When this game was released I was still in academia, and playing it in 2023 makes me feel like I’m back in academia… In the sense that nothing in the game’s metaphorical curriculum actually matters, because once we know we’ve passed the potential fail state we’re shunted onto something new that has no real relevance to what came before, even in the graded final unit. Which is doubly fitting because the lecturer who taught me networking protocols, Sam, admitted he had only ever played two games: The first Portal, and Civilization V.

To dispense with metaphors though, I’d argue Portal 2 is overdesigned. There’s a lot here and, given how much screentime is devoted to straightforward interlude corridors where you’re talked to by either Potato GLaDOS, Wheatley or Cave Johnson, it all just feels extraneous. A vain attempt at making you hype for the next text chamber, without actually thinking about how to tie it all together. Much of the joy in Portal 1’s later chambers come from applying everything you know to get through the puzzles without stalling halfway through, from detaching your sense of space and accessible terrain from what’s immediately in front of you and viewing the chamber through the lens of where you could go with portals. This is, after all, what ‘thinking with portals’ even means.

Portal 2 doesn’t want you to think with portals. It wants you to think with aerial faith plates, gel and gravity.

The interludes… God, the interludes.

In Portal 1, deviating from the test chamber formula was a shock. Meant to throw the player off and put them in an unfamiliar, uncontrolled situation that both looked and felt weird. In Portal 2, it’s… Every few puzzles, sadly. I’ve said it numerous times, but the bulk of this game’s is spent in what I’ve been calling ‘interludes’; they contain no puzzles, just large spaces that require you to scan the room for patches of portal-compatible terrain, so you can make a very banal A-B portal to cross. These segments don’t really engage with any of the mechanics up above, which is especially jarring given many of them feel designed explicitly to do that. The game would feel a lot more cohesive if using the other mechanics in uncontrolled situations was more prominent, and not just something that happens in the last boss.

One last note that almost slipped the script: Portal 2 has a bit of an issue with signposting. Oftentimes it devolves into pixel hunts (again, interludes), or the way forward requires the game to flash a prompt on screen saying “HEY, YOU CAN INTERACT WITH THIS!”. It’s so very weird given Valve often excel at this, even in the VR space.

The unique thing about Portal 2 compared to other games I rag on incessantly is that the developers addressed every single problem I have with the game… Within the same game. It’s called Portal 2 Co-op and it fucking rules dude.
I played it about two years ago with my stepdad (because I know he would grief me and I him) and it was like peering into an alternate universe.

In co-op, none of my complaints exist. There are no dogshit interludes that get in the way of puzzles, so you and your partner can focus exclusively on the puzzles. The puzzles themselves leverage mechanics a lot more evenly, and in general just felt like they demanded more brain power than singleplayer’s relatively banal puzzles. The supporting cast are gone entirely, it’s just GLaDOS managing to blend her Portal 2 self with her Portal 1 self. It’s just, in every way, so much better. Sure, there are some levels that mirror Old Aperture and feature gratuitous gollops of gel, but they’re a sight better than their counterpart.

And this wasn’t even a post launch addition. It was in at day 0, the two co-op characters were a fixture of the marketing, and they’re on the cover art. If you play only Portal 1 and then Portal 2 co-op, you have a cohesive and well rounded experience.

Still, despite everything I just said, I do have to give Portal 2 credit for something that probably wasn’t even intended:

GLaDOS’ dynamic with Chell is delicious. To keep it brief: GLaDOS spends all of Act 1 trying to hate and belittle Chell for various things (her weight/face/bone structure/parenthood/apparent lack of morality/lack of speech/etc) but it’s just… It’s all a veneer, one that quickly shatters when Wheatley enters the picture. Wheatley, unlike Chell, can’t withstand GLaDOS’ emotional abuse and lashes out destructively. In turn, GLaDOS realizes that Chell is her only source of companionship, which reduces her to a pitiful creature who tries to rationalize why Chell should empower her again, a far cry from her usual domineering self. I know some Portal fans have spent a decade arguing it’s an act, but it’s really obvious given that her first words after the finale are “Oh thank god, you’re alive” followed by Want You Gone, which is a breakup song to the letter.

It’s… Shit dude, it’s the most accurate depiction of a mutually abusive relationship I’ve ever seen which is doubly impressive since Chell is so mute she doesn’t even have a credited VA. It’s all helped by Ellen McLain’s legendary performance, which to this day is still the best voice acting I’ve heard among the thousands of games I’ve played.

In the end, though, there’s only one real takeaway I can have from this game, and that is:

It’s really obvious why Valve stopped making single player games until Alyx. They’ve made it abundantly clear that innovation is their philosophy and an inability to meaningfully innovate killed a lot of potential sequels/games in their studio. Portal 2 is their one exception, and it shows. This game was by no means bad, and it was a huge massive success that put the company on the map for a whole new generation of people.

But it’s decidedly not much of a Valve game.

It is absolutely a 2010s videogame, though.

Over the years I've slowly become numb to "good presentation" in games. The oldest revision to my Top 25 list is primarily games that got by just by looking and sounding good. Unfortunately, as time has went on, presentation doesn't do much for me. It's sticking gold trim on a door: Worthless if the door sucks.

I bring this up to save you a much longer review.

I was told for years that Ghost of Tsushima was the one exception to Sony's deluge of flavourless overly cinematic AAA tripe. That it was their one earnestly good game. My PC recently had a critical fuckup that left me stuck with just a PS4 for a weekend, so I figured I'd try this out.

And... It has excellent presentation. It looks beautiful, and it's the only one of these 'cinematic' games I think actually managed to capture the style of the movies it's aping. The soundscapes across Japan are amazing, and the voice actors bring a fantastic sense of atmosphere to a world that's almost literally on fire.

But I peeled back the stickers, stared into its depths, and what did I find?

Another Sony open world game. Shadow of War but with infinitely more cash and immeasurably fewer ambitions behind it.

It is painfully derivative. Stumbling upon my first Standard Far Cry outpost made me double over in hysterics (and headbutt my fridge, so precarious is my sofa's placement) and the standard RPG skill tree even moreso. I don't exactly resent Sucker Punch for doing what they do best, but for all this game's visual and auditory artistry, it's not really all that different from the last few Big Open World games. Modern AC, RDR2, The Witcher 3, Ghost Recon Wildlands, Shadow of War, Mad Max... Take your pick, man. It's the same as it ever was.

Perhaps the worst part is that, had this not released into a genre which is both incredibly prolific and deeply incestuous with regards to its influences, it would most likely be a masterwork that people gush over for decades to come until hbomberguy makes a "Ghost of Sushi Mama sucks, and here's why" video. But, at least to someone who has played an obscene amount of these games, I can't really praise it for anything because the best parts of this game are either a too-obvious homage to samurai cinema, or mechanics and ideas ripped from games almost old enough to go to college.

Don't get me wrong, the game isn't bad. It plays well enough, nothing broke on me, and it's balanced competently enough that I never felt my playstyle was explicitly stronger than anything else, but... Much like every other AAA Sony title, though, it's safe, which is so much worse. Safe is, and always has bee, boring.

Bad is memorable. Good is memorable. Boring is forgettable.