Yultimona
2012
This review contains spoilers
I reread my original version of this review and didn't like it very much, so here's a complete revision of it for no reason other than because I feel like it. If you're curious about how the original version looked, I uploaded an archive of it before deletion.
///
INTRODUCTION: The power of music
.
Music is a tool that's both understood to its fullest extent and underappreciated.
The year is 2018. My knowledge of cyberpunk, as a genre, begins and ends with both Blade Runner movies. That's about to change. What draws me to Cyberpunk 2077 is several things: it's simultaneously boisterous and grandiose in one fell swoop, but the rot around the edges isn't acidic enough to feel inauthentic. It's violent, sharp, and even a little witty. But by this point, I've played through Grand Theft Auto V. What seals the deal is all of this and a song.
'Hyper' is about as succinct a title as you could give to a song whose build-up crescendos into a more exaggerated form of itself as it struggles to move past the emotion established from the very first second. A palpable rage is kept behind a thin piece of cloth made of tungsten. You can feel its failed attempts to claw through before it inevitably gives up. Whatever's behind the fabric can't make up for what's in front of it, and trying to fight that is as suffocating as living in ignorance of it. In a world like Night City, that rage can be felt across several blocks of empty gloss and hopeless glamor. The idea that this is anyone's ideal portrait of the future comes about when considering what the other side of the cloth is. But as more get suckered into lives of crime that end so abruptly that death becomes an urban legend of its own, the other side merely becomes a pipe dream to fuel the reckless pursuit of everything in the eye's sight. The trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 is far less than the four minutes the song uses to establish this vibe, but by associating itself with the song, it says everything it wants to say about its setting without the voice-over narration spelling it out.
Compared to the dirtier and much angrier sound of Hyper, Syndicate's theme song sounds richer. It's gouging your eyes and ears out with diamonds that could stab your bank account so severely that it converts the bank itself to communism. It's supposed to be big and badass, a new sound for a new generation. High-class bloodshed with luxury. It almost feels ironic when juxtaposed with the game itself, which assigns two of the super-hacking powers you get as glorified kill switches. It's incredibly fucked up that you can jack yourself into someone's head, tell them to shoot themselves point blank, and feel good about it, and perhaps that's the point. It's punchy in an ironic sense, only upbeat because that's the only tune it knows to play in a world with fewer options by the second.
That there's no defining characteristics of Syndicate's theme other than that of a then-contemporary dubstep track by one of the sub-sub-genre's leading pioneers comes off as more of a backhanded compliment, though. Like Cyberpunk, this sound informs the way the game uses this setting—only, in this case, for worse. Music is understood by unappreciated; it makes for much stronger non-verbal communication than we often give it credit for. It can be romantic, it can show off pride or dedication, but just as easily, it can be a sign of lacking confidence to come. Given how EA marketed Syndicate, it's entirely possible that they just said "good enough" and didn't think twice about it. Syndicate is not a very good game and they knew it all along.
.
PART ONE: No shit, Sherlock — Subtlety and Syndicate
The difference between Cyberpunk and Syndicate is that Syndicate spends no time making its point.
Cyberpunk is, similarly, not a particularly subtle game. It is possible to be subtle in these settings, but it's not something you typically see. When exaggeration is the name of your game, that doesn't tend to go hand-in-hand with the minutiae of what tends to go unspoken. What matters, then, is having your heart in the right place. Cyberpunk might feed you philosophy on a platter so unavoidable that there are dialog options tied to it in the first act, but those dialog options inform relationships with genuine, fleshed-out characters whose quirks manage to side-step what the setting tends to lack in nuance. It's thanks to these characters that Cyberpunk is as emotionally resonant as it is cheesy.
Syndicate lacks even a satirical punch. The emotional core here is forced and hackneyed. You always know how you should be rooting for and against because the script for this thing was evidently a paycheck job for its notable writer. The characters here as one-dimensional as they come, and you can correctly assume their allegiances by the time their introduction is over. Star-power in the form of Rosario Dawson and Brian Cox may seem cool on the back of the box, but paired with performances as uninspired as the script, itself, this selection of actors only serves to reinforce your assumptions without a hint of irony. The world lacks finer details to side-step its lack of subtlety, leaving you with levels occasionally full of lore that you have no real motivation to seek out other than to indulge the presence of bread crumbs. It's not hard to guess what the supposed big reveal is, if only because a world so lacking in ethics that a turbo-kill-yourself-and-everyone-in-the-room button wouldn't turn a blind eye to children. The reveal lands with a thud, if only because (foreshadowing for the next chapter) the main character is a black slate I have no reason to root for other than the fact that I'm playing as him.
Let's disregard the Cyberpunk comparisons for a moment and contemplate what the lack of subtlety on offer could provide. Since the game opens on an exposition dump about how fucked this world is, it's entirely possible that the malnourished narrative peckings on offer are able to peacefully coexist with scenarios that speak for them. Maybe if you're that blunt, then your game's a cautionary tale?
Syndicate is a monotonous shooting gallery that clocks in at sub-ten hours. Its idea of spectacle typically boils down to giving you a mini-gun and boss fights that are less difficult than the levels that precede them. When it does threaten to do something new, it doesn't stick the landing and almost immediately reverses course. Credit where credit is due, it has a clearly defined art style and didn't look too bad for its time—granted the overwhelming bloom effects didn't disintegrate your retinas. But those pretty visuals can't compensate for the fact that most of the levels in Syndicate consist of going through the motions and little else.
The unfortunate truth is that, on both a narrative and gameplay context, Syndicate doesn't exactly side-step the typical trappings of the cyberpunk genre. It may not go full ham on its worst aspects, like orientalism, but it does nothing of note, either.
Except for that one time where it tries to.
.
PART TWO: This is why my review has a spoiler tag.
Before I played Syndicate for myself, my hazy memory of the Wikipedia plot summary and Let's Plays of this I watched when I was a child told me that the real subversive bit was at the very end. As you walk down the final hallway, you experience what is essentially a playable all-is-lost moment. The man in charge of your implants tries his damnedest to stop you from getting to him, and thus your movement becomes sluggish, unresponsive. This moment puts into context a cutscene from earlier with a frustrating lack of control. Here, the game's not pushing you on-rails, but that's because the man who put you on those rails now wants you off.
So, anyway, that's not what this chapter is about. It's worth mentioning this moment because, for the brief amount of time it lasts, it almost manages to juxtapose itself with Syndicate's craziest moment.
This is the true potential of Syndicate. Throughout the game, you are occasionally given bits of text that don't fully flesh out the main character, but give you enough of a picture to understand that there's slightly more going on than you controlling a gruff guy with a gun. After the final boss fight, this comes full circle. For all intents and purposes, you've just killed your only friend. Now, your only friend wouldn't grieve you if he'd done the same. His lack of any compassion or empathy is shouted at you from the rooftops early on. But as you're sitting on top of his corpse, that doesn't matter. The first-person perspective becomes a distant third-person as you see the man you've been controlling all this time, afraid of what he's become.
This moment doesn't work, but I applaud it as the only part of this game where you can feel a sliver of passion from all corners of the creative paradigm behind it. It's far bolder of a moment than a game like this deserves, and had it been given time to have teeth, might threaten to redeem an otherwise routine and mundane offering.
The reason it doesn't work is simple: the bits of characterization that precede it feel half-assed. We're not inundated with the thoughts of our main character, a la Wolfenstein: The New Order (once again, foreshadowing). The character never speaks, and his presence as a silent protagonist is rarely ever commented on in the way it is for a game like Half-Life 2. To go from only a facsimile of a protagonist to a literal portrait of grief in motion is an impossible jump to make. It is indicative of something else, but before I get there, there's an elephant in the room that needs to be let out.
.
PART THREE: Two-stars rationale
Syndicate may be unremarkable, but it plays fine. Guns feel more frighteningly loud here than they do in most shooters, and although I wish this was used to a different effect, it does still make what set-pieces there are fun to go through. The mini-gun, in particular, has the best sound design of its type I've ever seen. The spectacle might be toned down, but the developers clearly knew what the game was and did their best. That thing tears, and I love it.
In terms of small additions, you can see your feet! This is still a feature that's missing in many shooters, and wouldn't have been particularly common in 2012. But the fact that it's in a game primarily developed for consoles with less than a gigabyte of memory to work with makes it all the more impressive that it works.
The secondary wireframe art style is also well done, bordering on more interesting than the "Mirrors Edge for those with visual impairments needing to get worse" that the main game goes for. I'm not sure you could pull off a feature-length, big-budget AAA with exclusively that art style, but I would love to see a much smaller indie project take it on.
There's one more thing, but I can't talk about it anymore.
.
PART FOUR: Did you do this? No, EA did it.
Syndicate's big selling point back then, the one thing all reviews for it praised at the time, was its cooperative mode. If you've played Payday before, you'll recognize what's here as what that series became after the post-Syndicate husk of Starbreeze merged with a desperate Overkill. What this essentially means is that the Co-Op here is likely very, very fun. I'll never know for myself. Owing to poor sales numbers, Payday 2, and the fact that Syndicate is now delisted from all digital storefronts (likely for that one Skrillex song), you can start a lobby for Co-Op games, and that's it. No one will ever join you. You can try to play it by yourself, but as I learned very quickly, it's not optimized for solo-play.
