(spoiler warning)

Rockstar’s second western, a (very loose) sequel of sorts to Red Dead Revolver, follows John Marston, a retired outlaw tasked with tracking down and killing/capturing his former gang members, the government holding his family hostage until the deed is done. Through the course of the 20-30 hour adventure, Marston completes bounties, plays lots of poker, gets involved in the Mexican Revolution, kills hundreds of people, herds cattle, picks flowers, meets a bunch of colorful characters, breaks horses, and more (depending on how much of the side content one chooses to do). It’s a formula that should be familiar to anyone who has played an open world game from the past 10 years, with basic shop, sidequest, money, and hunting systems to flesh out the game’s fairly simplistic gunplay.

Visually, the game often looks stunning, especially at sunset, and the cutscenes are very well framed, showing an understanding of the language of film/video beyond a lot of its contemporaries. It runs like ass on ps3, though, and the fairly zoomed out third-person camera combined with the heavy aliasing made it a bit hard to see stuff in the distance. It’s still quite impressive on the whole, though, especially considering it’s nearly 10 years old.

The writing is mostly pretty good, though Rockstar’s tendency towards satire makes it a bit obnoxious at times. Their cynicism works better when it encapsulates all the characters, I find, but this one goes to great pains to show Marston as the straight man, a contrast to all the crazy weirdos he runs into, and the lack of sincerity in the supporting cast does get a bit grating at times. The sound design is absolutely excellent, though. The booming thunder and crackling lightning of storms is some of the best I’ve heard in a game, and little touches like the voice actors yelling their lines for horseback sequences shows a high level of foresight for the aural experience here.

It seems that, though the story presents John Marstron as an outlaw with a heart of gold (which is also how I tried to play the game), the game design is instead aiming for the freedom to do whatever evil outlaw shenanigans you want, from stealing wagons to murdering random strangers. A lot of the game’s prompts and combat systems are highly contextual and assume things for you, which led to Mr. Marston doing some despicable shit I had no intention of. The game wants you to be able to play it any way you want, but because of its imprecise controls I ended up getting the opposite effect.

A man runs to me, yelling that his friend is about to be hanged by a gang, having done nothing wrong. I climb on my majestic white stallion and follow him to the site. The bandits are seemingly ready for us, and a hail of gunfire greets me before I have time to react. I do the natural thing and draw my rifle, pointing the camera towards the outlaws. I hold down the left trigger and the aiming reticule snaps to the man next to me. I pull the right trigger to fire, almost an unconscious reflex, and the man who brought me there searching for help is dead. Hoping to at least save his friend and complete my objective, I open fire on the bandits, my screen running red with my own blood as my health quickly depletes. During this vastly outnumbered gunfight, text appears in the top left of the screen stating that the innocent man has now been hanged, and is dead. I finish the fight and ride away from a pile of blood and bodies, all the worse for my involvement.

Once, I went to take a ride on caravan, this game’s fast travel system, but since I stood on the driver side and not the passengers’, the “drive” prompt led me to immediately sit down in the same space as the driver, after which the game realised that two people weren’t supposed to occupy the same space and triggered an animation of my throwing the guy out. Shocked, I got out of the caravan and ran after the driver in hopes of making amends, but the game gave me no such option. Then, I holstered all my weapons and walked peacefully over to the sheriff to turn myself in (which is a mechanic in this game). His deputies, whom I’d completed several quests with, showed no such mercy and opened fire. Full of bullet holes, I ran for cover. A deputy snuck up behind me, and a “bribe” prompt appeared. I gave that one guy 10$ and the entire thing was forgotten. This had no impact on any future interactions in the town. I did lose 400 “honor” points, though.

At a certain point I just gave up and went with the mayhem, but it runs somewhat counter to what the narrative tries to say. We’re often reminded that Marston killed lots of people, but you never really see that side of him, pretty much everything he does in this game is at the behest of someone else, in effort to get back to his family and give up the outlaw life. At one point quite late in the game, the antagonist, Dutch, takes a hostage and then Marston lets him go to protect the hostage, even though I got a hostage killed a few minutes earlier in that same mission lol.

