Undertale, Thumper, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Evil Within 2 (PS4 Quick Reviews)

Just some quick takes on a few games I played this year.

HORIZON: ZERO DAWN

I actually enjoyed this game more than Breath of the Wild. It's some of the best combat in an open world game to date. There are so many different points that the presentation leaves you in awe. Some of the typical blasé open world tropes are present, but it leaves such strong impressions on how it plays and how it looks that you have a hard time caring. If you haven't played it (which you probably have) then you definitely need to. Easy contender for 2017 game of the year.

Grade: A

UNDERTALE

Undertale is unique. The music is great. It's quirky and fun and full of cool little surprises. Who couldn't love Undertale? It's the game of 2017 that made me smile the most. There's plenty of unforgettable characters. But it's not perfect. You live moment to moment for these highlights. It has hits and it has misses. The characters are what make Undertale. It relies heavily on them. Maybe it relies on them a bit too much. But overall, it's worth seeing.

Grade: B

EVIL WITHIN 2

Biggest disappointment of 2017. It starts off fairly strong and then blows out into this open world design that personally didn't appeal to me at all. There's an occasional scare but the game never felt like a survival horror game. Ammo was plentiful and the enemies never seemed to be something hunting you, rather something you chose to avoid or engage. Certain stealth mechanics also completely gut the suspense. It pained me to dislike it as much as I did. It's an alright game but not at all what I wanted.

Grade: C

THUMPER



Thumper is amazing. If it were released in 2017 it would've been in my top 5. The bulk of my time with it was spent in VR. It's so good. My god. I can't gush enough over Thumper. The soundtrack is amazing, the gameplay is simple but fierce, and every session left me realizing I was gripping the controller so tight it left my hands aching. Throughout my playthrough I was left mentally exhausted from it. It's phenomenal. If you have a VR headset, you have to get it. I can't recommend Thumper enough.

Grade: A

Assassin's Creed : Origins (PS4 Review)

I never thought I'd see the day that I felt compelled to write a review of an Assassin's Creed game. The series just always felt like something I played by availability and not by some driving interest. Up until now I'd see one of the entries on sale when the deluge of big releases were coming to a trickle. It was the interactive media palate cleanser, I guess; it was always neutral, transitional, and available. So when I think about Origins, I see a few things that made me come to this one with a sense of genuine curiosity. Ubisoft took a break from the cadence of the franchise to step back and reassess the mechanics. I was curious what they had accomplished with that extra time, and my experience was surprising.

Origins has accomplished the impossible task of making me care about what's going on. The playable characters, Bayek and Aya, are a ferocious duo that are likable from the onset and never fall out of good graces. You can see how their intentions begin to widen into something beyond themselves, and it was enough to keep me interested. Sure, the Abstergo nonsense is still in here, but it does a decent enough job of trying to keep it behind the curtain. I can respect that. What's more impressive is just how much more there is to do after completing the main storyline, and how persistent the itch is to jump back in and explore. The world of Egypt is vast and beautiful. In some ways it doesn't make sense from a design standpoint. There are expanses of terrain with next to nothing but sand, and yet it adds a level of authenticity to the world that I appreciated. This is doubled down with gorgeous art direction and a camera mode that I found myself drawn to time and time again. Players can compose a shot, choose from a variety of basic editing effects, and upload it to the map. This creates a marker of where the shot was taken, so when players sift through the community photos they can easily travel to that destination. It's a cool way to interact with the community without being intrusive, and there are other equally subtle methods that the game uses to tie the experience together just enough to feel right.

The combat is better than predecessors but only just. It pads out the experience with straightforward RPG mechanics and a skill tree that branches in three paths; these paths boil down to melee, ranged, and tools. Each path has skills you'll find useful or fun to use, and you certainly don't need to worry about committing to any particular option. It took me a bit to adjust to the combat, feeling somewhere in between The Witcher 3 and Dark Souls. The target locking, swapping, and even ranged feel at times janky, but the odds are never at a point where poor precision impedes progress. Stealth is less integral this time around, and it actually makes a point of that in the story. It may be the a key reason I enjoyed Origins so much. Bayek isn't an assassin but a Medjay, an ever-present public figure in Egypt, policing and protecting his people. He settles problems by investigation and confrontation rather than stalking around in the shadows. Certainly you're welcome to play that way if you want to, but it's not something the game makes a big deal out of if you choose not to, nor does it include missions that demand you to specifically play it stealthily or face desynchronization.

