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It's a little weird, right? Arguably the western world's most famous historical blood sport and all recent depictions of it in games have been miserable affairs, to the point where Ubisoft's For Honor (a soul-sucking experience in its own right) is one of the more satisfying modern depictions of a gladiator as far as gameplay goes. I'm pleased to report that this game beats the average.
I do feel conflicted about saying that, because I know the controls will almost immediately be a turn-off to most. Moving your character around feels like steering a pallet jack. Simply ambulating towards your opponents requires that you strain against the physics of the world, against the weight of the leather and cloth (and hopefully, metal) covering you, against the momentum you've already built up. We haven't even swung a weapon yet! Damage is entirely physics-based - for the 81 people on this site who have played Exanima, you've got a sense for how this plays out. You pick a direction to swing and, if you feel like getting a little zany with it, you can whip your character around to try and get some extra oomph behind it before your weapon comes colliding into whatever poor bastard is unlucky enough to be there with you. It's slow and heavy, but it turns each big hit into a white-knuckle, stomach-dropping event that palpably changes the flow of the fight.
That's what I admire most about WWAATD, though - its ability to create a mood, assuming you're willing to buy in. Combat does not feel dignified - there is no choreography. Your weapons and armor have durability, and they are not cheap for someone of your station. You're struggling against the limitations of physics imposed by your character's body and armor, against your opponent and their equipment, and the whole time you're running calculations about how quickly you can butcher the guy in front of you to avoid paying for medication or maintenance. You already came into this fight at 60% HP and your equipment isn't doing too hot, but you swung for the fences and picked a fight that pays out big, assuming you can hack it. Lose a weapon, though, or a shield, and the whole thing comes apart - it's a mad scramble for whatever you can find on the ground, and fuck the costs, you're trying to save your entire character before you break this weapon, too. It's the feeling of fighting with your own brain telling you that this warrants desperation, knowing that the only way out of a situation this dire is to suppress that, to keep a steady mind and a steady hand as you back yourself out of this corner and hope to land a rare, truly clean hit on your opponent to turn things around.
It only works because of the imperfect controls, but at the same time it's very difficult to avoid feeling like you've now done a couple runs and have developed a good plan that is being kneecapped by deliberately obtuse mechanics. There's nothing perfectly consistent in these fights, which makes things thrilling when you're in the right state of mind and deeply frustrating when you're not. Thankfully, it always feels like the AI is playing by the same set of rules, but that's little consolation when the best prospect you have for the next round of RNG fights is a 1v6 against some enemies who are clearly working for a more generous patron. People have different levels of patience for different kinds of frustration and tedium in games, and admittedly mine runs a little low when it comes to accommodating unintuitive/inconsistent controls, made worse when you get screwed with a bad selection of fights. I'm a little sympathetic towards this game, though, because it's the first gladiator game I've played in a minute that takes an honest shot at the concept and isn't developed by some pathetic jagoff.
(Actually, it's kinda heartwarming that this game is such an obvious labor of love - the dev seems downright giddy that anyone would play this at all, judging by the loading screen tips and the tweets.)
I do feel conflicted about saying that, because I know the controls will almost immediately be a turn-off to most. Moving your character around feels like steering a pallet jack. Simply ambulating towards your opponents requires that you strain against the physics of the world, against the weight of the leather and cloth (and hopefully, metal) covering you, against the momentum you've already built up. We haven't even swung a weapon yet! Damage is entirely physics-based - for the 81 people on this site who have played Exanima, you've got a sense for how this plays out. You pick a direction to swing and, if you feel like getting a little zany with it, you can whip your character around to try and get some extra oomph behind it before your weapon comes colliding into whatever poor bastard is unlucky enough to be there with you. It's slow and heavy, but it turns each big hit into a white-knuckle, stomach-dropping event that palpably changes the flow of the fight.
That's what I admire most about WWAATD, though - its ability to create a mood, assuming you're willing to buy in. Combat does not feel dignified - there is no choreography. Your weapons and armor have durability, and they are not cheap for someone of your station. You're struggling against the limitations of physics imposed by your character's body and armor, against your opponent and their equipment, and the whole time you're running calculations about how quickly you can butcher the guy in front of you to avoid paying for medication or maintenance. You already came into this fight at 60% HP and your equipment isn't doing too hot, but you swung for the fences and picked a fight that pays out big, assuming you can hack it. Lose a weapon, though, or a shield, and the whole thing comes apart - it's a mad scramble for whatever you can find on the ground, and fuck the costs, you're trying to save your entire character before you break this weapon, too. It's the feeling of fighting with your own brain telling you that this warrants desperation, knowing that the only way out of a situation this dire is to suppress that, to keep a steady mind and a steady hand as you back yourself out of this corner and hope to land a rare, truly clean hit on your opponent to turn things around.
It only works because of the imperfect controls, but at the same time it's very difficult to avoid feeling like you've now done a couple runs and have developed a good plan that is being kneecapped by deliberately obtuse mechanics. There's nothing perfectly consistent in these fights, which makes things thrilling when you're in the right state of mind and deeply frustrating when you're not. Thankfully, it always feels like the AI is playing by the same set of rules, but that's little consolation when the best prospect you have for the next round of RNG fights is a 1v6 against some enemies who are clearly working for a more generous patron. People have different levels of patience for different kinds of frustration and tedium in games, and admittedly mine runs a little low when it comes to accommodating unintuitive/inconsistent controls, made worse when you get screwed with a bad selection of fights. I'm a little sympathetic towards this game, though, because it's the first gladiator game I've played in a minute that takes an honest shot at the concept and isn't developed by some pathetic jagoff.
(Actually, it's kinda heartwarming that this game is such an obvious labor of love - the dev seems downright giddy that anyone would play this at all, judging by the loading screen tips and the tweets.)
2023
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 madeMidgar 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.
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
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.
Genuinely can only think about the developers who wasted who knows how much time just to churn out a product that is so fundamentally broken that it's widely declared to be "less playable" than a game old enough to have grandchildren. I can only hope that this works better in Japanese because there's no other reason I can think of to sit on this game for 4 decades and release this as the "new and improved" version. Whole game feels like a teacher of a foreign language class grading me on my ability to converse with a student who's been sleeping through the lessons.
