Before there was Oblivion with guns, there was Resident Evil 4 without guns. More so than with respect to even its emphasis on crowd control, dynamic difficulty scaling or abundance of contextual carpal tunnel generators, God Hand’s arguably most reminiscent of its spiritual cousin in terms of how forward-thinking it is.

An action game likes convenience. To be able to jump in and fight what you want, when you want with as little fluff as possible’s part of why DMC’s Bloody Palace (or equivalents) became a genre mainstay, why Bayonetta 3’s revamped chapter select system is probably the single most underappreciated feature of 2022 and why the not-infrequent complaint about Nioh having a level select menu is so mystifying. Play enough games from when this family tree was still in its relative infancy and you’ll likely realise how easy it is to take such features for granted, which is why it's so cool that God Hand had something like the Fighting Ring so early on in the genre’s history.

A practice area coupled with all sorts of bespoke combat encounters you can tackle and/or fail any number of times, totally free of consequence, would be a natural fit for any action game, but it’s especially great for God Hand because of how its equipment system works. There’s not just a litany of attacks at your disposal, each with their own distinct properties and niches, but you can also equip any of them in any order and assign them to any button. It’s an unprecedented degree of customisation that might’ve otherwise been overwhelming without an area like this, and which I’m not sure’s been matched before or since. The likes of The Wonderful 101, God of War 3 and DMC5 might let me switch from one weapon to any other in any order, but not even they let me build a moveset out of pimp slaps if I feel like it, purely because I can.

The draw of experimentation that comes with this is hampered a bit by certain rough patches – for example, multi-hit attacks occasionally feel disincentivised in a way that doesn’t seem intentional because of how frequently enemies block and counterattack as the difficulty level increases (especially on Hard where you’re permanently at the highest), while low profile moves which dodge enemies’ high attacks for some reason don’t avoid jumping grabs – but what helps keep the combat malleable despite these is the counterhit system. Interrupt an enemy or boss’ attack with one of your own and they’ll varyingly flinch, be stunned, get juggled or launched, even if none of those properties work on them normally. It creates an engaging sense of back-and-forth and ensures you’re never completely strapped for options no matter how suffocating the situation you find yourself in or which moves you've equipped, especially when taken in tandem with being able to cancel any of Gene’s attacks at any point with one of three different dodges (which, provided your thumbs can remain intact, is also particularly helpful for circumventing the aforementioned issues with multihit attacks).

On that point, God Hand’s handling of defence is something more games could probably stand to learn from. The Great Sensei is a sink or swim moment in this respect and, in my view, the embodiment of what makes it shine, stringing together high attacks, vertical attacks and crowd control in blistering succession that demands you have an iron grip on each of Gene’s dodges and what they’re for like no boss before or after him. He would still be infamously difficult because of all this in a vacuum, but I think part of why he’s such a challenge also stems from how many other games with real-time combat systems treat their (often singular) dodge as a one-size-fits-all invincibility bubble and how tough it can be to break the conditioning that that sort of standardisation instils. Lost Judgment is another 3D beat-‘em-up which plays excellently, but despite being 15 years God Hand’s junior on platforms multitudes more powerful, it can’t help but feel comparatively primitive whenever Yagami “evades” a sweep kick by ducking his head. In contrast, God Hand’s more nuanced combination of side/backward dodges and bobbing & weaving reminded me loosely of Soulcalibur, which on top of its counterhit system makes one wonder how much other action games might benefit from leaning into their common ground with fighting games.

Not all of God Hand’s boss fights or enemies utilise its mechanics equally well, the final boss in particular running the risk of jettisoning the player’s goodwill into the bin, but some scattershot ups and downs are to be expected when your game is so bonkers at every turn. It speaks to how entertaining its stages manage to be, both conceptually and in design, that you end the game with no further mechanics than what you start with and it never once feels stale. There’s an inherent excitement that comes with cramming so many clowns, demons, cowboys, Venetian canals, floating pyramids and other seemingly disparate ideas that you don’t know what to expect next; while some might be surprised at the fact that he considers Resident Evil 4 to be the opposite, it’ll likely shock nobody that Shinji Mikami feels that God Hand is the game with the most amount of himself in it. What results is no doubt chaotic, but more than worth looking past the imperfections of for experiencing what’s essentially his and a bunch of other loveable goofballs’ collective personality transcribed onto a disc, which also happens to be perhaps the only game that feels like an interactive version of an action film’s fight choreography.

If you happen to still have a PS2 lying around, I can attest that the ~80 gamerbux that used copies of this bad boy go for are worth it. You may not be you know who, but you’ll feel like it by the end.

As I initially set off to finish the last of the remaining dungeons, I round a corner and a stray thought occurs: “Can I dogfight dragons in this game?” After an evening spent on that instead, it turns out that I can both do that and send it tumbling down a cliff in the process. Another thought follows: “This is probably the coolest game I’ve ever played.”

This reflects a strength that’s been carried forward from Breath of the Wild and part of what separated that game from standard open world fare: the “triangle rule.” It includes shaping environmental geometry in such a way that landmarks and other notable sights were deliberately obscured from angles players were most likely to view them from, creating a visual chain of interest as they orient themselves around it. It’s impressive that Tears of the Kingdom retains this considering just how much Hyrule has been reshuffled and expanded upon, but where it particularly excels in this regard is in terms of new additions, namely its tripling down on verticality.

Diving into a well or tree stump, winding up in a complex cave system, finding treasure behind a waterfall or at the top of a hidden shaft and using Ascend to pop out the other end in parts unknown is the exact kind of storybook-like experience that this new formula needed, like meat added to the bones of the sense of adventure BOTW was otherwise so successful at selling. Caves seem a deceptively simple inclusion on a conceptual level – goodness knows open world fantasy games’re no stranger to them – but one reason you couldn’t just plop TOTK’s into some other game is because of how their design’s informed by Link’s traversal options. Just finding them often resembles a scene out of Katsuya Terada’s art for the first few Zelda games, steep climbs into hidden entryways and all, often in a way that foreshadows the challenges inside. Slippery walls, boulders you have to smash your way through, confined spaces and other hazards combine to form the other reason, which is the contrast these environmentally constrained puzzle boxes create with the rest of the game’s freedom.

Shrines and temples alike exemplify this, as much as or more than the spectacle of diving from a sky island straight into the Depths in what’s a sensation I haven’t felt since Gravity Rush 2. Getting goofy with a combination of Ultrahand and Recall or whatever other powers you prefer to circumvent obstacles brings to mind an anecdote I have about a level in Thief 2 called Casing the Joint – years now after first playing that level, I still couldn’t tell you the “proper” way to beat it, because I’d always drag boxes from the opposite end of the level and use them to scramble onto titular joint’s roof before smashing a window that would leave every guard permanently alerted. Scuffed a method as it may sound, the important thing is that the game says “yes” to the player regardless, and the same’s largely true of TOTK; although, as with BOTW, some of its quest design shows that it isn’t fully designed in accordance with these sorts of open-ended solutions (Calip’s omniscient fence in Kakariko comes to mind), this isn’t necessarily so much a flaw as just an indicator that it’s not quite the same type of game. Where limitations like these do exist, they rarely feel so arbitrary as to outweigh the feeling of thinking like an adventurer that comes with nonlinear problem solving through Link’s new, more multifaceted powers.

Fuse is a favourite of mine not just for how it turns any item you come across into a potential tool, but also because this by extension encourages thinking about your equipment more than BOTW required. A bokoblin reaper may share the same animations as a horriblin hammer, but only one of them’s getting used for smashing enemies’ armour, clearing boulders out of caverns or searching for ore among other things. It’s understandable why some players may initially be upset at the apparent lack of any new weapon types compared to BOTW, but considering how many different functionalities are covered thanks to this one power, I wouldn’t be surprised if the devs considered and rejected the idea based on potential new ones being redundant. It feels weird to say so about a game that isn’t by any means hurting for recognition, but this is just one example of how it (and its predecessor) probably deserves more credit for achieving more with less.

This extends to its enemy design. We have a tendency to think of “enemy variety” in terms of the quantity of different enemy types, but what gets lost in that sort of discourse is the mechanical variety between those types. Even in BOTW, bokoblins have more dynamic behaviours than the combined enemy rosters of some other games, and that was without boss bokoblins, aerocudas and Zonai constructs for them to interact with. While TOTK having a higher amount of different and region-specific enemy types is appreciated nonetheless, I’m glad that fleshing out these behaviours amongst a relatively condensed roster still seems to have been a priority.

Flux Constructs are a standout in both that respect and why we ought to also apply this sort of lateral thinking to TOTK’s combat as well – in a game in which you can remove a golem’s hands to prevent him from being able to punch you, shoot dragons out of the sky with a DIY plane or suspend yourself in air with a foot-mounted flamethrower, it seems myopic to judge it based on how many ways Link can swing a weapon. Between using Recall on a certain attack of theirs to fling myself to places I couldn’t otherwise reach, darkness that’s actually dark and which requires resources to dispel, plus summonable AI companions, it becomes apparent that the sceptics were wrong – this isn’t BOTW DLC, but rather a Dragon’s Dogma 2 closed beta.