There's a basic loot system that doesn't really do much more than give you the contented fondness of watching numbers go up. About six weapon varieties exist in the game and they ostensibly behave the same between their types. Rarities denote how many bonuses each weapon can have, including additional effects like poison on touch or increased adrenaline buildup. I never felt a desire to keep a certain weapon and upgrade it though, choosing rather to just take the weapon with the higher numbers and press forward. None of the loot I collected seemed to really matter all that much. It was cool to keep finding new things, and it definitely made me try weapon types I wasn't too keen on at the beginning. So props is due at least for injecting some change throughout the experience.

The leveling is a bit clumsy. I experienced a few hiccups as I tried to keep in pace with the main questline. The indisputable best way to collect experience is by doing side missions in the towns and the map does a great job of breaking down geographies by level ranges like an MMO would, so you know where to go and when. But the side missions aren't often that great, and many of them ironically boil down to MMO fetch quests or The Witcher 3's fantasy CSI. It would be nice to have seen some more love in the side mission design, especially since it's such a necessary part to leveling. Also, some missions take longer than others or had more demanding level suggestions, and I couldn't find a rime or reason why some of these missions doled out less experience than others. In the course of my playthrough I couldn't find many other good alternatives to leveling, unless you love tower climbing or clearing outposts for a fraction of the EXP yield. So there were occasions where I had to hunt down new missions and it stalled my progress. It did make me venture into new areas of the world and it did encourage exploring though, but the double edged sword was the inconvenience of participating in more of the same to just get by a roadblock.

As I'm writing out these thoughts I'm realizing why I enjoyed Origins so much, and on the surface it sounds like a lot of gripes. But the game left an impression on me that wants to see these rough edges refined. They took a few calculated risks and the payoff is as intended, which is to compel a player to see more, do more, and try more, but the risk also produced some mild irritations. Every choice does more good than harm. Mechanics are chaotic but fine, some of the RPG elements seem basic but welcome, and the progression is dated but enthralling in the way it flows from one providence to the next. There's a clear attempt at something that goes far beyond the series' safe and tasteless design, and I can't complain about any of it at a point where it feels substandard. The characters are the best in the series, the world is the most interesting and beautiful world to explore in the series to date, and the encounters have more significance than ever before. Origins is worth seeing, and definitely worth checking back into long after the main event is accomplished.

Grade: B

Hellblade : Senua's Sacrifice (PS4 Review)

I'm finding an evolving market for something akin to the adventure games of the 90's. I've played quite a few in the past few years. Grim Fandango Remastered was fun for what it was as well as a good primer for the modern adaptations of the genre. I've liked enough of these games to keep giving them a shot. Very rarely do I have mixed feelings when it comes to adventure games. Hellblade is one of those types of experiences that isn't quite like the others but shares enough similarities that I have to lump it in with more passive games like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter or Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Where it diverges from those games is probably its greatest fault.

Hellblade is a psychological adventure game steeped in Norse mythology. Adventure games thrive on storytelling and puzzles - so where Hellblade starts is promising. It appears in tune with itself and sucks you in immediately. Senua arrives on the shores of Helheim to search for a way to free her lover's soul. It presents a great introduction into Senua's character - a fragile, terrified, and troubled woman scarred deeply by the events that led to her partner's death. A turbulent mixture of voices in Senua's psyche debate her every move throughout the game. These voices taunt her, encourage her, and bicker between themselves. The voice acting is top notch and visuals staggering for a $30 game. The story sticks a landing early on and sustains that driving force for a good chunk of the game. And then something happens. The experience becomes unraveled in a way that lays out where it's going and how it intends to get there. By the time that happens, it just doesn't have enough to keep the themes it wrestles with afloat within the medium.