Beyond these criminal offenses, I’ve run into a couple other minor annoyances in how the game expects me to play it. For instance, to capture people when on bounties or helping someone get back stolen goods you’re supposed to lasso the target, then get off your horse, hogtie them, and then throw them on your horse and bring them to the quest giver. Now, the first time I ran into one of these quests I didn’t know that, so I just lassoed him and slowly dragged him behind me, being careful not to hurt the poor bastard too much. I then brought him directly in front of the quest giver and stopped. Nothing happened, neither of them reacted, no cutscene was triggered, all because I didn’t deliver them in the order of operations the game expected me to. Eventually I figured it out, but it was a process where my train of thought was ”hmm, how did Rockstar’s designers expect me to complete this task”, rather than engaging with the game’s world.

The biggest surprise for me was the extended 5 act structure of the plot. The game could’ve easily ended on Marston returning to his family, but instead it delves into the relationship with his family, fleshing out his wife and son far beyond anything I expected to see here. They could’ve been just plot devices to set off all the cowboy action, but instead they become fleshed out characters in their own right. It’s by far the most sincere portion of the game, and probably my favourite story section as a result. From God of War to The Last of Us and beyond, video game dads have become a pretty popular trend as of late, but this game did it before it was cool, arguably setting off that trend in the first place, and the epilogue brings the narrative full circle. Red Dead Redemption is a very messy game, but despite all its flaws I did still enjoy my time with it.

spoilers

At first glance, this seems like a largely frivolous mashup, the Pride & Prejudice & Zombies of gaming, a modern successor to old b-movie fodder like 1966’s Billy the Kid Versus Dracula. Look a little deeper, though, and it’s clear that Undead Nightmare’s Weird West skin is a vessel for further analysis of the western as a genre. The ending in particular is quite damning of the whole idea of the western expansion and Manifest Destiny, the lingering effects of colonialism plunging the world into chaos. By the end, Marston returns the stolen Aztec mask which caused the zombie outbreak, and all seems well. However, the grave-robber character Seth rushes back into the crypt and steals the tribal artifact once again, reigniting the zombie plague. Even when there’s an easy, obvious solution to the problem, the settler population continues to desecrate native cultures and fuck everything up all over again, in a seemingly inescapable cycle.

One of the most striking moments in this expansion is the Sasquatch hunt sidequest. A farmer tells you that there’s a bunch of Sasquatches going around eating babies. Marston sets off in search of them, killing the mythical creatures without much second thought, as they are other and look more like animals than humans. Once you get to the final Sasquatch, though, he begs you to kill him, speaking quite fluently and maligning that his entire species has been hunted down and killed. It’s terrifying how easy it is here to dehumanise another group and wipe them out, a deeply disturbing allegory for the treatment of Native Americans throughout the western era (which continues today in a myriad of ways). It’s a totally surreal scenario, yet its underlying theme is just as real and relevant as anything the main game provided.

Gameplay wise, the basic mechanics are about the same as the main game: you have an array of bolt-action, lever-action, and semi-automatic weaponry, along with a couple of throwable explosives. The third person, auto-lock targeting system where headshots are top priority plays out basically the same as Grand Theft Auto V, aside from the different arsenal. There’s also a bullet time feature, as with the main game, but here you get it at max level from the start, encouraging you to use it far more. There’s a couple of new weapons, but most of them are in fairly short supply and don’t shake up the formula too drastically.

The other main difference from the base game in this respect is the zombies themselves. They’re slow, lumbering things that walk out in the open. Cover is basically useless here, instead you’ll be running and gunning your way through zombie hordes. The emphasis on headshots is even greater, as body shots don’t do much to keep the zombies down. I actually find this combat a lot more enjoyable than the main game, though it’s a tad too easy most of the time. The game claims that ammo is scarce and you should conserve your bullets, but beyond the first town or two that was never really an issue for me.