I’m only being slightly facetious, because much of what makes Dragon’s Dogma and its mutual point of influence, i.e. Skyrim, special as adventure games is present here too. If those two games could each be distilled into one key characteristic, I’d say they’re respectively dynamism and player-directed experiences. TOTK takes both and melds them with a largely honoured commitment to unrestricted problem solving that – in my view – has always felt like the most natural direction for Zelda to go in, forming a superlative package which I think sits at the top of its franchise, its console and potentially open world games in general.

All this and somehow I still feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface of all there is to appreciate here. As many words could be written about the atmosphere invoked during a sunset with the Dragon Head Island theme playing, the extent to which Ganondorf’s phase 2 transition has been living in my head rent free or the fact that, if you think about it, Link himself has become the legend of Zelda. I might play another 100 hours and still be finding new things to wrap my head around. Such a game.

Something’s clearly amiss from the outset of Bioshock 2. The first thing you lay your crusty visor upon is graffiti stating that Babylon has fallen. You’ll then notice that Rapture’s once pristine art deco stairways are now taken over by luminous coral overgrowth, rubbish and, strangely enough, butterflies. Even the game’s HUD is corroded with rust and calcifying under barnacles. It’s like a corruptive force has washed over and warped the city’s very essence, wherein lies Bioshock 2’s own essence – a reinterpretation of one of gaming’s most well realised worlds more thoughtful than it’s ever given credit for.

This is most noticeably distilled in Sofia Lamb, monologue dispenser extraordinaire and embodiment of Rapture’s ideological swing of the pendulum. Collectivism for her doesn’t stop at every I in service of the we, but rather the outright elimination of self-awareness and subsuming of individuals into a singly-minded mass, a bit like a (purely theoretically) more utopian vision of those guys from that other game whose title ends in ‘Shock 2.’ She’s a well chosen opponent for a story whose stakes are so much more personal this time around, revolving around her attempts to erase the individuality of your girl Eleanor and transform her into what she refers to as “the People’s Daughter,” a prototype for the citizenry of the utopia she envisions who’ll be unable to question anything and who can fill any societal role by way of plasmids. Where Ryan and Atlas question the player’s agency, Lamb questions the player’s ethics: you can prove her wrong and even save her from herself by setting a positive example for Eleanor to follow that only Subject Delta as an individual is in the position to produce.

Your treatment of the Little Sisters is a key factor in this respect, as ever, but Bioshock 2 tweaks this mechanic so that the method of obtaining the most ADAM from them is much more proportional than before. To get the best result from rescuing each one, you need to protect her as she harvests ADAM from two corpses scattered about the area, attracting splicers, new kinds of Big Daddies and eventually the bullet sponge to end all bullet sponges that is a Big Sister. Between all parties attacking each other in the crossfire, security bots and a harsher limit on how much first aid/EVE you can carry, these sections can become legitimately tough, if not in terms of deaths accrued then certainly in resources consumed. Harvesting Little Sisters is now granted the niche of middling reward for little risk, an all the more tempting proposition if you use one of the new modular difficulty options to turn Vita Chambers off. It’s an altogether solid solution to the dilemma that led Clint Hocking, lead designer of Splinter Cell 1, Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2, to coin the term ludosudowudo-whatever.

2 revises much of Bioshock’s formula in other, similarly beneficial ways. Being able to wield a plasmid and a weapon simultaneously ties each half of the combat system together by granting you bonus damage to enemies afflicted by plasmids, allows for more flexible enemy design (brutes and Big Sisters are particular standouts, turning every environmental object into both a potential tool & hazard) and is otherwise such an obvious addition that a friend of mine misremembered it being in the first game. They say any FPS is as good as its shotgun, and while we do have one here that’s both very useful and emblematic of this series’ A+ art direction, only Bioshock 2 is as good as its gigantic drill hand, which allows for anime moments and the worst possible deaths in equal measure. They and every other weird and wonderful weapon Subject Delta comes across enjoy greater functional variety this time around too, thanks to an expanded weapon upgrade system that grants each one a unique quirk at the final, gated tier – for example, reflecting projectiles with the drill or ricocheting bullets for the machine gun.

Mechanics aren’t the only things that’ve been fleshed out, either. Bioshock 2 concentrates a veritable Metroid Prime’s worth of effort into conveying the sense that you, the player, really are inside the rustbucket of a suit inhabited by Rapture’s #1 dad. Rims of Subject Delta’s visor occupy each corner of the screen, reflect light and jolt about according to his current state. Droplets of blood, water and certain plasmids spatter and drip down its glass, which also gets fogged up by steam. Landing after a jump is accompanied by a hefty screen shake, an upheaval of lingering dust and a metallic thud. You can even see your shadow now, projected by dynamic light sources, which is used against you for at least one jumpscare that I’m aware of. A diegetic HUD of some kind might’ve helped it stand out even more in this respect, but in general and as befits a game with this kind of ancestry, Bioshock 2’s immersion dial has been turned up several notches compared to its predecessor, making the recipe of raiding long-abandoned apartments and backrooms for tidbits of environmental storytelling and other goodies feel all the more tactile.

This is all without even touching upon Minerva’s Den, but despite deserving its credit both as what should be a standard for DLC and for its influence over a subset of indie games birthed in the years that followed, I can’t help but feel that the general perception of it as the highlight of a lesser entry is erroneous. It’s really just more of what’s an already excellent game which demonstrates an intimate understanding of what made its predecessor tick, gameplay-wise and thematically, and is as a whole long overdue a reappraisal.

Revisit Rapture with Bioshock 2 and discover that what you’ve been misled to believe is an ancillary sequel is, in reality, assuredly among the most underappreciated games to have still garnered relative acclaim, as well as further evidence that the real best games usually have an average Backloggd score starting with a 3.

Train your ears as you make your way through Avalon Forest and you can practically hear a familiar sound.

You could quite easily argue that Bayonetta Origins is the most Clover-esque game to come out of Platinum thus far, but it becomes apparent early on that its level design and progression structure’s drawing from a very different well: Metroid! Areas and items initially just out of reach, cordoned off by the likes of icy branches or rippling lakes, become open as Cheshire gains more elemental powers. These powers sidestep the common issue of feeling like glorified keys by the degree to which they flesh out the game’s action portions, simultaneously enabling a combat system that has more going on by the midway point than most comparable titles do by their climax and bolstering the setting’s labyrinthine characterisation through mechanics. With Metroid Prime fresh in everyone’s minds after having recently been treated to an atypically faithful remaster, one would hope audiences have a renewed appreciation for how rare it is to see this sort of design even attempted in 3D, nevermind executed to such a standard that every loop and interconnection between Avalon’s different biomes feels geographically plausible.

Neither Cereza nor Cheshire will be shinesparking their way out of bounds, to be clear, but that’s just as well, because the artistry on display in Origins is made to be soaked in at a leisurely pace. To illustrate the point, here’s a collage I made out of some of my screenshots. This game’s beautiful, there’s no other word for it, but one reason that’s exciting is because it’s reflective of the hidden talent yet lurking within Platinum. The staff behind Origins includes more than a bit of new blood, including the game’s director, and (if I’m not mistaken) this is Tomoko Nishii’s first time in the art director’s seat. We may hope that her and her team’s work is recognised and rewarded, because the world needs more games that can cause me to involuntarily mumble “how did they do that?” more than once. Their interpretation of Irish mythology is especially ace – the stained-glass, crystalline whimsy of the Tír na nÓgs and the faeries is a wonderful fit for the imagery conjured up by folk songs I’d heard as a wean.

As befits a playable storybook, all involved with the narrative side of Origins demonstrate a similarly tight grasp of their crafts. The voice direction here’s easily on par with that of The Wonderful 101 and suits the characters’ expressive visuals so well, the narrator’s gruff impression of Cheshire being particularly brilliant but not so much as to outshine or overshadow Angeli Wall, whose understanding of Cereza is such that you can all but hear flashes of her future self buried under layers of insecurity and self-consciousness. Therein lies a key strength of Origins – recontextualisation. Every instance of Bayonetta’s attitude in the mainline games feels all the more nuanced having now been exposed to her humblest of beginnings. Considering what he endures in this game, Cheshire has well and truly earned his right to be such a goofball by the time he becomes Viola’s companion (maybe that’s not just tobacco in his pipe). A post-game bonus chapter redefines Jeanne’s eventual fate as a knowing act of selflessness where previously it might’ve seemed uncharacteristic of her. It all represents the best kind of storytelling one could ask of a prequel, i.e. that which retroactively enriches the rest of its franchise.