What this co-op mode represents is two separate wholes: Starbreeze before and after several of its developers left to found MachineGames. If you're wondering why that one particular moment from this game stood out to me enough to warrant its own section, it's because it is, transparently, one of the last remnants of what I assume the creative vision for this was up to a certain point. Many of these same developers working on The New Order, whose introspective elements are fully realized, points to that being a creative proclivity of theirs. Unfortunately, I don't think introspective first-person shooters sold to publishers like EA in the mid-to-late 2000s, so in all likelihood, Syndicate was sold on its co-op mode before anything else. With this in mind, it would not shock me if the original creative vision was gutted by a corporate mandate or two and then further pummeled by the departures that followed.
In hindsight, the two incohesive wholes that make up Syndicate make it a rough game to revisit. Every inch of this thing screams executive interference, which, given its script, is far funnier than Cyberpunk releasing broken will ever be.
///
INTRODUCTION: The power of music
.
Music is a tool that's both understood to its fullest extent and underappreciated.
The year is 2018. My knowledge of cyberpunk, as a genre, begins and ends with both Blade Runner movies. That's about to change. What draws me to Cyberpunk 2077 is several things: it's simultaneously boisterous and grandiose in one fell swoop, but the rot around the edges isn't acidic enough to feel inauthentic. It's violent, sharp, and even a little witty. But by this point, I've played through Grand Theft Auto V. What seals the deal is all of this and a song.
'Hyper' is about as succinct a title as you could give to a song whose build-up crescendos into a more exaggerated form of itself as it struggles to move past the emotion established from the very first second. A palpable rage is kept behind a thin piece of cloth made of tungsten. You can feel its failed attempts to claw through before it inevitably gives up. Whatever's behind the fabric can't make up for what's in front of it, and trying to fight that is as suffocating as living in ignorance of it. In a world like Night City, that rage can be felt across several blocks of empty gloss and hopeless glamor. The idea that this is anyone's ideal portrait of the future comes about when considering what the other side of the cloth is. But as more get suckered into lives of crime that end so abruptly that death becomes an urban legend of its own, the other side merely becomes a pipe dream to fuel the reckless pursuit of everything in the eye's sight. The trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 is far less than the four minutes the song uses to establish this vibe, but by associating itself with the song, it says everything it wants to say about its setting without the voice-over narration spelling it out.
Compared to the dirtier and much angrier sound of Hyper, Syndicate's theme song sounds richer. It's gouging your eyes and ears out with diamonds that could stab your bank account so severely that it converts the bank itself to communism. It's supposed to be big and badass, a new sound for a new generation. High-class bloodshed with luxury. It almost feels ironic when juxtaposed with the game itself, which assigns two of the super-hacking powers you get as glorified kill switches. It's incredibly fucked up that you can jack yourself into someone's head, tell them to shoot themselves point blank, and feel good about it, and perhaps that's the point. It's punchy in an ironic sense, only upbeat because that's the only tune it knows to play in a world with fewer options by the second.
That there's no defining characteristics of Syndicate's theme other than that of a then-contemporary dubstep track by one of the sub-sub-genre's leading pioneers comes off as more of a backhanded compliment, though. Like Cyberpunk, this sound informs the way the game uses this setting—only, in this case, for worse. Music is understood by unappreciated; it makes for much stronger non-verbal communication than we often give it credit for. It can be romantic, it can show off pride or dedication, but just as easily, it can be a sign of lacking confidence to come. Given how EA marketed Syndicate, it's entirely possible that they just said "good enough" and didn't think twice about it. Syndicate is not a very good game and they knew it all along.
.
PART ONE: No shit, Sherlock — Subtlety and Syndicate
The difference between Cyberpunk and Syndicate is that Syndicate spends no time making its point.
Cyberpunk is, similarly, not a particularly subtle game. It is possible to be subtle in these settings, but it's not something you typically see. When exaggeration is the name of your game, that doesn't tend to go hand-in-hand with the minutiae of what tends to go unspoken. What matters, then, is having your heart in the right place. Cyberpunk might feed you philosophy on a platter so unavoidable that there are dialog options tied to it in the first act, but those dialog options inform relationships with genuine, fleshed-out characters whose quirks manage to side-step what the setting tends to lack in nuance. It's thanks to these characters that Cyberpunk is as emotionally resonant as it is cheesy.
Syndicate lacks even a satirical punch. The emotional core here is forced and hackneyed. You always know how you should be rooting for and against because the script for this thing was evidently a paycheck job for its notable writer. The characters here as one-dimensional as they come, and you can correctly assume their allegiances by the time their introduction is over. Star-power in the form of Rosario Dawson and Brian Cox may seem cool on the back of the box, but paired with performances as uninspired as the script, itself, this selection of actors only serves to reinforce your assumptions without a hint of irony. The world lacks finer details to side-step its lack of subtlety, leaving you with levels occasionally full of lore that you have no real motivation to seek out other than to indulge the presence of bread crumbs. It's not hard to guess what the supposed big reveal is, if only because a world so lacking in ethics that a turbo-kill-yourself-and-everyone-in-the-room button wouldn't turn a blind eye to children. The reveal lands with a thud, if only because (foreshadowing for the next chapter) the main character is a black slate I have no reason to root for other than the fact that I'm playing as him.
Let's disregard the Cyberpunk comparisons for a moment and contemplate what the lack of subtlety on offer could provide. Since the game opens on an exposition dump about how fucked this world is, it's entirely possible that the malnourished narrative peckings on offer are able to peacefully coexist with scenarios that speak for them. Maybe if you're that blunt, then your game's a cautionary tale?
Syndicate is a monotonous shooting gallery that clocks in at sub-ten hours. Its idea of spectacle typically boils down to giving you a mini-gun and boss fights that are less difficult than the levels that precede them. When it does threaten to do something new, it doesn't stick the landing and almost immediately reverses course. Credit where credit is due, it has a clearly defined art style and didn't look too bad for its time—granted the overwhelming bloom effects didn't disintegrate your retinas. But those pretty visuals can't compensate for the fact that most of the levels in Syndicate consist of going through the motions and little else.
The unfortunate truth is that, on both a narrative and gameplay context, Syndicate doesn't exactly side-step the typical trappings of the cyberpunk genre. It may not go full ham on its worst aspects, like orientalism, but it does nothing of note, either.
Except for that one time where it tries to.
.
PART TWO: This is why my review has a spoiler tag.
Before I played Syndicate for myself, my hazy memory of the Wikipedia plot summary and Let's Plays of this I watched when I was a child told me that the real subversive bit was at the very end. As you walk down the final hallway, you experience what is essentially a playable all-is-lost moment. The man in charge of your implants tries his damnedest to stop you from getting to him, and thus your movement becomes sluggish, unresponsive. This moment puts into context a cutscene from earlier with a frustrating lack of control. Here, the game's not pushing you on-rails, but that's because the man who put you on those rails now wants you off.
So, anyway, that's not what this chapter is about. It's worth mentioning this moment because, for the brief amount of time it lasts, it almost manages to juxtapose itself with Syndicate's craziest moment.
This is the true potential of Syndicate. Throughout the game, you are occasionally given bits of text that don't fully flesh out the main character, but give you enough of a picture to understand that there's slightly more going on than you controlling a gruff guy with a gun. After the final boss fight, this comes full circle. For all intents and purposes, you've just killed your only friend. Now, your only friend wouldn't grieve you if he'd done the same. His lack of any compassion or empathy is shouted at you from the rooftops early on. But as you're sitting on top of his corpse, that doesn't matter. The first-person perspective becomes a distant third-person as you see the man you've been controlling all this time, afraid of what he's become.
This moment doesn't work, but I applaud it as the only part of this game where you can feel a sliver of passion from all corners of the creative paradigm behind it. It's far bolder of a moment than a game like this deserves, and had it been given time to have teeth, might threaten to redeem an otherwise routine and mundane offering.
The reason it doesn't work is simple: the bits of characterization that precede it feel half-assed. We're not inundated with the thoughts of our main character, a la Wolfenstein: The New Order (once again, foreshadowing). The character never speaks, and his presence as a silent protagonist is rarely ever commented on in the way it is for a game like Half-Life 2. To go from only a facsimile of a protagonist to a literal portrait of grief in motion is an impossible jump to make. It is indicative of something else, but before I get there, there's an elephant in the room that needs to be let out.
.
PART THREE: Two-stars rationale
Syndicate may be unremarkable, but it plays fine. Guns feel more frighteningly loud here than they do in most shooters, and although I wish this was used to a different effect, it does still make what set-pieces there are fun to go through. The mini-gun, in particular, has the best sound design of its type I've ever seen. The spectacle might be toned down, but the developers clearly knew what the game was and did their best. That thing tears, and I love it.
In terms of small additions, you can see your feet! This is still a feature that's missing in many shooters, and wouldn't have been particularly common in 2012. But the fact that it's in a game primarily developed for consoles with less than a gigabyte of memory to work with makes it all the more impressive that it works.
The secondary wireframe art style is also well done, bordering on more interesting than the "Mirrors Edge for those with visual impairments needing to get worse" that the main game goes for. I'm not sure you could pull off a feature-length, big-budget AAA with exclusively that art style, but I would love to see a much smaller indie project take it on.
There's one more thing, but I can't talk about it anymore.
.
PART FOUR: Did you do this? No, EA did it.
