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.

I have been downright ravenous for good, non-VR climbing games since playing the demo for Jusant last month. Now that my appetite's been sated, I can be safely re-introduced to normal human society.

These slow traversal puzzles that require you to master a variety of micro-mechanics are my shit. The courses can be genuinely challenging, and the game skews close enough to reality that seeing an "elite" course remains intimidating well after you've familiarized yourself with the controls. Those controls will be a hurdle, too. Memorizing inputs isn't really the hard part: it's developing a sense of connection between your character's limbs and the commands you're inputting, because small mistakes are punished severely with rapid stamina loss - if you're like me you'll probably fall multiple times before the tutorial is over. Some concepts will come more naturally to IRL climbers, who will intuitively understand positioning your core to get better leverage on different holds, but you don't need to come in with any familiarity.

As it exists right now, its biggest problems are issues with ragdolling and visual clarity - on rare occasion you'll find an excellent handhold in an area that doesn't make any sense, no matter how you rotate the camera. The castle is the worst about this, but thankfully natural formations tend to adhere a little closer to what you're seeing on the screen, minimizing the time you'll spend on scavenger hunts for the right nooks and crannies. It's especially important when the game places so much emphasis on the position of each limb. Sometimes a hold that looks weak at first glance lets you position your core in such a way where your whole body is in a better position afterward (this is a good thing, btw, not a bug!). It doesn't matter if the course is rated "intermediate" when you can't find these spots that differentiate it from an elite course.

It's not the prettiest game, it frequently strays into body horror, and once you learn the mechanics you can achieve some truly ridiculous feats, but I can't really say I mind any of these. As with any good puzzle, small breakthroughs and completions are reward enough on their own, and despite how strictly you must adhere to the climbing line, there are so many ways to fuck up and fall that it still feels like a personal achievement when you make it to the end. Big recommend for anyone who's been on the hunt for a game that tries to simulate free soloing.

My heart sank a little bit when I'm immediately asked to pick between a knight, an archer, and a mage, but I'll admit that I never really envisioned my knight becoming a hyper-mobile ranged character whose damage exclusively comes from throwing tree branches and a grappling hook. Each character has their own set of skills that can be re-tooled for increased damage or utility, depending on how you're feeling. With the limited pool of upgrades, it's not really designed to make things interesting for min-maxers, but if you're the type to see that the grappling hook can turn the knight into a necromancer and immediately start planning a new build, you'll probably get something out of this.

It's systems on top of systems on top of systems and I'm not convinced they'll all work out as the game progresses, because this thing gets grindy fast, but I think I'm just happy to see a Diablo clone that does something interesting with its skills and doesn't have any extra costs for DLCs or cosmetics. Enemy and mission variety are virtually nonexistent (at least, they are at this stage of Early Access) but hey: I paid $10 for this bad boy and I had $25 worth of fun, so I'm marking this one down as a win.

Absolutely in love with this base-building system. Putting something like this together is bold after your last game went with the conventional approach of click-to-place prefab structures, but I respect it. The whole idea of building your own base is now its own puzzle that requires advance planning, and I've spent basically my entire playtime in the game so far engineering modern marvels and then lecturing my friends when they interrupt my Lunch atop a Skyscraper moments by demonstrating their poor understanding of terminology any 5-year-old would know 💅

There aren't any robust physics calculations happening, but being forced to build custom structures brick by brick means that you'll develop an appreciation for even slightly large structures and will take way more psychic damage IRL when some graceless goober manages to knock them down. Any friend who plays these #EarlyAccess #Survival #Crafting games for the base building will get sucked into this like quicksand, developing a terrifying fervor for the proper procedures of placing struts/supporting beams in order to reclaim the materials later.

It's easy to forget what Steam was like ten years ago, even if you were there. Steam was still using the Greenlight program at this point, requiring that indie developers beg the Steam community for votes to improve their chances of being manually approved by Valve for sale on the platform. While the selection would start improving rapidly in the next couple years, I bring this up because I think Payday 1 benefited tremendously from the platform's limited catalog. If you were shopping for something like Payday, there wasn't anything else on Steam that would scratch that itch. It's easy to feel like Payday: The Heist got much more attention in 2011 than it would today, given that it's essentially a bunch of heist movie references stapled onto Left 4 Dead. Hell, one of the most popular levels from the original game is a Left 4 Dead level.

