Quite a fun and good-looking strategy game on a phone, but the lack of information (e.g. damage numbers) and fiddliness (perhaps an inevitability with any non-turn-based strategy game on a cellphone) makes it an occasionally difficult game to play.

Too many times I had troops run into death because I was having difficulty selecting them; or because I had selected both melee and ranged (whether by accident or not) and they ran into melee range with ranged first. The last one kept happening because the ranged units don't stop to shoot at an enemy when in range but instead run into where you directed them and only then start shooting, forcing you to micro them around or just let them take free fire (there might have been an option somewhere to change this, but I don't remember, nor why I didn't use it if there was).

I still enjoyed it, even though not enough to hurry with finishing it before my Play subscription ran out; I also wasn't in the mood to renew it for just this (and another game) that I wasn't that enthused about. However, I might still one day return to this one at least.

Less consistently scary, but more fun, both in its stealth and shooting.

Yet I found myself missing the highs of fear from the first one or the constant dread I felt walking down the unpredictable villages, city streets, and hospitals of the first game.

The story manages to somehow be even hammier than the first one, but I can’t deny that as a parent the start of the game really worked for me - running into a burning building, knowing I’d die trying to save her, I thought, if it was my kid yelling for her daddy to help, I would to it instantly, fuck all my chances of survival. And while the finale of the game felt mechanically lackluster (especially the shooting gallery parts), as a parent and married, I found it touching and my love for Sebastian, the protagonist, was higher than ever before seeing the way he carried his daughter. And to think I actually missed the moody serious Sebastian from the previous game at first.

Some of the story stuff about overcoming grief and understanding that you are not at fault for things that you didn’t have any power over is also pretty good. And this time it also didn't take 6 hours for the game to finally start explaining something or giving you a proper goal.

Everything with the administrator is whacked though (and what is it with his animations? What is he doing with his hands all the time? Why? Nobody gesticulates like that). And I kinda low-key hated where the story went with most of the side-characters, thinking “fucking bullshit” more than once.

But I did like Union the city, even though I think it doesn’t do enough to stand out as a memorable video game place. There were some moments though where I had the same kind of nostalgic-for-stereotypical-life-from-the-movies feeling that so heavily pervaded my experience of Control (even though covid isolation has long since ended in my country), but the downside of the stealth and open maps is that the rules governing the enemy AI become more clear and the game itself through that feels safer. A horror game is less effective with its horror when it’s approached as just a set of mechanics and rules meant to create an experience. You’re supposed to fear the monsters, not think how juking them in unrealistic ways can allow you to backstab the whole gang without wasting any ammo.

Ultimately it’s this gaminess that proved to undermine the game for me. As the end was approaching, I was ready to be done with it, so facing another small area with a new enemy filled me with dread not for the monsters, but the boredom. There’s not enough ammunition to really enjoy it as an action game (at least not on Nightmare) so you’re forced to mess around with the AI in silly ways to succeed.

Crafting is another part of the game where I appreciate them trying something new, but with it is also gone the precise balance of ammunition from the first game where you always had too little to feel good but enough to survive that made it feel so great and added to the constant dread. Here there are times when I had to scavenge around before I could do sidequests because I just didn’t have enough ammunition to survive them; and bosses take so long that they have to magically keep refilling ammo drops for you to be able to survive.

I still enjoyed the game and coupled with the first Evil Within (which is in many ways a very different game, in some ways worse and in others better) I quite like this series. I’m both sad that there’s no third Evil Within, but also glad that poor Sebastian didn’t have to return to this hell again.

Plagued by unnatural dreams and supported by a small inheritance that I received from an eerie old man who died in the hospital where I used to work as a janitor, I set myself to pulling back the veil that protects our reality from the abnormalities beneath it, searching for answers, direction, and something more, something I couldn't yet put to words. Slowly, I collected a few followers and established a fledgling cult with little to our name besides ambition and a crazy idea, and a mission that would put us on the map. I kept telling my followers to just wait, we'll soon take on that big mission while sending my most trusted believer seeking opportunities in the streets in the hope of alleviating our sudden financial troubles as the inheritance ran out and I was busy working myself into another sickbed. Finally, having no vitality left to fight another bout of illness, I croaked, leaving behind a lost believer and two hangers-on who returned to their regular life with nothing to show for it. As for the believer, I hope they'll forgive me in time or, at the very least, raise me from the dead.