Syndicate's big selling point back then, the one thing all reviews for it praised at the time, was its cooperative mode. If you've played Payday before, you'll recognize what's here as what that series became after the post-Syndicate husk of Starbreeze merged with a desperate Overkill. What this essentially means is that the Co-Op here is likely very, very fun. I'll never know for myself. Owing to poor sales numbers, Payday 2, and the fact that Syndicate is now delisted from all digital storefronts (likely for that one Skrillex song), you can start a lobby for Co-Op games, and that's it. No one will ever join you. You can try to play it by yourself, but as I learned very quickly, it's not optimized for solo-play.
What this co-op mode represents is two separate wholes: Starbreeze before and after several of its developers left to found MachineGames. If you're wondering why that one particular moment from this game stood out to me enough to warrant its own section, it's because it is, transparently, one of the last remnants of what I assume the creative vision for this was up to a certain point. Many of these same developers working on The New Order, whose introspective elements are fully realized, points to that being a creative proclivity of theirs. Unfortunately, I don't think introspective first-person shooters sold to publishers like EA in the mid-to-late 2000s, so in all likelihood, Syndicate was sold on its co-op mode before anything else. With this in mind, it would not shock me if the original creative vision was gutted by a corporate mandate or two and then further pummeled by the departures that followed.
In hindsight, the two incohesive wholes that make up Syndicate make it a rough game to revisit. Every inch of this thing screams executive interference, which, given its script, is far funnier than Cyberpunk releasing broken will ever be.
2022
inb4 all of the top reviews on this are by the most popular reviewers on Backloggd, and all of their reviews read along the lines of "god of war? more like, GOD, I'm bored."
2022
I don't think there's any way I can rate this. I don't have any serious issues with it, and my praise basically ends at "pretty fun."
But hey, it's pretty fun.
But hey, it's pretty fun.
2006
In some ways, it's weird to consider that Roblox, the 2006 game that I installed on my home computer in 2008 with my father's permission (viruses that wipe your OS will do that), can almost be considered ahead of its time nowadays. What with Meta being this billion-dollar company blowing billions out of the ass with a horse pill of a laxative that has their name on it. Fuck you; I was there in '08! And it was clunky, unintuitive, ran like shit, and I only liked playing it because I was bored. But goddamn, if that Devo hat, Halloween hat, and upside-down trash can with the pattern of those things they put french fries in in low-rent fast food joints didn't look fabulous on my character. Too bad I lost that account because it was tied to an email address I don't own!
Part of Roblox's appeal goes along this line: LittleBigPlanet is a fantastic game, right? But it took Media Molecule nearly a decade to make a version of it that cut the pretense of it being a platformer away and turn it into the game engine equivalent of the copy of MTV Music Maker that Jim Guthrie performed the entirety of Morning Noon Night on. Roblox isn't a game that would come to consoles for a decade, yet it was ahead of the curve in that regard. Limited by its engine, as you may be, it pulls no punches. Want to learn how to make a game? Learn how to code. Of course, back when Roblox's selling point was "haha, funny house go boom" and "game looks like Lego," there was this air of creativity, but it was mostly limited to the T-Shirts you could put on your character for free.
Nowadays, there's a lot of impressive stuff going on. Phantom Forces is, hands down, the best shooter I've ever played through my web browser. Its closest competition, Krunker, isn't half as in-depth with its weapon customization and has movement that pales in comparison. Arsenal, for as floaty and basic as its movement and gunplay are, has a powerful core gameplay loop that, if given more polish and budget, could be a strong AA multiplayer game on Steam.
And then there's Bad Company. It's funny that I brought up Krunker because it has more in common with Bad Company than Phantom Forces. Bad Company almost plays like an arena shooter, with the best players utilizing and exploiting its swift movement system to assist their pinpoint accuracy. It's shocking to see how young its userbase seems through chat because compared to the shooters I played growing up, Bad Company is fucking hard.
But here's why I didn't mention it in the last paragraph. For as good as its shooting feels, it stands out the most for an unfortunate reason: its progression system is two cans of ass. It's not different; it's just confusing. And perhaps that's the point. See, you could grind for hours on end to unlock one of the fun weapons you tried in Gun Game—or you could buy it. It's unfortunate because things weren't like this. Or, at a glance, they seemed more concerned with the innocence of fun.
Around ten years ago, Roblox's premise of being an all-or-nothing platform led by and made for creatives was becoming clearer by the day. Deadzonezackzack made two games to prove this point: Deadzone and Deadzonezackzack's Battlefield (which was about as subtle with its inspiration as you think it is). Deadzone would later become Unturned, which arguably lacks a lot of Deadzone's charm. A fan-made remake would prove essential playing for anyone who wanted a social horror game on the platform in 2013. In the meantime, there was a flood of new, innovative games that took advantage of Roblox's sparse aesthetic and open-ended nature. A remake of the original Cops Versus Robbers, Very Important Person, and Framed all stood out as shooters that used the framework for more interesting purposes. Games like Robloxia were social simulators where you could buy a party bus and tell everyone to flee by leaving the driver's seat and firing at them with a shotgun that did no damage. Things were looking up, a little bit down, but the ups were getting stronger.
Almost a full decade after Roblox's golden age waned, I'm left with the reality that Phantom Forces has lootboxes that the developers had to patch out for Belgian players. But more than that: the signs were always there. We never thought of them as microtransactions back then. They were funny shirts that you bought with your hard-earned Tix that would let you into rooms that others could only dream of entering. It felt more prestigious than typing in 1337 to a Numpad and having a secret door open. It made games better and kept them feeling fresh.
But then Roblox got rid of Tix, and the illusion fell apart. I want to say that Roblox is a good game because I grew up with it and still occasionally play it for the handful of games I return for. I want to say that all was bright and good and will be green again. But who am I kidding? It was fucking prescient. Those VIP shirts? They're everywhere now. Sometimes, they're called Battle Passes. They used to be loot boxes, but it didn't take long for the enthusiast to realize that randomized loot generation is just shorthand for "gambling for fucks." And none of this is getting into Roblox's very shady history of barely paying their developers, barely keeping sexual predators under watch, and silencing dissent.
I'm put into this weird situation where I can't say I love this game because saying that is saying that I don't care enough not to want those things to happen. But I am inherently biased. I was raised on this game. Come on! I can't hate it. So I'm not going to rate it. I'm going to let my experiences languish in the sun, and whether you choose to read everything I write or not isn't relevant. Let it cook, let it burn, and then maybe I'll have more to say.
Part of Roblox's appeal goes along this line: LittleBigPlanet is a fantastic game, right? But it took Media Molecule nearly a decade to make a version of it that cut the pretense of it being a platformer away and turn it into the game engine equivalent of the copy of MTV Music Maker that Jim Guthrie performed the entirety of Morning Noon Night on. Roblox isn't a game that would come to consoles for a decade, yet it was ahead of the curve in that regard. Limited by its engine, as you may be, it pulls no punches. Want to learn how to make a game? Learn how to code. Of course, back when Roblox's selling point was "haha, funny house go boom" and "game looks like Lego," there was this air of creativity, but it was mostly limited to the T-Shirts you could put on your character for free.
Nowadays, there's a lot of impressive stuff going on. Phantom Forces is, hands down, the best shooter I've ever played through my web browser. Its closest competition, Krunker, isn't half as in-depth with its weapon customization and has movement that pales in comparison. Arsenal, for as floaty and basic as its movement and gunplay are, has a powerful core gameplay loop that, if given more polish and budget, could be a strong AA multiplayer game on Steam.
And then there's Bad Company. It's funny that I brought up Krunker because it has more in common with Bad Company than Phantom Forces. Bad Company almost plays like an arena shooter, with the best players utilizing and exploiting its swift movement system to assist their pinpoint accuracy. It's shocking to see how young its userbase seems through chat because compared to the shooters I played growing up, Bad Company is fucking hard.
But here's why I didn't mention it in the last paragraph. For as good as its shooting feels, it stands out the most for an unfortunate reason: its progression system is two cans of ass. It's not different; it's just confusing. And perhaps that's the point. See, you could grind for hours on end to unlock one of the fun weapons you tried in Gun Game—or you could buy it. It's unfortunate because things weren't like this. Or, at a glance, they seemed more concerned with the innocence of fun.
Around ten years ago, Roblox's premise of being an all-or-nothing platform led by and made for creatives was becoming clearer by the day. Deadzonezackzack made two games to prove this point: Deadzone and Deadzonezackzack's Battlefield (which was about as subtle with its inspiration as you think it is). Deadzone would later become Unturned, which arguably lacks a lot of Deadzone's charm. A fan-made remake would prove essential playing for anyone who wanted a social horror game on the platform in 2013. In the meantime, there was a flood of new, innovative games that took advantage of Roblox's sparse aesthetic and open-ended nature. A remake of the original Cops Versus Robbers, Very Important Person, and Framed all stood out as shooters that used the framework for more interesting purposes. Games like Robloxia were social simulators where you could buy a party bus and tell everyone to flee by leaving the driver's seat and firing at them with a shotgun that did no damage. Things were looking up, a little bit down, but the ups were getting stronger.
Almost a full decade after Roblox's golden age waned, I'm left with the reality that Phantom Forces has lootboxes that the developers had to patch out for Belgian players. But more than that: the signs were always there. We never thought of them as microtransactions back then. They were funny shirts that you bought with your hard-earned Tix that would let you into rooms that others could only dream of entering. It felt more prestigious than typing in 1337 to a Numpad and having a secret door open. It made games better and kept them feeling fresh.