The biggest flaw for Hellblade is the cadence that it conforms to. On paper, it sounds like a nice compromise between action adventure and true adventure games. The main issue is how it presents all of these interactive parts and what it does (or doesn't do) with them. Take for example the combat. While it's simple and breaks up some of the monotony of advancing and solving a puzzle, they overuse it so much to the point that it becomes predictable and at times even contrived. You know when a combat segment is coming up before you even get there and eventually you'll know exactly what it entails. The difficulty also increases artificially. Instead of making the combat more complex by layering new skills or introducing substantial variations in foes, the game just throws more conservative iterations of enemies at you at the same time. The end result is an otherwise stylish one-on-one combat mechanic boiling down to a frustrating chore where you have to account for multiple attackers outside your peripheral. They lean more and more weight on the combat right up until the conclusion and every interaction with it becomes an increasingly tedious task.

You would hope the puzzles make up for the tedium though, right? Well, no, they don't. They suffer from most of the same criticisms. The first puzzle you encounter in the game may stump you for a few minutes. Once you figure out the solution and get beyond that first gate though, you'd be surprised to think that they'd dare to repeat that motif for the entirety of the game. That's exactly what they do and it's probably the most deflating realization. Puzzles should become increasingly complex in any game and should feel intuitive to the world. They shouldn't just feel like they're padding out an experience - but in Hellblade they regrettably do. Later down the road, instead of solving one of these types of puzzles, you'll now have to walk around a small area and solve two or three of the same type of environmental puzzle before you can advance. Once you solve the first puzzle in the game, you know exactly what to do for the next eight hours. The linearity of the game hampers the appeal of even doing these particular tasks. You understand the language of the game in the first thirty minutes, where an undeviating path and visual cues hint way too clearly at every solution. It feels more like paint by numbers than something like The Witness where you're overcome with consistently satisfactory moments of insight. If the puzzles were more diverse and interesting or the world was more open, there'd be something here to actually sink your teeth into. But there isn't. It's all just too shallow and it practically treats its audience like they're mindless.

Hellblade seems as if its trying way too hard to fit into the video game mold. It's as if the story began as a film script and they worked their way back to the channel they felt most familiar to tell it. It's punctuated enough in story paradigm that it could work as a movie, but then they chopped it up with elementary game mechanics. The writing starts solid but becomes increasingly overbearing as time goes on. That seems to be an ongoing complaint with this review. It starts at a high point with great art and sound design and gets burdened by too much of everything else after the player base has more than grasped it. There are times when they keep driving home a point so much that you can't help but roll your eyes. And sure, you could make the argument that the theme calls for burdening and oppressive writing, but I think it hits the nail so hard and so frequently in every facet of its form that the game becomes obnoxious.

I went into Hellblade with high hopes and ended up relieved when it was over. The song in the ending credits actually made me cringe. I know that sounds like hyperbole but it did. It perfectly summed up how I felt about this game as a whole. I've posted it below in the hopes that if my review doesn't get my point across, the song possibly will. It's a shame, because you can see a clear divergence between the love that went into making the world and the game design choices and unendurable writing that weighed it down. I may be in the unpopular vote here. It just wasn't for me at all. I think it would be way easier to forgive the missteps if I could sit back and just take in the story. It has to be judged as a game. It has to be judged as a story that justifies the reasoning to be a game. I don't think it hits either target.



