I wonder if they even know what they did. You know who. That anonymous lower-level business advisory manager who worked at EA between 2017 and 2018. Watched what happened with No Man's Sky and Battlefront 2. Crunched the numbers, surveyed the right people, did the appropriate market research, and found out that most disturbing of truths our artform will likely never fully recover from. They figured out it's financially optimal to release a game before completion. Sure, some equations needed to be done to figure out the appropriate balance between the release date and pre-orders and on release performance and how long the game has been in development and how much marketing expenditure has gone into the release cycle and the estimated time before it's in a state considered 'good' by the populous, but the conclusion is there, and will never go away. Cyberpunk proved it even further. You can have two different 'release' hype cycles around your game, and still leave people with a good taste in their mouths, excited for more, even if you rush it out the door. It's just good business. I wonder if this person knew the damage they'd be dealing. Did it trouble them at all? Did they toss and turn a little before deciding to tell their higher-ups? Or did they not even think twice? We'll never know.

This is far from an egregious example of such. Shoddy and inconsistent frame rates and pop-in are the norm for many of our lazier AAA games, it's telling the completely stock-standard 21st Century Capcom in-app purchases are getting more of the press. People are numb to it, I am usually! In the truest essence of the human experience, I'm only so upset this time because it happened to me. I genuinely really want to play this game, it looks excellent, a truly distinct and singularly innovative piece of art. One of those rare things that can be described as 'next-gen' in a complimentary sense. So what do I even do? Do I simply purchase an unfinished product and support the active malpractice occurring here? I can't do that. Do I fall for the obvious 'second release' model and buy it when they finish it? I feel like I'm supporting the continuation of this practice if I do. Do I never buy the game? This is ethically the right call, but am I supposed to forever deprive myself of engaging with the work of artists I love because the system they work within is so awful? I don't know. The only easy answer is piracy, which in 2024 is both actively illegal and the only moral way to engage with a large proportion of all video games ever released. It's so depressing to genuinely adore the whizbang technical exploration of mega-budget pop art when 90% of current examples of such are visually miserable superhero movies and legitimately unfinished open world junk. This should be neither of those things, yet the circumstances of its release make me feel just as deflated. It's a cruel world out there sometimes.

Was this game worth the wait? Absolutely.
Is this game the masterpiece many will claim it is? No.

Rebirth is much improved on Remake in so many areas, the combat is quite a bit better, the music is great as usual, visually even in the “performance” mode this game looks amazing besides some textures along the lines of “the door” from Remake.

But,
And a HUGE but:
The story outside of what was in the original fucking STINKS. None of it makes sense in the slightest and I’m not sure even Max Dood is going to be able to make sense of this one. The only positive to this is that we got a Yakuza 5-tier final boss sequence at the end (in both gameplay and story).

I’m probably also just mad that Vincent is here for a decent chunk and is not even used how Red XIII was in Remake. For what it’s worth I did like what they did with Cid to make up for him not being playable.

Still, a great game that was fun and extremely good for the majority besides certain story sections, and I hope now we get a Vincent game in the vein of Intermission to tide us over til the next game.

There’s no way they don’t call that one Final Fantasy VII Reunion, right?

Resident Evil: Revelations 2: Irredeemable garbage that should bring deep shame to every single person in the credits. I will live a worse life having experienced and beaten this. It shouldn't be for sale. Anyone giving this a thumbs up in the Steam reviews needs to be banned from the platform before seeking mental help.

The first Revelations game felt like the IP of Resident Evil farted onto a disc: it burned your nostrils but despite being faint, the spirit of the series still lingered there.
Honestly, the Resident Evil franchise really knows how to make you go back and think that last game you did not like wasn't that bad after all. I was lukewarm on Resident Evil 5. After 6, I thought 5 was a masterpiece, comparatively. After Revelations I thought “At least 6 could be fun in a co-op Michael-Bay-movies-while-hammered kind of way?” and after Revelations 2, I wish I played the Raid mode of Revelations more instead.
Are there more bad Resident Evils than good at this point?