Spent most of my play time wondering how everyone I've ever met or thought about gave this a 7/10, only to hit the point in the game where it goes "Let's get this shit over with" and flips everything on its head in the last 10% of the campaign. I stand corrected. This is what a 7/10 looks like.
But son, let me tell you right now, there is nothing better than shoulder-slam-express-mailing some stupid goblin into a wall at highway speeds. Actually, there is, and it's using the Gambler passive (making people leave the lobby) until someone sticks around long enough to let me play blackjack in the middle of their boss fight. The combat's just good, there's so much room for creativity and skill expression with the way you can mix and match skills and weapons and jobs and use the unique properties of these attacks and their "cancels" to fly through the levels like a caffeinated hurricane of blades and magic and bullets.
Jack rocks. Dude cares about one (1) thing. Talking about the past? Talking about the MacGuffin? Pipe down, pencil-neck. If it's not about killing Chaos I'm not hearing it. Multiplayer is actually made better by forcing the other players to dress up as your party members - watching Jed and Ash bop around the stage with you in a way that makes them feel like people instead of Pikmin. But, uh, just one thing. A lot of things, actually-
Why does Sophia show up and then only talk like twice? Why are the "quick" versions of the executions on normal enemies still 45 minutes long? Why is it so hard to see anything on some of these levels? This bloom got me feeling like it's 2008 again. Why is there NO gear variety? Why is auto-dismantling located in system settings when I've gotta update it every sixteen seconds? Why is the level design so... unambitious? What's up with that framerate? Why is the last act paced like that?
To be clear, I like more than just the combat - there are so many little things they get right that keep the flaws from sinking the whole project (despite the pacing, I like the plot, I like Kenjiro Tsuda, I love the soundtrack, I could go on). Can't say I'm smitten with it or anything but when it works, it really, really works. That pacing issue just keeps rearing its head when I think about this game though, how it feels like the game ultimately just gives up on proper execution of plot beats and goes "here's 'end game', this is what you're here for, right?" and drops you back into the menus assuming that you'll figure it out. Not really sure that the game holds up to that endgame grind either, unless we're giving bosses new attacks - the red/purple attack system is a little too generous to the player when the bosses already telegraph their moves so far in advance.
But son, let me tell you right now, there is nothing better than shoulder-slam-express-mailing some stupid goblin into a wall at highway speeds. Actually, there is, and it's using the Gambler passive (making people leave the lobby) until someone sticks around long enough to let me play blackjack in the middle of their boss fight. The combat's just good, there's so much room for creativity and skill expression with the way you can mix and match skills and weapons and jobs and use the unique properties of these attacks and their "cancels" to fly through the levels like a caffeinated hurricane of blades and magic and bullets.
Jack rocks. Dude cares about one (1) thing. Talking about the past? Talking about the MacGuffin? Pipe down, pencil-neck. If it's not about killing Chaos I'm not hearing it. Multiplayer is actually made better by forcing the other players to dress up as your party members - watching Jed and Ash bop around the stage with you in a way that makes them feel like people instead of Pikmin. But, uh, just one thing. A lot of things, actually-
Why does Sophia show up and then only talk like twice? Why are the "quick" versions of the executions on normal enemies still 45 minutes long? Why is it so hard to see anything on some of these levels? This bloom got me feeling like it's 2008 again. Why is there NO gear variety? Why is auto-dismantling located in system settings when I've gotta update it every sixteen seconds? Why is the level design so... unambitious? What's up with that framerate? Why is the last act paced like that?
To be clear, I like more than just the combat - there are so many little things they get right that keep the flaws from sinking the whole project (despite the pacing, I like the plot, I like Kenjiro Tsuda, I love the soundtrack, I could go on). Can't say I'm smitten with it or anything but when it works, it really, really works. That pacing issue just keeps rearing its head when I think about this game though, how it feels like the game ultimately just gives up on proper execution of plot beats and goes "here's 'end game', this is what you're here for, right?" and drops you back into the menus assuming that you'll figure it out. Not really sure that the game holds up to that endgame grind either, unless we're giving bosses new attacks - the red/purple attack system is a little too generous to the player when the bosses already telegraph their moves so far in advance.
After playing Sakuna, it's hard not to feel like gaming as a whole has missed the mark by reducing every "farming sim" to absent-mindedly picking a tool and left-clicking squares on a grid. I don't hate these games - I have way too many hours in Farm Together - but it's hard to feel like there's any art to it, any appreciation for the discipline. In Sakuna, though, there's so much reverence for and attention to the labor of traditional rice farming that the idea of planting enough seeds to cover the game's single plot of land can feel daunting when you start.
This is why I think it succeeds. It's not that it's got sluggish animations - some of Sakuna's movements in the field are snappy enough that they'd be considered violent if you recreated them in your garden - but the fact that individual steps of the process are given time and attention that most games just skip right past with the plant-water-harvest loop. You till the land by inputting each individual swing of a hoe, you plant seeds one at a time as you tiptoe backwards through the field, you dehull the rice with repeated up-down movements on the analog stick. Your rice will only be evaluated as a batch at the end of the season, but the process instills in you an appreciation for each seed as its own plant. It's not hard to see the laborious, quasi-spiritual exercise of caring for the rice mirrored in the diligence and effort it takes to become a kinder person, to cultivate healthy relationships, to break a bad habit. This journey for Sakuna - the character - is not strictly about farming.
The elephant in the room is the combat, because everyone I've spoken to has agreed that this game's combat is serviceable and not much else. I literally do not care at all about the combat, so I will not speak of it further!
No game out there is in the same hemisphere as Sakuna when it comes to depicting farming as a craft, how the process and its results tie into culture and history and science. If we're lucky enough to see Sakuna inspire a wave of games with similar respect for farming as something that requires diligence and discipline, I suspect it'll be easy to look back at Sakuna and wonder what was so special, because this very much feels like the kind of game that gets eclipsed by its spiritual successors. I wouldn't wish for this game to fade into the background, but if someone can use the foundation Sakuna has laid to climb a little higher, then I welcome it.
