Remember Diablo 2 and its infamously stingy inventory system? Years ago, the classic RPG taught many of us how remarkably satisfying it feels when all of your loot clicks together just right. Enter Backpack Hero: a game that takes this very system and runs —nay, sprints with it.

To be clear, Backpack Hero isn’t the first attempt to make a game out of loot packing. The Save Room games, for example, turn Resident Evil 4’s inventory system into a standalone puzzler. What, Backpack Hero does, instead, is interpret this concept as a full-fledged, deckbuilding roguelite. The result is surprisingly engaging, even if some of the game’s supplementary systems don’t quite stick the landing.

Backpack Hero (PC [Reviewed], Switch)
Developer: Jaspel
Publisher: Different Tales, IndieArk
Released: November 14, 2023
MSRP: $19.99

Granted, calling Backpack Hero a deckbuilder is slightly misleading. Here, items you find along the way are your deck, and your playing mat is the very backpack you’re lugging around. As you crawl through the game’s dungeons and engage in turn-based combat, the uppermost portion of the interface always shows your inventory. You attack, cast spells, and generally interact with the dungeon by activating items: swords, shields, gems, potions, and so on.

The catch is that most items require very specific placement and rotation in your inventory. Better yet, many of them must be arranged in a way relative to certain other items for them to work properly. And, since you’re getting new stuff basically all the time, Backpack Hero keeps you on your toes by forcing you to reinvent your inventory between encounters and loot drops.

Roguelikes and roguelites often force players to switch up strategies as they play, but Backpack Hero takes things a step further with its sheer variety of item effects. Only rarely is a sword just a sword. Instead, it may only work if stored diagonally, or heavily incentivize lugging some cursed auxiliary items around. Is it worth carrying around, then? That’s a choice you’ll have to make often in Backpack Hero. Acquiring a new piece of loot demands you seriously consider your item management. It’s engrossing and satisfying. 

For example, look no further than how Backpack Hero handles armor. Helmets are shoved in the topmost rows of your pack to be effective, while boots should go at the bottom. Add extra complexities, such as diagonal buff application and adjacency bonuses, and you’ve got a heck of a puzzle on your hand with every new encounter. 

Meanwhile, certain magical items might only work if there aren’t any items immediately adjacent. Others might be lighter than air and automatically float to the top of your bag. Since there aren’t any item slots to be concerned about, your efficiency in combat boils down to personal ingenuity and inventiveness. Look, if you want to fill up your backpack with three different suits of armor, that’s a choice Backpack Hero permits. You do you. 

In this sense, Backpack Hero is sublime. Every run is its own puzzle, with enough pieces in play to encourage optimization on your own terms. Synergy is the word of the day here, and discovering the optimal item placements, rotations, and correlations is a delight. Not only do you get to embody the proverbial loot goblin, but you also get to feel smart about it!

As with many other indie darlings, however, Backpack Hero has its own take on a vast, all-encompassing meta progression system. To keep you busy between dungeon runs, you’ll manage an entire downtrodden town: Haversack Hill. Shops, schools, libraries, houses… It's all reminiscent of the old PlayStation classic Dark Cloud.

Unfortunately, interacting with Haversack Hill’s denizens kills the brisk, satisfying pace of the core itemized dungeon crawling. One moment, you’ll be micromanaging your backpack to crowd control an entire gauntlet’s worth of enemies. Then, seconds later, you’re looking for roaming NPCs in Haversack Hill to tell them you’ve got that sweet stack of bricks they’ve been looking for. This disparity could work in the game’s favor to balance out tense combat encounters, certainly, but improvements to Haversack Hill were too dull for this to work.

The central narrative isn’t particularly good, and there aren’t any interesting characters or functionalities to fiddle around with during the townscape portions. Haversack Hill just doesn’t add much value to Backpack Hero’s already strong dungeon gameplay—  it’s more mundane busywork. Instead of looking forward to upgrades and unlocks you’d typically see in similar roguelikes, I just wanted to get back to dungeon crawling as soon as possible.

Haversack Hill does, inadvertently, offer one bright spot. The town itself is pure drudgery, but collecting resources for its progression is much more interesting. To establish new services and invite more NPCs, you collect unique resources in the dungeon. Naturally, gathering these is a balancing act in and of itself. The only way to lug around bricks, wood beams, and other building materials is to sacrifice room in your inventory which, in effect, means leaving optimal combat performance on the table.

I really enjoyed the risk vs reward tradeoff of this system, as it adds more puzzle elements to an already intricate dungeon crawler. Had Backpack Hero focused the township parts to their absolute basics, perhaps even reducing it down to a sleek UI, I could see myself playing it for hours on end. As is, though, I couldn’t stomach more than one round of town management per session.

That said, Backpack Hero comes with a dedicated Quick Game mode. Here, you’re free to choose whichever character you want, all of them pre-unlocked for your playing pleasure. I actually found this to be the best way to play the game: unrestrained from any townscape homework. Just you, your ingenuity, and a virtually infinite pool of delightfully weird magical items to choose from.

The obvious downside, though, is that you’re losing the main story mode’s sense of progression. By building up Haversack Hill, more regions of the dungeon open up, unlocking new goodies and passive bonuses in turn. It’s nice to skip the town segments via  Quick Game mode, but you’ll, in turn, sacrifice the intrigue of collecting resources and learning item synergies through the drip feed of unlocks. I still preferred playing via Quick Game at the end of the day, I just wish I could enjoy the best of both worlds.

Ultimately, Backpack Hero specifically lets you side-step its biggest fault  — it’s a thoughtful step that gets my praises. I’d go so far as to say the core gameplay is more than compelling enough to forget whatever other perceived problems there may be. It’s delightfully infectious, calling me back for the same reasons the legendary Slay the Spire did. 

Despite floundering a bit with meta-progression mechanics, Backpack Hero is still a thoroughly entertaining deckbuilding roguelike. Its use of item management as a central game mechanic is wildly inventive, and I consistently wanted to reenter the dungeon just to explore new item synergies. I do wish the town sections didn’t drag the pace of the main campaign as much as they did. But even if you strictly use the Quick Game mode, Backpack Hero is still a worthwhile venture.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Backpack Hero appeared first on Destructoid.

Dead Tomb is a game that can spark your interest before you even start playing it. It’s based on a lost media game, Temporel Inc. Its progenitor was released on the Videoway content delivery system, which means it just disappeared when the service shut down.

Being the most complex game on Videoway, it had its fans, and they went to work remaking it by reverse engineering a recorded playthrough of it. I don’t have any firsthand insight on the Videoway, so I’ll again direct you to Hardcore Gaming 101’s write-up. Fans first recreated Temporel Inc. in Flash, and then Collectorvision created an NES port, which was released a few years ago on a cartridge by Limited Run Games under the name of Dead Tomb.

Now, 8-Bit Legit has released it on modern consoles, which makes the game much more accessible, as it should be.

Dead Tomb (Switch [reviewed], Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, NES)
Developer: Collectorvision
Publisher: 8-Bit Legit
Released: January 26, 2023
MSRP: $4.99

Dead Tomb is a verb-drive adventure game, which is sort of a halfway point between a point-and-click and a text adventure. To interact with an object, you pick a verb from a list. It’s a style of game most famous in Lucasart’s SCUMM titles, such as Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. 

You play as a time traveler from the future, who gets waylaid on a trip back in time and finds themself in ancient Egypt. You’re captured by Pharaoh Seti I's soldiers, robbed, and dumped in a pyramid. Your goal is to try and find a diamond used to power your time machine and escape.

It’s probably important to set your expectations with Dead Tomb. Maniac Mansion, this is not. It’s a much simpler and more linear experience. It’s not necessarily shorter (though it is quite short), but there is less chance that you’re going to become stuck or have to start over. There’s also far less backtracking involved, so it’s a bit more comfortable than Maniac Mansion, but also less complex.

That’s not entirely a bad thing. In fact, it’s a big part of Dead Tomb’s charm. Depending on your aptitude (and a bit of luck), you might still find yourself wandering in circles, occasionally trying to figure out what verb you need to use on a noun, but there’s usually a feeling of forward movement. Again, that’s going to depend on your adventure game literacy, but I definitely felt some momentum.

Where Dead Tomb can get a bit vexing is figuring out how it wants you to interact with the environment. You build up an inventory, but learning how to use it can be tricky, especially in the beginning. It’s not a matter of going into your pockets, pressing “use,” and rubbing it on something in the environment. Often, once it’s in your pocket, you need to approach something in the environment and select the right verb, at which point it says, “Pour ranch dressing on cheesecake.” It feels kind of backward and unintuitive. Then, by the time you get used to it, you’re done with the game.

While Dead Tomb is not terribly cryptic, there are spots that go against common logic. Early on, there’s a nail driven into the wall. If you try to take it, the descriptive text says it barely moves. You have to try and take it three or so times before it finally lands in your pocket. I don’t think this is the only time I’ve seen such a mechanic (and it only happens once in the game), but it's always interesting to me when a game requires you to fail in exactly the same way repeatedly before you meet with success. Video games have instilled in me the principle that if something doesn’t work on the first attempt, I need to try something else.

On the other hand, you don’t have to worry about death. I mean, you can die in sometimes hilarious ways, but then the game just prompts you to continue, and you start back where you were. It contributes to Dead Tomb being such a brief experience, but I think I prefer it to just repeating puzzle solutions until I get back to where I was.

It also allows you to test out obviously bad ideas just to see your character die.

I keep mentioning this, but it’s the brevity that bothers me most about Dead Tomb. As I said previously, you can complete Maniac Mansion in roughly the same timeframe, but that game has multiple solutions and gives you a variety of characters to put together a team from. Dead Tomb is linear. There’s only one way to solve it. There may have been a secret ending I missed, but I’m doubtful.

It’s certainly a fun game while it lasts. The breeziness of the puzzles and charming but unremarkable soundtrack make it a comfortable experience. I really enjoyed playing Dead Tomb, I’m not sure I’m going to remember the game will stand in my memory quite as much as the history behind it. At least the price for the digital version makes that kind of experience absolutely worth the recommendation.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Dead Tomb appeared first on Destructoid.

I skipped over Trace Memory when it was released on DS back in 2005. I wasn’t into the adventuresome puzzle-solving genre at the time because I was boring. So, I got to go into Another Code: Recollection with fresh eyes.

That’s probably fine, because Another Code: Recollection isn’t just a collection of Another Code: Two Memories (Trace Memory) and Another Code: R – A Journey into Lost Memories. Neither is it a remaster that simply heightens the graphics to the Switch’s standards. If you wondered how the puzzle mechanics that were reliant on the DS or Wii hardware got transferred to the Switch, they didn’t. 

Another Code: Recollection is more accurately based on the two Another Code titles. It lies somewhere between a remake and a complete reimagining.

Another Code: Recollection (Switch)
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: January 19, 2023
MSRP: $59.99

Even the narratives of both games deviate in parts from their source material in both great and small ways. The basics of the first game are at least all there.

You play as Ashley Mizuki Robbins, who is called to Blood Edward Island by her father, who she thought was dead. That usually sounds like a bad idea, but this isn’t Silent Hill 2. She journeys there under the supervision of her legal guardian, who was aware that her father was alive this whole time but promised not to tell. Of course, once on the island, Ashley’s supervisor disappears. You eventually find yourself in an abandoned mansion full of puzzles. Don’t worry; this isn’t Resident Evil, either.

It’s difficult to really explain the plot without giving too much away, even if I were to assume you’ve already played the first game. To give you the basis in broad strokes, Ashley is joined by a child’s ghost named D, and the two explore to regain lost memories. D has full ghost amnesia and can’t remember anything, while Ashley just wants to know the truth about what happened to her mother.

The second game, Another Code: R – A Journey into Lost Memories, takes place two years after the first game and has Ashley getting dragged out to Lake Juliet, where her bag gets stolen. While looking for it, she winds up tripping over everyone else’s problems. There’s a kid who ran away from home, a strange pollutant in the lake, and all kinds of suspicious characters. A strange event happened in the area five years prior, but in the typical NPC manner, nobody wants to say what it was.

Both titles have a whiff of the young adult novels I barely remember reading in my youth. They’re mysteries involving a youth who is way more capable than the adults. There’s a sense of contained danger and a great deal of sentimentality. I’m not sure if I mean that as a compliment.

Both games in Another Code: Recollection are narrative-heavy. Cutscenes and dialogue outweigh puzzles by a large margin, and this is especially true of the second game. While Two Memories has you progress slowly by gating progress with puzzles, much of A Journey into Lost Memories has you simply walking to a certain spot where you just trigger a cutscene.

The problem is, I can dig the puzzles. They’re often simple, and I never got stuck on any of them, but they’re well-designed, even if they don’t get as exotic as the original versions. The narrative on the other hand, I’m not so sure about.

There are a lot of good ideas in the stories of the games, but I think it’s let down by the characters. While some of them are realistically written, most of them aren’t all that interesting. I suppose that’s somewhat realistic, as well. However, it’s hard to care about characters when their issues are so drab, and their personalities are so monotone. Everyone’s friendly to Ashley in the exact same warm and accepting way. That is until they turn out to be a secret bad guy.

That may be of great comfort for some people. The second game, in particular, has you wandering about a peaceful and weirdly deserted small town. It’s slow in a way that some might find relaxing. In some ways, it reminded me of Deadly Premonition’s take on small-town life, but for all the issues in that game’s storytelling, it at least had interesting characters. I want to know more about the ship captain that appears in the beginning of Two Memories. He seems cool. I don’t really care that some of the teen characters play in a band. Sometimes, that feels like the only thing that some adults know that teenagers do.

As for Another Code: Recollection being closer to a reimagining than a remake, fans of the earlier games may be surprised by how far it deviates. You couldn’t, for example, use a walkthrough of one of the original versions, because everything has changed. Not merely shifted, but completely redone.

Two Memories was played from a top-down perspective on the bottom screen while the top screen displayed pre-rendered depictions of the area you were in. Another Code: Recollection changes this by making it full 3D. Likewise, the plot was redone to offer a better connection to the second game. This is on top of the puzzles being completely different. And, by the way, none of them really feature the inventiveness seen on the DS hardware.

In fact, you may think that the first game was so heavily changed to fit in with the style of the second game, but A Journey into Lost Memories has been largely overhauled, as well. It’s definitely more recognizable, and some of the puzzles are similar, but everything has changed. The original version had a sort of side-scroller movement system, and that was replaced completely with a more standard 3D camera. Most importantly, the narrative has been heavily revised. If you played the original Wii version, the one in Another Code: Recollection will feel familiar, but it’s largely a new game.

I always felt like I was on the cusp of digging the stories presented in Another Code: Recollection. I did connect with some of its sentimentality, and while many of the characters are bland, some of them are more interesting. There’s a sweetness to the whole story, and I think there are players who will click with it. To be clear, I don’t dislike the overarching narrative, but I doubt it’s going to stick in my mind.

Having never played the original versions of these two games, I can’t really tell you if the changes made to the narrative and puzzle design are for the best. They largely eschew the hardware trickery of the DS and Wii, and that makes it feel a bit more mundane. The challenges are still well designed, but they don’t give the games a unique personality among other adventure titles. On the other hand, by being such a divergence, the collection doesn’t render the original games obsolete, so they can still be played as a companion.

Yet, despite my apathy, I still admire the earnestness on display here. Another Code: Recollection exists because someone really cares for the original titles, and it shows. The two games that make up the collection were niche to begin with, so it takes a certain passion to completely overhaul them to make them presentable to a new audience. This passion shines through the production.

So, while Another Code: Recollection didn’t really do much for me, I hope that it finds an audience, whether it’s newcomers to the series or fans of the old.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Another Code: Recollection appeared first on Destructoid.

Sometimes, a game has a lot riding against it, and it has to go the extra mile to prove its excellence. The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered isn’t in the worst position pre-launch, although it has a steep hill ahead of it to prove why it should exist at all. Staying true to its history, Naughty Dog manages to not disappoint, and delivers a package filled with upgrades and a few surprises. 

The studio didn’t have to try too hard to sway me in its direction regarding the game. The Last of Us Part 2 sits up there as one of my favorite games of all time, and around the announcement of the remaster, I was already easing into another playthrough, which I excitedly put on pause to cleanse my palette for this new offering. 

Despite this, I could sense that my perception might not be the norm, and even its most ardent fans were asking worthwhile questions. Was this a sincere gaming product, or an advertisement for the upcoming HBO series? It’s hard to argue against the sentiment that this is far from a title that requires a remaster, for either technical or preservation reasons. Nevertheless, it manages to not only justify itself but also gives the most seasoned veterans something new to experience.

The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered (PS5 [reviewed])
Developer: Naughty Dog
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Released: January 19, 2024
MSRP: $49.99 ($10 upgrade for owners of the PS4 title)

A tale of revenge and trauma

I’ve previously discussed the concept of trauma and its depiction in indie games, and how the personal element amplifies the impact of these experiences. The Last of Us Part 2 is a triple-A attempting to explore trauma, specifically that which is intertwined with love, hate, and regret. Despite the lack of the “reading a personal diary” effect of indies, the sequel manages to pack some weight behind its message.

Part of that punch comes from the coincidental state of world politics and, more specifically, the currently ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict. As game director Neil Druckmann has explained, growing up in Israel and witnessing the bloody relationship between Israel and Palestine. In his 20s, he saw footage of that violence, which triggered feelings of revenge followed by self-disgust. As the Washington Post explains, with TLOU P2, “he wanted to explore that emotional tumult on a didactic level.”

The conflict, along with its sociopolitical foundations, have been discussed and debated at length and continue to be. If you want to feel an artistic exploration of the underlying theory from a somewhat controversial but deeply human perspective I’d argue it’s hard to do better than The Last of Us Part 2.

We’ve already got a review of the base game, so I’ll keep the story synopsis brief. It’s the sequel to The Last of Us, which follows the tale of Joel, a hardened weapons smuggler who depends on brutality to survive in a collapsed society where a pandemic has turned the masses into the Infected (they’re zombies).

He finds himself smuggling a different kind of cargo - Ellie. This young girl and her immunity may be the answer to humanity’s problems if she can just make it to the rebel group known as the Fireflies. During the journey, the bond between Joel and Ellie strengthens so much that he is unable to accept it when he discovers that she will have to die for the cure to be made. Driven by love and trauma, he rescues Ellie from the operating table and kills the only surgeon capable of performing the procedure, damning humanity in the process.  

The sequel reveals that the pair have carved a relatively peaceful life for themselves in the Jackson community which stands together against the threat of the Infected. This peace is brought to a bloody end when a faction from faraway discovers Jackson and decides to enact their own idea of justice. The event leaves Ellie traumatized, and the pain drives her to go on a ruthless manhunt to ensure the crew faces retribution.

There’s nothing new about the motivations of the main characters - it is a behavior as old as human society. Wanting to “teach someone a lesson” being used as an explanation for malice is ubiquitous, even when dealing with daily grievances like road rage. Once you spot the pattern, it’s impossible not to immediately start questioning where righteous indignation ends and malevolence begins.

This isn’t a perfect story by any means. What annoys me most is how it feels like it’s constantly underestimating its audience, so it hammers you over the head with its themes just in case you didn’t get it the first time around. The “an eye for an eye” mentality gets quite literal at one point. There are always two sides to every story, so we’re shown a character named Abby, who appears villainous at first before we learn her origins. She also happens to collect coins. It all gets too much at times.

Speaking of Abby, the narrative makes a valiant attempt to have players sympathize with her in a relatively short space of time despite her introduction featuring an atrocity that likely infuriated anyone who had played the predecessor. It’s a tall task, and while I believe The Last of Us Part 2 manages it sufficiently, I wouldn’t shake my head at those who disagree.

A gorgeous dystopia

The Last of Us Part 2 already looked next-gen on PS4, and the remaster manages to polish things in a way that won’t knock your socks off but can definitely be appreciated. You’re given two modes - Fidelity and Performance. On Performance mode, you’ll be able to play at 60FPS, though you’ll be dealing with visuals rendered in 1440p, and then upscaled to 4K. Fidelity offers native 4K, but it has an expensive entry price — 30 FPS gameplay.

It cannot be overstated how magnificent Fidelity mode looks. When it comes to console games, I can’t think of much else that looks this beautifully detailed and borderline photorealistic at some moments. There is a noticeable visual difference between this mode and its Performance counterpart.

What suits you will depend on your playstyle. If you’re playing on the higher difficulties (which I recommend), gameplay becomes an important factor, which makes Performance mode the preferred choice. Though Fidelity looks amazing, Performance still offers pure visual splendor. On the lower difficulties, for players who are more focused on the story than the tense ambushes, 30 FPS may be worth it for that native 4K beauty.

Much like the first game, audio plays a significant role in the overall experience. Gustavo Santaolalla’s special touches always come at the right moments to accentuate the most emotional moments. Once again, by sound alone, you can map out where your enemies are and what direction their footsteps are traveling in. If there’s been any improvement on this front, it wasn’t enough for me to notice it.

Endure and survive

The gameplay in the remake is a replica of the original. Interspersing the cinematic drama are moments of intense combat that drop you straight into survivalist post-apocalyptic scenarios. You get great freedom when it comes to how you want to tweak your difficulty, and you’re able to independently adjust aspects like enemy combat, companion combat, and stealth difficulty, to name a few.

There is certainly value to playing the game on the easier levels. Get a sequence done correctly the first time around, and it feels like your gameplay is straight out of an action movie. Nevertheless, there’s something a bit more thematically consistent when you crank things up to Survivor or Grounded.

Ellie is outnumbered and outgunned, usually packing nothing more than her blade, a brick, and maybe a single bullet in her rifle. There’s a tower teeming with WLF soldiers seeking her. She’s surely not going to overpower her opponents, so she has to rely on her brains and agility instead to get the best of her foes.

Some solutions come in the form of expert stealth to pick off your rivals. Other times, it’s a matter of trial and error until you find the route that’ll get you through the danger zone undetected. There are also those special scenarios where you can implement some creativity and have Infected and enemy factions at each other’s necks while you sneak off. Additionally, environments are more than just a backdrop - you can implement them in your strategies whether you’re hiding traps behind doors or waiting with a loaded shotgun under a truck.

