brudanos
899 reviews liked by brudanos
GoldenEye 007
2023
(Had originally posted this on the regular GoldenEye page, but then the Xbox version got its own entry)
Cleared the whole game on 00 Agent and unlocked all the cheats, something I'd never done before! It was great to finally do this two and a half decades after having played GoldenEye for the first time, and some of these levels really gave me a run for my money!
- Facility on 00 Agent in under 2:05: This is to unlock the Invincible Bond cheat. I barely scraped by after about an hour and a half of trying, only to realize that you can do the move+strafe speed doubling on Xbox if you change your D-pad to "Move + Strafe". WHOOPS THAT WOULD HAVE MADE IT EASIER
- Archives on 00 Agent in under 1:20: This is one where you have to absolutely nail the optimal route. Is this what speedrunning feels like??
- Control on Secret Agent in under 10:00 and again on 00 Agent: This legitimately took me over 3 hours of play time to beat these twice. The speed isn't a concern, if you manage to survive and don't screw around, you'll definitely make it in under 10 minutes. What really surprised me is that the issue wasn't Natalya dying. In fact, she only died once! Blowing up the downstairs mainframes right away will open up holes in the bulletproof glass panes that funnel the enemies to a smaller general area than if they break through themselves. The problem was just staying alive long enough for Natalya do get all the computer work done (accomplished this 80% of the time) and then making it to the elevator without keeling over. The saddest moment of this playthrough was making it to the last section with plenty of health, but accidentally throwing the last remote mine on the ceiling juuuuust far enough away from the mainframe behind the last door, softlocking the level. I killed every guy in the whole place, no one had a grenade or anything I could use! GAH
- Caverns on 00 Agent: I didn't realize how much of an ammo decrease there was on 00 Agent until this playthrough. If an enemy drops 30 rounds on Agent, they'll only drop 10 on 00 Agent. Caverns was the level where I really had to nail headshots and conserve ammo, because I kept running out and then encountering a large group of enemies. Definitely use the timed mines on ammo crates when you see them!!
- Aztec: I had never played the two secret levels before! It was wild going into Aztec and Egyptian, not knowing a thing about what I needed to do. Egyptian ended up being a pushover (if you look up the pattern of tiles to walk on in the Golden Gun room), but Aztec kicked my butt for a couple hours. What was incredibly satisfying was that it wasn't luck-dependent like the waves of enemies in Control, I got legitimately better with each run, ultimately beating the level on 00 Agent with health to spare. Quite possibly my favorite level in the game now!
But OH NO! It turns out the only two achievements I'm missing (complete story on Agent and Secret Agent) require you to not just get a checkmark on those missions, you have to beat each level on each difficulty. That's 3 different playthroughs. Guess I'll be logging this two more times this week! I CAN'T GET ENOUGH GOLDENEYE BABY
EDIT: Instead of a fourth review of GoldenEye, I'm gonna do a P.S. here. It turns out that if you've beaten everything on 00 Agent and gotten all the difficulties checked off, you can complete the Agent and Secret Agent achievements with cheats on! I turned on all weapons for the Agent playthrough, but the most enjoyable experience I had with this rerelease was turning on RC-P90s and Paintball Mode and blasting through the Secret Agent difficulty. What a delightful victory lap!
Cleared the whole game on 00 Agent and unlocked all the cheats, something I'd never done before! It was great to finally do this two and a half decades after having played GoldenEye for the first time, and some of these levels really gave me a run for my money!
- Facility on 00 Agent in under 2:05: This is to unlock the Invincible Bond cheat. I barely scraped by after about an hour and a half of trying, only to realize that you can do the move+strafe speed doubling on Xbox if you change your D-pad to "Move + Strafe". WHOOPS THAT WOULD HAVE MADE IT EASIER
- Archives on 00 Agent in under 1:20: This is one where you have to absolutely nail the optimal route. Is this what speedrunning feels like??
- Control on Secret Agent in under 10:00 and again on 00 Agent: This legitimately took me over 3 hours of play time to beat these twice. The speed isn't a concern, if you manage to survive and don't screw around, you'll definitely make it in under 10 minutes. What really surprised me is that the issue wasn't Natalya dying. In fact, she only died once! Blowing up the downstairs mainframes right away will open up holes in the bulletproof glass panes that funnel the enemies to a smaller general area than if they break through themselves. The problem was just staying alive long enough for Natalya do get all the computer work done (accomplished this 80% of the time) and then making it to the elevator without keeling over. The saddest moment of this playthrough was making it to the last section with plenty of health, but accidentally throwing the last remote mine on the ceiling juuuuust far enough away from the mainframe behind the last door, softlocking the level. I killed every guy in the whole place, no one had a grenade or anything I could use! GAH
- Caverns on 00 Agent: I didn't realize how much of an ammo decrease there was on 00 Agent until this playthrough. If an enemy drops 30 rounds on Agent, they'll only drop 10 on 00 Agent. Caverns was the level where I really had to nail headshots and conserve ammo, because I kept running out and then encountering a large group of enemies. Definitely use the timed mines on ammo crates when you see them!!
- Aztec: I had never played the two secret levels before! It was wild going into Aztec and Egyptian, not knowing a thing about what I needed to do. Egyptian ended up being a pushover (if you look up the pattern of tiles to walk on in the Golden Gun room), but Aztec kicked my butt for a couple hours. What was incredibly satisfying was that it wasn't luck-dependent like the waves of enemies in Control, I got legitimately better with each run, ultimately beating the level on 00 Agent with health to spare. Quite possibly my favorite level in the game now!
But OH NO! It turns out the only two achievements I'm missing (complete story on Agent and Secret Agent) require you to not just get a checkmark on those missions, you have to beat each level on each difficulty. That's 3 different playthroughs. Guess I'll be logging this two more times this week! I CAN'T GET ENOUGH GOLDENEYE BABY
EDIT: Instead of a fourth review of GoldenEye, I'm gonna do a P.S. here. It turns out that if you've beaten everything on 00 Agent and gotten all the difficulties checked off, you can complete the Agent and Secret Agent achievements with cheats on! I turned on all weapons for the Agent playthrough, but the most enjoyable experience I had with this rerelease was turning on RC-P90s and Paintball Mode and blasting through the Secret Agent difficulty. What a delightful victory lap!
Let me start this off by saying I’m on record for saying that this wasn’t a game that was needed. We didn’t need this sequel and this game wasn’t something I needed to play. Too depressing. Blah blah blah.
This may be the best experience I’ve ever had. I can’t say this is my “favourite game”. Not because it’s bad, because it’s more than a game. The narrative that you are endured through the amazingly paced 25 hours is so deep, so strong - calling it a “game” is doing it injustice.
There were so many questionable choices I couldn’t understand why they were made. But they knew what they were doing and every step closer to the end made me feel so strongly about what was happening. I didn’t agree with the POV it ended on because I was shown how the world truly was here.
If you haven’t played this yet, you must. Turning this into a tv show or a movie isn’t even enough. This is some thing you need to experience through your eyes, your hands and your heart
This may be the best experience I’ve ever had. I can’t say this is my “favourite game”. Not because it’s bad, because it’s more than a game. The narrative that you are endured through the amazingly paced 25 hours is so deep, so strong - calling it a “game” is doing it injustice.
There were so many questionable choices I couldn’t understand why they were made. But they knew what they were doing and every step closer to the end made me feel so strongly about what was happening. I didn’t agree with the POV it ended on because I was shown how the world truly was here.
If you haven’t played this yet, you must. Turning this into a tv show or a movie isn’t even enough. This is some thing you need to experience through your eyes, your hands and your heart
Pokémon Violet
2022
Pokémon Violet and Scarlet are the first great Pokémon games since Black 2 and White 2.
Right before Thanksgiving Break, my kindergartener brought COVID home with her. We're all boosted so it hasn't been anything serious, but we've all been sick since right after Violet's release. It has definitely sucked having the whole family sick during a holiday break, but I couldn't have asked for a better game to spend the past week and a half with.
Due to being off work sick (thank goodness for COVID PTO), I was able to put nearly 60 hours into Pokémon Violet in the first 10 days of its release. For whatever reason, when I'm sick, I normally can't just play one game all day. I always end up trying a bunch of different things. But Violet hooked me the way that no game has since Breath of the Wild.
The best Pokémon games (as far as I'm concerned) are the ones that nail that sense of adventure I felt when I played Blue Version for the first time in 1998. As the series has gone on, new generations have grown increasingly linear and hand-holdy. Sword and Shield had a map that was effectively a straight line, as if they had taken inspiration from the absolute worst board in the entire Mario Party franchise. Sun and Moon created a great world, but strictly limited where you were able to go. Pokémon X & Y famously stopped you from going through certain parts of Lumiose City due to a "blackout". All of these games lacked a sense of agency. You've always been able to pick whatever team you want, sure. But when a set path is enforced, you can only get so much variety into those 6 slots. This is why VS (Scarvi? Vioscar? I have no idea what the joint name will be for these two) taking place in a legitimate open-world setting makes all the difference.