This harmoniousness is part of why the sentiment I’ve occasionally read cropping up, that Origins turning out to be as great a game as it is in wake of Bayonetta 3 is somehow surprising, is one I find a little perplexing. If Origins’ quality might be seen in relation to its companion piece in any capacity, it’s in a sense that vindicates and is complementary to that game’s principles, not which stands in contrast to them. Origins shares more than a bit of its DNA – the core axis of controlling two characters simultaneously, multiple currencies with independent purposes, a boss, several characters and visual motifs – but perhaps the most important component is the same willingness to throw caution to the wind and upend series conventions, taken to the more extreme conclusion of completely overturning the tone, art style and general formula associated with Bayonetta as opposed to “just” altering all of those significantly. It’s an already bold direction that Origins has doubled down on, which seems a hard thing not to respect when courting mass appeal would likely be so much easier.

If all hasn’t made it clear already, this is the type of game that a cynic might describe as one that doesn’t happen anymore. It’s borne of pure passion, in other words, and come the end credits, there’ll be no doubt in your mind that the team behind it are utterly in love with these characters and the world they inhabit. As rich in mechanics as in story, stuffed with unlockable costumes, riddled with the little things (check out Cheshire’s idle animations in each of his elemental forms) and representing a series with no shortage of fresh ideas, you can’t reasonably ask for more than this.

Let’s dance, and possibly pet some bunny rabbits.

Miss a beat in Hi-fi Rush and Chai will attack on beat anyway. It’s probably unreasonable to expect it to punish this sort of thing in the same ways that other rhythm action hybrids like Patapon, Metal Hellsinger or Cadence of Hyrule do, because it’s so notable in part specifically for being so different from everything else, but there’s being different and then there’s being disincentivisingly handholdy. It’s a symptom of a larger problem – Hi-fi Rush seems almost afraid of allowing the player to fail.

With a scarce few exceptions like one of the final boss’ more belligerent attacks, the contrast between proper timing and mistiming in Hi-fi Rush isn’t success versus failure, it’s success versus negligibly less success. It’s true that enough mistimed attacks can detract from your final rank, but this is inconsistent with how assist attacks contribute to your score despite not requiring any timing at all (exacerbated by their charitable cooldowns), as does an offbeat jump if it ‘avoids’ an enemy’s attack that was nowhere near you anyhow, and the penalty’s so minor it’s hard to notice. Rhythm Master difficulty goes some way toward assuaging all this by giving you an immediate game over if your rhythm meter falls below C, but it’s not hugely impactful because of the aforementioned inconsistencies, while the fact that it’s only available after beating the game also makes the common action game mantra of “the first playthrough is the tutorial” feel unfortunately literal.

As another example of this, Hi-fi Rush affords the player a generous helping of attack magnetism, or whatever you prefer to call the melee equivalent of aim assist that’s particularly common in western action games. Chai’s mobility is so rigid that I imagine the designers may have felt the absence of this might’ve led to a frustrating amount of dropped combos. Even still, it’s at best unnecessary given that Chai already has an equivalent of Nero’s Snatch from DMC4 & 5, and at worst a net negative for how it diminishes positioning. It doesn’t stop Hi-fi Rush from getting better as you yourself do, like any other worthwhile action game, but being able to both feel and see the developers artificially nudging things in your favour like this does cheapen the appeal of getting to grips with what is, in the grand scheme of things, quite a cool combat system.

Apparent influences from other action games, like its equivalent of Astral Chain & Bayonetta 3’s wink attacks, lend themselves naturally to the combat’s rhythm-based formula and complement the game’s lovely presentation well. Environmental doodads bounce to the beat like in Metal Hellsinger, diegetically communicating helpful information to the player not only in terms of timing but also because enemies always attack to the beat, which ensures consistency on their part (albeit hampering their ability to surprise you). Another caveat to the combat’s strengths, though, is that there isn’t really enough of it, at least until you unlock Rhythm Tower i.e. the Bloody Palace analogue.

Most levels in Hi-fi Rush are very long by action game standards and a hefty proportion of nearly all of them consists of platforming segments. This sounds inoffensive in a vacuum, particularly for a genre in which “gimmick” seems to be a dirty word in most people’s minds, until the stiffness of Chai’s movement and the absence of a proper bossfight for two or three entire chapters in the game’s midsection make it apparent how drawn-out these sections often are. The latter feels especially deflating because the bosses that are here are of a really high standard, being diverse both visually and mechanically, with a huge amount of effort and artistry gone into even just the freezeframes in their introduction cutscenes. I’d much rather have had a couple more of them than be Letz Shaked twice in a row.

What makes it feel especially disappointing to be part of the internet’s propensity for contrarian armchair criticism, aside from the fact that Hi-fi Rush couldn’t be any more up my street conceptually, is that it isn’t a game that deserves to be ragged on like this. At the end of the day, this is a new IP in an historically niche genre that’s feature-complete out of the box, bereft of tonal carcinogens like irony or cynicism, stuffed with substantial post-game unlocks and has Korsica in it. It’s just also one which is eclipsed several times over in depth, variety, pacing and general well-consideredness by any number of other action games both modern and from the period it’s a love letter to, which don’t tend to lack for sincerity, charm or bonus content in the first place.

Is it funny, deserving of success and easy to recommend to anyone interested in action games despite this? Yup. Is it the best action game ever, as suggested by its average rating here (at the time of writing) and elsewhere? That's kind of wild. I’m potentially open to the idea that Hi-fi Rush is in the top seven or so best games that Masaaki Yamada has worked on.

More firmly, I’m genuinely delighted that Tango’s thrown its hat into the action game ring and that doing so’s rewarded its clearly, transparently talented staff with their most unambiguous success so far. I’d love even more to be able to speak of them in the same vein as Capcom or Platinum or Team Ninja who, barring one or two semi-recent and enormously overemphasised missteps apiece, have long comprised a reliable triumvirate of quality action experiences which light up my frontal lobe in a way few other developers can. How often I found myself smiling during Hi-fi Rush’s cutscenes and character interactions versus actually playing the game means that I can’t yet, but it’s still promising enough to be indicative of their potential to someday join them on stage as one of the action genre’s rockstars.

In the grim dark past of the 7th console generation, there was an overabundance of the third person shooter with dodge rolls and melee combat blended in. What was so common then isn’t so common now, though, and the aspects that helped Space Marine stand out from its contemporaries have only become easier to appreciate with time, be it its copious shoulder bash-induced clouds of red mist or its many quotable lines which would later serve as solid material for my brother’s meme channel on Youtube. So it is that, in the grim dark present of the 41st review, there are only good times.

Shameless plugs are for the weak, but so is cover. The Imperium’s marketing department told us as much. For the most part, this confident departure from genre norms translates into the game well. Anyone who’s played Halo CE’ll be familiar with Space Marine’s health system on the surface, but where it substantially deviates is that there are no health packs – or rather, enemies are your health packs. If that sounds reminiscent of a feature in a later shooter that rhymes with “mory mills,” that’s because it is, but with a few differences that make this earlier spin on the idea more interesting. Mainly, Space Marine’s equivalent doesn’t make you invincible, which necessitates that you think before use and encourages you to jump into the fray rather than cower behind walls whenever Titus is hurt. This falters a bit on the hardest difficulty where enemies deal noticeably higher damage, especially so when Chaos starts showing up with beefier ranged weapons, but the inclusion of this system’s ultimately a net positive for how it breaks the mould and contributes to the feeling of being a walking tank.

The latter’s accentuated in a lot of ways, kinetically and visually. Among other nice touches, the screen shakes with every footstep whenever you’re sprinting, small enemies like groks can be squished by quite literally rolling over them, much of the faithfully modelled backdrops can be destroyed and the normal humans who comprise the Imperial Guard are barely half your height. It extends beyond these, though, because the feedback on attacks is excellent as well. Orks bend in all sorts of shapes as you riddle them with lead while headshots gib the entire top half of their bodies, stun attacks launch mooks across the room with a thunderous bang (helpful in communicating which enemies can be executed amidst the carnage) and slamming into crowds from above by way of a jump pack piles on enough slow-mo to make Zack Snyder blush.

Jump packs are a particular highlight of Space Marine in general. Not many shooters of this era play with verticality in quite the same way as rocketing up to the top of techno-Gothic buttresses and crashing back down while raining down shots of plasma. These antics have the knock-on effect of driving home the sheer scale of Graia’s environments, which dwarf even our titular Astartes, as well as permitting greater flexibility in terms of level design by allowing you to approach encounters from multiple angles. It’s tempting to wish you had a jump pack permanently equipped, but only being sprinkled into specific areas of the game helps the campaign maintain variety, especially since they come with the wisely implemented drawback of only letting you equip melee weapons + pistols, forgoing heavy weapons entirely. Still, it’s not hard to see why they are, or were, such a popular pick in the multiplayer.