There’s something really satisfying about worming your way through an area and snuffing all your pursuers out before they even know they’re being stalked, or engaging in high-speed action encounters where you evade your foes only for you to snipe them in the grass when they least expect it.

It takes everything at your disposal, some smart strategizing, and a little luck to survive these encounters when a single gunshot is usually enough to end your run. The lack of random resources also makes the world a little more realistic when you’re not finding shotgun ammo inside office building file cabinets.

But it should be stressed that playing at this difficulty level is a matter of preference. To make things a little more bearable, fine-tune the settings by perhaps turning up the frequency of encountering resources and increasing Ellie’s durability. You’ll still get to enjoy enemies functioning at their smartest, but the dreaded one-shot kills won’t be a problem anymore.

There’s also been a roguelike mode titled No Return included, and it’s as feature-filled as it is exhilarating. You’re put through randomized levels where your objective is to remain alive regardless of what’s been thrown at you. 

You can play as different characters, including folks like Dina and Tommy, who have unique abilities. Your base game upgrades don’t transfer, and you’ll have to work from scratch to get your pistols and other weapons back to an optimal level. 

It doesn’t feel tacked on at all - it’s a fleshed-out experience worth investing your time in, and it’s also designed to give you a sense of progress as your hard work helps you unlock new characters and skins. In short, the game mode allows you to experience the best of what the sequel’s combat has to offer, and if gameplay is what draws you to this franchise, the roguelike mode is probably the best gift to receive in lieu of the canceled multiplayer mode.

For the fans

For players who fell in love with the PS4 game, a shot to replay it won’t be declined quickly. But the remaster comes packed with content to ensure the experience is worthwhile. One of my favorite features is the director’s commentary, which genuinely expanded my view of TLOU P2’s world and Naughty Dog’s artistic vision. I’d highly advise you to turn it on if you’ve watched all the cinematics a couple of times already.

It isn’t overused, so you won’t be dealing with chattering in your ear the whole time. But when it does kick in, you’re seldom left without learning something new, even if it’s something minor like discovering that freeing the zebra in one of Abby’s flashbacks was originally designed as a mini-game. It also directed my attention to characters like Jesse, who I'd originally overlooked but now have a greater appreciation for the crucial role he plays in the overall narrative.

As has been advertised, one of the bonus features allows you to play the guitar as Gustavo, Ellie, or Joel. You can switch between the regular instrument, or you can switch it out for something else, including a banjo. There’s no getting around the fact that it’s gimmicky, but it is nonetheless a calming addition that I can imagine a music lover enjoying when they need a break from the gritty action of the main game.

Perhaps the largest draw for some players will be the inclusion of three lost levels. These are encounters that were conceptualized and developed to some degree, but were still months away from completion before it was decided they would be cut. Each lost level is introduced by Druckmann, who gives some context regarding the scene and why it isn’t in the final game. 

The lost levels are one of the most interesting ways a studio has provided insight into a game’s development. As you play these clearly unfinished levels, you pass points where you can trigger developer commentary to discover more about what Naughty Dog was considering as the encounters were being developed, and some of the challenges faced. 

They also provide a peek into just how difficult to wrangle a game with a story of this magnitude. Ultimately, I’m glad these lost levels were axed, as they would have subtracted more than they added to TLOU P2. Nonetheless, discovering just how far developers were willing to go to achieve lofty goals like making Jackson feel immersive or highlighting Ellie’s trauma does trigger greater appreciation for the final product.

How polished can a diamond get?

The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered is a tricky one to assess. It should be obvious at this point that I consider it one of, if not the, best offering from a Sony first-party studio in gaming’s eighth generation. Despite this, it’s not lost on me that this is a remaster of a 2020 game that already has an impressive PS5 upgrade patch.

From a tech standpoint, you’re not getting anything considerably better than the PS4 version with an upgrade patch. For most, I’d wager the biggest easily discernible difference players will find when they play the base game is the use of the adaptive trigger for weapons. It’s not transformative, but it’s nice.

This alone wouldn’t justify a remaster, but that’s not all Naughty Dog is offering. You’re getting a new game mode, but it’s nevertheless capable of adding hours to your gameplay provided you’re into that kind of thing. 

Some additions will probably only appeal to the more hardcore fans, including the ability to play instruments as Gustavo Santaolalla and friends, as well as the chance to explore the lost levels. New skins make an appearance, and yes, this matters significantly to me. I like playing as Ellie in a spacesuit. 

This is the most polished version of Naughty Dog’s vision, and it’s chocked full of content illustrating passion for the craft and a deep appreciation for the fans. If you already own the game and had fun with it the first time around, $10 is a reasonable entry price for a package that expands the ways you can enjoy TLOU P2. 

Never played the game before? Well, I don’t think it’s worth piling on any more praise, except to say this is about as good as it gets when it comes to Sony’s cinematic over-the-shoulder third-person action-adventure experience.

The post Review: The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered appeared first on Destructoid.

Sitting down to write this review, I could barely believe Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is the first new entry in the Prince of Persia franchise in 13 years. After both considering my time with this game and the rich history the series has enjoyed until now, I had to remind myself why that is.

Jordan Mechner's original Prince of Persia pioneered the cinematic platformer genre back in 1989, and Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was a critical darling back in 2003. There's so much potential to draw from between those entries, yet regardless, the series floundered. The last entry in the series, The Forgotten Sands, didn't exactly light the world on fire. And while the Sands of Time movie was well received at the time (except by Destructoid), it didn't seem to have any cultural staying power either. After that point, Ubisoft appeared to focus on the Assassin's Creed series and put Prince of Persia on the back burner.

This puts Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown in an interesting spot. It's both a return to the series' 2D roots and, simultaneously, a reimagining of this universe as a Metroidvania. I'll admit, it seems like an odd pivot on the surface. But after finishing the game and putting over 20 hours into exploring Mount Qaf, solving puzzles, and fighting epic bosses, I think this was the right choice. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown feels like it puts the franchise back in a good direction, and can stand on its own as one of the better Prince of Persia titles in the series canon.

See, Mount Qaf is far from ordinary. Time doesn't flow naturally here, and intertwining timelines cause all sorts of strange time-related issues. In exploring Mount Qaf, the player is able to find new powers and enhancements to aid Sargon in combat. Some of these powers directly manipulate the strange flow of time at Mount Qaf.

My life got flipped-turned upside down

Timing a parry can be risky compared to just dodging the attack, but it's also more rewarding due to the counterattack damage. Even as regular enemy encounters and boss fights increase in difficulty as you explore Mount Qaf, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown feels consistently fair. If you take the time to carefully study enemy encounters, you'll be rewarded with the kill.

And I'd like to take a minute

Just sit right there

I'll tell you how I became the Prince of Persia

I really enjoyed exploring Mount Qaf as Sargon in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. I wouldn't call myself a huge Prince of Persia fan or a huge Metroidvania fan. But Ubisoft has managed to take the two and smash them together into a refreshingly new and entertaining interpretation of Prince of Persia. I'm not sure if they plan to continue down this path, but I really hope they do.

The glimpses of tedium definitely hamper the experience, but few games have managed to get me so excited just for reaching the next boss. If you are a fan of Metroidvania-style games or even just a fan of fast-paced combat with a focus on boss fights, you'll love this iteration of the Prince (of Persia).

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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It would be easy to say that Final Fantasy XVI: Echoes of the Fallen is just more Final Fantasy XVI. See, it's so easy, I just said it right there. And that’s about 90% of what you need to know about this DLC.

Granted, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I generally feel grated by DLC that’s kind of slapped haphazardly onto a game without a lot of thought, and that’s not the case with Echoes of the Fallen. Instead, Echoes of the Fallen functions as a neat bonus endgame quest that culminates in the game's closest equivalent to a superboss. I didn’t necessarily find Final Fantasy XVI lacking for content, but I really like how integrated into the game this DLC is. A totally new player wouldn't even know this was content added after the fact if the game didn't announce it!

That said, is Echoes of the Fallen worth paying actual money for? Let’s go over it so you can make that judgment for yourself.

Find the flame

A Long Fall

A drifting tender

Ultimately, your mileage with Echoes of the Fallen will mirror your experience with Final Fantasy XVI. If you got to the end of the game and found yourself wanting more new content, Echoes of the Fallen absolutely delivers that. It doesn’t offer a captivating story, but it does hit some nice highs with its new boss battles. In fact, I’d say its final boss fight is one of my favorite encounters in the entire game.

Beyond that, this DLC pack is just a short and sweet return to Final Fantasy XVI. If you've moved on from the game already, I don’t think Echoes of the Fallen will do much for you. The game fortunately felt complete as-is without this DLC, so this is an extremely elective piece of content. If you consider yourself a fan of Final Fantasy XVI, then you’ll probably enjoy what Echoes of the Fallen offers. It won’t make believers out of anyone else, but in this case, I think that’s perfectly okay. It knows who it’s for and doesn’t necessarily aim higher than that.

Overall, I liked Echoes of the Fallen. It adds a fun endgame dungeon for those looking to extend their stay in Valisthea, and it delivers some challenging new encounters to sink your teeth into. It’s over in just a few hours and doesn’t do much narratively, but it’s a fun ride for what it is. Whether it’s worth the money is up to you, but if you’re looking for more Final Fantasy XVI, this DLC pack certainly delivers. Echoes of the Fallen is not a must-have, but it is worth having.

The post Review: Final Fantasy XVI: Echoes of the Fallen appeared first on Destructoid.

Astlibra Revision is one of those “hidden gems” that I was advised to go into as blind as possible. To paraphrase, I was told to trust it would be worth my time to see it through to its conclusion. Now, three weeks and change later, I have finished Astlibra Revision. And while I don’t think that advice was totally necessary, I still don’t know how to begin describing the experience.

For lack of a better option, the best way to understand this game is to understand its creator. Astlibra was developed predominately by one Japanese developer who goes by the name “KEIZO”. From what I’ve gathered, KEIZO is not a professional game designer. So in addition to his full-time job, Astlibra was the passion project he worked on in his free time. In that sense, Astlibra isn’t unlike that one RPG Maker game you might have spent a month tinkering with. Except KEIZO kept working on Astlibra for 15 years, releasing chapters episodically until it was finished.

Of course, as you might expect, the boy’s firm answer to that last question is “no”. And after setting out on a journey that lasts eight years, the boy and his crow become proper monster-slaying grown-ups who finally find other human settlements. And before you know it, the duo quickly get wrapped up in a plot that not only takes them across the world, but time itself.

This mixture of clichés and twists honestly describes Astlibra as a whole. The plot is something I want to discuss later, as there’s a lot to unpack here. But even when it comes to the gameplay, Astlibra proves that you shouldn’t judge a game based on appearances.

But what even is Astlibra?

Despite starting on such a small scale, I can’t stress enough that the combat in Astlibra just keeps growing. With each chapter comes new magic, abilities, and entirely new attacks in your core move set. Even at the point you'd think the game would hit its mechanical peak, it still escalates. This is a good thing, because you’re going to need as many tools as you can get. Before long, you’ll find dungeons with ridiculous amounts of monsters and massive bosses that throw blankets of bullets at a moment’s notice.

That said, the game’s plethora of options quickly turns into a blessing and a curse.

Prepare to grind

If there is one thing I cannot stress enough about Astlibra, it is that it is very much designed for people who enjoy grinding. If you want just about anything in Astlibra, you must work for it. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, but it does make the game’s appeal very niche in practice.

For instance, take the game’s equipment. There are a ton of armaments you can equip, each different in terms of range, handling, power, and even elemental affinity. However, all equipment – armor and shields included – comes with skills you can master by earning enough EXP while using them. Some skills are duds, but others are basically essential. These include things like extending your invulnerability period after getting hit or boosting elemental damage. So to get the most of your character, you better like swapping equipment and filling up every bar you see.

However, you also must consider how you get equipment. Every area in the game comes with its own batch of things to buy, but you can’t just use money to get them. You also need a wide variety of monster materials from that respective area, which you almost certainly won't get through standard play. So the rhythm of the game quickly becomes identifying the materials you need, farming them until you’re done, and then repeating the process until you’ve grinded out everything you can in an area.

Make numbers go up

It gets better, though

A story across time

There’s no time like the present

How does Astlibra Revision run on Switch?

Weigh it on the scales

Despite all the game’s rough edges, that constant feeling of surprise ultimately nudged Astlibra into “Great” territory for me. At many points, I felt just as invested in the story on my screen as I was with the story of KEIZO creating it. Watching someone basically learn game design right in front of you is such a surreal experience, especially whenever you abruptly unlock new foundational combat mechanics that I imagine KEIZO just wanted to add on a whim. It’s a game that can, on occasion, be weird and baffling in ways that few commercial games are. But it’s nonetheless overflowing with passion, and I can’t help but feel impressed by that.

Astlibra Revision asks a lot from players upfront. It’s very much built for those who like grindy games, and it’s unpolished in ways that you’d expect from a title created by one person. But if you can enjoy what the game puts on the table, you’ll find an engaging combat system and a captivating, if not occasionally bizarre story. It’s an acquired taste for sure, but for those with the right palate, Astlibra is a one-of-a-kind experience.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Someone once told me that the Sega Saturn controller (the Japanese one, not the chunky American one) is the best 2D controller ever made. I don’t remember who it was, but it happened. The claim stuck with me.

I’m not sure I agree, but game controllers are a very personal choice. For years, we’ve essentially been using different configurations of the same thing. To me, four face buttons feel like the optimal number for my thumb to handle, so my preference is the SNES controller, but I can respect anyone who prefers Sega’s six-button design.

And for those people, there’s now Retro-Bit’s Sega Saturn Wireless Pro Controller, which, beyond just being a rather faithful wireless translation of the console’s input, slaps a couple of analog sticks on there so you can also use it for modern games.

You know, if you want to.

I had planned on starting to import Sega Saturn games, but that was before the Analogue Duo shifted my attention to the PC-Engine. However, the Retro-Bit Sega Saturn Pro Controller isn’t exclusive to that console. It works with a bunch of different consoles and PC through Xinput and Dinput. For that matter, one of the consoles I tried it on was the aforementioned Analogue Duo, and it worked just fine.

This is something I’m pretty used to when it comes to modern controllers. It seems that this generation has resulted in a renaissance in third-party controllers. Back in my day, third-party controllers were generally what you bought when you didn’t want to shell out for an official one but still wanted multiplayer. You’d hand them off to your friend, who would complain the buttons stick. It would get stuck in a drawer and somehow seemed to disintegrate just sitting there.

Now, whenever I need to use a controller, I have a tonne of choices. For 2D games, I usually use my 8BitDo SF30 Pro or M30. For 3D, I use the console’s native controller or a PS5 Dualsense on PC. My SF30 has analog sticks, but I usually only resort to them if a game is largely 2D with 3D sections or if, sacrilegiously, a 2D game doesn’t use the D-Pad. It’s just not as comfortable as a handled controller. Then, of course, there’s my arcade stick and racing wheel, which no girl should be without.

The Sega Saturn Pro Controller has a few drawbacks. The first is the fact that it currently only has a 2.4GHz version for wireless. To be fair, a lot of gamers seem to prefer this because, in most cases, it has the least amount of input lag. It also means you don’t have to worry about constantly pairing the controller. However, it does mean that you’re shackled to a dongle. Even while re-pairing with Bluetooth can be a pain, physically moving a dongle isn’t that much better. Also, if you want to change between the Saturn and USB dongle, you have to clear the pairing before you can pair it with the other adapter, so it’s not great.

The second is that the joysticks kind of suck to use. They’re very small, and reaching to the middle of the controller isn’t exactly ergonomic. This is essentially the same problem I have with the sticks on my SF30 Pro. The symmetrical design doesn’t work very well on a controller that doesn’t have handles, and because they’re small and very recessed, you need to be mindful of how your thumbs are sitting. Like the SF30 Pro, I will likely only use them when it’s absolutely necessary. However, there is a positive to them that I will get to.

The build quality is also very faithful to the original’s, which can be disappointing if you’re used to the 8BitDo M30. That controller has a nice matte finish and a solid feel, while the Sega Saturn Pro Controller feels like a controller from the ‘90s. If you’re interested in this controller, there’s a good chance that you want it to feel as close to the original as possible, and it really does. Over the years, Retro-Bit has gotten a lot better about matching the original version of whatever they’re reproducing, and that shows here.

The shoulder buttons have a bit of a different click to them, and the D-pad has a bit more wiggle to it, but neither of these things makes a practical difference in gameplay. Nothing about it made me want to switch back to an original Saturn controller.

What I do appreciate, however, is its ability to function as a Sega Saturn analog controller. I’m pretty sure the only games I have that support this are Nights into Dreams and Christmas Nights. I thought they were fine with the D-pad, but now that I’ve experienced them in analog, yeah, they’re a lot better. I’m actually surprised by the difference. It’s worth mentioning that the triggers are not analog, but off the top of my head, I can’t think of a game besides Panzer Dragoon Saga that uses them, and even then it doesn’t use them for anything important.

Switching to analog takes a button combination, but it’s not too difficult. Unfortunately, you can’t use the symmetrical sticks in Virtual On to mimic the dual-stick controller, but Retro-Bit notes this saying, “This feature is not available, but we like the idea.” It may be added in a later firmware update.

One thing I noted about using the controller is that there are four shoulder buttons as opposed to the Saturn’s usual two: R, L, ZR, and ZL. The manual says that R and ZR both map to the Saturn’s R button, which would allow you to choose where you want your index fingers to lie, but that’s not correct. R actually maps to the Z face button. This seems like a mistake and maybe will be fixed in future firmware.

It’s also a bit disappointing to use on Switch, which maps Z and C to R and L. This is mostly Nintendo’s fault. The controller would be great on the Genesis and N64 (another 6-button face) channels, but, for some daft reason, Nintendo doesn’t let you remap controls for their systems. You can do it in the settings menu of the Switch, but then you’d have to keep fiddling around with it whenever you wanted to play something normally.

This isn’t a problem with the Sega Saturn Pro Controller, however. The 8BitDo M30 has the same problem. Nintendo could do a lot better when it comes to supporting third-party controllers.

Aside from some “wish it had” features, the Retro-Bit Sega Saturn Pro Controller is exactly what it says it is: It’s a Saturn controller with symmetrical analog sticks. It’s faithful to the original form factor with additional functions. How much use you’re going to get out of the sticks is dependent on your preferences and situation.

For me, I’d probably just stick to the 8BitDo M30 without the analog sticks. It’s cheaper, more modern, and has Bluetooth version. However, 8BitDo doesn’t make a Saturn receiver. Not yet, anyway. So, by default, the Retro-Bit Sega Saturn Pro Controller is my new favorite Sega Saturn controller. Even if I could use the M30, I’d still probably break out Retro-Bit’s solution for Nights into Dreams.

But if the Sega Saturn controller is to you what the SNES controller is to me, this might be exactly what you’re looking for. The sticks might not be comfortable for modern games, but even retro-inspired games sometimes don’t pay proper tribute to the D-Pad. For those occasions, they’re nice to have. The build quality and faithfulness to the original control are admirable in the Sega Saturn Pro Controller. However, as I said in the opening, controllers are an entirely personal choice, so there’s a good chance you already know if this is the controller for you.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the hardware provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Retro-Bit Sega Saturn Wireless Pro Controller appeared first on Destructoid.

Let’s get the obvious talking point out of the way: Pokémon Scarlet & Violet are divisive games. Generation IX has caught a lot of heat for its glitches and lack of polish, but despite that, I personally have still had fun with these games. So someone like me should love The Indigo Disk, right?

Let me explain: here at Destructoid, we’ve played hot potato with Pokémon review duties. CJ Andriessen and Eric Van Allen reviewed Pokémon Violet and Scarlet respectively, each arriving at the same “6/10” score. And later, the impeccable Chris Carter took the reins on the first DLC pack, The Teal Mask, who concluded that it wasn’t as good as The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds and also gave a 6/10.

We’re not necessarily bound to each other’s scores as an outlet, but sometimes things just line up that way. And for that reason, I really wanted to throw my own take in on Generation IX before we move on to whatever GameFreak has lined up next.

With The Indigo Disk, I expected to give these Pokémon games a day in the sun and maybe even give a slightly more generous score. After all, this second DLC clearly offers more than The Teal Mask did. There’s no way that The Indigo Disk could be worse than The Teal Mask, right?

Well, the good news is that, yes, The Indigo Disk absolutely is the superior DLC pack compared to The Teal Mask. It also fumbles in ways that wound up making me feel the most frustrated I’ve ever been with the Pokémon franchise to date. It turns out even I have my limits.

Prepare for trouble, and make it double

Early in The Indigo Disk, you’ll learn that Blueberry Academy is full of hardcore trainers who prefer double battles. Seeing as how Pokémon's officially sanctioned competitive scene focuses on double battles, I enjoyed seeing the main game prioritize this format.

The Indigo Disk does a good job pitting you against common strategies in high-level play. For example, more than a few trainers will incorporate support Pokémon into their teams, using stat boosting moves or throwing in a Protect to block your incoming damage. Additionally, enemy trainers aren’t afraid to equip impactful held items on their Pokémon. Think you can just nuke every enemy you see with glass cannons like usual? Not if your opponent’s Focus Sash has anything to say about it.

Level the playing field

As our own Chris “Master Trainer” Carter mentioned in his review of The Teal Mask, Pokémon DLC has a leveling issue. And while The Indigo Disk fares better than its predecessor here, it suffers from the same problem. Wild Pokémon are level 60ish, boss battles are level 70ish, and the postgame breaks into level 80ish content.

Unfortunately, the dedicated Pokémon fanbase most interested in DLC most likely has a max level team already. And while battles against the Elite Four fare decently, that’s only a single digit number of battles that stand out. I can understand balancing the DLC in a way that’s accessible to people who didn’t do any postgame grinding. But ideally, the DLC should offer ways to please both crowds.

Throw out the BBQ

Despite the endless quest potential inherent to an open world Pokémon game, Blueberry Quests largely consist of aimlessly walking around, taking pictures of Pokémon, catching a Pokémon of a certain type, and making TMs and sandwiches. One might think these quests will escalate in complexity as you go, but… nope. It is seriously just a rotation of generic open-world busywork that starts repeating almost immediately. And once again, this system is where The Indigo Disk puts all its cards.

