Not particularly enamored with this one although I can certainly understand why many are, since it allows for those kinds of conversations that frequently feel impossible in 2023, the kind where you and your friends or coworkers come together to talk for hours about the choices you made at a particular juncture and what happens if you pick option C instead of option B, you know what I mean - conversations that are much rarer when a modern game's sense of mystery can be completely dispelled within 10 hours by front page reddit posts and scores of "articles" reducing each dialogue prompt to Baldur's Gate 3: How To Get THE BEST Companion Cutscenes. The #general chat in my Discord server has people I haven't spoken to in years coming out of the woodwork to talk about the results of character creation, about the companions they've romanced and killed, about all the ways their characters lost an eye, and they all seem pretty content with the breadth of discoveries that this game enables.

For my first 20 hours, I was basically the same - there's a lot of fun to be had in poking around these early areas with the horniest party of all time (despite that fact) and chatting with rats, cats, and dead guys. In these early chapters the game best supports my preferred playstyle: a big circuitous route around the map, looking at everything as I drive past but only stopping to drink deeply from a select few side stories. Push further into the main story, though, and find yourself woefully underleveled because you grew tired of these fights 10 hours ago. It's never so difficult as to completely block you from progressing, but it's easy to feel that your punishment for not seeking out each and every side quest is being forced to initiate every fight from the (admittedly cumbersome) stealth or spend the whole fight herding enemies into a big circle so you can use your Level 3 AOE Spell of choice to meme the encounters until they're finished. I have no experience with D&D or this particular ruleset aside from other video games, but the adherence to such a system and its limits are obvious when you spend forty hours playing this game just to unlock a single cast of a spell that these developers would've given you immediately in their last game. It's a pace that works pretty well for weekly tabletop adventures with a group of IRL friends, but feels a bit too slow and unrewarding when I'm sitting alone, staring at a menu of unappetizing "roll advantage"/"create difficult terrain" spells as a reward for my once-nightly level-up.

What's kept me playing are the settings and companions - the mind flayers are arguably the least interesting part of this whole deal, so while it sucks that the main plot so prominently revolves around them, the side quests are generally well-crafted enough that one or two of them would be a satisfying enough adventure to fill the entire night on their own. I do wish that the companions would Talk Normally for five minutes but they've done well enough in telling some of the companion stories (Gale is a particular standout) that they can create genuinely affecting moments if you look in the right places. Not all of them are told so well, and some of the companions feel deeply artificial as a result, but generally speaking I can understand why a player might recruit any given companion not named Lae'zel to their party. For the most part, I'm also fond of the party chatter - every once in a while you'll get a nice bit of banter that feels like the result of actual role-playing with friends, whether it's a joke or a short flavorful exchange revealing how two companions interact or a story that fleshes out someone's background. It's not as personal as it could be if it were your real friends bantering with you, but it's a fun approximation and it's deployed tastefully.

Ultimately my grade for the experience is a big ol' shrug and the word "Sure?" written exactly like so. I think the lipstick looks fantastic even if it fails to produce miracles for the pig that is 5th edition rules, with its awkward magic system and glacial level progression and a litany of boring buffs. Compared to the average person I'd be considered a "hater" of Divinity Original Sin 2 but it felt so colorful compared to this! I love killing bosses by shoving them into a pit as much as the next guy, but much of this experience feels like the developers are skillfully wringing every drop of charisma that they can from the source material and hoping that the player doesn't notice that "the chill druid left and now the mean druid is being mean, go fetch the chill druid" feels a little trite. I'll be doing my best to hit the end credits, but if I don't make it, know that I'm probably out there starting a new save on Tyranny instead.

Playing Hi-Fi Rush feels like reading the first volume of a comic about a brand new superhero, unburdened by expectations.

There's such an obvious, whole-hearted commitment to creating a world that runs on music that I found myself bobbing my head and tapping my foot to literally nothing an hour after I put this one down. Rhythm is so thoroughly baked into this game's DNA that, after a certain point, it becomes more difficult to do things off beat than on it. It's got charm and earnestness that quiets my impulse to nitpick. Everything is music in some way, and every element snaps into place on a beat - UI elements, footsteps, enemy attacks, YOUR attacks, item pickups. Cohesive and confident enough that I would almost believe it if you told me it was somehow an influence on every rhythm genre hybrid that came before it. Feels like a game from 3 hardware generations ago, and I mean that in the best way possible.