Online multiplayer components often present a challenge when recommending certain games, given that they essentially have an expiry date, but – perhaps due to their prevalence at the time – those in many 7th generation titles were also commonly compounded by the general perception of being “tacked on.” Even universally acclaimed examples like those of Uncharted 2 or The Last of Us still seem to be perceived as secondary or otherwise not particularly important, to the point that it’s not uncommon for remasters and/or remakes of these titles to be referred to as definitive despite outright removing these pieces of the full package. Granted, this is somewhat understandable in the case of overtly narrative-driven games like those two, but the man hours that go into crafting these parts of an end product deserve as much consideration as the rest of any given game.

In no small part thanks to its quality, this is especially true of Space Marine’s multiplayer. We’re talking playable Dreadnoughts. We’re talking the musou-like melee combat of the campaign translated into versus modes, leading to gameplay scenarios and movement tricks most online shooters don’t have. We’re talking an entire co-op mode that got patched into the game for free, complete with a role reversal DLC that has you as a Chaos Marine surviving onslaughts of Guardsmen and Orks who fight each other (that’s the stuff). We’re talking in-depth character customisation that lets you fiddle with every minutiae of both flavours of marine, from chapter symbols to the trims of kneeguards. We’re talking the game’s main theme swelling as every match draws to a close, every time as cathartic as the last.

Don’t cry because it’s over, but don’t smile just because it happened either. Smile also in part because we’re well into the age of ‘never ever’ sequels becoming reality and, soon enough, Titus’ world won’t end on a cliffhanger that immediately follows a QTE final boss. Even if he isn’t voiced by Mark Strong anymore (Relic’s games in general have consistently fantastic voice direction), even if we might occasionally pine for something wholly new and original, even if it's already a satisfying package in both single and multiplayer terms as is, Space Marine’s ideas are worth bringing back and expanding upon. Only in death do video games end.

As most people with more than a passing interest in games have a vague idea of what System Shock 2 is, some may find it surprising to learn that it sold fewer than 60,000 copies on release. Even now, despite the fame it’s accrued in the years since, it’s still hard not to feel as if more people are aware of it than have given it a try themselves. There are several reasons I think this, but chief among them’s how exceedingly rarely you hear anyone talk about how cool it is that enemies’ melee attacks will stop mid-swing if a doorframe, wall or other object gets in their way.

This isn’t just fancy collision detection, but rather a microcosm of its design philosophy. “Immersive sim” is a term so often misconstrued that I don’t blame some people for thinking it’s not a real thing. It’s not just about having lots of ways to do one thing, or a first person perspective, or being able to manipulate objects and physics – it’s equally about taking a fictional world and making it behave as though it were real. It’s why System Shock 2 lets you create and climb on top of a psychokinetic barrier, then skip half the level with it with no arbitrary failure states or invisible walls incurred. It’s why your choices of how to circumvent an obstacle aren’t limited to the developers’ own imagination and how many scripted sequences of events they decided to implement that day, SHODAN dishing you out the same cybernetic goodie bag regardless of your methods. It’s why there’s not only no movement speed cap, but also why if you stack enough different speed buffs at the same time, you’ll die from running into a wall (yes, really). Small wonder that Looking Glass initially referred to this kind of game design as “immersive reality” instead.

Ultima Underworld and the first System Shock were so revolutionary in part because this style of design emphasised roleplaying via manipulation of systemic game mechanics rather than abstract numerical stats. Consequently, System Shock 2 leaning into standard RPG elements as it does may seem a step backwards, and it is definitively the root of some balance issues. If System Shock 1’s laser rapier is overpowered, System Shock 2’s assault rifle is forbidden by the Geneva Convention. PSI builds skew a bit towards the glass end of ‘glass cannon,’ while a select few PSI powers are so good they render certain O/S upgrades redundant. These problems can be safely handwaved for a few reasons: half the fun of a singleplayer RPG is breaking it anyhow, you generally need endgame levels of stat investment before you can equip the really silly stuff, and (most importantly) it enhances playstyle variety. Turn the game into Quake-lite by hopping yourself up on speed meds and enough grenades to glass the surface of Tau Ceti V, channel Thief and use the Dark Engine’s immaculate sound design to pinpoint enemies sonically as you scuttle around in the shadows, save precious resources by using your PSI wizard powers to trap gaming’s creepiest spiders in tight spaces instead of blasting them, or basically everything in between these extremes. You can imagine why Arkane’s Prey smacks you in the face with the words 'play your way' soon after starting.

Horror can feel diluted if you’re afforded too many options, so it’s all the more impressive that System Shock 2 manages to be so unnerving despite so much player freedom. The Many are repulsive from top to bottom, to the point that encountering humans controlled by parasitic worms sticking out of their chest and boring into their brain becomes a relief by the end of the game. A keen eye will notice human faces slowly dissipating into the aptly named rumbler’s skin, a raspy ”I’ll tear out your spine” is never far behind when the CLANG CLANG CLANGs of a cyborg midwife echo down the corridor and the squelching of annelids’ll never cease to make you involuntarily jolt in your chair. Never listen to anyone who claims that the soundtrack is out of place, because the Von Braun’s abundant club bangers are a necessary impetus in giving players the confidence to press on.

Our fair SHODAN serves a similar purpose story-wise, which is the primary reason for my aforementioned feeling that System Shock 2’s fame exceeds its playerbase. She’s universally recognised as one of the medium’s apex baddies, deservedly, but her characterisation in 2 isn’t as laser focused on trademark self-obsessed villainy as in the first game. Many of her most infamous monologues, her ”lo-lo-lo-look at you, hacker”s and “in my talons, I shape clay”s originate there, but even in those two links you’ll notice they’re associated with her render from 2. Compare her dialogue in 2 without context and you might be forgiven for thinking it’s Soldier G65434-2’s abusive girlfriend harassing him through dial-up.

This is more of an observation than an outright criticism. Thrusting SHODAN into a relatively powerless position as the player’s quasi-ally turned puppet master was a controversial decision amongst even the game’s devs, but it was probably the right move – there are only so many times you can directly go up against something that’s already been defeated once before it stops feeling threatening. In any case, Terri Brosius’ wonderfully delivered passive aggression’s always a pleasure to be subjected to and makes for a great contrast to the insane range demonstrated by Stephen Russell’s turn as our fleshy friends, a contrast bolstered by our nameless hero’s combination of man and machine. Who better than him to take down both extremes?

System Shock 2 itself strives to meet different extremes, which makes the fact that it never feels stretched thin that much more of a marvel. It’s a narratively rich, mechanically nonlinear horror-action RPG FPS complete with funky beats, inventory Tetris and smartly designed difficulties which force the player to fundamentally change their approach. Has anyone done it better? You already know the answer.

Hylics like you and I will hang a basket over a shopkeeper’s head, ransack his life’s work from under his nose without consequence, laugh at how ridiculous this is and heap it upon the list of Skyrim’s alleged shortcomings. Game developers will look at the same situation, hang it up on their wall and adhere to it as a design philosophy.

Developers have commented on this sort of contrast between their own perspective and that of players before; most famously, designer of Civilization III and IV Soren Johnson coined the old adage of “given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game.” This is no less true of The Elder Scrolls than any other RPG, but in its case, a different sort of contrast also exists in what’re generally considered the best quests. Ask anyone what their favourite part of Skyrim is and you’ll likely hear Ill Met By Moonlight brought up, or often The Mind of Madness, or any number of the ones which incidentally lead them to discover Blackreach for the first time. In a game packed with so many spectacular highlights, who in their right mind would find themselves longing for what most of us would write off as fetch quests, rote tedium amounting to nothing more than having to collect a certain amount of a certain item? The answer’s none other than Todd Howard.

He’s completely right about this. It’s been almost ten years since I’d last played Skyrim, and I still vividly remember the relief I felt in finally coming across a random, unnamed Bosmer bandit whose blood sample was the last one I needed to complete one of the main quests. As Todd describes, I beat the quest in a time, place and manner which were all purely unique to me, which – despite the apparent mundanity of collecting different races’ blood samples – is more than enough to have firmly embedded it in my brain as much as any Daedric artefact hunt or murder mystery or mediation of a truce between two sides of a civil war.

What this speaks to is the greatest strength of Skyrim and Bethesda’s catalogue in general: experiential value. Radiant AI’s long been the butt of jokes, largely thanks to Skyrim’s big brother in particular, but the fact that it enables these games to effectively react to themselves and create genuinely dynamic situations no two people will come across is probably taken for granted. To make an open world feel alive and lived-in’s an elusive undertaking, but even so much as attempting a system like this puts Skyrim several steps ahead of near enough everything else outside of its own series. As invariable as it is that your Dragonborn will eventually become a stealth archer (in part because of how much character building’s been watered down compared to its predecessors), unique, organic experiences and roleplaying opportunities still abound thanks to it.