The joy of exploration instantly washed away my disappointment with SwSh. THIS is the Pokémon adventure I'd been wanting for so long! The early inclusion of the box legendary as an improved bike was genius, ensuring that you're able to begin exploring wherever you'd like from the get-go. I played for 3 or 4 hours before I even entered Mesagoza, catching at least one of everything I encountered and exploring as far as I could in every direction. Throughout the dozens of hours that would follow, I was often impressed and sometimes overwhelmed by just how many Pokémon were on-screen at any given point. I'm obviously not saying this was impressive from a technical standpoint, but having completely removed random encounters and replaced it with a buffet where you can actually see every Pokémon you could run into made me absurdly happy. It's a bit of a shame that they didn't keep Arceus's throw-a-ball-anytime catching mechanics, but this is a perfectly enjoyable middle ground. I've encountered and caught two shinies thus far, and being able to see them in the overworld instead of just looking for sparkles in a random encounter made those moments more engaging than any shiny I'd caught in a previous game. (BTW if anyone wants a shiny Gallade, hit me up in the Backloggd Discord, I'm not crazy about this thing) Constant items to pick up were great for a DK64-pilled brain like mine, and the ability to send my little buddies out to genocidally auto-battle hordes of Skiddo into oblivion never got old. I do have to say that while I love the idea of using materials to craft TMs in theory, I've only actually crafted like 3 of them so far. Maybe I'll get more into it in the post-game!
The different rewards for the three different types of badges and challenges were great. Deciding what to do next became less about whatever was nearby and more about "Hmm do I want to upgrade Miraidon's riding abilities next, or do I want higher-level Pokémon to listen to me first? More TMs might be nice though", and I really appreciated having an actual motivation for going after those goals beyond just checking stuff off a list. The only issue I had with any of this was that there's no EXP gained from the Team Star raids. That felt like a rather stingy omission.
Besides checking the "Adventure" box, Pokémon lives or dies with its new monsters. And Gen IX easily has the goofiest batch we've ever gotten. (Some spoilers in this paragraph for Pokémon descriptions if you're going in blind and haven't played yet) I laughed out loud when my Tandemaus evolved from two mice hanging out into four mice hanging out. I felt hilariously conflicted when Dunsparce FINALLY got an evolution, and it was... that. There's a dung beetle! A dead puppy! A dolphin superhero! A cute pink baby thing with a giant hammer! A Godzilla that's even more Godzilla than Tyranitar was! An entire car! And most importantly, the Fire/Grass spicy pepper Pokémon I've literally been wishing for since like 2009! Clodsire and Annihilape are some of the best "new evolutions added to an old Pokémon" designs we've ever had. And these PARADOX MONS you guys. This is the one bit where Scarlet has a bit of an advantage over Violet, as I don't think Robot Delibird or Pokemon Rumble U Hydreigon are anywhere near as cool as Great Tusk or Roaring Moon, but they're all wins in my book.
Lastly, to touch on the ending with out any spoilers, I don't think any other Pokémon game has stuck the landing like Scarlet and Violet have. The three different story paths all converge for the climax in a way that 100% worked for me. SwSh were probably the worst offenders for having the game just fizzle out at the end, so the contrast here is night and day. (I considered a Sun and Moon joke here, but couldn't get it to not sound hokey) There are legitimate characters here that I actually cared about, and their involvement in the post-game has got me excited to take on the new challenges the game presented after I rolled credits.
The big question on my mind now is how Terastylizing is going to affect VGC. I hated Dynamaxing in my main playthrough of SwSh, but it ended up being one of the best, most balanced mechanics the competitive side has ever had. I'm so intrigued to see how players change their types to flip the metagame on its head!
I am elated by this new direction for main-series Pokémon. My playthrough was thankfully not affected by any glitches other than superficial visuals, but I still can't wait to see what they can do if they manage to get literally any kind of technical expertise into Game Freak!
EDIT 12/18/22: After 86 hours and change, I've 100%ed this game. Every trainer has been beaten. Every Pokemon Center prize obtained. Each teacher quest completed. Every final exam passed. All TMs acquired. I had completed the Pokedex right after I rolled credits, but now I'm finally done. What a killer game.
But I spent AT LEAST 8 hours just trying to get Sweet Herba Mystica from raids for Mr. Saguaro!!! GAH
Right before Thanksgiving Break, my kindergartener brought COVID home with her. We're all boosted so it hasn't been anything serious, but we've all been sick since right after Violet's release. It has definitely sucked having the whole family sick during a holiday break, but I couldn't have asked for a better game to spend the past week and a half with.
Due to being off work sick (thank goodness for COVID PTO), I was able to put nearly 60 hours into Pokémon Violet in the first 10 days of its release. For whatever reason, when I'm sick, I normally can't just play one game all day. I always end up trying a bunch of different things. But Violet hooked me the way that no game has since Breath of the Wild.
The best Pokémon games (as far as I'm concerned) are the ones that nail that sense of adventure I felt when I played Blue Version for the first time in 1998. As the series has gone on, new generations have grown increasingly linear and hand-holdy. Sword and Shield had a map that was effectively a straight line, as if they had taken inspiration from the absolute worst board in the entire Mario Party franchise. Sun and Moon created a great world, but strictly limited where you were able to go. Pokémon X & Y famously stopped you from going through certain parts of Lumiose City due to a "blackout". All of these games lacked a sense of agency. You've always been able to pick whatever team you want, sure. But when a set path is enforced, you can only get so much variety into those 6 slots. This is why VS (Scarvi? Vioscar? I have no idea what the joint name will be for these two) taking place in a legitimate open-world setting makes all the difference.
The joy of exploration instantly washed away my disappointment with SwSh. THIS is the Pokémon adventure I'd been wanting for so long! The early inclusion of the box legendary as an improved bike was genius, ensuring that you're able to begin exploring wherever you'd like from the get-go. I played for 3 or 4 hours before I even entered Mesagoza, catching at least one of everything I encountered and exploring as far as I could in every direction. Throughout the dozens of hours that would follow, I was often impressed and sometimes overwhelmed by just how many Pokémon were on-screen at any given point. I'm obviously not saying this was impressive from a technical standpoint, but having completely removed random encounters and replaced it with a buffet where you can actually see every Pokémon you could run into made me absurdly happy. It's a bit of a shame that they didn't keep Arceus's throw-a-ball-anytime catching mechanics, but this is a perfectly enjoyable middle ground. I've encountered and caught two shinies thus far, and being able to see them in the overworld instead of just looking for sparkles in a random encounter made those moments more engaging than any shiny I'd caught in a previous game. (BTW if anyone wants a shiny Gallade, hit me up in the Backloggd Discord, I'm not crazy about this thing) Constant items to pick up were great for a DK64-pilled brain like mine, and the ability to send my little buddies out to genocidally auto-battle hordes of Skiddo into oblivion never got old. I do have to say that while I love the idea of using materials to craft TMs in theory, I've only actually crafted like 3 of them so far. Maybe I'll get more into it in the post-game!
The different rewards for the three different types of badges and challenges were great. Deciding what to do next became less about whatever was nearby and more about "Hmm do I want to upgrade Miraidon's riding abilities next, or do I want higher-level Pokémon to listen to me first? More TMs might be nice though", and I really appreciated having an actual motivation for going after those goals beyond just checking stuff off a list. The only issue I had with any of this was that there's no EXP gained from the Team Star raids. That felt like a rather stingy omission.
Besides checking the "Adventure" box, Pokémon lives or dies with its new monsters. And Gen IX easily has the goofiest batch we've ever gotten. (Some spoilers in this paragraph for Pokémon descriptions if you're going in blind and haven't played yet) I laughed out loud when my Tandemaus evolved from two mice hanging out into four mice hanging out. I felt hilariously conflicted when Dunsparce FINALLY got an evolution, and it was... that. There's a dung beetle! A dead puppy! A dolphin superhero! A cute pink baby thing with a giant hammer! A Godzilla that's even more Godzilla than Tyranitar was! An entire car! And most importantly, the Fire/Grass spicy pepper Pokémon I've literally been wishing for since like 2009! Clodsire and Annihilape are some of the best "new evolutions added to an old Pokémon" designs we've ever had. And these PARADOX MONS you guys. This is the one bit where Scarlet has a bit of an advantage over Violet, as I don't think Robot Delibird or Pokemon Rumble U Hydreigon are anywhere near as cool as Great Tusk or Roaring Moon, but they're all wins in my book.