This is why I think it succeeds. It's not that it's got sluggish animations - some of Sakuna's movements in the field are snappy enough that they'd be considered violent if you recreated them in your garden - but the fact that individual steps of the process are given time and attention that most games just skip right past with the plant-water-harvest loop. You till the land by inputting each individual swing of a hoe, you plant seeds one at a time as you tiptoe backwards through the field, you dehull the rice with repeated up-down movements on the analog stick. Your rice will only be evaluated as a batch at the end of the season, but the process instills in you an appreciation for each seed as its own plant. It's not hard to see the laborious, quasi-spiritual exercise of caring for the rice mirrored in the diligence and effort it takes to become a kinder person, to cultivate healthy relationships, to break a bad habit. This journey for Sakuna - the character - is not strictly about farming.
The elephant in the room is the combat, because everyone I've spoken to has agreed that this game's combat is serviceable and not much else. I literally do not care at all about the combat, so I will not speak of it further!
No game out there is in the same hemisphere as Sakuna when it comes to depicting farming as a craft, how the process and its results tie into culture and history and science. If we're lucky enough to see Sakuna inspire a wave of games with similar respect for farming as something that requires diligence and discipline, I suspect it'll be easy to look back at Sakuna and wonder what was so special, because this very much feels like the kind of game that gets eclipsed by its spiritual successors. I wouldn't wish for this game to fade into the background, but if someone can use the foundation Sakuna has laid to climb a little higher, then I welcome it.
2023
(Not going to talk your ear off on this one, I just think this deserves more attention than it's currently getting)
This game is what I always wanted Dorfromantik to be - Dorfromantik can be relaxing, but trying to play the game well tends to make it deeply frustrating instead as you try to min-max the placement of each tile only to get another fucking railroad that you've gotta work with. Terrascape is less restrictive than even Dorfromantik's creative mode. Sure, it's an easier game as a result, but the game trusts that you'll look at your score and go "I can do better" and put a little more thought into your next game. You've got plenty of flexibility to make something that looks visually appealing without sabotaging your score since you're under no obligation to put your tiles anywhere near each other (and no obligation to leave them there - points are only calculated when a building is placed!). Game of the year? No, but it's doing a great job of scratching that "casual city builder" itch where other games have left me hanging.
This game is what I always wanted Dorfromantik to be - Dorfromantik can be relaxing, but trying to play the game well tends to make it deeply frustrating instead as you try to min-max the placement of each tile only to get another fucking railroad that you've gotta work with. Terrascape is less restrictive than even Dorfromantik's creative mode. Sure, it's an easier game as a result, but the game trusts that you'll look at your score and go "I can do better" and put a little more thought into your next game. You've got plenty of flexibility to make something that looks visually appealing without sabotaging your score since you're under no obligation to put your tiles anywhere near each other (and no obligation to leave them there - points are only calculated when a building is placed!). Game of the year? No, but it's doing a great job of scratching that "casual city builder" itch where other games have left me hanging.
2023
"The Commission alleges that the company’s ubiquitous advertisements touting their supposedly 'free' products—some of which have consisted almost entirely of the word 'free' spoken repeatedly—mislead consumers into believing that they can file their taxes for free with TurboTax. In fact, most tax filers can’t use the company’s 'free' service because it is not available to millions of taxpayers, such as those who get a 1099 form for work in the gig economy, or those who earn farm income. In 2020, for example, approximately two-thirds of tax filers could not use TurboTax’s free product." -Federal Trade Commission
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"Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting 'encroachment,' Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has.
Under the terms of [the IRS Free File Program], Intuit and other commercial tax prep companies promised to provide free online filing to tens of millions of lower-income taxpayers. In exchange, the IRS pledged not to create a government-run system.
Since Free File’s launch, Intuit has done everything it could to limit the program’s reach while making sure the government stuck to its end of the deal. As ProPublica has reported, Intuit added code to the Free File landing page of TurboTax that hid it from search engines like Google, making it harder for would-be users to find." -ProPublica
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"The IRS brags that 70 percent of Americans are eligible for Free File, but for the 2019 tax season, only 4.2 million returns out of 157.2 million total were filed through Free File, or 2.6 percent." -Vox
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Intuit, H&R Block, and others like them make their money by pulling a bait-and-switch on people who would otherwise take advantage of the system you would expect from a wealthy, modern country - one that lets them file their taxes for free. They have paid for millions of dollars in lobbying over decades to keep taxes as confusing as possible, and their efforts to deceive you will continue until you find yourself one click away from being done with this whole nightmare and going to fetch your wallet to just get this over with.
I can't recommend in good conscience that you put your Social Security Number into some mystery program (even though I find myself agreeing with MSCHF). What I will ask is that you avoid giving Intuit or H&R Block a single cent if at all possible, because they will only use that money to make your life worse.
Uhhh Iris is cute. Who doesn't love an office lady! The backgrounds here are pretty good and I never found the soundtrack grating. Would be nice if they had a fullscreen option, but for something this short, I had a pretty good time! Didn't expect to laugh so much, hehe!
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-for-free
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"Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting 'encroachment,' Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has.
Under the terms of [the IRS Free File Program], Intuit and other commercial tax prep companies promised to provide free online filing to tens of millions of lower-income taxpayers. In exchange, the IRS pledged not to create a government-run system.
Since Free File’s launch, Intuit has done everything it could to limit the program’s reach while making sure the government stuck to its end of the deal. As ProPublica has reported, Intuit added code to the Free File landing page of TurboTax that hid it from search engines like Google, making it harder for would-be users to find." -ProPublica
---
"The IRS brags that 70 percent of Americans are eligible for Free File, but for the 2019 tax season, only 4.2 million returns out of 157.2 million total were filed through Free File, or 2.6 percent." -Vox
---
Intuit, H&R Block, and others like them make their money by pulling a bait-and-switch on people who would otherwise take advantage of the system you would expect from a wealthy, modern country - one that lets them file their taxes for free. They have paid for millions of dollars in lobbying over decades to keep taxes as confusing as possible, and their efforts to deceive you will continue until you find yourself one click away from being done with this whole nightmare and going to fetch your wallet to just get this over with.