But then Roblox got rid of Tix, and the illusion fell apart. I want to say that Roblox is a good game because I grew up with it and still occasionally play it for the handful of games I return for. I want to say that all was bright and good and will be green again. But who am I kidding? It was fucking prescient. Those VIP shirts? They're everywhere now. Sometimes, they're called Battle Passes. They used to be loot boxes, but it didn't take long for the enthusiast to realize that randomized loot generation is just shorthand for "gambling for fucks." And none of this is getting into Roblox's very shady history of barely paying their developers, barely keeping sexual predators under watch, and silencing dissent.
I'm put into this weird situation where I can't say I love this game because saying that is saying that I don't care enough not to want those things to happen. But I am inherently biased. I was raised on this game. Come on! I can't hate it. So I'm not going to rate it. I'm going to let my experiences languish in the sun, and whether you choose to read everything I write or not isn't relevant. Let it cook, let it burn, and then maybe I'll have more to say.
1988
It Ys what it Ys
2021
HEY GUYS, HEY GUYS.
ISN'T IT FUNNY HOW OUR GAME PLAYS LIKE ASS?
DOESN'T IT MAKE YOU LAUGH WHEN YOU HOP ON THE MOTORCYCLE AND YOU CAN'T FUCKING CONTROL IT?
HOLD ON; I HAVE A FUNNY ONE FOR YOU THAT YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE. WHAT IF I GAVE YOU A GUN, AND WHEN YOU SHOT SOMEONE WITH SAID GUN, THEY RAGDOLLED?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
REMEMBER GOAT SIMULATOR?
ISN'T THAT FUNNY?
ARE YOU LAUGHING YET?
WHY AREN'T YOU LAUGHING?
Just because a game is fun to play with people you know does not mean it's a good game. There are aspects of Just Die Already that are genuinely fun. As someone who loves verticality in games, the butt propeller is probably the best part of this game. Unlike a lot of what's in this game, its function isn't to be obnoxious and has actual use. There's also a lot of variety in the world here, which is good considering how small it is. There's a decent amount of puzzles, challenges, et cetera. None are difficult or require too much thinking to pull off, but if you're playing this game with someone like your brother, are you really paying attention to the game?
That's ultimately the fault of many of these "shit on your own, but better with other people" games. They just aren't good games. If I was your best friend in the whole wide world and I took you to the most mediocre pizza parlor in town, would you care for the pepperoni? You'd have to say that you had a good time because the cockroach hotel you were sitting in is just a setting. I've eaten at The Old Spaghetti Factory, been to places to weren't made to be annoying so an audience of pre-teens that can't even open the door could have a laugh at somebody else's expense. Maybe I'm just getting old and jaded, but comedy has to say something. Even if you're pitching your television show about it being about nothing, that says something. But for the butt of your joke to be that you're annoying? I mean, that's something you use to ease up to a joke, not the joke itself. If you don't really have anything else to say besides that other than, "haha, look at how whacky I am," I'm not amused.
Extra points for including some pretty enjoyable competitive multiplayer modes, but there's a good reason this didn't stick around on our rotation of games for long.
ISN'T IT FUNNY HOW OUR GAME PLAYS LIKE ASS?
DOESN'T IT MAKE YOU LAUGH WHEN YOU HOP ON THE MOTORCYCLE AND YOU CAN'T FUCKING CONTROL IT?
HOLD ON; I HAVE A FUNNY ONE FOR YOU THAT YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE. WHAT IF I GAVE YOU A GUN, AND WHEN YOU SHOT SOMEONE WITH SAID GUN, THEY RAGDOLLED?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
REMEMBER GOAT SIMULATOR?
ISN'T THAT FUNNY?
ARE YOU LAUGHING YET?
WHY AREN'T YOU LAUGHING?
Just because a game is fun to play with people you know does not mean it's a good game. There are aspects of Just Die Already that are genuinely fun. As someone who loves verticality in games, the butt propeller is probably the best part of this game. Unlike a lot of what's in this game, its function isn't to be obnoxious and has actual use. There's also a lot of variety in the world here, which is good considering how small it is. There's a decent amount of puzzles, challenges, et cetera. None are difficult or require too much thinking to pull off, but if you're playing this game with someone like your brother, are you really paying attention to the game?
That's ultimately the fault of many of these "shit on your own, but better with other people" games. They just aren't good games. If I was your best friend in the whole wide world and I took you to the most mediocre pizza parlor in town, would you care for the pepperoni? You'd have to say that you had a good time because the cockroach hotel you were sitting in is just a setting. I've eaten at The Old Spaghetti Factory, been to places to weren't made to be annoying so an audience of pre-teens that can't even open the door could have a laugh at somebody else's expense. Maybe I'm just getting old and jaded, but comedy has to say something. Even if you're pitching your television show about it being about nothing, that says something. But for the butt of your joke to be that you're annoying? I mean, that's something you use to ease up to a joke, not the joke itself. If you don't really have anything else to say besides that other than, "haha, look at how whacky I am," I'm not amused.
Extra points for including some pretty enjoyable competitive multiplayer modes, but there's a good reason this didn't stick around on our rotation of games for long.
I can't rate this thing; just know I'm not a fan of it.
The worst part about Social Interaction Trainer is that all jokes aside, it's actually a really good idea. As someone who's on the higher end of the spectrum, I've grown up with adults trying to "fix" me in one way or another. I'm not going to go into detail, but it was only ever effective when I was being given basic advice that could have saved my sparse social life in the years beforehand. Giving a person like me at that age control of a virtual social situation without having to feel embarrassed about "not doing well" instead of having it be an imagined one would have worked wonders. If it's done well, it has the potential to let someone grow at their own pace.
That's not what this is.
Social Interaction Trainer is a cheap joke game that makes a jab at autism before you even have the opportunity to hit the "play" button. It's not an offensive joke, but it makes it clear right off the bat that this wasn't made in good faith. Social Interaction Trainer understands the basic, unwritten rules of socialization. It does not tell you them. By that definition, it fails at its job as something that might have an inkling of practical use. It expects you to keep bashing your head into a wall until you do things the way it wants you to. It will tell you "don't do this" when you fail when it would be more practical for it to say, "maybe try this instead." It's to the game's detriment that, viewed as the joke it's intended to be, it's not a very funny one. There isn't enough absurdity involved, and when things do get silly, it's exploring the minutiae of everyday life. I would normally be a fan of that, but it doesn't work out too well, given the circumstances. Perhaps it does get funny and goes to weird places. I wouldn't know. If it wanted to pack that kind of a punch, it had to be an immediate subversion of expectations. Otherwise, you've created an unfunny joke game with a barrier to entry for anyone who doesn't think and behave like you do. You're selling it on the pretense that somebody might be foolish enough to think it has any practical advice to give them. I normally wouldn't make a big fuss about the former, but when you're trying to form an audience that's either punching down or doesn't know they're the butt of a joke you're telling, you can go fuck off. It's dimwitted ideas like this that make the concept of radical honesty difficult to commit to. If I want to be in a better state of mind, I have to let go of my resentment. Easier said than done in a case like this.
About the best way I can describe this bland turd is that the funniest joke of all is the developer who, after making one of the Steam achievements require a Patreon subscription to get unlocked had a "disagreement" with Valve that led to them raising the price to over 100 dollars. Oh, but it's funny, right? He sure showed them! The game isn't on Steam anymore. But they got owned! The game isn't on the biggest digital storefront for PC gaming, not out of ignorance or malice, but misbehavior, lowering its visibility and ensuring that the developer will actively see fewer profits. Are you surprised that someone who made a game dedicated to punching down turned out to be a bit of a belligerent prick? I'm not.
The worst part about Social Interaction Trainer is that all jokes aside, it's actually a really good idea. As someone who's on the higher end of the spectrum, I've grown up with adults trying to "fix" me in one way or another. I'm not going to go into detail, but it was only ever effective when I was being given basic advice that could have saved my sparse social life in the years beforehand. Giving a person like me at that age control of a virtual social situation without having to feel embarrassed about "not doing well" instead of having it be an imagined one would have worked wonders. If it's done well, it has the potential to let someone grow at their own pace.
That's not what this is.
Social Interaction Trainer is a cheap joke game that makes a jab at autism before you even have the opportunity to hit the "play" button. It's not an offensive joke, but it makes it clear right off the bat that this wasn't made in good faith. Social Interaction Trainer understands the basic, unwritten rules of socialization. It does not tell you them. By that definition, it fails at its job as something that might have an inkling of practical use. It expects you to keep bashing your head into a wall until you do things the way it wants you to. It will tell you "don't do this" when you fail when it would be more practical for it to say, "maybe try this instead." It's to the game's detriment that, viewed as the joke it's intended to be, it's not a very funny one. There isn't enough absurdity involved, and when things do get silly, it's exploring the minutiae of everyday life. I would normally be a fan of that, but it doesn't work out too well, given the circumstances. Perhaps it does get funny and goes to weird places. I wouldn't know. If it wanted to pack that kind of a punch, it had to be an immediate subversion of expectations. Otherwise, you've created an unfunny joke game with a barrier to entry for anyone who doesn't think and behave like you do. You're selling it on the pretense that somebody might be foolish enough to think it has any practical advice to give them. I normally wouldn't make a big fuss about the former, but when you're trying to form an audience that's either punching down or doesn't know they're the butt of a joke you're telling, you can go fuck off. It's dimwitted ideas like this that make the concept of radical honesty difficult to commit to. If I want to be in a better state of mind, I have to let go of my resentment. Easier said than done in a case like this.