Lastly, to touch on the ending with out any spoilers, I don't think any other Pokémon game has stuck the landing like Scarlet and Violet have. The three different story paths all converge for the climax in a way that 100% worked for me. SwSh were probably the worst offenders for having the game just fizzle out at the end, so the contrast here is night and day. (I considered a Sun and Moon joke here, but couldn't get it to not sound hokey) There are legitimate characters here that I actually cared about, and their involvement in the post-game has got me excited to take on the new challenges the game presented after I rolled credits.
The big question on my mind now is how Terastylizing is going to affect VGC. I hated Dynamaxing in my main playthrough of SwSh, but it ended up being one of the best, most balanced mechanics the competitive side has ever had. I'm so intrigued to see how players change their types to flip the metagame on its head!
I am elated by this new direction for main-series Pokémon. My playthrough was thankfully not affected by any glitches other than superficial visuals, but I still can't wait to see what they can do if they manage to get literally any kind of technical expertise into Game Freak!
EDIT 12/18/22: After 86 hours and change, I've 100%ed this game. Every trainer has been beaten. Every Pokemon Center prize obtained. Each teacher quest completed. Every final exam passed. All TMs acquired. I had completed the Pokedex right after I rolled credits, but now I'm finally done. What a killer game.
But I spent AT LEAST 8 hours just trying to get Sweet Herba Mystica from raids for Mr. Saguaro!!! GAH
Soccer Story
2022
The startup screen UI.
The file select screen.
The sparse MIDI acoustic guitar OST for the opening area.
The "SUCCESS" message.
Right down to the fonts.
Right off the bat, Soccer Story makes it clear that this isn't merely an homage to Golf Story, it's a flat-out copy in a shocking number of ways. This homework-copying is far more brazen than any of the games which have ripped off Overcooked; when something like Moving Out or Catastronauts reused Overcooked's format, they at least had enjoyable gameplay to back it up. But no amount of plagiarism can hide how dull and slow Soccer Story is.
Movement is sluggish, aiming mechanics are bare-bones, bland fetch quests and "find/hit 10 things" checklists are overly plentiful. Above all else, it completely lacks the charm and fantastic writing of Golf Story. There's no sense in aping another game's style and penchant for silly gameplay diversions if you can't make it enjoyable.
Derivative, but can't live up to what it's so determined to copy. Booooooo.
The file select screen.
The sparse MIDI acoustic guitar OST for the opening area.
The "SUCCESS" message.
Right down to the fonts.
Right off the bat, Soccer Story makes it clear that this isn't merely an homage to Golf Story, it's a flat-out copy in a shocking number of ways. This homework-copying is far more brazen than any of the games which have ripped off Overcooked; when something like Moving Out or Catastronauts reused Overcooked's format, they at least had enjoyable gameplay to back it up. But no amount of plagiarism can hide how dull and slow Soccer Story is.
Movement is sluggish, aiming mechanics are bare-bones, bland fetch quests and "find/hit 10 things" checklists are overly plentiful. Above all else, it completely lacks the charm and fantastic writing of Golf Story. There's no sense in aping another game's style and penchant for silly gameplay diversions if you can't make it enjoyable.
Derivative, but can't live up to what it's so determined to copy. Booooooo.
Telltale games worked, at least in the beginning. Most would say that's because they were effective choose-your-own-adventure games, but we quickly learned that Telltale's formula was to give you branches that eventually led back to the same ending. So if your choice wasn't the true seller, it meant Telltale were just really good at grabbing you with well written stories. Once they put too much on their plate and their writing became rushed the magic was lost. In my opinion, Tales from the Borderlands was the best Telltale game. An interesting, thrilling, and hilarious adventure in the Borderlands universe from the perspective of people who have no superpowers, no high tech guns, and no clue what they're doing. New Tales from the Borderlands however almost feels like a parody of a Telltale game, because it seems no one in 2K has any real idea what made the original Tales (or Telltale plots in general) so special.
I could see how from the perspective of other companies Telltale games seem simple, especially with the Telltale secret formula now known by everyone, but in reality they were bigger than anyone else realized and honestly that was part of the beauty of them. Tales from the Borderlands was a story that was fully ingrained in the Borderlands universe. Sure these characters were involved in less action and explosions, but they travelled all over Pandora. Every episode had new locations, new characters, special guest legacy characters, and new interesting lore. Tales even went so far as to forever change the franchise plot by affecting a beloved character who had been around since the first game.
New Tales feels like it has no agency, half the game-time length of the original, and possibly no budget. Seemingly 50% of this entire game takes place in the same location. Our 3 main characters just meander about doing nothing until all of a sudden the plot comes to them, and maybe that would be alright if our characters were extremely lovable and fun to watch but the only main character I truly fell in love with was Fran the frogurt lady.
All the new side characters have little to no time to make an impact on the player except for LOU13 who in all fairness is the best character in this game. The character Stapleface also stuck out to me, but again she was only there for an extremely limited amount of time. When it comes to legacy characters, as far as I can tell we got 2: Rhys who is only really in the first chapter and felt a little... off for some reason, and Lor who has I think a single 2 word line also in the first chapter (Lor is Lorraine from Borderlands 3 who has since transitioned which honestly makes me wish they were actually in the plot of this game).
Lore-wise I feel this game was nearly completely separate, and don't see anything they set up ever coming back in any real way. It's certainly possible, what with the vault treasure that the games plot is centered around and what happens to the Tediore corporation, but I just don't believe this game was meant to have such an impact.
It's really sad how disappointed I was in New Tales from the Borderlands. I don't hate it by any means. It's still got some good humor and decent attempts at heart. Sadly tho I have to say this is my least favorite entry into the Borderlands universe.
I could see how from the perspective of other companies Telltale games seem simple, especially with the Telltale secret formula now known by everyone, but in reality they were bigger than anyone else realized and honestly that was part of the beauty of them. Tales from the Borderlands was a story that was fully ingrained in the Borderlands universe. Sure these characters were involved in less action and explosions, but they travelled all over Pandora. Every episode had new locations, new characters, special guest legacy characters, and new interesting lore. Tales even went so far as to forever change the franchise plot by affecting a beloved character who had been around since the first game.
New Tales feels like it has no agency, half the game-time length of the original, and possibly no budget. Seemingly 50% of this entire game takes place in the same location. Our 3 main characters just meander about doing nothing until all of a sudden the plot comes to them, and maybe that would be alright if our characters were extremely lovable and fun to watch but the only main character I truly fell in love with was Fran the frogurt lady.
All the new side characters have little to no time to make an impact on the player except for LOU13 who in all fairness is the best character in this game. The character Stapleface also stuck out to me, but again she was only there for an extremely limited amount of time. When it comes to legacy characters, as far as I can tell we got 2: Rhys who is only really in the first chapter and felt a little... off for some reason, and Lor who has I think a single 2 word line also in the first chapter (Lor is Lorraine from Borderlands 3 who has since transitioned which honestly makes me wish they were actually in the plot of this game).
Lore-wise I feel this game was nearly completely separate, and don't see anything they set up ever coming back in any real way. It's certainly possible, what with the vault treasure that the games plot is centered around and what happens to the Tediore corporation, but I just don't believe this game was meant to have such an impact.
It's really sad how disappointed I was in New Tales from the Borderlands. I don't hate it by any means. It's still got some good humor and decent attempts at heart. Sadly tho I have to say this is my least favorite entry into the Borderlands universe.
🎮 Platform: PS5
⌚ Time played - 12.5h (some frustrating levels at the end added to this. Could have been an 11 hour run otherwise, with collectibles hunting included)
⭐ Score: 3.7/5
🏆Trophy completion - 56% - Easy but not really a fun trophy. Things to collect, have to look up mid chapter achievements etc. This means you are not immersing yourself in the game, and also means you really need a 2nd play-through. Chapter select is there so nothing is missable, but there is no way to jump to mid chapter to pick up missing trophies. I don't understand why games don't give you ability to jump to all the checkpoints IN chapters. Missed about 25% collectibles but i wasn't going to bother. On PS5 you get in game hints which are helpful if you get stuck or want to collect things. They were good. Also to upgrade all your items for trophy lots of materials are really hard to miss so if you don't collect enough you literally have to play everything looking for mats....
📚 Full Review:
Overall a good game that had me immersed. However the story is nothing creative. I believe I saw the movie Willard who did the same thing :) I would say if you generally like story driven games with good emotional touch play this.
- Generally enjoyable story though nothing creative
- Good emotional moments between the main char and the boy.
- Mid story beats of stealth take downs weren't too repetitive, but because there is no depth to it, it can get boring for people
- last 2 chapters were very glitchy, auto aim deliberately stopped working and i had to do this one fight 10 times in the last chapter. it was frustrating. Aiming is SUPER hard in this game when aim assist isn't working.
- Side characters were forgettable. They were generally there to push levers, fill the silence. Sorry.
- Game doesn't do much to explain WHY these things are happening. Maybe part 2 does.