The other day the AC unit broke in my apartment, and maintenance sends up this kid (probably 16 or 17) to set up a portable AC unit until they could get it fixed. He looks over at my computer and says "I like your setup, what games do you play?" I tell him I hop between things and crank my brain up to Jimmy Neutron-brain-blast levels of power trying desperately to think of a single example of a video game I've played that a normal person would know, and I end up going "oh, have you heard of Dinkum?" He shoots me a look, immediately says "uh, no. I play Apex," and leaves without saying another word

Surprised by the number of people who think of this game as predatory or morally bankrupt in some way. It's simple - a game where you just WASD around, where every weapon is a passive effect, and the game never really attempts to disguise the fact that unlocking more things just changes the components of the light show.

You don't have to enjoy the game (or even respect it, really), but there's definitely room for stuff like this to exist in the landscape without it degrading the medium or whatever the concern might be. There's still a game here, there's still concern for how systems interact with each other and you can still come up with unique strategies using the handful of tools you're given. It's not artistically ambitious, but I don't think it has to be. The existence of fine dining does not render fast food obsolete.

Just some quick thoughts for this one, apologies if it's a little scatterbrained.

As a game this is probably the most ""content"" for your dollar that you could possibly get out of a scripted game and I'm truly blown away by how much effort it must have been to put this whole thing together. Dondoko Island is a minigame with more mechanics than 98% of the games I play each month. If that were all there is to say then I'd be giving it a 10/10 - and I understand that everything after this point is going to make me sound like an insane person to 85% of people playing this - but the truth is that this game (like Y7) is so hell-bent on being silly at all times that it often undercuts itself when it comes to dramatic tension or consistency of plot/characters - again! Genuinely, if the Ichiban games just knew how to solve their tonal issues then I'd be giving this game an extra star, if not more. Classic Yakuza goofiness works best as a break from the drama - it's less effective when the cutscene establishes a legitimate, serious threat to your loved ones and then immediately warps to your female party member decked out in a coconut bra and maracas strumming a ukulele at a guy with a beach ball for a torso.

Some things (the combat and chain attacks, Hawaii, every non-Sujimon minigame) are miles better than they were in Y7, but the game also loves to tell the same jokes over and over so things that are initially endearing (seonhee fangirling over kiryu) become extremely grating by the end. I also think Yakuza Gaiden works better as a farewell tour for Kiryu because it's not just crammed into a game about someone else in a city he's barely been to - having Kiryu reminisce can be fun at points but so many of the locations are completely arbitrary and having Kiryu go "Remember all the times Date rescued me in a helicopter?" because he walked into a cafe feels dry and artificial, not fun. I'm almost resentful that so much of the focus is placed on him in this story when his main purpose for most (not all) of it is to be a cool friend who people on the street constantly recognize. The big Kiryu checklist wavers between being interesting (reflecting on basic things Kiryu never got to enjoy because of his insane life of constant fighting) and mind-numbing (do you remember the dancing minigame in Y0? how about the fishing minigame?). Ultimately though, it's part of a larger push to make these characters feel like they have lives outside of Ichiban's adventures (Ichiban included) and it works wonders... when it works at all. Tomizawa shines particularly brightly as someone whose drink links highlight a life that's been uprooted in a way that ties into the main plot while remaining personal to him and exposing more of his character. Saeko and the other women, however, mostly get these nothingburger chats that are about Ichiban or how cool Kiryu is or how stressful it is to run a business.

Also: It needs to be better about signposting when you're about to switch protagonists. At one point it splits your group between two locations and warns you that you're going to need good gear because there's some combat coming up, but it doesn't tell you that it's going to switch you to the other group first, leading me to 75 straight minutes of fighting with a party that is severely underpowered because I read the warning and assumed I'd be fighting with the group I was currently controlling.

Also also: I'm still not a fan of the enemies they cook up in the Ichiban games. A lot of them are creative and fun and a lot of them really, truly are not - it's cool to see what attacks they assign to random day jobs, it's not funny or interesting when the fat guy in ill-fitting clothes hits you with a big hot dog or the Chinese mafioso performs acupuncture in the middle of a fight. That shit is so fucking boring, dog. Ichiban could really use a better imagination.