Grade: D

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (PS4 Review)

(All screenshots in this review have been captured directly from the PS4)

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a beautiful adventure game by The Chinese Room, the development team behind Dear Esther. It boasts a well written story of convincing characters that are matched in depth by the actors who voice them. The music, composed by the game’s director Jessica Curry, is another strong component in what begins to sound more and more like a ringing endorsement. Unfortunately, the game fails a very basic checklist requirement that left me disappointed and frustrated.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture maintains a character movement speed that I would find unacceptable to just about anyone. In fact, the further you play the more it starts to detract from your experience and become a burdening, needless weight. It’s astounding that anyone on the development team could find this as necessary without eventually admitting that it locks itself to a molasses-like trudge merely to prolong the game length. I began the experience with an excited inquisitiveness, walking around every inch of the map to observe the remnants of an empty village. I wanted to inspect all of the little details that caught my eye - but every step of the way I found myself pressing the buttons on the controller compulsively, trying to find if there was some run mechanic that hadn’t unlocked yet or I’d yet to input properly. When I realized I was putting combinations of buttons together that no sane person would ever map a run action to, I knew that I was facing my own personal sort of doomsday.

Even though the acting in this game is phenomenal and the writing is great, I began to steadily lose interest. They do try to make up for the movement speed by offering guidance in the form of these amiable little orbs of light. They lead you through this open concept map by imploring you to follow them like a dog, running toward the place they’re leading you to and then running back over to beckon before running off again. That’s great and all, but it really begins to become the only thing that pushes you forward. I began to rely on it exclusively in order to progress through the story as quickly as possible, and stopping to see many of the more subtle details become too much of a pain. I felt literally exhausted by the experience when I finally got to the end and I have no qualms in saying that I’m not entirely sure what the conclusion amounted to.

The story goes in some interesting directions based around the Biblical end-times. There are a handful of characters that you’ll encounter in a minimalist presentation, obscured forms that appear to be made of agitated light. When you activate these cues, the characters perform minute-long plays that feed you details about the characters and the “situation” that involves the disappearance of more than half the townsfolk. Each of these performances is exceptionally well done, and if it weren’t for these moments, I would’ve probably never finished the game. That creates the secondary problem of feeling numb by the ending. The final divulgence of information feels like a half-baked idea that could’ve been handled better.

Everbody’s Gone to the Rapture is the kind of game that you’ll find good things about but you may feel progressively less fond of them when you let the entire experience digest. There’s things to see here, but without the proper ability to see them, many of the world’s intricacies are willfully left unfound and unappreciated.

Grade: C

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (PS4 Review)

I downloaded The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on a whim. Things have been slow for games lately and I had heard a few good things about it from friends. Most of those praises were centered around the looks - and to my understanding the game has been remade with the Unreal 4 engine specifically for the PS4. It’s described as a horror adventure game and though my experience with adventure games is limited I was compelled to play through its modest 5 hours in a handful of sittings. I was skeptical at first, feeling as if the highly realistic graphics and simplistic gameplay were going to be just another example of disproportionate priorities within game design - but each consecutive session became more and more engrossing and once arriving at the end I was left with a strong desire to seek out more of these bite-sized experiences. To that point I recommend The Vanishing of Ethan Carter highly.

Ethan Carter begins with a black screen that says, “This game is a narrative experience that does not hold your hand”. There are no fail states. There are no enemies. You explore the world for clues and items. The most involved portions of the game are environmental puzzles where items need to be positioned in order to conjure up ghostlike memories that will help you solve a series of murders. You then enter the proper chronology of events that will piece together how each one of these murders occurred. You’re not required to perform any of these puzzles - in fact, you could walk right to the end of the game without doing any of it. The reward of Ethan Carter is related to how much exploration you put into it. To that end, I find the game’s deceptively linear design effective.

What stood out most about the game were its vignettes of weirdness that punctuate the experience. There’s a fair share of spectacle to be had in the game that incentivizes you to really want to see everything. It's constantly looking to give you good reason to do everything. The hyper realistic presentation paired with these abnormal episodes that seem like hallucinations works quite well. There were definitely more than a few times that the game impressed me, both in the world itself and in its dreamlike happenings.

It’s hard to say a lot about The Vanishing of Ethan Carter because the majority of its enjoyment is found by experiencing it yourself. There’s not much to judge about it from a gameplay perspective and I can’t give away much of the story without doing it a disservice. I think that the shorter length of the experience works very well in tandem with what it offers. It’s a story and experience that I’ll speak fondly of and one that intrigues me to try some of the other recent adventure games that appear to be making a steady comeback.