I tried again.

This time I was the inspector who, following a lead, had happened on the trail of the wannabe cultist leader. The leader might have died, but his right hand was alive. But as I got closer and closer to her, the new-found madness in my dreams started to envelop me and just as I was ready to nail her with damning evidence, dread devoured me and I was lost.

I tried again. And again. And again, the cycle furiously repeating into another early death.

You get the point. It's a complicated game to get into with little direction and no hand-holding, the realities of a cult simulation quickly beating the novice into the ground just to start again with the same story from a selection that becomes increasingly limited walking down the familiar streets into another unexpected and seemingly unavoidable death. You might learn something from your every last loss, but there are so many other losses waiting.

Slowly a sense of meaningless creeps in as I tap through the same actions I've done before, stumbling into the same problems I faced before, with too little knowledge to still deal with them. I feel more comfortable with its fiddly interface that is constantly threatening to become just way too much, especially on the small cellphone screen, and there’s still a desire to dive deeper into this weird world that so successfully seems to evoke the feeling of being called by the secret whispers from another side to become the person that you usually take on in some horror game as the mid- or late-game boss, depending on whether it's going to send you against the demon itself in the end or not.

But it’s a game that encourages experimentation and exploration in its intro but punishes you severely for not knowing how to play the game properly. It’s as if to really enjoy it, you must read a guide beforehand; but I’d prefer a game to convince me there’s value to reading a guide for it before I actually do that.

In another playthrough, thinking myself ready, I took on the big mission, but it soon proved to be much more demanding of our resources than I had thought, and as my closest believer succumbed to the wounds suffered, we returned with nothing to show for it, back to our withered home. Our cult was done and I returned to my normal everyday life that could never be the same again, now aware of the precarious balance between our worlds, but impotent to do anything about it. I hope my believer behind the veil will find it in themself to forgive me; I will not be raising them again. My Google Play subscription is through and I’m not renewing it for this game.

A soothingly beautiful audio-visual experience that is lighter than it thinks.

The sound especially is very important to the experience. I played the first game approaching it like a puzzle game on buses and such without sound, but that’s a mistake - it’s more an experience than a puzzle game, especially considering the puzzles tend to be rather easy (which is good for a dumbass like me) and sometimes not even puzzles at all, just walk here and tap that.

More often than not, the puzzle you’re staring at is actually more impressive for the geometric trick they’ve come up with. Some moments made me go “how do they come up with this?”; and once I understood that I could decide myself the final symbol for the level, it became a small enjoyable thing I looked forward to (especially to see how the animation played with it then).

With its gorgeous visuals and calming music, it really is more noteworthy as an chill experience, especially as many of the puzzles aren’t intellectually involving.

It tells its story in short bursts of enigmatic fortune teller quotes which add to the ephemeral magical atmosphere, but little to anything else. As a parent, I was touched by the interaction between the parent and the child and the need to let go, but with its bonkers story in the other part it felt in service of little relevant and the game’s ambiguous finale obscures the potential emotional effect of the new meeting between the parent and child. It was surprisingly touching to see the old friend though.

Ultimately, it doesn’t have enough emotional or metaphorical resonance to really stick, and with puzzles that often left me bored, it falls just short of greatness. But I did use a screenshot I took from the game as the background for my phone, so there’s that.

Coming from the previous game to Space Marshals 3, a few changes are obvious. First of all, the game looks gorgeous. There's more detail and there are certain electrical and water effects that would feel at home on a bigger game. It might come at the expense of performance, but at least for me it wasn't that noticeable a hit and was definitely worth it, even if it did almost burn a hole in my phone.

Unfortunately, some of the other changes fare less well. The new upgrade system is especially problematic as getting better weapons is directly tied to one’s ability to complete the missions to near-perfection - something that should be reserved for those looking for an extra challenge, not as a requirement for progress. It’s also difficult to understand what weapon is worth choosing over another so you can end up digging yourself deeper into a hole with sub-par weapons and missions you can’t finish well enough.