I realize that this might seem overly negative for the rating I've given. I enjoyed myself for the vast majority of its runtime, but so much of this just collapses in on itself for me when I give it any thought at all. I'm still in awe at the production value here - this game blows my mind in much the same way that 2D mode in Dragon Quest XI did - they simply did not need to go so hard in crafting a big video game buffet. Combat has only seen a few changes but the changes that have been made take it from something I tolerated in Y7 to something I truly enjoy (as long as I'm not underleveled). Y8 addresses so many of the concerns I had with Y7 but about once an hour I'm reminded that the Daidoji faction is transparently complete nonsense (in the same way the Florist used to be), that the Drink Links still insist on having One Big Problem that each character must solve that ends in a fight (which means each character only gets to talk about a single thing during their moments in the spotlight), that both the English and the Japanese dubs feel inappropriate for the setting at least 50% of the time. There's a lot to like about this game and for significant chunks of it - mostly while I was ignoring the story - I was considering just giving it 5 stars and calling it a day, but the more I think about it, the less appropriate that feels.

genuinely delightful. i think it's possible to compare this unfavorably to JSRF but realistically i think it trims a lot of what doesn't work about that game (too many weak, mostly linear levels; finicky platforming) and keeps most of what does, with large-ish zones (expanding outward with completion) and a compelling sense of style even if your favorite bit of stylistic flair from JSRF isn't represented here. i do think it could benefit from a slight increase to speed, especially on the ground where even boosting feels somewhat limp, but otherwise? i think this rocks. probably could use some tutorialization too. nobody seems to know how to get that one graffiti spot in mataan without googling

It's a tough one. For the record, I have not played the original, so this touches on elements of the original and the remake at the same time.

PROS:
+ Some really lovely work on fictionalizing this just enough that those familiar with the details of the real-life people and places will be left on their toes. I think this comes together really nicely in the last third despite the game practically screaming the Big Reveal at you as it's being set up - that's not really where the thrill lies.

+ Additionally, it's nice to have an RGG game that goes super hard on political intrigue. Previous games touch on politics, of course, but it always has the texture of interpersonal drama among the Important Involved People - factions are typically extensions of their leaders and footsoldiers are very rarely granted any agency in the narratives of these games. You see shades of that here as well, but the political turmoil, the calculus, the maneuvering involved means these factions come closer to being groups of people instead of one big hive mind.

+ Using the facescans/voice actors from the main series for this spinoff is generally quite nice. Characters like Mine getting more time in the spotlight is always welcome, and the big stars are basically just the same characters from the mainline games, so fans of Saejima or Goda that want more will get it. You could certainly be more ambitious with these - I kind of wish Not-Kiryu would give up on the "no killing" thing, but I get it - it's Bakumatsu fanfic with Yakuza characters, might as well ham it up.

+ The Yakuza series is so good with soundtracks that it feels like it's not even worth mentioning that the soundtrack is good, but I'm going to do it anyway: The soundtrack is good.

+ Swords and guns are nice mostly for the heat moves. There are only so many ways you can do a big punch, but the heat moves for these weapons are as heinously violent as you would expect and they're a breath of fresh air. The gun is especially fun in this context.

MIXED:
= Very strange to return to the older mechanics after five Dragon Engine games. A good thing in that combat possesses the weight of the older games, a bad one in that I lose more health to the camera facing the wrong way mid-fight. Wild Dancer is especially prone to this given that the style is based almost entirely around twirling around and between opponents.

= The slice of life... minigame(?) is nice! Unfortunately, being segmented off by a boat ride on the edge of the map means you're never just going to stop in because you're nearby. You've got to consciously decide to go make room to pick radishes in between deciding the fate of Japan. I guess this is how Yakuza works, tonally, but there's just too much separation here and it seems like THIS is the point where this kind of thing becomes jarring for me personally.

CONS:
- Crafting is a straight-up mistake. There's too much going on here, it's too hard to get parts and too hard to get smithing experience unless you spend unfathomable resources crafting shit you don't need. The weapons aren't distinct enough to warrant this Monster Hunter-style equipment progression and the fact that you're not really actively pushed to engage with it makes it worse, not better. The components are everywhere, too, so I'm stuck reflecting on how many resources I'm losing out on by choosing to pursue the plot instead of opening a pot every ten meters during the climax. Perhaps related...

- ...the Yakuza series is generally good at indulging the fantasy of the duel, something I think there's a pretty good appetite for especially when adding samurai to the mix. For me, that samurai fantasy does not include a boss interrupting the fight every six seconds to un-stagger-ably shoot fire from his hands for three seconds. Every ability like this also does insane damage, but I'm open to being told I didn't craft good enough armor or whatever. It's probably true.

