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.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (PC, PS4, PS5 [reviewed], Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Rya Ga Gotoku Studio
Publisher: SEGA
Released: January 26, 2023
MSRP: $69.99

The introduction sequence for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is, quite honestly, fantastic. Starting out, directly after the events of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, we see Ichiban and the crew trying to enjoy a normal life after the Great Dissolution and ensuing drama. Ichiban does his best to support the rudderless yakuza struggling to earn a living as civilians, while also endearingly struggling in his own way, especially in the romance department.

It’s not long, though, until some ghosts of the past resurface. After bad actors rope Ichiban and co. into a sea of online controversy, our hero departs for Hawaii, where his long-lost mother, Akane, is thought to be hiding. Along the way, you’ll mostly hang out with familiar faces. Every cast member from Yakuza: Like a Dragon returns in some form, and the Geomijul’s Seonhee makes her playable debut in Infinite Wealth, alongside two newcomers: the compromised cabbie Eric Tomizawa and Chitose Fujinomiya, a maid Akane contracted for help.

The story takes many, many twists and turns, and it wouldn’t really make sense to dig too deep into the specifics. Suffice to say, it doesn’t take long for a seemingly simple trip to Hawaii to escalate into the kind of antics you’d expect from Like a Dragon. Secret underground areas, sudden betrayals and double-crosses, and of course, shirtless fist fights with back tattoos bared are all part of the Yakuza charm, and none of that is missing here.

Some of Infinite Wealth’s highest highs are in these story moments, especially for the individual characters. Yakuza: Like a Dragon roped me in fast with its cast of older characters, going through extremely relatable life struggles amid all the chaos, and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth still captures that. Both Tomizawa and Chitose make excellent additions to the crew, while now-veterans Nanba, Saeko, and Adachi get plenty to work with, too. Heck, Joongi Han and Zhou – who arrive fairly late in Y:LAD – get plenty of character building in Infinite Wealth.

Let me buy you drink

Personalities and relationships really shine thanks to the Bond system, an overarching mechanic where party members can spend time with the protagonist to talk about their lives. Drink Links and growing Bonds are back, with truly great moments tucked away in those side stories. Characters like Seonhee and Tomizawa have especially effective moments in their Drink Links, adding intimate narrative details on the side while chipping away at the big picture. 

The addition of Bond Bingo also does a lot, dropping a bevy of spots around town where you can start up little skits. They’re framed as one of the party members taking note of something, like their favorite food or a place that reminds them of a particular memory, which gets marked off on a big bingo board. The goal is to form bingos and earn a ton of Bond progress, but you’ll make a lot of Bond progress just by playing the game; the real draw is the dialogue, which is pretty great.

All these ways of getting to know characters, with such a large cast, can feel a tad overwhelming. Really, splitting the party helps a lot in managing the sheer breadth of narrative content Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth has. After some chapters together, Ichiban and Kiryu eventually split up and lead their own crews. The scope of the story ratchets up even further, as Kiryu starts to retrace his many, many steps through Ijincho and Kamurocho as part of his own journey, too.

As was revealed in the story trailer for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Kiryu has been diagnosed with cancer, and a major facet of his own journey sees him revisiting the past. Some of this means simply interacting with particular locations, where Kiryu can reflect on memorable events from previous Yakuza games, while others are much more involved quests.

Limitless greed

Substories also return, growing quite lengthy in some cases, making for even more ways to lose track of the hours in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. My map was constantly filled with icons noting activities I could take on, all of them building up the various numbers I had, whether it was my party’s level and stats, the money in my pockets, or all the different personality traits that Ichiban builds up over time.

I haven’t even broached the subject of some of the larger minigames. The monster-catching Sujimon minigame is back, with on-the-map raids similar to recent Pokemon titles. Trainers are all over Hawaii waiting for a challenge, and there’s even a story quest involving fighting the aptly named “Discreet Four.” Building up a potent Sujimon party and taking down the best trainers around is its own adventure.

And then there’s Dondoko Island, Ryu Ga Gotoku’s version of Animal Crossing that has Ichiban cleaning up a trashed island and restoring it to resort status. It is, simply put, a really easy way to lose hours and hours of your time. I think I spent about three to four days of my review time with this game just on Dondoko Island, clearing out trash and building the island of my dreams. What was once a field with a single toilet in the middle of it soon became a bustling town, replete with food stalls and karaoke… and still, the toilet in the middle of it. It’s a landmark!

That said, it’s not all roses on Dondoko Island. The action combat doesn’t feel particularly great, and there’s a lot of it. And really, it’s a mode that feels like it’ll be best to revisit throughout the journey, rather than breeze through in one go. Eventually, visitors can start going to the island, and you’ll need to manage their wants and needs in an almost tycoon-style fashion. Getting some of the better, and more fun, visitors means finding them back in the open world of the main game, and progressing both the main story and various substories.

Plus, have I mentioned yet how big this world is? Not just with things to do, but in actual size. RGG added a segway for Ichiban and crew to travel around on, and really, it’s a helpful tool. Exploring the open world is highly encouraged; it’s where you grind battles for EXP and cash, it’s where you can hit the Square button (or your platform equivalent) to throw up the shaka and gain new friends to add more Aloha Links, and it’s where you stumble on items, substories, and more.

Even just Honolulu itself is big, and there’s still the addition of Ijincho and Kamurocho, too. It's a hefty game, in all senses. You can throw darts, try your luck on a dating app, play shogi or blackjack or koi koi, and even play a bike delivery game with a bunch of nods to its Crazy Taxi inspirations. Heck, just go to an arcade and play Sega Bass Fishing or Spike Out, or play online matches of Virtua Fighter 3tb.

Big world, small people

I stress the expanse of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth because this series has, in its own way, always been big and full of strange side attractions. Yakuza is no stranger to odd side games that eat up tons of time, from taxi driving to cabaret management, and that knob is turned all the way to 11. Usually, the appeal of Yakuza is that it has all this ridiculousness, but underneath both the explosive action and excessive side activities, there’s a beating heart of characters and story. Infinite Wealth still has that heart, but it misses in some tangible places.

As I said before, each character gets their time in the spotlight. Ichiban felt a bit second-fiddle to Kiryu, whose history and legacy are felt throughout his sections, but even still, Kasuga is every bit the lovable Dragon Quest-obsessed guy that he was in his debut game. Moments of this game where we get to see characters from through its history, past and present, interacting are instant highlights.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth has a bit of a villain problem, though. Mostly in that its antagonists are both numerous, and aren’t quite as compelling or charismatic as the main cast. A few are your regular aggressors, the guys you fight a few times over the course of the game, and others are the ones waiting in the wings. But really, it felt like a few of the antagonistic forces just fall flat in the end.

This extends to the main plot, which can stifle a dramatic moment or two with some lackluster plot beats. Some characters and plot lines feel like they appear and disappear just for the benefit of moving the party from one location to another. I like the broad strokes of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s story, but it didn’t have that focused ramp-up I enjoyed in some of the series’ best narratives, like say, Yakuza 0 or Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

Ultimately, the best plot moments outside the chapter-ending climaxes are those Drink Links and side stories, where individual characters and stories can shine. The world of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is huge, but it's the moments that narrow down to a pinpoint that stuck with me most.

A second turn

When it comes to combat, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth shows that Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio must have been listening and taking feedback on Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s systems. Broadly, it feels like an upgrade in almost every way, while keeping much of the same spirit alive.

Characters can now move within a set range on their turn, eliminating some of the awkwardness around lining up attacks and AoEs. In fact, more movement – combined with the potency of knockbacks, back attacks, and other environmental enhancers – really makes the battles of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth feel more alive and active. I still had one or two moments where I was awkwardly trying to angle something just right, or would perform a knockback only for my teammate to watch the enemy fall down instead of adding a follow-up hit. But controlling the arena feels like a much more doable task in Infinite Wealth.

Additionally, the breadth of Tag Team and special moves, as well as the new jobs and Skill Inheritance system that lets job skills carry over, all form a wonderful playground for building a party. It’s still a pain to have to return to the job store – Alo-Happy, a tour company, in this game – to swap out roles. And it’s a real bummer that jobs are still gender-locked. While the guys have some support options, and the gals get one of my favorite new jobs in the Agility-focused Kunoichi, it still seems odd there aren’t some overlapping jobs between them. I don’t really see why Chitose can’t surf or shoot guns, or why Tomizawa can’t pick up the bucket and mop for a cleaning gig.

Still, battles in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth are extremely good, with plenty of wild characters to fight and tough bosses to take down. While there’s a small bit of relying on the hits later on, even the ways in which Infinite Wealth remixes expectations from Yakuza: Like a Dragon is really fun.

One of the best ways is Kiryu’s ultimate move, which lets him unleash the beast and lash out in beat ‘em up form, turning the turn-based RPG into a Yakuza brawler for a short span of time. It’s one of the cleverest mechanics in this game, that really shows how confident RGG feels with their RPG systems, and it’s used to incredible effect.

It’s a real testament that, even after rolling credits, I’m still eager to unlock more roles and grind out more challenges in the battle system. Where Yakuza: Like a Dragon certainly felt like a game that rewarded smart play and good planning, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth feels like RGG taking a system built on inspirations and confidently making it their own. There are still some wrinkles to iron out – please, add a way of opting out of weapon attacks in favor of basic strikes – but largely, RGG has the combat down on the second time around.

If you’re coming to Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth for a massive RPG that packs in all that RGG Studio has ever offered into one package, this is that game. It’s titanic, yet it’s still got some character heart down below. And just the draw-in alone of seeing these characters laugh, learn, and fight alongside each other will be worth the ticket price for longtime RGG fans. I’d worry newcomers would feel quite lost at some points, even if they can broadly follow the story beats.

Yet I do still have some nitpicks and drawbacks, around the broad plot, the villains, and even how well some of the minigames stack up to others. (I found the Tinder-like dating app to be a really strange, opaque game compared to the relatively straightforward FMV dating in Like a Dragon Gaiden.) I really like broad pieces of this game, but with so much here, some portions feel way more fleshed out, and others feel like they drag the median down. Even the game’s conclusion ends rather abruptly, and with a bow-tie that feels a bit hastily wrapped.

Among the wealth of Like a Dragon games we’ve had over the last year or so, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is easily the stand-out for me. It’s still got a lot of what I love from this series, and I think anyone looking for a good follow-up to Yakuza: Like a Dragon will find it here. The second time around doesn’t feel quite as revolutionary, but this is still an island vacation I wouldn’t turn down. Some time spent in the sun with Ichiban and crew is always time well spent.

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

The post Review: Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth 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.

Crime is a slippery slope. One minute you're evading taxes and the next you're joining a gang and pulling off the biggest heist of your little veggie life. That's where we're at now in Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, a sequel that delivers a heist both sprawling and suitably snack-sized.

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion launched in 2021 as a cute and snappy Zelda-style adventure, clocking in at a breezy couple hours at best. It came off as both sendup and parody, frequently breaking the fourth wall in an almost "I'm a little nervous to be a video game" manner. Flash forward a few years and we're clearly working with a more confident team at developer Snoozy Kazoo. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank doesn't exactly turn the concept of the first game on its head, but it goes about its structure in a more novel and cleverly disguised way.