⌚ Time played - 12.5h (some frustrating levels at the end added to this. Could have been an 11 hour run otherwise, with collectibles hunting included)
⭐ Score: 3.7/5
🏆Trophy completion - 56% - Easy but not really a fun trophy. Things to collect, have to look up mid chapter achievements etc. This means you are not immersing yourself in the game, and also means you really need a 2nd play-through. Chapter select is there so nothing is missable, but there is no way to jump to mid chapter to pick up missing trophies. I don't understand why games don't give you ability to jump to all the checkpoints IN chapters. Missed about 25% collectibles but i wasn't going to bother. On PS5 you get in game hints which are helpful if you get stuck or want to collect things. They were good. Also to upgrade all your items for trophy lots of materials are really hard to miss so if you don't collect enough you literally have to play everything looking for mats....
📚 Full Review:
Overall a good game that had me immersed. However the story is nothing creative. I believe I saw the movie Willard who did the same thing :) I would say if you generally like story driven games with good emotional touch play this.
- Generally enjoyable story though nothing creative
- Good emotional moments between the main char and the boy.
- Mid story beats of stealth take downs weren't too repetitive, but because there is no depth to it, it can get boring for people
- last 2 chapters were very glitchy, auto aim deliberately stopped working and i had to do this one fight 10 times in the last chapter. it was frustrating. Aiming is SUPER hard in this game when aim assist isn't working.
- Side characters were forgettable. They were generally there to push levers, fill the silence. Sorry.
- Game doesn't do much to explain WHY these things are happening. Maybe part 2 does.
Hollow Knight
2017
This is another one of those games that’s been talked to death, so we’ll see what I can actually add to the conversation! For the longest time I didn’t think I’d like Hollow Knight, mostly because I’m kinda hit or miss with metroidvania games (in particular, the only ones that’ve really sucked me in are the true blue metroid games) and I’m more miss than hit with hard, precise games. The only really hard games I’ve loved are the Souls games, and I knew HK was inspired by souls a bit, but I didn’t realize the extent. It’s kind of an exact halfway point between the genres it pulls from, and a well designed one at that, and while I wouldn’t say I loved the game as a whole, I certainly loved many parts.
I’m not really sure what about some metroidy games hooks me vs other ones. Right now my going theory is a dark, quiet isolation, going by how I like metroid 2 so much, and how Hollow Knight’s more Dark Souls-influenced atmosphere (imo) gives it more of a quiet resting melancholy than most in the genre. It feels more like a flattening of Souls into 2D than most of these games, I guess. That sense of tragedy definitely helped bring me in, until I was caught up in the adventure, regardless of difficulty.
That difficulty is something I’m not wholly in support of in souls games though, feeling like it crosses from fun to frustrating too often, and I have a similar feeling here. When the bosses are good, they’re great, and when you have the powers that some fights are designed around, they can be fantastic. But when they get tough, there can be this feeling that you know how to do the fight, you just can’t pull it off for whatever reason. The quicker fights got, the more I felt like I was flailing around until I got lucky and didn’t get hit, and some fights I Did Not get lucky for a While. My favorites were the fights with some room for error, still tough but built in a way where you can maneuver around the boss and learn its patterns within one or two runs, even if you don’t beat them for a few more. The Mantis Lords, the Broken Vessel, these are my favorite kinds of fight here, and luckily they’re pretty plentiful. There’s just a few in there that soured the experience a bit for me.
But that’s hardly unique to this game, and besides that and some really really too precise platforming, the game is hugely successful at what it wants to be. Cozier than souls and metroid, but still melancholy, still isolated, and still creepy when it wants to be. I mean what, am I gonna complain when an area like City of Tears exists? It was calling my name before I even knew it existed!!
Honestly, 2D games are so much more accessible than 3D games that even if you’ve given up on souls games, you should give this a try. For the most part it’s super manageable, and if you’re willing to explore to the MAX you can absolutely mitigate the harsher edges of the difficulty curve. That just isn’t the way I usually play stuff unfortunately, and so instead of wholeheartedly loving the game, I only like 75% love it and 25% like it! play it
I’m not really sure what about some metroidy games hooks me vs other ones. Right now my going theory is a dark, quiet isolation, going by how I like metroid 2 so much, and how Hollow Knight’s more Dark Souls-influenced atmosphere (imo) gives it more of a quiet resting melancholy than most in the genre. It feels more like a flattening of Souls into 2D than most of these games, I guess. That sense of tragedy definitely helped bring me in, until I was caught up in the adventure, regardless of difficulty.
That difficulty is something I’m not wholly in support of in souls games though, feeling like it crosses from fun to frustrating too often, and I have a similar feeling here. When the bosses are good, they’re great, and when you have the powers that some fights are designed around, they can be fantastic. But when they get tough, there can be this feeling that you know how to do the fight, you just can’t pull it off for whatever reason. The quicker fights got, the more I felt like I was flailing around until I got lucky and didn’t get hit, and some fights I Did Not get lucky for a While. My favorites were the fights with some room for error, still tough but built in a way where you can maneuver around the boss and learn its patterns within one or two runs, even if you don’t beat them for a few more. The Mantis Lords, the Broken Vessel, these are my favorite kinds of fight here, and luckily they’re pretty plentiful. There’s just a few in there that soured the experience a bit for me.
But that’s hardly unique to this game, and besides that and some really really too precise platforming, the game is hugely successful at what it wants to be. Cozier than souls and metroid, but still melancholy, still isolated, and still creepy when it wants to be. I mean what, am I gonna complain when an area like City of Tears exists? It was calling my name before I even knew it existed!!
Honestly, 2D games are so much more accessible than 3D games that even if you’ve given up on souls games, you should give this a try. For the most part it’s super manageable, and if you’re willing to explore to the MAX you can absolutely mitigate the harsher edges of the difficulty curve. That just isn’t the way I usually play stuff unfortunately, and so instead of wholeheartedly loving the game, I only like 75% love it and 25% like it! play it
Sonic Frontiers
2022
When I was eight years old back in 2001, my brother and I received a copy of Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for the GameCube from my dad for Christmas. I wasn’t really familiar with Sonic at the time, being that I was a hardcore Nintendo kid, so I’m not sure what prompted him to get this game for us. Still, intrigued, I remember sitting down with my brother to venture into this strange land that Mario had kept us locked away from in the great console wars of the 90s. I fell in love instantly with the colorful cast of characters, the over-the-top anime madness, the frankly incomprehensible story, and, most importantly, the concept of just going fast. Since then I’ve played nearly every game in this incredibly inconsistent series, including the spin-offs, even during my teen years when I was “too cool” for most video games. Sonic the Hedgehog has been a part of my life for much longer than most anything else, and in a strange way it’s one of the few connective tissues that ties together the person I was as a child, the angsty teen version of me from high school, and the adult me in the present.
As I’m sure you’re aware, since the days of Sonic Adventure 2 the 3D games in the franchise have struggled. Some of them, like Sonic Forces and Sonic Boom, have been offensively bad, and even the best ones like Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations were just okay. 21 years later, I find myself, mouth agape, as the credits roll on Sonic Frontiers and I am… ecstatic. The mere sight of Knuckles or Shadow or the Chaos Emeralds always brings me joy, and that’s why we Sonic fans have survived this long. But no. This time, I am ecstatic not because Sonic Frontiers is a masterpiece (because it is very, very much not). I am ecstatic because Sonic has, after two decades, matched the enthusiasm that I bring to the franchise.
Sonic Frontiers is undeniably a mess of ideas. Sure, it takes a lot of inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I firmly believe is one of the best video games ever created. But there are also moments where I swear I’m playing Nier Automata, Xenoblade Chronicles, Skyrim, Super Mario Odyssey, Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy XV, or even Marvel’s Spider-Man. Sometimes all at the same time. So, how do all of these disparate visions for what Sonic Frontiers actually is fit together? Truthfully, a lot of the time, they simply don’t. But in those moments that they do, when it all comes together - those moments outshine the highest points of even the best games I played this year.
The story, written by Ian Flynn of the much beloved IDW comics, brings Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy to the Starfall Islands, tracking down where the Chaos Emeralds have bounced off to this time. Of course Dr. Eggman finds his way there hunting down the same thing, and our old friends stumble onto the remains of the lost civilization of a race called The Ancients. If you’re familiar with Sonic, you’ll likely remember Chaos, the water monster that was the primary antagonist of Sonic Adventure and who has appeared numerous times since then.
In a pretty interesting turn, Sonic Frontiers actually explains the origins of the Chaos Emeralds and Chaos himself as lost artifacts of the Ancients in a pretty organic way. It was a bold move to base the story around lore that we’ve been desperately craving since Sonic Adventure since 1998, but it paid off. While the actual dialogue is pretty mediocre and stilted, Frontiers still clears the incredibly low bar of having the best story in the franchise based on providing this extensive, detailed lore. Taking us to the homeland of a villain from decades ago is just the first piece of the payoff to the longtime fans present in this game.