Oh yeah, Area Zero

And as far as that core story goes, it… exists. I’m not going to pretend like I expect literary excellence from a Pokémon game. That said, Scarlet & Violet tried this weird thing where it presented generally likable and endearing characters. Nemona, Penny, and especially Arven turned into a great party of friends, and seeing how the final story arc of the base game unfolded made me really want to see more of this world and cast.

So you can understand how disappointed I feel that both DLC packs have little to do with the core games.

Missed opportunities

Pokémon has such a rich foundation that could be taken in so many different directions. What's more, there's clearly a market hungry for that. Take one look at YouTube, and you’ll find challenge runs of classic Pokémon games with millions of views. Fans are eager for creative ways to play Pokémon. So why does the official DLC offer “take a picture of a swimming Pokémon?”

There are so many possibilities to explore with Pokémon, yet The Indigo Disk does precious little to get creative. Imagine if the two DLC packs were combined into one standalone adventure that was balanced around training and leveling the new Pokémon? Or what if the DLC centered around a roguelike experience where you never knew which Pokémon you’d use each run? I’m not saying those are good ideas, but they are ideas. I’d rather see a swing and a miss than the busywork we have now.

It's more Pokemon

I’d understand if, by this point, you think I completely hate The Indigo Disk. But despite all these misgivings, I did have some fun with this DLC. Exploring the new Terarium and catching Pokémon put a smile on my face, and those battles where everything really clicked were fun to play. I do still think Scarlet & Violet are enjoyable, and neither DLC pack necessarily changes that. Heck, if I was feeling generous, I’d say the focus on double battles here is a step in the right direction.

However, at this point, I’m so tired of seeing Pokémon “take a step in the right direction”. As a reminder, this is the highest grossing multimedia franchise in the entire world. Yet this is at least the second generation in a row that’s left me hoping the team will get it right next time. As it is, Pokémon Legends Arceus was a huge “step in the right direction,” but Scarlet & Violet learned precious little from it. DLC like The Indigo Disk could have rounded out the base games in areas they originally lacked in. Instead, it’s just more. An influx of sheer content, as if we’ll forget Pokémon even exists if we don’t have something shoved in front of our faces every year.

In the past, all this stuff might have bothered me less. But Pokémon's longevity has made it one of the main ways I can connect with my younger family members. Seeing even them wonder why Scarlet & Violet perform like they’re hanging by a thread on the Switch over a year later is inexcusable to me. And with how much The Indigo Disk tees up a Generation V remake, I’m honestly dreading how hard Unova will get butchered at this rate. I’d love to be proven wrong, but at this point, I’m not really counting on it

The Indigo Disk is more Pokémon Scarlet & Violet, for better or for worse. If you’re still deep into Generation IX, you’ll at least get mileage out of exploring the new areas and seeing the new Pokémon and TMs. But beyond that, The Indigo Disk neither offers a compelling challenge for longtime fans nor a chill grind for more casual fans. Players can at least take solace in that this second half of the DLC is generally better than the first. But for those frustrated by the rushed yearly cycle of Pokémon games, The Indigo Disk will only reaffirm your misgivings.

The post Review: Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: The Indigo Disk appeared first on Destructoid.

Mark my words; we’re about to be buried under a deluge of clones of Vampire Survivors. Right now, it’s already a drizzle, but it reached indie game escape velocity, and that means everyone will be trying to burn the same fuel.

Just look at Among Us. Certainly, it wasn’t the first social deduction game, but in the wake of its success, there was an explosion of them. Some of them are just blatant carbon copies.

Now, these two runaway successes are colliding in Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting. It is entirely just Vampire Survivors wearing some Among Us-skin boots.

I keep thinking that I have no experience with Among Us, but that’s not true. My nephew loves the game, so I’ve played it multiple times with my family. A game all about gaslighting each other is the perfect game to play with relatives. It also let me find out who my mother trusts more, between myself and my sister. Something to think about as I get flung out of the airlock again.

It’s more that I don’t have a connection with Among Us. As a reclusive misanthrope, I don’t play much multiplayer if I can help it. Then, when the merchandise started filling up department stores, my snobbery kicked in.

I do love Vampire Survivors, though. It’s a great source of dopamine and good music. Getting the DLC is sort of a foregone conclusion. It’s $2.49, which is less than I spent on breakfast.

For less than the price of breakfast, you get 9 new characters, 15 new weapons (I think it’s actually 16, but they might not be including mini-horse), 6 new tracks, a big new stage, and one of those fancy new adventures. It’s not a lot, but the price is easily worth it just for that music.

As I mentioned earlier, what Among Us brings to the equation is largely cosmetic. You won’t be rooting out the Impostor. You will still just be walking around while your assembled arsenal automatically obliterates everything that comes near. There are lots of references to the game, sometimes reaching way too deep, but this is still Vampire Survivors.

The references sometimes get a bit contrived here. One of the weapons, Lucky Swipe, is just a keycard moving back and forth. What’s worse is that it makes a really annoying sound, and it’s not the only new weapon that does so. It got so bad sometimes that I turned down the sound and raised the volume on the music so it would stop grating on my nerves.

Speaking of which, the new music is just fantastic. Easily some of the best in the entire game. I could listen to it on loop, which, considering a typical round of Vampire Survivors is 30 minutes, I usually am listening to it on loop. Perhaps a better compliment is that I will most likely be choosing it back in the main game.

The main issue I found with Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting is that the weapons seem extremely overpowered. Throughout the Adventure Mode, I never fell short when it came to hitting the 30-minute mark. Even then, I’d usually be so buffed up that the Reaper that is supposed to end the round was unable to touch me. I would get up and walk away from the game, leaving my Crewmate standing idle, and it would take a good five-or-so minutes until the Reaper had enough friends to overpower me.

This is maybe less of a problem when you just play the main game with Emergency Meeting gear. It gets diluted within the multitude of weapons that are available to you. However, it still means that the Adventure Mode is complete cake. Adventure Mode is a new feature to the overall structure of Vampire Survivors to begin with, and neither of the previous DLCs even featured their own adventures, so the value of it, to begin with, will vary depending on what you expect from the game.

On top of that, it sometimes feels that Vampire Survivors is a game about becoming as overpowered as possible. So, complaining that an addition makes you more overpowered might be missing the point.

I considered making this a scored review, but figured the wasn’t much point. At its core, Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting is a simple content pack based around another property. It’s not like Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania, where the marriage of design concepts creates a unique offshoot. This is Vampire Survivors in a t-shirt.

On the other hand, it’s not an insubstantial t-shirt. For the price of one wash cycle in your apartment’s laundromat, you get some great additional music tracks. The references are fun for people who have played Among Us, even if they lead to your speakers emitting sounds that are as pleasing to the ear as a sandpaper Q-tip. It’s a bit of a mixed bag overall, but if you’re a fan of either game, it’s maybe not worth ejecting into space.

The post Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting is better value than a breakfast sandwich appeared first on Destructoid.

The Sonic franchise has taken many forms, from 2D to 3D, and even a point-and-click game. This time around, we're dealing with Sonic Dream Team which is a platformer available on various Apple devices through its Arcade.

As a fan of the series, Dream Team's concept piqued my curiosity. To my surprise, I'm subscribed to Apple Arcade, allowing me to download the game without forking out any cash. What I discovered is a sterling Sonic platformer that'll unfortunately fly under the radar for most, despite providing the kind of gameplay fans are always desperate for.

Sonic Dream Team (Mac [reviewed], iOS, iPad, AppleTV)
Developer: Hardlight
Publisher: Sega
Released: December 5, 2023
MSRP: Free for Apple Arcade subscribers

A dream I don't want to wake up from

Sonic Dream Team's plot is what you'd typically expect from the franchise. Doctor Eggman's got some device or powerful object he wants to use for evil, and it's up to Sonic and his friends to stop it. This time around, Eggman's got the Reverie, a device that can make dreams come true. The story is mostly told through comic-book-style panels that are gorgeous and feature voice acting, which is something I appreciated.

All the Sonic heroes that have become staples of the franchise are present (unfortunately, including the annoying Knuckles), and you can play as them. As the game's title suggests, you're thrust into a world that feels fantastical and sometimes downright psychedelic. There is variation in the kinds of environments you encounter, and they each come with their unique style of beauty without deviating from the overarching theme.

The environments were pleasing to look at, and I enjoyed exploring the settings of the different stages. My favorite was Nightmare Maze, which contains waterways you can use to access some of the hidden areas of each level.

Dream Team is not a game that attempts to push graphical boundaries, but at the same time, it doesn't attempt to mimic the pixel art of the early games either. Instead, we have slightly blocky visuals that look a tad better than what you get from your average lower-budget game.

There's no need to discuss graphics all too much because that's not what draws fans to the franchise. Far more than graphical quality, a good soundtrack is what characterizes a Sonic game. Sonic Dream Team doesn't fail on this front, and while there's nothing there that comes close to classics like the Star Hill Zone, the tracks don't disappoint.

The Sonic experience

In Sonic games influenced by the classic titles, there is a certain element of gameplay that'll determine whether you love them obsessively or loathe them intensely. The games encourage you to go fast, and that's where most of the fun comes from. However, doing so will inevitably have you crossing obstacles that you simply cannot predict.

Because of this, slowing down to get the hang of the platformer is one of the ways to conquer every level. This isn't the most fun way to do things, and I'd argue that it's not in the spirit of the game. Instead, you're supposed to lose, learn where the obstacle is, and then tackle it without getting tripped up the next time around.

This style of gameplay will have you dying dozens of times, but that's part of how you learn levels until you can complete them as fast as possible. In fact, you're frequently asked to do precisely this, with some levels challenging you to complete them within a set amount of time.

If you're a fan of this style of gameplay, Sonic Dream Team will satisfy you, and I had great fun learning the tricks necessary to cut down my completion time. The difficulty level in terms of the environmental design is moderately high - not impossible, but not something you're going to breeze through either. In the later levels, I got my butt kicked more times than I'd like to admit.

Sonic Dream Team gets the gameplay right

Sonic Dream Team features a few game modes. Most of them follow the regular style of gameplay you'd expect from the franchise - go fast in a relatively linear fashion while collecting rings and defeating enemies. Others require you to beat the clock and some force you to slow down to explore the different environments to find all Dream Orbs.

Each of the game modes are enjoyable, and thanks to good level design, I don't mind trying different objectives in the same locations. The ability to play as different characters isn't an arbitrary addition, as they have varying abilities, allowing you to get to previously unreachable places.

The levels are a good length, about as long as those in classics like Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Completing the game will take you about six hours, though that number can change drastically depending on your skills and whether you're slowing down to explore.

For the most part, Dream Team runs smoothly, though it isn't void of technical issues. Annoyingly, it froze a couple of times and even made my Macbook crash more than once. Granted, my M1 isn't exactly the latest machine on the market, but it shouldn't be having problems with a mobile game like Sonic Dream Team.

Weird and wonderful

The Sonic franchise has been around for decades, and through the good, bad, and terrible, it's managed to maintain an avid fanbase. At this point, it's hard to separate how much of this love is nostalgia and how much is a genuine appreciation for a franchise that debuted as an original, exciting platformer.

With the game released on Apple's devices, it's probably going to be missed by many who would have had a blast with it. It has a weird story with surreal settings and gameplay that's too good to be stuck where it currently is.

Sonic Dream Team deserves appreciation. In short, it's not the worst, but it's certainly not the best either, with just enough here to satisfy classic Sonic fans and those seeking to experience the hedgehog's adventure in 3D.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game purchased by the reviewer.]}

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I am very happy that the River City/Kunio-Kun/Nekketsu/Downtown series has continued to this day. River City Ransom was a formative game for my modern tastes. River City Girls, as a game, I don’t love as much. Its art style and soundtrack, on the other hand, I dig with both hands.

To be honest, I was practically married to the NES/Famicom art style of the series. Whenever it moved away from those rectangular meaty-armed brutes, I always felt like something was lost. However, in recent years, we’ve seen that art style preserved. Some of those games that lean on the old 8-bit art style have even felt a little hollow behind the aesthetic, which is probably why I connected so well with River City Girls.

Misako and Kyoko have evolved from obscure side characters to headliners in their own right, and I love them for it. WayForward took the license, injected their own passion and vision, and cut out their own slice of it.

The Art of River City Girls is an incredibly well put together demonstration of that.

The Art of River City Girls collects artwork from River City Girls 1 and 2, as well as River City Girls Zero, which was WayForward’s localization of Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka. It’s a pretty all-encompassing look at the art, with concept art, sprite sheets, illustrations, and even versions of the manga-style cutscenes.

All of this is packaged in a cover that resembles a classic yearbook. On top of that is a plastic slipcase that is a bit more product-y. I guess while we’re on the subject of actual product features, it’s over 300 pages (325 by my count).

It kicks off with a foreword by Adam Tierney. It’s the sort of introduction that starts with “It’s hard to believe,” but after that, it gets right into some behind-the-scenes facts as it briefly recounts the initial pitch to Arc Systems Works, states that working on the River City/Kunio-Kun/Nekketsu/Downtown series was a dream project for WayForward and shows off the very first concept artwork depicting Kyoko and Misako (which still gets used in promotions).

The introduction encapsulates what I appreciate in this art book. There’s art, background tidbits, and a vivid taste of the team’s enthusiasm for the property.

There’s another thing I like about The Art of River City Girls: abs. There are more six-packs than a liquor store in this tome, and I am absolutely on board. Of course, there’s Marian’s abs, the former damsel from Double Dragon and playable protagonist in River City Girls 2. There’s Kunio’s rival Riki who is too cool to wear his jacket and instead prefers to keep his midsection warm with worryingly tight sports tape. Really, though, I don’t think we get to see enough of Kozuki and her amazing washboard. Damn, girl. Mmm!

Most of the behind-the-scene information is done in brief blurbs alongside the artwork. They’re pretty interesting, providing context and background to many of the characters. This includes Sonny Lee being the third Double Dragon character (the Triple Dragon?) or Crash being based on the box art of Crash ‘N’ the Boys: Street Challenge (Bikkuri Nekketsu Shinkiroku! Haruka naru Kin-Medal).

Another great thing to see is the promotional artwork that introduces us to Pirate Kyoko, Vampire Misako, and Santa Abobo. These are pieces that I’m not even sure where they were originally posted or what they were used for, so it’s neat to have them preserved in this book.

When WayForward came to the River City/Kunio-Kun/Nekketsu/Downtown they brought a lot of their own style, and that’s reflected in The Art of River City Girls. While the overwhelming majority of the book focuses entirely on WayForward’s work, it helps give context to its place within the overall property.

Judging from playing the games, it was the art team that had the most fun making them. The style is incredibly unique while still paying tribute to the games that it sprang from. Characters were pulled from all over the Kunio-verse in a loving depiction of the games. The Art of River City Girls feels like having them in your living room, excitedly pointing out everything you may have missed.

The Art of River City Girls is available at Fangamer.

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Before they offered to send me a unit for review, I had the Analogue Duo preordered. It would have been the first of the company’s consoles that I ponied up for. That’s because, beyond just being a very nice boutique console, it solves a few problems for me.

The Turbografx-16 is a nightmare to collect for. Sketchy capacitors mean that a lot of them just die on the shelf, and the typical price of a Turbografx game is ridiculous. Pricecharting has the average price of a game for the console at over $100. Forget the best games the console has to offer; if you want anything aside from sports titles, you’re paying out the nose. And that’s not even taking into account Turbografx-CD games.

Because of this, the Analogue Duo is a pretty strange console to produce. Someone who is curious about collecting for the console is probably going to get discouraged quickly. This is almost a “who is this even for?” situation, but there’s an answer to that we’ll get to. It’s extremely niche. The niche-est console Analogue has taken on.

“It isn't really financially viable in terms of development investment,” Analogue CEO and founder Chris Taber told me. Analogue didn't make the Duo to bring in a pile of money, they did it because they love the platform, and you can easily tell.

I have a modest stack of Turbografx-16 games already in my collection, but that isn’t the reason I wanted an Analogue Duo. I want to start collecting for the PC-Engine, which is the Japanese equivalent to the TG16. While the Turbografx was a tremendous flop here in North America, the PC-Engine was a huge success. NEC was able to compete with Nintendo, initially outselling the Famicom before holding a firm second place in the market next to the Super Famicom.

As such, a lot more games were published in Japan, and the market, as a whole, is a lot cheaper. It’s still kind of pricy if you want the case they came in, but it’s not as galling as the North American prices.

But the TurboGrafx-16 and the PC-Engine are both region-locked. I spent a lot of time considering how I was going to start collecting. Was I going to buy a core PC-Engine console and build from there? Was I going to spring for the PC-Engine Duo that comes with a built-in disc drive (and is also where the Analogue Duo takes its aesthetic)? I couldn’t decide on an elegant solution that would cover all my needs.

Then, the Analogue Duo came along and provided that. It can play all the games that the TG16, the PC-Engine, and their attachments can. Plus, if I was planning on springing for the PC-Engine Duo, I would already be putting myself in the price range of Analogue’s offering. More than just a convenient upgrade, the Analogue Duo is exactly what I was looking for.

Out of the box, the Analogue Duo is a slick piece of kit. It’s slightly less wide than a TurboGrafx-16, but it has a lot less height. It’s flat enough that if I turn around and look at the shelf it’s on, I can barely see it. There’s also much less junk in the trunk compared to a TG16 with a Turbo-Booster. It feels sturdy, it looks modern, and I don’t want to touch it too much and ruin its pristine look. Speaking of which, it comes in TurboGrafx black and PC-Engine white. I went with the black because I hate white electronics. They just don’t age as well.

If there’s one downside to the design, it’s that the controller port is on the side of the unit rather than the front. Also, it uses the PC-Engine miniDIN port, so if you have TurboGrafx controllers, you’re going to need an adapter to plug them in. That’s kind of a bummer because those adapters aren’t particularly easy to find.

It’s also worth noting that the TurboGrafx-16 supported 5 players. It only had one controller port, but using a TurboTap, you could plug five controllers in. You can still do this with the Analogue Duo, but there’s a caveat: it only supports 4 wireless controllers. If you want a fifth player for something like Bomberman '93, you need to plug a controller in alongside the 4 wireless ones or plug in a TurboTap and connect all five controllers the old-fashioned way. You can’t have, say, two wireless controllers and three original through a TurboTap. You either have one classic controller or five. There is no in-between.

Analogue shipped two 8BitDo 2.4G PCE controllers alongside my unit. These controllers are (very) slightly smaller and sleeker than the stock TG16 controllers while maintaining the same form factor. The biggest difference is an easily missed home button and turbo buttons rather than switches. The downside to that is there is no way to control the speed of the turbo unless there's a setting that can be tweaked with 8BitDo's software. Unfortunately, the TG16 controller isn’t very ergonomic. The d-pad is small and crammed in the bottom-left of the controller, too close to the edge. My thumbs would always cramp up during long sessions.

Thankfully, you can sync quite a range of Bluetooth and 2.4G controllers, as well as some USB. I have built quite a collection of 8BitDo controllers, and everything from my M30 to my Arcade Stick works great. I also tried a RetroBit Sega Saturn Pro controller, which connected without complaint. The documentation also lists common controllers like the Switch (and Wii U) Pro and DualSense. You might lose some of the authentic feel, but your thumbs will thank you.

Booting into the console gets you a quick walkthrough of the features of Analogue OS. I read the instructions, then promptly forgot them. I only know that Select+Down takes you to the home menu because I keep mistakenly hitting it, leaving me wanting to disable the button combo. Which I couldn't find a way to do so in the OS settings.

The Analogue OS is a pretty neat slice of cheese on the retro console. It keeps track of games you’ve played and for how long. You’re also able to change settings to alter the visuals to suit whatever version of the console you want. There are filters that emulate the Sony Trinitron (a CRT screen), as well as the Turbo Express and PC-Engine LT handhelds. Analogue says these aren’t “Filters” since they’re created on a hardware level through the FPGA, but I really don’t know what else to call them. They also say FPGA isn’t emulation, but really what they mean is it’s not software emulation. I understand why they want to make the distinction clear, because it really isn’t the same thing, but it’s hardware emulation, which is still emulation.

The “filters” are convincing. Anyone who feels that old games only look right on CRT screens will probably appreciate them. Whether I personally prefer sharp pixels or soft glow varies with my mood. I find that the Trinitron mode sucks a lot of the color out of the screen. Other people working with FPGA for this sort of thing have been using HDR to boost the color, but that’s not an option right now. Perhaps it can be patched in with firmware updates, but if not, it's not a huge problem.

Speaking of firmware, the Analogue Duo touts the feature of allowing save states, but it’s not implemented yet. Chris Taber says that the reason is because CD games are proving to be a challenge, but it’s supposed to be added through a firmware update sometime after launch. Likewise, sleep mode is not yet implemented, which I imagine is due to the same complication.

If you don’t want to deal with the OS, there is the option to just boot directly to the HU Card or CD when it’s detected. I think it’s pretty neat, though, even if there’s room for improvement.

In terms of running games, however, it’s flawless. The image that you get is bright and sharp at 1080p, and the screenshots here don't really do it justice whatsoever. Compatibility is also perfect, as far as I know. I have eight TG16 games, so I can only test to that extent. Upon getting offered a review unit, I ordered some PC-Engine and CD-ROM² games in hopes that they’d arrive in time for this review, but alas, they didn’t make it.

However…

The CD-ROM² and TurboGrafx-CD weren’t exactly picky about what kind of disc you put in them. It was a problem with early disc consoles and one of the reasons Nintendo stuck to cartridges for the N64. So, I put together a Little CD-R and, bam, we’ve got Super Air Zonk. The OS even recognized the game. I then tried Tengai Makyou: Ziria with the fan translation patched into it, and while the Analogue Duo just referred to it as “CD,” it ran just fine.

While we’re on the subject, Analogue states that the Duo will run anything the original hardware would, and this includes Everdrives. I feel like buying a console for this is most valuable for people who like collecting the physical software, but I’m not going to judge if you stick an Everdrive in there. It would at least help with running fan translations.

The Analogue Duo is my first console by the company, and I am impressed. It effortlessly does everything it says on the tin with potential to do more in the future. Save states have yet to be implemented, but the store page doesn’t list them as a feature, so I’m not certain if they were ever even announced.