The sequel attempts to become more than that, to be its own game and improve upon the parts of Payday 1 that resonated the most with players. I started a job at a local grocery store the day before Payday 2 released, and I bought it immediately after they handed me a paycheck - and I was happy! The small selection of launch heists felt a little too "safe", but everything else was a massive improvement when it came to creating a personal connection with the game. Customize your own masks, your guns, the skills you want to take (separate from the heister you picked!) and play some heists in actual, real stealth.

This is not the game Payday 2 is today.

Ten years of updates has rendered the game horrifically bloated, each update adding new heists, heisters, masks, gameplay systems, cosmetic systems, progession systems, currencies, balance changes, enemy types, ammo types, melee weapons, weapon mods, grenades, and an arsenal of guns so large that I can't really think of anything outside of H3VR that beats it. The only way you can keep up is by being an early adopter, because the onboarding process for Payday 2 nowadays mostly relies on having a friend that will drag you through 2-5 hours of heisting before you start to understand how all the moving pieces fit together.

Many of the community's running jokes about the game's more unwieldy elements have a basis in reality as well. Yes, it "runs on a racing game engine" in the same way that DotA 2 can trace its lineage to Quake's engine. Yes, it's a "bag-throwing/drill-repair simulator". Overkill Software realized that the most popular heists in Payday 1 asked players to manage some other resource and introduced bags of loot that the cops can reclaim from inattentive players. This loop has been repeated in basically every mission since Payday 2's release, and while I think you could criticize this for being a lazy way to add gameplay to missions that should be radically different, in my experience the players of Payday 2 tend to feel like they haven't really done a mission if they're not managing some kind of tangible loot.

If you can sift through all the nonsense, though, the game has its allure. Payday 2's gameplay - in its current form - is about putting together a "build" with skills, weapons, and perk decks that synergize so you can clear some of the more sadistic content in the game. However, if you're playing on difficulties for people that leave the house, the possibilities open up a lot more and the game's variety really shines. Run a melee build, run a "summoner" build that uses turrets and converted cops to fight for you, sprint around the level at light speed using a shotgun to light everyone on fire. It's all fine, but it really takes off when you're playing this with a friend or three and all of you are engaging with these systems at the same time. Sprinting over to a teammate to revive them with a shout, keeping a lookout while they answer a guard's pager to maintain stealth - while some games are better at actively encouraging teamwork, each mission completed in Payday 2 feels like a bonding exercise through the little ways you're constantly looking out for each other.

So sure, you could play Payday 2 with bots, but even if they improved the lackluster AI you'd find that the game loses a lot of its magic. The game is at its worst when it's not doing anything to encourage collaboration (this is where that "drill repair simulator" joke comes from), but the reason it's still in Steam's Top 25 by concurrent players is because the rest of the game gets it right. Despite all the updates and the bloat, the allure of Payday 2 remains the same since its release: It retains the best parts of Left 4 Dead as a game bundled with a social space, letting you shoot the shit with friends or strangers in a purely cooperative environment, wordlessly providing assistance in the form of a trigger pull as you remove the helmets from an army of cops.

I just can't say that this is any better than the demo I played years ago. Sure, it scratches a particular kind of high-octane violence porn FPS itch that's pretty rare these days, but what does that really count for? While sliding and landing headshots feel great, there's no connective tissue here at all. Even if you're willing to accept that the story is a no-show, the mechanics of combat are tuned in such a way that the end product is little more than an aim trainer.

Stealth options are completely useless, stamina is strictly an annoyance, and anything that isn't a headshot may as well be a light breeze. I just... a game that looks like this should not be putting me to sleep, but I need something, anything to chew on. Humor me! Pretend that there's something more than a slo-mo button and a DOOM soundtrack and a reference to the Backrooms. If you can't do that, I'm just going to play Severed Steel instead.