What is it that makes this game tick? Why are the Sonic fans so excited? It may sound insane to those outside the fandom, but this is the first Sonic game in a long time that is actually built around “going fast.” Sonic games have been riddled with careful, precise platforming for 20 years that runs totally counterintuitive to the whole idea of the Blue Blur, and I personally believe it’s been because they are trying to capture some of what makes Mario so great. Sonic is not Mario and is never going to be Mario, and I think Frontiers is the first time that Sonicteam has openly admitted this in their design strategy.
Sonic Frontiers takes place across 5 contained open world zones, each one themed around a different biome and with different cyberspace levels, enemies, challenges, and lore to unpack. Each of these zones is packed with stuff to do, and yes, I mean packed. Everywhere you look, you’ll see an Unreal Engine default landscape with dozens of springs, wires, balloons, rails, pulleys, rings, platforms and dash panels. You know, stuff that you might see in a Sonic game. Except it’s all just floating there, just pasted over a world created in a completely different art style. And you know what? I don’t care. This game world is so incredibly fun to play in that I just could not care less how hilariously dumb everything looks. Deal with it.
The core of why Sonic fans are clicking with this game is that Sonic has never, ever felt this good to control. You get the sense of speed that comes with combining the two past styles of momentum and boost movement, but you also feel the precise control needed to do the actual platforming. As I said before, precise platforming and going as fast as possible have always been at odds, but there’s a beautiful meeting of the two principles in Sonic Frontiers that I had started to believe was impossible. Utilizing the multitude of rails and springs and such, it’s easy to manipulate the physics of the Hedgehog Engine to get around the open world at lightning fast speeds you feel like the game never intended.
Holding down the right trigger turns on your boost, which has a set amount that recharges very quickly, and using this boost along with your homing attacks and developing series of abilities you can work your way through lots of these miniature obstacle courses while making your way from Point A to Point B without interrupting your pace. Filling up your rings to maximum turns on a second boost that lets you move twice as fast, and that’s when you really feel the lightning. Sonic was always meant to be moving faster than even the player can see, and this giant open world is finally the place he can do it while still maintaining a sense of control. These obstacle courses typically yield a memory token, which I’ll get to later. Suffice it to say, this is the most fun I’ve had moving in a game since Spider-Man on the PS4. It’s perfect.
I have seen a few different videos of the PS5 version, which I played as well, having severe pop-in for the floating obstacles and rails. I did experience some pop-in, but it was never close enough to affect me no matter how fast I was going. I have to comment that this game is pretty bug free, although I’ve seen a few videos saying otherwise. All I can say is that my experience featured no major bugs and only a handful of minor ones. It’s one of the more functional launch AAA games I’ve played recently.
While you’re running around you’ll encounter little Koroks, uh, sorry, I mean Cocos, that are just little guys. They’re just little guys! The Cocos are the current inhabitants of the Starfall Islands, and only the Elder Cocos are able to speak to you directly. The others set you up for random minigames that feel so totally out of place they may as well be a different game, even removing abilities seemingly at random to try and make them make any sense. It’s jarring to be blasting through the desert at 200 mph one second and then the next trying to carry a stack of 10 cocos you’re balancing that are vomiting bombs into Knuckles waiting arms. Once these mini games are complete, the participating Cocos inexplicably drop to the floor as their souls feel the sweet release of death while the others celebrate. I still have no explanation for this. Even when the mini games are fun, it’s impossible to not feel like they very much do not belong in Sonic Frontiers.
In addition to the Shrines, you’ll find miniature overworld puzzles very much akin to the ones that net you a Korok seed in Zelda. Completing these unlocks more of the map, so you’ll definitely want to do each one as you come across it. None are particularly hard, and while some are laughably easy, most require a little bit of thought.
Collecting Cocos across the overworld and taking them to the Elder Cocos will earn you extra ring capacity or extra top speed. I opted for speed every time, because heightening your ring capacity actually just makes it harder to reach max boost. The only reason you’d take that upgrade is for the boss fights, which we’ll get to soon. The Coco can also use the attack and defense upgrades you receive from the map puzzles to boost your stats for combat.
Dotted around each of the zones are seven or eight shrines, each of which transports Sonic to a Cyberspace level. Think of it as a miniature dungeon, each one taking anywhere between one and four minutes to complete. I actually grew to love these, and I think there’s exactly the right number of them. The shrines are certainly less plentiful in Sonic Frontiers than in Breath of the Wild, but are also very replayable. Each shrine contains an old school 2D or 3D Sonic level from a previous game reskinned and fitted to work with the art style of the Frontiers cyberspace world. Longtime fans will notice about 30 seconds into a level “Am I in Sky Rail right now?”, which is another sort of subtle way to pat us veterans on the back.
Each Cyberspace level has four missions: complete the stage with any time, complete the stage with S rank time, collect X number of rings, and collect all 5 red star rings. I actually really got into the swing of replaying these until I got all four missions complete, and left only two shrines in the game uncompleted. Going back and trying to beat your time is actually quite fun in these very short levels. You’ll be rewarded with vault keys, which are needed in the overworld on each island to unlock the chaos emeralds. Most of the levels come from Sonic Adventure 2 and Generations, which I remind you are the good ones, so they already feel great to play and are very conducive to this new movement Sonic has in Frontiers that lets you move both faster and with more control than ever before.
I’m sure some of you are thinking right now “is it lazy for Sonicteam to just recycle old stages they know we like instead of making new ones?” For me, I actually see it as more of an homage to the series as a whole and to its longtime fans, and it’s not like they didn’t create a massive totally original gameworld outside of cyberspace anyway. I quite enjoyed the pacing of cyberspace and only found a handful of the levels to not be fun.
One lucky shrine on each island takes you to a parallel world where Big the Cat is inexplicably just fishing. By trading him the fishing tokens you find lying around the overworld, you can borrow his fishing rod and get to work on this quaint minigame. It’s a very simple case of clicking the button at the right time, but I ended up liking it a lot. It’s a little disorienting when Sonic pulls a full sized real Unreal Engine crocodile or squid out of the water and proudly holds it up, but this is when Sonic Frontiers is at its best. When it proudly declares how serious everything is and leaves the audience to revel in that silliness. The fishing minigame also has the huge benefit of allowing you to trade your catches for memory tokens, vault keys, leveling items, rings, cocos and more in case you get stuck.
Sonic Frontiers is the third game in the franchise to feature combat, following the woeful execution of the idea in Sonic Boom and Sonic Unleashed years ago. Well, they actually nailed it this time, much to my surprise. Besides the classic homing attack, punches, and kicks, you start with the new cycloop ability. While running, you can hold Y or Triangle to leave a path of light behind you. Connecting the light trail with a loop sends a wind blast inwards, damaging enemies, flipping switches, and producing rings. In addition, holding L1 and R1 together allows Sonic to parry. I like the addition of the parry, which is very necessary to defeat certain enemies, but the parry window is much too wide, lasting up to 5 seconds from when you hit the input. It almost doesn’t feel like you’re even doing it. If this system returns in the future I’d like to see a decreased window to give the player more of a feeling of control.
While spamming your main attack to build up combo points, you’ll use the new abilities you unlock from Sonic’s small skill tree to finish off the fairly wide variety of enemies in the overworld. Most of them require a specific and different technique to overcome as well. There is also a dodge ability, which is quite important when fighting stronger enemies. Speaking of which, dotted around each zone are four to five mini-bosses. Each one holds a gear, which is needed to unlock a shrine. These mini bosses are unique and fun, and all get a splash screen when they first appear to let you know they mean business. All enemies drop skill tokens when killed, which are of course traded in at the skill tree for new attacks. My main read on combat is that it’s not just impressive for a sonic game, it actually feels good in the grand scene of action adventure games. I hope to see Sonicteam build on this system in the next game.
The other main feature of the overworld is the aforementioned memory tokens. Sonic’s friends, as well as the new character Sage, have been trapped in the cyber world and are only able to break through as holograms on each island to speak to sonic. By collecting memory tokens and taking them to a hologram, you’ll basically unlock a cutscene, chaos emerald, or mini boss fight that moves the story along. While I understand the idea here, and I think the pacing works well for what Sonic Frontiers is trying to do, I think it misses a huge part of why people love Sonic.
We LOVE these characters. We do. We want to see them all hang out, interact, and fight together. Separating out the supporting cast into single 1 on 1 interactions with Sonic was a big mistake. We get a single scene at the end where we see Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles all together, which is all any of us want. Although this is the first Sonic game written originally in English, the cutscenes are also a bit strange in how spaced out the dialogue lines are , and I wonder if it’s to account for the Japanese dub that had to go over this game later. Regardless, although the performances and delivery are excellent, the dialogue in Frontiers feels stilted because of these gaps in a way that reminds me a lot of Kingdom Hearts 3.