You probably need to be a very specific type of person to really find value in an Analogue Duo. It’s a weird crossover of a retro-loving, TurboGrafx-appreciating, import-willing gamer. It’s such an incredible niche thing, that it’s amazing that Analogue went to such efforts to reproduce the console in such luxurious depth. I’m deeply impressed. I’m also thankful, because it’s exactly the console I was looking for.

There’s only room for improvement because Analogue allowed it to be there. I’d still be recommending the Analogue Duo to my fellow niche-goblins even if there weren’t still forthcoming firmware improvements. It’s a slick modern version of the TurboGrafx 16/PC-Engine that brings the retro platform into the present with a 1080p HDMI output and other modern comforts. You can tell the team was passionate about the project because they were clearly insistent on getting it right on the first try.

The post Review: Analogue Duo appeared first on Destructoid.

The city builder genre was quite unique when 1989’s SimCity hit the scene. It was a game with no end, something rarely (but not never) seen in those days. But there are only so many times you can maximize the density of your residential zones before it loses its grip.

2014’s Banished altered this by incorporating a survival aspect and increasing the possibility of failure. It’s been adopted by many builders since, and Against the Storm is another. And in it, we see the genre mutate further. There actually is a great deal of progression in Against the Storm that further diverges from SimCity’s “build forever” philosophy. By incorporating some aspects of the roguelite genre, it’s able to give greater meaning to your civil development strategy.

And it’s very successful, so long as you are okay with repeating the same steps a lot.

Against the Storm (PC)
Developer: Eremite Games
Publisher: Hooded Horse
Released: December 8, 2023
MSRP: $29.99

Against the Storm is set in a world ravaged by a deadly weather pattern known as the Blight Storm. Every few years, the eponymous storm wipes all the world clean of civilization. The last survivors are only saved by retreating to the Smoldering City, where they are protected by the powerful Scorched Queen.

You are a Viceroy of the Queen, and are sent out into the wilds to establish colonies to gather resources. This means plopping settlers down in the middle of dense forests and carving out a town with a productive industry and a happy population.

The Scorched Queen is as demanding as she is powerful. Your goal for each settlement is to build your reputation to a certain point before her patience runs out. You can keep the impatience meter under control by making steady and constant progress while also making sure her subjects are happy. Once you cap out your reputation meter (or max out her impatience), you win, and it’s onto the next settlement.

Also, the forest hates you, and you have to suppress its rage as much as possible. Against the Storm is a very layered game. I’m not going to be able to cover every facet of the game in this review.

You only get so much time to create your settlements before the Blightstorm pushes everything back to the Smoldering City, and the cycle begins again. I’m not sure if I’m slow or quick when it comes to playing Against the Storm, but I usually only get about three or four settlements before everything starts over.

As you succeed with your various towns, you get meta resources that you can use to upgrade your civil abilities. These upgrades range from starting with specific buildings or simply bonuses to trading and production. However, increasing your skills isn’t the primary objective of the game.

What keeps Against the Storm from growing stale really quickly is the fact that each settlement provides different challenges. You always start with three of the five available species of settler, and each one has different needs to keep them happy. Every time you start a map, the available resources are randomized. Even if you had a very successful settlement that thrived because of a sustainable supply line for creating pies, doesn’t mean that strategy will be viable in the next settlement. One of the ingredients might not even be found on the map, which means that pie just isn’t on the menu.

You may have to lean heavily on visiting traders who you can barter with for other supplies. If you’re short on fabric, for example, but are overproducing insects, you can trade the latter for the former. If you’re having trouble keeping your villagers happy, you can just buy a bunch of pies from the trader if they have them in stock. It’s a short-term solution, but sometimes you just need it to get you through until you can establish better infrastructure.

Likewise, the buildings you have access to are limited. You start out with the basics, then can unlock more out of a random assortment as you raise your reputation. Once again, this is an effective way of forcing you to adopt strategies based on what’s available rather than what is most effective.

While randomized elements might not be for everyone, they not only support the repetition of the town-building segment but also put more emphasis on survival. You have to adapt to the varied elements of each map. You need to learn not just the massive array of nuanced mechanics but also how to read the game and think on your feet. 

Even the best survival city builders have trouble with this. There’s usually a threshold past which the survival element is diminished. You know how to keep your colony alive against any threat. But in Against the Storm, that threat is always changing. Each new grove that you cut into could reveal something you’re unprepared to face and leave you scrambling. The random nature of this never felt unfair to me, as there was always enough time to react appropriately and divert resources to solving the issue.

The final goal of Against the Storm is to connect a route of settlements to “Seals” out in the world and close it. That extends the next cycle by a number of years, which helps you reach the next Seal. There are eight Seals in all, and I’m assuming that closing the Adamantine Seal wins the overall game, but I’m not sure. I’m 40 hours in (some of which was during Early Access), and I’ve only managed to close the first.

It’s probably best to tackle Against the Storm in short bursts. I’ve been playing the Early Access version for months off and on, and it never really wore thin. Going back to it, I always could remember the basics, but some of the more complex stuff I had to relearn. Finishing one settlement, then waiting until the next day to start another, seems like the best way to play without the repetition becoming abrasive. Plus, as you advance through the prestige levels, you’ll gradually earn more and more new mechanics to learn. It’s a lot to digest.

It’s also wrapped up in a lovely whimsical package. I always love a good nature-focused fantasy, and its music is just so calming and endearing. It manages to be cute while also maintaining an appropriate gloominess.

I’m impressed by how well Against the Storm came together. There are so many facets and mechanics to it that I feel they must be hard to juggle when designing a game like this. However, they all interplay perfectly. Each one is introduced gradually and thoughtfully to ensure that you don’t get overwhelmed by all these gauges and menus. The randomized elements are probably going to bother anyone who is allergic to RNG, but the way they’re incorporated never felt frustrating or unfair to me.

Against the Storm is easily my favorite city builder to reach its full release this year. It manages to escape from the sometimes dull lack of progression felt in some other builders, while also providing a lot of depth to sink your teeth into. Because of that, it lives for far longer than most games in the genre can claim. Eremite Games has really built something special here. A very nearly perfect storm.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Against the Storm appeared first on Destructoid.

Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion was a pretty weird game when it came out in 2000, and it’s an equally strange pick for a remaster. But it had to be done. Nightdive knew this. They knew that the N64 trilogy (if you exclude the multiplayer-focused Turok: Rage Wars) had to be completed.

It couldn’t have been an easy task. While Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil had PC versions they could pluck from, Turok 3 remained exclusive to the N64. Thankfully, Nightdive’s wizardry has only become more potent over the years, and because of their work porting other N64 games like Doom 64 and Quake 2 (64) to their proprietary KEX Engine, they were able to reverse engineer Turok 3 to save it from the suffocating tomb of the console that birthed it.

Still, it’s a damned weird game.

Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion (PC [Review], Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Nightdive Studios, Iguana Entertainment
Publisher: Nightdive Studios
Released: November 30, 2023
MSRP: $29.99

Part of what makes Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion so strange is that it’s unfortunately very normal. The first two Turok games were practically their own flavor of first-person shooters. The genre was still in its toddler stage, so the rules weren’t quite yet written. The levels were sprawling and confusing, and while it had a similar formula to the spawns of Wolfenstein 3D, they were anarchic mish-mashes. The punks of the burgeoning FPS genre.

It helped that the people behind Iguana Entertainment were rather adept with the N64’s notoriously difficult hardware. Each of their games has interesting technical flourishes, with Turok 2: Seeds of Evil sometimes being referred to as the best-looking game on the console (at the price of draw distance and framerate). Though they had been transitioned to the more dull corporate moniker of Acclaim Studios Austin, that technical trickery is still present in Turok 3.

However, that punk approach to the FPS formula was completely lost. In 1998, Half-Life rewrote the FPS playbooks, and developers were abandoning Wolfenstein 3D’s key-hunt approach. In its place were much more linear experiences that allowed easier storytelling. Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion wants to be Half-Life so hard you can see the vein bulging from its forehead.

The game kicks off with a rather elaborate cutscene showing the previous Turok, Joshua Fireseed, being killed and passing the mantle on to his siblings, Danielle and Joseph. They’re tasked with defeating Oblivion, which is maybe some malevolent force of evil, but it might also be some sort of alien army. The story stops making sense really quickly. Maybe you need to read the comic books.

While previous Turok games were set exclusively in the Lost Lands, a place where time has no meaning, Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion starts off on Earth. I think. Also, it’s the future, maybe.

You get the choice to play as either Danielle or Joseph, and while the bulk of the game remains the same regardless of the choice you make, their paths diverge in some places to focus on different gameplay. Danielle has a grappling hook, while Joseph is 15 and still hasn’t hit puberty, so he can fit through small paces. Their weapons also vary in some places. It’s not much, but it does make further playthroughs more worthwhile.

But while the first two Turok titles were fast-paced affairs where you blew away hordes of enemies, Turok 3 slows things down so it can tell you a hilariously awful story. The first whiff of Half-Life you get is running into a guy who shows you the way down a completely linear corridor, climbs up a ladder, and gets eaten. The next level is set in some sort of military research facility where the still living scientists opine that all their research is ruined and their colleagues are dead. The second stage is Black Mesa, is what I’m saying. Even the soldier dudes move in similar ways to the Marines in Half-Life.

But it’s the shooting that suffers the most. Rather than constantly swimming upstream against hordes of foes and running at about 50mph, they’re much more sparsely scattered about. They die very easily, perhaps to make up for the inaccuracy of the N64 controller, so you wind up spending a lot of time exploring empty environments. Also, neither Danielle nor Joseph can reach the speeds of Tal’Set’s amazing stride.

It at least stops being a direct attempt at copying Half-Life after the second level. There’s even a section pulled from Turok: Dinosaur Hunter that you walk through as if to say, “Look at how much more lifeless our levels have become after just three years!”

At least the weapons are still as varied and exotic as they’ve ever been. The celebrated cerebral bore is back, and in the later levels, you’re always tripping over ammo for it. It’s a fire-and-forget sort of weapon that launches a drone that drills into the heads of your foes before detonating. It’s injury and insult in one package, a very video game weapon.

I mean, really, I got by with the pistol, rifle, shotgun, rocket launcher, and cerebral bore combination, but that small selection of useful weapons is still more impressive than most. 

If there’s one place Turok 3 improved it’s with storytelling. The characters are lip-synced and have legible facial expressions, which was impressive to see on the N64. However, their faces also sometimes contort in disturbing ways, which hasn’t been helped by the polishing strokes that Nightdive made to their models.

But the story. Gosh, the story. I don’t even know where to begin with it. The bizarre revelation and cliffhanger right at the end is especially going to live with me for a while.

Say what you will about Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion in its original state, Nightdive did right by it. They had to reverse-engineer it by pulling it from its cartridge and extracting everything from the compiled program. Then, they rebuilt it in the KEX Engine. While they were at it, everything got touched up. This went beyond simply improving the models without altering the visual style like they did with the Quake remasters. They also improved the resolution of all the textures.

I’m impressed. I asked Nightdive how they managed to improve the resolution of the textures, as they were no doubt heavily compressed for the N64. “No AI,” I was told. “Artists.” The team found the original source for the textures wherever they could. However, even then, they touched some up by hand and recreated ones that they couldn't find.

Turok 3 doesn’t exactly look new. Not at all. Not even slightly. But it looks less like a ported N64 game and more like a remastered PC game from the early 2000’s. You wouldn’t guess that Nightdive didn’t have access to the source files.

Well, except for the voices. Geez, you can still hear the N64 muffle all over them. Well, except for the opening porch scene.

Some cut content has also been restored, and Nightdive also added environmental props to try and make things seem less lifeless, but they really didn't jump out at me. Probably a good thing.

As much as I’ll always give Turok 3 flak for its eagerness to follow in Half-Life’s shoes, I find a lot of charm in its ineptitude. It was also the only game in the series that I completed in my youth without using cheats. That’s maybe because it’s less than five hours long and could be completed in a rental period, but still, I’ve never hated it.

It’s just amusing to see such a loving remaster of a game that is mediocre in the most charitable of terms. With the attention Nightdive has given it, you would swear it was a classic. And I love that. I wish more publishers and developers had the guts to dredge up the forgotten dregs of the past and not just repackage them but restore them for a new audience. I was prepared for Nightdive to take a pass at remastering Turok 3 because it would be financially unviable. It wasn't the smart thing to do. It was the right thing to do. So, they forged onward and made it happen with their signature flourishes. Respect from top to bottom. Certainly makes it difficult to slap a score on it, though.

Now, what about Turok: Rage Wars?

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion (2023) appeared first on Destructoid.

I’m not terribly familiar with the Steamworld games, including SteamWorld Dig and SteamWorld Heist. I tried a bit of Dig, and it didn’t click with me. However, I am very familiar with city builders, so the latest game, SteamWorld Build, still got me excited.

This entry is done by a different developer The Station, whose previous work was also called The Station. So, SteamWorld Build is a bit of a departure for both the developer and for the series as a whole. 

SteamWorld Build (PC [Review], Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: The Station
Publisher: Thunderful Publishing
Released: December 1, 2023
MSRP: $29.99

The world is ending, so some of the surviving robots are following the instruction of a disembodied robot eye and digging into the ground to try and find rocket parts so they can leave. Rather than do it themselves, however, they’re building a settlement directly over the abandoned mine so they can attract other robots that they can send to their deaths in the cold, unfeeling earth.

SteamWorld Build feels closest to the survival city-builder genre to me, but only in terms of controls and the management of resources. There really is no survival here. There’s no real fail state, and even if you suck really badly at things, you will probably always be making progress. Really, SteamWorld Build has its own flavor, which works both in its favor and against it.

Beneath that, there’s also a mining and exploration game where you direct your robots to dig through blocks of earth to try and find resources and other objectives. Dungeon Keeper kept coming to mind as I played it, and there’s maybe a splash of that in here in the sense that you hollow out areas and can build rooms. Some of the blocks you order your robots to destroy also contain ore, so there are at least aesthetic similarities if little else.

Really, the goal here is to build up your town, so you can get better mining gear, so you can dig deeper and get more resources for your town, so you can get even better mining gear and get to the bottom. It’s an effective way to entangle the two modes of play. You’re constantly switching between the town and your mine, which is helped by a control scheme that makes it easy to get around. It feels nice.

The main flow of town building has you first plop down worker houses and have them extract resources to make products that will attract more workers. After all their needs are met, you can upgrade them to the next class of citizens and repeat the process with more and more complicated production lines. You’re constantly building and reinforcing supply lines so you can fit more and more robots into your society and meet milestones to unlock the next level of gear and production.

Meanwhile, underground, you’ll be putting your new gear to use. You need to ensure the mine is stable, that you have enough workers, and you must create infrastructure for resource extraction. Eventually, you’ll run into monsters and other hazards underground and need to deal with them, but I’m fairly certain your robots can’t permanently die. They can get eaten or destroyed in battle, but I think they either get fixed by mechanics or replaced. As I said earlier, it’s a hard game to fail at. You can certainly play it worse, but I don’t think it’s possible to be so bad at it that you get stuck. Prove me wrong, I guess.

Alongside this is a storyline that plays out in cutscenes. It’s… fine. I didn’t find it annoying, but I didn’t find it compelling either. On my second playthrough of the game, however, I was happy to be able to turn it off entirely. That’s a great option to have.

This is going to sound strange and ironic, but the major issue with SteamWorld Build is that it’s too mechanical and robotic. Progress is entirely linear, which is extremely strange for a city builder. With how difficult it is to fail, if a fail state exists at all, there’s very little dynamism to the whole experience.

What this means is that one playthrough plays pretty much the same as another. It’s a city builder that absolutely needs to have a narrative overlaying everything because you aren’t making one of your own. The robots under your care might as well not exist. They don’t have lives or schedules. They’re merely tools; a number that lets you know how close you are to reaching the next milestone.

After your first playthrough, any subsequent approach to the game might as well be a speedrun. You have the skills in place, you’ve solved all the problems, and you’ve seen the story. There is no other playstyle to experiment with, and you’re just doing everything again, but maybe more efficiently.

As someone who loves city-builders and management games as a whole, SteamWorld Build feels alienating. It’s a city-builder for people who don’t like city-builders.

While that’s a big problem for a genre entry, it’s not as damning as it might be. SteamWorld Build is an incredibly polished game. And while the lack of friction adds to the inhuman feel of the game, it is laudable. The graphics and music are so well executed that I honestly can’t imagine them being improved in any way. While the game itself feels so robotic, the aesthetic shows a lot of personality. It's like human flesh over a metal endoskeleton.

What I mean to say is that if an extremely rigid city-builder doesn’t sound like a problem to you, or even if it sounds appealing, then SteamWorld Build is worth trying. I can honestly say that I didn’t hate the time I spent with it, even on the second playthrough. It just feels empty when I think back on it. I don’t think it’s going to stick with me. But there are far worse problems for a game to have than being too robotic.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: SteamWorld Build appeared first on Destructoid.

Being born late into the ‘80s, the Atari 2600 was an intriguing mystery to me. By the time the N64 hit, the NES felt old to me, so the idea of a console even older than that was exciting. This was before you could jump onto YouTube to look up gameplay. I wanted to see it for myself.

It wasn’t until college, around the time that the retro gamer identity really became a thing, that I finally found myself a 2600 Jr. Since then, I keep tripping into 2600 games. I own around 60, which isn’t as impressive as some of my other libraries, but considering I never actively tried to find Atari 2600 games, it says something.

A major issue with this, however, is that every model of the 2600 uses an RF output, and modern TVs hate it. Even late-model CRTs will sometimes refuse to display an Atari 2600, and those that do often do so behind a sheet of noise. I eventually modified my four-switch 2600 to composite video to finally get it to play nice with my modern setup. However, that’s not an option for a lot of people.

For people who want the 2600 experience without all the fuss, Atari themselves (and Plaion) have created the Atari 2600+.

Bringing back woodgrain electronics

The Atari 2600+ is based on the four-switch model of the 2600. Clone versions of the console are hardly a rarity, since the Atari Flashback has been around for nearly two decades. This one is unique, however, as it accepts Atari 2600 and 7800 cartridges. But rather than just be a reproduction, it outputs through HDMI and supports widescreen. It’s also a bit smaller.

If you’re a retro enthusiast, your first question is going to be what kind of emulation it uses. A lot of modern retro consoles have switched to using field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware emulation rather than software emulation because it’s more accurate. The Atari 2600+, unfortunately, uses software emulation through Stella for 2600 games and ProSystem for 7800. Stella has been around since 1996, so it’s damned good software emulation, but it’s software emulation nonetheless.

The major problem here is that compatibility isn’t perfect. There are games that won’t work on the Atari 2600+, but they are rare. Atari has a list of games, and there are only three fails as of writing, but there are quite a few that are untested, and a few that I noticed aren’t even listed at all. For example, one of my favorite Atari 2600 games, 1986’s Solaris, isn’t listed. However, I can confirm that it’s a pass.

Another downside is that the system needs to load at startup. Whereas the Atari 2600 gets an image on display the moment you flip the switch, the Atari 2600+ displays a splash screen, then states that it’s loading, and then you get the image. I don’t find this to be that much of a nuisance, especially since you can hotswap games to avoid the initial splash, but I do feel it’s worth noting.

If looks could kill

Aesthetically, it’s pretty spot on. From the wood panel front to the cold, dull click of the switches, it’s a good reproduction. The big new additions are a switch on the back that changes it from 16:9 to 4:3, and the logo on the front lights up. Otherwise, it’s basically just a smaller four-switch 2600.

The controller is also pretty exact. The CX40 joystick is one of the most iconic controller designs in video game history, but it also sucks. However, this is a good reproduction, as it features the rubberized stick (some aftermarkets just have a plastic stick), so long play may give you blisters. I didn’t pop it open to see if it uses the dome contacts of the original or if they changed it to carbon dot contacts. The screws are under the pads on the bottom of the controller, and I just don’t want to pry them off a perfectly good CX40.

Of course, the CX40 is an uncomfortable controller with a single button that can’t even be reversed for left-handed people. I had the idea of plugging in a Sega Genesis controller, since both the CX40 and Genesis controller use DB9 ports. I’d swear this worked on my original 2600, but maybe I’m mistaken, because it doesn’t work with the 2600+. I tried a 3DO controller as well. Nothing.

Control freak

What’s mostly vexing about this is that the 7800 had a two-button controller. I own a single Atari 7800 game, Pole Position II (another accidental acquisition). It requires a two-button controller, a button for brake, and another for accelerate. The CX40 has one button, so it doesn’t work. The above controllers don’t work either. I tried a Sega Master System controller, and there’s not button mapped to accelerate.

Atari has announced they’re reproducing the Atari 78+ controller, which is sort of great, but also not really because it’s not the best controller. Also, you have to buy it separately.

If we’re using software emulation here, I’m not sure why I can’t use whatever DB9 controller I want. I get that it’s trying to be faithful to the original hardware, but I feel this could have been a place where we could have deviated enough for comfort’s sake. I’m just saying it would be nice to plug in my 8BitDo M30 and use it wireless. As it is, if you want wireless play, you’re going to have to find one of the actual 2600 wireless controllers from the ‘80s. Just a warning: those get interrupted if an ambulance drives by or someone turns on a microwave.

I’m not sure if this can be addressed later. The splash screen states that this is v1.00, which suggests to me that the firmware (or software layer) can be updated. However, if there’s a way to access any software settings, I can’t find it. It would have been nice if you could tweak certain things about the console if you’re savvy. Like, maybe turning off the sprite limitations to get rid of flicker on some games. Scanlines, maybe?

In the slot

As for games, the Atari 2600+ comes packed with a 10-in-1 cartridge. It includes some obvious entries like Adventure, Combat, Haunted House, Missile Command, and Yars’ Revenge mixed in with some other common games that are less well-remembered.

Interestingly, the 10-in-1 and the 4-in-1 that comes with the CX30 paddle controllers both use DIP switches on the back of the cartridge to select the game you want. This is probably so they remain compatible with original hardware, as an in-game selection isn’t as easy to display. I kind of find it cool that they did it this way, but I also think that a normal home user might think it’s a bit intimidating.