Add to it that now the game likes to throw random ultra-difficult encounters your way and enjoyment can be very difficult indeed. It was especially infuriating when I discovered in the middle of a mission that I had taken the wrong weapons - e.g. taking stealth weapons against a finale where you have to fight a powerful flamethrower in small quarters and going from 0 deaths (and perfect score) to 15 (and no rewards) within a minute.

And when you do start getting those better weapons and items, there’s another limit on the gear forcing you to avoid using them in order to still be able to unlock the best reward for a successful mission - available only if you did it perfectly.

But once I had gotten some good weapons and stopped caring about unlocking new weapons and just equipped what I wanted and played how I wanted, with no care in the world how many times I might have to respawn, I really started enjoying this game. It’s no coincidence that the third chapter had most of my favourite maps, and I might have had even more pure fun doing the bonus action missions with my favourite weapons after the main game.

This series truly has surprised me with how much fun they can offer. The stealth is improved in this one, even if it sometimes flat-out refuses to let you use it. And the action can be very fun, once you get some cool weapons and learn to work with its slightly-sluggish aiming and chaotic violence and inputs (how many times I accidentally chose the wrong weapon for the job …). The map design also tends to be good and they're often a joy to explore. The writing is silly and doesn't take itself seriously at all, but there were still some laugh-out-loud moments. And whoever decided to put in that reference to 'Allo 'Allo!, a British sitcom about WW2 from the 80s, a childhood favourite (that for the most part held up pretty well in my 20s), thank you - you made my day. :D

I might have spent more time annoyed with the game than I’d like, especially in chapter 2 (where I even considered quitting the game), but in the end, I still found plenty to enjoy in it (and am glad I got to chapter 3). I still might not play it on anything but the phone, but eh, this wasn't released on anything else anyway :P

I really-really love this game, even if I feel I can't rate it that highly. That's mainly because while the game touches on some emotionally affecting things, and has even a storyline of dealing with a depressed friend, it ultimately is afraid to really go for it and ends up hitting the lowest hanging clichés.

For one (and this paragraph is going to be spoilery), the wife should have stayed dead. Not that I didn't like her, on the contrary - I thought the characters they built in the flashbacks and their relationship were really sweet, but it was exactly because of that, and how it felt important that by what felt like the end of this storyline Deacon had come to an acceptance of her death. It felt like a true story of grief and moving on. And then she returns, and in an unbelievably important role as well, emphasising the clichéd nature of the story where everybody that matters to the protagonist matters to the world. Oh, and if you’re going to have a character sacrifice themself in the end, how about respecting that? Even if that sacrifice made absolutely no sense at all.

And yet I really enjoyed traveling this world on a bike and dealing with its post-apocalyptic dangers while getting to know Deacon and the other characters. It can get repetitive, but I didn’t mind much, only when the game continued after it should have already ended. But it’s the feeling of the world that mattered to me the most. I think it was aided by the fact I played the game on a higher difficulty that removed some UI stuff and made it more “survivalist” or whatever. Meaning the action also didn’t feel button smashy or easy and you had to actually be careful in order to not die (including sometimes running the hell away).

I wish the story had the guts to honour the seriousness with which it took itself, and the game should have been shorter, but I value the time I spent with it very highly, both messing about in the world and many of the story beats (the acceptance of grief really touched me, before the game lost its guts). An imperfect gem is still a gem.

I like riding on the flying drone and sightseeing its vision of a slightly-futuristic gleaning London (it was especially fun to then visit actual London for the first time in a few months after playing the game), but the writing and its vision of a resistance movement is so juvenile and silly that it is impossible to take anything they do and say seriously. If they wanted to make it a goofy cartoon, fine, but there's just not enough juice in the characterless and empty story or bite in their social "criticism" (if there even is anything to take seriously) to keep one's interest going once the gameplay has exhausted itself, which will happen sooner rather than later with its 18+h gametime (according to HowLongToBeat). I might return to play a bit more just cause I like open-world games, but if I'm being quite honest with myself, chances are it's staying abandoned. Such a disappointment after loving Clint Hocking's Far Cry 2 to absolute bits (not that I blame him personally, game development is complicated).