I genuinely haven't found anything that scratches the same itch this game does. Ultimately it's very similar to a MOBA (no wait where are you going) in that you've got ultimate control over a single, small entity trying to exert individual influence amidst your team's broader strategy - gaining vision, exerting map control, positioning around objectives. In actuality, though, this is so much slower than any MOBA I've played, and it's brilliantly tense as a result. When turning your ship, turning your guns, and reloading each take between 3-30 seconds, you feel the full weight of committing to each action. If you don't, you die to someone who does.

As a result it feels so much better to play than a World of Tanks or a War Thunder, games where you're not really forced to make decisions, where you can just show up to a battle and play chicken with your enemies over and over without really thinking that you've done anything wrong. Sure, the community is still under the impression that there are pay-to-win ships that let you turn your brain off, but the reality is that - at the average person's skill level - you can style on any $30 premium ship by using your brain a little.

And you really get to savor it when you outsmart someone, too. In part, this is due to the pace: If someone positions poorly, you'll get plenty of time to line up a clean shot. Fire torpedoes around an island and watch as an enemy player scrambles desperately to dodge them before losing a massive chunk of their health bar. You'd think all of this would mean that the enemy player is having an awful time, but it's much better than you'd expect. That slow pace often means that very few scenarios feel like certain death - there's a lot of room to wiggle yourself out of any bad situation unless you've REALLY messed up.

But the feedback? The player feedback tho? Incredible. In a game that's mostly pretty quiet, any sound will be attention grabbing, but World of Warships tries to earn that attention anyway by making sure that every salvo leaving your guns sounds like a peal of thunder, that every torpedo dodged ratchets the tension up five- or ten-fold as the alarms grow increasingly shrill, only so you can breathe a sigh of relief as they fade into silence again. Each shot that lands is rewarded with a ribbon and a brief but subtle sound effect, with truly damaging hits often decorating your screen with an entire rainbow as the opponent's ears are left ringing. To say you'll be "immersed" in a game where your camera floats hundreds of meters above the era's largest ships sounds like fiction, but any WoWS player can tell you what it feels like to stare a laser through their monitor as they dodge a torpedo by a hair's breadth - it's absolutely thrilling.

Weirdly, I think sitting through a nearly 90-minute-long debate between my coworkers about whether or not Diablo 4's dash is "lazy design" has helped me clarify my thoughts on this whole affair. I'll be comparing it to Diablo 3 a lot because that's the entry that's most clear in my mind.

I think it's an improvement over 3 in most ways. I can understand that someone might be a little put off by the shift away from the third entry's maximalism, where player health could be in the millions within an hour and landing crits for billions of damage within 5-10 hours. I suppose my level 52 rogue with 1300 health in D4 might be a little underwhelming in comparison, but the gameplay effect is the same - I run up to a pack of enemies, build up stacks using one ability and turn them into a smoothie by casting a second one.

It's generally a little more accessible and a little less frustrating, though. The aforementioned dash debate was on the subject of the new, universal mobility skill: every class can press a button to do a short-range dash, and if they want more mobility they can use a skill slot to pick up a class-specific ability. It allows for more interesting builds, more interesting enemies, and even some puzzles designed around this new button. Nothing to encourage over-reliance, of course - you're not going to be using this very often - but it's certainly nice to have. You stock multiple charges of health potions instead of having just one with a cooldown, you can actually upgrade stuff at the blacksmith, and nicest of all? All those weird shopkeeper functions in D3 that required you to burn some rare resource (upgrading gems, re-rolling gear properties) just cost gold. That's it!

The best changes to the gameplay, though, come from a couple key changes.

The first is the shift away from assembling sets of gear. In Diablo 3, picking a build mostly meant finding an ability that you could buff to comical levels by wearing one or two sets of equipment. It really limited what you could do, and it meant that improving your gear took the form of upgrading gems or finding copies of the same set with better secondary stats. D4 doesn't have any gear sets. Builds are dependent on the skills you take, the ways you choose to enhance them, and then, once you've done all that, you go and you find a legendary item and you throw it in the fucking trash. Okay, that's not technically true. You take it to a vendor who rips the legendary property from the item and allows you to apply it to a different piece of equipment. I love this system. I never would've assumed I'd play a new Diablo game where the loot actually feels meaningful, where I'm encouraged to look at items below the highest tier of rarity, where I only have to upgrade gems 2-3 times.