I have been carefully saving the best part for last - the boss fights. You may have seen videos or gifs of them going around, and it’s because this part of the game nails what the fans want from Sonic more than anything else the franchise has put out. This, this is the vibe. This is what we were waiting for.
[Video]
There are four titans like this you’ll face, each one accompanied by an original metalcore song by Sleeping with Sirens, where you become super sonic and get to unleash the shounen fury that has always been relegated to a final boss fight in the past games. Finally, this is it. I grinned like a big dumb idiot as the music kicked in and I snatched the last chaos emerald off the head of the first boss to take my own final form. These fights are largely spectacle but do ask for a decent amount of precision as well. This first boss fight with Giganto 5 hours in is not only my favorite boss fight of the year; it is the best one in franchise history. This is a hype moment that is going to stick with me forever.
This leads me to the absolute best feature of Sonic Frontiers - the music. This OST is unbelievable. It features excellent music in every genre spanning from soft piano twinkles to hard house to EDM to metalcore to symphonic ballads and of course to the classic Sonic butt rock sound that we legitimately love. Every track is great, and most of them are exceptional. It was composed by Sonic music veteran Tomoya Ohtani, who’s been working on Sonic Soundtracks for decades. On top of his solo compositions, when you hear the result of his work with groups such as Sleeping with Sirens, Dangerkids, To Octavia and One OK Rock to produce something more than the sum of its parts, I hope you’ll recognize He’s one of the most talented composers out there today. Take a listen to the soundtrack. Now!
Sonic Frontiers is a mess of ideas that I’d maybe give an award to for “least directed” game. Most of the time, it’s barely holding itself together as a mass of ideas from other, better games, with Sonic pasted onto it. But when it hits, oh my god it hits. When the music swells and Kellin Quinn is blasting your eardrums with a guttural scream while you plunge a 300 ft sword into a titan the size of a skyscraper, it won’t matter that you’re doing it in the most artistically dissonant game I have ever seen. It won’t matter that there is literally no explanation for the presence of the Sonic items in this world. It won’t matter that you have to rack up 5 million points in a terrible pinball mini game to progress the story for no given reason. The heights of Sonic Frontiers are the highest highs Sonic has ever seen, and while casual players may not enjoy the game as much as longtime fans, I had more fun in this mediocre game than I had in all the many, many better games I played this year. The blue blur is back, and I cannot wait to see where he goes next. One thing’s for sure - always to new horizons.
As I’m sure you’re aware, since the days of Sonic Adventure 2 the 3D games in the franchise have struggled. Some of them, like Sonic Forces and Sonic Boom, have been offensively bad, and even the best ones like Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations were just okay. 21 years later, I find myself, mouth agape, as the credits roll on Sonic Frontiers and I am… ecstatic. The mere sight of Knuckles or Shadow or the Chaos Emeralds always brings me joy, and that’s why we Sonic fans have survived this long. But no. This time, I am ecstatic not because Sonic Frontiers is a masterpiece (because it is very, very much not). I am ecstatic because Sonic has, after two decades, matched the enthusiasm that I bring to the franchise.
Sonic Frontiers is undeniably a mess of ideas. Sure, it takes a lot of inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I firmly believe is one of the best video games ever created. But there are also moments where I swear I’m playing Nier Automata, Xenoblade Chronicles, Skyrim, Super Mario Odyssey, Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy XV, or even Marvel’s Spider-Man. Sometimes all at the same time. So, how do all of these disparate visions for what Sonic Frontiers actually is fit together? Truthfully, a lot of the time, they simply don’t. But in those moments that they do, when it all comes together - those moments outshine the highest points of even the best games I played this year.
The story, written by Ian Flynn of the much beloved IDW comics, brings Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy to the Starfall Islands, tracking down where the Chaos Emeralds have bounced off to this time. Of course Dr. Eggman finds his way there hunting down the same thing, and our old friends stumble onto the remains of the lost civilization of a race called The Ancients. If you’re familiar with Sonic, you’ll likely remember Chaos, the water monster that was the primary antagonist of Sonic Adventure and who has appeared numerous times since then.
In a pretty interesting turn, Sonic Frontiers actually explains the origins of the Chaos Emeralds and Chaos himself as lost artifacts of the Ancients in a pretty organic way. It was a bold move to base the story around lore that we’ve been desperately craving since Sonic Adventure since 1998, but it paid off. While the actual dialogue is pretty mediocre and stilted, Frontiers still clears the incredibly low bar of having the best story in the franchise based on providing this extensive, detailed lore. Taking us to the homeland of a villain from decades ago is just the first piece of the payoff to the longtime fans present in this game.
What is it that makes this game tick? Why are the Sonic fans so excited? It may sound insane to those outside the fandom, but this is the first Sonic game in a long time that is actually built around “going fast.” Sonic games have been riddled with careful, precise platforming for 20 years that runs totally counterintuitive to the whole idea of the Blue Blur, and I personally believe it’s been because they are trying to capture some of what makes Mario so great. Sonic is not Mario and is never going to be Mario, and I think Frontiers is the first time that Sonicteam has openly admitted this in their design strategy.
Sonic Frontiers takes place across 5 contained open world zones, each one themed around a different biome and with different cyberspace levels, enemies, challenges, and lore to unpack. Each of these zones is packed with stuff to do, and yes, I mean packed. Everywhere you look, you’ll see an Unreal Engine default landscape with dozens of springs, wires, balloons, rails, pulleys, rings, platforms and dash panels. You know, stuff that you might see in a Sonic game. Except it’s all just floating there, just pasted over a world created in a completely different art style. And you know what? I don’t care. This game world is so incredibly fun to play in that I just could not care less how hilariously dumb everything looks. Deal with it.
The core of why Sonic fans are clicking with this game is that Sonic has never, ever felt this good to control. You get the sense of speed that comes with combining the two past styles of momentum and boost movement, but you also feel the precise control needed to do the actual platforming. As I said before, precise platforming and going as fast as possible have always been at odds, but there’s a beautiful meeting of the two principles in Sonic Frontiers that I had started to believe was impossible. Utilizing the multitude of rails and springs and such, it’s easy to manipulate the physics of the Hedgehog Engine to get around the open world at lightning fast speeds you feel like the game never intended.
Holding down the right trigger turns on your boost, which has a set amount that recharges very quickly, and using this boost along with your homing attacks and developing series of abilities you can work your way through lots of these miniature obstacle courses while making your way from Point A to Point B without interrupting your pace. Filling up your rings to maximum turns on a second boost that lets you move twice as fast, and that’s when you really feel the lightning. Sonic was always meant to be moving faster than even the player can see, and this giant open world is finally the place he can do it while still maintaining a sense of control. These obstacle courses typically yield a memory token, which I’ll get to later. Suffice it to say, this is the most fun I’ve had moving in a game since Spider-Man on the PS4. It’s perfect.
I have seen a few different videos of the PS5 version, which I played as well, having severe pop-in for the floating obstacles and rails. I did experience some pop-in, but it was never close enough to affect me no matter how fast I was going. I have to comment that this game is pretty bug free, although I’ve seen a few videos saying otherwise. All I can say is that my experience featured no major bugs and only a handful of minor ones. It’s one of the more functional launch AAA games I’ve played recently.
While you’re running around you’ll encounter little Koroks, uh, sorry, I mean Cocos, that are just little guys. They’re just little guys! The Cocos are the current inhabitants of the Starfall Islands, and only the Elder Cocos are able to speak to you directly. The others set you up for random minigames that feel so totally out of place they may as well be a different game, even removing abilities seemingly at random to try and make them make any sense. It’s jarring to be blasting through the desert at 200 mph one second and then the next trying to carry a stack of 10 cocos you’re balancing that are vomiting bombs into Knuckles waiting arms. Once these mini games are complete, the participating Cocos inexplicably drop to the floor as their souls feel the sweet release of death while the others celebrate. I still have no explanation for this. Even when the mini games are fun, it’s impossible to not feel like they very much do not belong in Sonic Frontiers.
In addition to the Shrines, you’ll find miniature overworld puzzles very much akin to the ones that net you a Korok seed in Zelda. Completing these unlocks more of the map, so you’ll definitely want to do each one as you come across it. None are particularly hard, and while some are laughably easy, most require a little bit of thought.
Collecting Cocos across the overworld and taking them to the Elder Cocos will earn you extra ring capacity or extra top speed. I opted for speed every time, because heightening your ring capacity actually just makes it harder to reach max boost. The only reason you’d take that upgrade is for the boss fights, which we’ll get to soon. The Coco can also use the attack and defense upgrades you receive from the map puzzles to boost your stats for combat.