Both frontrunners for all sorts of industry awards last year were also dark fantasy action-adventure games with RPG elements and emphasis on exploration. There’s absolutely nothing in either of them remotely as cool as being able to ride a dragon and have it fight another dragon in the sky in a battle that can end up seamlessly spanning an entire province, which you can also explore nearly every inch of and interact with nearly any object in on foot (on 7th gen hardware, no less). This is the same game that lets me eke out a quiet life as a married woodcutter with a hoard of cheese wheels of dubious origin in my cellar, or Tamriel’s most indirect serial killer who instigates fights throughout the province by leaving valuables in the street, or an opportunistic necromancer who employs nearby corpses to solve all combat encounters for me, or an Altmeri master thief who stalks and then knicks the belongings of any and all Bosmer I run into because the Thalmor aren’t extreme enough for his taste, or essentially anything else I can imagine. At every turn, on every playthrough, is the stuff you’d see on the cover of a classic fantasy adventure book, something I’d wager only one other game released since Skyrim can lay claim to.

It’s for these reasons that I’ve not given Skyrim a numerical score. Until this revisit I had it logged as a 3/5, which in my view is “just alright,” but there’s two problems with calling Skyrim just alright. For one, games which actually are only just alright don’t have even a fraction of the longevity Skyrim’s demonstrated in so many different metrics, and two, what standard are we comparing it to to arrive at the idea that it isn’t much more than that? There’s no other game that does what Skyrim does, exactly like Skyrim does, but better. You don’t have to love it to recognise that; as of the time of writing, Skyrim isn’t even my second favourite TES, but not even its own predecessors fit the bill since all of them are so starkly different both from it and from each other.

You can easily point to better alternatives for specific, individual aspects of Skyrim. Dragon’s Dogma puts its combat to shame and even features an NPC relationship system more in line with Oblivion’s. Its quests would be more rewarding if it were designed like an immersive sim so that attempted solutions like this would actually work. Its dialogue system’s arguably even more limited than Fallout 4’s, without the excuse of being burdened by a voiced protagonist. The lack of a climbing system like Daggerfall’s or Breath of the Wild’s feels more and more conspicuous every time you bump into invisible walls on slight inclines. The aforementioned simplified character building means that the days of leaping across Vvardenfell or Cyrodiil in a single jump are sadly long past us. It goes on, and on, and on.

Skyrim’s so evergreen despite plenty more issues than just these because there’s no holistic package that compares. There’s being bloated, and then there’s offering such a wealth of varied gameplay opportunities each delivered to a (in the grand scheme of things) relatively high standard that you learn to tolerate its many dozens of cracks. Your favourite game, and mine, probably doesn’t have worldbuilding this well-considered, feature any areas that compare to Sovngarde musically or visually, let you live out the idyllic mammoth farmer lifestyle we all secretly pine for, and/or suplex talking cats. This picture looks like a joke at first glance, but you’ll eventually come to realise how true it is.

~ GetRelationshipRank <ProudLittleSeal> 0 I work for Belethor, at the general goods store.

Popular perception of sequels suggests they’re usually worse than the original. This arguably rings truer for films than other media, but I have frequently felt mystified when playing game sequels I’d often heard described as better than their predecessor, usually finding that other cornerstones of the experience are neglected or lost in pursuit of mechanical refinement. This is common enough for me that it’s part of why, despite loving the first, I deliberately avoided playing Lost Judgment for over a year. I’ve rarely been so glad to have my misgivings dispelled.

Judgment’s walljumping, leapfrogging and cancelling moves via EX Boost were exactly the sort of expressive tools that RGG Studio’s combat always needed, but Lost Judgment takes several further steps to result in what’s by far their most cohesive system. Buffing Yagami’s attack speed, damage or knockdown resistance through dodges, charged attacks and parries respectively makes styles far more functionally distinct than the first game’s conceptually sound but imbalanced attempt at separating them into fighting individuals and crowds. Get two or more of these active at once and you can do some pretty fun stuff, EX-actions feeling more congruous now that Yagami’s able to do cool things without them. There’s less to it than it looks, but juggling being easier and more consistent pull off than in Judgment allows for more creativity on the player’s part and encourages better knowledge of Yagami’s moves, while also retaining just enough of a barrier that it feels more proportional to its reward than at least two other Dragon Engine titles’ combat. What accentuates this is that enemies are similarly fleshed out, between heavy ones that can throw each other at you and new status effects to watch out for among those with weapons, while bosses are (generally) no longer Frankensteined out of old assets and feel all the more distinctive for it. There’s enough to chew on that I recall feeling like there was a party going on between my hands at this part early on in my first playthrough.

Most full-on action games are still better alternatives to Lost Judgment if combat specifically is what you’re after, but that’s fine, because it’s stuffed to the gills with other things to do. It deserves as much credit for how much more enjoyable it’s made traversing the hub cities this time around, especially Ijincho. With the simple addition of a skateboard, what was once a mire of either absent-mindedly holding forward for prolonged periods or taxi-induced cuts to black becomes a giant playground of endless obstacles to jump over and grind along. Climbing hasn’t much more going on than something like Uncharted’s, but the grip meter at least adds a degree of tension to it, enough so that there are timed challenges in the (very handy) Gauntlet menu. Side cases retain the thematic harmony with the main plot that they enjoyed in the first game, though I did very few on my first run since I was so gripped by wanting to see what happened next.

What the plot comparatively lacks in personal stakes for Yagami, it makes up for in being thought provoking. The issues at its core are treated with a healthy dose of nuance to the extent that even Yagami’s friends will occasionally comment on sharing Kuwana’s perspective; the Mole was, and is, great in his own way, but they made the right call not trying to one up him and instead opting for an antagonist who’s not so clear cut, handling the (usually tired) angle of grey morality with grace. There’s an apparent step up on various levels of its presentation too. Few bosses have had quite so mythical a backdrop as that of Tesso’s first encounter, with its neon-lit rain and eerie throat singing, while the modellers and artists have gotten noticeably better at making characters created from scratch look believable. I was genuinely surprised to learn that Akutsu isn’t facescanned, for instance, a marked contrast from the days of Yakuza protagonists looking uncanny when onscreen alongside obviously real people.

I’ve only just now mentioned Yakuza by name because, increasingly, I feel that Judgment shouldn’t be lumped in with it as though the two are synonymous. I mentioned part of why I avoided playing Lost Judgment for so long at the start; the other part was Yakuza, or more specifically its approach to sequels. They’d conditioned me to expect that Lost Judgment would either diminish or totally axe some of the original’s good ideas for seemingly no reason other than difference for difference’s sake, something likely brought on by a release schedule that occasionally feels akin to an assembly line. It not only does nothing of the kind, it’s marinated in a palpable albeit not completely successful effort at improvement from top to bottom. In any case, the first Judgment did better than most of its sister series in considerably less time despite technically being a new IP, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest one has an appeal which the other lacks.

For me, that appeal lies in the relative clarity of what this now-duology wants to be and do. As aforementioned, Lost Judgment isn’t an entirely rosy sequel; among other things, Hoshino’s dragged through the mud to such a cartoonish extent I can only assume one of the writers (understandably) wanted Saori for himself, detective segments are barebones as ever and perhaps the only part of Kaito’s DLC that isn’t underwhelming is its price tag. These are only slight blemishes, though, on what’s otherwise a game which has dug in its heels and demonstrated unwavering belief in its identity as an (arguably for the first time) unambiguously solid beat ‘em up with plenty to say and plenty else to do that all ties into it. I’m simultaneously interested in a potential third Judgment and so satisfied with the two we now have that I don’t think it’s really needed. It’s almost enough to make a man forget about Sawa-sensei for a split second.

It’s important that you treat Pentiment with the same scrutiny and scepticism that you (hopefully) do with any other historical source. Most media, not just videogames, are, politely put, atrocious at dealing in good faith with the settings and themes that Pentiment tackles, to the point where it’s probably reasonable to call it one of the most authentic games ever made in this regard. The flip side of this is that it makes the things Pentiment gets wrong feel more conspicuous than they would be otherwise.

If that last part has your guard up, you can safely lower it, because Pentiment’s small handful of inaccuracies are pretty minor in that they don't affect the plot overmuch. I won’t say what they are specifically, because this is the type of game where any and all details ought to be discovered yourself, but among other things, they include at least two cultural events which are unambiguously Christian being misattributed to Alpine paganism of some description, as well as one figure who was (to my knowledge) neither pre-Christian nor worshipped as a goddess being described as a pre-Christian goddess.

There are a couple of reasons why these don’t overly strain Pentiment’s believability and for which it deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt. For starters, relative to the vast majority of media set during the early modern period and (in this case, just after the) Middle Ages, Pentiment’s immensely tactful to the point where I'm (almost but not quite) inclined to think these kinds of mistakes were intentionally included, on the part of its characters rather than its writers; that it avoids the common error of misattributing the origins of Christian saints to pagan figures further suggests this. More broadly, it’s unreasonable to expect anything to be perfect in terms of accuracy and – on exceedingly rare occasions, in exceptionally talented hands – inaccuracies can be advantageous. Excalibur’s a more visually distinctive and symbolic film for featuring armour which is about 1000 years too advanced for the 5th/6th century AD. Shadow of Rome’s a more memorable game for making you fight a ~15ft tall Germanic barbarian whose weapon of choice is a marble pillar. Likewise, in a meta sort of way, Pentiment’s central idea of historiographical truth being difficult to pinpoint is arguably strengthened by its own shortcomings in this respect. Ideally, this’ll encourage players to be more wary of any historically-themed media they engage with, including Pentiment itself.