The skill tree: Diablo 3's system of assembling complementary skills and passives wasn't bad for veteran players, but even then, it was pretty difficult to visualize the opportunity cost of picking one enhancement over another. Now, skills are broken down into clearly defined groups, and everything from a group (plus all their enhancements) is visible on one screen at the same time. Uh oh, you've just picked a passive that applies to all your "imbuement" abilities, those are scattered ALL across the tree! Mouse over each ability at the bottom of your screen and you'll see that each one is clearly tagged with a couple properties that will make it obvious which buffs apply to which abilities.

As for the player's stats, my rogue has a lot of gear with buffs to intelligence on it. If you told me this in Diablo 3 I would ask how you even managed to do that, then I would assume that fate has played a cruel joke on you. In Diablo 3 you ignored every single stat that wasn't your class' favorite and had a loot system that did most of the work for you - nearly all the gear you would get would favor your class and buff that stat. D4 doesn't do this. You'll still get gear your class can actually wear, but that gear can have any kind of attribute on it, and those stats will always provide some kind of benefit to you. Intelligence isn't optimal on a rogue, but it's not the end of the world because INT gives rogues extra crit chance. This is shuffled around for each class to remain useful, but you don't have to memorize any of this because you can immediately check what applies to you when you open your inventory.

While a lot of the decisions that directly affect moment-to-moment gameplay have been clarified, the game's biggest weaknesses are still issues with information and transparency. I have been asked several times what a "murmuring obol" is. I don't know how to explain the difference between normal dungeons, Whispers, and the Helltide stuff. The current endgame content is confusing, and while it's explained through a pop-up, all of this still feels obtuse when you're tasked with deciding what you should do next after you've finished the story. You could watch a YouTuber explain how paragon levels work this time around, but you shouldn't have to do that, and best of all: my friends who do watch these videos still find it confusing! It's weird, too, because some of the better selling points of the game - e.g. co-op scaling allowing players of any level to play together - are completely reliant on information sources outside of the game itself. The oft-derided battle pass isn't out yet, but that's what makes me fear for everything I've mentioned in this section. Information issues matter less when you know the game like the back of your hand, which is to say that a profit-focused approach to this game will cater more to the Forever Players who pump endless money into this game than the people trying the series for the first time, the people trying to show something they love to a friend, the people most affected by a lack of clarity.

It's pretty easy to be skeptical of this given that the description is a horrendous little salad of exhausted buzzwords - immersive sim, cyberpunk, open world, procedurally generated, dystopian, early access, voxel graphics - but it's actually pretty damn good, even better than expected after their Steam NextFest demo.

Going to get this out of the way early: This game is buggy - you'll get some framerate hitching and some pretty severe pop-in, not to mention the bugs that can occur when something is too close to a wall. I'm sure there's a chance of running into something game-breaking, but I haven't seen it - the closest I've encountered is a single instance of falling through the earth when trying to enter a building (which just resulted in some hospital bills that I... decided not to pay).

If you're not falling through the earth, though, it's magical. You gotta do the actual legwork of piecing everything together, and the game is not going to make any connections for you. Maybe you'll be a little frustrated when your case board fails to connect the address for "K. Zoungrana" to the existing entry for Keyon Zoungrana, but it's a very easy quirk to work around. Once you learn how to arrange the board in a way that suits you, you can begin knocking out these cases like clockwork. Sometimes a murderer may as well write their name at the crime scene, but sometimes you pick up a "freebie" photography assignment only to notice that the only "clue" you have on your target is that they're a 26-year-old security guard... somewhere.