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank (PC [reviewed], Switch, Xbox)
Developer: Snoozy Kazoo
Publisher: Graffiti Games
Released: January 18, 2024
MSRP: $14.99

The heat is on

Gone are the halcyon days of traipsing through the Weapon Woods, passing sundry items from veggies to fruits and back again, and brazenly ripping federal documents in twain. If Tax Evasion is a bite-sized riff on The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is Phantom Hourglass and the Botanical Bank is the Temple of the Ocean King.

After linking up with the Pickled Gang, Turnip Boy quickly starts the loop of crashing their van into the bank, snatching as much primo loot as possible, and escaping before the timer runs out and the peach fuzz drops in full force. Prepare to get very familiar with this place, because outside of the single-room hideout it’s the only location in the game. 

When I busted into the bank for my first few runs, I got the impression that this was going the procedurally-generated route. Turnip Boy does tout its roguelite elements, after all. That's not the case, though, and the bank is carefully designed and laid out such that you'll soon know every loot-filled corner like the back of your hand. The act of going deeper and deeper into what is, in actuality, a very simple and straightforward map is key to Turnip Boy's appeal. After the first dozen or so times you ram through those walls, the sense of familiarity becomes refreshing and the desire to find something new is invigorating. It doesn't hurt that it all goes down to the tune of a thumping soundtrack that's a far-cry from the quaint earworms of the first game.

Outside of this core loop, the progression system is actually pretty similar to Tax Evasion, with various food-based critters asking Turnip Boy for increasingly absurd favors. Some of them can be handled fetch-quest style, but the bulk of the problems can be solved by absconding with enough dough to buy new items from the dark web. Costs increase as you open up more of the bank, but so do the spoils as you reach the depths of what this mighty money bin has to offer.

Mr. Shakedown

Getting the goods goes beyond a little smash 'n grab action. You'll blow up vaults with C4, chisel statues to unveil the hidden gems within, and approach hostages to literally shake the coins and bills out of their shallow little pockets. You'll end bank runs with a few thousand dollars early on, but by the end you'll be pulling in hauls in the hundreds of millions. There's plenty of opposition, from snails and bunnies to baton-wielding bacon and gun-toting donuts. There are even more ways to dispose of them, starting with a standard sword-and-gun combo and moving on to everything from fish to music-blasting conch shells, lasers, and a rocket launcher that would fit right in with the climax of a Resident Evil game. 

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank puts the lite in roguelite with some very surface level, but still effective, genre trappings. Most weapons are found in the wild, and you can spend some cash to up the odds of finding the good stuff. It's all random, so some bank runs will yield more effective results than others. Taking new discoveries back to the hideout will give you a chance to offer them to one of the Twins for weapon research. The more you raise your research level, the more weapons you'll find permanently added to your loadout options. 

There are maybe a couple moments I would describe as moderately annoying at most over the course of the 4-5 hour campaign, but the combat is never grating. Even if the mighty grenade launcher has you dying repeatedly to yet another culinary cop, there are a handful of combat difficulty options available from the very beginning. There are also plenty of accessibility options in terms of how you approach the meat of the action. If you just want to chew on the expanded Turnip Boy lore and revel in the late-game twists, you can toggle God Mode on and off at any time. You can also change the outlines of enemies and interactive items, raise or lower the damage you deal, and turn on auto aim and an aim laser for more precise shooting. 

Four main bosses await in the bank to test those shooting skills prior to the final showdown, none of which require much in the way of thinking to topple. At the very least, they provide an opportunity to serve up more of the Turnip Boy-brand humor established in the first game. This is one of the key areas in which the team is clearly more confident. Even when the jokes don't land, there's no collar-tugging reliance on references to tired video game tropes. Instead, Snoozy Kazoo doubles down on the absurdity with a small group of central characters, with the gruff and determined Dillitini guiding Turnip Boy through the labyrinth that lies ahead. 

Turnip the volume

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is a fast-paced steal 'em up that wears its purposefully repetitive hook on its sleeve. There's a genuine sense of discovery in these steel-reinforced walls, and it's nice to see Snoozy Kazoo improving upon the art of the first game to create a more unified pixel aesthetic that extends from the gameplay to the character art during dialogue exchanges. It’s also dumb as hell, which appeals to me in the most primitive way possible. 

I'm not quite sure how often I'll pay it a repeat visit, as the focus on earning money to purchase key items makes for a more predictable and rote means of making it from one area to the next. I'm very happy to have played it thoroughly at least once, though, and this vault is worth busting into regardless of whether or not you enjoyed the first round of food-based federal crimes. 

The post Review: Turnip Boy Robs a Bank 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.

It's been a while since I've felt as genuinely mixed over a game as I have for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. Coincidentally, the last game I felt this conflicted over was Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, but for dramatically different reasons, as the only things they have in common are the IP and unstable performance.

While the 2022 title was a horde shooter, Owlcat's take on the 40,000 universe is the first CRPG entry. It shares a lot in common with the developer's previous Pathfinder games but stands out in the library. Again, that's in positive and negative ways.

Rogue Trader is a brilliant game, but it could've been fantastic, and that's what's frustrating about it. For every shining quality, there's usually something tacked on detrimental to the overall experience. It's a grim, haunting journey for all of the right reasons given the universe, but a few tedious encounters and bugs made for some extraneous misery along the way.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (PC [reviewed], PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S)
Developer: Owlcat Games
Publisher: Owlcat Games
Released: December 7, 2023
MSRP: $49.99

A gothic interstellar adventure

Rogue Trader's premise sees players take on the titular title after inheriting it from a distant relative, Theodora. While the story initially has you tracking down Theodora's supposed killer, this deviates into a tale of life as a Rogue Trader.

Much of the plot after the first chapter revolves around humanity's conflicts with various Xenos species and the protagonist protecting their colonies. Rogue Trader's writing is by far its strongest trait, but it feels oddly paced as the story shifts from its initial premise for dozens of hours.

And while some of that drags, Rogue Trader does excel in its moment-to-moment writing, like in your interactions with Kronos Exapanse's inhabitants and other characters. Humans, like Argenta and Hendrix, who zealously serve the Imperium, do so with different approaches. While the former is gleefully devout, the other is coldly brutal, but what's clear is their dedication.

Even Xenos companions like Yrilet do a wonderful job coming off as truly alien beings despite being humanoid. As my primary romance, Yrilet led me down a surprisingly emotionally charged arc about breaking down cultural barriers and living with the grief of a life you can never return to. It's her little touches, along with phenomenal and distinct voicework from the cast, that really make Rogue Trader sing.

Supplemental details filling in what players can't or won't witness are woefully enchanting. When I'm not shown something happening, text descriptions weave their own flavorful tales that do the job just fine. Rogue Trader's most brutal scenes are often conveyed through text, and it serves its cruelty far better than any images of gore and violence would.

The mini-text adventures play with writing styles, framing my character's deeds and personality from several angles. For instance, one casts me as a powerful figure incapable of wrongdoing, while another voice seeks to turn me into prey. Seeing a massive passage ahead is always a treat, even if I do long for more voiced dialogue.

With the flexibility the Rogue Traders themselves have, some still feel railroaded down particular paths and assigned boxes — that's thanks to labeling certain choices Dogmatic, Iconoclast, and Heretical. Picking these options enforces the protagonist's worldview, with certain dialogue options opening up once far along these paths.

Those paths boil down to exactly what their names infer, too. Dogmatic choices reflect zealotry, while Heretical ones dictate clear rebellion. Iconoclast decisions reflect Heretical ones in that they deviate from norms, but typically for more selfless reasons. It's the path I went for since I tried to play as an outlaw who broke conventions for altruistic reasons.

It's akin to Mass Effect's Paragon and Renegade system, sharing its same ups and downs. After exploring all my options, there isn't much of a reason to deviate from the one ideology. If I stray too far, I risk endgame choices for little benefit. Conceptually, it's neat to tie that morality to gameplay, but yet again, it's limiting and robotic in practice.

Fighting in the Imperium's name!

As with Owlcat's previous games, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader uses turn-based combat, with all combatants using movement and action points. Managing your resource pool between choices to move around and attack grows more complex over time, as you're only allowed a single attack until later levels permit more.

The number of attacks also varies depending on a character's Archetype, Rogue Trader's class equivalents. While there are only a few, character backgrounds and skill variations within an Archetype offer significant flexibility. Those evolutions make characters shine, even if sharing some choices. The scoundrel Jae and voidship navigator Cassia might start as Officers ordering others around, but one can evolve into a frontline commander, while the other remains in the back focusing on buffs.

While that draws some parallels to Owlcat's Pathfinder games, Rogue Trader meaningfully expands on those efforts, particularly when it comes to positioning. You'll need to note strategic spots for cover and weapons with picky ranges. I've learned that the hard way with my powerful Operator sniper, who grows more useless the closer enemies get.

The only real drag when it comes to battles were space combat sessions, as the player's voidship is pretty weak starting out. As the game progresses, however, the inverse slowly happens. Some on-foot battles remain fun and fast, but boss encounters became increasingly frustrating. Although I rarely died more than once in a fight, several bosses were miserable.

One particularly egregious fight sent me against someone taking extra turns when his minions were attacked. I managed to beat him on the second try, but it was irritating to the point the strategic intrigue no longer mattered — I just wanted to speed through for the story. It was an optional fight, sure, but I had to do it for the Psyker Idra's companion quest.

Meanwhile, ship battles improve as you gain new allies and gear, but the challenge heavily pivots into non-existent. It's not bad, but Rogue Trader struggled to find its sweet spot, a balance somewhere to feel like I'm improving and rising to the occasion. It's all good stuff, but there are little layers of irritation. I ultimately enjoyed these encounters, but when it drags, it really suffers.

Is the Warp distorting reality, or is that a bug?

Despite some encounter ups and downs, Rogue Trader never failed its settings. Most of the game finds players in human worlds, where you can smell the dirt and grime of places like Footfall. Contrast this with the player's voidship, whose gothic and industrial aesthetics make it oppressively regal, and you've got something truly impressive in its scope and contrast between locations.

Part of that setting owes its stellar ambiance to its music and general sound design, too. The voidship theme shines as particularly haunting with its low choir, and serves as something appropriately unwelcoming to the hub. Other tracks gently fade into the background, or rely heavily on ambient sounds, but they all read as thoughtfully crafted for each scene.

And while art style really drives Rogue Trader's moody setting, texture quality is truly lacking, especially frustrating with how it runs. Performance is surprisingly unstable on a decent gaming PC, with the framerate often dipping below 60fps with DLSS enabled. It's not a big deal with a game like this, but it's never fun seeing performance abruptly tank in basic areas like the voidship. Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous had similar performance issues for me, and it's a shame to see them carry over.

Even more bizarre are the bugs present and how they worsened the longer I played. While the performance hiccups prevailed throughout my playthrough, by hour 45 it wasn't uncommon to see NPCs t-posing, and on one nasty occasion, everyone just stopped moving and forced me to restart. Owlcat is patching Rogue Trader, but I can't help but feel like I'm witnessing its reality collapse in on itself.