Any such grievances are further obscured by the mostly impressive weight Pentiment lends to your decisions. I had the fortune of playing through Pentiment concurrently with my brother, and when we’d walk in on each other playing it, we’d do mutual double takes as one of us was in the middle of story events that the other didn’t even consider would be possible. Speech checks being affected by past dialogue choices encourages you to constantly, properly pay attention to and think about what you’re saying in a way I personally haven’t seen done since the isometric Fallouts or Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. Although its time limits (while appreciated) aren’t implemented as organically as Fallout 1’s, an advantage Pentiment has over even those titans is that it also autosaves after every single action you take, lending everything a degree of permanence that few other RPGs can offer. If you were feeling particularly cheeky, you could go as far as to say that Pentiment can be counted alongside the campaign of Black Ops 2 in the pantheon of games which actually are what everyone pretends New Vegas is.

I call it only mostly impressive because Pentiment’s key weakness is the linearity of its third and final act, which even if you’re being charitable can only really be called overbearing. Not to bang on the choices-don’t-matter drum too hard, because nobody can ever seem to agree what choices mattering in a game really looks like, but you’re much more likely to wish you were able to say or do something other than the options you’re given in the last act than in the preceding two. Potential twists and turns you might hope to direct this chapter’s plot towards are often snuffed out by blurted out variations of “actually, I was only pretending to want to do that” that you rarely have any control over. This isn’t to suggest that Pentiment ends on a sour note – the ending itself’s quite lovely – but from a decision making standpoint, the whole last stretch’s noticeably more limiting.

However close it comes, this is never enough to distract from Pentiment’s visual splendour. Jan van Eyck paintings and The Tragedy of Man are the only other media I can think of which incorporate so many different historical art styles into one cohesive package and so skilfully. Sebhat being drawn in the style of Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox art’s a particularly inspired touch, but in general it’s no wonder that the art director and animators are the first names to pop up on the opening credits, because it’s like a playable manuscript. Rarely do you come across a game where you can legitimately say that the visuals are a selling point in and of themselves.

There should be more games like Pentiment. It represents two things we need more of – big developers putting out more niche, experimental titles, and historical media which isn’t riddled with self-congratulatory 21st century arrogance that spits on the memory of everyone who happened to be born before an arbitrary point in time, in which characters actually believe what they say and aren’t one-dimensional caricatures of the past. Be thankful it exists, whatever its issues.

Of all the different realities in the multiverse, there's not one in which Bayonetta 3 turning out the way it has isn’t the best possible outcome, both for its identity as an individual game and for its series at large. Any number of its decisions are already controversial, but it’d have been disappointing if it wasn’t so substantially different from its predecessors after being on ice for so long. Not everybody’ll be onboard with the direction it goes in, but if you are, it’ll scratch an itch in a way that few other action games can.

Demon Slave especially is in the eye of the beholder, but I personally think it’s probably Platinum’s best crack at simultaneously controlling multiple characters thus far. The new wink attack finishers take after Astral Chain’s sync attacks quite heavily, down to being signalled by a lens flare, but they have some tweaks which make them a noticeable improvement upon that base. One key difference is that wink attacks universally have slight invincibility frames, lending them an element of defensive use if done with proper timing and avoiding previous frustrations of your Legion being just dandy while Howard gets smacked across the room – I might’ve died to the bombs at the end of this sequence if it weren’t for this addition. There’s also less ambiguity as to when Bayonetta’s able to do a wink attack, since she always transforms into her demon masquerade form beforehand, hearkening back to the clearer audiovisual language of Bayo 1 where specific grunts of hers always preceded certain attacks. The demons themselves are a great help in encounters with multiple enemies too; when you’re being ganged up on and need some room to breathe, their special directional attacks come in very handy for creating some space. It’s attack, defence, spacing, comboing, traversal and more all in one, and I think the layers it adds to these aspects of Bayo’s combat system is enough to mark it as a firm net positive despite the scoring system arguably overrelying on it to an extent come Infinite Climax.

On a more unambiguous note, the weapons in Bayo 3 are unreal. Not being able mix and match hand/feet equipment sounded suspect pre-release, but it’s a worthwhile exchange for everything else offered in return here. Each of them having a fully fleshed out moveset of both punches and kicks makes me constantly rotate between them all, whereas in the previous games I actively avoided options like 2’s Kafka which couldn’t help but feel relatively limited. Part of what helps them largely circumvent the homogeneity this could’ve introduced is their new Demon Masquerade forms and the movement options that coincide with them. Simoon’s flying ability controls like a dream to the point where I occasionally drop combos because I forget to switch out of it, and the spider form’s swinging/wall climbing or the train’s multidirectional choo choo charge are similarly versatile highlights, but the beauty of Bayo 3’s arsenal is that the rest are also so varied you could ask someone what their favourite is and get a different answer each time. Between the aforementioned, their starkly different charge functions and how equipping different demons can alter the effects of the same combo(s), it’s hard to decide between just two. By the way, press PPP with the yo-yos and don’t cancel the animation that plays afterwards. Thank me later.

I mentioned the spider form’s wall climbing specifically because, for all the talk of Bayo 3’s gimmick sections, it doesn’t seem like it’s getting enough credit for taking gimmicks from its predecessors and incorporating them into standard gameplay. Wall climbing is essentially Witch Walking whenever you want, wherever you want, and the extra manoeuvrability afforded by this (plus the other Demon Masquerade forms) allows the level design to be more creative in terms of hidden verses, collectibles, Umbran Tears, etc. with no real instances of arbitrary backtracking. Remember that bit in Bayo 2 where you’re in a mech suit? Past a certain point of 3, you can summon it on demand too. I’m tempted to argue that 3’s actual gimmick segments are by far the least obnoxious ones Platinum have ever done, but there’s not much point, since its revamped checkpoint system means it can theoretically be enjoyed purely for its normal combat encounters anyhow. It’d have been nicer if it went as far as something like Uncharted 4’s system and let you replay any individual verse in the game, but even being not so fine-tuned and debatably too generous, it’s nonetheless immensely preferable to the days of jumping in and out of the main menu.

Speaking of things Bayo 3 doesn’t get enough credit for: visuals. Compare any of the returning enemies to their original incarnations from 1 or 2 in the model viewer and the upgrade in quality’s immediately apparent. The sole area in which the homunculi fall short of their divine and devilish counterparts is that becoming progressively cracked as they take damage probably isn’t as clear an indicator of their current health as previous games’ custom of armour falling apart to reveal grotesque musculature underneath. Had Singularity’s fractured, digital aesthetic (complemented wonderfully by the distorted choir in his battle theme) been extended to his underlings, I think people would be more charitable to them, because creatively speaking they’re absolutely up to par even if you don't dig into their light Buddhist theming. I wish we could somehow peer into the minds of whichever artist came up with the idea of the giant flowers made of molten humans that litter Virga’s back, or whoever pitched the scenario of fighting a self-cloning, peacock-shaped Sun Wukong in the sky using clouds as a bubble bath. If Bayo 3 might be compared to DMC5 in any regard, it’s that its art direction seems doomed to be drastically undersold.

Viola seems like an obvious point of comparison in this respect, but that’s at least a little bit reductive. I’d bet several halos that most players won’t learn she has her own equivalent of dodge offset until after beating the game for the first time, which begs the question of how many other less obvious, unique tricks she has in her toolbox – certainly more than I feel qualified to talk about at length. To those concerned about where she and the gang end up by the finale, I say this: worry less, and read character bios more. You might say that storytelling via optional collectibles isn’t the ideal way to handle the narrative in a game like Bayonetta, but I’d equally argue that you aren’t a real fan if you can’t explain why Rodin’s pizza chain is penguin themed (and I’m only half joking).

I didn’t mean for this to be so long, but I really like Bayonetta 3. So much so that at one point I tried to make a smiley face in the level select menu. It doesn’t try to beat either of its predecessors at their own game and goes off in a totally different route, leaving in its wake a trilogy that really only ever slightly wobbles in quality and where there are legitimate reasons to revisit each. It’s been a while since I felt such a drive to want to get better at a game, accentuated in no small part by the fact that it’s draped in such a characteristically amazing soundtrack and charm. It’s crazy, it’s rare, it’s you know what.