Man, 16 hours sure feels a lot, especially for a horror game that for the first half keeps dropping more and more mystery on top of more mystery. It’s no wonder that I finished several other games in between starting and finishing this (including R&C: Rift Apart and Gravity Rush Remastered)

There are enough reasons for the game to deserve some attention though. From the very first moment, it looks great, with darkly graded atmospheric asylums, cityscapes, and the periphery of a broken city. Even the sewer level is noteworthy for its gooey dark malaise.

The action feels nicely heavy, especially when Sebastian, the player character, tries throwing anything, moving his whole body forward with the inertia, making handling grenades a tricky affair and bottles for stealth perhaps even trickier (though once I managed to figure out the timing and placement of the body, stealth became something I looked forward to).

The shooting has a similar weight to it, which I found to be enjoyable. The weapon selection is limited and mostly ordinary (you’ve got your pistol, your shotgun, your sniper rifle, and, if you’re replaying it, even some assault rifle), with the exception of the crossbow that you can craft different arrows for, but unlike some of the more boring shooters I’ve recently tried, the way the weapons handle here and the natural threat the game instils in every action sequence make up for what they might lack in originality. Perhaps regular weapons even add to the verisimilitude that helps a horror game to be more effective.

They have also managed to strike a good balance in how much ammunition they provide you with, managing to make it always feel as if you have just a bit too little and yet always enough. The ability to craft arrows helps, though considering how difficult and dangerous it is to get the crafting components (often gotten from disarmed traps that sometimes blow up in your face if you disarmed them badly) you always feel like you have to be careful about not wasting them.

The story, concerning mental hospitals and impossible events, made me fear at first the most that it would become another boring “oh, it was all in his mind!”, and while it ultimately certainly has touches of it, it’s done in a way that is somewhat unique and more interesting for it. What’s more, there are no real twists in the narrative, just the slow reveal of the true nature of this nightmarish world. I even became genuinely interested in the story, once the game started providing some answers. Even Sebastian’s backstory which I had scoffed at with the lightly-sexist first note, had me running with glee whenever I saw the tell-tale reddish aura of another note about his past. There were entries in it that as a parent really touched me and made me care more for this one-note character.

Another reason I had to take breaks from the game though is how thoroughly unnerving it can be. It doesn’t spend much time scaring the viewer through disgusting sights or jumpscares (though there are certainly both, especially the first, with some truly impeccable body horror), but there’s a constant sense of dread drenching the whole game. Part of it is due to how vulnerable Sebastian feels. Sure, he’s a strong-bodied hard-jawed macho man who’s pretty damn good with a gun, and yet that’s nothing compared to the army of weird creatures, the way danger can come from anywhere, the simple oppressive atmosphere of the game, or his almost utter impotence when confronted with the uncontrollable nature of his world, even further emphasising his emasculated role. The few times that you feel powerful or safe, for example the mounted gun sequences, are all the more enjoyable for how rare they are.

My biggest problem with the game though is its infatuation with one-hit deaths. Many sequences filled with traps or monsters require you to execute them to near perfection or be sent back to the beginning with an instant death, however much health you might have had. While I might understand the aim (though I’m not sure I do), moments like this quickly become infuriating and, what’s more, they eat away at the sense of dread. If you’re repeating the same moment over and over again, whatever horror you might have felt at first evaporates and it just becomes a mechanical exercise in patterns. A horror sequence repeated is rarely a horror sequence that is effective.

And it’s made even worse by the trial-and-error nature of these moments. The simplest example is not knowing when you’re supposed to fight and when you’re supposed to run, ending with moments where I tried fighting when I was supposed to run (and died a few times, before I understood that this time the insta-death was supposed to be a lesson and not just part of the fight) or spent a long time looking for a way out that didn’t exist. But it’s even more aggravating during puzzles (or boss fights that act as puzzles) where every time you try something new, you might be punished by instant death and the need to repeat everything up to this point in order to try something new.

Oh, and the game has some awful film-style black bars beneath and above the image that I instantly turned off and never regretted.