Despite the deep issues I have with Rogue Trader, I can't help but love it for what it is. The servitors in my voidship might be perpetually t-posing, but the gothic spaceship remains an amazing hub. Late-game fights can become a slog, but the synergy amidst my party delivers endless satisfaction when builds come together.

Rogue Trader is gargantuan and annoying on occasion, but haunting and wonderful through and through. It captures what makes Warhammer 40,000 so captivating and horrifying through its presentation, setting the mood in a way that keeps me enthralled through the worst of it. If Owlcat is anything, it's a studio that creates RPG diamonds. It hasn't made one without rough edges just yet, though I hope it eventually perfects its craft.

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

The post Review: Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader 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.

Devil May Cry: Peak of Combat (iOS, Android)
Developer: NebulaJoy
Publisher: NebulaJoy
Released: January 10, 2024
MSRP: Free-to-play (with microtransactions)

Even Dante could not fill this dark soul with light

Devil May Cry: Peak of Combat is, on its surface, a mobile game set in Capcom’s acclaimed Devil May Cry universe. However, to call Peak of Combat a Devil May Cry game is like calling Konami’s Pachinko machines the latest installment in Hideo Kojima’s stealth-action franchise. While it’s tempting to call gacha games like this trash based on the genre alone, Peak of Combat is a special kind of trash.

Peak of meaninglessness

Peak of copying

Peak of not being fun-on-the-go

Peak of pressing red dots

Peak of monetization

Peak of misleading advertisements

Peak of greed

Peak of Garbage

The post Review: Devil May Cry: Peak of Combat 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.]}

The post Review: Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown appeared first on Destructoid.

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.]}

The post Review: Astlibra Revision 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.

Metroidvanias and bullet hells hold a special place in my heart for contrasting reasons. One is great for an explorative and relaxing experience that's typically a one-and-done. The other, meanwhile, provides an adrenaline boost that gets many repeat playthroughs in vain attempts to scratch the skill ceiling.

From this perspective, examining CreSpirit and GemaYue's latest collaboration TEVI seems contradictory but not unwelcome. It advertises itself as a Metroidvania/bullet hell mash-up, and it's a concept I adore, despite my mindset on both genres. The cute anime art style and developer's existing pedigree with Rabi-Ribi only served as the icing on the cake. TEVI is even sold as Rabi-Ribi's successor due to having the same genre mash-up and GemaYue's return.

While I never played Rabi-Ribi, my time with TEVI might have sold me on it. Although TEVI suffers from a fairly uninteresting plot early on, the fantastic gameplay and progression system make it a joy to blast through.

TEVI (PC [reviewed], Switch)
Developer: CreSpirit, GemaYue, and Ein Lee
Publisher: CreSpirit and Neverland Entertainment
Released: November 29, 2023
MSRP: $29.99 (PC), $34.99 (Switch)

Some journeys start with a stumble

TEVI's hook is pretty simple. Players control the titular lead, a girl on the hunt for Astral Gears. These objects are filled with a powerful energy called mana, and Tevi collects them to help her rabbit-obsessed father's research.

Joining her are Celia and Sable, an angel and demon who are both created from magitech. They mostly follow her journey inside her orbiters, tiny floating orbs that shoot off various ranged attacks. Of TEVI's narrative choices, it is neat seeing something like magitech recontextualized as an entire race of people with distinct subraces.

Unfortunately, it takes a bit for the story to get rolling. While the opening sequence set 30 years prior helps set up TEVI's important plot points, it takes some time for anything interesting to happen. For the first few hours, the plot devolves into looking for Astral Gears without much direction and comes off as unfocused.

The conversations around Celia's chest size and the aforementioned obsession Tevi's father has with rabbits don’t help, either. The latter comes off especially weird, given how he projects it a bit onto his daughter, whose hat has mechanical rabbit ears to blend in with beastkin, who look human with animal ears and sometimes tails.

These only happen a few times around the starting hours and for brief moments, but this is what TEVI leads with. So while I was enjoying the gameplay loop, it did feel like I was watching an unfunny anime during cutscenes.

Any issues I have with the narrative disappear quickly as the tone focuses on the Astral Gears' purpose, and stopping the spread of a corrupting entity known as the Decay. TEVI never transcends into a storytelling masterpiece, but the core characters get solid arcs, and the closing hours are compelling with a surprisingly bittersweet conclusion.

While having a slow pace at the start of a story is fine, TEVI doesn't put its best foot forward. At least my biggest issues with the story don't occur often, and really just didn't leave the best first impression.

Hopping through art

Even if my story complaints extended throughout TEVI, the art direction would have compelled me to keep playing. Throughout the entirety of its runtime, TEVI is an ocular feast.

It's hard to determine my favorite area in the game because each has something special about it. From Morose's strangely comfy industrial setting, to the adorable mushroom cottage-core vibes of Merry Village, even the beginning areas are distinct and lovely.

TEVI is generally a relaxing game to casually roam around in. Some of my favorite moments came from just soaking in the varying atmospheres. Even the rainy and somewhat melancholic Gloomwood and the city of Ana Therma are pleasant to explore for collectibles.

This isn't to say that TEVI only has the cozy vibes going for it. Some areas, like The Plagued Forest, show how devastating Decay is by turning a normal forest into a toxic wasteland. The creatures and machinery still alive are corruptions of their former selves, spewing even more Decay. It's so prevalent in the air that, before entering the forest, Tevi needs a gas mask to protect her from the toxins.

The Plagued Forest also happens to be where TEVI's plot picks up, since it demonstrates how Decay took over swathes of its world. One similarly desolate mid to late-game area is particularly haunting due to its connection with Tevi's backstory, showing glimmers of what was there before.

TEVI's character art is also solid, if indistinct from other games with an anime-adjacent art style. Even though some of the revealing outfits look genuinely uncomfortable to wear, both major and minor characters have cool designs. A standout for me is Tevi's design, which demonstrates her capabilities as a mechanic while appearing easy to move around in. It's rare for me to like the protagonist's design the most in a game, but Tevi herself is cool enough that I'd want to cosplay her.

As wonderful as TEVI's art direction is, its gameplay is its greatest strength. I would consider it good enough that it's become arguably my favorite Metroidvania this year, and one that's perfect for playing on a handheld.

Heavenly bullet hell in my Metroidvania?!

TEVI's best part is by far its gameplay loop because it's a joy to play. It takes the best of its inspirations and goes wild with them.

Starting with how it handles its Metroidvania elements, exploration is fantastic. Not just for how pretty its world looks, but because exploration is almost always rewarding. There's a lot to see for sure, but it sometimes feels like there's a potion with a permanent boost or money blocks around every corner.

Permanent movement abilities also come along at an even pace. There are mainstays like the double jump and slide, but others stand out in fun ways. The jetpack, for one, lets Tevi gain more air while letting her float for a few seconds. Once I got used to how it worked, the jetpack was fantastic for landing jumps I would have otherwise missed. It's also fantastic in boss bottles, for avoiding the tail end of particularly long attacks.

And TEVI's boss fights have some wild attacks. This is where the bullet-hell inspiration comes into play. Boss battles are the game's biggest highlights, and bring out its best qualities.

Although combat isn't deep, it provides some fun options. Airdashes and slides work as attacks and are great for quick movement, and Tevi's basic four-hit combo is always reliable for solid damage. Celia and Sable also have three different charge shots which have their uses, both in and out of combat. These and more can receive flat upgrades, or be boosted with sigils Tevi can equip.

If boss attack patterns remained simple and relatively grounded, TEVI's combat would be serviceable. Thankfully this isn't the case, as even boss encounters in the opening hours are a blast to fight.

An early example of this is Tevi's friend and self-appointed rival, Vena. As another engineer, she attacks using her various bombs and stat-buffing robots to give her a leg up. It's a great introduction to how the dozens of boss encounters alternate between massive lasers, lock-on attacks, and clusters to take out the player. Those three are the most rudimentary descriptions of boss moves, but each uses those basic concepts to create dozens of dazzling attacks that take all sorts of different shapes and speeds.

Another thing I appreciate about the boss progression is that each new encounter incrementally adds to the bullet pattern complexity. Even with a good bit of upgrades collected, each fight felt like it was always getting a bit harder. The final encounter had me sweating because of how much there was to keep track of. Late-game fights are no joke in TEVI, with plenty of screen-filling attacks and narrow margins to avoid them, and I love it.

It's a small point to harp on, but it's an area TEVI excels because, from a gameplay and narrative standpoint, the stakes match up pretty well. I wish I could say the same about normal enemies, however. While not actively detrimental to the overall experience, normal enemies pale in comparison to the boss encounters. 

There isn't much to say about the regular enemies, other than they serve their purpose as obstacles. Not to say they are poorly designed. Even the most basic machine enemies recycled throughout the game always come back with a unique spin on their base attacks. It's just that the bosses absolutely shined brighter whenever they appeared over TEVI's lengthy adventure.

A lengthy and worthwhile journey

Something that surprised me about TEVI was its length, taking around 25 hours with only half of the items collected. With detailed exploration and dedication to find every item and upgrade, playtime could probably increase to 30-35 hours.

This doesn't even account for how replayable TEVI is, with how it handles difficulty. Alongside increasing enemy attack damage, higher difficulties also bump up the enemy bullet density. It's a neat way of keeping repeat playthroughs on high difficulties fresh. This doesn't even account for other modifiers, including a Turbo Mode to increase game speed or Random Sigils, which randomizes where sigils are found in the world.

These possibilities wouldn't matter much if TEVI was a slog to get through, but it's the opposite. Even if the story drags in the beginning and it's easy to blitz past normal enemies, TEVI is always a joy. Simply maneuvering around the environment is wonderful due to how beautiful and varied each locale is.

The boss battles make TEVI shine the most because it has several of the best fights I've played this year. As odd as this comparison might be, I'd say they’re as enjoyable as Armored Core 6's fights. Both have frantic and challenging battles that are never unfair. 

TEVI is a pleasant surprise that hopefully doesn't fly under most radars. Even with my gripes, I can comfortably recommend TEVI to anyone looking for a solid Metroidvania with a bullet hell twist.

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

The post Review: TEVI 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.]}

The post Review: Sonic Dream Team appeared first on Destructoid.

When Ubisoft revealed the first-look video for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora a couple of years ago, I thought, “Oh cool, an Avatar-themed Far Cry game!” I generally have a good time with Far Cry, but have been a bit burnt out on the gameplay loop recently. Turns out I was wrong. 

While Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora does indeed have some overlapping elements with the Far Cry series, it’s very much its own game. If anything, it takes those elements and pushes them further, while molding them to fit within the world of James Cameron’s Avatar.

For fans of Avatar in general, Frontiers of Pandora is just what you’re looking for. Even if you’re not, the beautiful world that Massive Entertainment has created mixed with its tight combat system pushes the staple open-world fun of Ubisoft to the next level. Sure, it’s got some of the same stuff we’ve done before: clearing out enemy bases, hunting animals for materials, and more sidequests and collectibles than you can imagine. But even still, it does so with its own unique additions that make Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora its own.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (PC [reviewed], PS5, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Massive Entertainment
Publisher: Ubisoft
Released: December 7, 2023
MSRP: $69.99

Yo, listen up here's a story

The story starts with you creating your own young Na’vi, who is essentially part of what the RDA (humans) call The Ambassador Program. It’s marketed as a program to help bridge the game between Na’vi and Human relations, but of course that’s not the case. Turns out, your tribe, the Sarentu, mysteriously disappeared and you are the last remaining member. The Sarentu were a very respected and prestigious tribe on Pandora, so their disappearance is obviously worrisome to the Na’vi.