I can't recommend in good conscience that you put your Social Security Number into some mystery program (even though I find myself agreeing with MSCHF). What I will ask is that you avoid giving Intuit or H&R Block a single cent if at all possible, because they will only use that money to make your life worse.
Uhhh Iris is cute. Who doesn't love an office lady! The backgrounds here are pretty good and I never found the soundtrack grating. Would be nice if they had a fullscreen option, but for something this short, I had a pretty good time! Didn't expect to laugh so much, hehe!
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-for-free
Everything that's interesting about rally, softened to be accessible in a way that I'm not sure was entirely necessary. Do these courses feel more rally-like than the base game? They do, but only by the slimmest of margins. They're the base game's off-road races with tighter turns and fewer straightaways. As a result, it requires better understanding of your car's handling than any of the base game's off-road courses, but it still pales in comparison to other rally games (even the ones with comparably arcade-style mechanics).
The rest of this review is going to dig into that last point, so I want to go ahead and get the "selling point" out of the way early: You buy this DLC if you want more off-road and mixed-surface races, or if you want to test Forza Horizon's absurd vehicle selection/tuning options on more technically demanding off-road courses. I spent a significant amount of time in the base game on the joke idea of trying to turn a Koenigsegg Agera into a viable rally car - you can! You can do that. Now you get more chances to test it.
Here's why it's a "softened" rally experience.
Pace notes are present but have been greatly simplified. I don't mind that they've ditched the numbering system that the most popular rally games use - turns are now "flat-out, easy, medium, hard, hairpin" - but there are other reasons why they're not useful here. You will get no information on whether a turn opens or tightens, whether it's safe to cut or not, etc. You can still "sight read" a lot of the courses just fine, you still have a minimap, and the limited vocab used in the pace notes makes them feel more like "flavor" than a "feature". You can't adjust the timing either, which has been pretty inconsistent in my experience - the most egregious examples have the co-driver telling me the turn I'm already navigating.
The races themselves take place on the same wide roads with decent lines of sight to the next turn, so those pace notes I mentioned can be completely disabled for the daytime events. The races are still one-and-done, single-stage events that (by default) retain the cosmetic-only damage model from the base game, meaning that you don't have to worry about endurance, or comeback opportunities on future stages, or any of the things that make longer rally events so thrilling.
Leave the difficulty on the same setting you did during the base game and you'll have a much easier time clearing these, too. I found that "Highly Skilled" provided a consistent enough challenge for me across all race types in the base game, but after cranking it up for this DLC I often still found myself 5-6 seconds ahead of 2nd place by the second or third split - in a single-stage event! I'm assuming it's still simulating Drivatars in the background but they do not seem to be doing too well.
The most loyal Forza Horizon players I know - the ones that eagerly await every DLC - they treasure the game for its variety. It is a big, plastic box full of toy cars and you can play with trucks or hyper-engineered hyper-speed hypercars and drive them on a long highway or over a big ol' jump, whatever you like. It's perplexing to me that the DLC with the most straightforward concept - "use whatever car you like in some mixed-surface races with a bunch of turns" - is the one where they seem the most afraid of stepping on the player's toes. I'm not asking for another simulator, because I know that's not what they're trying to do, but I still think this is a miss. Leaving both pacenotes and the minimap enabled by default is the most obvious symptom of the bigger issue here: it does not ask players to have the skill required to navigate a challenging environment at speed, and the tools it gives you are not developed enough to allow the customizable difficulty to compensate. These challenges are what makes rally exciting, what gives it a flavor distinct from the kinds of races that are represented in the base game. Don't get me wrong, the DLC is still enjoyable, but it's because the first three words are "Forza Horizon 5," not because of any interesting take on rally racing.
The rest of this review is going to dig into that last point, so I want to go ahead and get the "selling point" out of the way early: You buy this DLC if you want more off-road and mixed-surface races, or if you want to test Forza Horizon's absurd vehicle selection/tuning options on more technically demanding off-road courses. I spent a significant amount of time in the base game on the joke idea of trying to turn a Koenigsegg Agera into a viable rally car - you can! You can do that. Now you get more chances to test it.
Here's why it's a "softened" rally experience.
Pace notes are present but have been greatly simplified. I don't mind that they've ditched the numbering system that the most popular rally games use - turns are now "flat-out, easy, medium, hard, hairpin" - but there are other reasons why they're not useful here. You will get no information on whether a turn opens or tightens, whether it's safe to cut or not, etc. You can still "sight read" a lot of the courses just fine, you still have a minimap, and the limited vocab used in the pace notes makes them feel more like "flavor" than a "feature". You can't adjust the timing either, which has been pretty inconsistent in my experience - the most egregious examples have the co-driver telling me the turn I'm already navigating.
The races themselves take place on the same wide roads with decent lines of sight to the next turn, so those pace notes I mentioned can be completely disabled for the daytime events. The races are still one-and-done, single-stage events that (by default) retain the cosmetic-only damage model from the base game, meaning that you don't have to worry about endurance, or comeback opportunities on future stages, or any of the things that make longer rally events so thrilling.
Leave the difficulty on the same setting you did during the base game and you'll have a much easier time clearing these, too. I found that "Highly Skilled" provided a consistent enough challenge for me across all race types in the base game, but after cranking it up for this DLC I often still found myself 5-6 seconds ahead of 2nd place by the second or third split - in a single-stage event! I'm assuming it's still simulating Drivatars in the background but they do not seem to be doing too well.
The most loyal Forza Horizon players I know - the ones that eagerly await every DLC - they treasure the game for its variety. It is a big, plastic box full of toy cars and you can play with trucks or hyper-engineered hyper-speed hypercars and drive them on a long highway or over a big ol' jump, whatever you like. It's perplexing to me that the DLC with the most straightforward concept - "use whatever car you like in some mixed-surface races with a bunch of turns" - is the one where they seem the most afraid of stepping on the player's toes. I'm not asking for another simulator, because I know that's not what they're trying to do, but I still think this is a miss. Leaving both pacenotes and the minimap enabled by default is the most obvious symptom of the bigger issue here: it does not ask players to have the skill required to navigate a challenging environment at speed, and the tools it gives you are not developed enough to allow the customizable difficulty to compensate. These challenges are what makes rally exciting, what gives it a flavor distinct from the kinds of races that are represented in the base game. Don't get me wrong, the DLC is still enjoyable, but it's because the first three words are "Forza Horizon 5," not because of any interesting take on rally racing.