Dotted around each of the zones are seven or eight shrines, each of which transports Sonic to a Cyberspace level. Think of it as a miniature dungeon, each one taking anywhere between one and four minutes to complete. I actually grew to love these, and I think there’s exactly the right number of them. The shrines are certainly less plentiful in Sonic Frontiers than in Breath of the Wild, but are also very replayable. Each shrine contains an old school 2D or 3D Sonic level from a previous game reskinned and fitted to work with the art style of the Frontiers cyberspace world. Longtime fans will notice about 30 seconds into a level “Am I in Sky Rail right now?”, which is another sort of subtle way to pat us veterans on the back.
Each Cyberspace level has four missions: complete the stage with any time, complete the stage with S rank time, collect X number of rings, and collect all 5 red star rings. I actually really got into the swing of replaying these until I got all four missions complete, and left only two shrines in the game uncompleted. Going back and trying to beat your time is actually quite fun in these very short levels. You’ll be rewarded with vault keys, which are needed in the overworld on each island to unlock the chaos emeralds. Most of the levels come from Sonic Adventure 2 and Generations, which I remind you are the good ones, so they already feel great to play and are very conducive to this new movement Sonic has in Frontiers that lets you move both faster and with more control than ever before.
I’m sure some of you are thinking right now “is it lazy for Sonicteam to just recycle old stages they know we like instead of making new ones?” For me, I actually see it as more of an homage to the series as a whole and to its longtime fans, and it’s not like they didn’t create a massive totally original gameworld outside of cyberspace anyway. I quite enjoyed the pacing of cyberspace and only found a handful of the levels to not be fun.
One lucky shrine on each island takes you to a parallel world where Big the Cat is inexplicably just fishing. By trading him the fishing tokens you find lying around the overworld, you can borrow his fishing rod and get to work on this quaint minigame. It’s a very simple case of clicking the button at the right time, but I ended up liking it a lot. It’s a little disorienting when Sonic pulls a full sized real Unreal Engine crocodile or squid out of the water and proudly holds it up, but this is when Sonic Frontiers is at its best. When it proudly declares how serious everything is and leaves the audience to revel in that silliness. The fishing minigame also has the huge benefit of allowing you to trade your catches for memory tokens, vault keys, leveling items, rings, cocos and more in case you get stuck.
Sonic Frontiers is the third game in the franchise to feature combat, following the woeful execution of the idea in Sonic Boom and Sonic Unleashed years ago. Well, they actually nailed it this time, much to my surprise. Besides the classic homing attack, punches, and kicks, you start with the new cycloop ability. While running, you can hold Y or Triangle to leave a path of light behind you. Connecting the light trail with a loop sends a wind blast inwards, damaging enemies, flipping switches, and producing rings. In addition, holding L1 and R1 together allows Sonic to parry. I like the addition of the parry, which is very necessary to defeat certain enemies, but the parry window is much too wide, lasting up to 5 seconds from when you hit the input. It almost doesn’t feel like you’re even doing it. If this system returns in the future I’d like to see a decreased window to give the player more of a feeling of control.
While spamming your main attack to build up combo points, you’ll use the new abilities you unlock from Sonic’s small skill tree to finish off the fairly wide variety of enemies in the overworld. Most of them require a specific and different technique to overcome as well. There is also a dodge ability, which is quite important when fighting stronger enemies. Speaking of which, dotted around each zone are four to five mini-bosses. Each one holds a gear, which is needed to unlock a shrine. These mini bosses are unique and fun, and all get a splash screen when they first appear to let you know they mean business. All enemies drop skill tokens when killed, which are of course traded in at the skill tree for new attacks. My main read on combat is that it’s not just impressive for a sonic game, it actually feels good in the grand scene of action adventure games. I hope to see Sonicteam build on this system in the next game.
The other main feature of the overworld is the aforementioned memory tokens. Sonic’s friends, as well as the new character Sage, have been trapped in the cyber world and are only able to break through as holograms on each island to speak to sonic. By collecting memory tokens and taking them to a hologram, you’ll basically unlock a cutscene, chaos emerald, or mini boss fight that moves the story along. While I understand the idea here, and I think the pacing works well for what Sonic Frontiers is trying to do, I think it misses a huge part of why people love Sonic.
We LOVE these characters. We do. We want to see them all hang out, interact, and fight together. Separating out the supporting cast into single 1 on 1 interactions with Sonic was a big mistake. We get a single scene at the end where we see Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles all together, which is all any of us want. Although this is the first Sonic game written originally in English, the cutscenes are also a bit strange in how spaced out the dialogue lines are , and I wonder if it’s to account for the Japanese dub that had to go over this game later. Regardless, although the performances and delivery are excellent, the dialogue in Frontiers feels stilted because of these gaps in a way that reminds me a lot of Kingdom Hearts 3.
I have been carefully saving the best part for last - the boss fights. You may have seen videos or gifs of them going around, and it’s because this part of the game nails what the fans want from Sonic more than anything else the franchise has put out. This, this is the vibe. This is what we were waiting for.
[Video]
There are four titans like this you’ll face, each one accompanied by an original metalcore song by Sleeping with Sirens, where you become super sonic and get to unleash the shounen fury that has always been relegated to a final boss fight in the past games. Finally, this is it. I grinned like a big dumb idiot as the music kicked in and I snatched the last chaos emerald off the head of the first boss to take my own final form. These fights are largely spectacle but do ask for a decent amount of precision as well. This first boss fight with Giganto 5 hours in is not only my favorite boss fight of the year; it is the best one in franchise history. This is a hype moment that is going to stick with me forever.
This leads me to the absolute best feature of Sonic Frontiers - the music. This OST is unbelievable. It features excellent music in every genre spanning from soft piano twinkles to hard house to EDM to metalcore to symphonic ballads and of course to the classic Sonic butt rock sound that we legitimately love. Every track is great, and most of them are exceptional. It was composed by Sonic music veteran Tomoya Ohtani, who’s been working on Sonic Soundtracks for decades. On top of his solo compositions, when you hear the result of his work with groups such as Sleeping with Sirens, Dangerkids, To Octavia and One OK Rock to produce something more than the sum of its parts, I hope you’ll recognize He’s one of the most talented composers out there today. Take a listen to the soundtrack. Now!
Sonic Frontiers is a mess of ideas that I’d maybe give an award to for “least directed” game. Most of the time, it’s barely holding itself together as a mass of ideas from other, better games, with Sonic pasted onto it. But when it hits, oh my god it hits. When the music swells and Kellin Quinn is blasting your eardrums with a guttural scream while you plunge a 300 ft sword into a titan the size of a skyscraper, it won’t matter that you’re doing it in the most artistically dissonant game I have ever seen. It won’t matter that there is literally no explanation for the presence of the Sonic items in this world. It won’t matter that you have to rack up 5 million points in a terrible pinball mini game to progress the story for no given reason. The heights of Sonic Frontiers are the highest highs Sonic has ever seen, and while casual players may not enjoy the game as much as longtime fans, I had more fun in this mediocre game than I had in all the many, many better games I played this year. The blue blur is back, and I cannot wait to see where he goes next. One thing’s for sure - always to new horizons.
Pentiment
2022
I don’t even know where to start, how to describe this game without spoiling it. I guess I can say, if the game looks interesting to you, go play it right now. If, in addition, you’ve ever liked a game made by Obsidian or a hyperlocal adventure game (Night in the Woods, Kentucky Route Zero, Norco), or some combination of the two (this section is here so I can mention Disco Elysium) then GO PLAY IT RIGHT NOW.
Beyond that, the task becomes workable. When my girlfriend asked me what I thought of the game, I said “I think it’s probably one of the best works of art I’ve ever experienced”, and I stand fully behind that text message I sent like 10 minutes ago. Somehow, Josh Sawyer and his team at Obsidian have crafted a wonderful murder mystery with themes around class consciousness and theology, and a lovely, tender story and cast of characters, and they made it entirely out of historical references you’d literally need an encyclopedia to fully understand. And don’t fret, the encyclopedia is ALSO in the game.
Admittedly the introduction is a little dry. It leans heavy on establishing the setting, your place in it, and a calm before the fall, and it’s important, but until things get going it was feeling a bit like what I was worried it would be: interesting and intellectual, but lacking in heart. Once you get used to the game though, things pick up quick and all of a sudden you’ve been playing for 6 hours straight and it’s 1 in the morning and you don’t want to stop, because you don’t know if the next person you talk to, or the next meal you eat, or the next setpiece you explore could throw mysteries and answers at you in equal measure, pulling you deeper and deeper until the next chapter break.
I don’t think I know how to talk about this game at all actually. Not the way I usually do. Mostly you just have to decide what leads to follow based on what information you have, and what your character can provide based on their background and standing with each member of the community. But that doesn’t really get to the heart of what’s so good about the game, what I love about it. That lies in the seemingly endless depth on display, a hyperfocused depth of character and setting that only exists in those other hyperlocal adventure games and Obsidian-style RPGs, to my knowledge.