By the end of the brief introduction sequence, you are older and much wiser about the real motives of The Ambassador Program, which certainly aren’t favorable to the Na’vi. A resistance group of humans and Na’vi breaks you out shortly after Jake Sully rallies the tribes against the RDA in the movie, which is where Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora really begins. Even though Jake Sully and his actions are referenced, from here on out Frontiers of Pandora is its own story set on the Western Frontier continent of Pandora.

At its core, the overarching narrative is mostly what you’d expect; the RDA is bad and up to no good, and the resistance is trying to put a stop to it. They’re up to some more nefarious things on Pandora than we’ve seen in the movies, too. But the story also delves into the Sarentu as you learn more about their heritage and what happened to them. As you progress, you will rally other tribes to join the resistance in fighting back against the RDA, with each one sharing more information with you about the Sarentu and their importance to the world. The story is solid, but made even better by the incredibly detailed and living world of Pandora all around you.

About a little guy that lives in a blue world

Massive Entertainment really put a lot of detail into creating its version of Pandora. The Western Frontier the player can explore is split into three regions: The Kinglor Forest, The Upper Plains, and The Clouded Forest. At the start, only the Kinglor Forest is available to you, and you unlock the other two areas by progressing through the main story. 

The Kinglor Forest is a lush and sprawling rainforest resting under a floating mountain formation, one of the iconic biomes from Avatar. To say the world is beautiful would be an understatement. If you remember the surreal feeling of the forest lightning up at night when seeing Avatar for the first time, be prepared to relive it.

The world is also massive, both in scale and literal size. Colossal trees tower above as you run swiftly through the forest. Some of the most memorable moments I have with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora are just running through the rainforest while scaling monumental tree roots and mushrooms, all while the chirps and calls of creatures echo around me. It feels like an actual living world, which is a big part of what makes Avatar and more specifically Pandora so special.

Also, everything opens up very early, allowing you to explore the world with freedom. You can tackle a plethora of sidequests as well as hunt down a ton of collectibles. There’s a 3D world map that marks the location of a collectible, quest hub, or important location. Once you’ve acquired the collectible or visited the location, it changes to a green blip indicating you have obtained what was there. I’m usually not a fan of collectibles, but I had a lot of fun seeking them out. Bellsprigs and Tarsyu Saplings, the two primary collectibles, also give you rewards for finding them. Each Bellsprig you touch grants you a permanent max health boost, while each Tarsyu Sapling gives you a skill point. It’s nice to have collectibles that are not only fun to explore and hunt down, but also worthwhile in terms of rewards for doing so.

Very early on, the Aranahe tribe in Kinglor Forest tasks you with bonding with and acquiring your own Ikran. For those unfamiliar, these are the flying creatures that Na’vi can bond with to mount and take to the skies. To do so, you must ascend to the top of an Ikran Rookery and tame one of the creatures. The journey to the top is a very aesthetically pleasing experience, with a bit of adventure, puzzle-solving, and platforming all thrown together. The outstanding music—which, by the way, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora‘s entire soundtrack is incredible—only enhances the journey even more. It’s a very cool experience and ends with you being able to fly across the Western Frontier of Pandora.

And all day and all night and everything he sees is just blue

For how authentic the world of Pandora feels, the same can be said about playing as a Na’vi. For starters, you are taller than a human. It may not seem like much, but with the first-person camera towering over humans, it’s a noticeable difference right away. You can also hold down the jump button to extend how high and far you can jump. Once again, this may seem like a small thing, but it really makes you feel like a Na’vi as you’re jumping across fallen trees and scaling cliff sides. 

Then, there’s the combat. It’s a very tight and realistic feeling. Your primary weapon of choice is going to be the bow, which works just how you imagine it would. Hold down the fire button to pull the arrow back, causing it to go further. It’s always fun when you perfectly line up a shot—because of course, there is bullet, err, arrow drop—and hit your enemy. You’ll also have access to a couple more Na’vi weapons like the Hunting Bow, which is essentially a longer-range bow, and the Staff Sling, which allows you to hurl explosives at great distance.

There are also a couple of RDA weapons. Each weapon seems to have its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, the bow is a one-shot kill on your basic human enemy. However, when going up against an RDA AMP mech suit, you’re going to use their own weapons against them: the Assault Rifle or Shotgun. While it may seem like the Na’vi weapons are weaker, they typically are not. You can also craft additional ammo for them on the fly, whereas ammo for the RDA weapons has to be looted, from containers or dead RDA enemies. 

A major part of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is the crafting. You’ll collect materials throughout all of Pandora, be it mushrooms growing on the forest floor, honey from beehives hanging from the trees, or even hides and teeth from animals you will hunt. You can use these materials to craft various recipes and designs you’ll unlock by progressing through the story, increasing your favor with the various clans, and completing specific side quests. Some of the recipes are for better types of food which, when consumed, give you buffs. Primarily though, you will be crafting armor and weapon upgrades and mods.

You also have the ability to use your Na’vi Senses. This puts a focused central point of your vision that highlights pretty much anything of note: collectibles, gatherable materials, animals, and even enemies. It’s essentially Eagle Vision from Assassin’s Creed. I like the system, but also wish it was a bit more expanded to maybe grant you the increased senses for your whole vision, not just the focused center point. Then again, maybe that would make it too strong.

Like him inside and outside

As I said, there are some definite similarities to Far Cry here. You’ll raid RDA outposts and bases, as well as shut down their mining and drilling operations. One of the cooler aspects is doing so eradicates the pollution in that area. A large portion of the map in the Western Frontier starts off orangeish-brown with pollution from nearby RDA installations. But each one you take out allows life to flourish in the area. This isn’t just for looks, though. You’ll also gain access to new sidequests, fast travel points, collectibles, and loot by doing so. 

I’ve grown tired of the whole “liberate enemy outposts” system, but can say I genuinely sought them out and enjoyed doing so in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. As I said, they took some of the core systems and added enough nuance from the Avatar IP to make it different and fun. 

There’s also a skill system, with five different paths you can invest your skill points into. Skill points are obtained by hunting down Tarsyu Saplings and completing the main story and side quests. There’s quite a bit of diversity in the skills, which is nice. Focusing on the Survivor Skill Tree will give you more health and increase resistance against certain types of damage. The Maker Skill Tree, however, increases the quality of materials you obtain, and improves the quality of equipment you craft.

Each skill also has its own Apex Skill that you unlock by completing a specific challenge and unlocking every other skill in that tree. All of the five Apex Skills are pretty big, so they are definitely worth going for. I personally found some skills more worthwhile than others, but with all of the Apex Skills being so useful, I found myself wanting to progress through each tree eventually. For example, the Apex Skill for the Maker Skill Tree makes all of your crafted gear and weapons more powerful. I beelined this Apex Skill and am glad I did so, because the now-increased damage my weapons deal is a real game-changer.

I'm blue

Unfortunately, I did encounter a few issues that at least affected my playthrough somewhat along the way. I had a pretty well-optimized adventure while playing through the Kinglor Forest area. However, once I reached the second and third areas, I saw some noticeable FPS drops. The dense forest didn’t have many issues, but for some reason, the open plains were a bit more trouble.

I’m also not a fan of the Combat Strength system in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. I like that there’s no actual experience grinding to level up. Your Combat Strength is calculated based on the gear you have equipped, including armor and weapons and their attachments. You can also increase your Combat Strength by selecting certain skills on the skill tree that boost damage or health.

But the main issue here is that the number acts as sort of a hard wall when fighting enemies. For example, if your Combat Strength is 7, almost 8, and you are fighting an enemy that has a strength of 8, you’re not going to have a good time. The enemy takes reduced damage while also dealing a lot more damage to you. However, equipping a very minor upgrade that will push your score up to 8 suddenly makes the enemy much easier. In a way, it can feel as though it trivializes the stats on equipment because, at the end of the day, you just want to strive for a higher Combat Strength than your opponent. 

Finally, as much as I like the 3D world map, in some cases, it’s not very practical from a gameplay perspective. I’d often be at the spot on my map indicating there was a Bellsprig or Tarsyu Sapling—both collectibles—which was literally visible on the map. However, the actual location of the collectible was in a nearby cave.

Da be dee da ba di

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora does Avatar justice. Massive Entertainment has created a truly immersive and polished Pandora, that quite frankly far exceeded my expectations. Massive managed to create the same feeling of awe that I experienced when the Avatar movie was released almost 14 years ago. Running through the lush forests of Pandora with its incredibly grandiose overgrown flora while the sounds of creatures simply living all around me creates such an authentic rendition of life on Pandora. 

If you walked away from Avatar wishing a world like Pandora actually existed out there, here you go. This is that world. Seeing Pandora is one thing, but being able to scale its massive treetops, soar high above its floating mountains on an Ikran, and traverse its wide open plains on the back of a Direhorse is really something special. This is the best version of Avatar yet. 

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

The post Review: Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora 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.

The Persona series has been molded from RPG into many, many other genres, especially Persona 5. Dungeon crawling, dancing, though sadly no brawling; and now, with Persona 5 Tactica, it’s time for some turn-based tactics.

As I mentioned in my review-in-progress, there’s really no shortage of extra content for those who don’t want to leave the world of Persona 5. And if you want more Persona 5—more hijinks, gags, and general time spent with the Phantom Thieves—then Tactica can certainly accommodate that.

On top of that, it’s a solid tactics game that even has some interesting ideas. Persona 5 Tactica is lighthearted, fun, and even hits some solid notes near the end with its stance on fighting for your beliefs. But it also falters, often enough to note where this could have been a more rewarding tactical experience.

Persona 5 Tactica (PC, Switch [reviewed], PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Atlus
Publisher: Sega
Released: November 16, 2023
MSRP: $59.99

At the start of Persona 5 Tactica, we catch the Phantom Thieves recuperating from a recent excursion in Leblanc, before they’re suddenly pulled into another dimension, a “Kingdom.” While it somewhat acts like the Metaverse of Persona 5, it’s slightly different; here, a tyrannical ruler named Marie lords over her subjects. A rebel corps of adorable hat-guys resist, led by the seemingly human but enigmatic Erina; and soon, the gang also finds Diet member Toshiro Kasukabe trapped here, too.

Starting with just Joker and Morgana, the duo teams up with Erina and the rebels to save the other Phantom Thieves, who have been enchanted (or maybe just brain-controlled) by Marie’s magic. And then, after rebuilding the crew, it’s time to start a revolution.

You say you want a revolution?

This theme carries through the lengthy first Kingdom and onto subsequent sections, as the Phantom Thieves’ excursion doesn’t end with just one big bad. I won’t go deep into where Persona 5 Tactica goes, but it does stay focused on ideas of power and relative peace. Essentially, how a tyrannical rule can feel so oppressive that any resistance is seen as too costly, and either submission or apathy is preferable to fighting back.