2021
have been coming back to this one lately after stalling out back in 2021 and wow is it disappointing that they don't do anything more interesting with the slavery plot. setting up a free excuse to go absolutely apeshit on the baddies and instead they do nothing with it, like the writers mistakenly thought that "slavery" is the name of a schoolyard bully or a big cartoon dragon and not, uh, something that is responsible for incalculable real-life misery. it's just... that's kinda a heavy concept to wield when the rest of the game is so ankle-deep. it feels like they were totally bored with the idea before you even make it to the second boss
i do sincerely like the combat though! as someone who barely touches JRPGs i had some issues with not being genre-savvy enough (mostly as it pertains to buffs/resource management) but other than that? i had an unreservedly good time with this chunk - dog, look at those boost strikes! pure shounen action schlock (i say this affectionately). shame that everything even tangentially related to the story is completely toothless!
i do sincerely like the combat though! as someone who barely touches JRPGs i had some issues with not being genre-savvy enough (mostly as it pertains to buffs/resource management) but other than that? i had an unreservedly good time with this chunk - dog, look at those boost strikes! pure shounen action schlock (i say this affectionately). shame that everything even tangentially related to the story is completely toothless!
Stretches the definition of "remaster" a bit, but I think in this case that's for the best. I referenced Need for Speed's identity problem in my review for Unbound, seeing how two years after 2010's Hot Pursuit came out, Forza started pulling NFS' identity as "the fun one" out from under them with each new entry in the Horizon series.
("The fun one" isn't meant to suggest that other games like FlatOut or Burnout didn't exist, but if you were in it for the racing or the licensed cars - not the destruction physics - Need for Speed was the safe bet, the game popular enough that you could talk about it with acquaintances. It's also worth pointing out that Burnout hasn't had an original, mainline entry in the series since 2008, and FlatOut has received 2 sequels since then that have both disappointed series fans.)
Hailing from a pre-Forza Horizon era, Hot Pursuit still feels confident. The game is a playable car commercial. Not the ones about how your car will stop you from turning pedestrians into tomato paste, but the ones about how buying a new minivan can help you re-discover the joy of driving on an impossibly well-paved road winding along a cliff by the sea.
If the playable car commercial was indeed the inspiration for this entry in the series, then it executes on it admirably well. I'm not going to claim that the race designs are groundbreaking, but each one has a concept that keeps the whole affair from becoming a checklist despite the total lack of a story to guide the campaign. The roads are just wide enough and the traffic just sparse enough that you'll have to remain vigilant, but worry not - you'll be frequently rewarded with opportunities to fully open the throttle and just let loose on the open road. The voiced introductions for each car (played alongside the roar of its engine) are dramatic, sure, but they fit so well with the game's aesthetic and the narrator speaks so authoritatively that you'd be forgiven for thinking that something as mundane as the Nissan 370Z could play a pivotal role in automotive history, "redefining what an affordable sports car could be".
There are conventional races, there are time trials (mostly used as an opportunity to let you drive a Bugatti way earlier than normal), but the game is at its best when the cops show up to a race and you're clawing for first place while everyone involved - including you! - is flinging spike strips and EMPs all over the track. Where this game's slightly larger, straighter roads might make another racing game boring, you'll need the space to be strategic when the intensity is cranked this high. Otherwise, you'll find yourself cornered by a spike strip that has drifted into your path, still trying to come to a stop after being deployed at 240 mph. The large roads and the limited usage of player gadgets means that the emphasis is on driving skillfully first and foremost, and the simplicity of those gadgets keeps the mental load light while doing so. It still skews closer to straightforward NFS titles than a kart racer, but it does so without feeling rote or unfocused.
Except, uh, if you know this game you know I've been mostly talking about one half of it. I'm not nearly as enamored with the cop missions, which are typically going to task you with taking down racers before they finish a race or a certain amount of time elapses. There's just not enough present here to make the cop missions feel like anything more than a distraction, comparatively. The big distinction between cops and racers is the focus on a deadline, but the abilities that are unique to cops can't sell the fantasy of being the cat in a game of Cat & Mouse when the racer abilities do a better job of conveying impact. Helicopters and roadblocks are more fun for racers due to the added tension, but racer abilities don't return the favor: Turbo feels like you're piloting a missile for a few seconds, but from a cop's perspective, your target just gets faster? You're not getting the same sensation. This isn't to say that cop gameplay totally lacks excitement, because on a fundamental level you're still racing, you're still using gadgets (and spike strips still pack a punch), but you lose ~20% of the Racer campaign's thrill when you're not chasing a podium while staring down the barrels of two different factions trying to turn your car into tinfoil.
I suppose now is the point where I admit that I'm more than a little biased. I didn't realize I'd be so sentimental about this whole thing until I fired it up and realized this (or rather, the original version of this game) is the last game I remember being excited about before I started racking up adult responsibilities, and this is the first time I've picked it back up in 13 years. So uh - take all this with a grain of salt?
("The fun one" isn't meant to suggest that other games like FlatOut or Burnout didn't exist, but if you were in it for the racing or the licensed cars - not the destruction physics - Need for Speed was the safe bet, the game popular enough that you could talk about it with acquaintances. It's also worth pointing out that Burnout hasn't had an original, mainline entry in the series since 2008, and FlatOut has received 2 sequels since then that have both disappointed series fans.)
Hailing from a pre-Forza Horizon era, Hot Pursuit still feels confident. The game is a playable car commercial. Not the ones about how your car will stop you from turning pedestrians into tomato paste, but the ones about how buying a new minivan can help you re-discover the joy of driving on an impossibly well-paved road winding along a cliff by the sea.