Alongside the Atari 2600+ launch, Atari also released Berzerk Enhanced Edition and Mr. Run and Jump. 

I think for Berzerk, it’s using the homebrew hack created by Mike Mika, but I don’t see him credited anywhere. It’s mostly just the normal 2600 version of Berzerk, but with a few added voice lines. Pretty neat, considering the hardware. The enemies can also shoot diagonally now, making it more in line with the original arcade version. The voices are impressive.

Mr. Run and Jump is an actually new 2600 game. It was created by John Mikula of Graphite Lab and was converted into a modern title that was released this past July. It’s an extremely basic platformer, but it’s surprisingly slick for the 2600, which didn’t see many games of the genre. I have to note that neither John Mikula nor Graphite Lab is listed on the packaging or in the game itself (unless there are end credits, which wasn’t common on the console). I suppose that’s very faithful to Atari’s classic way of doing business.

Credits might have been included in the manuals for these games, but surprisingly, there are no manuals. This is especially weird for Berzerk Enhance Edition because it has a number of different game modes that you choose using the Game Select lever on the console. However, without the manual, the only way of knowing what these are is by looking it up online. Further, Evil Otto doesn’t appear in the default game setting, so… What the hell?

You get what you get

You mostly get what you get with the 2600+. It’s an Atari 7800 in a smaller Atari 2600 casing that is powered by USB-C and outputs with HDMI. It’s not impressive. If you’re familiar with 2600 games and don’t like them, this isn’t going to change your mind. However, if you’re already somewhat invested in the console and want one that doesn’t use RF without having to mod it, then this is probably for you.

I mentioned that it does widescreen, but it’s just 4:3 stretched to 16:9. I know there are people who like filling their screen with a stretched image, but not in this house.

That era of home consoles is far from my favorite. Each game is a short experience that usually can only keep you entertained for about five minutes before you’re slotting in the next cartridge. It can be enjoyable with friends, especially if you’re willing to compete for high scores. On the plus side, the entire catalogue of the console is still reasonably cheap. If you want to build up a stack of games, it isn’t expensive to do so.

And that’s that. If you know what you’re getting into, the Atari 2600+ will suit your needs. It does what it says it does and not much else beyond that. It might be a good starting point if you want to build a 2600 collection. It’s definitely a good way to get the full physical Atari 2600 experience. But that’s it. It’s exactly what I expected and nothing more.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the hardware purchased by the reviewer]}

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It’s kind of amazing how much influence Mother 3 has had on game design in the West, despite never being released here. It’s a bit hard to describe the difference between Earthbound influence and Mother 3 influence, but it’s there. Knuckle Sandwich seems to be in the Mother 3 camp.

Actually, Knuckle Sandwich is a bit of a mash-up of Mother 3, Undertale (which was also inspired by Mother 3), and WarioWare. At times, it seems to push the concept to the extremes. Other times, it wallows in it.

Knuckle Sandwich is mixed. How much you enjoy it is going to depend on your tolerance for its pacing, and if its weirdness and humor are enough for you to overlook some glaring flaws.

Knuckle Sandwich (PC)
Developer: Andy Brophy
Publisher: Superhot Presents
Released: November 22, 2023
MSRP: $19.99

You’re a hapless loser. You can’t hold down a job, you screw up everything you do, and people just keep taking advantage of your naivety.

Sorry, I’m talking about the protagonist of Knuckle Sandwich. I’m sure you’re lovely.

After moving to Bright City, the protagonist sets out to find a job and winds up with no end of bad luck. One thing leads to another, and a blue-skinned vampire is asking you to help figure out what keeps causing corruption in the city. Then it generally meanders about pointlessly.

Let me tell you, Knuckle Sandwich has one hell of an opening. For the first hour or so, you’re kicked around through a varied bunch of events, each one more subversive than the last. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but for a while there, I was thinking that this could be a late contender for some sort of Game of the Year award. I would say I was “grinning the whole way through” if I was still capable of feeling any sort of joy.

You might say that it kept going off script or, rather, that it never had a script at all. And then eventually, it finds its script, and everything comes screeching to a sudden halt.

While the early moments of Knuckle Sandwich might give you the impression that this is a parody RPG, it’s a bit misleading. This is just an RPG. Well, it's not just an RPG, but it’s sunk so deeply in the genre that it’s more an RPG than it is anything else. You spend a lot of time in dungeons, solving simple puzzles and lining up to take turns swatting at enemies.

The big difference here is that each time you attack or defend, there’s a simple mini-game to decide how much damage you deal or receive. If you can nail a defense mini-game, it will cause damage to the enemy instead. There’s a vast assortment of mini-games, which is one of Knuckle Sandwich’s strengths. It doesn’t just rely on the abstract comparison of dice rolls and stat points; it provides something unique each time.

In many ways, this is yanked from Undertale but without the nuance of being presented as an alternative to combat. There is no alternative to combat. There’s just combat. Undertale gives you the choice of murdering people the old-fashioned way or playing a mini-game to avoid conflict, but Knuckle Sandwich just asks you to kill people. Which is fine, though it once again feels like a harsh contrast to the introduction.

The problem is that the mini-games quickly become tedious, and the combat is over-long. There isn’t a whole lot you can do to boost your advantage. Levels feel unmeaningful. Your inventory is laughably small (similar to Earthbound), so carrying healing items or extra weapons feels useless. You’re often left chipping away at enemy after enemy, and it begins to drag, and it never stops.

In the options, there’s a way to tweak the difficulty of the battles. After a while, I reduced the difficulty. Then, I enabled the option to skip them entirely. I really don’t regret that.

The narrative is in a similar place. In the beginning, it feels like the story is going to center around your hapless avatar. It feels like he’s there for us to laugh at as he gets kicked around, like Arthur Dent from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or the eponymous protagonist from The Stanley Parable. Early events put the hooks in, creating a fun mystery. Then, the whole story loses its center and meanders for the next ten hours.

Don’t get me wrong, the writing is often clever. The dialogue remains funny throughout the game, landing hits far more than misses. There are a lot of clever subversive tricks that it plays, and it often keeps you guessing.

It’s just when you remove the joke-filled dialogue and the breaks in the fourth wall, the overall plot is so limp and passionless. At its base level, it’s extremely simplistic and unfocused. Its conclusion is extremely unsatisfying, gathering up all the loose ends and trying to tie them together in a way that should be as clever as its prologue but instead feels lifeless. Some sub-plots feel as though they were forgotten entirely, whereas others get closure in a way that feels sloppy and rushed.

The protagonist goes from some schmuck who’s getting towed along against his will to some generic hero; a mostly incompetent last/best hope. Somewhere in that complete void of a personality, I guess there's some buried self-righteousness that drives him onward. I feel short-changed and betrayed.

That’s an enormous shame. It’s not as though Knuckle Sandwich feels like a slapdash production. The art style and animations are extremely detailed, charming, and well-executed. This is supported by a weird but enjoyable soundtrack that compliments its aesthetic. If anything, it never quite lands on its own personality, but I’ll probably remember it best for its looks and sounds.

Overall, Knuckle Sandwich’s gameplay and narrative just aren’t as clever as its dialogue. It commits a parody game design faux pas very late in the game. This might be a spoiler, but it stops you to solve an “unavoidable series of convoluted puzzles,” and then it gives a near-literal wink. It’s a jab at RPG dungeon design. But then it makes you do those convoluted puzzles anyway. It makes you do something that it acknowledges as boring. And it is.

Good one.

Knuckle Sandwich is at its best when it goes off-script. It’s just that when it finally has to go back on-script, we find that the script is a rather tedious one. I spent 15 hours to see the ending in hopes that all the boredom I experienced was building to some sort of pay-off. That there would be some tremendous punchline at the end that brings reason to all my suffering. There was none. Just a fading bruise.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Knuckle Sandwich appeared first on Destructoid.

The expansion for Tales of Arise, Beyond the Dawn has been two years in the making. And while it doesn't hit all the notes, it's a fitting addition to an already fantastic RPG.

The Tales series has been a staple of RPGs since the franchises' origins in 1995. 2021's Tales of Arise brought the series to modern audiences. By the time I dove into Dahna and Renah in early 2022, many people had already fallen head over heels for its spectacular combat, lovable characters, and grand aesthetics.

When the credits rolled after 59 hours of playtime, I felt satisfied, despite a rushed ending. Then, during the September's State of Play, it reappeared, like an old friend you haven't seen in a while. All the memories came back to me as Beyond the Dawn, an all-new expansion, was revealed. While it's been two years since the game's original release, it feels like Beyond the Dawn sought to capture what made the original great. After playing through Beyond the Dawn, I can confirm that it does feel like Tales of Arise, yet could've been much more.

Taking place two years after the events of the original, Tales of Arise - Beyond the Dawn reunites Alphen, Shionne, Rinwell, Law, Dohalim, and Kisara. This time, they'll meet Nazamil, the young daughter of a Dahnan citizen and a Renan lord. Cursed to don the same mask as Alphen did, the team comes together to stop her doomed fate.

Tales of Arise - Beyond the Dawn Expansion (PlayStation 5 [reviewed], PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC)
Developer: Bandai Namco Studios Inc.
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Released: November 9, 2023
MSRP: $29.99

Right out the gate, you're thrown into action and back to the frantic battles the original was known for. It's a welcome sign for those returning to Tales of Arise, like I was. Depending on how many hours you put into the game, getting back into the flow can take some time. However, once you've found your footing, it all comes back to you, and it's back to the grind.

Your progress in the base game doesn't transfer to the expansion, to create a level playing field. You start the game at level 75, no matter what. This didn't bother me much, since it helped ensure one couldn't speed through battles and miss the fun.

In terms of gameplay, it's more or less the same. There are new dungeons, equipment, and weapons, but everything remains intact from the main game, even the enemies. The combat is still the star of the show and continues to be as engaging and intuitive as before. Landing combos is still tons of fun and there's no better feeling than landing a Boost Strike after shaving hit points off a tough enemy.

It's a huge surprise other big RPG franchises have dabbled, but haven't fully tapped into Tales of Arise's style of action combat. For me, it acts as a smoother transition between turn-based and free-range. Composer Motoi Sakuraba remains at the top of his game with the score. I can't count the number of times I grooved along to Flame of the New Dawn mid-fight.

On a Hot Streak

Beyond the Dawn really reminds you just how fun and unique the cast was and continues to be. Whether through skits, battle dialogue, or cutscenes, they still show off their personalities with that same lovable flair. Kisara still acts like everyone's mother, Alphen continues to obsess over Shionne, and Law can't stop yelling. It's like seeing your family for the holidays after being away. There are subtle changes, but everything remains the same, which isn't a bad thing. Tales of Arise's colorful cast was one of my favorite aspects of the base game and it's good to see them faithfully reunited.

The English voice actors for the characters also remain and continue to do a great job. Personally, it's a shame not to see them in the end credits. Seeing as this may be the last time we hear them, it would've been fitting to have them credited alongside the Japanese cast. Regardless, standouts for me include Ray Chase's Alphen, Bryce Papenbrook's Law, and Katelyn Gault's Kisara. Their performances in the main game stood out to me then and still do, as they capture that same energy.

The narrative of Beyond the Dawn is pretty standard, delivering some twists and turns along the way. It's a little hard to get into specifics without spoiling things. The expansion doesn't waste time in dropping big reveals. While things happen quickly, it doesn't feel dragged out. Even still, it doesn't hit the same highs as the base game's narrative did.

Sure, it's a lot to expect an expansion to live up to what came before, but it did feel a bit tame. Most of that can be attributed to no new main character arcs, which I didn't mind, to be honest. We've seen the characters develop, so it lets others—mainly Nazamil—shine. As she's the main star of the expansion, it's better to highlight her rather than others.

Newcomer Nazamil, for me, doesn't stand out much as a character. Her personality is a bit cliché in the beginning, with shyness being her only standout feature. It also doesn't help that she can literally become invisible and likes to draw. However, it doesn't make her progression through the story any less charming. While it is a touch predictable, as you learn Nazamil's backstory, you can't help but want the best for her.

Nazamil's English voice actress, Ryan Bartley, does a great job of balancing the character to keep her compelling. Given her role as Rei in Neon Genesis Evangelion, it's a safe and solid choice for the reserved outcast. Still, Nazamil's transformation within Beyond the Dawn is as interesting as it is simple. I do think it could've gone deeper, but it's effective in its delivery.

There are times in Beyond the Dawn's narrative when the overall theme of friendship and companionship might feel too trite. Regardless, I don't think the story had any leeway for it to go in another way. Nazamil's personal struggles couldn't be told without diving into the ever-present 'power of friendship'. It's natural that the story would lead there and befitting of the series' commitment to crafting relationships with the party.

Forged in Fire

Beyond the Dawn's biggest strength is its worldbuilding. Much like the base game, the side missions, party conversations, and vibrancy stand out to me. What's interesting this time around, however, is the fact that it continued to develop after the original game's ending.

We see the changes we made after beating Vholran and merging the two worlds. Now that Renans live with Dahnans, we see new technology throughout the cities and Astral Artes users working with others. We also see the consequences of that, for better or worse. Tensions still remain, and the idea of bringing these two civilizations together was easier said than done.

During my playthrough, there were times when side missions revolved around issues we thought we solved in the base game. The zeugles still roam the lands and food is a rarity for those without the Gald. There's still work to be done and we are the ones to fix it, or at least spark the change. Franchises such as Persona and Final Fantasy tend to have everything solved in the end due to "saving the world." Beyond the Dawn subverts that, which I applaud them for. Witnessing the things we strived to change, like race relations and democracy, start to come together feels more rewarding than having it be there from the start.

For me, Tales of Arise - Beyond the Dawn fits the framework for an expansion. It adds more story, quests, and dungeons for players to enjoy without introducing any new game-changing mechanics. My playthrough lasted about 13 hours, but I could see many going up to at least 20 for completion. I did many of the new side missions, which helped slow the narrative's often quick pace. Despite the length, the expansion doesn't overstay its welcome. It tells a story, gives the player more stuff to do, and leaves. There's no need to deck things out to the extreme and Beyond the Dawn showcases that restraint.

All that said, when the credits rolled on Beyond the Dawn, that feeling of satisfaction I felt from the original came back. This time, it wasn't because I completed the game. It was because I completed the narrative. Everything felt more in place than in the original. In a way, this felt like the best way to end Tales of Arise; to tell a story of forgiveness and family from the perspective of those whose own was forged through hardship and acceptance. It fills in that much-needed hole the original ending had and goes on its own terms.

A lot of my criticism feels negative, but my experience with Beyond the Dawn was very pleasant. As a big fan of Tales of Arise, returning to Bandai Namco's world was a personal joy. You don't realize how much you missed the skits and combat until you witness them again.

To put it simply, Beyond the Dawn is just more Tales of Arise. If you want more of the game, it's worth the time. Personally, while the $30 price tag is a bit too high, I don't think you'll be too disappointed. A little let-down, sure, but it's hard to imagine things ending in a different way. Plus, the risks it took to craft a healing world instead of a healed one pay off.

Overall, Tales of Arise - Beyond the Dawn is an expansion fit for the main game's already fantastic base. Fans who enjoyed the original game will find themselves feeling the same way they did before. Fortunately, Beyond the Dawn ties it up with a simple yet effective bow. While it could've been neater, it delivers a worthwhile experience for big-time fans.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Tales of Arise – Beyond the Dawn Expansion appeared first on Destructoid.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 shows how tradition can (and should) be broken in some cases.

I haven’t been as mixed on a Call of Duty game in a long time since Black Ops 4; another game with a problematic release given its lack of a campaign. On the one hand, this game features some of the best foundational gameplay since my favorite era of Call of Duty. But then, on the other hand, it lacks substance and relies too heavily on nostalgia best left in 2009.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (PC, PS4, PS5[reviewed], Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Sledgehammer Studios
Publisher: Activision
Released: November 10, 2023
MSRP: $69.99

Aimless

Playing through the 15-mission single-player campaign in Modern Warfare 3 often had me wondering if this game was better off not having a campaign at all. To Sledgehammer Games’ credit, it seemingly developed this game in a fraction of the time of most annual releases, especially since it just released Vanguard two years prior.

But, at the same time, this approach shows how unsustainable and unhealthy this development cycle is, with the messiest and worst campaign in the franchise to date. The 15 missions it has are deceptive, as players can finish them in a matter of three to five hours; much shorter than previous games.

Worse still, it eschews the jokes about the campaign being a tutorial for multiplayer in favor of being a glorified tutorial for the upcoming Warzone Urzikstan map. Many of the missions take place in larger map areas with a few objectives for players to accomplish and some freedom of choice in how to go about tackling them.

This sounds fine and dandy as an idea, but in practice, it falls flat. Unwanted elements of DMZ and Warzone exist, such as the armor plates, looting supply crates, and parachuting around. There is almost no story hook throughout these missions and they pretty much act as a bridge to the next actual cutscene.

Unfortunately, those cutscenes don’t offer much to reward players for completing the campaign’s bland tasks, either. The plot feels like a slightly expanded and redone version of 2022’s MW2 with the same villain and little resolution. In fact, it even ends on a frustrating and weird cliffhanger. That said, there are the occasional “traditional” cinematic, action-packed linear campaign missions here and there.

But even those aren’t perfect. For instance, the opening mission “Operation 627” plays like a wild and fun prison break adventure, but even it doesn’t last long enough. Worse still, the campaign’s “No Russian” sequel “Passenger” is unnecessarily controversial and egregious in its context. If there’s any game where you can safely skip the campaign and not miss out, this is the one.

Playing without rose-tinted glasses

Multiplayer remains king in Modern Warfare 3 and is where most people will likely spend their time. Another odd choice from Sledgehammer, but understandable given the harsh development timeline: remastering all 16 of the launch maps from the original 2009 Modern Warfare 2.

As someone who came into the series just after that with Black Ops, this was pretty much my first time checking out the likes of Rundown, Karachi, and more. I will admit most of these maps haven’t aged the best, especially with the current fast-paced movement systems.

Last year’s MW2 didn’t have solid maps and, unfortunately, that trend continues this year with the latest game. A few of them are fantastic, such as Terminal, Invasion, and Skidrow, while most of the others were better left stuck in 2009. I'm torn because some game modes like Search & Destroy feel better than ever in this title.

However, a tried-and-true mode like Hardpoint doesn’t work well on almost any of the maps due to them not being made with it in mind. This led to me being even pickier than usual with what maps I play in multiplayer and less overall enjoyment.

Moving with grace

My negative experience with most of the maps in MW3 feels even more painful because this year's model has the best movement and gameplay of any Call of Duty game not from the jetpack era. New additions like Tac Stance complement the smooth and improved returning mechanics like slide canceling and dolphin diving.

There isn’t a second of downtime in this game, which I love. As an SMG player who likes to always be in people’s faces, I could zip across most maps in a few seconds and start blasting away at some unsuspecting opposing player. The speed of this game feels incredible and just right when paired with the higher-than-average player health.

This results in a smart balance of swiftness and heft. While you can find enemies in no time, you need skill with the varied and impressive weapons to succeed. The crossover of all MW2 weapons and most cosmetics also means this game has a fantastic and familiar foundation for existing fans as well. This results in thrilling gameplay, which mismatches with many of the maps.

Hope remains

Players looking for the best parts of MW3 should honestly look outside the usual trappings of campaign and multiplayer. Instead, game modes like Ground War offer some of the finest and most thrilling moments in this adventure. Ground War gave me the high-quality, Battlefield 3-like experience I’ve been sorely missing for a while now. This is because of its massive maps, large player counts, and onslaught of vehicles across land and sky. Pair this with the best-in-class movement and gunplay, and you have a grand time.

At the same time, Treyarch cooked up a unique but welcome take on Zombies with the open-world Operation Deadbolt. This feels like the true successor to TranZit, my favorite Zombies iteration. It lacks some direction with the open-world maps and many objectives, but the horror aesthetic and countless undead forces give it a special sense of freedom.

It could use some tweaks when it comes to content, missions, and challenges, but this Zombies experience is off to a solid start. Overall, Zombies feels like the best part of 2022’s DMZ but with a more compelling enemy threat.

In the end, Modern Warfare 3 begs the question of whether this annual cycle should continue or not. Almost half the game feels shoehorned in, such as the forgettable campaign. Meanwhile, the other half has mixed results in the case of the multiplayer maps. But if players engage with the truly special parts of MW3, such as its exceptional improvements to gameplay and spectacular alternative modes like Zombies and Ground War, they’ll find there is a worthy experience in there somewhere.

The post Review: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 appeared first on Destructoid.

I was really hoping for a relaxing game. I needed one. Spirittea was promising that experience. Unfortunately, it’s a clear demonstration that there’s a fine line between relaxation and boredom.

Mashing up my favorite Spirited Away and Stardew Valley and featuring my favorite pastimes of taking baths and drinking tea, it had everything going for it. Heck, the protagonist is a writer who travels to the countryside to work on their latest book. I'm a writer. At least, I sometimes claim to be.

But after nearly 20 hours, I was a season and a half into the game. I’d befriended a handful of spirits and villagers. The bathhouse was coming along. But it was crawling. Forget relaxing; going back to Spirittea was beginning to just add to my misery. Something went wrong here.

Spirittea (PC [Reviewed] Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch)
Developer: Cheesemaster Games
Publisher: No More Robots
Released: November 13, 2023
MSRP: $19.99

I’ve given some of the synopsis already, but to reiterate, you’re a writer who has retreated to the countryside to remove distractions and focus on your next opus. However, soon after drinking tea from a magic teapot, you gain the ability to see spirits. Well, a spirit. However, this maneki neko tells you that all the other spirits of the village have become lost as the residents have stopped worshipping them. You’re tasked with helping them find themselves, then, uh, bathing them.

Yeah, there’s a bathhouse at the top of the mountain, and it’s a great way to make money because my old college professors were right: writing doesn’t pay the bills. Any spirit you help out becomes a customer at the bathhouse, and so do all their identical siblings.

You then spin off the money you make to expand the bathhouse, allowing you to douse more minor Gods. And this is exactly where everything starts going wrong. The bathhouse is the focal point of all of Spirittea’s problems. And that’s mainly because the whole business, the whole central task that you do in order to progress through all the game’s systems, is as dull as bathwater.