The main structure of the game involves you roaming from town to town, clearing out the zombies to help the survivors and then doing a variety of sidequests for them. There are a few “main” missions, and in typical Rockstar fashion some of these are quite heavily scripted, but overall this looser format gives the player far more gameplay freedom than their other recent titles. It does get a little repetitive at times, though, especially once you get to Mexico and there’s not really much further amping up the stakes. The structure of the narrative as a whole feels somewhat slapdash and thrown together, leaning heavily on established relationships from the base game, giving each major player a quick quest or two, and then on to the next town.

Even though there’s plenty of great individual moments here, they don’t really form much of a coherent whole, at least from a character or plot perspective. The one thing that ties it all together is how most of the survivors, instead of banding together, dig themselves even deeper into their own prejudices, blaming the apocalypse on everything from Mexicans to Jews to African Americans and beyond. It’s an eerie echo of increasing tensions in the world right now, decades of prejudice and mistreatment once again bubbling to the surface of popular culture.

It’s also quite entertaining to see how fed up with all this shit Marston is, he even deliberately lets a couple of racist dickheads get eaten by zombies when he easily could have saved them, and threatens people at gunpoint several times. Unlike the main game, where he was framed as a redeemable character trying to be a better person, he’s just totally done and letting his violent instincts takeover, and this characterization fits way better with Rockstar’s misanthropic satire. There were many annoying characters who I just wanted to pull a gun on and get it over with in the main campaign, and it’s very satisfying to see Marston finally line up with that (does this make me a bad person?).

If the main game drove home that by 1911, the west is pretty much dead and the cowboy life became totally unsustainable, this explores the one way in which cowboys could’ve been relevant again: a total stop in societal progress by means of a zombie apocalypse. As grim and fed up as Marston becomes, there’s a perverse pleasure in returning to the gun-slinging and horseback-riding ways of old that’s not lost on him, nor the player (nor on Rockstar, it would seem, who had to rewind time itself to for Red Dead Redemption 2 to be possible). The apocalypse destroys the very world which Marston, Dutch, and co are hopelessly railing against, giving them one last chance to be outlaws again, even if it costs the entire world.

Some of the best storytelling in the medium. The premise itself is fairly standard genre fare but the character work here is by far the most impressive I've ever seen in a video game. Very light on exposition, and much of the character dynamics are revealed through subtle body language in the animation, the main themes left unsaid and bubbling under the surface. The vocal performances are incredible and bring these characters to life more than anything I’ve seen in the medium. There’s more subtlety and grace in the narrative here than even a lot of movies and television, honestly. It allows players to connect the dots themselves, instead using the lengthy cutscenes to communicate emotional tensions. The characters can rarely find the right words to express themselves, so the player must read them as they must read each other.

Still looks great 7 years later, especially running in HDR at 1800p on the Pro. The framerate dips a little here and there, but it’s still pretty consistently around 50fps at the worst of times, and there’s of course still the option to run it at 1080p 60fps if you’d prefer. The only thing that’s really aged much is the character models, but even those are better than a lot of early PS4 games.

The gameplay is really solid, much better than the Uncharted games I find. The stealth is a little barebones and confusing but otherwise it’s a really solid action-horror tinged cover shooter, playing like a toned-down version of Resident Evil 4, complete with quick turn, limited ammo offset by enemies who drop more the less you have, incremental weapon and character upgrades, and inventory management. I really like the crafting here, it forces you to plan ahead to some extent and doesn’t allow you to hoard resources too much, so you need some foresight into what you’re gonna need. It’s not perfect but I really enjoy it, and it makes for some really tense gameplay in the 4v4 multiplayer matches as well. The Last of Us is not a perfect game, but it is a landmark title for the medium that pushes linear AAA shooter campaigns to new levels of nuance in storytelling, and plays way better than you’d expect.

Does this game want to be realistic or escapist? This should be a simple question to answer, yet its inconsistencies in design make it harder to crack than the Enigma machine. In one early setpiece, you grab an MG42 turret to hold off the Nazis.