If the playable car commercial was indeed the inspiration for this entry in the series, then it executes on it admirably well. I'm not going to claim that the race designs are groundbreaking, but each one has a concept that keeps the whole affair from becoming a checklist despite the total lack of a story to guide the campaign. The roads are just wide enough and the traffic just sparse enough that you'll have to remain vigilant, but worry not - you'll be frequently rewarded with opportunities to fully open the throttle and just let loose on the open road. The voiced introductions for each car (played alongside the roar of its engine) are dramatic, sure, but they fit so well with the game's aesthetic and the narrator speaks so authoritatively that you'd be forgiven for thinking that something as mundane as the Nissan 370Z could play a pivotal role in automotive history, "redefining what an affordable sports car could be".
There are conventional races, there are time trials (mostly used as an opportunity to let you drive a Bugatti way earlier than normal), but the game is at its best when the cops show up to a race and you're clawing for first place while everyone involved - including you! - is flinging spike strips and EMPs all over the track. Where this game's slightly larger, straighter roads might make another racing game boring, you'll need the space to be strategic when the intensity is cranked this high. Otherwise, you'll find yourself cornered by a spike strip that has drifted into your path, still trying to come to a stop after being deployed at 240 mph. The large roads and the limited usage of player gadgets means that the emphasis is on driving skillfully first and foremost, and the simplicity of those gadgets keeps the mental load light while doing so. It still skews closer to straightforward NFS titles than a kart racer, but it does so without feeling rote or unfocused.
Except, uh, if you know this game you know I've been mostly talking about one half of it. I'm not nearly as enamored with the cop missions, which are typically going to task you with taking down racers before they finish a race or a certain amount of time elapses. There's just not enough present here to make the cop missions feel like anything more than a distraction, comparatively. The big distinction between cops and racers is the focus on a deadline, but the abilities that are unique to cops can't sell the fantasy of being the cat in a game of Cat & Mouse when the racer abilities do a better job of conveying impact. Helicopters and roadblocks are more fun for racers due to the added tension, but racer abilities don't return the favor: Turbo feels like you're piloting a missile for a few seconds, but from a cop's perspective, your target just gets faster? You're not getting the same sensation. This isn't to say that cop gameplay totally lacks excitement, because on a fundamental level you're still racing, you're still using gadgets (and spike strips still pack a punch), but you lose ~20% of the Racer campaign's thrill when you're not chasing a podium while staring down the barrels of two different factions trying to turn your car into tinfoil.
I suppose now is the point where I admit that I'm more than a little biased. I didn't realize I'd be so sentimental about this whole thing until I fired it up and realized this (or rather, the original version of this game) is the last game I remember being excited about before I started racking up adult responsibilities, and this is the first time I've picked it back up in 13 years. So uh - take all this with a grain of salt?
It really is Sekiro to Nioh's Dark Souls, but Sekiro is more careful about what it cuts and keeps from its sibling series.
One of the things that keeps Nioh playable despite all its cluttered menus and Diablo-like loot drops is the ability to press a single button that will explain almost anything on your screen. It's not perfect - Nioh's got a lot going on - but it will at least help you understand the value in keeping equipment with bonuses to "Tenacity" and "Low Attack Break". Wo Long doesn't even bother with actual explanations for game mechanics, resulting in a situation where you can read multiple paragraphs about the real life philosophy behind the Five Phases but the actual effects of morale, a central concept in the game, are never explained beyond "it increases your combat power". This lax approach to game clarity carries over into that Help feature too, with most explanations offering up "Health Recovery improves Health Recovery" or similarly enlightening statements.
Combat has been pared down a bit, with the complete removal of weapon-specific skill trees, stamina, and stances. Instead of stamina and limited charges for magic spells, your Spirit bar serves as as a combined mana pool and posture meter, depleting as you do bad things or special moves (dodging, taking damage, using magic) and replenishing by doing good things (successfully landing hits, deflecting attacks). It's a fine system, one that's more intuitive than it sounds because you're likely already avoiding damage and landing hits of your own. Spells, on the other hand, require such a large investment in their stat and the spirit costs are so punitive that hybrid builds are nonexistent for large chunks of the game. What this amounts to for most players is a game in which you have very little incentive to do anything other than light attack or deflect. The window in which you can deflect an attack is much larger than you'd expect - think of a Dark Souls roll that regenerates stamina when you successfully dodge an attack. When deflecting is so easy and actively benefits you, it's easy to forget that blocking is even possible.
And companions? Complaining about NPC companions is as old as NPC companions are, so we'll keep it short. The game is visually busy already, and the companions are as visually noisy as they are incompetent in battle. What's worse, the companions have collision - I was knocked off ledges multiple times while platforming due to my companion landing on my head. I also frequently found that if (and that's a BIG "if") my companions were able to survive more than one or two attacks from a boss, the boss frequently gets stuck in a loop of big, AOE, zoning attacks that make it harder to hit. It's hard to appreciate that you're fighting alongside Liu Bei or Cao Cao when they're getting one-shot by a horse demon within ten seconds of the fight starting.
It's a shame, then, that it feels great! Your character moves like they're in a musou game. Deflecting attacks is hands-down the most satisfying thing in this game despite its ease, emitting a ka-SHING with an impact that has more in common with a lightning strike than two swords meeting. The game feels so good that you can play for a long while on that alone, riding the high of scoring a fatal blow on the boss right when you were most desperate for it. That you can spend the entire game coasting on light attacks and deflects doesn't matter when you're still enjoying the novelty of trying out each weapon's Martial Arts.
Kotaku's Levi Winslow repeatedly called it an "accessible" Souls-like in their review of the game, and I think I would agree with that assessment if we're speaking strictly about the combat. The main issue is that at some point you're going to have to interact with those menus and the loot and the Five Phases system as it interacts with leveling and magic and resistances and it's going to be a LOT to throw at someone who can't touch on reference points from Dark Souls, Nioh, and Diablo. Hell, the PC version displays Playstation button prompts when I'm using an Xbox controller, so something as simple as "the ability to match what's on the screen to my controller" is out the window too. I wouldn't go so far as to call this game "safe," but it's squarely in Team Ninja's comfort zone, and they've done very little to make this game stand out as its own IP and very little to offer an olive branch to new players, even those coming from Nioh. It's a fine time (especially early on!), but there are so many frustrations for a game that lacks a distinct personality.