As a detective in a world run by the Coca-Cola Cops, you're treated more like a hobbyist or a DoorDash driver than someone with any authority, and it works pretty well to encourage player creativity. The first time someone spits in your face after you offer them two hundred dollars for their name, you'll probably wonder what else you can even try. There's actually some pretty creative evidence trails and potential solutions I've seen pop up, so your problem is likely one of two things: 1. You haven't explored more creative solutions, or 2. Your conscience is too clean. I, on the other hand, have learned that I have no morals whatsoever. Try this: Knock on the suspect's door, and ask if they'll let you in. You can stand there for ten minutes trying to bribe them with ever-larger sums of cash, or you can close the door in their face and ram through it, knocking them unconscious with the impact, rummaging around in their apartment while they sleep it off. Is it court-admissible evidence? I don't even know if they're taking these guys to court! Not my problem!

Even the largest cities here are pretty small, but they make up for it with their depth. Every person has a place to sleep and something to do during the day, and this alone allows for so many angles of attack on any given case. You might be schlepping back and forth across the city just to collect pieces of paper, but with such a broad tool set it rarely feels tedious when every search is fruitful - at worst, you're building up your database so future investigations are easier.

It does settle into a formula with time, and once you start seeing patterns it's easy to feel like some of the magic is lost. NPCs suffer the most, because you only get a handful of interactions with them - I'm not sure why you can ask someone for their fingerprints but not their occupation, for example. The core investigative loop, though, is still pretty fun even if you feel like you've seen it all. Again, your arsenal of data gathering options is so large that just determining the right approach feels like you've done something clever, and finally being able to clean up a completed case board at the end of the day remains satisfying from hour 1 to hour 20.

For now, I should get back to it. I've just learned that my next door neighbor was murdered while I was searching my unconscious landlord's apartment for a burger that ended up making me sick.

Total War - the series - often struggles with faction variety. Historical fidelity mostly asks that people from the same area and time period fight each other with similar technologies and concepts of warfare, and spicing things up for gameplay purposes often means dipping into the ahistorical, poorly documented, or theoretical. Look at any of the games about WW2-era tanks, boats, or planes and you'll often find that these games create a sense of progression by extending the timeline decades in either direction. Total War isn't immune to this - Creative Assembly will take any excuse to give a faction some kind of ninja unit - but a complaint I've commonly heard from newcomers to the series is that factions feel same-y, with each game creating 1-3 faction archetypes and letting those define the gameplay. Small nuances that determine how each faction should play are either completely invisible to a new player or difficult to intuitively balance. The player asks how much they should lean into their faction's gimmick in order to strike that balance, and the Warhammer games answer confidently: Crank that shit to 11.

If you're playing the Mesoamerican dinosaur faction, it's a pretty safe bet to invest in melee. The King Arthur faction whose population is divided into an illustrious knight class and mobs of untrained peasants probably wants you to play around the horse guys. The gameplay hook for each faction should be obvious from their theming without even glancing at the stats, and Creative Assembly have done a fantastic job of making them just as distinct on the broader campaign map. As a result, factions can feel unique from one another even within the same "race", and the asymmetry forces you to constantly make new, interesting decisions as you try to mitigate your opponent's strengths while playing to your own.

What's more, CA have gone absolutely nuts in bringing the fantasy elements of Warhammer Fantasy into the game. Every friend of mine who's played this game for more than a battle or two has at least one unit that they can gush about for non-gameplay reasons. For me, I'm a Pirates of Sartosa guy, so it's the Necrofex Colossus - a sort of giant, bipedal undead mech made out of the rotten timber of sunken ships and the flesh of their crews, acting as "artillery" by walking right up and blasting you with a cannon at point-blank range. The animations are wonderfully expressive, selling the gameplay fantasy and character of each and every unit regardless of your familiarity with the setting: The rats are a loose, jittery swarm of units while the rigid, rickety ground troops of the Tomb Kings stand in contrast to the inhuman, predatory swiftness of the creatures they employ. It's the feeling of playing with all your action figures at once - GI Joe vs. a bunch of Lego figures vs. a Stormtrooper - with all the vivid effects your childhood brain could imagine and all the strategy you'd need to keep you engaged as an adult.