It’s heartening, really, to see Persona 5 Tactica challenge those ideas, much like its Phantom Thieves did in the original game. It may feel like many of the same notes, about changing hearts and fighting for a better future, but its revolutionary ideals still feel stirring in Tactica. Newcomers Erina and Toshiro are welcome focal points, and their eventual twists and turns are pretty good.

On the other hand, don’t expect too much story on the Phantom Thieves’ side. Some of the crew, like Haru and Futaba, end up getting a little extra spotlight as their own struggles line up with the new characters’. But others, like Makoto or Yusuke, are just kind of there. Most of the Persona 5 crew is here to interact and hang out, tossing around jokes, but not necessarily taking any huge steps on their own personal journeys. Tactica is very much focused on Erina and Toshiro.

It’s told well, though the style-swapping between visual novel-like text segments, 3D-animated cutscenes, and fully 2D animated cutscenes does feel a bit odd at times. I’m not the biggest fan of the general “look” the Phantom Thieves have in P5 Tactica, but it wasn’t particularly egregious either. 

The traditional P5 style is much more prevalent in the menus and UI, which includes some gorgeous transition effects and a Velvet Room abbreviation that reads, “V. Room.” You know, like a car. What? It makes me laugh.

Squaring up

When it comes to tactics, Persona 5 Tactica has some pretty interesting ideas. In broad strokes, this will feel familiar to any turn-based strategy fan, but especially those who have played games like the Mario + Rabbid series. You take your turn, moving your three deployed characters on the grid and attacking using a variety of abilities, then the enemy moves.

Individual units have a variety of skills available, including risky but potentially strong melee strikes, standard gun attacks, and of course, using magic through their Personas. In this game, Joker’s Wild Card status extends to all the Phantom Thieves (after clearing a certain mission), so everyone can equip a second Persona to expand their magic repertoire and bump their stats.

Most of your actions will focus around a central concept: setting up the One More. If an enemy is outside of cover, or otherwise vulnerable, then not only will a hit score full damage but it will also knock them down and give the attacker another turn. (This can work against you too, by the way.) Setting up chain reactions, where one unit can ping-pong between targets dishing out damage and zipping across the map, is crucial.

It’s also important for setting up the Triple Threat Attack, the reward for all your tactical planning. If a unit is on a One More turn, lines extend from each Phantom Thief, forming a triangle between your trio; if the triangle sits over a downed enemy, then it lights up with fire for a Triple Threat. The Thieves commence the all-out attack, damaging the downed foe and everyone else caught in the area.

Triangle strategy

The Triple Threat sounds more complex than it is. Really, it’s the combination of this move and the One More that makes Persona 5 Tactica’s strategy feel rewarding. It can feel a bit awkward at first, as you have to think several moves ahead with everyone. One unit needs to tee things up, and then you have to determine how you’re going to angle your triangle position from there.

Often, it pushed me to make some risky plays. I like how freeform it feels, while also eventually forcing you to plant three stakes in the ground and cash out as best you can. There were maps where, thanks to some smart moves and careful planning, I cleared it at two turns lower than the par goal for extra rewards. Other times, I messed up an angle somewhere, and was left to watch my units get blasted about by Legionnaires.

The enemy units do enough to make Tactica tough, too. From support units to giant, hulking brutes, and some especially annoying shielded foes, there’s a good variety on display. I felt like enemy design hit its peak with ninja units that would force-swap places with a unit after being attacked. It could put my units way out of position, but also be used as a way to cleverly navigate the map or set up big Triple Threat hits.

Nowhere is this enjoyable aspect of the strategy more evident than the Quests, Persona 5 Tactica’s optional levels that, at their best, feel like puzzle boxes. Some of my favorite missions in P5T weren’t big fights against bosses or frantic holdouts against overwhelming odds, but Quests with simple but head-scratching objectives. “Get to the target in one turn” or “clear all enemies in two turns” maps felt like little chess puzzles that I loved carefully looking over.

The bummer is those rewarding little strategy puzzles aren’t what makes up the whole of Tactica. The middle of the game is where most of my favorite tactical bouts happened; the early run of missions are heavy on tutorials, and are at least an easy on-ramp for tactics newcomers. The endgame felt almost a bit too easy, and to get into why, I’ll need to delve even deeper into the mechanics of Tactica. Specifically, its stats and guns.

A demonic arsenal

Lavenza and the Velvet Room return, mostly doing what you’d expect: facilitating demon fusion and compendium management. Making good Personas for your party to hold is worthwhile, for the stats and for the additional skills or passives they offer. But there’s another option that unlocks a decent way into the game: fusing weapons from demons.

Guns play a significant role in Persona 5 Tactica, way more than I ever felt they did in Persona 5, and initially you just have a shop for upgrading them. Each character has their own fire type too, ranging from basic pistols for Joker and Makoto to Haru’s grenade launcher, Ann’s submachine gun, and Ryuji’s shotgun. Fusing weapons adds even more properties, from changing up the range and spread of the gun to adding elemental effects and, of course, adding damage.

I haven’t really mentioned the Skills system yet, where you spend reward GP from missions and Quests to upgrade each Phantom Thief individually. Really, they’re fairly straightforward; I was hoping for some more options to customize and define playstyles for each character, but they’re all meant to upgrade what they already do. Each upgrade path felt similar for characters. Bump up their magic, give them extra movement squares and range, and unlock their signature skill.

Basically, there are a lot of avenues for upgrading your characters. And by the campaign's end, I felt like my characters were borderline overpowered. Granted, I had finished each Quest and been utilizing the systems put in front of me to eke out the most power I could. But in exchange, the difficulty (I was on Normal) didn’t feel like it could keep pace. Heck, there were some enemies who I couldn’t knock into a downed state, because one attack to knock them out of cover and another to start the One More would take them out completely. Making Triple Threats happen became its own challenge.

In some ways, this is nice. I could see this being a very approachable strategy game for those who don’t spend a ton of time playing them. But I do wish some of the endgame stages felt like they either challenged me more, or offered greater rewards for more strategic play.

Steal your heart

Persona 5 Tactica is, by all means, a solid tactics game. It’s enjoyable, has some fresh ideas, and certainly has its own flair and character. But it also made me just a bit more aware of how this is yet another Persona 5 spin-off.

The story with Erina and Toshiro is good, but it feels like a Saturday morning excursion for the P5 gang. This is more Persona 5, but a frozen-in-time distillation of the vibes and good times with the gang, rather than a substantive addition to any of those characters’ stories. And we’ve had a lot of “more Persona 5.”

I’m not sure I’d recommend this to everyone, but for those who want this kind of mash-up anyways, I think they’re already on board. If you’re new to tactics games, Tactica might even be a nice on-ramp towards other options that get a little more in-depth.

So if the idea of a tactics game starring the Phantom Thieves, clocking in at a neat 30ish hours, sounds appealing, then Persona 5 Tactica is for you. It’s not as deep or compelling as other options, but it’s got the style and characters you like. The ending wraps up nicely too, even if getting there is a bit drawn out at the start. I’m happy I spent some time in the tactical Kingdoms of Persona 5 Tactica myself. But I also think I’m ready for a new crew to get the spotlight.

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

The post Review: Persona 5 Tactica 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.

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.

Something I realized about myself recently is how drawn I am to sapphic horror. I'm a big fan of horror in general, but there's something extra alluring when it relates to a core part of my identity.

Another thing I'm a sucker for is fairytale-inspired stories. Whether a work takes obvious inspiration from Alice in Wonderland or Little Red Riding Hood, I take note of it.

Little Goody Two Shoes combines both concepts into a game, taking a cottagecore lesbian life sim and combining it with exploration-based survival horror. I never knew I needed a mashup like this until this game.

While Little Goody Two Shoes has some flaws, it might be my favorite horror game of 2023. It's a bold statement when regarding the Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 remakes, but AstralShift's Pocket Mirror prequel brings something that truly stands out in the genre.

Little Goody Two Shoes (PC [reviewed], PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch)
Developer: AstralShift
Publisher: Square Enix
Released: November 7, 2023
MSRP: $19.99

A story of horror and cottagecore lesbians

Little Goody Two Shoes follows Elise, a young woman who works as a maid for Keiferberg Village's various townsfolk. It's a menial life she desperately wishes to escape, believing she deserves more.

Everything is upended when another young woman named Rozenmarine breaks into Elise and her late grandmother's cabin. Despite initially accusing her of thievery, Elise takes her in and the two begin living together.

Soon after taking in Rozenmarine, Elise stumbles upon a pair of beautiful red shoes that give her a glimpse of the riches she dreams of having. With promises of a dream life by an entity known as Him, Elise embarks on a journey to gather gifts for Him and escape Kieferberg.

Meanwhile, as daily disasters begin in the sleepy village, paranoia grows over a witch cursing the town. As Elise is the most openly argumentative person in Keiferberg and Rozenmarine is a stranger whose appearance happened to coincide with the disasters’ arrival, the former must also work to keep eyes off of her and her greedy quest. Elise obviously isn’t responsible for these disasters, but keeping others suspicious makes her a convenient scapegoat for them.

Little Goody Two Shoes' narrative is my favorite part of the experience, partly from the number of directions it takes. Between managing relationships with Elise's three love interests and keeping suspicions about her actions low, the game has a surprising amount of major and minor reactivity based on how conversations go.

Not every decision factors into its endings, but it's a nice touch seeing future conversations subtly change based on some previous ones. The writing's also strong, effectively handling themes of social persecution and what someone is willing to give up. Strengthening this further is its unabashed queerness, which becomes increasingly heartbreaking as Elise's identity grows in competition with her wish.

The love interests are also compelling characters in their own right. Rozenmarine is a traveler whose fate intertwines with Elise's, and her route tells a sweet story of love bringing soulmates together. There's also Lebkuchen, a nun who mirrors Elise in all the demands villagers thrust on her, and Freya, a girl who represents a kinder side to Keiferberg's villagers.

My playthrough focused on Rozenmarine, and depending on Elise's decisions, endings range from genuinely happy to soul-crushing. I found her concept of her and Elise being each other's soulmates a compelling reason to pursue her, and its payoff is satisfying whatever direction that takes.

The best '90s shojo game released in 2023

Besides its narrative, Little Goody Two Shoes' art direction is a contender for its best part. Even when playing on the LED Steam Deck, its pixel art environments pop. Places like Elise's cottage are appropriately cozy whilst the woodland areas are tense to walk through.

Characters also look fantastic, particularly Elise herself and her love interests. Although gameplay takes inspiration from PS1 adventure games, it aesthetically matches '90s shojo anime. Their enormous eyes and bright designs make them fit right in with something like Cardcaptor Sakura.

Helping the art is the music, with its vocal tracks also emulating that shojo feel and more ambient pieces lending themselves to their environments. My favorite is the track that plays when exploring Keiferberg during the evening. It's a soft and sleepy melody that blends perfectly with the image of Lebkuchen swinging as moonlight shines on her.

Even with its horror elements, Little Goody Two Shoes is a remarkably cozy game. Since it primarily takes place outside the danger, the time between the horrors is pleasant to exist in. Elise's home is peak cottagecore, and Keiferberg Village itself has an incredibly welcoming vibe despite its inhabitants' paranoia.