About the best way I can describe this bland turd is that the funniest joke of all is the developer who, after making one of the Steam achievements require a Patreon subscription to get unlocked had a "disagreement" with Valve that led to them raising the price to over 100 dollars. Oh, but it's funny, right? He sure showed them! The game isn't on Steam anymore. But they got owned! The game isn't on the biggest digital storefront for PC gaming, not out of ignorance or malice, but misbehavior, lowering its visibility and ensuring that the developer will actively see fewer profits. Are you surprised that someone who made a game dedicated to punching down turned out to be a bit of a belligerent prick? I'm not.
In which Hitler misclicked on Russia.
It's baffling that there's no undo button here. Once you've made a decision, you're locked into it. If you're playing locally and sharing the same controller or keyboard with lots of people, it's not a matter of if you accidentally shoot yourself in the foot by clicking on the wrong thing, it's when. You would never actually do that on a board, why isn't there the option to not do it here?
Otherwise, this is fine, I guess? It doesn't have the personality of Factions, but very few of these board game adaptations do.
It's baffling that there's no undo button here. Once you've made a decision, you're locked into it. If you're playing locally and sharing the same controller or keyboard with lots of people, it's not a matter of if you accidentally shoot yourself in the foot by clicking on the wrong thing, it's when. You would never actually do that on a board, why isn't there the option to not do it here?
Otherwise, this is fine, I guess? It doesn't have the personality of Factions, but very few of these board game adaptations do.
The only reason to buy this version of the game is for the Switch version, unless you haven't already bought it in the past. You can buy it to play it on your Steam Deck, but as is the case with a lot of PC games without controller support, trying to get that to work was janky at best, unplayable at worst. Really goes to show that there's a little more nuance to platform differences than "I drew my platform of choice as an anime girl with massive tits and yours is small and weak," because the Switch version of this is surprisingly good. Had there been an RCT3 port on the GameCube, it would probably have been hacked up and hardly recognizable. But almost 20 years later, the Switch version is the complete PC package, $10 restrooms and all. The controls aren't the most optimal, but that's to be expected. These kinds of games don't "work" on consoles in the traditional sense. But if you can ignore those warts, this is a portable version of RCT3 that can fit in your pocket, and it's glorious.
2022
(For personal reasons, I've decided against marking these types of impressions as reviews in the future. If you want to see more of them, be sure to check out the list I'm compiling of each.)
This is the most profound case study on how following industry trends a little too closely can bite you in the ass I've ever seen. The question of "in ten years, will you remember Babylon's Fall" is about as rhetorical as one can get; in less than twelve months, you won't even be able to play Babylon's Fall. And need I remind you, this game came out this year. I'd say it's unprecedented if it weren't so fucking depressing. Here you have this somewhat large group of people banding together to create something that, cynical or not, has pieces of them inside of it. I mean, sure, it's an aggressively cynical experience, but come on, it's there. And then what? The game comes out and, to the chagrin of its money-hungry publisher, is birthed to a mother who was warned her child would be a stillborn nine months in advance. Nobody buys it, but people are talking about it. So they create updates and try to get them talking about it for the right reasons—no Bueno. Sony released Morbius twice, and Platinum Games made more content for Babylon's Fall. Tomatoes, tamatoes. By the end of the day, they're staring at a pipeline of content that, even if it's better than it has any right to be, is going to see about as much exposure as the Backloggd page for Terrifying 9/11. Regardless if the decision came down to the developer or the publisher (I'm willing to wager it was the latter), you have to at least have some empathy for the developers in that experience. Their baby, their very, very mediocre baby, looks like Butthead.
Earlier this week, GameStop was giving away copies of Babylon's Fall for free when they weren't outright destroying them. The name No Man's Sky has grown to have a double meaning. It's the game's name, but it's also what many a gaming enthusiast will recognize as a solid redemption arc. Business doesn't make for involving storytelling unless you're playing a strategy game. And even then, are you really going to tell me that looking at fictional stock prices for ten hours is as gripping as the second season of Fargo? "Redemption arcs" don't happen. Perception can change over time, but a subset of enthusiasts will always howl at Sean Murray's name because of what went down in 2016. If you want to say that Cyberpunk is a good game, that's fine now, but eight years from where I'm standing today, that might still be a controversial statement with the wrong crowd. If you want your perception to improve, there has to be passion. No Man's Sky might have lacked a lot of promised features at launch, but the promise of a galaxy with a near-infinite number of planets to explore without explicitly being told to do so was still compelling. And Cyberpunk, buggy and half-baked as it was, was still pretty fun. What chance did Babylon's Fall have outside of the pedigree of its developer? What, you're expecting me to believe that James Franco will remake As I Lie Dying and not make it bad? Names don't mean anything. "What's in a name?—"nothing. Talent shifts, and among the talent that stays or is as competent as the talent that came before, humans don't breathe binary. If you're a creative person at all, falling on your face every so often is like a Monday. We don't like Mondays, but who are we going to complain to about that?
Babylon's Fall was shot in the foot early, and that wound dug deep. If one is to believe that this grabbag of investor-approved buzzwords is to fault for not attracting enough attention, they have to recognize that.
This is the most profound case study on how following industry trends a little too closely can bite you in the ass I've ever seen. The question of "in ten years, will you remember Babylon's Fall" is about as rhetorical as one can get; in less than twelve months, you won't even be able to play Babylon's Fall. And need I remind you, this game came out this year. I'd say it's unprecedented if it weren't so fucking depressing. Here you have this somewhat large group of people banding together to create something that, cynical or not, has pieces of them inside of it. I mean, sure, it's an aggressively cynical experience, but come on, it's there. And then what? The game comes out and, to the chagrin of its money-hungry publisher, is birthed to a mother who was warned her child would be a stillborn nine months in advance. Nobody buys it, but people are talking about it. So they create updates and try to get them talking about it for the right reasons—no Bueno. Sony released Morbius twice, and Platinum Games made more content for Babylon's Fall. Tomatoes, tamatoes. By the end of the day, they're staring at a pipeline of content that, even if it's better than it has any right to be, is going to see about as much exposure as the Backloggd page for Terrifying 9/11. Regardless if the decision came down to the developer or the publisher (I'm willing to wager it was the latter), you have to at least have some empathy for the developers in that experience. Their baby, their very, very mediocre baby, looks like Butthead.
Earlier this week, GameStop was giving away copies of Babylon's Fall for free when they weren't outright destroying them. The name No Man's Sky has grown to have a double meaning. It's the game's name, but it's also what many a gaming enthusiast will recognize as a solid redemption arc. Business doesn't make for involving storytelling unless you're playing a strategy game. And even then, are you really going to tell me that looking at fictional stock prices for ten hours is as gripping as the second season of Fargo? "Redemption arcs" don't happen. Perception can change over time, but a subset of enthusiasts will always howl at Sean Murray's name because of what went down in 2016. If you want to say that Cyberpunk is a good game, that's fine now, but eight years from where I'm standing today, that might still be a controversial statement with the wrong crowd. If you want your perception to improve, there has to be passion. No Man's Sky might have lacked a lot of promised features at launch, but the promise of a galaxy with a near-infinite number of planets to explore without explicitly being told to do so was still compelling. And Cyberpunk, buggy and half-baked as it was, was still pretty fun. What chance did Babylon's Fall have outside of the pedigree of its developer? What, you're expecting me to believe that James Franco will remake As I Lie Dying and not make it bad? Names don't mean anything. "What's in a name?—"nothing. Talent shifts, and among the talent that stays or is as competent as the talent that came before, humans don't breathe binary. If you're a creative person at all, falling on your face every so often is like a Monday. We don't like Mondays, but who are we going to complain to about that?
Babylon's Fall was shot in the foot early, and that wound dug deep. If one is to believe that this grabbag of investor-approved buzzwords is to fault for not attracting enough attention, they have to recognize that.
I honestly have no fucking idea what this was or how to even rate it, but I laughed my ass off in more than a few areas. Goofy, unpredictable, and surreal as hell, it more than lives up to its whacky name.
Gotta be real with you, though, I was expecting a reference to the one Steely Dan song that's literally about the apocalypse. Perhaps that's the distorted song that plays when you boot this up? I'm a massive Dan fan, and even I couldn't recognize the song being fucked with. However, however, Deacon Blues is my favorite Steely Dan song (with The Caves of Altamira in close second), so uhhh, can I get the based department on the line? Thank you.
Gotta be real with you, though, I was expecting a reference to the one Steely Dan song that's literally about the apocalypse. Perhaps that's the distorted song that plays when you boot this up? I'm a massive Dan fan, and even I couldn't recognize the song being fucked with. However, however, Deacon Blues is my favorite Steely Dan song (with The Caves of Altamira in close second), so uhhh, can I get the based department on the line? Thank you.
2013
Moreso than most games I've written about, it's hard to articulate my experiences with Grand Theft Auto V. As the best-selling action game of all time and subsequently one of the most recognized pieces of entertainment of our time, there's not much new ground to cover. No matter your issues with the game, it's consistently made billions of dollars.