It’s just that good, and it gets better and better as you go along. The layers peel back, pulling the sardonic exterior away so you can tug at the core underneath. I’m surprised a game like this could be made still, and by a company of the size Obsidian is. It’s got all the references of a game made by 3 nerds in a basement, all the heart of a game made by 3 indie devs in a basement, and all the technical prowess that being owned by Xbox gets you. I don’t get how a game can be so seemingly mired in itself and yet still so affecting, still such a triumph, and I don’t get how Josh Sawyer’s been doing stuff like this for 20 years. I’ll be buying the collectors edition if it materializes though, you can count on that.
Beyond that, the task becomes workable. When my girlfriend asked me what I thought of the game, I said “I think it’s probably one of the best works of art I’ve ever experienced”, and I stand fully behind that text message I sent like 10 minutes ago. Somehow, Josh Sawyer and his team at Obsidian have crafted a wonderful murder mystery with themes around class consciousness and theology, and a lovely, tender story and cast of characters, and they made it entirely out of historical references you’d literally need an encyclopedia to fully understand. And don’t fret, the encyclopedia is ALSO in the game.
Admittedly the introduction is a little dry. It leans heavy on establishing the setting, your place in it, and a calm before the fall, and it’s important, but until things get going it was feeling a bit like what I was worried it would be: interesting and intellectual, but lacking in heart. Once you get used to the game though, things pick up quick and all of a sudden you’ve been playing for 6 hours straight and it’s 1 in the morning and you don’t want to stop, because you don’t know if the next person you talk to, or the next meal you eat, or the next setpiece you explore could throw mysteries and answers at you in equal measure, pulling you deeper and deeper until the next chapter break.
I don’t think I know how to talk about this game at all actually. Not the way I usually do. Mostly you just have to decide what leads to follow based on what information you have, and what your character can provide based on their background and standing with each member of the community. But that doesn’t really get to the heart of what’s so good about the game, what I love about it. That lies in the seemingly endless depth on display, a hyperfocused depth of character and setting that only exists in those other hyperlocal adventure games and Obsidian-style RPGs, to my knowledge.
It’s just that good, and it gets better and better as you go along. The layers peel back, pulling the sardonic exterior away so you can tug at the core underneath. I’m surprised a game like this could be made still, and by a company of the size Obsidian is. It’s got all the references of a game made by 3 nerds in a basement, all the heart of a game made by 3 indie devs in a basement, and all the technical prowess that being owned by Xbox gets you. I don’t get how a game can be so seemingly mired in itself and yet still so affecting, still such a triumph, and I don’t get how Josh Sawyer’s been doing stuff like this for 20 years. I’ll be buying the collectors edition if it materializes though, you can count on that.
SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
The Last of Us: Part II demands more of its players than any other game I’ve played: patience through monotony, presence in each moment, openness to go where no player wants to go. To be fair to this game’s many critics, these demands were at many times exhausting, as no game (of which I am aware) has crafted such nuance and subtlety into every moment of a 25-hour experience; however, as I slowed down and committed myself to the story at hand, the cause for the game’s celebration slowly emerged from the inertia.
Building on the narrative prowess of the first game, TLOU2 deepens its mechanical story-telling in a compelling way, placing an incredible (and some would say, unbearable) weight on player experience from various perspectives. Make no mistake, the brunt of TLOU2’s controversial story-telling still occurs in cut scenes, but the moments that connect players with the characters take place in varied scenarios “on the sticks.”
The moment that best illustrates Naughty Dog’s huge ask for a player’s total presence occurs soon after the first proper chapter begins. Ellie and a support character find themselves in an open exploration space. Hidden away in just one of the 10+ locations to visit, totally optionally, a player can encounter a moment as profoundly simple and moving as the first game’s “giraffe moment.” Illustrating the optionality of this moment, I listened to several review podcasts where certain reviewers completely missed the moment. The reward waited for players who were committed to seeing all that Naughty Dog created, and the same principle runs through the rest of the story.
I must say something of the length which is the primary negative of TLOU2, entirely by the decision of Naughty Dog. Around the 12 hour mark (the full length of TLOU1), players are led to believe they have reached the climax of the story, only to discover they are less than halfway through the game. I’d be lying if I said this did not initially bother me, and it took nearly 3 more hours of gameplay before I understood the decision. For many, and fairly so, those 3 hours were too long for the game to be redeemed. Nevertheless, if TLOU2 was ever going to succeed with its narrative ambition, this is the way they needed to do it; I just wish they’d made those first moments of the second half more fun and purposeful.
I’ve saved the best for last—TLOU2’s gameplay! Now this is ironic for me, because I HATED TLOU’s gameplay to the point I almost quit it 3 different times, and I did give up on Left Behind. However, in TLOU2, Naughty Dog has somehow combined the fluidity of Uncharted’s popcorn-action combat with an immersive stealth experience that far exceeds the YES/NO logic of most games’ stealth question, “Is one pinky toe in tall grass? Then no one can see her.” The combat- and environment-designers brilliantly created sprawling combat arenas with enough options for any game-play style; their greatest achievement might be the real viability of running away/through fights—something I often forgot I could do because so few video games have actually allowed it. In the end, I finished the “over-long” story mode and immediately jumped into New Game+ to go for the Platinum trophy, simply because I wanted more time with the combat system.
TLOU2 is so much more than the Twitter fights, condescending critiques, and uproarious celebration can ever represent; in fact, this may be the most nuanced video game story ever told, and many have written it off or written its name in the Book of Life without ever picking up a controller. My plea as a reviewer is only that you play it, not that you enjoy it. If I’ve learned one thing from this game, it’s that we need every, single voice at the table when discussing such far-reaching stories, and my straight, white, male analysis will only be better for your response.
The Last of Us: Part II demands more of its players than any other game I’ve played: patience through monotony, presence in each moment, openness to go where no player wants to go. To be fair to this game’s many critics, these demands were at many times exhausting, as no game (of which I am aware) has crafted such nuance and subtlety into every moment of a 25-hour experience; however, as I slowed down and committed myself to the story at hand, the cause for the game’s celebration slowly emerged from the inertia.
Building on the narrative prowess of the first game, TLOU2 deepens its mechanical story-telling in a compelling way, placing an incredible (and some would say, unbearable) weight on player experience from various perspectives. Make no mistake, the brunt of TLOU2’s controversial story-telling still occurs in cut scenes, but the moments that connect players with the characters take place in varied scenarios “on the sticks.”
The moment that best illustrates Naughty Dog’s huge ask for a player’s total presence occurs soon after the first proper chapter begins. Ellie and a support character find themselves in an open exploration space. Hidden away in just one of the 10+ locations to visit, totally optionally, a player can encounter a moment as profoundly simple and moving as the first game’s “giraffe moment.” Illustrating the optionality of this moment, I listened to several review podcasts where certain reviewers completely missed the moment. The reward waited for players who were committed to seeing all that Naughty Dog created, and the same principle runs through the rest of the story.
I must say something of the length which is the primary negative of TLOU2, entirely by the decision of Naughty Dog. Around the 12 hour mark (the full length of TLOU1), players are led to believe they have reached the climax of the story, only to discover they are less than halfway through the game. I’d be lying if I said this did not initially bother me, and it took nearly 3 more hours of gameplay before I understood the decision. For many, and fairly so, those 3 hours were too long for the game to be redeemed. Nevertheless, if TLOU2 was ever going to succeed with its narrative ambition, this is the way they needed to do it; I just wish they’d made those first moments of the second half more fun and purposeful.
I’ve saved the best for last—TLOU2’s gameplay! Now this is ironic for me, because I HATED TLOU’s gameplay to the point I almost quit it 3 different times, and I did give up on Left Behind. However, in TLOU2, Naughty Dog has somehow combined the fluidity of Uncharted’s popcorn-action combat with an immersive stealth experience that far exceeds the YES/NO logic of most games’ stealth question, “Is one pinky toe in tall grass? Then no one can see her.” The combat- and environment-designers brilliantly created sprawling combat arenas with enough options for any game-play style; their greatest achievement might be the real viability of running away/through fights—something I often forgot I could do because so few video games have actually allowed it. In the end, I finished the “over-long” story mode and immediately jumped into New Game+ to go for the Platinum trophy, simply because I wanted more time with the combat system.
TLOU2 is so much more than the Twitter fights, condescending critiques, and uproarious celebration can ever represent; in fact, this may be the most nuanced video game story ever told, and many have written it off or written its name in the Book of Life without ever picking up a controller. My plea as a reviewer is only that you play it, not that you enjoy it. If I’ve learned one thing from this game, it’s that we need every, single voice at the table when discussing such far-reaching stories, and my straight, white, male analysis will only be better for your response.
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