These emplacements have limited ammo, and you have to reload them, suggesting that the game is aiming for a more immersive, believable style as opposed to the infinite ammo emplacements common in the genre. But then a few missions later you hop on a jeep turret and it has infinite ammo, only it can overheat. This is strange but for most of the game this rule of overheating vehicle turrets and ammo-based emplacements stays consistent, so it’s not that big an issue. However, in the penultimate level, you get on another MG42 to hold off more Nazis, except this one neither overheats nor has ammo. If you’re going to undercut mechanical choices just for a cool setpiece, why have these limitations at all?

There’s other little issues like this, such as every door open having a lengthy scripted animation, but then in the French Resistance level there’s no animation for opening windows. The weird “drag the stick to the circle and then press a button” quicktime event totally fails to simulate… any action, really. As silly as mashing buttons fast and stuff like that may seem, they offer a vague approximation of tension and more minute gestures than a typical control scheme can offer. The Call of Duty series has actually been pretty good with these kinds of things, the final fights in Modern Warfare 2 and 3 for instance have little intuitive motions as well as button prompts that immerse in the action of hand-to-hand combat decently well. Hell, even the trigger-mashing of Call of Duty 3 was more effective than this. I’m not against QTEs per se, but this game uses them really poorly.

For some reason, the cutscenes are locked at 30fps even though the game runs at 60, and the transitions often stutter even moreso, which is really jarring, especially considering how often this game is jumping into scripted sequences and wrestling control away from you. There’s a moment in the introduction to your squad where Zussman (I finished the game, like, an hour ago, and I had to Google his name because I had already forgotten it) does the five finger fillet and you can see the knife clipping through his hands, lmao. There’s so much care in some aspects of the presentation, but so many things just break or don’t work as intended and make the whole thing fall apart. There’s a few interesting ideas here, but most of it is taken from other, better ww2 fiction.

Call of Duty has always been a weird mishmash of various TV, movie, and other game influences, so the lack of originality isn’t a problem in and of itself, but WWII doesn’t do anything new with them, nor does it even do them as well as the things it’s cribbing from, let alone coming close to surpassing them. The narrative is totally divorced from the gameplay. In the cutscenes, your squadmates are your ride or dies, and you’re constantly saving each other’s asses from the brink of death, but in practice they… give you ammo sometimes, and mostly just sit back and watch while you risk your life doing all the difficult stuff.

They’re not teammates, they’re equipment dispensers. They don’t even give you the stuff you need, like Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite, you have to ask them for it, and they’ll just leave you to rot otherwise. This coldness of war worked in the old games precisely because they weren’t trying to connect you to the characters, aside from a few plot critical NPCs the man next to you could die at any moment in the grand, dehumanising machine of warfare. But here, contrasted with this inspiring tale of the heroism of 6 men played by actors whom Activision gave a bunch of money to pretend to be soldiers, it just makes it impossible to pick out any coherent thematic thread. The game takes great pains to show the destructive chaos of war, with nearby soldiers having limbs blown off constantly, but it’s also full of action setpieces like the collapsing church tower and the (rightfully) mocked train crash scene that would be more at home in an Uncharted game. There’s an entire mission about concentration camps, but you also have bullet time. This campaign doesn’t know if it wants to be a serious interactive experience or a heightened video game romp, and it fails at both.

There’s some stuff going around which is completely false, namely the story about Druckmann humping Laura Bailey in a mocap suit (which someone photoshopped her tweeting about and she had to come out and shoot it down). There’s also rumours about it being transphobic which I really don’t agree with and I think were at least somewhat overblown. I thought the trans character was handled really well, and the trauma he faced due to his gender identity was alluded to and discussed in dialogue but never directly shown, which was a nice restraint for an otherwise very disturbing game. I’m not trans, so of course I’m not an expert on this and maybe I’m missing something, but I thought it was respectfully done. The review bombing in general is ridiculous, and all the misinformation has led to a lot of toxic and polarizing discourse, which for the most part I think has been unwarranted. It’s also the gayest major video game out there which I’m 100% here for.