- The way they chose to fictionalize this story means that there is a LOT of focus on espionage, and RGG writes not-Kiryu as the least believable spy on the planet. Almost constantly people are saying things like "it is time to kill The Bad Guy" and Kiryu visibly freaks the fuck out, to which the other person will say "what was that about? do you know The Bad Guy" and he goes "absolutely not. I Have Never Heard Of Him" and the plot just continues on like nothing happened. Honestly this is funny enough that it's almost a pro

- I'm generally quite tired of the franchise moving in a direction where we pretend that Y0 and Y7 are the only games that exist. The recasting of characters is mostly fine, given that some of the facescans in the original are relative nobodies, but it REALLY leaves a sour fuckin' taste in my mouth to see every one of the Yakuza 0 lieutenants represented among the Shinsengumi captains while characters like Baba and Hamazaki get replaced with Zhao and Kuze. There's still a captain that doesn't have a main series counterpart! He even gets time in the spotlight! Come on man.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
+ https://i.imgur.com/JA0To49.jpg

Developer is so unhinged that the infamously hands-off Valve banned them from posting in their own game's forums, so they've taken to posting their 1. transphobic, 2. anti-masker, and 3. conspiracy theory-laden ramblings in the patch notes, one of which has been marked as a "MAJOR UPDATE" (lol) on Steam, simply titled "DONE"

Some links for those of you who would prefer to see the evidence:
- Imgur album of their Steam ""updates"" - fair warning, these are genuinely hateful
- Their now-banned Twitter account
- from the dev's steam profile lmao

RIP BOZO. fuckin loser

A very nice open world with an incredible amount of stuff to do, but this game's raison d'etre is milking you for money via a waifu slot machine, so they're deathly allergic to doing anything interesting with the game they've built on this chassis. People have already taken this game to task for the predatory nature of gacha mechanics, for openly aping Breath of the Wild's style (and doing it worse), etc., so I want to take this in a different direction and focus on what keeps the best parts of this game from being better:

Dungeons required for progression are locked behind a time-gated resource, with rewards that rotate based on the day of the week. The combat is serviceable and I could easily see myself grinding these dungeons if it let me (a la Diablo 3, spamming Nephalem/Greater Rifts). Many rewards are locked behind a story with countless unskippable, intrigue-less conversations - no human character that you actually see on-screen will do anything meaningfully villainous outside of the opening cutscene. It's a shame, too, because their writers have shown that they can actually create worthwhile stories in this universe - there's a fairly compelling storyline in Liyue about a lesser god whose kingdom collapsed around her, and it demonstrates the kind of stories that can fit in this world if you're not afraid of a character getting dirt on their clothes.

Every playable character is palatable, inoffensive, marketable anime slop. Male characters exist in three flavors: Twink, Tall Serious Guy, and Itto. Female characters represent a few more archetypes, but you're still not going to be blown away by the creativity on display here. Give me more varied characters, Mihoyo! You underestimate how horny people are - you can get way more adventurous than this and still have people dropping stupid amounts of money out of sheer thirst. Give me a silver fox character, give me a character with even 5% more body mass, give me an actual-ass evil character (not just assertive! I want evil!).

Why am I actually rolling for these characters, anyway? Optimal gameplay demands that I use one character 80% of the time, with the other 20% split between the remaining characters in my party - you swap them onto the field, trigger their abilities, and swap them out. Unless you're releasing a new character for the Main DPS role, there's no reason to give them interesting mechanics - not that this really happens anyway. Implementing new game mechanics is hard, and I acknowledge that, but Mihoyo has the money and the time to justify it. Currently, the most adventurous set of mechanics in the game belongs to Childe, whose abilities act as a stance system, swapping between ranged and melee - second place goes to Beidou who - wait for it - has a counter-attack on her basic ability. I'm hoping that with the eventual release of Lyney and Lynette we'll see a tandem character, but this would be radical compared to what's in the game now.

Genshin Impact has given me the worst gift possible by being a game that gives you valuable rewards for your time investment, but not interesting rewards. There's so much potential being left on the table here due to a complete dearth of ambition, but rough edges don't sell.