If there wasn’t as much of insta-death, this could be up there amongst my favourite games. But I was as often annoyed with the game as I was enjoying it (though the idea of enjoying this consistently intentionally dreadful experience made me wonder why it is that we do this to ourselves, those of us who love horror). Perhaps time will be kinder to it as the negative aspects slowly fade from memory and in a year I might be updating my favourites list with what I consider fondly as one of the best horror game experiences I’ve had.

Or perhaps the sequel will help me make a decision. Because whatever my annoyance, as soon as I was done with this game, I put the next one on download. How about that for a recommendation.

I'm not even sure why I tried out this poor-looking game in the first place. Perhaps it was something in the mixture of Western imagery and isometric action that sparked my interest in its demo on the Switch. Playing the demo, I was reminded of mediocre games from 10+ years ago that you waste some time on and then forget for good. I still left it on my wishlist though, in case of a good deal. But good deals came and went, yet it remained unpurchased. And would have probably been deleted wholesale at one point if I hadn't discovered it on Google Play on my new Android and installed it. Why not, I thought.

My first impression was, oh boy, is it uncomfortable to play it on the phone. Luckily, the discomfort didn't stay for long (or at least I got better at managing the game, even if the shooting remained a bit fiddly), and by the time I finished the game, I had found myself quite liking it. Enough that I might even remember it in a few years, even if I'm in no hurry to add it to any list of favourite games. But it offers enough of a mixture of gunplay, stealth, challenging level design, and dumb humour to entertain. Ultimately, I'm glad I played it. Glad enough that I put the sequel on download right after finishing this, despite the bad reviews. If a mediocre-looking game can make me do that, I guess it wasn't that mediocre after all.

A year or two ago, a Discord group I used to frequent chose this as their game of the month that they got together every Monday to play. Chasing nostalgia, I joined in. My expectations were low as every other time I had tried chasing nostalgia with TF2, it had been a sad shadow of what once was. But this time, despite all expectations, I had great fun, and for a few evenings that year I remembered why I used to love this game and had basically gifted my life to it.

It’s still pretty much dead though. But that’s fine. The main reason it worked back then so well was first of all that it was new and secondly because I had communities. For a while I was even in a clan made up of people who were in it not because they wanted to become good at professional gaming, but because they wanted to enjoy being in this one specific clan, made up of friends and acquaintances from one local server. My best buddy was our medic, I was our roamer soldier, the rest were people from the server, 3 of them friends in real life, and one who played with us often with his brother (who I hanged with a few times in real life). It was the kind of clan that you tell stories about later on and that you probably won’t repeat once it’s done.

After the clan inevitably died in a mixture of real-life barging in and unsuitable replacements, I tried a few other clans, but that part of the game was done for me. There was still so much fun before and after, back when the game was the coolest thing around, when people at Valve were as excited about working on it as we were seeing what crazy new stuff they came up with, back when the hat economy was a funny thing and not the building block of one of the worst things to ever happen to videogames, back when all my friends played it and I with them.

That’s all gone now, but such is life. As one person once told another, we’ll always have Paris.

My the COVID game.

I came to it rather late into the COVID isolation, which meant I was in a perfect spot to connect with its depiction of offices with empty tables, dim lights, and rooms filled with workplaces with little privacy. As I walked through the Oldest House, I felt deep nostalgia and a kind of comfort for all the cubicles and desks I passed, imagining working there myself and doing all the regular office things that we’ve come to mock and dislike. After a year and a half of social distancing, any kind of social office life seemed comforting. And Control boasts one of the best places in gaming, and due to its own nostalgic view of a certain type of old workplace, there’s a lot to feed one’s imagination.

The mechanics themselves are pretty fun, though the action does get repetitive the nearer the end you get as you’ve already become something of a god, flying around and throwing rocks or shooting grenades at anybody who’s mindless enough to mess with you. The omnipotence is fun at first but becomes even somewhat boring by the end. And the game is a bit too long for what it’s offering, both mechanics-wise and in its story (that intrigues for a while but kinda runs out of anything interesting by the end).

I also made the mistake of trying out the DLCs in this complete edition before I had finished the game itself or before time had made me yearn for more Control and they ended up being the worst experience I had with the game; I didn’t finish any of them.