As somebody who likes to write about the games in my free time, a part of me feels like it would be safe to stop there. But honestly, that's an attitude that feels almost antithetical to the points made ad nauseam through this game's narrative. Caught somewhere between an old punk band playing their greatest hits to an aging audience that sees them as part of the establishment they once rioted against and a new punk band taking the opening slot to a welcome applause from the same crowd, Grand Theft Auto V is both beholden to the dirge of the formula that its predecessors helped popularize and bolstered by the effort it makes to move away from what was becoming stale at the time. As a playground for destruction, it provides the requisite tools. It allows players to create goofy scenarios of their own accord without ever fearing that the player might veer off onto a course that isn't related to the narrative or a side quest of some sort. It's no Saints Row 2, but it actually runs at a stable framerate and is more readily available, so it's much easier to play nowadays. The two pillars of its sandbox, driving, and shooting, wouldn't exactly make compelling games on their own. Of the two, the driving is arguably better. But there's enough there that, if a team wanted to take what was there and morph it into something more small-scale, it would hardly be a fool's errand to get it up to snuff. Combined as they are in a massive open-world sandbox, there's enough there to provide hours of entertainment away from the main quest. The driving strikes a perfect balance between weightiness and floatiness, never absolutely embracing either camp but providing enough of the goods from both to create something simultaneously challenging and approachable to someone who's never picked up a controller before. The combat feels like a watered-down version of Max Payne 3 with the weapon wheel and abilities from Read Dead Redemption, which is to say that it mostly works but isn't anything spectacular. Watered-down or not, Max Payne 3 was a really fun game, though, and that shines through here. You won't be diving off of staircases or doing any of the crazy action moves that you did in that game, which I do believe makes this the lesser game. But in exchange for the replayability that hurdling yourself off a ledge in slow-motion while systematically slaughtering everyone around you offers, there's a wonderfully eclectic collection of weapons on offer. Not all of them have as much use as others; outside of the one mission where it's required, using a jerry can and then shooting the gas trail feels jankier than Postal 2, and I mean that with sincerity. Almost everything else, though, is lots of fun to play around with, in and out of story content. Where things do start to falter a little bit is that the open world content is too inconsistently interesting for a 100% completion playthrough to feel like anything but a massive chore. I know this is the kind of opinion that'll get me downvoted off of Reddit within a microsecond, but I honestly think Cyberpunk 2077 plays with its setting in more interesting ways. "Look around the world and collect a ton of things" sounds like a lot of fun until you realize that you have to collect 50 of the fuckers, and that's just one quest. It begs you not to be too goal-oriented while asking you to see if you can complete as many of its arbitrary goals as you can. And none of that would be a serious issue if the things you were collecting felt tangible in any way. A torn piece of a letter is a torn piece of a letter. You don't get to see the letter as you're putting it back together, and the game doesn't use the letter in any mysterious way that might interest you in collecting all fifty shreds. Going back to Cyberpunk, the one piece of its world that did feel like a massive checklist, mini-boss fights, is used to expand its setting. It's not enough that you've killed or incapacitated someone who was bugging out; you have to look around to understand why they went haywire in the first place so the person you're corresponding with can find better ways to help that person if you kept them alive. It's intriguing, builds on top of, and, in some cases, recontextualizes what you know while leaving a fair amount of the event to your imagination. If even one of the exhausting number of spaceship parts this game asks you to collect had something similar, I'd be going under bridges all the time. That's not to say that there isn't anything of the sort that's interesting here. There's a side-mission where the game asks you to find places that look eerily similar to screenshots sent to you so you can track down suspects. If the developers kept it at that level or tried to do something that wasn't just "find all of the stuff!" I wouldn't be complaining. But for fucks sake, you could at least make a murder mystery interesting without asking the player to fetch an endless number of collectibles for it.
And then there's the story.
I honestly don't know how to feel about Grand Theft Auto V's narrative. It's entertaining in a few areas, anti-climatic in others, and a bit too much of one good thing in-between all of the cracks left over by both. If you intend to spend 30 hours with a lighthearted action romp that doesn't take itself too seriously, you probably won't mind this. If you can't stand it when characters in a story are just stand-ins for whatever the writer's beliefs on society are and barely have anything recognizable past that, I don't have very good news to tell you. The three leads do manage to surpass this through the physical and vocal performances of the actors behind them, but I don't believe the rest of the cast fares any better. The best it gets is Trevor's drug buddies, but that's because Trevor is a fun character to play straight off of. Everyone else falls into this slippery slope where if everything is satirical, it starts to lose its bite. The main missions are at least pretty fun, even if it has the Rockstar problem of "every mission needs to have a shootout, and if not a shootout, then a car chase, and if not a car chase, then something monotonous to play off of your expectations of both." I don't blame anyone for never being bothered to see this game to its credits because, fun as that may be, it's a little too obvious in its structure. And that's not even talking about the other massive insecurity Rockstar's singleplayer games have struggled with since GTA III. The most fun moments I've had in Grand Theft Auto V's main stories have been when I've found incredibly arbitrary ways to fail. Planting a bomb on the door of a clueless janitor's home, not seeing him react to it when he gets to said door, and then blowing it up in his face is some Looney Tunes shit, and the game telling you that the obviously dead janitor was just "spooked" is never not hilarious. There are missions in Grand Theft Auto V where the game accounts for what the player is doing in a given situation; none of the fun ones are part of the main quest.
Once you've beaten Grand Theft Auto V and seen all you intend to see, there's not much to do outside of playing the aggressively monetized online mode. Except for using mods to swap all pedestrian models with Goku, replacing the textures of one specific building in the world with the shittiest looking McDonalds you've ever seen, replacing several of the ads in the open world with weeb shit, and then installing a mod menu to make every car start at a thousand miles per hour so you can steal a bus and make Speed 3 a real movie. Is that a run-on sentence? Probably. But I don't care. The modding scene for GTA games has always been out there, and it's no different here—which is why ennui runs through my system when I say you shouldn't buy this game if you intend to support the creators of such projects. In short: Fuck Take-Two Interactive. To elaborate, Take-Two Interactive likes to dick over its fans who dare to modify their game, seeing their contributions as blasphemous if they don't align with their corporate aspirations. It's ironic that I brought up Cyberpunk earlier because these motherfuckers would fit right in with that universe. But most ironic of all, the CEO of Take-Two said that his company would never release a game like that and that they're focused on quality, yadda yadda yadda. Less than a year later, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy—The Definitive Edition was pooped onto store shelves. Whoops! It turns out that when you talk out of your ass like that, people are less likely to trust anything you say going forward. Especially when you remove a lot of the wonderful work your fans are creating because you see it as "competition." What a sick joke!
As somebody who likes to write about the games in my free time, a part of me feels like it would be safe to stop there. But honestly, that's an attitude that feels almost antithetical to the points made ad nauseam through this game's narrative. Caught somewhere between an old punk band playing their greatest hits to an aging audience that sees them as part of the establishment they once rioted against and a new punk band taking the opening slot to a welcome applause from the same crowd, Grand Theft Auto V is both beholden to the dirge of the formula that its predecessors helped popularize and bolstered by the effort it makes to move away from what was becoming stale at the time. As a playground for destruction, it provides the requisite tools. It allows players to create goofy scenarios of their own accord without ever fearing that the player might veer off onto a course that isn't related to the narrative or a side quest of some sort. It's no Saints Row 2, but it actually runs at a stable framerate and is more readily available, so it's much easier to play nowadays. The two pillars of its sandbox, driving, and shooting, wouldn't exactly make compelling games on their own. Of the two, the driving is arguably better. But there's enough there that, if a team wanted to take what was there and morph it into something more small-scale, it would hardly be a fool's errand to get it up to snuff. Combined as they are in a massive open-world sandbox, there's enough there to provide hours of entertainment away from the main quest. The driving strikes a perfect balance between weightiness and floatiness, never absolutely embracing either camp but providing enough of the goods from both to create something simultaneously challenging and approachable to someone who's never picked up a controller before. The combat feels like a watered-down version of Max Payne 3 with the weapon wheel and abilities from Read Dead Redemption, which is to say that it mostly works but isn't anything spectacular. Watered-down or not, Max Payne 3 was a really fun game, though, and that shines through here. You won't be diving off of staircases or doing any of the crazy action moves that you did in that game, which I do believe makes this the lesser game. But in exchange for the replayability that hurdling yourself off a ledge in slow-motion while systematically slaughtering everyone around you offers, there's a wonderfully eclectic collection of weapons on offer. Not all of them have as much use as others; outside of the one mission where it's required, using a jerry can and then shooting the gas trail feels jankier than Postal 2, and I mean that with sincerity. Almost everything else, though, is lots of fun to play around with, in and out of story content. Where things do start to falter a little bit is that the open world content is too inconsistently interesting for a 100% completion playthrough to feel like anything but a massive chore. I know this is the kind of opinion that'll get me downvoted off of Reddit within a microsecond, but I honestly think Cyberpunk 2077 plays with its setting in more interesting ways. "Look around the world and collect a ton of things" sounds like a lot of fun until you realize that you have to collect 50 of the fuckers, and that's just one quest. It begs you not to be too goal-oriented while asking you to see if you can complete as many of its arbitrary goals as you can. And none of that would be a serious issue if the things you were collecting felt tangible in any way. A torn piece of a letter is a torn piece of a letter. You don't get to see the letter as you're putting it back together, and the game doesn't use the letter in any mysterious way that might interest you in collecting all fifty shreds. Going back to Cyberpunk, the one piece of its world that did feel like a massive checklist, mini-boss fights, is used to expand its setting. It's not enough that you've killed or incapacitated someone who was bugging out; you have to look around to understand why they went haywire in the first place so the person you're corresponding with can find better ways to help that person if you kept them alive. It's intriguing, builds on top of, and, in some cases, recontextualizes what you know while leaving a fair amount of the event to your imagination. If even one of the exhausting number of spaceship parts this game asks you to collect had something similar, I'd be going under bridges all the time. That's not to say that there isn't anything of the sort that's interesting here. There's a side-mission where the game asks you to find places that look eerily similar to screenshots sent to you so you can track down suspects. If the developers kept it at that level or tried to do something that wasn't just "find all of the stuff!" I wouldn't be complaining. But for fucks sake, you could at least make a murder mystery interesting without asking the player to fetch an endless number of collectibles for it.