Losing all my gamer cred by going to bat for a gacha game

I have a tendency to describe things as “confident” - it gets scrubbed out of a lot of early drafts of my reviews, one of those words I’ve gotta stop falling back on lest it lose meaning. It’s a shortcut to describing a more nebulous sensation - a potpourri of smaller factors coming together, instilling the notion that the creators genuinely enjoy what they’re making and don’t need any extra tricks to win over the audience.

Honkai: Star Rail is surprisingly confident.

I’m not sure if it’s the result of them being 4-5 games deep into the series (depends on who’s counting) or the result of their last game being bigger than God. Maybe it’s that the game is already such an obvious improvement over Genshin in so many ways.

Most obvious are the shifts in setting and plot structure - HSR trades a single, sprawling world for a planet-hopping space opera, and it’s clear that this works better with miHoYo’s style of storytelling. Genshin's scattershot subplots had a tendency to overplay their hand and lacked any real stakes, while HSR’s compartmentalization - assigning each planet its own story - allows for a more focused approach that lends plot beats much greater credibility. It’s almost certainly made easier due to the smaller “zones” comprising each planet in HSR: There’s no need to accommodate a Genshin player’s decision to fuck off and pick mushrooms on a different continent mid-climax if there’s nothing for them to forage. The broader plot is mostly miHoYo playing the hits authored by better works of fiction - sometimes, though, the tune is catchy enough that you don't mind the cover band.

miHoYo is still hooked on giving 1 page of character development for each 10 they devote to overexplaining very simple plot events, but that character development does a better job of placing each person within the world they inhabit. They still write the most annoying children on the planet, but there are good stories for the adults of HSR. Among the dry, white bread story beats Bronya gets during the main plot of the first world, it’s easy to skim right over characters like Natasha, the first character I’ve encountered from miHoYo that feels like they actually believe something. It’s not groundbreaking stuff, but it did catch me off guard - her story is one of planting trees whose shade you may never enjoy, and the whole thing is stained with regret in a way that made Midgar Jarilo-VI feel larger than the player's screen. It’s reflective of a shift towards “maybe character exploration shouldn’t be locked behind so much time and effort” that ends up making the cast of HSR a lot more interesting to listen to than Genshin’s 100-strong cadre of schmoozers. It’s not a perfect success - miHoYo still wants you to roll for these characters, so there’s a limit to their flexibility - but it’s a step in the right direction.

On top of trading out the open world, HSR also gives up Genshin’s real-time action for turn-based combat. You’re still matching elements to an enemy’s weakness, otherwise there’s very little in common with HSR’s older cousin. Playing this, it’s obvious that miHoYo has a much better understanding of how turn-based combat should work than they do for real-time action. Character abilities in Genshin long suffered from a lack of mechanical complexity, with “skill expression” for most team lineups taking the form of rotating through the characters and mashing their skills as quickly as possible before rotating back to your carry. The turn-based nature of HSR asks you to think much more carefully about how your party interacts with one another, because your enemies will get a turn and you will have to respond to them. The restriction of weapons (“Light Cones”) to certain archetypes limits creativity, but I’m not too bothered by that when there are so many other ways to change up your party. The character kits are fine, too, and efficient use requires some thought - there’s nothing on the level of playing baseball inside a fighting game but I’ve been having a lot of fun accompanying my tiny mahjong goblin on the road to nuking entire teams.

I’ve already spent too long talking about a gacha game, so let me sneak one last thing in before I wrap this up - “Trailblaze Power”. Genshin players know it as resin, it’s the currency that regenerates with time and is used to claim valuable rewards. The good news is that you’re no longer going to be sitting on your hands for three real-life days waiting for the right dungeon to come around just so you can farm the one item you need. Just roll up to whatever portal gives you the resource you need, and do it when you have the time, no need to wait for a specific weekday. The bad news is that you’ll probably feel short on currency far more frequently than you ever did before, since you’re never going to have that forced downtime. I think it’s a favorable change. I’m not going to schedule my life around Genshin dungeons.

I want to be clear and say that HSR is not the product of a completely new formula - many concepts, ideas, and even characters have been tried and tested in miHoYo’s previous games. If you developed a distaste for Genshin on a fundamental level, this is not going to win you over. But as someone whose complaints with Genshin were largely problems with the structure and ankle-deep plot, I’m pleased to say that I came into this game wearing my hater goggles and I’m drafting this review after hitting player level 31 in a single weekend, having found very little in the way of disappointments. I think it’s fine to find the style, gameplay, plot, or monetization off-putting, because it’s not top of the class in any of these fields. It’s an improvement in almost every way over its predecessor, though, and I won't lie - I can't help but smile at a pleasant surprise from the developer I was most skeptical of. Maybe I’ll come back later and find something to be sour about (especially as more content is added), but I want it to be known that I’m cautiously optimistic for now - high 6 to a low 7/10.