EDIT: It's been pointed out that you can manually switch the button prompts from Playstation to Xbox in the settings - thank you to HazeRedux for the correction!
One of the things that keeps Nioh playable despite all its cluttered menus and Diablo-like loot drops is the ability to press a single button that will explain almost anything on your screen. It's not perfect - Nioh's got a lot going on - but it will at least help you understand the value in keeping equipment with bonuses to "Tenacity" and "Low Attack Break". Wo Long doesn't even bother with actual explanations for game mechanics, resulting in a situation where you can read multiple paragraphs about the real life philosophy behind the Five Phases but the actual effects of morale, a central concept in the game, are never explained beyond "it increases your combat power". This lax approach to game clarity carries over into that Help feature too, with most explanations offering up "Health Recovery improves Health Recovery" or similarly enlightening statements.
Combat has been pared down a bit, with the complete removal of weapon-specific skill trees, stamina, and stances. Instead of stamina and limited charges for magic spells, your Spirit bar serves as as a combined mana pool and posture meter, depleting as you do bad things or special moves (dodging, taking damage, using magic) and replenishing by doing good things (successfully landing hits, deflecting attacks). It's a fine system, one that's more intuitive than it sounds because you're likely already avoiding damage and landing hits of your own. Spells, on the other hand, require such a large investment in their stat and the spirit costs are so punitive that hybrid builds are nonexistent for large chunks of the game. What this amounts to for most players is a game in which you have very little incentive to do anything other than light attack or deflect. The window in which you can deflect an attack is much larger than you'd expect - think of a Dark Souls roll that regenerates stamina when you successfully dodge an attack. When deflecting is so easy and actively benefits you, it's easy to forget that blocking is even possible.
And companions? Complaining about NPC companions is as old as NPC companions are, so we'll keep it short. The game is visually busy already, and the companions are as visually noisy as they are incompetent in battle. What's worse, the companions have collision - I was knocked off ledges multiple times while platforming due to my companion landing on my head. I also frequently found that if (and that's a BIG "if") my companions were able to survive more than one or two attacks from a boss, the boss frequently gets stuck in a loop of big, AOE, zoning attacks that make it harder to hit. It's hard to appreciate that you're fighting alongside Liu Bei or Cao Cao when they're getting one-shot by a horse demon within ten seconds of the fight starting.
It's a shame, then, that it feels great! Your character moves like they're in a musou game. Deflecting attacks is hands-down the most satisfying thing in this game despite its ease, emitting a ka-SHING with an impact that has more in common with a lightning strike than two swords meeting. The game feels so good that you can play for a long while on that alone, riding the high of scoring a fatal blow on the boss right when you were most desperate for it. That you can spend the entire game coasting on light attacks and deflects doesn't matter when you're still enjoying the novelty of trying out each weapon's Martial Arts.
Kotaku's Levi Winslow repeatedly called it an "accessible" Souls-like in their review of the game, and I think I would agree with that assessment if we're speaking strictly about the combat. The main issue is that at some point you're going to have to interact with those menus and the loot and the Five Phases system as it interacts with leveling and magic and resistances and it's going to be a LOT to throw at someone who can't touch on reference points from Dark Souls, Nioh, and Diablo. Hell, the PC version displays Playstation button prompts when I'm using an Xbox controller, so something as simple as "the ability to match what's on the screen to my controller" is out the window too. I wouldn't go so far as to call this game "safe," but it's squarely in Team Ninja's comfort zone, and they've done very little to make this game stand out as its own IP and very little to offer an olive branch to new players, even those coming from Nioh. It's a fine time (especially early on!), but there are so many frustrations for a game that lacks a distinct personality.
EDIT: It's been pointed out that you can manually switch the button prompts from Playstation to Xbox in the settings - thank you to HazeRedux for the correction!
2021
I know this just now got its release on an accessible platform, but I'm a little surprised that I've been hearing about a different plot-heavy action roguelite steeped in Greek mythology for years now.
Returnal uses every element of its design to work towards its central theme. The plot is constantly introducing you to something else that doesn't fully make sense right as you've come to understand the last clue. Knowledge of Greek mythology will help a player quite a lot and let you skip ahead a bit in making sense of what's going on, but even then I found my own theories about the plot to be ever-shifting, and I'm sure if I went back to complete more of the Tower I'd find them changing yet again. I won't say much else because I think continually going "oh my god" (good realization) and "oh my god" (terrifying realization) is a key part of the experience, and I'd like to preserve that as much as possible for anyone who hasn't yet played it.
What I will say is that the game (story-wise) is deliberately unpleasant, making this possibly the first roguelite plot I've seen where your inevitable failure does not feel like something the developers have to hand-wave away to keep things moving. Your goals are vague - much of the game is spent with the objective of reaching something that Selene is fixated on. Instead of a surmountable, heroic challenge, the whole thing feels eerie and unnerving - a desperate, irrational struggle through the tendrils towards a distant, beckoning something that holds little chance of being friendly. The tentacles and tendrils and all the other ways that the forest grasps at you, the way the same forest has... a run-down house resembling nothing else on the planet? The way the ambient soundtrack sounds wispy and ethereal and flowing and aquatic, interrupted by unnatural stutters and surges of sound that lends the entire environment a feeling of vastness that simultaneously has too much and frighteningly little going on.
And it's because it all works so well together that the most video game-like parts of it begin to stick out. To be clear, this is a nitpick: I was tempted to start this off by saying that the fights are "too good". The further I progress, the more I'm thinking about the story, and the harder I can feel my thoughts being violently yanked off-course by seeing a gun on the ground and having to decide if it's better for the challenge ahead than the one I'm using. It's a nitpick because these encounters are still fun, the items still suit the game thematically - the only pure upgrades you get in Returnal are traversal tools - but after each fight I find myself thinking about consumables, one of the very few elements present that feel like they don't belong. To be honest with you, it's probably necessary if you want players to continue through multiple deaths, because combat in Returnal has been pretty aggressively trimmed down to a (very strong) set of action game fundamentals. Removing the most game-y elements would arguably suit the mood a little better, but those same bits that I'm griping about are the only parts that allow you some room for mistakes.