Yakuza remains as interesting as one could reasonably ask such an iterative formula to be, and its latter day entries’ relative inconsistency is probably worth putting up with given that there aren’t any other series which scratch quite the same itch. Even still, it feels as though it could stand to learn from looking back. Having only played Yakuza 2 for the first time after experiencing its modern descendants beforehand, I’m struck by how much it continues to offer over them now.

The sixth console generation’s appeal stems in part from a combination of general refinement and (albeit to a lesser extent) the lack of standardisation which characterised the previous. Cavemen that we were, we hadn’t yet learned to balk at the prospect of exiting menus with the triangle button, or to heap curses upon any 3D vaguely action-adventure-y title which didn’t afford us full camera control via the right stick. Yakuza 2 falls into both categories, but the latter’s particularly important. The fixed camera present outside of combat ensures that you only ever see its three cities from exactly the angles the developers intend you to, which has some positive knock on effects. They share the excellent content density of (most of) the more recent games, but they’re also complemented by a greater sense of scale which makes them feel that much more like real places. The disparity in detail between Kiryu’s model and those of pedestrians already isn’t nearly as egregious as it’d later become, and it’s further disguised by this pulled-out perspective. There’s no need for non-diegetic signals to tell you when an OI TEME has been sounded either, since it guarantees thugs’ll always be in your line of sight. Long story short, it works wonders for immersion.

“But RGG-sama,” you might say, “what about my epic melee combos?” It’s probably fair to say that Yakuza 2’s combat doesn’t approach the complexity of something like Judgment, but that doesn’t necessarily make it worse. All the juggling, wall jumping and style switching in the world rings at least a little hollow when your opponents reuse movesets from games designed without any of those things in mind. Yakuza 2’s enemies and you are on a much more level playing field than that, but this isn’t to suggest that it doesn’t still have room to express yourself. My favourite trick is that you can follow up Kiryu’s full rush combo with two kicks in a row if you quickly turn him around after the first and then flick the stick backwards before the second, but there’s similar fun to be had in seeing how long you can keep enemies in grab loops like a much lankier Max Thunder. Also particularly praiseworthy is how much shorter Yakuza 2’s heat actions are than those of its successors, going huge lengths towards making them feel like an organic part of Kiryu’s moveset as opposed to cutscenes and feeling much less disruptive in general.

What one might find more disruptive about Yakuza 2 is that a handful of its substories are missable, a few more than that can be failed and said failures are retained in new game plus, meaning that you’d have to start a fresh save file if you wanted to successfully complete them. I said “might,” because I personally consider this to be great. A game actually allowing you to make mistakes is refreshing enough in its own right, but it’s particularly synergistic with settings as grimy as Kamurocho, Sotenbori and Shinseicho. In neighbourhoods as rough as these, why shouldn’t things be able to go wrong? When your punishment for picking the “wrong” option in later games’ substories is often just a slightly less beneficial reward, if even that, the experience feels a little bit less interactive. Maybe some degree of foolproofing is necessary in RGG’s eyes so as not to risk alienating their ever expanding audience, but I think they’d be surprised what people can tolerate given how many are still on board following the hardest of genre shifts in recent years or any number of the twists and turns they’ve chucked our way in the past. Choose your fighter.

That isn’t to denigrate the writing, mind; Ryuji and Kaoru steal every scene they’re in, the former receiving an appropriately mythical degree of build-up, and the shifting of gears in the last few hours is enough to make anyone look over their shoulder for any secretly Korean sleeper agents lurking about. Those sorts of moments are part and parcel of Yakuza’s charm, which 2 doesn’t lack for in other areas either. Some of its substories are funny enough that we’re still getting reheated variations of them today, and its soundtrack is up there with Ishin as among the series’ most varied. You can clearly hear the DNA it shares with MGS in places, afforded by Norihiko Hibino’s contributions, while the likes of Block Head Boy make a solid case for the argument that every song should have unintelligible backing vocals. Naturally, these are among the tracks that never got brought forward.

I’ve purposefully gone without alluding to the remake up to this point, because I don’t think Yakuza 2’s existence should be defined by that of some other, very different game which happens to (mostly) share the same plot. It has as many merits in a vacuum as it does relative to Kiwami 2, and I heavily encourage anyone curious about trying it not to be dissuaded by a certain subset of fans who’ll say anything to save strangers on the internet from the terror of playing a good game which happens to be kind of old.

Are the unskippable cutscenes annoying? Should Kiryu run a bit faster outside of combat? Are you Korean too, and am I? Like a certain dragon, I can only say this: a real game oughta be a little stupid.

Have you ever looked at an album’s cover art and wished that, somehow, you could play it? Do you gain much satisfaction from a well-timed button press and/or chasing high scores? Did you grow up watching Scuzz? Metal: Hellsinger was made for you if your answer to any one of those questions is yes, but even if these don’t apply, you should play it anyway. Fast-paced, old school FPSs have had among the strongest resurgences any kind of game’s ever had, but even the most boisterous of those feel tame after you’ve experienced one that’s been beautifully blended with a rhythm game.

It’s unreal how much the seemingly simple addition of having to stay in rhythm adds to this sort of formula. Chaining perfectly timed dashes, shots, reloads and slaughters one after the other as Matt Heafy or Serj Tankian or whoever else begins to progressively batter your eardrums isn’t just bound to make you involuntarily grin, it’s also an example of how Hellsinger trumps one of its influences. Slaughters are analogous to Doom’s glory kills, which I’d argue were already outdone by WH40K: Space Marine’s executions five years prior, but Hellsinger takes a step further and makes this kind of mechanic more cohesive than ever. You have to properly time slaughters the same way you do virtually every other action in the game or else your score streak goes kaput, and you can’t rely too heavily on the brief invincibility they give you since they don’t prevent your fury (i.e. your score multiplier) from going down. We have risk, we have reward, and they’re implemented in such a way that they add to Hellsinger’s enthralling flow rather than disrupting it, thanks to small but constant tests of timing and prioritisation.

The rhythm informs much of Hellsinger’s visual design, too. I especially love how light sources (including certain enemies) flash along to the beat, eventually turning into streams of fire you’d see at a concert once your fury gets high enough. It’s not just window dressing, either. In such an active, hectic game where so many things are going on at once, it’s immensely helpful to have indicators of how well you’re doing implemented diegetically into the environment, serving a similar function to Patapon’s (also clever) light bar. The environments themselves complement the Unknown’s movement abilities well, offering you plenty of ways to zip all over the show and gradually increasing in complexity over the course of the game’s short runtime to form a well-balanced difficulty curve in tandem with new, increasingly manoeuvrable enemies being thrown at you in each level. It might’ve been good to have varied the bosses’ appearances more, but their attack patterns and arenas are each distinct enough functionally speaking that they remain entertaining throughout.

As far Hellsinger’s story goes, much of the criticism it seems to be receiving on here strikes me as being overly concerned with the what rather than the how. Is there a better way is there to tell a tale in a game like this than via song lyrics which only kick in once you’re playing well enough, alternate between the perspectives of the three main characters and finally culminate in a remix of the main menu theme? This is the kind of thing that’s exclusively possible within this medium, accomplishing which I’d say pretty vastly outweighs whether or not the (entirely skippable) cutscenes are to your taste. The narrative’s primarily here to make you feel unstoppable with some brief moments of levity sprinkled in through Paz, as if you were playing an interactive version of Judas Priest’s Painkiller or Brothers of Metal’s Chain Breaker, and it’s a total success in that respect.

If you’ve been listening to metal for most of your life like I have, I should also hope you’re aware of just how many concept albums out there are comprised of the most broken of broken English. Few would doubt the quality of Avantasia’s discography, for instance, but I imagine equally few could tell you off the top of their head what half of their songs are about. I bring this up both because people seem to lack a frame of reference for how comprehensible Hellsinger’s writing is compared to much of what it’s a love letter to, and also to illustrate the point that content is secondary to how that content is delivered. Put another way: it’s not what you say, but how you say it, and Hellsinger says it with an appropriate helping of tongue-in-cheek which lends it the same charisma as other great odes to the genre like Metalocalypse.

No doubt, the fruit of saying “the soundtrack is good” hangs so low it’s on the ground, but I’m saying it anyway. You could release it standalone and it’d pass for a high quality album, though listening to it (and the excellence that is Stygia in particular) in a vacuum just isn’t the same without shotgun blasts and demonic wing flaps pulsating in the background.

Hence why you should play Metal: Hellsinger. It’s around five hours of pure unadulterated joy, and more than that if you’re into games like Hotline Miami where you can easily pass an afternoon chasing higher scores. The fact that the Unknown has what is probably the coolest design for any protagonist in the past decade or so is just a bonus. Do it for her.

Not least for its sheer creativity and ambition, Astral Chain is a game we’re lucky to have gotten. Given that action games are generally niche as is, it’s difficult to imagine that one which primarily predicates itself on controlling multiple characters at once was an easy pitch, especially considering its development came hot on the heels of Scalebound’s cancellation. The best media is often borne of troubled circumstances, and Astral Chain surely is one of the best, both of Platinum’s catalogue and its genre at large. Tough out its steep learning curve, and beneath initial frustrations, you’ll uncover a rough gem that stands out as being exceedingly rewarding to learn even by the lofty standards of its peers.