And then there's the story.
I honestly don't know how to feel about Grand Theft Auto V's narrative. It's entertaining in a few areas, anti-climatic in others, and a bit too much of one good thing in-between all of the cracks left over by both. If you intend to spend 30 hours with a lighthearted action romp that doesn't take itself too seriously, you probably won't mind this. If you can't stand it when characters in a story are just stand-ins for whatever the writer's beliefs on society are and barely have anything recognizable past that, I don't have very good news to tell you. The three leads do manage to surpass this through the physical and vocal performances of the actors behind them, but I don't believe the rest of the cast fares any better. The best it gets is Trevor's drug buddies, but that's because Trevor is a fun character to play straight off of. Everyone else falls into this slippery slope where if everything is satirical, it starts to lose its bite. The main missions are at least pretty fun, even if it has the Rockstar problem of "every mission needs to have a shootout, and if not a shootout, then a car chase, and if not a car chase, then something monotonous to play off of your expectations of both." I don't blame anyone for never being bothered to see this game to its credits because, fun as that may be, it's a little too obvious in its structure. And that's not even talking about the other massive insecurity Rockstar's singleplayer games have struggled with since GTA III. The most fun moments I've had in Grand Theft Auto V's main stories have been when I've found incredibly arbitrary ways to fail. Planting a bomb on the door of a clueless janitor's home, not seeing him react to it when he gets to said door, and then blowing it up in his face is some Looney Tunes shit, and the game telling you that the obviously dead janitor was just "spooked" is never not hilarious. There are missions in Grand Theft Auto V where the game accounts for what the player is doing in a given situation; none of the fun ones are part of the main quest.
Once you've beaten Grand Theft Auto V and seen all you intend to see, there's not much to do outside of playing the aggressively monetized online mode. Except for using mods to swap all pedestrian models with Goku, replacing the textures of one specific building in the world with the shittiest looking McDonalds you've ever seen, replacing several of the ads in the open world with weeb shit, and then installing a mod menu to make every car start at a thousand miles per hour so you can steal a bus and make Speed 3 a real movie. Is that a run-on sentence? Probably. But I don't care. The modding scene for GTA games has always been out there, and it's no different here—which is why ennui runs through my system when I say you shouldn't buy this game if you intend to support the creators of such projects. In short: Fuck Take-Two Interactive. To elaborate, Take-Two Interactive likes to dick over its fans who dare to modify their game, seeing their contributions as blasphemous if they don't align with their corporate aspirations. It's ironic that I brought up Cyberpunk earlier because these motherfuckers would fit right in with that universe. But most ironic of all, the CEO of Take-Two said that his company would never release a game like that and that they're focused on quality, yadda yadda yadda. Less than a year later, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy—The Definitive Edition was pooped onto store shelves. Whoops! It turns out that when you talk out of your ass like that, people are less likely to trust anything you say going forward. Especially when you remove a lot of the wonderful work your fans are creating because you see it as "competition." What a sick joke!
For some ungodly reason, this barebones remaster of an Xbox Live Indie Arcade remnant is one of the games you'll find on PlayStation's answer to GamePass, a service packed to the brim with gems like Balan Wonderworld and Left Alive. All jokes aside, the service isn't that bad, and if you're looking to get into gaming and have a PlayStation, it's a pretty good deal. But yeah, this game kind of blows.
Well, okay, it's not that bad. It's just incredibly rudimentary. According to this testimonial by the developer on the game's development, it was a project not born out of love but as a reaction to their other game being a flop. Their solution? Fuck it; I don't know, make a zombie game. What felt like a glorified flash game in 2010 now feels incredibly dated in 2022, let alone in 2017, when this remaster launched initially. And when I say "dated," I mean that as more than a descriptor for this game's premise. You can't aim and move at the same time; you have to awkwardly aim in the direction that you want to move and do that instead. If you're playing Co-Op locally, which is the preferred way of playing any multiplayer game with friends or family, you'll soon realize that this is a defense game where only the first player can buy anything. You unlock upgrades after each night; these, too, cannot be added by anyone but the first player. And none of this is to mention how devoid this game is of anything resembling character. Sure, this remaster looks better than the original, but aside from doing the bare minimum to get this XBLIA game "up to snuff," no work has been done towards making it look good to the eye. Maps are barren, characters only exude personality from the skin they have, and zombies shamble toward you in typical zombie-like fashion. Playing this and reading the article I linked to above, it makes sense that the original game was made out of desperation rather than passion. But this remaster was made long after the zombie craze, so maybe there's some passion in tact? Eh? They both play the same, and if you played this with your friends on your 360 back in the day, you're just going to get the same experience with a different controller. There are a few quality of life changes; the most noticeable being that you can now walk through barricades in build mode. But for the most part, the only thing about this remaster that's changed the more than half-decade-old game it's polishing up is the age of the person playing it.
None of this is to say that the groundwork for this game isn't solid or that you can't have a good time in it. It's like how I enjoy both Taco Bell and Chipotle, but given the option to feed myself something that lasts me for half a day or more, Taco Bell isn't even something I consider. I can settle for a Doritos Locos Taco and a Five Layer Burrito if needs be, but if I have the opportunity, a single burrito from Chipotle will do more than both of those and the requisite soda they pack their combos with combined. If you think Chiptole is gross and you prefer the Five Layer Burrito, I'm not shaming you. But I know what kind of food I enjoy more, so, eh.
Two stars.
(And yes, I'm aware that that last paragraph is the most "hi, I'm American and I'm slowly eating myself into a grave" thing you'll read all day)
Well, okay, it's not that bad. It's just incredibly rudimentary. According to this testimonial by the developer on the game's development, it was a project not born out of love but as a reaction to their other game being a flop. Their solution? Fuck it; I don't know, make a zombie game. What felt like a glorified flash game in 2010 now feels incredibly dated in 2022, let alone in 2017, when this remaster launched initially. And when I say "dated," I mean that as more than a descriptor for this game's premise. You can't aim and move at the same time; you have to awkwardly aim in the direction that you want to move and do that instead. If you're playing Co-Op locally, which is the preferred way of playing any multiplayer game with friends or family, you'll soon realize that this is a defense game where only the first player can buy anything. You unlock upgrades after each night; these, too, cannot be added by anyone but the first player. And none of this is to mention how devoid this game is of anything resembling character. Sure, this remaster looks better than the original, but aside from doing the bare minimum to get this XBLIA game "up to snuff," no work has been done towards making it look good to the eye. Maps are barren, characters only exude personality from the skin they have, and zombies shamble toward you in typical zombie-like fashion. Playing this and reading the article I linked to above, it makes sense that the original game was made out of desperation rather than passion. But this remaster was made long after the zombie craze, so maybe there's some passion in tact? Eh? They both play the same, and if you played this with your friends on your 360 back in the day, you're just going to get the same experience with a different controller. There are a few quality of life changes; the most noticeable being that you can now walk through barricades in build mode. But for the most part, the only thing about this remaster that's changed the more than half-decade-old game it's polishing up is the age of the person playing it.
None of this is to say that the groundwork for this game isn't solid or that you can't have a good time in it. It's like how I enjoy both Taco Bell and Chipotle, but given the option to feed myself something that lasts me for half a day or more, Taco Bell isn't even something I consider. I can settle for a Doritos Locos Taco and a Five Layer Burrito if needs be, but if I have the opportunity, a single burrito from Chipotle will do more than both of those and the requisite soda they pack their combos with combined. If you think Chiptole is gross and you prefer the Five Layer Burrito, I'm not shaming you. But I know what kind of food I enjoy more, so, eh.
Two stars.
(And yes, I'm aware that that last paragraph is the most "hi, I'm American and I'm slowly eating myself into a grave" thing you'll read all day)
I haven't really ever played a game like this; I tend to ignore a lot of the current indie space. But I really, really enjoyed this. Melancholic, slightly harrowing, and even cute in moments, it's a touching story that deeply resonated with me, even though I don't personally have experience with the main subject. Especially when it comes to stories with subjects like this, that's an impressive feat. It would also be remiss of me not to mention how good the art is. It's not like, "wow, I'm blown away, nice graphics, video game." But, like, shit. It looks pretty good, y'know.
2019
I wrote four paragraphs about this game and realized I hadn't touched its challenge mode. Consider this re-review my definitive piece on this game.
Red Hot Vengeance is not "too good to be a free game"; it's a "this wouldn't be worth my time if I had to pay money for it" game. Ostensibly a cross between a few of the various systems in Max Payne and Hotline Miami with an isometric perspective, it's got a lot going for it at a surface level. It's fast, violent, and has a nice visual aesthetic. But this game was made by only two people on an engine not meant to make games in 3D, and man, it shows.