What's good, here? Moira's voice actress is good. Her lines are shit, but she still gives it her all and sometimes it bleeds through the awful writing. She said “Fucking statue!” at one point and I actually thought “Damn, girl, what's your name?”
The main menu has a startling jumpscare that I like. It's not great, but I like the look of it.
One time I said out loud “Turn on your fucking flashlight, Barry,” and he did. That made me laugh.
It looks better than the first game (mind you: that was a 3DS port).
The only reason I gave it 1 star instead of 0.5: the dedicated dodge button was a good choice considering the speed of everything.
That's it.

Quite simply, this is not a Resident Evil game outside of a couple names that don't have any impact on you. They can say “Claire Redfield” all they want – I don't care, it's not her. The “zombies” are more like tweakers than living dead, except for the ones who are way too dead as they look like skeletons in clothes and are no challenge to kill.
This feels like cheap junk that you'd find in your Steam library on accident, not realizing it was part of a Humble Bundle you bought several years ago. Why was this made?
It follows the duo style of play except you control both partners. Each duo has an “Eye” and a “Muscle”: Moira and Claire, Natalia and Barry, respectively. The Eye's duty is to find secret gems, ammo, and hidden enemies. The Muscle shoots anything moving that isn't their Eye. It's not too exciting: you will play mainly as the Eye, looking around in corners for shiny points that you then focus on to make an item materialize or perhaps for the hidden symbols that earn you point multipliers at the end of levels. When baddies emerge, you press Tab and swap over to the person who has guns and kill them all. That's it, over and over again. It's a boring loop.
There are puzzles that Homer Simpson wouldn't even need to think about to solve.

The plot is half-assed gibberish. You're on an island, you want off, figure it out. There's a second Wesker named Alex and she's orchestrating some evil nonsense. I don't think you even figure out what, exactly, just that's she's wiping people out to make a virus... probably. She's trying to turn into a bug because she read some Kafka, maybe? I don't know, but don't worry: she's dead, now.
I got the bad ending because I was too quick at pressing the F key during a certain segment. I was supposed to just push Tab, but I didn't even see it because I'm simply too good at video games. What's weird is apparently the whole journey was so Moira could overcome her fear of guns. She shot her sister when she was young and, understandably, doesn't want to touch another one. I would have thought making her use a gun would be the bad ending, then, but apparently I'm an asshole for thinking so; guns are always good and everyone should want to use them all the time to solve every problem, and they're mindbroken and in need of forced-fixing if they think otherwise. Alright, Capcom.

I was going to play the DLCs but I raged out of The Struggle (feels appropriate) and didn't even try the other one or Raid mode. The game is off my computer and back in the nether where it belongs. This piece of shit crashed on me twice when I alt-tabbed, too, very frustrating.
The episodic content was a shitty idea and apparently Capcom added DRM to this thing recently, several years after it came out (as they did the first Revelations). Why? I wouldn't even recommend torrenting this game, it's THAT bad.

Like the first game, I do not recommend Resident Evil: Revelations 2, except I strongly recommend you avoid this one. Some games are just bad for you.

Another game that's PEAK PSX aesthetic, with a mixture of the comfortable, soothing music.
The low-poly environments and super expressive sprite work.
The very silly interactions between the characters and the wonderful dynamics they have.
And the wonderfully written story!

The only issue I have with the game is how incredibly slow the battles are, and how way too easy the game is. Though both of those things do admittedly add to it's comfy atmosphere, it's a real joy!

My introduction to the Tomb Raider franchise was the deeply unpleasant, poorly designed 2013 reboot, an awful game and an awful experience that somehow did not deter me from playing its sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and having a much better time with it despite the presence of a lot of modern AAA design elements that really put me off of that sort of game. Having, I guess, committed to those, I figured I would return to the roots, as I so often do with these things, and I’m glad I did because Tomb Raider 96 is both an excellent 3D platformer and in incredibly WEIRD game full of funny quirks and bizarre choices that are I think mostly pretty bad in concept but never affect the play enough to do any actual harm to the experience.