Best of all, TWW2's co-op campaign is an actual blast. The diversity of the factions combined with the number of leaders in each faction means that both players can pursue the exact flavor of strategy gameplay that they like. If you can at least tolerate the battles, TWW2 lets the owner of an army assign individual units to each player. Divide them up equally, or control the entire army while your friend plays Dynasty Warriors with your general. There's a lot of room for co-op shenanigans with this feature alone, and it's my favorite co-op strategy game as a result.

There's so much to this setting and the Total War games have shown a tremendous willingness to engage with all of its quirks, resulting in an end product that is bursting with flavor. It has taken tremendous restraint to write this review, because it could've very easily been a soup of GIF links and bullet points about all the cool, goofy, clever stuff that you'll be exposed to simply by playing the various campaigns. Play any of these games and it will quickly become obvious why people have spent decades in love with this universe.

Look, okay, I know it sounds bad on paper. Also, it's kinda bad in practice for an hour or so. Yeah, I know there's not a lot to chew on here, that it's just 3D Farmville without the microtransactions, that on some consoles it runs like hot garbage.

Sometimes you just need a stress ball, alright? For me, I gotta feel like there's some kind of long-term planning, so I can't just fire up an aim trainer or Minesweeper or [third example].

This game is very carefully tailored to the person who wants to:
1. Create a personalized cartoon farm for its own sake.
2. Repeatedly return to the game at their own pace and have their dedication rewarded with constant progress.
3. Play a stress-free hangout game with their friends without needing to schedule a game night. No advanced mechanics, no fail states.

Because this game is married to real-life timers, the early game suffers badly. You've picked up a new game and this is likely to be the peak of your interest in it, only to find that you can't do very much because you're short on money and the crops you can plant right now don't make very much. If the aforementioned design goals don't sound like you, you're probably going to bounce off this thing right here. Sorry! There's no catch, it's not a "secret masterpiece" that asks you to push past the tedium. What you see at hour 2 is what you get at hour 200, just on a smaller scale.

Mechanics:
What I've learned to admire about it in the past week of playing with a newbie is the way each element of the game contributes to an ever-shifting economy. There are five main sources of income - Fields, Trees, Animals, Flowers, and Fish. Each income source strikes its own balance between required effort, payout, and frequency, and since each crop has its own level, crops can scale differently as you go - something that has excellent gold per minute at the start may be quickly outpaced if you show a little dedication to a lesser crop. There is no wrong choice - you will always be rewarded, but efficiency freaks will always have something to consider.

The other reason why this works is that different functions use different currencies. I know we're all exhausted by hearing "currencies" in the plural, but this actually serves a gameplay function. Gold is used for crops, diamonds are used for cosmetics, medals are used for major convenience upgrades, and tickets are used for automation. The mention of "crop levels" might have caused some to wince, but it allows for this evolving sense of progression where animals seem like a huge money pit for a new player, but their products convert nicely into tickets that make larger farms easier to run. Second example: Trees fall off very quickly as gold generators, but late-game trees start yielding rarer resources like spices instead, keeping you from bulldozing your orchard.

Quests ensure that you'll always have several plates spinning to meet their diverse needs, but since there are no time limits and no fail states, you can straight up ignore all of this and just let your kid walk around in splitscreen planting whatever they like, ignore the thing for ten minutes/a day/three weeks and come back to show them the fruits of their labor.

What I will say regarding the economy is that some crops do become functionally useless as time goes on - the game rewards you so much for unlocking new crops that the oldest ones cannot possibly scale enough to compensate. Everything gets better with dedication, but once you've made enough progress to unlock 2000-profit-per-seed chard, you probably don't care about the 15 profit lettuce, and your farm is likely too large to benefit from its fast grow time since you've got other stuff to do.

Conclusion:
It's not a lot, but there's value in it. It's good for kids, it's good for chilling in a Discord call and chatting, it's good for when you're slightly too high and staring at your Steam library like you're sorting a to-do list. I know it shares an aesthetic with 500 different App Store games called some shit like "Harvest Heroes" but you gotta trust me on this one! It's me, your Backloggd friend! Let's hop on a voice call together and plant leeks for six hours straight! Please help me harvest leeks

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.