This review contains spoilers

I've been doing a repeat run of The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa alongside a friend of mine who's been playing for the first time, Discord streaming his playthrough. This particular friend sends Ringo to class every day without fail and pushes the mortal human's ability to stay awake just to cram in as much studying/exercise as possible. He is - by the game's standards - richer than god, and yet he routinely risks Ringo's wellbeing to loot random enemies in the world for truly pathetic amounts of money, usually less than 50 yen. He is as mystified by my playthrough as I am by his: if his Ringo is about making numbers go up, mine is about the intangibles. I have not purposely improved a single skill that the game measures. My Ringo is a voracious reader, but makes no special effort to dedicate time to employment or education - not unless it helps him buy books.

I suppose I'm the one with the aberrant playstyle. The experienced gamer knows that more often than not, filling every spare second with stuff pays off - more XP, more money, more NPC affection, etc. But I know how this whole thing ends. I know that Ringo Ishikawa is stubborn. You can study all you want, but he will never let his teacher read his essay to the class. You can make him read Anna Karenina and Rumble Fish and Winesburg, Ohio and Confessions of a Mask and by the time you reach the only conversation in the game where he discusses these books with someone else, it's pretty clear that Ringo is not "in it" to brag about what he read or watched or played or did. He speaks brusquely, frequently teases his closest friends, and maintains a kind of... firm kindness with acquaintances. It feels somehow appropriate to have this stubbornly principled teenage delinquent skip school to read The Brothers Karamazov in a single sitting before declaring "I'd need to re-read it a few times to let it all sink in. A powerful read."

The game is going to start laying out the hints pretty early - Ringo's friends are becoming their own people, and while the gang is ostensibly still together, nobody's heart is really in it anymore. With this, your time is limited.

With this - this realization - how do you spend your time? Watching my friend trek all the way to school and back feels like reaching that point in a conversation where you realize that your brain is just not wired in a way that allows you to fully relate to the other person. Their perspective is too alien, their values too different. Perhaps you can understand the thoughts that lead them to their conclusion, but the idea of your own brain producing those same thoughts feels... wrong. Improbable.

Why does my Ringo read? If I'm honest with you, it's not for him. When you make Ringo read, he sits down, a page counter appears above his head, and you watch it tick up as the day passes - no fast forwards, no special music. Ringo reads for the same reason that he and his friends will sometimes stop in the park, or in the rice fields outside of town, or on the balcony of his apartment, smoking and having conversations that only they can hear. He does it because it lets me linger in the empty space, because it makes me feel overwhelmingly present in those moments. And when you sit there with them, maybe you can push it to the back of your mind that Ken probably won't join any more of your fights, or that Masaru keeps asking you for money and never explains why. Those precious seconds where the gang is still together stretch out into minutes - but no more than that - and you have to move on.

As of the time of this writing, my friend still has not finished the game. It's actually been almost a month at this point, and there's a solid possibility he may not return to it. I won't push him. Maybe he didn't like to linger in those moments like I do. Maybe he moved on, moved past the gang, maybe his Ringo grows up. Perhaps he'll enjoy it better that way: as a little slice of life where everything was still just fine - not perfect, but fine. The last thing his Ringo does is drag his friends to support Goro's newfound passion for theater. My Ringo?

My Ringo boards the train alone.

For as much as I love this game, I can't help but wish they had gone even harder on making a game that completely throws action-packed missions to the wayside in favor of making a cowboy slice-of-life. If I had spent 33% less time mowing down dudes and 33% more time with Mary Linton, 33% more time breaking into a slave catcher's foreclosed house, 33% more time learning about the cholera outbreak affecting one of the game's towns, I'd be even more in love with it. The guns are fun, I like them, but I think their presence could be significantly reduced without feeling like the violence has lost its thematic weight.

Not every game should be like this, of course, but Rockstar proved that they can make something interesting with all the money they pumped into this product, so I can only wonder what would've happened if they tried a little harder to break with convention.