Its horror segments also deserve praise, with the wheat fields in particular filling me with an indescribable dread. Even the opening woodland section is wonderful for giving such a claustrophobic sensation while still in a forest.

A moment that made me tense up from atmosphere alone happens in the wheat fields’ opening moments. Separated from Rozenmarine, Elise ventures deeper into the woodland, and the final bridge before the stage’s proper start gives me shivers. Elise takes each step with caution as crows stare at her and a golden moon follows behind. There are no threats here, but through imagery and sound, I’m filled with dread as someone I’ve quickly grown close to might be hurt, or worse.

That’s the power Little Goody Two Shoes’ atmosphere has when attempting horror. I might have never struggled with any particular moment, but its excellent audio and visual direction never allowed me to keep my guard down.

Best to not be scared on an empty stomach

Since Little Goody Two Shoes takes inspiration from fairytales, it's no surprise it emulates their flavor of horror. That means less focus on scaring players and more on inspiring deep dread as Elise marches toward an ominous goal.

To gather the gifts Elise is giving Him, she ventures into the eerie woodlands by Keiferberg Village to endure trials. These involve exploring the area and doing some light-puzzle solving to progress.

None of the puzzles are hard, and the only real concern is not dying to the enemies scattered throughout. If mistakes are made, Elise can expend a healing item to recover.

Managing these healing items and also food to prevent Elise from starving makes up Little Goody Two Shoes' resource management. While healing items are plentiful enough in the woodland, food is almost exclusively bought with cash earned through performing menial tasks for villagers. These minigames present themselves as adorable arcade games, and ranks determine how much payment Elise recieves.

Depending on a player’s performance, they can be flush with cash and supplies, but only if they do well. A single bad day can stretch budgets remarkably thin, and force Elise in a tough spot. I had to make a call between continuing Lebkuchen’s story, bribing the nosy Muffy with expensive food to keep suspicions down, or starving. Since I was interested in Leb’s story and starving means dying, I risked the higher suspicion. It wasn’t that high to begin with, but it was inching toward a spot I wasn’t comfortable with.

Neither of these will help against anything instantly killing Elise. These scenarios pop up most often when saying the wrong thing or during chase sequences. While I love the tension some of them bring, they can also be a source of frustration. It's because of some instant kill sequences my two gripes with Little Goody Two Shoes come up.

One is the sometimes odd save points. Saving is done manually at specified points, and this isn't an issue as they're largely generous. It only gets aggravating when dying at the last moment to an instant-kill trap during a long section and needing to restart it.

Compounding this is the fact these sequences often occur after unskippable cutscenes. Most other scenes have a skip function to fast-forward through them, so it's baffling that scenes that arguably need this feature most don't have it.

These gripes are minor because the most progress I ever lost due to deaths is around 10 minutes. It's honestly less about repeating gameplay, and more about not having the option to skip dialogue I've seen.

A mirror that looks into a doomed character's happier alternatives

Little Goody Two Shoes is something special. It was honestly an amazing enough experience that after finishing, I bought its predecessor Pocket Mirror to see more of this universe.

My knowledge of that title is cursory, but seeing how Little Goody Two Shoes ties into it sinks my heart. It did spoil what some of Pocket Mirror's reveals, but that isn't stopping my enjoyment of that game.

While I have nitpicks, my experience left me wanting to return and see everything else Keiferberg has to offer. From its compelling romantic routes, fun gameplay loop, optional side stories, and phenomenal atmosphere, Little Goody Two Shoes is everything I ask for in a game. Its puzzles are easy enough to quickly solve but its threats are present enough that it still has challenges.

It was difficult determining my exact feelings with this title until a scene occurred with Elise and Rozenmarine sitting together on a cliff overlooking Keiferberg. It’s presented beautifully as a radiant sunset cakes the scenery, but the cliff’s placement besides Elise’s house powerfully conveys how isolated she is from the rest of the village.

The topic of soulmates came up, and while I can’t say how it goes due to spoilers, its conclusion made me realize just how much I adore this game. It also makes the final hours significantly more painful with how Elise’s wish turns out. Many fairytales end sadly and accenting Little Goody Two Shoes’ tragedy is me being responsible for it.

Overall, I'm ecstatic that something like Little Goody Two Shoes exists. Its mix of sapphic horror in a fairytale setting with a retro shojo art style makes it wonderfully stand out.

While a horror/dating sim fusion initially sounds odd, its fantastic execution helps drive its themes home in a powerful way. I can only hope this finds a strong audience because it absolutely deserves one. AstralShift has at least found a new big fan in me.

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

The post Review: Little Goody Two Shoes appeared first on Destructoid.

I genuinely despise writing negative reviews. There are real human beings behind every project, and bad games are seldom the product of moral failings, but instead are typically caused by an unfortunate convergence of factors both predictable and otherwise.

With that said, the gaming industry isn't a charity, and people deserve to know what they're potentially spending their hard-earned money on. Here's what you need to know: the problem with Flashback 2 isn't merely that it is buggy, sometimes to a hilarious degree. Instead, the main issue is that even if the bugs weren't present, it still wouldn't be worth its current price tag.

Flashback 2 (PC, PS5 [reviewed], Xbox Series X/S)
Developer: Microids Studio Paris, Paul Cuisset
Publisher: Microids
Released: November 16, 2023
MSRP: $39.99

The silver lining

Let's start with the positives. Flashback 2 is the follow-up to the cult classic 1992 game by Paul Cuisset. Flashback found popularity through its simple but effective level design, as well as its adventurous story. Despite its age, the art style can still be appreciated, and the wide range of movements available ensures you can engage with several aspects of the environment. It's a game I enjoy, which is why I was looking forward to this title.

Like its predecessor, Flashback 2 manages to capture that sense of adventure. It has varied environments that each present a unique aesthetic, with my favorite being the jungle which instantly reminds me of the 1992 game. The cities are cyberpunk communities with industrialist architectural styles, and when racing between locations on a motorbike, you'll be treated to bright colorful lights and neon signs.

It's also a game that looks good (sometimes). On PS5, the game runs at 60 FPS most of the time, though you can expect some pretty significant framerate dips, especially when new enemies are spawned. There aren't many graphics options on consoles (exactly zero to be precise), but that's not too much of a downside, as the game isn't graphically intense.

The cutscenes, which are ocassionally presented in comic book-style panels, are also aesthetically pleasing. It would have been nice to have more of them, as they help give you a better sense of the kind of world the developers were attempting to create. The soundtrack and ambiance complement the visuals nicely, and the voice acting is also satisfying.

Lastly, I like the mini-games that are present. To get through some doors, you'll have to engage in some hacking. This involves completing a mini-game that has you moving blocks around until the blocks with the same symbols collide with each other. These puzzles aren't particularly hard, but they are satisfying to solve. You'll also have a mecha battle to get through, which is short but kind of entertaining, at least compared to the rest of the game.

These are all the positive things that can be truthfully stated.

Artificial stupidity

For most of the game, you'll be exploring different environments and completing tasks on your quest to stop the shapeshifting Morphs that threaten humanity. Of course, you'll have a trusty weapon on hand called A.I.S.H.A. that also doubles as an AI companion.

I hated the shootouts. Every last one of them. Flashback 2 takes on a 2.5D style and then is brave enough to throw in some gunplay. It is painfully awkward to aim from this perspective, and oftentimes I found myself just rapidly tapping R2 and relying on the spray-and-pray method. As time progressed, I got a little more comfortable with aiming, but at no point did it ever feel like I wasn't in a constant battle against the camera perspective.

The enemies don't make things any more enjoyable. They're stupid, uncoordinated, and sometimes just plain broken. Instead of having enemies that strategize against you, Flashback 2 instead attempts to inject some difficulty by flooding you with foes. The problem is that whether there are two aliens or twenty, the spray-and-pray method still applies. There is no strategizing when most of the gunfights take place in empty corridors - you just shoot and shoot until there are no more baddies.

There is at least one saving grace when it comes to gunplay, and that's the fact that when you die, you're not forced to restart the encounter. You can pick up where you left off, with a full health bar this time. Normally, this would be a bad thing, as it would make the game too easy. However, in the case of Flashback 2, it helped shorten what was an agonizingly frustrating experience.

Things reach a peak in awfulness with the last battle where the game suddenly decides to entirely change the perspective into... I don't know what this would be called. It's kind of fully 3D, but way too confusing to call it that. Attempting to aim goes from being hard to being wholly impossible. Trying to explain it won't do it justice. Just know it's painful to deal with.

It should be mentioned that stealth is technically an option, but practically it's not, and in the end, it's inconsequential because you'll be barraged with enemies at some point either way. You don't have to worry about ammo either so there's rarely a reason to not just blast your way through any problem.

The gameplay is below average, but it would have been far more acceptable if it weren't for the bugs...

The bugs…

The bugs... there's a lot of them. They're not just annoying, they're game-breaking. They will bring your progress to a screeching halt and sometimes even make you lose hours of progress. Trust me, I learned the hard way. Flashback 2 shouldn't be on sale in its current state.

Let's start with the subtle bugs first. Arrow buttons don't work on the main menu, forcing you to use analog sticks. Don't press any buttons while the game is loading. You could accidentally pause while on a loading screen. Why is this possible? On that note, be aware that you'll be running into far too many loading screens, and they last far too long. Why is this 2.5D title loading slower than Spider-Man 2?

For significant parts of the game, you'll have an NPC with you as you get around. They're not quite escort missions, as your companion can't die, but they do come with most of the same problems. If you're getting anywhere, you'll have to wait for your cruelly slow companion to catch up with you. NPCs frequently get stuck, or sometimes just decide they're not following you anymore. With AI this rudimentary, this should never have been attempted.

Now onto the bigger bugs. More than once, I got stuck in a wall, forcing me to load up an old save, costing me hours of begrudgingly earned progress. You see, there are a limited number of save points, and they're spread out quite thinly. It is an archaic style of game design likely meant to hearken back to the 1992 classic, but it only succeeds in triggering frustration. Some things are better left in the past.

I also just fell through the floor a few times, landing me in a black void. At some point, I hoped the game would just stay that way, and I'd have an excuse to not finish it. Unfortunately, reloading an old save fixed the problem.

Toward the later hours of Flashback 2, it felt like I was intentionally being punished. The frequency of bugs increased, and eventually, the game didn't bother even giving me my next mission objective. This forced me to search for a playthrough online so I could figure out what I needed to do next to finally end this ordeal. I’m so glad I had an obscure French YouTube channel to help me because the game sure wasn’t.

That wasn't even the most ridiculous moment. The peak of my frustration hit when the game was actively giving me incorrect instructions. That image above is a spoiler but it doesn't matter at this point. What's important is that it's telling me to press the Right button. That's false, I'm supposed to press the Down button. Eventually, it glitched so badly that the text in the message box stopped appearing at all.

On the French YouTube channel, you can watch a desperate soul struggle with this portion for over 15 minutes. They go to the controls menu to see if they missed anything, and they even reload a save file from far earlier multiple times before they realize just how badly they've been bamboozled.