Bathhouse etiquette

To complete your book, you need to find spirits. This is because you don’t have a single creative thought in your head, so the only hope you have is to experience the spirit world. In order to find more spirits, you need to run the bathhouse. You have a few options to make money, but the only significant one is the bathhouse. In order to level up and make money faster, you need to find more spirits.

Yet, it doesn’t matter how many spirits you find; the task of bathing them never becomes fun to do. You take them, plunk them in the grid overlaying the bathwater, and try to make them as happy as possible. There’s not really much you can do to make their experience better aside from scrubbing the spirit with a broom. You just have to avoid plopping them beside other spirits that they hate. Each spirit corresponds to one of the four seasons, and they sit best with spirits of the opposite season.

But you can’t easily discern what season the spirit belongs to. In order to find out, you have to dig up a tome that has information about the spirit. To dig up tomes, you need maps. Expensive maps. And no matter how many maps I’ve collected, I can’t discern a single damned one of them. I got some tomes simply by spotting patches of grass that discolor under the spirit vision, but rarely would the tome tell me about a spirit that actually visited my bathhouse.

Your other option is to use trial and error to deduce their season and keep meticulous notes, and I thought we were trying to relax here.

Spiritual hygiene

Beyond trying to make the spirits happy, you need to maintain the fires that heat the bath, and keep a supply of clean towels. Honestly, even though those are two obvious chores, they would make the whole task of putting spirits in bathwater a lot more interesting if you had to juggle them. But you don’t. As I said, once you have the spirit in the water, there’s not much else to do with them. You just let them soak. So, I spent a lot of time waiting for the bin to get filled with dirty towels, just so I had something to do while standing around.

There’s also cooking. I fixed up the kitchen pretty early to find that the whole system is a mess. Each spirit has a favorite meal, and to find it, you need the corresponding tome for the spirit. Then you need all the ingredients, and you have to have them in the kitchen, which doesn’t initially have its own storage. You need to buy that separately.

But even when I had a spirit’s favorite food, I couldn’t figure out how to feed it to them. So, I gave up.

It wasn’t the only time that I felt like a bathhouse upgrade was a waste of money that I earned with my blood, sweat, and boredom. Learn from my mistakes; your first priority should be repairing the baths that you can reach. I made the mistake of fixing the stairs because I wondered what Spirittea was hiding up there. Spoiler: it’s a broken bath. A very expensive broken bath.

I guess I didn’t learn my lesson because, soon after, I repaired the hall to the west wing. I figured there was something neat there because there was an obvious loading barrier. However, guess what I found there? A broken bath.

Maybe I should have learned my lesson, but I have to wonder why Spirittea is making me pay for a repair just to reach another thing for me to repair. This whole process would work better if Spirittea would offer some guidance as to what would benefit you most at that moment. Instead, it lets you tie your own noose.

I got a job making money for the man

The bathhouse doesn’t pay well, either. In order to unlock the bridge to the hot springs, you need to pay 15,000 of the game’s currency. In the 20 hours I played of Spirittea, the range of profit I would make from one full day working the bathhouse was between 2,000 and 5,500. That’s three boring days of squeezing the bathhouse for all its worth, and I don’t even know what’s up there. It’s probably another broken bathtub. I thought that if I kept throwing money at bathhouse repairs the central gameplay concept would become somewhat interesting, but it never happened.

In fact, it got worse. As you could in Stardew Valley, you can make friends with the townsfolk. Dialogue is one option, but typically you’ll get one or two statements from them before they tell you to screw off. If you happen to catch them at the right time of day, they might allow you to take them bug hunting or fishing. Both of those can help you buff up your friendship a lot faster than small talk. You might also find yourself making teppanyaki with them or playing an awful rhythm minigame that represents karaoke. What I don’t understand is why Spirittea’s general soundtrack is enjoyable, but when you’re stuck playing karaoke, it sounds like a musical greeting card.

If you manage to cap out your relationship with a character, you then tell them about how spirits are real. Rather than have an existential crisis when they’re forced to recognize that small Gods walk amongst them, they take your word for it and help out at the bathhouse. This involves washing towels, running dirty towels to the back room, scrubbing the spirits, and feeding the boiler. You know, all those actual activities you need to do while the spirits are soaking.

So, if you make four friends, you’re left just plopping spirits into the water. Just to twist the knife, the spirits trickle in at a slow pace, meaning that after you dunk a ghost, you have nothing to do but wait for the next one to show up.

Honeymoon by the ocean

I have many, many more complaints (the controls are inexplicably butt), but I feel like I’m mostly just venting frustration. I gave Spirittea so many chances to show me one reason to keep playing, and it never arose. Despite this, I had to keep diving in for the purposes of this review, and the annoyances just kept piling on. This is not what I had in mind.

At some points, I wondered if the developer intends Spirittea to have the same post-launch support that Stardew Valley did, where a number of appreciable upgrades are added over time. However, if that’s the case, the foundation should have been a lot stronger. At this point, entire activities will need to be pulled out, overhauled, and slotted back in. That’s very hard to do in an already living game.

I think the developer, Cheesemaster Games, had the passion and the vision to make Spirittea something special. And, to be fair, one person's boredom is another's relaxation. However, all the parts should have been better planned out before they were assembled. Instead of a bunch of complementary systems that build into a satisfying, captivating, and relaxing game, it’s just an inescapable tub of annoyances. After that experience, I really need to take it easy for a bit.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Spirittea appeared first on Destructoid.

After a week of nearly nonstop play, I hit a wall with Warcraft Rumble and the grind is in sight. Here's how it all went!

Warcraft Rumble (Android, iOS [reviewed on an iPhone 13])
Developer: Blizzard
Publisher: Blizzard
Released: November 3, 2023
MSRP: Free-to-play (with microtransactions)

The core game is fun, but it needs some economy tweaks

Warcraft Rumble is a 1v1 tap-to-deploy lane-based battler that asks you to send units off to micro-wars to take down an opposing headquarters. Your job? To march and destroy the opposite base before your opponent takes out your own, through clever countering and smart resource management. Each unit is associated with a cost (typically dependent on power level), and while your unit coffers recharge automatically, Kobolds can be deployed to mine ore on the map for more resources.

Although there are a lot of nuances involved, air units generally counter ground units, ranged units counter aerial, and so on. Look, Blizzard basically took Clash Royale and Blizzified it. Now instead of sending out knights and wizards, you're throwing Alliance soldiers and Horde Shamans. Tomato tomatoe.

The thing is, it's really fun, and Blizzard—the masterminds that they are—prey on nostalgia. Units will spout famous phrases from Warcraft lore, and all your favorites are here, including leaders like Tirion Fordring, Sylvanas Windrunner, and more. The animations are full of life, and the art team did an incredible job of recreating some of the more iconic bits of Warcraft history in this ostensibly silly, vibrant world that exists inside of the Hearthstone universe.

The core systems are good too. Starting off countering is intuitive, then it becomes a tapestry of strategy as you're attempting to divine out how to become the most efficient tower-killer machine possible. Some units have very unique abilities, and others are hybrids of multiple unit types. You'll also be able to play around with "Unbound" units, which can be summoned anywhere on the map at will (and are typically balanced by higher troop prices, or weaker stats).

Nearly every match is engaging as a result of everything coming together so splendidly. It's easy to assume that you can rest on your laurels as your army marches into enemy territory, but a few quick summons could completely wipe your board and turn the tide. If you lose, it's no biggie; just start again and either keep the same loadout, or swap to something else.

There's a lot to do until you hit a wall

Warcraft Rumble progress is tracked by "sigils," which are essentially account levels (I got up to 68 before I felt fatigued). More features will unlock the more you earn sigils by completing story levels, which in turn leads to more units, more leaders, and more options.

Given that matches only last a few minutes on average, it allows for a wide array of experimentation. Want to try a new leader and a completely different loadout? Easy! If it sucks, you just re-arrange it until you're happy. I've done this many times and eventually came up with a few arrangements that I really vibed with, and ended up doing exceedingly well in PVP. Coming up with those combos and figuring that puzzle out was a rush.

It helps that leaders all have different core abilities, and buff specific units when used in tandem with that leader. So Horde leaders often provide bonuses to Horde units, and so on down the line. Since the game doesn't restrict you in any way (it just nudges you toward synergy), there are a ton of possibilities to sift through. It's meaty.

Here are all the things you can do beyond playing through the core story:

• Play through dungeons (a series of three levels)
• Rise the PVP ranks with scaled units
• Join a guild and collectively earn more rewards like additional leaders
• Replay old levels on heroic mode for added twists (many of which are fantastic) once you reach 50 sigils

The core loop grabbed me immediately, then slowly but surely began to annoy me.

Monetization starts out innocuous, then it gets more insidious

It sounds like I'm having fun with Warcraft Rumble right? Well, I am! But it also takes a turn. Most of you are probably reading this review to see if Warcraft Rumble eventually becomes one of those mobile games, and it does.

Starting off, and all the way to the mid-game, you likely won't be swayed to spend any money at all. Rewards flow freely, and you'll be able to acquire a hefty army full of leader options very quickly. I was actually surprised at how much water that typically stingy hose spat out, and having tons of leaders is especially useful for army testing and PVP.

The thing is, eventually, those units do need to level up to take on some of the tougher stages (which really kick into gear around 50 sigils, about halfway through the story); and your means of doing so are very slim. While grinding dungeons to upgrade your leaders is actually viable and painless, leveling your units is much more obfuscated, and is done in a way to drive you to microtransactions.

The game boasts a "quest" system that allows you to level up units, but it's painfully slow and centered around individual boosts rather than large swaths of army leveling. Then there's the G.R.I.D., which is a randomized table for upgrading your unit's rarity (which in turn grants them game-changing powerful abilities, like polymorphing the first unit shot by the S.A.F.E. Pilot). To upgrade those units, players need to acquire stars (another leveling currency beyond XP), Arc Energy, and cores; the latter two of which are the main upgrade currencies. Confused yet? Well, it was designed to be confusing, and it really puts a damper on widespread meaningful progress.

The more units you have the more options that the game will pull from for randomized XP boosts, making it extremely hard to actually build a core loadout. You might have a really high XP unit that isn't rare or higher, or a rare or higher unit that isn't very strong/is low level. We know why it's being done this way ($$$), but it's incredibly obtuse and will ensure that many players stop playing, uninstall, and never go back (until the inevitable currency grace patch comes in the future, when the player base needs a kickstart).

It's a shame, because the team only needs to tweak a few things and combine a few currencies, and the game would become instantly smoother and less predatory. Having to deal with bugs that soft and hard crash the game doesn't help.

Try out Warcraft Rumble, or don't - that's OK too

Putting this many roadblocks in Warcraft Rumble, after Blizzard has already stumbled enough, takes guts. Hopefully, Blizzard doesn't squander their potential audience because of it, as the design team deserves better. Given the state of many free-to-play games though, the monetization is likely working as intended. If that's the case, maybe we'll get a microtransaction-free Apple Arcade version down the line.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game downloaded by the reviewer.]}

The post Review: Warcraft Rumble appeared first on Destructoid.

When I started into Berzerk: Recharged, I was shocked. There were no robot voices.

Berzerk was a 1980 arcade title, which means it existed before good graphics were invented. While something like Pac-Man could generally be considered a better game, Berzerk had one thing going for it: the robots talked. They’d draw from a series of words and phrases that would get pasted together into taunts. Things like “Chicken! Fight like a robot!” or “Get the humanoid!” Imagination was leaned on to fill in a lot of graphical blanks in those days, and having the robots converse with each other and actively taunt the player really helped get you in the headspace.

If there are no robot voices, what are we even doing here?

Berzerk: Recharged (PC [Reviewed] Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, Switch)
Developer: Sneakybox
Publisher: Atari
Released: November 10, 2023
MSRP: $9.99

Berzerk wasn’t a very complicated game, but try to remember that this was two years after Space Invaders and the same year as Pac-Man. The evolution of video games was going to be kicked into high gear for the next two decades, but 1980 was still pretty early.

Largely, the game just involved you running around electrified mazes, shooting at hostile robots (in eight directions! Fancy!) You’d get extra points if you cleared a screen before proceeding to the next, but if things go too hot, it was always better to duck through a doorway. If you lingered too long on a single screen, Evil Otto would show up. Hilariously, Otto was just depicted as a ball with a smiley face, but he was invulnerable, so you could only really run.

Berzerk: Recharged is pretty much still just that. You’re a little dude, you’re in a maze, and you shoot robots. The biggest difference here is the addition of power-ups and twin-stick shooting. Also, co-op, but who has friends in this economy? Does that make a huge difference? No, not really. It’s not the major overhaul that Quantum: Recharged offered. But Quantum didn’t age as well as Berzerk’s simple gameplay, so it maybe needed it more.

Get the humanoid!

I’m a bit surprised by the visuals in Berzerk: Recharged. I feel they’re a reasonable interpretation of the original’s graphics, but at the same time, the Recharged series has always struck me as being more stylish. Sneakybox has frequently reinterpreted older games as being more Tron-like, using lots of neon-heavy minimalistic designs. 

By contrast, Berzerk: Recharged is a lot more cartoon-like. If I was feeling particularly mean, I’d say that it looked like a Flash game from the ‘00s. I’m not, so I’ll just say that it doesn’t have the same edge as other games in Sneakybox’s remake series.

The soundtrack, however, is outstanding. Sneakybox has frequently tapped Megan McDuffee of River City Girls fame to compose for the Recharged games, and she has outdone herself here. It still has a cyber-pop sound to it, but the hooks are outstanding.

Meanwhile, the gameplay doesn’t really shake up the formula all that much. There are dashes and power-ups, but you can turn these new abilities off to gain a boost to your score. I played without them, and honestly, Berzerk: Recharged doesn’t need them. It plays basically the same if you just use your standard pea-shooter and human legs.

The robots also don't talk as much. I know that's a small complaint, but I've already discussed how important the robo-jabber is.

Get the intruder!

Atari has made no secret that the Recharged series is mostly for the fans. Alongside it, they’re doing more feature-packed remakes like Lunar Lander Beyond and Haunted House. They’re generally good snack games. Even if you dive in to try and plumb out every one of its achievements, you can probably be done with it in an afternoon. As long as you know what you’re getting into, you’ll probably have a good time.

On the other hand, I feel like most Recharged games supersede their inspiration in some way. Even if they aren’t explicitly better, they’re a reasonable substitute. I don’t really feel that way about Berzerk: Recharged. To me, it’s no replacement for the original, which, with all its limitations, still managed to present a fun and strangely atmospheric experience. The remake is more disposable, and that’s a shame since I couldn’t readily tell you where you can get an arcade-perfect port of Berzerk.

Nonetheless, Berzerk: Recharged is a fun experience for as long as it lasts. It doesn’t quite capture the charm of the original, and there are many better choices now in terms of twin-stick shooters. However, those games don’t have a deadly grinning ball that follows you until it witnesses your death. Its gleeful grin, looking down at your robot-ravaged body, reveling in its victory. No, you are safe from that nightmare in your pathetic human games.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Berzerk: Recharged appeared first on Destructoid.

Air Twister certainly makes an impression coming out of the gate. It’s a weird children’s fever dream involving an alien invasion, floating sky cities, and a Princess that comforts a dying swan. It doesn’t get more comprehensible from there.

Having watched the initial trailer at some point years ago, I felt like Air Twister was a game I needed to experience. Unfortunately, it was released on Apple Arcade. I had let my trial subscription lapse on that service because I simply didn’t use it. I don’t play games on my phone. It’s for checking the comments on my articles and should otherwise be ignored.

Finally, it has arrived on consoles, which is where video games live.

Air Twister (Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, Switch, iOS)
Developer: YS Net
Publisher: Inin Games
Released: November 10, 2023 (Console)
MSRP: $24.99

Air Twister is the latest game from Yu Suzuki and YS Net. Yu Suzuki is a legendary designer behind a lot of well-loved games like Out Run, Shenmue, and Hang-On. That’s just a few. He’s had his fingers in all kinds of great-tasting pies. However, I’m only a fan of one of these pies, and that’s Out Run. Pretty much all the rest of them range from lukewarm to slight dislike.

I still respect the heck out of the guy. Beyond simply being a capable and influential director, designer, and producer, he’s had a lot of influence on video games as a whole. It’s obvious that he’s very passionate about making games, though he reportedly doesn’t really play them.

According to an interview with Gamespot, he’s hesitant to call Air Twister a spiritual successor to one of his most prominent works, 1985’s Space Harrier. So, I’ll do it instead.

Air Twister is a spiritual successor to Space Harrier.

It’s obvious, so I don’t know why he’s coy about it. To give a point of reference, I can only use Space Harrier. To make comparisons, there’s Space Harrier. The strategies you use in Space Harrier work here. There are even direct references to Space Harrier in the game itself. Even though Space Harrier is a game I’m lukewarm on (though I never played it with the original motion cabinet), I still don’t count its direct influence as a bad thing.

You play as swan-loving Princess Arch. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be pronounced like the structure or the shape. Apparently, she’s trying to save her planet, but it looks like multiple planets, or maybe they’re dimensional pockets. Invaders have come spilling out to wreck things. She’s the only competent person, so she’s got to save everybody.

It’s pretty bizarre. There are flying fish, Moai statues, and giant hostile clocks. To make it even stranger, there is lore to all of it. There’s even lore about Arch’s favorite dish.

If you’re unfamiliar with Space Harrier, it was an early rail shooter. For your quarters, you got to spend a lot of time looking at the protagonist’s butt. The levels were flat and straight, but they had a lot of interesting effects to them, and the game made use of the Super Scaler system to give a sense of depth as the sprites came toward you.

Air Twister is exactly like that, except the levels aren’t straight lines, and the protagonist has a much nicer and more prominently displayed butt. Also, there’s a lock-on system where you fly in front of an enemy and can build up strings of targets.

While the twisting levels add a nice touch to Space Harrier’s gameplay, and the fantasy environments are neat to take in, it really doesn’t change a whole lot. This is still a lot closer to Space Harrier than it is to, say, Star Fox. Very rarely can you make contact with objects in the environment, so the actual motion is rarely utilized for anything fun. I’m assuming this has a lot to do with its mobile origin, but it’s somewhat underwhelming.

The core game is a linear series of 12 levels and two bonus rounds. Each level is capped off with a boss battle, as is tradition. There’s a lot of variety in the boss battles, even if there isn’t in your standard enemies. Otherwise, the game itself is pretty routine.

However, that routine gameplay is supported by an intricate unlock system that serves as a sort of meta-progression. While playing the game, you gain stars which you can then spend to advance further in the unlock structures while gaining new weapons and cosmetics. If anything, this helps support the fact that Air Twister is a rather short game at its core. Having more than just a high score to chase is always a good thing. Getting to dress up Arch in various hairstyles and pants is rather satisfying.

However, that’s all there really is to say about it. I don’t feel that Air Twister is really a game that feels necessary to play multiple times. I finished the main story on maybe my third or fourth attempt, and then it just becomes something that you do to unlock more stuff. There are some challenges that remix the game’s mechanics, many of which you actually have to unlock.

Speaking of not holding up to repetition is the soundtrack. It’s done by Valensia, which Yu Suzuki is a fan of. Aside from the fact that the opening to the first song you hear is extremely evocative of Queen’s Bohemian Rapsody, I really don’t mind the sound. It’s a bit like the result of a torrid love affair between prog rock and a stage musical.

However, while it’s enjoyable on the first listen and fits the aesthetic pretty well, I’m not a fan of being repeatedly beaten over the head with the same tracks. It’s made worse by the fact that they’re lyrical songs, which means I wind up with short snippets of phrases stuck in my head. It makes me extremely uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable right now.

Air Twister is enjoyable enough. It’s weird and stimulating, as any arcade game should be. The problem is, much like Space Harrier, it’s let down by its simplicity. There’s some support from the upgrade meta-game and the added lore, but it’s really not enough to sustain the game for very long. Something like the branching pathways from Star Fox 64 would probably be beneficial to the longevity of the gameplay. That would at least add some variation to the story mode.

For that matter, the one thing from Air Twister that will probably still stick with me a month from now is the swan death, and that was shown in the first trailer.

Overall, Air Twister is a fine arcade title. It’s initially fun to play, and its trippy fantasy visuals do a decent job of drawing you in. However, once you’ve managed to topple the final boss and are treated to the end cutscene, there really isn’t much to keep you playing or cement the game in memory. The main story mode becomes just what you grind on to afford better butt dressings. I think the fallen swan deserved better.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Air Twister appeared first on Destructoid.

It’s easy to feel how Like a Dragon is changing in Gaiden. But that doesn’t mean the latest, un-numbered entry in Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s series is eschewing its roots.

Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name mostly takes place concurrent to Yakuza: Like a Dragon, a game that saw RGG Studio tackle RPG ideas with a new hero in the lead. And though we’re back to brawler basics here with Kiryu in Gaiden, there’s enough here to make it a valuable excursion for the long-time fans.

Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name (PC, PS4, PS5 [reviewed], Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio
Publisher: Sega
Released: November 8, 2023
MSRP: $49.99

A man with no name

Gaiden hands the mantle back to long-time Yakuza protagonist Kazuma Kiryu, now living under the pseudonym Joryu. After his death in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life was faked, Kiryu went into the service of the Daidoji, living a sequestered life and doing the occasional odd job for them to ensure the Morning Glory Orphanage and Haruka can live in peace.

One deal gone wrong, though, and “Joryu” is back in the thick of criminal conspiracies and politics. The plot moves pretty quick, and even though chapters are longer than you might expect, the overall game is pretty short by Like a Dragon standards, especially after the hefty runtime of Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

Considering this entry started out as DLC, the runtime lines up. And honestly, I welcomed the brevity; while I would’ve liked a little more time with some of the new cast members, Gaiden covers the ground it needs to. There are a few heavy emotional beats saved for the very end too, in a conclusion that feels crafted to hit every button for a franchise fan.

Most of Gaiden is spent in Sotenbori, a small slice of Ijincho, and a new locale called The Castle, a floating container ship that’s home to a playground for the uber-rich, owned and operated by the yakuza. The former is familiar, and the latter is a home for tons of the minigames and side activities, of which Gaiden has plenty.