The campaign of Red Hot Vengeance lasts about an hour. The game is free, and while the pacing isn't as consistent as it could be, there's still more than enough to appreciate. At its best, Red Hot Vengenace will have you improvising action scenes in a way that Hotline Miami wasn't flexible enough to do. You'll be switching between your two side arms and one big arm to create chains of destruction, sneaking up on unaware guards and bathing in the chaos you create. The controls, while cumbersome on a keyboard to the point of frustration, flow like the wind on a controller. Granted, your aim assist is set to high, and you have auto-reload turned on (both of which are off by default), you'll probably enjoy the game. The two significant issues with the campaign, the areas where its production value is evidently lacking, are its voice acting and cutscenes. The cutscenes occasionally have some nice background art and have a nice flow to them, but anything that's not the background screams 'DeviantArt' in the worst way possible. The story itself is an edgy mess of nonsense that, like the DeviantArt slideshows it presents itself with, is so contrived in its central conflict that it's laughable. The voice acting in combat is terrible. Poorly read lines repeat themselves to the point of inducing nausea. And it's not much better in cutscenes. Again, on par with the story and presentation, the sole voice actor responsible for most of this game's dialog sounds like a teenager making a bad grown-up impression. If you ever intend to play this, you should absolutely skip all of the cutscenes and mutate the dialog. You aren't missing out on anything special, and experiencing this game with context makes it a worse experience.
Had I not played the challenges, I would leave it there—6/10, clearly flawed but inoffensive. Having played the challenges, I'm in a compromising position. The challenges exacerbate the pacing issues I alluded to. Some are genuinely fun and follow a straightforward progression of difficulty without much hassle. The star of the show here is a vampire-like challenge where you bleed to death within seconds and can only heal yourself by killing. You're forced to rethink your approach to the game completely, and it turns an otherwise okay shooter into a frantic rhythm game with a solid flow-state. There's another challenge where enemies explode when you kill them, so you have to chain them together. These both remind me more of TimeSplitters than anything else, which is great at first until you realize that this game is not above some of the bullshit those games occasionally delved into. Only, it's worse here. The worst TimeSplitters challenges struggle with a few design quirks and/or are set back by some of the technical limitations of the platforms the game was on. Red Hot Vengenace doesn't have much of an excuse for the technical side of things, but unlike TimeSplitters, when the challenges in this game are bad, they're awful. Teach your grandmother how to knit eggs atrocious. For every two or three of those unique challenges I mentioned, there are four or five that are either too easy or too artificially difficult for their own good. The worst offender sees an infinite swarm of police spawn on you as you try to navigate a maze with limited ammo. Both challenges in this format embody everything wrong with this game. If you're playing on a keyboard, the clunky movement controls will fuck you up nine times out of ten. You'll want to take cover behind a wall, only to realize that you've accidentally stumbled out into the open and died immediately. Reloading breaks the flow, meaning you'll find yourself in a trap of backtracking to your detriment because pushing forward without firepower means death. Enemy AI can shoot faster than you reload and practically have infinite ammo, too, so if you're caught in a corner and run out of ammo, there isn't an option for you that excludes death. Health kits are sparse, which becomes a serious issue when the red health bar under you is obscured by splashes of blood everywhere. You have to do everything as fast as possible, which means that playing with anything but a controller is the least optimal thing to do. The neverending barrage of distant enemy AI means that you can't consistently lock-on to enemies, and the aimbot accuracy of the AI outnumbers what your feeble joysticks can do even with the strongest aim assist mode turned on. I pity the masochists who try to beat it without dying. It is an endless gauntlet of some of the worst game design I've seen in recent memory. It's not fun, it's not fair enough to be challenging, and by the time you find out that the more creative challenges only show up once because there are two of these fucking things, you'll want never to touch the challenges again.
A lot of what makes and breaks this game is that it's a 3D game built in Gamemaker Studio. Gamemaker Studio, in case you weren't aware, is the engine that was used to create games like Undertale and Hotline Miami. It's a versatile tool for making 2D games. But, if you love hurting yourself, the option to try and make something in 3D is there. The community loves to proclaim that you can create anything that you want to do, but take it from a developer that has spent over seven years trying to make a Silent Hill homage in this engine: "Trying to make a 3D game in Gamemaker is like trying to build a house with a hammer". It's impressive, then, that these developers managed to make this game work as well as it does. But the clunky keyboard controls and lack of detail in its visuals transparently highlight the shortcomings of such a method. If you want to make a 3D game, don't use Gamemaker. I don't care what the community says; it's not worth the pain involved.
Red Hot Vengeance is not "too good to be a free game"; it's a "this wouldn't be worth my time if I had to pay money for it" game. Ostensibly a cross between a few of the various systems in Max Payne and Hotline Miami with an isometric perspective, it's got a lot going for it at a surface level. It's fast, violent, and has a nice visual aesthetic. But this game was made by only two people on an engine not meant to make games in 3D, and man, it shows.
The campaign of Red Hot Vengeance lasts about an hour. The game is free, and while the pacing isn't as consistent as it could be, there's still more than enough to appreciate. At its best, Red Hot Vengenace will have you improvising action scenes in a way that Hotline Miami wasn't flexible enough to do. You'll be switching between your two side arms and one big arm to create chains of destruction, sneaking up on unaware guards and bathing in the chaos you create. The controls, while cumbersome on a keyboard to the point of frustration, flow like the wind on a controller. Granted, your aim assist is set to high, and you have auto-reload turned on (both of which are off by default), you'll probably enjoy the game. The two significant issues with the campaign, the areas where its production value is evidently lacking, are its voice acting and cutscenes. The cutscenes occasionally have some nice background art and have a nice flow to them, but anything that's not the background screams 'DeviantArt' in the worst way possible. The story itself is an edgy mess of nonsense that, like the DeviantArt slideshows it presents itself with, is so contrived in its central conflict that it's laughable. The voice acting in combat is terrible. Poorly read lines repeat themselves to the point of inducing nausea. And it's not much better in cutscenes. Again, on par with the story and presentation, the sole voice actor responsible for most of this game's dialog sounds like a teenager making a bad grown-up impression. If you ever intend to play this, you should absolutely skip all of the cutscenes and mutate the dialog. You aren't missing out on anything special, and experiencing this game with context makes it a worse experience.
Had I not played the challenges, I would leave it there—6/10, clearly flawed but inoffensive. Having played the challenges, I'm in a compromising position. The challenges exacerbate the pacing issues I alluded to. Some are genuinely fun and follow a straightforward progression of difficulty without much hassle. The star of the show here is a vampire-like challenge where you bleed to death within seconds and can only heal yourself by killing. You're forced to rethink your approach to the game completely, and it turns an otherwise okay shooter into a frantic rhythm game with a solid flow-state. There's another challenge where enemies explode when you kill them, so you have to chain them together. These both remind me more of TimeSplitters than anything else, which is great at first until you realize that this game is not above some of the bullshit those games occasionally delved into. Only, it's worse here. The worst TimeSplitters challenges struggle with a few design quirks and/or are set back by some of the technical limitations of the platforms the game was on. Red Hot Vengenace doesn't have much of an excuse for the technical side of things, but unlike TimeSplitters, when the challenges in this game are bad, they're awful. Teach your grandmother how to knit eggs atrocious. For every two or three of those unique challenges I mentioned, there are four or five that are either too easy or too artificially difficult for their own good. The worst offender sees an infinite swarm of police spawn on you as you try to navigate a maze with limited ammo. Both challenges in this format embody everything wrong with this game. If you're playing on a keyboard, the clunky movement controls will fuck you up nine times out of ten. You'll want to take cover behind a wall, only to realize that you've accidentally stumbled out into the open and died immediately. Reloading breaks the flow, meaning you'll find yourself in a trap of backtracking to your detriment because pushing forward without firepower means death. Enemy AI can shoot faster than you reload and practically have infinite ammo, too, so if you're caught in a corner and run out of ammo, there isn't an option for you that excludes death. Health kits are sparse, which becomes a serious issue when the red health bar under you is obscured by splashes of blood everywhere. You have to do everything as fast as possible, which means that playing with anything but a controller is the least optimal thing to do. The neverending barrage of distant enemy AI means that you can't consistently lock-on to enemies, and the aimbot accuracy of the AI outnumbers what your feeble joysticks can do even with the strongest aim assist mode turned on. I pity the masochists who try to beat it without dying. It is an endless gauntlet of some of the worst game design I've seen in recent memory. It's not fun, it's not fair enough to be challenging, and by the time you find out that the more creative challenges only show up once because there are two of these fucking things, you'll want never to touch the challenges again.
A lot of what makes and breaks this game is that it's a 3D game built in Gamemaker Studio. Gamemaker Studio, in case you weren't aware, is the engine that was used to create games like Undertale and Hotline Miami. It's a versatile tool for making 2D games. But, if you love hurting yourself, the option to try and make something in 3D is there. The community loves to proclaim that you can create anything that you want to do, but take it from a developer that has spent over seven years trying to make a Silent Hill homage in this engine: "Trying to make a 3D game in Gamemaker is like trying to build a house with a hammer". It's impressive, then, that these developers managed to make this game work as well as it does. But the clunky keyboard controls and lack of detail in its visuals transparently highlight the shortcomings of such a method. If you want to make a 3D game, don't use Gamemaker. I don't care what the community says; it's not worth the pain involved.