Key word, “steep.” The amount of tools you have at your disposal in Astral Chain’s genuinely overwhelming, decision paralysis being about as much of a hurdle for a new player as the ongoing demonic invasion for the Ark’s boys in blue. You’ve wrapped the titular chain around an enemy, incapacitating it for a brief moment. What next? You might whittle it down with one of the Sword Legion’s eco-friendly flurry attacks, but maybe it’d die faster if you expend much more energy to sneak in some headshots with the Arrow Legion. The Arm Legion has the most cost-efficient damage in the business and can even float over hazards, but what if you can’t take advantage of these benefits in time because he’s so slow? Oops, now it’s broken free – parrying its attack with the Axe Legion’s shield would end things fast, but if you can’t afford the risk, you might instead ride the Beast Legion and employ its automatic dodging in exchange for comparatively little reward. Lots of decisions to be made.

This is only taking into consideration the simplest possible situation in the game, too, without regard for the Howard twins’ own arsenal, how every combination of enemies one can think of will eventually be thrown at you by the time you reach the postgame, what’s quite handily some of the most varied combat arenas action games have to offer, or any number of other less obvious techniques you can do. For a bit of perspective, I didn’t learn that you can have more than one Legion out at once until after my first playthrough, which might make it sound like the game’s obtuse but is really just another example of how gratifying it is to feel yourself improve. There’s a particular miniboss I dreaded fighting near the start of the game, but by employing this one neat trick, you too can have a grand time against it come the story’s end. Chimeras hate him!

Action games can get away with fighting predominantly taking place in flat, featureless environments if their combat has enough meat on its bones by itself, so in a way it’s almost bold that Astral Chain’s levels are (as aforementioned) this diverse regardless. Seeing a crate in the distance gated by narrow walkways, explosive environmental hazards, disappearing and/or invisible platforms and actually having to stop for a moment to think about how to get there is a pretty refreshing experience to have in this kind of game. Platforming segments are surprisingly painless even when they occasionally crop up in boss fights, thanks to how little damage falling results in, though the way Howard slightly overshoots wherever you tell him to jump does take some adjusting to. A pinch of stealth and rarer but typically uninteresting tailing missions are less successful, but many of them are thankfully relegated to optional sidequests and they do help sell the feeling of being a cyberpunk peeler. Famed video essayist Masahiro Sakurai once spoke of how crucial slight pauses are to making otherwise mundane actions feel impactful, and it’s thanks to this kind of thing that cleaning up red matter (i.e. Astral Chain’s equivalent of picking up rubbish) is more engaging than most other games’ entire combat systems.

It might’ve been beneficial for whichever Howard you play as to actually speak, given Platinum’s pedigree for excellent protagonists – Wonder Red is the single best to grace the medium and I’ll let yet another Howard speak for me if you disagree – but Astral Chain doesn’t lack for their trademark charm in other areas. Marie is a solid litmus test for how much of a killjoy someone is, while morale-boosting minigames like handing out balloons to passersby in a dog suit and obligatory cat collecting sidequests help inject lightheartedness into what’s otherwise a pretty moody setting. It also marks another example of Platinum putting just about everybody else to shame when it comes to how music is utilised, not just for its quality and range or how it dynamically changes according to all sorts of conditions, but also because a song fit for an OVA playing every time you pop this game’s equivalent of Devil Trigger is the type of thing that should be studied in schools of some kind. Look out for the rhythm of Howard’s steps next time you’re walking around the hub area, as well.

I could just as well gush over how pretty Astral Chain often is, its needlessly in-depth character customisation, its all-thrills-no-frills postgame or what an absolutely astounding boss Noah Prime is (he genuinely might be the best Platinum’s ever crafted), but hopefully you’ve gotten the gist. The uptick in doomsaying surrounding Platinum in recent years has always struck me as vastly disproportionate, and having finally gotten round to Astral Chain has reinforced that opinion regardless of the odd framerate drop or a slightly questionable ranking system or whatever else. Like Taura himself, it gets better and better over time, and one can only hope he goes on to become as big of a name as some of his fellow P* alumni.

The gamer intelligentsia have led me astray. Mass Effect 3’s ending is relatively alright (heavy emphasis on “relatively”) – it’s near enough everything else that’s the problem.

Enough time and post-release patches have passed now that its stronger aspects have started to overshadow its shortcomings, which to an extent isn’t without merit. Intergalactic supersoldier Shepard no longer struggles to breathe after jogging for three seconds and has learned how to dodge roll, making movement less restrictive in general. The game makes full use of his enhanced agility through a legitimately great enemy roster which sports all sorts of new dynamic behaviours, whether it be homing projectiles or lunging attacks or setting up turrets to create chokepoints on the fly. Feedback on attacks is probably the most cathartic it’s ever been, in no small part thanks to power combos, which also go some way toward making the RPG mechanics feel the most relevant they’ve been since the original.

You might notice that that’s all to do with combat, which is because it’s about the only respect in which ME3 isn’t an unequivocal step back from its predecessors. The already simplistic dialogue wheel’s stripped down even further, the player barely having any control over what Shepard says most of the time and the middle option often being axed in the few instances where you do. This kind of railroading wouldn’t be so egregious if Paragon and Renegade choices weren’t as polarised as they are; alternating between the two within the same conversation feels akin to a series of mood swings, with Shepard going from Aslan one moment to Judge Holden the next, now with no in-between. No part of the game better illustrates how poor a roleplaying avatar Shepard has become than the fact that you can choose to murder a longtime friend, doom his billions-strong race to extinction and proceed to lie about it in the most aloof tone possible, only to then have to sit through PTSD-induced nightmares over the implied off-screen death of some kid he’d only seen for the first time a few minutes prior.

The impressively lame Kai Leng and the inability to shove him into a locker would be enough to dock several points on its own, but many of the other side characters aren’t inspiringly handled either. I laughed when a certain somebody died in the main quest’s finale, not because I particularly disliked him, but because of the contrast between Shepard’s mournful head shake and my trying to remember what his name was. Tali’s Joss Whedon-isms feel similarly misplaced aboard a ship controlled and staffed by hostile AI in the midst of a battle for the fate of her species. Ashley and Liara continue to suffer from essentially becoming different characters in each game of the trilogy, though Javik is a saving grace and his deconstruction of the latter’s naive preconceptions about his people is about the only personality she’s afforded. James also exists, supposedly, though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise given that you can’t actually speak to him or anyone else anymore once you’ve exhausted all the dialogue they’re generously granted for whichever point in the main quest you’re at.

I praised the combat earlier, but no amount of bolted on, marginal improvements can offset how woefully uninteresting the scenarios you fight through are. Prior to the release of Dragon Age II, someone at Bioware was infamously misquoted as saying they “want the Call of Duty audience,” but what's on offer here doesn't feel far removed from this hypothetical philosophy. Much more often than in either of the prior games, control’s wrestled away from you for such invigorating setpieces as sliding down a small pile of rubble, the stakes these are obviously trying to communicate rendered inert by how it’s impossible for you to be in danger during them. Just about every situation, from making your way down to the hideaway of ancient sub-aquatic alien giants to aiming missile batteries at the weak point of a starship, is solved through wave-based survival sequences in square arenas that wear out their welcome within the first hour. The return to Omega is the epitome of this sort of design, and a microcosm of ME3 in general, because for all intents and purposes it’s not actually Omega – it’s a series of linear shooting galleries that happens to look like Omega, with all the merchants, quest givers, decision-making and everything else resembling an RPG snuffed out.

It’s staggering how dreary the first few parts of this game manage to be considering it opens with a full scale invasion of Earth, but I caution against wanting it to be over with as soon as possible like I did. As a result, I skipped a certain sidequest, not initially knowing that they’re effectively just excuses to catch up the cast of ME2, and it led to one character making a reappearance as a standard, unaltered enemy who happens to share her name and reuse that one voice clip from ME1. It’s so shoddy I like to imagine it’s intentionally so, to really drive home what a punishment for lazy players it is, but even this rationalisation can’t shake the feeling that I would’ve preferred nothing at all.

I’ve written before about how I prefer to avoid negativity unless I can use it to highlight something else I care for, and I hold to that – cynically tearing down somebody else’s hard work is as effortless as it is exhausting, both to do and to read. But nothing’s made me appreciate what lightning in a bottle ME1 was quite like experiencing firsthand how hard its potential was fumbled. From the HUD, to the composition of your squad, to the ending’s attempt to bring back ME1’s focus on organic vs. synthetic life (for which I give it credit), ME3 is drenched in the feeling that it really wants to be ME1 again. I wish it wasn’t, because I’d rather just replay that instead, even knowing where it leads to.

I should go.