The core of the experience, then, is that platforming. If I had to compare it to a modern game it would be less the modern tomb raiders and uncharteds that are often compared to this and something closer to a precursor to the Ubisoft 3D Prince of Persia lineage. Most of the levels here do involve other elements like occasional combat and puzzle solving to a greater or lesser extent, but Tomb Raider MOSTLY just sticks you in often very large, occasionally complex 3D environments and asks you to kind of just jump over to that ledge, then that one, then that one. The platforms are often gussied up as pleasant environmental features like natural rock formations, bridges, statues, etc. I think the game does a good job in general of disguising how rigidly all of its geometry adheres to a clear grid structure, disguising it sometimes with the aforementioned décor and sometimes letting the jagginess of the early PS1 dev cycle create the illusion of restriction, when the reality is the game is clearly this square on purpose. And that’s a good thing, it lets the game demand a great deal of precision from you, but it also means you very rarely find yourself in a situation where you’ll be making a jump you shouldn’t be trying, or where you’re uncertain about the scripting of a sequence because of the environmental design. It makes the world feel a little bit more artificial, with how obviously constructed around Lara’s verb set everything is, but it makes for a more rewarding play experience.

Lara’s verb set rules, by the way. As one of the biggest ones if not THE progenitor of semi-realistic 3D platforming, it’s wild how much of this feels exactly right for the needs of the game. Tomb Raider came out before Playstation analogue sticks and LONG before 3D action controls had been standardized, so there IS a learning curve, but there’s also an optional tutorial selectable from the main menu to walk you through the movement specifically (it tellingly doesn’t teach you about weapons or inventory or contextual actions). Once you have a handle on things it becomes apparent that your set of actions is slightly more robust than something you might find in one of the older, less streamlined Assassin’s Creeds or those weird Lord of the Rings games. The big difference between Tomb Raider and one of those is that rather than any action being contextual, you have to actively press and/or hold every button for every action as you need them, for things like jumping at the right moments, grabbing ledges after a jump, shimmying, dropping and catching, everything you do requires active input. After just the tutorial and a couple of the early, simpler levels, these controls were singing to me. The experience is so engaging when you have to be ON it at all times. And while it is a somewhat clunkier experience by nature than more modern games, the team at Core Design was obviously aware of this and accounted for it. You have dedicated buttons for slow walking, taking small sidesteps, and quick 180 degree turns – everything you need to be able to position yourself with the precision necessary to do what the game asks. It’s a somewhat complex control scheme but it’s an excellent one, that understands the limits of the controller, the hardware, and the map design and elegantly adapts to their needs. This is how you create a genre.

Of course, it’s not all jumping around cool obstacle courses in Tomb Raider, but before we can talk about the OTHER stuff you get up to I think it’s important to discuss Lara Croft herself, and the game’s narrative. Tomb Raider doesn’t really HAVE a much of a narrative, maybe ten minutes of cutscenes spread over a fifteen-hour game, and usually with absolutely no connective tissue between levels, just a results screen that tells you how fast you went and how many animals you shot and how many secrets you found then BAM you’re in the next one. What scant few cutscenes it does have are MOSTLY here to make Lara Croft seem COOL AS FUCK bro. She’s a hot babe who lives in a MANSION built on STOLEN WEALTH. And YEAH, she may break into tombs and ruins and historical sites and ROB THEM and then SELL THE GOODS for CASH and yeah, she starts the game by taking a job to do exactly that for somebody and only stops because that person tries to double-cross and kill her, but she assures us out loud early on that SHE’S NOT IN IT FOR THE MONEY, only the THRILL. It’s a very weird and funny portrait of an anti-hero who is simultaneously supposed to be one of those detached 90s asshole characters who we like despite knowing they’re a shithead while still being thumb-twiddlingly self-conscious about her moral character. They’re constantly making sure to try to make Lara seem not as evil as she obviously is, these white British developers seemingly aware how much of A Problem this premise is politically even back then when mainstream media was still getting away with A Lot. She’s not in it for The Money, she seems at least KIND OF annoyed when an innocent man is killed by equally innocent wolves that she led him to, she HAS this big mansion but she’s converted it into a gym! (do not worry about the many stolen artifacts she is hawking in the foyer). She’s not as bad as THAT OTHER adventure archaeologist, the evil French one who uhhhh, litters? That is the only evil thing he does that Lara does not also do. She kind of vaguely thinks genocide is bad, I guess. It’s really funny, she’s seriously awful.