Space for so many activities

While Like a Dragon Gaiden is a little slimmer in story content, it easily feels like one of the better side-game offerings in the series. Plenty of favorites return, from the shogi and hanafuda that feel like staples at this point to the return of Pocket Racer. Sotenbori is filled with tons to do, and the main quest even takes you on a tour of some of the most notable to-do’s.

While the cabaret club returns too, it’s not through a management sim, but in an FMV dating sim-style interactive video. I’m a long-time lover of FMV in games, and RGG has been gradually incorporating more of it. It can work, and it's particularly funny when you’re given topics and responses that lean into Like a Dragon’s quirkier side. But other times, the ring-lit eyes staring at you through the screen can feel a little strange. Chalk this as a novel experiment with very mixed results.

On the whole, though, there’s a ton to do in Like a Dragon Gaiden, and all of it feels engaging. Billiards has shot puzzles and varying levels of competition, the Pocket Circuit has tons of customization, and karaoke makes a requisite reprise, complete with “Baka Mitai.”

The Arena offers some of the most in-depth distractions, though. Set aboard the floating Castle, this Like a Dragon’s Arena is surprisingly robust. Kiryu can fight in regular combat, or against a legion of adversaries, or in the extremely fun Hell Team Rumble.

Essentially, Kiryu can build up a roster of fighters who he can recruit throughout the world, who will fight alongside him in the Hell Team Rumble. These are chaotic, frantic, glorious all-out rumbles, where your crew fights another until only one is left standing. It’s like if the Jets and Sharks fought in a league, or the Anchorman news team brawl was made into a game.

Just the scope alone is impressive, but add in the scouting, recruiting, and training aspects, and the Arena becomes a genuinely engaging side game that reminded me of good times with Blitzball in Final Fantasy X. You can also play as characters that aren’t Kiryu, adding some fun ways of expanding this game’s combat out even further.

Codename: Joryu

The brawler combat of Like a Dragon Gaiden is pretty good to start, too. In some ways, it’s been scaled down. Rather than a bevy of stances, Kiryu has only a Yakuza stance, the familiar Dojima fighting style, and the new Agent style.

Agent is where some of the most unbridled fun is in Like a Dragon Gaiden. Framed as Kiryu practicing a new fighting style, to keep him occupied, it soon begins to incorporate special gadgets. The Spider is a literal web tool that can grab enemies and fling them around, or pick items off perches in the open world. It really never gets old, flinging enemies across the street and hearing them yell as they go flying by.

A legion of drones can be summoned to pester foes, keeping their attention off Kiryu. And the exploding cigarette is, well, an exploding cigarette. It does what it sounds like it does, and does it well. Add in some rocket boots than bowl over crowds as you dash through them, and Agent is a blast, clearly intended for dealing with large groups.

The dynamic of Like a Dragon Gaiden’s combat is fairly simple: beat down big groups with Agent, fight solo enemies with the Yakuza style. Tougher enemies and bosses get a special move, which you can dodge and hit back with an Ultimate Counter, an extremely rewarding move to pull off. The simplicity works well though, letting you really focus on brawling and beating down enemies.

At this point, the Like a Dragon series brawling feels pretty familiar. The new updates are just enough to make Gaiden feel distinct, and RGG puts enough added combat ideas and twists in to keep things fresh, between the story, roaming crews, and the Arena. While it’s not as complex to dig into as something like Ishin, and the upgrades feel a bit straightforward, Agent stance alone really shakes things up.

The social network

Everything, from brawling to minigames and more, is tied together under the Akame Network, an app system run by the network’s namesake, Akame. After meeting her in the story, she’ll rope Joryu into helping out the homeless and others in need around Sotenbori, as well as boosting the Network’s reputation as its key representative.

The Akame Network serves a lot of purposes: it’s a special item shop, it’s another currency to meter out upgrades you would normally buy with cash and orbs (now cash and Network points), and it’s a hub for all side stories. Rather than always stumbling across them in the open world, most of the substories I found were through requests at Akame’s.

I’m mixed on whether I like this option, though for Gaiden, it does ultimately work well. The brevity of the story means you’ll be running into odd content gates fairly often, and it’s simply easier to have substories be opt-in missions you can pick up whenever. There’s not as many surprises waiting around the corner, but it means you’re not worrying about advancing the story and losing a substory.

The substories are, also, very good. This isn’t a huge surprise, but I like how RGG Studio tackled the lineup for this version of Kiryu, specifically. Many of the substories I played were callbacks to old running gags or previous Yakuza games. Kiryu’s past is always following him, and in some ways, haunting him.

The ghost of you

Like a Dragon Gaiden is, on its face, a story about what Kazuma Kiryu was doing during the events of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and how those events will seemingly lead into him becoming a full-fledged party member of Ichiban’s in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. It’s interstitial, meant to provide some story for those who really want more, or even just want a little Yakuza brawling as the main series goes more RPG.

Yet it’s also clearly wrestling with where the series is headed. Yakuza started out as a series about the titular crime organization, following Kiryu as he dealt with all the inter-family conflicts and fights for power. With Yakuza: Like a Dragon, though, RGG signaled the “end” of the yakuza, both literal and symbolic; an act that Kiryu takes part in, too.

With that in mind, Kiryu’s actions in this story become much more interesting. He is growing older, and his legacy is fading. He’s given up his name, which carries immense value and respect, in order to protect those that matter most to him. What kind of life does that leave for him to live?

It’s the start of something I imagine we’ll see explored more in Infinite Wealth, if its teasers so far are to be believed. And yes, there is a pack-in demo for Infinite Wealth that comes with Gaiden, to help cover the two-month gap between them. 

But this all means that the Kiryu we see in Gaiden is complex; gleefully antagonizing a villain in one moment, then solemnly contemplating his situation later. Like a Dragon Gaiden is Kiryu at his “most”: his most jovial, most emotional, most guarded, and most vulnerable. It all makes for one of the most compelling depictions of this character to date.

Ready to start

So while Like a Dragon Gaiden feels like an appetizer for what’s to come, it’s also a bit of an indulgence for anyone who’s been following this series. What started out as possible DLC feels expanded out into a look-back at Kiryu’s journey, up to now.

Its brevity may leave some feeling a bit put-off, but the side stories and activities more than make up for the shorter campaign. Much like The Castle Gaiden introduces, this entry feels like a carnival of things to do, with constant asides delving into all that Like a Dragon can be.

Like a Dragon Gaiden has games, laughs, tears, and brawls where characters dramatically reveal their resplendent back tattoos. It does what a new Like a Dragon entry needs to do, and tees up some big emotional moments for its longtime series lead along the way. If you want a deep story with twists and turns, this may not be all you hope for. But if you run off the beaten path to get a model AiAi out of the UFO Catcher, this should more than tide you over to Infinite Wealth.

The post Review: Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name appeared first on Destructoid.

Remedy is known for its weird and subversive games. However, what is less acknowledged is just how frequently the studio has significantly influenced and changed the industry.

Max Payne popularized bullet time in video games, while Control was one of the most complex implementations of ray tracing at its launch. With Alan Wake 2, Remedy has done it yet again, this time with its narrative, offering a mind-bending postmodern experience that goes places no other gaming story has.

Alan Wake 2 (PC, PS5 [reviewed], Xbox Series X/S)
Developer: Remedy Entertainment
Publisher: Epic Games Publishing
Released: October 27, 2023
MSRP: $59.99

Welcome to Bright Falls!

In my Review in Progress, I went quite in-depth regarding the gameplay, visuals, and audio. After completing the sequel, my opinion only improved, and I'm convinced that Alan Wake 2 is one of the best-looking games you can get your hands on today.

There are so many gorgeous moments that make me curse the absence of photo mode. When Saga's exploring Bright Falls at dusk, the setting sun gives everything a deep red hue, and the light reacts to the environment in astonishingly realistic ways. In the Dark Place, I was treated to an interesting medley of lights and baroque architecture. Rainy, isolated streets and grimy subways set an eerie, nightmarish mood that's nonetheless irresistibly beautiful.

I've spent more time toying around with both Quality and Performance mode, and I've noticed that the framerate isn't as stable as I initially thought. It's especially evident when you dodge as Alan and the framerate suddenly tanks. On the same note, Remedy just released another hefty patch, so these hiccups are probably on their way out.

With Alan Wake 2, Remedy aimed to set new graphical benchmarks. That goal has inarguably been achieved. The studio teamed up with longtime partner Nvidia, and the game is one of the first to feature the "new Ray Reconstruction feature in DLSS 3.5." It also pushes boundaries with its gameplay, using the fast SSD to load new environments rapidly, which makes traveling between the regular world and the Mind Place/Writer's Room seamless.

Compared to its predecessor, gameplay improvements are bountiful but still not fantastic. About halfway through my playthrough, I slid the difficulty down to Story mode because I wanted to get past the combat as fast as possible and get back to exploration and progressing the story. The encounters with the few bosses were mostly forgettable, with perhaps the last boss being the exception.

However, where Alan Wake 2 does succeed lies in its horror — exploring eerie environments make the moment-to-moment trudge forward a delight. The jump scares felt like a jolt of electricity that kept me on edge, and there were several moments where I opened a door or turned a corner and was not prepared for what I encountered.

The story is a monster

My last report also mentioned Alan Wake 2 was still throwing plenty of surprises my way, and that never changed. After finishing the game, I'm left stunned by what Remedy crafted. Its postmodern narrative pushes forward storytelling within the medium, and while it's not perfect, it's impossible to hate a game that sincerely has something to say.

I found myself captivated by the idea of the Dark Place and its intimate relationship with creativity and the arts. As the story unfolded, it became evident that the Dark Place was a fan of swallowing up artists in particular. However, it is also through art that one has a hope of escaping the corrupting Dark Place. The Dark Place also has a negative influence on Alan's writing, twisting it into something more depraved than he ever wanted.

The overall writing will be divisive. Alan's internal monologues tend to be long, flowery, and dramatic. I liked it, but it's easy to see how some will find it pretentious. The sequel also effectively builds up perfectly punctuated moments of tension, making you ache for answers to the mysteries raised. Most of the sequences involve surprising twists that are almost impossible to predict. Others are left dangling, but more on that later.

A love letter to the arts

Part of what makes Alan Wake 2 stand out among the cornucopia of AAA hits released this year is just how much genuine passion exudes from it. Of course, the game is beholden to capitalistic demands. It was funded by Epic Games Publishing, and as a result, it's an Epic Games Store exclusive title on PC. Furthermore, there have been no physical copies released on any platforms to cut down on costs.

None of this gets in the way of what is evidently a sincere love of the arts. Almost every medium gets some appreciation in Alan Wake 2. With its two protagonists and survival horror gameplay, it pays homage to the Resident Evil franchise, a cornerstone of the gaming industry. Heavy movie references are plentiful, with The Shining being one of the biggest influences. The Oceanview Hotel is reminiscent of the film's Overlook Hotel, and the winding road Saga drives down seems borrowed from Stanley Kubrick's film based on Stephen King's horror novel.

There are also several literary allusions present. Most notably, the game features a postmodern narrative that blends horror with the detective genre. It's set in New York, and features an artist whose true identity is questioned as the plot progresses. This closely follows Paul Auster's City of Glass, which also features a New York detective with a plot that bends back on itself and eventually features Auster himself. It shouldn't be a surprise to see Auster elements pop up, as Remedy's Sam Lake has named the author as an influence.

Music maintains just as much prominence in Alan Wake 2, with prophetic lyrics and melodies integrated into gameplay at several points. On this front, the Poets of the Fall are of great aid, and they assist in bringing a chapter that manages to surpass Control's Ashtray Maze. There are also several more obscure art forms you'll find littered throughout the game, such as photography and graffiti with subliminal messaging.

The end result is an eclectic mix of influences that coalesce to form a unique and often weird experience that only Remedy could pull off.

A vain nightmare

The passion poured into Alan Wake 2 is evident. Everything from the music to the visuals to the live-action performances are top-notch, and with this game, Remedy has once again solidified itself as an industry leader. Nevertheless, there are certain points where the passion seems to cross over into vanity, and the overall experience becomes a little too navel-gazey.

This occurs with the appearance of Sam Lake, who you'll see as Alex Casey and also as himself. You'll also be hearing the word "Lake" a lot, which isn't a coincidence. As the plot progressed and Alan went through the anxieties of being a writer and crafting the perfect ending, it became increasingly harder to determine whether I was playing a game about Alan or a game about Lake.

The experience is not just Lake-obsessed. It's also very Remedy-obsessed. It's easy to overlook if you aren't familiar with past titles from the studio, but the references included go far beyond the Remedy Connected Universe and include titles like Max Payne. Alex Casey really looks and acts like Payne, and you're constantly reminded of this.

These moments pulled me out of the game and reminded me I was consuming a work of fiction. That may have been the point, but it's a little too heavy-handed.

It's not a loop, it's a spiral

Alan Wake 2 is a survival horror game with heavy mystery elements. This is highlighted by the detective gameplay elements that have you piecing together clues and collecting information on different characters.

The point of most detective stories is to finally solve the case and reach a satisfying conclusion. Remedy, not being one to follow conventions, subverts expectations and provides an ending that strips all the events prior of their weight and leaves you with a cliffhanger.

On some level, it's understandable why the choice was made. Alan Wake is being molded into a franchise, so there needs to be a bridge from this game to the next. However, it would have been satisfying if the game stuck to its guns and given us a conclusive ending, sans the post-credits scene.

Ultimately, the ending didn't stick the landing, but it wasn't enough to ruin the experience — just dampened my overall perspective. After so many brave and iconoclastic choices, it was disappointing to see the finale take such a safe and conventional route.

After spending a week with Alan Wake 2 and finally seeing the credits, I can say that it's one of my favorite titles in an extremely competitive year. Not only has it redefined what I believe video game narratives are capable of, but it also left me invigorated to see how Remedy will innovate once again.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Alan Wake 2 appeared first on Destructoid.

After I finished downloading WarioWare: Move It, I booted it up in handheld mode and was met with a warning screen: yep, I completely forgot that it was a motion control-only game. My journey afterward was rife with peril, but the weirdness and general ingenuity of this series alleviated most of those frustrations.

WarioWare: Move It! (Switch)
Developer: Intelligent Systems
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: November 3, 2023
MSRP: $49.99

To be clear, yes, WarioWare: Move It (if you couldn't tell from the name) is a motion control-only affair. For story mode, you'll be using two Joy-Con in tandem for each player (to a maximum of two), and for the 2-4 player party mode, each person will be tied to one total Joy-Con. They're referred to as "Form Stones" in the lore, and they fit like a glove.

As usual, WarioWare: Move It's story mode begins with Wario being an asshole, and winning a trip to an island paradise for him and 20 of his friends (read: the entire cast and crew of the WarioWare series). After causing a ruckus he ends up being cursed by a shrine, with all of his other compatriots joining in on island adventures of their own (that occasionally cross paths with one another).

The setup and setting are a blast. Yes, it's ridiculous, but the over-the-top voice acting, vibrant island visuals, and the typical unpredictable nature of the series all funnel into a constant sense of discovery. You never truly know what lies around the corner with this game, and I only hit a wall when certain poses are introduced. Let's talk about poses in detail, because they're the core pillar of the entire game.

The Big Cheese is the Dark Souls of poses

While trying to complete microgames (the 10-second or less minigames that the series is known for), you'll need to perform specific "poses" to properly negotiate the aforementioned motion controls. For instance, early poses involve very simple concepts, like holding the Joy-Con above your head (Sky Stretch) or to your side (Choo Choo).

As you progress these poses get a bit more complicated, like stacking two Joy-Con vertically to form a sword (Knight), or putting them side by side horizontally to mime a game of tug-of-war. Some poses even force you to drop the Joy-Con; so yes, Joy-Con straps (I hope you kept them!) are a soft requirement for WarioWare: Move It. I assume at least one person reading this is groaning. I'm just the messenger!

Seriously though, your mileage will vary on each individual pose. While Move It gallantly intros each of them with a brief 30-second tutorial, some of them require further study. There were poses where I picked them up on the first try and they instantly clicked. For a few, it took me a handful of attempts to actually get it right, and even then, there were occasional mishaps. For several contentious poses, I questioned why they even existed in the first place.

Once things do click though, the multi-form challenge runs get appropriately hectic. Like learning a VR control scheme for the first time, there is a true novelty to "weird motion controls," and putting one Joy-Con on your nose and another on your "rear" (as the game calls it) for a chicken pose (titled Ba-KAW) is just funny. When said pose actually works the first time, it's a blast.

Some of them are going to get on your nerves. For me, it was the "Big Cheese," which involves sticking out your chest, straddling your legs, and putting the Joy-Con to your sides. No matter how much I tried the motion controls for this pose felt inaccurate, and story levels that required it were a huge pain.

I'm sure someone else will acclimate very quickly to Big Cheese, and find Ba-KAW to be the real problem child. You may even have Joy-Con sensing issues that inadvertently impact your performance. That's inherently part of the experience, and the gamble Nintendo took with forced motion controls in 2023.

Party mode has its ups and downs

So that's the gist of how the story mode plays out. Here's a brief overview of each core party mode (again, for 2-4 players), so you have an idea of what to expect:

• Galactic Conquest - A board game affair with longer minigames. This one is so silly it gives Mario Party a run for its money. In one match I was taken back to the beginning, forced to give half my points to another player, then taken back to the beginning again in subsequent turns. In another game I made it near the end, then stepped on a space that randomly swapped the goal with the starting point, forcing me to instantly lose. The minigames are a blast, but you absolutely cannot go into his mode with the mentality of taking it seriously.
• Medusa March - A fast-paced microgame marathon that also has the added wrinkle of "freezing" in place to avoid the stare of a Medusa boss. This one is good for getting a lot of reps in and is fairly innocent.
• Go the Distance - An old-fashioned PVP slugfest that mainly runs through microgames in quick succession.
• Listen to the Doctor - This childlike "Simon Says"-esque game requires an honor system mentality. You're still playing microgames, but a "doctor" NPC will tell you to do something silly, like apologize while attempting to win. Other players will then vote on whether or not you actually did it. I generally avoid this one, even with a small child, because it's so hectic that it's tough to discern what the other player is doing (especially with some of the more subtle requirements).
• Who's in Control? - This 2v2-only game ensures that smaller groups straight up will never play it, but the premise is fun enough, and reminiscent of the "spot the fake" trend that took off with Among Us. A team attempts microgames as a duo, with one person trying to actually win, and another faking it. The opposing team needs to spot the fake.

As always party mode is mostly a vessel for microgame delivery, but some folks are going to be alienated by the limitations of the mode itself. Remember this is a "2-4 player" gametype, and WarioWare: Move It is sadly lacking in solo consideration. While party mode inherently caters to groups by design, prior games did have more concessions for solo play.

I'm always game for more WarioWare, even if some of the choices are suspect

Even with the hangup of motion controls, when your daughter is laughing hysterically while playing, you know the WarioWare team did something right. Look, I love that characters like Mona and Joe still exist, and decades later, anyone cares about them enough to keep putting them in a first party Nintendo game. While the motion control issues are going to be polarizing in theory and in practice, I had a blast getting to see this cast in action again.

Most WarioWare fans will likely want to pull the trigger on this one, but I don't blame you for being wary. There's a lot of give and take here, especially with the heavy motion focus.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: WarioWare: Move It! appeared first on Destructoid.

The "wholesome games" subgenre has quickly become an overcrowded one with plenty of indie developers vying to create the next cozy hit game.

It can be annoying to see the trend being done to death, but it does illustrate that there is a genuine desire for non-violent games that calm you instead of stressing you out. Jusant is another one of those games, and it's a title you shouldn't ignore. I'd previously played the demo and was mildly impressed. After playing the full game, my opinion has only grown more positive, and I'm in love with Don't Nod's little experiment.

Jusant (PC [reviewed], PS5, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Don't Nod
Publisher: Don't Nod
Released: October 31, 2023
MSRP: $24.99

Make the desert bloom

"Jusant" is a French word used in the maritime world, and it refers to ebbing tides. It's a fitting name for Don't Nod's game, as it has you climbing a tall tower. As you ascend, you catch a greater glimpse of a sprawling ocean bed reaching toward the horizon. The name also works on a metaphorical level because your ascent has you uncovering the secrets of a past civilization, like an ocean receding to reveal the seabed beneath.

Don't let the name fool you into thinking you're in for a pretentious experience. Jusant is nothing like that. The game is exceedingly simple, and it strips you of everything but the essentials. You have your rope, your pitons, and your backpack, which is inhabited by a blob of water you encounter after an hour or two of play. The little blue guy is adorable, and he helps you out by causing flowers to bloom or fireflies to carry you.

As previously stated, you have a massive tower to conquer. Though you can play with a keyboard and mouse, playing with a controller makes for a far more immersive experience. You use the L2 and R2 triggers to control the protagonist's hands, and in doing so, you end up experiencing the same feeling of strain and exhaustion as the climber as you search for the next handhold.

Much of the challenge comes from the fact that your ascent isn't always straightforward. There are environmental obstacles to overcome, and these turn Jusant into a meditative puzzle game. Sometimes, you'll have to stick a piton to your rope and do a wall run to reach the next ledge. In other instances, you're required to rappel down and swing across a gap.

The puzzle aspects of the game are challenging without being frustrating. There were a few spots that brought me to a screeching halt, and I had to go through a bit of trial and error before I finally figured out what was required. None of it ever annoyed me, however, and with every attempt, I felt like I was learning something new.

Part of what makes the experience so pleasurable is the fact that the basic elements of the puzzles are simple. You either have to use your water blob, or wall run, or swing, or some combination of these moves. If you get stuck, slow down and look carefully at the environment. The way forward isn't always intuitive, and some pathways are red herrings that lead to dead ends.

Subtle, simple, and sweet

For most of the game, you'll be playing in relative silence, with only a few natural sounds and your footsteps and panting as your soundtrack. This is ideal, as it puts you in a meditative state of mind. Its use of silence makes it the perfect game to throw on when you're listening to a podcast, or if you want to unwind for half an hour before bed. There's also no voice acting, which means that the narrative unfolds through environmental storytelling and occasional collectible notes.

