I don't think I'm surprising anyone by saying that PlatinumGames has made a fun action game here - at this point, it's something to be expected. My praise for Vanquish comes from concepts: it's a refreshing take on seventh gen third-person shooters, where speed and power management take precedence over hiding and waiting. After fumbling through the first few levels, the game finally clicked for me: I began to see new areas as gardens of opportunity rather than simple arenas to shoot through. Accelerating at top speed, slamming boots-first into a robot's face, slowing down time to shoot on the fall down... It's exhilarating stuff. There was never a time in the game where the combat felt explicitly unfair: the wide range of weapons, movement options, and open areas gave a ton of wiggle room. The tools are always there, and it's up to you to utilize them best. The upgrade system encourages the player to pick favorites, and helps cement a playstyle that works for you. I favored the assault rifle and sniper, but I can just as easily see someone maxing out heavier and/or more niche armaments. Definitely going to come back to this one someday and play it on a harder difficulty.

If The Last of Us and Hellblade had a baby, it would be A Plague Tale: Innocence. A story about family bonds intertwining with religion, ethical controversies and a good dose of surrealism. Stunning graphics, intriguing characters, and a decent plot to tie it all together, with some good twists along the road by the way. The gameplay loop is quite satisfying too, a formula similar to Portal, because i see Plague Tale as a stealth puzzle game.

His biggest flaw is the second half. Everything we've already seen is presented again with a new coat, quite too similar i would say. It's not good enough, it's not that engaging. Perhaps it's a bit longer than it should be, it gets a bit tiresome. But it's also an affordable game. It's a small-scale game that behaves like a Triple-A. Asobo Studios didn't try to reinvent the wheel or subvert clichés, they simply did the basics well executed. A very solid experience! I really thought they were going to drop the ball at the end, but that's not what happens, gladly.

Back to back on the PETA attack!

Hey, it beats Super Meat Boy Forever in terms of design! Aaaaand it's still one of the worst games I've ever played. Genuinely. It's not even funny bad. It's just BAD. McCardiarrac Arrest aside, this is absolutely abhorrent. Bad controls, abysmal graphics, terrible level design, I mean, shit! I could at least laugh at Cooking Mama Kills The Animals's graphics, but THIS is just blood and gore shat straight out of someone's ass. I rage quit eventually because the controls were simply THAT awful and unfun. Isn't this designed for kids???

What a joke.

PART 1: OK, MAYBE I HATE COMPETITIVE TEAM GAMES

Before I start this review, I want to use this Part to yap for a bit, so if you are not interested in it, just skip to Part 2! Where I’ll actually start talking about my actual experience with the game.

Around 4 years ago, when I quit playing League of Legends I kept seeking another competitive team game that would tick the same boxes for me, but every game I would try one out I would either end up disliking them or not taking them seriously enough to actually consider them my “main game”. Which would result in me dropping them, and moving on to the next shiny thing, but what they all had in common is that I disliked playing with other people, League left this mental scar on me where now I think every random player I meet online is one mistake away, whether it's from me or them, from flaming the fuck out of me. This happened with Paladins, Apex, Overwatch, Dead by Daylight, Hell, it even happened to me in the Versus mode of Left 4 Dead 2, where stakes couldn't possibly be lower.

Eventually, I started gaslighting myself into thinking that all Multiplayer games fucking sucked now, and the constant tryhard mindset was to blame for it. Of course, there are clear exceptions, like Splatoon or competitive games where it's just 1vs1 where I can blame either myself for my mistakes or my opponent for doing something I didn’t know how to play around.

During the same time I stopped playing League, I was getting deep into Final Fantasy XIV, while I have plenty of things to say about it, I’ll save them for whenever I review it in the future. The point is that when I started participating in endgame content, which is for the most part, PVE Focused, I found myself having that same fun I was looking for in multiplayer games that I had been seeking for a long time. The joy of sharing a clear with your team and cheering and being way more patient with each other, went far beyond than just being relieved of having ended a stressful match that was barely won.

This is something I also noticed while playing Souls games, Left 4 Dead 2 co-op campaigns, Phasmophobia or Lethal Company with my friends, and when I recently got into Helldivers 2, I was completely aware of this epiphany by now. Multiplayer games don’t actually suck, competitive team ones do, and it's now a new age for me, where I will use this realization to get into games I’ve never thought were for me, hell, maybe I’ll actually try getting into Monster Hunter despite my initial reluctance towards those series.

Now, let’s have a nice cup of Liber-tea over Helldivers 2.

PART 2: DEMOCRACY MANIFEST

When Helldivers 2 gameplay was first revealed I remember two key things about it, one of my friends was excited about it because it was a wild glow up from its predecessor, and it had this footage where the people playing it had one of those cringey scripted voice chat interactions. But for some reason I cannot find it on YouTube, I swear it happened at The Game Awards, but I’m starting to think it's my own case of Mandela Effect.

However, things started changing once the game actually dropped, and it seemed like its growth in popularity happened overnight. The next thing I learn, the game is having so many people trying to play it that the servers cannot keep up. This is something unprecedented, and it actually prompted me to take a look, what was going on over there that had everyone so fired up? And so I started checking out some streams, it’s a 4 player co-op third-person shooter where you can fight either Bugs or Robots. On the surface, I thought it was nothing special, then I caught a glimpse of the players using the in game Stratagems and throwing them around, making things blow up and causing as much collateral damage as possible, my interest was starting to get piqued, who doesn't like to cause a big explosion? But the biggest thing to accompany all of it, was the Galactic War system with its Major Orders, where every couple of days every player in the game is tasked with working towards a common goal to be rewarded with currencies and sometimes new purchasable weapons. Apparently, this is led by a guy called Joel over at Arrowhead that acts like a real-time DM and sends out the orders depending on what the players were doing.