Some of the glitches and errors just feel like a lack of quality assurance. The sequel blindly reuses game over messages, even when you've lost for reasons other than Conrad dying. The game is lying to you in the image above. Conrad didn't die. You can see him standing right there.

Mission objectives annoyingly remain on the screen even when cutscenes play, but that's not the end of the long list of bugs. During battles, if you pick up an item containing text or get stuck in some dialog, Conrad will stay frozen until you've worked through all the text, leaving you vulnerable to enemy attacks and with no means to defend yourself. Also, remember that cool hacking mini-game I mentioned? Flashback 2 eventually manages to ruin that by overlapping images and turning the screen into a visual mess, as you can see above.

Just play the first game

It's decades later, and Flashback hasn't magically become a bad game. You can still pick it up on Steam for about $10, maybe less when it's on sale. I guarantee you'll have a better time with it than the sequel.

It took me 10 hours to get to the end of Flashback 2, but I suspect I could have cut that down to 5-6 hours if it wasn't for bugs frequently forcing me to lose progress. I didn't enjoy much of it, and I barely paid attention to the plot because it didn't matter. You can't focus on the plot when the game is so broken.

I cannot in good conscience recommend this. Your time and money is better spent elsewhere.

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

The post Review: Flashback 2 appeared first on Destructoid.

Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 is indefinitely an improvement over the original. Like Aang learning all four of the elements, developer Fair Play Labs has created a more comprehensive package for this game.

Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 (PS4, PS5 [reviewed], Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC, Nintendo Switch)
Developer: Fair Play Labs
Publisher: GameMill Entertainment
Released: November 7
MSRP: $49.99

Fun Smash-like gameplay, elevated from the first

Every character's moveset has been recreated from scratch (except for a handful of moves sticking around). That effort from the developer has paid off. While the gameplay isn't as refined as its contemporaries, each special attack feels more suited to the platform fighter genre. Both Korra and Aang use all of the elements rather than just one as well.

The new characters also bring some entertaining elements to the game. Azula unleashes her lightning and flame-focused attacks in an acrobatic fashion. Meanwhile, Jimmy Neutron's moveset revolves around his gadgets and his pet robot dog, Goddard.

Despite many positives, the game still feels somewhat awkward. Jumping in the air still feels floaty, and the impact of some moves feels too muted. What does help the gameplay, though, is the addition of the dodge roll and shield. They add more strategy to the overall flow and fit right in. Each character's shield looks different, as opposed to the Super Smash Bros. series. Garfield, in this instance, hugs a pillow.

Unfortunately, while playing the Arcade mode, the AI can be dumb. It jumps off the stage and accidentally falls to K.O. itself. This has happened around three to five times during my time with Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2.

A graphical upgrade

Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 looks far better than the first game. The characters are more expressive, and the lighting upgrade is gorgeous. For example, SpongeBob grins when he lifts his two hands up for an upward attack. Aang also looks angry whenever he charges an earth attack.

I love fighting on Jellyfish Fields because it's so vibrant and brighter than the original. You can see the sunlight glimmering within the water. Additionally, you'll notice Bikini Bottom in the background. This amount of detail wasn't in the original. The graveyard stage also looks stunning with a darker atmosphere and a hint of light from a lamppost.

However, there are still some issues to address. Most "Final Smash" attacks that have been added to the sequel seem rushed and don't have the animation quality of the overall game. Aang's Final Smash attack, for example, lacks the impact of the four elements fusing into an almighty beam. On the other hand, there are some funny final smash attacks, like Ren blowing up the entire planet and Reptar rampaging through a burning city.

While the overall game looks much better than the first, there are some technical issues. In one instance, the victory screen didn't show the character, and I had to restart the game to get back to the menus. Some of the hitboxes are also too big, leading to less exciting and frustrating matches.

New modes in Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2

There's a single-player story mode that features rogue-like gameplay. Danny Phantom villain Vlad Plasmius has corrupted characters across the Nick universe. To save them, you'll need to defeat them in combat. Each run lets you purchase upgrades with the currency you gain. These are fun as you gain a damage percentage and use buffs.

Part of what makes buying upgrades fun is the interaction between characters. For example, the Cabbage Merchant gets freaked out by Aang and Azula showing up. If you've watched the show, you'd know the Last Airbender ruined this poor guy's shop (by accident) while getting chased by the Firebenders.

The bosses are a bit of a mixed bag. They can be fairly tough and have certain interesting patterns to avoid. However, I found that too many of them stood still for a long time, letting me take out a quarter or even a half of their health before they activated another attack. As a result, I didn't feel satisfied after taking out the bosses.

However, it is funny to see Aang commenting that he's unhappy about taking out a spirit like SpongeBob SquarePants' Flying Dutchman.

Overall, this mode had me playing the game for hours in one sitting. I loved getting new characters for this campaign and evil costumes for the roster.

Finally! A good platform fighter that has great online!

I've played Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 with a friend of mine from the other side of the continent. I live in Western Canada, and my mate is from an Eastern U.S. state. Thankfully, while playing this game, it was as if he was playing next to me. The connection is flawless, and I'm so happy to play a platform fighter with him. He refuses to play Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with me due to the sloppy connection.

Unlike the last game, this sequel supports cross-play. This means someone on the PS5 can check out the game with a PC player. You'll need to copy a password down, and then you can join your pal in a lobby. It works well, but you have to make sure that crossplay is on. For some reason, my Eastern American friend had the crossplay feature off by default.

There's full voice acting, but man, the music's just okay

One of the major complaints of the original game, when it was released, was that it lacked voice acting. It was later added in an update, but the second game received this feature from day one. Most of the actors, like Rob Paulsen and Billy West, reprise their roles, and they sound fantastic. There are some unique voice lines in the campaign as well, which is a neat touch.

Unfortunately, the so-so music doesn't match up to the outstanding voice acting. While it gets the general gist of the atmosphere around the stages, most of the tracks bore me. There are some standouts, though, like the Jellyfish Fields and Campaign themes. The second is grand and epic, while the first maintains the charming vibes of the SpongeBob SquarePants show. I also like the mariachi-fueled "Miracle City Volcano."

It would be neat if the next game could get the official music from each of the series rather than making original tracks that fail to meet the mark.

Perhaps GameMill Entertainment could hire composers to remix memorable songs like Avatar: The Last Airbender's "Peace Excerpt" or SpongeBob SquarePants' theme music like Nintendo does with Super Smash Bros.

Is Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 worth playing?

Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 is worth trying out. The new movesets make this game more exciting than the original, and the online netcode is surprisingly stellar. If you want to check out All-Star Brawl 2 alone, the campaign mode is compelling enough to play it for hours. While the music is disappointing to listen to, the new voice acting does add so much to the game.

[The publisher provided one PS5 code and one PC code to the writer]

The post Review: Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 appeared first on Destructoid.

Super Mario RPG is Super Mario RPG. It was an instant classic when it came out on the Super Nintendo in 1996, and it’s still a classic in 2023. That’s the review. Leave your comments down below.

Oh, you’re still here. That’s understandable. After all, I don’t think you needed me to tell you that Super Mario RPG is a fun game. This unique collaboration between Nintendo and Squaresoft garnered a devoted following almost immediately upon release, and that passion from its fans endures to this day. While this is technically the origin point that led to the Paper Mario and the Mario & Luigi series, Super Mario RPG remains one of the wackiest and most surreal games the mustached plumber has ever starred in. Quite frankly, it's a miracle we’re even seeing this game again at all.

When I previewed the game and noted that it was a mostly faithful remake, I saw quite a few mixed reactions. For some, a remake should be the original game preserved with modern graphics and updated music. For others, a remake should be a transformative experience that expands upon the source material. Does Super Mario RPG achieve either of these objectives? And perhaps more importantly, did Super Mario RPG need to change to appeal to a modern audience?

As good as Super Mario RPG is, the answers to both questions are surprisingly complicated. Not necessarily in bad ways, though.

Super Mario RPG (Switch)
Developer: ArtePiazza
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: November 17, 2023
MSRP: $59.99

Fungah! Foiled again!

For those totally unfamiliar with Super Mario RPG, our story begins with a tale as old as time. Bowser has kidnapped Princess Peach, and it’s up to Mario to save her. Even in the Super Mario RPG universe, Mario’s reputation precedes him. So, naturally, he speedruns his mission and whacks Bowser in record time. However, rather than cut to a happily-ever-after, a huge sword crashes into Bowser’s Castle, separating Mario and Princess Peach once again.

A new foe enters the scene, and it’s up to Mario to both find the missing princess and discover why these weapon-based enemies have invaded both the Mushroom Kingdom and beyond.

Mario games don’t typically focus on storytelling, and Super Mario RPG isn’t exactly Shakespeare with its twists and turns. That said, Super Mario RPG remains, to this day, one of the best stories set in the Mario universe. The world and its inhabitants are vibrant, with funny dialogue that always got a smile out of me. Yet the story sequences move on quickly, so it never feels bogged down by cutscenes.

I get the sense that Super Mario RPG was written specifically for people who don’t typically like RPGs. Its story beats are exceedingly simple, and the text can say everything it needs with a handful of words. Yet within that space, there's so much life and tongue-in-cheek dialogue, which makes the package work so well. It feels like proper comedy, not just an RPG with some funny lines, and I love that vibe so much.

Lots of people use something called a “door” to go in and out of their houses

Additionally, this most recent playthrough of Super Mario RPG made me realize how much I love the characters in this game. Mallow and Geno are, of course, charming and lovable in their own ways. But Super Mario RPG is the rare Mario game in which I actually think Mario is the star of the show.

Like many '90s RPG heroes, he's a silent protagonist, but he’s so expressive in ways we typically don’t see even today. Mario recaps story events through elaborate charades, and he often reacts to wacky enemies or situations with slapstick humor that looks straight out of Looney Tunes. On a few occasions, we even see the usually cheery plumber lose his cool, and honestly, watching Mallow keep Mario from throwing hands is funnier today than it was in 1996.

At this point, it's a running joke that if you have a group of friends playing something like Mario Kart, almost no one will actually play as Mario. He’s often treated as a blank slate, with the entirety of his personality coming from Charles Martinet’s incredible voice work. But Super Mario RPG does such a good job characterizing Mario that I’m sad this didn’t become his canon personality. He’s an endearing little ball of chaos, emotive in a way rarely seen by modern Mario.

Super Mario RPG obviously isn’t the only game in the Mushroom Kingdom to get creative with its world and characters. But as one of the first Mario games to take a story-focused approach, it’s amazing just how well Squaresoft and Nintendo nailed it on the first try.

Mario! The chain! Aim for the chain!

The writing isn’t the only part of Super Mario RPG that has aged well. Even exploring towns still feels great, thanks in part to the focus on Mario’s most defining characteristic: jumping. Small platforming challenges and secrets are everywhere, adding extra spice to the more mundane parts of RPGs. See a treasure chest that’s out of reach in a shop? Well, do some snooping, and you may find a few hidden boxes. Climb to the top, and there's a chimney that drops you in just the right spot. These types of small puzzles are everywhere, and they’re always fun to uncover.