I did finish the main game though, and while by the end I was ready to be done with it, I will cherish what the game gave me with its first half for as long as I remember COVID. So, probably for my whole life.

I don't think I like this game much, and yet I keep returning to it. A rather plain-looking game with open-world elements that add little to it, there's still something exhilarating in speeding down a mountainside or a dirt track with a cool bike, taking daring turns and death-defying jumps, barely making that front-flip or 360, just to then speed into a tree you didn't notice and break your biker's back.

The Ironman-like career mode is kind of fun in how it encourages playing carefully and building up to opening shortcuts to different worlds, but I still feel like it's a game I'll play for a while and then forget it existed.

I found the soundtrack horrible though. I'm a fan of electronic and all kinds of music that might sound similar to what the game presents, but I found it so repetitive and annoying here that I turned it off. It might just be a matter of taste, but that’s still something that rarely happens to me. And for a chillax game that can be the death-knell, if you're not bringing your own music.

I couldn't find the tutorial, but I feel the game could make good use of it. Also was disappointed that the forest, which is my favourite environment, isn't unlocked from the start.

This is the game that rejuvenated me after the depressing mediocrity of Killzone: Shadow Fall.

I found this game’s first five minutes to be more stirring, artistic, amusing, and filled with originality than all of the hours I played Killzone. While mechanically it can get repetitive as you get deeper into the game, one really cannot undersell how intriguing and freeing the gravity-changing mechanic is, from the moment it’s introduced, through the many times it became fiddly or outright difficult to control during the game, right up to the very end by which time it had become second nature (even if still remaining fiddly).

If a good game needs one noteworthy mechanic to draw attention, Gravity Rush has one of the best.

And even while the game doesn’t introduce much mechanically new past a certain point, it’s the mystery of the world and its weird condition that kept me hooked and made me put the sequel on download the moment the final cutscenes had finished.

The only noteworthy problem I have with the game is that its visual portrayal of its leading female characters, especially the one you control, is very sexualized, suiting the lead up in such a weirdly sexual costume that even a character in the game comments on it negatively (and her “Raven” counterpart has an even worse one). You can unlock alternate costumes, but they aren’t much better, each of them appealing to some fetish, be it French maid, schoolgirl, sexy cat girl (which is made additionally creepier having been given to her by the obviously older policeman), or a tight-fitting soldier’s uniform (which I guess is the least fetishistic? But also the one you get last and, personally, too militaristic for my taste). The intention is additionally made clear when every time you don a new costume for the first time, it plays a montage of the camera ogling her body, with half of them starting with a close-up of her thrusting her butt back.

But at the same time Kat, the lead, is an immensely likable character and it’s no wonder she was praised by the contemporary reviews. She’s slightly naive, but not dangerously so, acting self-assured enough, especially when detecting a lack of empathy in others or standing up for what she considers right (or her own safety!) Every interaction that she has with other people makes her feel like a more well-rounded character, and that writing tends to expand to the side characters as well, even if not to as deep a degree.

And there are moments when the game turns a critical eye towards the behaviour of men, especially in the Spy pack’s second sidequest that notably calls out the way men can ignore women's safety by not turning attention to when they feel vulnerable (even when they speak out) and the creepiness of Kat’s stalker (though I’d say he still got off way too lightly). Kat’s own infatuations are also portrayed in a way that feels life-like and cute, like watching your own child discovering themselves (just too bad she’s mostly clothed in costumes meant to appeal mainly to a horny male gaze).

But none of my complaints are enough to take away from the fact that this is the kind of game that I love, that makes me feel hopeful for gaming and makes the time spent doing essentially meaningless things magical. I am also very excited to see where the story goes and am eager to spend more time listening to Kat tell off dumb guys. And damn that cat is cool.

It was after 30 minutes of cutscenes, clichés and nothing interesting happening that I understood I can just skip the cutscenes and the whole story and lose little in the progress. I appreciate that they tried to do something different by starting you as a child escaping a city with his father, but they fill it with more clichés and waste the opportunity to build any meaningful relationships so it would have been better to just throw you in the action right away.