But what really, REALLY convinced me that I had to buy the game, was the Malevelon Creek arc, where the community tragically lost control of this particular planet to Automatons, it was a massacre, tons of brave Helldivers and Super Citizens were slaughtered in the process, but the playerbase wouldn't stand by it, and vengeance was sworn on that day. It wasn’t until the Major Order to take it back was given where the players valiantly fought in the name of DEMOCRACY to bring it back to our side, and it was done at a speed that neither devs nor players could have even predicted.

This is something I had to take part of, there was one issue, however. At the time I was busy playing other games, so despite buying it, it wasn’t until recent weeks that I started playing it a lot more, it is one of my biggest regrets to not have been part of this when player counts still soared over 500k every day, but it still warms my heart to log in and see over 100k still playing actively. One of my most common fears with live service games is that at any moment where failure starts to be shown, it's only a matter of time when the publisher says it's time to turn the lights off, and all that time invested gets flushed down the toilet (RIP Knockout City and Rumbleverse, I still think about you two now and then), but Helldivers 2 seems like its here to stay, and I’m happy to be a part of it, to be spreading justice and freedom for as much as I can. To hopefully one day participate in a Major Order as iconic as The Battle for Malevelon Creek

If there's something I had to complain about the game is how some types of enemies are extremely obnoxious to fight against (I fucking despise Chargers and Hulks), and that Arrowhead has a weird philosophy when it comes to weapon balancing, I don't consider myself an expert in game design, but at the end of the day, this is still a PvE game, one that can become really fucking tough at times, if anything I think everything should be busted, so there’s no meta to be enforced by whatever toxic players might be out there and everyone can play their own way.

To wrap things up, on top of my brief rant about Competitive Team Games, there’s another type of game I dislike a lot nowadays and that’s not a controversial opinion, we are all tired of Live Services, games that don’t respect their customers and that think we all have unlimited time, games where just playing them isn’t enough. Gone are the 7th gen days when games would drop with a weirdly, yet charmingly designed Multiplayer mode whose servers barely worked in favor of rotating shops and time-limited Season Passes that unlock only fluff most of the time. Make no mistake, Helldivers 2 also has some of these tropes, but it appears that this time it remembered it still has a box price, so what would be the point of time gating battle passes and having absurdly expensive cosmetics? None, get all of that shit by playing, go out there, kill some bugs and bots, get that rising feeling of power when your Helldiver starts maniacally laughing because you kept firing for a full mag. Drink of the cup of Liber-tea.

Okay, so I'm going to give you a spicy hot take right off the bat:

In my opinion, Assassin's Creed games only became well-rounded and enjoyable when they transitioned into the RPG-like format that started with Origins.

That's obviously not to say that the RPG AC games are immaculate; in fact, more often than not, they are purely quantity over quality. However, from a pure moment-to-moment gameplay standpoint, I have enjoyed the RPG Assassin's Creed games, flaws and all, far more than the standard formula that the majority of the games in the series thus far have followed.

That is also not to say that I haven't at least enjoyed parts of previous Assassin's Creed games. Unity's parkour animations, for instance, really are as fun and compelling to play around with as everyone's always saying. But pound for pound, the RPG games are much more my thing.

That said, I endeavoured to at least give Mirage a try since OG Assassin's Creed fans have been clamouring for a game like it for years now, and I figured with all the improvements made for the previous three games, this one would be more my speed.

And, well?

The highest praise I can give Mirage is that it's an excellent podcast game. That might sound like a sardonic indictment against it, but, at least to me, it really isn't. The gameplay foundations are solid enough that it can be fun to just go through the motions as background fodder while listening to your podcast or audiobook of choice.

Of course, that's obviously not what Ubisoft Bordeaux intended when they made Mirage but that's part and parcel of what I enjoyed the most about it.

The rest of Mirage outside of the gameplay stuff? Very meh.

Granted, Mirage is a prequel to Valhalla, a game I have not finished, and Basim is introduced and goes through an arc there before starring in his own game here.

So, despite what Ubisoft themselves have stated, perhaps it is best to start with that one.

I say so because he's kind of a bland protagonist with an uninteresting story otherwise, despite the good performance given by Lee Majdoub. I will admit that I was skipping through much of the narrative since it wasn't that engaging, and stayed that way until the last third of the game.

Even the gameplay has its issues, though. Ironically, one of my main criticisms for Mirage is the same people have given to Valhalla and Odyssey before it: it's just too repetitive and dull. True, you can argue the same for the previous three AC games, but at least there, it felt like there was a lot more going on at any given moment, and it was likely more interesting, to boot.

Again, overall, much like Far Cry 6, Mirage is a really great podcast game. That may not be what you're looking for in a new Assassin's Creed, but it's what you get here. Unless, that is, if you're a staunch fan of the original style and longed for the series to return to that.

If that is you, in all sincerity and without a shred of sarcasm, I am glad that you got what you wanted.

5.5/10