Gameplay wise, the best thing Naughty Dog has made in ages, maybe ever. The stealth is vastly improved, and actually a viable option for the majority of encounters now. Hiding in tall grass and bushes isn’t a binary invisibility but a layered system based on proximity and movement. Instead of everyone just instantly knowing your position when you’re spotted, there’s a caution phase where enemies will be on higher alert and search your last known position. The crafting is expanded even further from the first game, allowing you not only to craft explosives and ammo for combat encounters but also further options for stealth, such as makeshift silencers and arrows for the bow. As before, crafting one item often comes at the direct cost of another, and many of these choices are suited to either stealth or action, only now there's even more such choices you have to make. Fights between multiple factions allow you to pit your enemies against each other, tossing throwables to draw them together and stir the pot, occasionally thinning the herd from the shadows.

There’s also more depth to the progression system this time around, with character upgrades attached to various perk trees that are gradually acquired throughout the game instead of just a list that you can tackle in any order, requiring you to actually put some level of planning in to get the stats you want, and with more variety than the typical combat/stealth/resources trio that a lot of modern games have. It’s still a pretty straightforward system, nothing super in depth, but it’s a welcome addition to flesh out the gameplay a little more, and fits nicely into the more methodical, preparation based encounters of the game.

The level design is also a huge step up, often featuring multiple routes through encounters. There’s even some more open areas, with optional locations that have their own sectioned-off combat scenarios. Unlike Uncharted 4, where I felt the open areas where neat but didn’t offer much in the way of incentive to explore, these parts of Last of Us 2 often have additional upgrade materials for perks, weapon upgrades, and even new guns, directly rewarding your exploration on a tangible gameplay level, as well as fleshing out the games’ environmental storytelling chops. Human enemies are smarter than in the first game, and the Seraphites even have their own creepy whistling system that impacts how quickly they’re able to notice you. The weapon upgrade system is basically the same thing as the first game, though additional holsters are now moved over to exploration instead. The infected have a few new enemies types, but for the most part they play quite similarly to the first game. Overall, it’s a lot of fun to play, and even if the story doesn’t grab you I think the game is worth picking up for the combat. It’s not gonna win over people who don’t like Uncharted or Last of Us 1, but for those who do it’s the best iteration of Naughty Dog’s TPS gameplay loops.

As with the first game, the big explosives setpieces are spaced out more so than the Uncharted games, making them more impactful when they do come around even though they’re smaller in scope. ND does a great job blending cutscene and gameplay here, so much so that I was occasionally telling myself “nah this can’t be running in real time it looks too damn good” only to be greeted with a QTE prompt 2 seconds later. God, this game looks great. Probably the most visually impressive game I’ve ever played (though I’m yet to get around to Red Dead 2), not only on a technical level, but also an artistic one, with the lighting reflecting and contrasting the mood of particular scenes, unending natural beauty punctuated by the evil that humans do to each other. The animations are incredibly detailed without being overlong and interfering with the gameplay too much, which is something I find ND is really good at in general. The music, performances, writing, and cutscene direction continue to be some of the best in the medium, pushing interactive storytelling into new and unconventional places.

Narratively, I understand why the game is so much more divisive than the first one: it’s challenging material that makes you feel bad and questions the very core of its characters, featuring a Pulp Fiction-y non-linear structure that puts you in the shoes of characters you thought you hated. I don’t think it’s trying to be directly critical of the player for their use of violence, rather it’s deconstructing why the protagonists choose to inflict such pain at all. There’s no big picture, no cure for the survival of the human race, just people, vengeance, and civil war. As with the ending of the first game, it’s often about the hateful things done for love, selfishly destroying everyone in your path to protect loved ones, even if it costs the world and ends up destroying the relationship with your loved ones that drove you in the first place.