Only then you'd understand how boring the action is. The OWL robot adds an additional tactical layer to the shooting that offers some interest, and some of the weapons have cool firing modes, but in many ways it's too cookie-cutter, while at the same time so surprisingly challenging that I even used the wallhack-granting echo ability which I usually never use in games that have something similar. After a while even the OWL becomes uninteresting once you understand how little it adds to the mechanics of the game (I do love the zipline though, the best thing in the game). And it’s like that with every “unique” thing that the game tries, for example the zero-G looks pretty and interesting at first, but soon becomes nothing more than short moments of travel between the usual puzzling and fighting. I was reminded of the zero-G in Dead Space, the weight of it and the fear that game generated, and Killzone did not shine in comparison.

I did try to enjoy it still, and there were a few fun moments amidst the action when it managed to entertain, but I would probably have enjoyed the game more if I could carry more than 2 weapons, especially as you can't change one of them. As it is, the utter mediocrity of the whole thing just got too much as I felt my life wasting away at it.

Frankly, I hate playing games like this - they’re not bad enough to be trash, but they’re not good enough to be much of anything else. Slowly, as I play them, I start doubting my own critical faculties and the inherent value of all gaming. Are there even any good games? Or is it just me vibing with something and not with others and games are mostly just like this, a mediocre waste of time?

It’s foolishness, of course, and the best cure for it is to stop playing the bad game and start something good because that’ll instantly remind you why you love gaming. This game was mediocre enough to fool me into thinking I might get something positive from playing it, but thankfully I decided to try out something else, a much older game, that within its intro credits had more originality than Killzone had shown in 4 hours, and after I finished my first session of this game, I knew what I had to do - go uninstall Killzone, and never look back. Not all PlayStation Hits deserve the title.

The Far Cry formula has gotten so rote by now that I just couldn't get into this game. The wacko nemesis, the cookie cutter weapons, the faceless goons, the endless quests, the meaningless story. Now they also gatekeep basic actions behind upgrades (can't use binoculars or carry more than one weapon or have any fun, I guess) and offer to sell you weapons from the crafting table for actual money (meaning they're more incentivised to make crafting a hassle so you'd cough up).

But it was really once I got to the first story mission in the sandbox and was hit by another instance of the quality Ubisoft humour with a guy called Beans trying to put together a collection of maps and such and calling it, get this, Wiki-Beans, that I decided I'm done. Mediocre mechanics can be saved by a great story and vice versa, but with Far Cry it seems everything's mediocre-to-outright-bad now.

Well, fine, the world looks pretty. But I really wish the game allowed me to get more fun abilities straight away (if there even are any). The auto-driving is a really nice addition since it lets me do anything better with my life; too bad the constant enemy patrols keep attacking and forcing another boring empty fight. The weapons are essentially the same you find in most shooters (especially boring after having just played R&C: Rift Apart and Resistance 3) and instead of coming up with more interesting weapons, they just add different levels of quality, like in MMORPGs, so that you start with a shoddy version of the same weapon you'll hopefully one day get in a good version (and you can get there faster if you pay some cold hard cash).

I thought maybe liberating an outpost would be more fun than the boringly scripted story missions, but hiding behind a rock trying to figure out where people are shooting me and then wasting ammo on taking them down because I'm using level 1 weapons quickly convinced me otherwise. The companions seem hardly worth the cost of revival when they keep getting shot down constantly, even on medium difficulty. After a while I just stopped reviving them, considering it a waste of both time and resources. And it's honestly no wonder considering the enemy AI seems advanced enough to only run and gun, often standing still in the middle of a field while shooting at me.

And it just shows how much care Ubisoft put into the gender selection when enemies keep referring to you as "him" in their barks even when you're a woman and other characters refer to you only as Captain or Cap, so that they wouldn't have to code in two names. There are gender-neutral names, you know, right, guys?

It's overall an infuriating game design that has little care for the game it's selling, but more for the product it's shipping. Now, I'm not saying you can't enjoy it, and I'm guilty of enjoying some badly designed and/or un-player-friendly games myself, but I just don't have any more place in my life for the repetitive and empty calories of Far Cry. In time I might come to appreciate it more, but the idea of giving more time to this game threatens to cause an existential crisis. I’d rather try something that remembers to make an effort.