Visually, Jusant continues its simple but sweet design. It has a colorful, rounded art style that gives it a bit of a childhood fantasy feeling. Though the entire game takes place on the tower, there is a surprising variety of environments. My favorite environment is found in Chapter 4, which takes place mostly indoors where there are fireflies and enchanting lights.

You have a wide range of visual options, allowing the game to run on almost any rig. I managed to get Jusant running flawlessly on the Steam Deck with almost all settings cranked up to High or Maximum, and I was still able to maintain a solid 30 FPS.

The game doesn't break any graphical barriers, but it's certainly not an ugly game. On the contrary, you're often treated to breathtaking views as you reach new peaks, and sometimes you'll unlock short cutscenes that show off the gorgeous environments. I advise you to play Jusant slowly and take in all the beautiful sights.

Blemished but not broken

Jusant does a lot of things right, but it is not without its flaws. Most notably, when jumping from one ledge to the next, it's not always easy to angle yourself correctly for the leap. Sometimes, you'll find yourself leaping backward, causing you to waste precious stamina.

The game could also benefit from introducing a little more environmental storytelling. In a game like Shadow of the Colossus, for example, the remaining architecture and relics speak volumes about the sensibilities of the civilization and the dangers they faced. The environments of Jusant feel generic and cartoonish at times, rather than the shadow of a past society. Consequently, the mystery driving you forward is weakened.

Get lost in the flow

Jusant is not perfect, but it makes an impression. It has a playtime of around 6 to 10 hours, depending on how fast you play and how quickly you figure out the path up. It's worth playing for those moments when everything goes right, which is fortunately often.

You experience these moments after an arduous climb that has you falling multiple times and trying different routes to overcome a stupid rock in your path. With only slivers of stamina left, you clasp onto the final ledge, hoist yourself up, and your sweaty hands can finally let go of the triggers. A picturesque view greets you, accompanied by nothing but the low whistle of a calm breeze. Everything feels right.

The concept of "flow" was first outlined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and it describes a state of mind when you're completely immersed in what you're doing. Time disappears and it feels like you're in the zone. The common example often given to describe this mental state is the climber who doesn't need to think about what he does next — he simply moves.

You can capture that feeling in Jusant if you allow yourself to get lost in the flow of gameplay. Before you know it, you'll be at the peak, and all the sweat and setbacks will feel worth it.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Jusant appeared first on Destructoid.

After I played the demo of RoboCop: Rogue City earlier this month, I mentioned I had never watched the RoboCop sequels. Because of recommendations from the comments on that article, I finally watched RoboCop 2, and I’m glad I did.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t as good as the original, but it still had worthwhile parts. The biggest issue, though, is its resolution. It spends a lot of its runtime setting up interesting narrative threads that all begin converging, and then they just wrap it up with a boss battle. The end.

RoboCop: Rogue City has a lot of problems, but it also has a great deal of spectacular successes. Chief among them is the fact that it grabs a lot of the dangling threads of RoboCop 2 and finally gives them the resolutions they deserve. There’s bad news, however. The developer, Teyon, also acknowledges and sets up for RoboCop 3, and I cannot condone anyone legitimizing that mistake. We should erase that mistake.

RoboCop: Rogue City (PC [Reviewed], Xbox Series X|S, PS5)
Developer: Teyon
Publisher: Nacon
Released: November 2, 2023
MSRP: $59.99

As I alluded to, RoboCop: Rogue City is a game that falls smack between RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3. It ties up loose ends of the former and leads into the events of the latter. It involves the eponymous cyborg trying single-handedly hold the city of Detroit together while navigating the fact that his creator, Omni Consumer Products, is the city’s single biggest threat.

If you’re unfamiliar with the series, it’s about police officer Alex Murphy who, after being brutally killed by thugs, is resurrected as an unstoppable cyborg by the morally bankrupt OCP. I respect 1987’s RoboCop for its nuance. At the forefront, it's a fun, R-Rated movie for the whole family. However, it is an absolute lasagna of themes that include (but are not limited to) what makes us human, the dangers of profit-driven overreach, and the role of law enforcement in modern society. It’s really good stuff, and the dumb name actually plays into its corporate themes.

I’ve always believed that RoboCop, much like Superman, would be a difficult subject to authentically adapt to the video game medium. The character is a garbage truck on legs. He’s practically unstoppable. On top of that, his fastest walking speed is “stroll.” However, Teyon looked at this, thought it was awesome, and somehow created an effective game around it.

Testikills

When the guns come out, RoboCop: Rogue City is focused on making you feel every bit as unstoppable as Alex Murphy. There is very little visual feedback to damage, even when a grenade explodes at your feet. The first real warning that your armor is starting to crack hits when you’re at 20% health.

The Auto9 pistol you are constantly equipped with never runs out of ammo and never stops being your most effective weapon. A headshot always kills unless the enemy is wearing a helmet, and in those cases, you can just shoot them in the dick for an instant takedown. Heads explode like ripe melons, splattering marinara sauce in all directions. If you’re feeling sassy, you can grab thugs and hurl them at their friends or punch them to send them bowling down the corridor. You can grab explosive-adjacent items and hurl them into groups of thugs. There is also a slew of skills you can upgrade that give you some truly cruel extra combat abilities.

It’s excessive, and it’s awesome. However, it runs the risk of becoming stale after a while, since challenge is obviously not a primary concern here. Most of your combat options are unnecessary, making RoboCop: Rogue City a clearly dumb shooter.

But rather than take creative liberties with Murphy’s abilities, Teyon took a smarter approach to the gameplay: it’s not only about shooting.

Guns, guns, guns

RoboCop: Rogue City has more in common with Deus Ex than a standard cinematic FPS. While there are sections of the game where you mostly just blast your way through linear environments, you’re often set free in more open areas where you spend time investigating, exploring, and completing sidequests.

There’s a lot to like when it comes to Rogue City’s narrative. While it takes a lot of story beats from the movies, it very effectively focuses on Alex Murphy grappling with his identity. A lot of it involves him trying to prove his humanity, in the face of many referring to him as a product facing obsolescence. During this, he grapples with his memories in the form of “glitches,” which was touched on in the second movie and then never resolved. As a player, you make choices regarding his association with OCP and who Murphy chooses to affiliate with. You can stick to Alex Murphy’s established character or just go full RoboDick if you’d prefer. There are multiple endings based on your decisions.

It’s perhaps the characters that give the narrative its real beating heart. Murphy is explored in depth, but he also interacts with original characters who each have their own arc. Even secondary characters, like many of Murphy’s fellow officers, are given names and personalities. People who you help, even ones that make only minor appearances, often show up later in the game, which gives you a constant feeling of familiarity.

The dialogue is full of the characteristic wit of the films, with satirical scenes like drug dealers explaining supply and demand to someone undercutting their pricing. There are softer scenes, like when Murphy is assisting a police informant with finding a movie in a rental store. Like the stories on which it is based, there’s a lot to dig into.

Somewhere, there is a crime happening

However, despite all the ways that Rogue City impressed me, it’s hard to miss how janky the whole product is. Even from a presentation standpoint, it's extremely inconsistent. Dialogue scenes have stilted animations that harken back to games from over a decade ago. Some of the cutscenes are reasonably well done, while others look terrible. Many of the characters are recognizable facsimiles of the ones in the movies, but the voices are often jarringly off, like the actors are straining to try and imitate them.

Peter Weller reprises his role as RoboCop, however, which is well done and just feels so right.

Gunplay also tends to get a bit ridiculous. Everything is leaned to make you feel as powerful as possible, which sometimes manifests in strange ways. You can grab enemies, for example, and that brings their faces straight up to the screen where you can view their awkward and gross visages. The grab, in general, has a range of a few feet, so if you hit the button (say during a slow-motion part) and the enemy is a few paces away from you, they’ll be drawn into your hand by an unseen force. The ragdoll is ridiculous, and environmental animations aren’t much better. I found all this to be amusing and enjoyable, but if you’re used to playing big-budget games from large publishers, the lack of polish might seem like a sign of poor quality.

You call this a GLITCH!?

Worst of all, however, are the technical problems I ran into. The audio levels are all over the place, with some characters sounding quiet and far away when they’re talking to you. I found it to be a huge improvement if I was listening through headphones. What was most distracting was the texture streaming problems I had constantly. The ground in front of me would be a blob of low-resolution textures that slowly come into focus while I stared at them. During the dialogue, whenever the shot would reverse to another character, I’d be treated to their soft, blurry faces for a while until patches of their skin would start to be rendered in higher resolution.

I took various troubleshooting steps to try and fix this, both with the game’s settings and my own graphics card, and nothing had any effect. I can often overlook performance issues, but this was so annoying and distracting throughout the entire game. I’m not sure if this problem exists on console versions. Maybe it will even be fixed in some early patch for the game. But it marred my experience.

Come quietly, or there will be... trouble

I said in my preview of Rogue City that I was curious to maintain the quality present in the demo. It’s certainly true that it gets clumsier as it moves towards its climax, but weirdly, it never loses its focus. It still manages to surprise all through its runtime, and there’s always something new to keep you engaged. I was afraid the environments would become less interesting, the story would start being rushed, or the game would eventually drop its exploration aspect, but that never happened. I feel that one of the game’s best setpieces shows up very close to the end. Everything gets proper closure.

In a lot of ways, RoboCop: Rogue City is a better successor to the first movie than either of its sequels. I think the only downside that a lot of fans will find is that it was made by a relatively small developer and backed by a less prominent publisher. There’s a lot less gloss than you’d find overlapping at a typical “AAA” game, but that also makes it obvious to see the passion that went into it.

That’s sort of what it comes down to. I feel like RoboCop: Rogue City is a terrific game. To use the obvious reference: I’d buy that for a dollar. I can see myself playing through its 15-20 hours again, not necessarily to check out things I may have missed, but simply to re-experience the world it presents. I know that it almost looks like something that belongs in the scrap heap, but if you’re able to look past its rough exterior and exposed seams, you might see the heart that beats underneath. Teyon did a fantastic job with the resources they had, but they’re only human.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: RoboCop: Rogue City appeared first on Destructoid.

I can’t remember the last time I was as upset with a game as I am with Sonic Superstars.

I don’t talk about this enough, but growing up, I was a bit of a Sonic kid. There was a time when I considered Sonic 3 & Knuckles one of the greatest games of all time, and I’ve continued to appreciate it as time goes on. That title wasn’t just great because of its finely tuned platforming mixed with breakneck speed. It also offered memorable levels, amazing music, unique characters that offered replay incentive, and a story with twists and turns told without words.

Sonic games, at their best, are legendary. And when Sonic Mania came out back in 2017, the potential for another golden age of 2D Sonic games seemed tantalizingly real.

That brings us to Sonic Superstars, which has the key ingredients for a fantastic Sonic game. It has clean and charming visuals, some stellar music, and new innovations like Emerald Powers and four-player co-op. In fact, when I played a demo of it a few months ago, I actually really liked it! That slice of the game was wacky multiplayer fun, with levels that featured a lot of neat gimmicks. I’ve looked forward to playing Sonic Superstars since, and by the time I sat down with my controller in my hands, I was really in the mood for some good old classic Sonic.

This is not good old classic Sonic.

Sonic Superstars (PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 [Reviewed], Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Sonic Team, Arzest Corporation
Publisher: Sega
Released: October 17, 2023
MSRP: $59.99

Get a load of this

Sonic Superstars starts off well enough. The animated intro introduces our core cast of characters as well as our villains: Eggman, Fang, and what appears to be some robot. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy are all playable from the outset, and they all control just how longtime fans would expect them to. The one slight exception is Amy, who sports her Sonic CD look and has a handy double jump. Sonic Superstars wants to evoke the Genesis Sonic games, and on a very superficial level, it succeeds.

Much fuss is often made about the physics of Sonic games, and Superstars feels basically right in this regard. Playing on my PS5, I couldn’t directly compare it with something like Mania. But movement felt at least roughly the way it should. Gimmicks like flying around as Tails felt familiar, so my muscle memory from the Genesis days was intact. It does seem like the game borrows its core physics from Mania, with its slight changes like Knuckles having a small delay when he falls on the ground. But with how good Mania was, I'm perfectly okay with this.

Even in its first level, Superstars leaves a generally strong impression. Listening to upbeat music while spin dashing through loop-the-loops felt great. That rhythm of slow platforming building up to those moments of sheer speed gave me that classic Sonic rush. Unfortunately, shortly after this, the cracks began to show all over Superstars’ design.

You’re not good enough to be my fake

Level design in Sonic Superstars is a persistent issue. Some believe Sonic games are about speed, but going fast and racking up rings is generally a reward. Those adrenaline rushes motivate you to brave trickier paths or tackle tough platforming challenges just to get to that next roller coaster. Meanwhile, in Sonic Superstars, I quickly found that the last thing I ever wanted to do was go fast.

I don’t mean through those scripted, speedy sections. Those were usually fine. But for much of the game, I found that maintaining even moderate speed consistently resulted in getting hit by something offscreen. Enemies and obstacles often appear in front of you without giving you enough time to react to them, resulting in cheap hits even when you think you’re in a safe section. Sonic Superstars is not a hard game; it’s just easy to get hit.

Superstars exasperates this issue with a few of its level-specific gimmicks as well. For example, in the jungle level, you'll grind down vines at high speeds. Great idea, except you can't enter your ball form, making you susceptible to any surprise enemies that pop up. In another level, a persistent countdown in the background will instantly kill you unless you hit switches throughout the level. So it's basically the mechanic of finding bubbles when you're underwater, except the distribution of those switches is really inconsistent. Even when you know the optimal path to go, juggling this mechanic doesn't really add anything other than another excuse to reset your progress.

Many levels just feel off, with uninspired gimmicks that seem like desperate attempts to make each level feel distinct. In fact, even some of those tightly scripted speedy sections spilled me right into spikes or obstacles. In classic Sonic games, I could eventually get into a sort of flow state where I was just engrossed in the level design and platforming. But with Superstars, I felt like the game always snapped me out of any groove I was on the verge of entering.

Chaos Control

Of course, Sonic Superstars has two new tools that should, in theory, counteract some of these rough edges. The first is the Emerald Powers, which you can earn whenever you find the hidden bonus stages in each zone.

I do quite like these in concept, honestly! Whenever you acquire one, you can equip a power using the right thumbstick and activate it with the press of a button. You can use each power once, and powers replenish whenever you hit a checkpoint. Some of these can be useful. For example, the power shown in the opening cinematic that makes several clones of your character rush across the screen works as a serviceable screen clear. The bullet power, which lets you repeatedly dash in any direction (including through the air), also has decent use cases.

However, in practice, many powers add functionally nothing. On screen prompts will inform you to, say, use the water power that lets you swim up waterfalls. Outside that context, that power might as well not even exist. Another power lets players reveal secret rings and platforms that wouldn’t appear otherwise. So, obviously, unless the game tells me to use it, I’d have no idea where to use this power since it reveals things I can’t see.

I wound up only rarely using Emerald Powers outside of those prompts. They’re nice in the situations you can make them work. But in general, this feels like a feature that solely exists to put something on the back of the box. I did use them occasionally during boss battles, but don’t worry, I’ll get to that can of worms later.

And we all did it together

Sonic Superstars' other major innovation is its inclusion of four-player co-op. Now, in my first impressions, I said that co-op in a 2D Sonic game is a fundamentally broken prospect. Superstars adds useful systems to make co-op play work, so it's certainly better than multiplayer Sonic 2 or 3. For example, a player left behind can instantly warp back to the location of whoever is further ahead. Unfortunately, despite my great first impressions of the demo, co-op play is impossible to recommend in the full game.

To test the multiplayer, I once again enlisted my girlfriend, who is somehow not sick of playing every platformer I want to review. Given that I’m at least a moderate Sonic fan and she’s only played the Genesis titles a few times as a kid, our results were mixed. She often felt frustrated by how easily she could get left behind, and she eventually had a hard time tracking where she was on the screen. When you try to play Superstars with people of varying skill levels, the multiplayer really falls off.

As she put it to me after our session, “I wouldn’t not play Sonic Superstars, but I wouldn’t offer to play it either.” Unfortunately, even if she wanted to continue our session, we would have run into some major issues.

Actually, it’s not really multiplayer

I originally planned to write about how Sonic Superstars works as a sort of pizza and beer (or soda for the kids) co-op game. You know, the type of chaos simulator where you and a friend can laugh off the rough edges and just enjoy some good company. Except Superstars quickly proves itself to be deliberately hostile towards its own multiplayer experience.

First of all, after you complete the campaign in Sonic Superstars, you can unlock a few extras to lengthen your total playtime. However, any and all gameplay you unlock after the fact is solo only. Additionally, even within the main campaign, you’ll be forced into single player levels regardless of whether or not you’re playing multiplayer. For a game that markets itself as a multiplayer experience, this is straight-up unacceptable. Anything good I could have said about Superstars as a co-op experience is nullified when so much content locks out your friend(s).

As it is, the game is vanishingly short if you play just the main campaign. My run, which involved collecting all the Chaos Emeralds, took me about six hours. I don't typically complain about how long a game is, but I can’t imagine dropping $59.99 on a game to play with friends just to get this little out of it. Could you replay it with different characters? Sure, I guess. But one playthrough may be enough for most, because it’s time to dive into the big problem with Sonic Superstars.

This game of tag is boring

The boss encounters in Sonic Superstars are straight-up unforgivable.

Many can argue whether boss encounters in classic Sonic games are good or not. For me, even in the most uncharitable of readings, bosses at least felt like quick skirmishes. Most don’t take that long, and even the more infamous bosses have memorable qualities. For example, is it cheap and unfair that the final boss of Sonic 2 can kill you in one hit? Yes. But the imposing music, the view from space, and the designs of Metal Sonic and the Death Egg Robot make for a tense climax. Additionally, once you "solve" the fight, you can clear both phases in about five minutes or so.

Conversely, Sonic Superstars bosses feature some of the most aggravating designs I’ve seen in a modern platformer. You’ll almost always start off in some kind of dodge phase, in which you have no ability to inflict damage. The boss will reveal some kind of vulnerability, you hit it, and then back to the dodge phase. Those dodge phases are consistently way too long, and generally just repeat the exact same mechanics until the boss is on its last legs. While some bosses provide a secondary moment of vulnerability, even perfect play makes these encounters drag to ridiculous degrees.

Now, you may think that doesn’t sound that bad. I mean, bosses in platformers typically go down in about three hits when they’re designed like this. Surely, they wouldn’t need double that amount of hits to go down, right? No sane development team would design bosses like that you’d need to hit six times, right?

Well, I’ve bamboozled you, because bosses in Sonic Superstars can take seven or eight hits to go down. Even the most mundane boss can take upwards of five minutes to finish, and you’ll find them at the end of almost every act.

You’re not the boss of me

To make matters worse, Sonic Superstars has one of the worst boss themes I've ever heard in a Sonic game. It sounds like a 10-second intro to a longer song that never got completed, so instead of finishing it, they added a key change to hide that it's looping over and over again. On the plus side, I found a glitch that actually stops the boss music from playing. I took advantage of this at every opportunity.

While I tried to just deal with the boss encounters, they actually got worse the longer I played. Once I had a hang of the game’s weird level design, I started to cruise through each Act quicker and quicker. But for the bosses, there's precious little you can do to speed them along. I realized that, in many cases, I was spending more time with the bosses than with the levels themselves.

Even the final boss of the regular campaign was so long and tedious that I practically screamed at my screen “Okay, I get it!” A moment that should have been exciting and climactic was instead something I just wanted to end. Meanwhile, a final boss in a mode that unlocks after the campaign was similarly repetitive, except it uses one-hit kill moves to reset you to the start of the ten-minute encounter. I typically like to clear these kinds of challenges just as a point of pride. But Superstars had already so thoroughly drained my patience that I just put down my controller and said "I'm good."

I can best describe Sonic Superstars as a game that at no point wants to offer an engaging challenge. Instead, it simply tries to make the player get hit or lose a life. It’s a type of difficulty I’d compare to dodging lightning 200 times in the Thunder Plains in Final Fantasy X. Instead of offering an interesting obstacle to overcome, it consumes so much time that the tension comes from the thought of repeating that agonizing gameplay again. It’s like the developers looked at that final boss of Sonic 2 and ignored everything aside from “kill player in one hit.”

Can't hold on much longer

The most deeply frustrating part of Sonic Superstars is that it does have moments of brilliance. Aside from the awful boss theme, several tracks in Sonic Superstars are genuinely fantastic. Additionally, individual levels can be really fun to play. Pinball Carnival and Cyber Station are generally great levels, with the latter having... well, one phase of a decent boss encounter. In certain moments, you can see the great game that Sonic Superstars could have been. That said, nine times out of ten, the game only ever feels this good when it’s borrowing tropes and ideas directly from past Sonic games.

The thought crossed my mind that Sonic Superstars feels like a Sonic fangame. But to say that would be an insult to the dedicated fanbase that has crafted absolutely excellent Sonic games through sheer love for the franchise alone. Sonic Mania proved that there are people who get Sonic. They understand what makes these games fun, what problems the games may have, and how to rekindle the magic that made 2D Sonic so amazing. By comparison, Sonic Superstars feels like something an AI would spit out if you told it to make a Sonic game. All of the bits and pieces are there, but it lacks the heart and passion that the classics had.

Frankly, Sonic Superstars feels like the first draft of a game that still needs a lot of fine-tuning. If you're a devoted Sonic fan, you may play Superstars and appreciate it for those occasional highs. If that is you, know that I have no hard feelings about you or your gaming tastes. My frustration lies solely with the fact that a 2D Sonic the Hedgehog game shouldn't stumble over itself like this. If anything, the moments I still managed to enjoy Superstars reinforced just how solid the Sonic formula is. Superstars just doesn’t cut it, and it’s hard to see so much potential squandered so carelessly.

Sonic Superstars is a game that understands the broad strokes of 16-bit Sonic games, but not any of the finer details. The new ideas it brings to the table are undercooked, and its multiplayer component is too poorly utilized to recommend. There are undoubtedly moments of genius here when everything lines up just right. But any goodwill I had for the game was ruined by the tedious, arduous boss battles. If you’re a Sonic fan who has thoroughly mastered the classics, you may find some entertainment here. But you deserve so much better than this.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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