Many have criticized this game for its lack of levity, and that’s somewhat true, but only in the back half of the narrative, and though it is depressing there’s very much a thematic purpose behind it. The flashbacks and happy moments early on in the narrative establish what characters are leaving behind in their quests for revenge, but also what was taken from them to stir that desire for vengeance in the first place, a web of violence and trauma becoming more and more tangled by self destructive tendencies until they have nothing left.

The story is hardly ‘fun’ in any kind of traditional sense, even though the gameplay is. It cuts deep, leaving scars on the cast that will perhaps never heal. It could’ve just been Joel and Ellie adventure 2.0, which it seems is what a lot of people wanted, but this is so much more daring, unique, and interesting that I have a hard time imagining how straightforward replication of the first’s formula could’ve been better (and I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, at least not completely, I love Uncharted 2 and that’s basically just the first game but bigger and more better). The Last of Us is not a brand that got its acclaim by playing it safe and giving us formulaic fun adventures. The reason the original stood out in the first place is because it dared to slow down and let you feel, building a deeply flawed protagonist who obviously does the wrong things, but making you care about him anyway. A game that just did what we expected from it would not be a worthy successor to The Last of Us.

How did this come out in 2009? It looks and feels like a ps3 launch game, complete with a lame sixaxis gimmick, framerate that struggles to hit 20fps most of the time, constant pop-in (seriously, cars and geometry sometimes didn’t load until they were like 30 metres away), and animations that make Morrowind impressive by comparison (for instance: https://youtu.be/O1P3GBG05Vg?t=53), jerking around like malfunctioning animatronics and with facial animations that basically consist of the bottom jaw moving up and down like a sock puppet. It’s hilariously bad and it makes the serious scenes impossible to take seriously. The colour scheme is that monotone, washed out grey and brown that was so popular at the time, and the lighting is so simplistic that the game feels lifeless most of the time. The dialogue is also terribly written, with stilted delivery that sounds like each line was recorded at different times and the actors never actually saw each other face to face. How was this released in the same year as Uncharted 2, adjacent to GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption?

Thankfully, most of the story cutscenes are rendered in a stylish graphic novel inspired style to sidestep this issue, but it’s still incredibly jarring whenever the game cuts back to in-engine cutscenes. The story is convoluted nonsense that has you going around beating up homeless people and engaging in police brutality, while you help the NSA use the Patriot Act to keep people safe (this is the good path). More specifically, there are these escort missions where the game doesn't let you cuff anyone, even though you have a previously established infinite lightning cuff power, so that you have to beat up the prisoners to make them fall in line (https://youtu.be/XNHSUzUB-CU?t=871).

There are somewhat interesting ideas about the government manipulating people and the conflicts being driven by a class divide, but it’s so disconnected from how the game’s binary morality directly rewards you for falling in line with the powers that be that it totally misses the mark. The choices are also mostly really stupid extremes, like “do you want to murder innocent sick people in a hospital or save them and become a literal messiah?”. Every time you make a major karma choice, the game pauses for 5 seconds to tell you the thing you did, and there’s no way to turn off or skip this notification. I know it doesn’t sound a lot, but there’s a lot of these moments and it adds up over time.

The instant you finish a mission, a pop-up appears and the game pauses, often triggering before the mission’s dialogue and cutscenes are even wrapped up. Everytime you clear a district by finishing a side mission, the game cuts to the map screen (the one element of the game with a consistent framerate), slowly zooms in on the area, tells you you’ve cleared it, and then lets you play again. These weirdly intrusive UI elements add nothing to the game. The power upgrade trees are another underdeveloped idea, mostly giving you wider AOEs on your attacks, which is really frustrating on the good run because it makes it harder and harder to not hurt civilians.

The gameplay is the real saving grace here. Aside from all the other problems I mentioned, the shooting and traversal is a lot of fun (even though the collision detection for the parkour is pretty jank at times). I could easily see my score on this going up to a 2.5 or maybe a 3 if it got a proper remaster. There’s a solid amount of variety in both your abilities and the enemy types, as well as the city setting affording tons of verticality and traversal options. Pretty much everything else here is doing the bare minimum to funnel you back into exploration and combat encounters, because that’s the one thing this game does nail quite well. It’s a shame this game is such a technical disaster, because there is a decent core gameplay loop here at the very least, but it’s buried under so many problems that it's hard to appreciate much at all.