It is the best attempt at working a story into a roguelike I've seen yet, and if you ask me it's worth picking up based on that fact alone. Selene is a character with genuine depth, and the game is fully committed to exploring that depth.
Returnal uses every element of its design to work towards its central theme. The plot is constantly introducing you to something else that doesn't fully make sense right as you've come to understand the last clue. Knowledge of Greek mythology will help a player quite a lot and let you skip ahead a bit in making sense of what's going on, but even then I found my own theories about the plot to be ever-shifting, and I'm sure if I went back to complete more of the Tower I'd find them changing yet again. I won't say much else because I think continually going "oh my god" (good realization) and "oh my god" (terrifying realization) is a key part of the experience, and I'd like to preserve that as much as possible for anyone who hasn't yet played it.
What I will say is that the game (story-wise) is deliberately unpleasant, making this possibly the first roguelite plot I've seen where your inevitable failure does not feel like something the developers have to hand-wave away to keep things moving. Your goals are vague - much of the game is spent with the objective of reaching something that Selene is fixated on. Instead of a surmountable, heroic challenge, the whole thing feels eerie and unnerving - a desperate, irrational struggle through the tendrils towards a distant, beckoning something that holds little chance of being friendly. The tentacles and tendrils and all the other ways that the forest grasps at you, the way the same forest has... a run-down house resembling nothing else on the planet? The way the ambient soundtrack sounds wispy and ethereal and flowing and aquatic, interrupted by unnatural stutters and surges of sound that lends the entire environment a feeling of vastness that simultaneously has too much and frighteningly little going on.
And it's because it all works so well together that the most video game-like parts of it begin to stick out. To be clear, this is a nitpick: I was tempted to start this off by saying that the fights are "too good". The further I progress, the more I'm thinking about the story, and the harder I can feel my thoughts being violently yanked off-course by seeing a gun on the ground and having to decide if it's better for the challenge ahead than the one I'm using. It's a nitpick because these encounters are still fun, the items still suit the game thematically - the only pure upgrades you get in Returnal are traversal tools - but after each fight I find myself thinking about consumables, one of the very few elements present that feel like they don't belong. To be honest with you, it's probably necessary if you want players to continue through multiple deaths, because combat in Returnal has been pretty aggressively trimmed down to a (very strong) set of action game fundamentals. Removing the most game-y elements would arguably suit the mood a little better, but those same bits that I'm griping about are the only parts that allow you some room for mistakes.
It is the best attempt at working a story into a roguelike I've seen yet, and if you ask me it's worth picking up based on that fact alone. Selene is a character with genuine depth, and the game is fully committed to exploring that depth.
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
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
2023
This review was written before the game released
-Hockey for people who insisted that the ref should get a stick, too
-Hockey for people who saw dek hockey and wondered if you could play with a bouncy ball
-Hockey for people who think about Blitz: The League once a month
-Hockey for people who tried to shoot directly from the faceoff in NHL 08
-Hockey for people who have said the exact words "If you can pull the goalie to get an extra attacker, why not pull an attacker to get an extra goalie?"
-Hockey for people who think the 1996 movie D3: The Mighty Ducks should have won an Oscar
-Hockey for people who tricked their friends into letting them play the Deceivers in Madden
-Hockey for people who tried to play "gun" in rock, paper, scissors
-Hockey for people who saw dek hockey and wondered if you could play with a bouncy ball
-Hockey for people who think about Blitz: The League once a month
-Hockey for people who tried to shoot directly from the faceoff in NHL 08
-Hockey for people who have said the exact words "If you can pull the goalie to get an extra attacker, why not pull an attacker to get an extra goalie?"
-Hockey for people who think the 1996 movie D3: The Mighty Ducks should have won an Oscar
-Hockey for people who tricked their friends into letting them play the Deceivers in Madden
-Hockey for people who tried to play "gun" in rock, paper, scissors
2018
I might be the only person on the planet who isn't willing to saw off 50% of their arms for more Ultrakill, but in contrast to Mothergunship I kinda understand the admiration. The gun customization is Mothergunship's flagship feature, where making your way through a level is as much about your movement as it is about your ability to create the nastiest frankengun on the planet, grafting dozens of barrels onto a monstrosity whose weight rivals that of a mid-sized battleship.
And sure, it's fun for a brief while to vomit a whole Vampire Survivors worth of bullets at your foes, but in doing so you've already discovered the game's winning strategy - more bullet, more victory. Certain projectile types might be better at dealing with certain threats, but these are not Ultrakill's tightly designed encounters, so you're highly unlikely to receive pushback that meaningfully encourages experimentation in this one. Similarly, the game's heavy usage of familiar weapon types (shotgun, gatling gun, grenade launcher) without any clever twists limits the creativity and depth of strategy the player can employ. I'm not asking for shameless rip-offs of Ultrakill's ricochet coin or punching your own shotgun pellets - although I'd welcome it - but opening up more opportunities for player interaction outside of Mouse1 + Mouse2 might single-handedly make this game into a cult classic.
And sure, it's fun for a brief while to vomit a whole Vampire Survivors worth of bullets at your foes, but in doing so you've already discovered the game's winning strategy - more bullet, more victory. Certain projectile types might be better at dealing with certain threats, but these are not Ultrakill's tightly designed encounters, so you're highly unlikely to receive pushback that meaningfully encourages experimentation in this one. Similarly, the game's heavy usage of familiar weapon types (shotgun, gatling gun, grenade launcher) without any clever twists limits the creativity and depth of strategy the player can employ. I'm not asking for shameless rip-offs of Ultrakill's ricochet coin or punching your own shotgun pellets - although I'd welcome it - but opening up more opportunities for player interaction outside of Mouse1 + Mouse2 might single-handedly make this game into a cult classic.