As true a horror game as anything else, really, with a focus on restricting the player's willingness to take action instead of their ability. You certainly can shoot at anything that moves, but success in SWAT 4 is highly dependent on not pulling that trigger when frightened. Enemies in later levels have guns that kill you faster, but the real threat is the paranoia: wandering in near silence, knowing that your time to correctly assess each situation is shorter than ever as the door in front of you suddenly opens, a gun pokes through and you shoot your co-op partner in the head because you didn't realize they had wandered off.

It's the best survival horror of 2005 genuinely a masterpiece, forcing you to meticulously comb through environments where you feel completely foreign, limited to being the second invader on scene in the best of scenarios. The constant pressure to remain vigilant punishes video game instincts you may have acquired elsewhere, where an impulse to shoot for the head can turn an "unauthorized use of force" into "killed a hostage". The praise might sound silly, but all these mechanics only become praiseworthy due to the work done to create atmosphere - it's incredible that you can skip every single briefing in the game and still come away with vivid memories of each level. Trudge slowly through the dark, combing each inch of a hostile environment for evidence as distant, sprinting footsteps remind you how far you are from establishing control.

As much as I'd like to conclude it there, it's a little hard to talk about this game now without considering the existence of Ready or Not, a spiritual successor that modernizes and blends the core SWAT 4 experience with its expansion and several popular mods. I can easily recommend Ready or Not if you just want easy co-op, but taken as a whole I still find SWAT 4 to be the more compelling experience. In moment-to-moment gameplay, Ready or Not skews a little closer towards traditional shooters than I'd like. SWAT 4's guns never feel fully accurate, the player always feels fragile, and each level feels like it existed before you loaded in - Ready or Not misses the mark on each of these, and has a markedly different mood as a result. Try SWAT 4, mod it if you have to, and see if this style of game is your speed. If you like the core gameplay and want more (or you find yourself frustrated by a lack of QOL features / non-Hamachi multiplayer) then it may be worth picking up Ready or Not, but I'd read up on the changes first.

so many reviews of this game (going beyond just this site) read like a shopping list of grating SFX, because in the moment it's very fucking hard to feel like you ever fully have a grasp on the situation. your brain is being force-fed new stimuli constantly, and the game makes no effort to actually help you decipher any of it, so you resort to isolating individual contributors to the chaos in the hopes that it'll help you ground yourself. almost constantly guns are going off, and if bullets are being sprayed then you're probably taking damage, even if you're in cover. whether that's the result of enemies being much better shots than Lynch or their desperate attempts to constantly flank you changes by the minute, and the fact that you can never really get a fix on how many bullets kill this guy at this range means that the player is probably too busy determining if everyone from the first wave is dead to notice that waves 2 and 3 are entering the room. at that point you've lost whatever control you may have had - you don't have the time or ammo to figure out if the enemies are finite or if they'll just pour into this room endlessly. if you've ever played a shooter where you can be "suppressed" by enemy fire, this is every shootout in K&L2 - sitting there as bullets and debris fly past you faster than you can process, hunkered behind cover that won't last forever, waiting for your chance to make something happen while these two losers mutter to themselves and scream at each other. sometimes it's important screaming. it's usually not.

not to suggest that the misery stops when the shooting stops. if you, a hypothetical non-player of K&L 2, were under the impression that this game might ask you to walk up to someone and talk to them to progress the plot, i am sorry to be the one who tells you otherwise. all of kane and lynch's quiet moments are quickly upended by gunfire in a way that feels less like a clever surprise and more like a message from the developers: what else did you think could happen? what else exists for these two, how could they possibly outrun this forever? shooting and screaming is all they know how to do, and they still manage to fuck that up despite their assurances that "things could've been alright if not for this, if not for you". sure, they've ruined each others' lives, but in truth, i don't know if either of them needed the help.

i probably wouldn't argue with someone saying the game is hateful. it doesn't really seem to hate the player, though, which i think is what a lot of people who have never played it take away from these reviews. no, all of the ways in which it inconveniences the player set the tone, making the game feel more like a playable LiveLeak video. there's the association with LiveLeak's classic subject matter, of course, but also with the sense that you're getting a dispassionate look at something as it exists in the real world. watch these two destroy a city, their bodies, their relationships, and know that it's not being scrubbed or retouched for you - this is what's out there for men like this.

can't hear anything over the sound of spider-tongues and boot leather