A step up from the first one in pretty much every way. On top of the vastly increased level of detail, far more naturalistic animations and character models, better lighting, and improved gameplay camera, the New Orleans-inspired setting of New Marais is far more colourful, varied, and lively than anything in the first game's drab New York City analog. The sound design and score are far better here, as well. Most importantly, it runs much better than the first game, still dipping an unfortunate amount but it’s in the mid 20s more often than not which is a huge step up. Again, a remaster would definitely be appreciated.

Cole's voice actor has been replaced, which initially bothered me but Eric Landin's performance grew on me as the game went on, in the end surpassing Jason Cottle from the first installment. The writing and voice direction is a huge step up in general, even from the returning actors, moving beyond just the bare minimum of periodic, awkward exposition dumps to keep the that the first had. The faux handheld camera style of the cutscenes adds a much needed visual personality to the narrative presentation, combined with the far improved animations making for some genuinely great moments (I quite like this scene in particular, seeing what characters do in their down time is always an effective tool to flesh them out and make them more relatable: https://youtu.be/VStkpB22_zw).

Zeke is actually somewhat charming here, still a flawed person but he feels like he really cares about Cole which the first game didn’t convey all that well. There’s a central villain who is actually kinda developed, and instead of each section of the game having a separate villain faction with its own leader barely connected anything, the various factions spring out from this main villain as the plot moves along, adding even more enemy variety while cleaning up the disjointed structure of the last title. The supporting cast is far more fleshed out than the first game, and there’s some levity sprinkled throughout that makes it far more engaging than the grimdark nonsense of the previous game. Cole even makes jokes once in a while. It’s still mostly self serious, but the added colour and energy make it feel so much more alive and the emotional beats hit harder as a result.

The morality is far more nuanced, too. Though there still are some very silly binary choices sprinkled throughout, the major narrative ones feel like believable approaches to achieving your goals instead of just playing a moustache-twirling maniac. This feeds further into the powers now as well, with many of the good side upgrades even giving options that minimize collateral damage. There’s a narrative choice about halfway through the game that gives you a brand new subclass of power type in addition to your electricity, distinguishing the karma paths even further, with drastically different arsenals available by the end of the game. On top of the enemy variety, this makes the already solid combat of the first game even better. Missions are more varied, the side missions don’t have weird police brutality shit for no reason, the different districts are not only visually distinct but also have varying architecture; all in all it’s a much better game to play.

It’s certainly not a perfect game. There’s some issues with getting side missions to appear when going for full completion, and the dead drop audio logs get interrupted whenever you do pretty much anything and then require you to dive back into a menu to activate them again, which became tedious to the point where I stopped caring about them even though they have interesting background information. The UI for when you beat a mission is still annoying and intrusive even if it doesn’t actively stop you from playing the game like the first one did. There’s major physics bug which will cause you to clip through an object and instantly die (this has happened to me multiple times within the same boss fight, though luckily it goes both ways and I’ve dispatched some minibosses in this fashion), and of course the aforementioned framerate issues are no small annoyance. The camera, while an improvement, still blocks your view sometimes and glitches out in tight spaces. Otherwise, though, almost every aspect of this title is a massive step forward from the first game, and it made me care about characters and a world I was completely univested in before, while looking, running, and playing better to boot. And it has a grappling hook.

Starts ok, with an interesting world and more balanced tone than the first. As it goes on, it doubles down further and further on the worst aspects of its design. One of the worst shooters I've ever played. Barely function auto-aim, with single stick shooting that makes Goldeneye look like high level Counter-Strike (other third person shooters that were available on ps2 at the time: Max Payne, SOCOM 2, Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando, 007: Everything or Nothing). The level design is awful. The story is neat but most of the missions just feel like filler and the plot structure is convoluted and nonsensical, mostly just people telling you to go to the place and grab the thingy that might be important later. Put about 12 hours into it and got through the second baron boss, but I just can't be bothered to finish it.