So that’s Lara, some kind of meandering adrenaline-seeking sociopath, so it is fitting that the other bit of the gameplay loop that kind of mindlessly pads out these levels is all the GUNPLAY as she mercilessly guns down random bats, wolves, bears, crocodiles, gorillas you fuckin’ name it, if it breathes Lara will shoot it with guns. A borderline comical amount of animal violence and it’s all so needless. Bats do no damage to you and they go down in one hit why are they here??? There is no aiming mechanic you just pull out your guns and mash the fire button until there are no more bats. It’s super funny to fall into a hole in the first level and be absolutely run over by a gigantic bear you didn’t know was there. None of the combat in this game is good and there’s not even that much of it but it feels very cool to jump around and shoot guns in mid-air. There are precisely two human enemies in the game and they’re both miserable to fight so I GUESS I would rather just mow down endless wolves but I am mostly wondering if Tomb Raider couldn’t have just had more slapstick adventure action in the vein of running away from large boulders or something.

Or maybe more dinosaurs. There are dinosaurs! coulda just been dinosaurs the entire time. See this is the secret third pillar of Tomb Raider: that it’s an extremely bizarre game, where just every element that ever made its way onto the ideas whiteboard also made its way into the game. What if there were dinosaurs in level THREE, no buildup, no story context, no sense of design pacing, and then they’re just GONE. Hell yeah gamer. At one point there’s like some King Midas themed shit and every time you turn into gold and die it’s accompanied by this incredible cartoon BONK sound effect, like, why?? You remember Pierre the evil French archaeologist? He appears in like EVERY level to try to kill you like the fuckin terminator. You never know when you’re gonna turn a corner and find Pierre there ready to pop you, and you have to shoot him like a hundred times until he does NOT die but instead runs around the nearest corner or behind a pillar or something where he will DISAPPEAR, ready to harangue you again in the next level. This happens like twelve times it’s insane! This game’s primary inspiration is obviously Indiana Jones but we cannot forget how big John Woo was starting to hit in America and I guess also the UK in the 90s and this is extremely obvious in Tomb Raider because Lara has the iconic two pistols and all of her attacks involve huge jumps and flips and shit it’s so funny and out of place in this otherwise very strictly laid out rules-heavy platforming game to have Lara just blasting infinite ammo pistol shots as she does a ten foot horizontal flip eight feet in the air from a standing position. All of these choices are nonsense but they add up to a game that does have something of a unique identity from its inspirations and certainly from its successors. Tomb Raider 2013 could never and more importantly WOULD never.

I don’t really know how to sum up a game as uneven as Tomb Raider. I feel like I just spent a lot of time bashing parts of it that feel half baked or like they don’t work, but the core appeal of it is so good, and makes up the majority of what you’re actually doing outside of setpieces. I barely talked about the puzzles which I think have a pretty high hit rate. They’re not like Puzzle Puzzles as much as they are just further extremes on the idea of environmental challenges most of the time. When it’s focused on stuff like this, using your core verbs to interact with the environment, Tomb Raider is almost unassailably good fun. It’s just when it does almost anything else that things get shakier. I do appreciate that it leaves the immense racism that is baked into the premise MOSTLY in the margins, as much as possible, in favor of a much stupider story about Atlantis. All the villains are Bri’ish stereotypes of Americans and French people so the worst shit gets left to context but it’s impossible to truly escape from it, as much as Core Design tries to divert you from thinking about it. I do feel that the things that are successful in this game and the things that aren’t are SO obvious that it’s hard to imagine Tomb Raider 2 being this weird, which would be a shame. That combination of incredible polish and comically rough edges in all the right places really make this one what it is, for me.