That philosophy extends to the game’s dungeon design (if you can call the enemy-laden areas in the game “dungeons”). Super Mario RPG loves its gimmicks and twists, making each challenge distinct from the last. In one minute, you’ll try to catch a bandit before they escape; in the next, you’ll tackle some light puzzle-solving. Then, before you know it, you're floating down a river playing a minigame.

It’s the type of ingenuity you’d see in a Nintendo platformer like Super Mario Wonder, except in an RPG setting. Even the smaller gimmicks, like finding a star in a treasure chest that lets you instantly defeat enemies, adds so much energy to the experience. Despite finishing this game several times in my youth, I stayed curious and excited throughout the journey. This kind of design was wildly creative back in the SNES days, and even today, Super Mario RPG feels fresh.

Now, let’s chat about the remake

So, yes, Super Mario RPG has aged quite well. But what does the remake add to the experience?

Well, let’s start with the obvious. Super Mario RPG has a visual overhaul on the Nintendo Switch, and it’s… pretty good! The art remains faithful to the original, with added environmental details where the SNES game just kind of had blank space. The decision to make Mario look so small in this version honestly added to my delight, too. Combine design with his over-the-top characterization, and that makes this Mario a strong contender for my favorite incarnation of the plumber yet.

That said, Super Mario RPG doesn’t exactly stun or wow with its aesthetics. It gets the job done, don’t get me wrong. It just doesn't often aim much higher than that. It's not really a bad thing, but in context, Super Mario RPG was one of the SNES' more distinct and impressive-looking games. That specific appeal is lost here, and I imagine some purists may prefer the original game for that reason.

The same can’t be said about the music, which absolutely went above and beyond here. Back in the day, Super Mario RPG's soundtrack never stuck with me like other games of the era did. But these arrangements of Yoko Shimomura’s tracks sing, adding enough flourishes to enhance and honor Mario's old tunes. For example, the extended battle theme includes a couple of key changes preventing the original theme from repeating too soon. I found myself stopping at several points just to listen to the music, despite my feelings regarding the original soundtrack.

There was a track or two that didn’t quite stick the landing. But overall, even if visuals aren’t a showstopper, I’d absolutely recommend playing this remake for the new music.

The name’s Nello...PUNCHINELLO!

So those are the aesthetics, but what about the gameplay?

At its core, Super Mario RPG plays the same as it always did; turn-based battles with timed button presses for attacks and defenses. However, we now have quite a few quality-of-life features that make the experience much smoother. Items and recovery magic have quick menus that you can access with a button press, making party upkeep a breeze. Additionally, inventory management drops the collective, total item cap and pivots to limiting how much of each item you can hold. Item restrictions could be a hassle in the original game, but it's a non-issue in the remake.

Combat is where we see the most substantial changes. The big additions here are chain bonuses that grow with every perfectly timed block or attack and Triple Moves that function like Final Fantasy-style Limit Breaks. However, there are a few other added touches here too. The game will now announce which enemy attacks can or can’t be blocked, and your perfectly timed attacks will now inflict a little splash damage on all enemies. Additionally, a couple of neat new systems come into play once you get your fourth party member.

Out of an overabundance of caution, I won’t elaborate on that last point. But I will say that, of all the changes to the game, the integration of your whole party is my favorite. In the SNES version, I defaulted to a party of Mario, Geno, and Peach and never strayed from that. However, this go-around, I felt encouraged to swap out party members regularly, adding some welcomed variety. Even Bowser, who I almost always benched, actually saw some use in my run. It's a more dynamic iteration on the classic combat, leaning more into the RPG side of Super Mario RPG.

Crying? But that's what people do when they're...sad!!

That said, I can’t say that the entirety of the new battle mechanics changed that much about the game. The new systems are intriguing enough in isolation, but the moment-to-moment gameplay didn't necessarily feel much different than its SNES counterpart. Stuff like the chain bonus didn’t alter how I played, and even the extra splash damage wasn’t usually enough to alter my tactics.

That said, the battle music does get more upbeat if you maintain that combo. So, in a way, the mechanic did provide an added incentive to time attacks just right. Yet again, Yoko Shimomura’s soundtrack comes in clutch.

The subdued impact of these mechanics probably comes from the fact that the Super Mario RPG remake is kind of easy. To be clear, it’s not terribly easy. The original game wasn’t necessarily known for its blistering difficulty, and the remake can put up a fight at times. But as long as you got your timing on your button presses right, there's less pressure to min-max your actual battle tactics. This ultimately made me wish the game featured an optional harder difficulty for those who are well familiar with the original.

I do appreciate that you can select an easier difficulty from the outset. Super Mario RPG is honestly one of the best games for anyone who wants to get into turn-based RPGs, and the remake retains that quality. But this is one respect where this remake may have stopped just a step too short. I think something as simple as a hard mode could have made the game a bit more transformative for longtime fans, but I wouldn’t rank this omission as a dealbreaker.

I am matter... I am antimatter...

So maybe the remake is only mildly transformative with its gameplay, but what about all-new content? Nintendo previously teased boss rematches, and while I appreciated some encounters, not all of these new fights are winners. However, the ones that worked really dug into the game's mechanics. This is where Mario RPG gets some real bite, which I think longtime fans will enjoy. One of these rematches, in particular, really stands out, too. Don't worry, you'll know it when you see it.

That said, without veering into spoiler territory, the boss rematches aren’t quite as comprehensive as they could be. While I was initially fascinated by uncovering “new” encounters, they were over too soon, and before I knew it I had cleared everything. My total playtime, with the rematches, was still under 20 hours all said and done. To be clear, Super Mario RPG goes light on filler. By no means do I think its shorter runtime is a bad thing, especially since most RPGs drag on for 40 hours or more. But if you’re a longtime fan only interested in new content, you might feel a bit disappointed.

There are a few odds and ends you can chase down to max out your save file. Basically, a few medals and trinkets for those who like to 100% a game for completion's sake. But, again, the remake stops itself just short of giving players captivating reasons to stick around after clearing its beefier rematches. Super Mario RPG still has plenty of secrets tucked away, little things like feeding a Yoshi handfuls of Yoshi Cookies for rare items. But I still wish more was done to explore everything Super Mario RPG's world has to offer.

It’s honestly to the game’s credit that I was still searching for reasons to keep playing despite the lack of rewards for my efforts. Yet, when I think about remakes like Pokemon Heart Gold & Soul Silver that both preserve and expand on the source material, I can’t help but wish that’s what was done here.

Like the moon over the day, my genius and brawn are lost on these fools

At the end of the day, Super Mario RPG juggles its duty to serve as a classic tribute and modernized experience well. However, your mileage will depend on what you want out of it. Judged strictly as a remake, this is a firmly good-to-great effort. The visual upgrades are nice, and the music is phenomenal. Meanwhile, the added content and gameplay elements may not be substantially transformative, but do offer more than something like the Link’s Awakening remake. It’s not nearly as comprehensive as, say, the recent Star Ocean: The Second Story R, but this RPG maintains all of the appeal of the original.

However, if we judge the game as a whole, Super Mario RPG remains an utterly delightful time full of energy and personality. The writing, level design, and even the world aged so well that it didn’t need many changes to modernize it. Sure, there are a few balance issues, and some of the platforming can be trickier than it needs to be. But from the moment I picked it up, I still didn’t want to put it down. It’s all the charm of a golden age Squaresoft RPG combined with the sheer joy of a top-shelf Nintendo game, so it’s no wonder this one remains so fiercely beloved. There’s still nothing quite like it, and I’m thrilled to see it return for a brand new audience to fall in love with.

Super Mario RPG is an all-time classic game that both RPG lovers and Mario fans alike owe it to themselves to play. This Switch remake brilliantly preserves the spirit of the original SNES game, with some great quality-of-life enhancements and a phenomenally redone soundtrack. Longtime fans looking for a more transformative remake may feel disappointed, but when the core game itself has aged this well, it doesn’t suffer in the ways a lesser title would. If you’ve never played Super Mario RPG, or if you simply want an excuse to revisit it, this remake is for you.

The post Review: Super Mario RPG (Switch) appeared first on Destructoid.

Perhaps the biggest highlight of Remnant 2 was its incredible world-building and design. All three core worlds—Losomn, N'Erud, and Yaesha—were so distinct and immersive that they very well could have been their own games. In the first Remnant 2 DLC, players revisit Losomn in an attempt to track down the One True King.

The new Forlorn Coast adds another variant to Losomn, making it one of the zone's three roll possibilities. The mad king thinks everyone has betrayed him, and teleports his castle smack dab in a Dran coastal town. After my roughly seven-hour journey through the new area, I was pleased with the content the DLC added to Remnant 2. To put it simply, this is just more Remnant 2, and that's not a bad thing.

Remnant 2: The Awakened King DLC (PC [reviewed], PS5, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Gunfire Games
Publisher: Gearbox Publishing
Released: November 14, 2023
MSRP: $9.99

If it ain't broke don't fix it

The level design in Remnant 2: The Awakened King may be the best by Gunfire Gamers yet. You start on the outskirts of the coastal town, with the castle of the One True King looming above. Inside the actual locale are plenty of events, dungeons to explore, and new loot. Eventually, I made my way up the cliffside to the castle of the mad king, overlooking the coastal dark Dran I had just spent hours exploring. It's a cool touch to actually look out over the town from atop the castle, knowing you have actually traversed its streets.

While overall, I enjoyed the new area, there is one specific locale that I found to be incredibly frustrating. The Forgotten Commune is cobbled together with wooden planks and ramshackle hovels inside a deep sewer system. Throughout most the level you have to be careful not to fall off, while also fighting enemies in narrow corridors and tight spaces. If the developers told me they were doing their own rendition of Blighttown from Dark Souls, I'd certainly believe them. I'd be upset, but I would believe them.

Speaking of which, The Awakened King is definitely on the more challenging side. I started on Veteran difficulty—the second of four difficulty levels—and actually ended up bumping it down to Survivor after slamming my head in The Forgotten Commune for a while. Some of the new enemies are super brutal, often spewing out poison-exploding orbs or exploding themselves on death. At some points, it felt over-the-top difficult, especially after just returning to the game after having not played for months. One of the bosses even spawns a slew of the explodey enemies, all while in a tight and narrow space. It not only took a few tries but definitely checked my patience. Have I mentioned how much I disliked The Forgotten Commune?

Speaking of new content, Gunfire Games sprinkled quite a bit throughout the core Remnant 2 game as well, primarily in the form of items and mutators. It's a great opportunity to play with a friend if they're new. With how the DLC works, the new area will simply be added to the pool of being rolled when you visit Losomn.

I assume that with the first DLC pack being broken into three pieces, we'll also see a new area in N'Erud and Yaesha. I feel like The Awakened King was the ideal supplement to Losomn, and I can't wait to see what they do with the others if that is the goal.

Remnant 2: The Awakened King doesn't do anything too wild or reinvent the wheel, but that's probably for the best, as the core game is already fantastic. It adds more content to an already outstanding action RPG and continues building on the scale and depth of its world. Content-wise, there's plenty there with a handful of new bosses, dungeons, and an all-new Archetype. If Remnant 2 already had its hooks in you with the base game, you'll like what Gunfire Games has to offer here. If you haven't, now is as good a time as any.

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

The post Review: Remnant 2: The Awakened King DLC 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.