08/13/2020 PS4 Open Beta - minor spoilers for the first few hours of the game

Crystal Dynamics’ Marvel’s Avengers wants to be a lot of things: a Destiny-style PvE loot grind, an Uncharted-tinged highly scripted action game, a God of War reboot-esque brawler, all enclosed within a new take on the Marvel universe ala Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man. If it did even one of these things well, it could’ve been worthwhile, but to call it a jack-of-all-trades would be an overstatement, as that implies a level of competency in the game’s variety of aims which it often doesn’t reach.

Being a team game, Black Widow has to be equally viable to the Hulk or the God of Thunder for co-op to work properly, even though that balance often undercuts what makes these heroes compelling in the first place. Which is where, in theory, the single-player levels come in. Locking the player to a specific hero allows the developers to cater the level design to their abilities and showcase what makes each character unique… you would think. However, aside from the occasional Hulk platforming sections that make Uncharted look masterful, the levels appear haphazardly thrown together without a particular character in mind.

The animations are lifeless, cutscene direction is bland at the best of times, the writing is bad both in terms of dialogue and overall plotting. The quicktime events feel unintuitive, and the transitions from cutscene to gameplay and back are woefully inelegant. Despite an all-star voice lineup, the lack of in-depth characterization ends up making it feel more like the Uncharted 4 cast cosplaying as marvel characters than it does a proper Avengers story. The art style very much looks like a knockoff of the first MCU Avengers film from 2012, which itself was not exactly the most visually compelling Marvel adaptation. In a world where even the homogenous cinematic universes have the occasional Aquaman or Guardians of the Galaxy, this feels sorely lacking in style.

The structure here is a real problem. The intro level gives you a taste of each character, but it’s not really long enough to give you a feel for any of them, and after this point the game locks you to Hulk and Kamala for the next 2 hours or so. The opening puts an emphasis on saving civilians and grounding the Avengers in this world, but this is mostly dropped afterwards, with all the following missions being totally devoid of civilian life (maybe this comes back in the full game later, though). It also transitions rather abruptly from the “A-Day” defeat of the opening level (I don’t think colloquial names for catastrophic terrorist events are supposed to rhyme), with a laughable cutscene comprised of the camera panning over stills of the sequence as if didn’t bother to animate the storyboards. On the one hand, this may be jarringly structured because certain things are edited out for the beta, but on the other that could mean even more time before the game properly opens up in the final product.

You’re not able to do co-op until you’ve cleared the 3 story missions available, which took me around 2 and a half hours or so, though I was doing other things in between so you’d probably be able to rush through it faster if you stay focused. It’s a really strange structural choice when the main draw of the game is playing superheroes with your friends. The narrative, itself not very compelling, is overly restrictive to the gameplay structure, locking out most of the cast for the main section of the beta, locking out co-op, and furthermore, Thor and Captain America aren’t playable for the remainder of this demo. Captain America “”dies”” offscreen in the opening level, so I’m assuming this major playable character is going to be locked off for the first half of the game or so in service of a dumb story decision. Not sure why Thor isn’t here, he’s even present on the radio in one of the side missions so I suppose they’re just holding him back for the full release, I don’t know.
(EDIT NOTE: The third story mission does allow co-op, though I couldn't find anyone online when I first played it, and as far as I recall you don't unlock Iron Man and Black Widow until after you finish it)

In future, Hawkeye and Spider-Man are also apparently being added, but for now there’s just these core 6, only 4 of which are really present in the beta. Yes, Spider-Man will be only on Playstation, but with how much this game is biting from ps4 exclusives Square probably had to make a deal with Sony to avoid getting sued (also I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes his way over to other platforms a few months later). Every aspect of this game, from the combat, to the visuals, to the loot elements, to the story structure, to the setpieces and story-driven exploration segments, to the humor, are thoroughly lacking and have been done far better by the games and films Avengers is so blatantly taking from.