Grade: A

Arkham Knight (PS4 Review)

Arkham Knight is a game that I wanted to like. I played through about 40% of its content before inevitably dropping it and never wanting to touch it again. The big problem with Arkham Knight is design. On a mechanical level, Arkham Knight controls fine. On a presentational level, Arkham Knight is top notch. It's just that through all of the things that Arkham Knight does right it feels more like fan service than a game I enjoy playing. I can't emphasize enough how visually impressive the world is. It's one of the best looking console games this generation and seldom struggles with framerate dips. While Rocksteady tries new things, they're not that great or even that deep. The design is formulaic, suggesting a gross imbalance between the game's presentational goals and design choices. A lot of the missions are too similar and what's worse is that the game repeats the structure shamelessly. You'll complete a mission or be in between a mission segment spending a portion of that time on a bat call talking to Alfred or Oracle or whomever else. It's nitpicking, I know, but when things are used in excess it's hard not to notice. Arkham Knight didn’t do enough to pull me in and what it offers isn’t enough to make me want more.

The driving and tank combat additions are unreasonably overused and they're bland. It's a real tragedy that they rely on it as much as they do. You use the Batmobile for chases, tank combat, and platforming. Platforming with a car is one part that I simply can’t understand. Even on paper the idea seems bad, so to see it make it to the final product brings up a lot of questions. The on-foot combat looks great and controls fine, but after so many of these games and games that I feel adopted it and did it better (Shadow of Mordor) I expected to see something new. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case.
What this comes down to in the end is that Arkham Knight feels like a gorgeous game with dated gameplay and narrow design choices. It’s possible that Rocksteady is just aching to move on to something new. I can understand that - but for a final hurrah, the closing chapter is stale and contrived. I think it’s worth renting it if you’re a Batman fan, but otherwise I don’t think this game has much to offer.

Grade: C

Titan Souls (PS4 Review)

You know what I love? Wendy’s. I unabashedly love it. I go there once a week and I always order the same thing: a double hot and juicy with no pickles. I love pickles too but that’s neither here nor there, folks. The fact of the matter is that it’s like a ritual for me. I love every aspect of it, including the drive there. Now what if there was some sort of horrid rule enforced on my weekly Wendy’s - say some type of obstacle. Let’s just say for the sake of this analogy I’m bumbling through here that I had to drive to Wendy’s while balancing a grain of rice on a tooth pick. For every time that I drop the grain of rice, my car is towed back at my house and my dashboard reads, “Fat chance, motherfucker! Do it again!” Eventually, I’d begin to question if the classic double was really worth it. Years later I would be found shambling around the parking lot of a Burger King, a shell of myself, talking to the french fry-laden bushes about bush stuff.

Titan Souls is sort of like this experience for me. It combines things that I love and does them in a way that feels like you’re part of some Soviet Union gymnastics team. Delineation to pattern is taboo, and while some of the one-shot-kill titans can allow a bit of mobility, the fights are either won in seconds or lost in seconds. Any fight that lasts longer than 10 seconds is just…no. It’s boring, you’re doing it wrong, you’ll probably die eventually, should I die? Should I just run into the boss and die? Sploot. Dead. Great.

Now instead of just letting you respawn outside the boss room or in the room itself, you have to run back to the boss room, which can take a few seconds but BELIEVE me when I say that this starts to feel like you’re slamming your dick into a car door repeatedly by the sixth fucking time, because the world is so vapid and bland that you hate, hate, HATE walking through it. It’s a critical problem with Titan Souls, because somewhere in between mixing Dark Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, and Zelda, the game stripped away not only the fun parts, but practically anything of praise. It’s woefully short, there’s no upgrade system or variety to the encounters, the world is more empty than Shadow of the Colossus (how the hell was this even possible?), and the fights are so short-lived that they leave no impression at all.

If this was maybe $5, I could possibly make some sort of case for trying it. It plays fine? It didn’t crash? The music is pretty? There’s clearly ideas in here worth exploring further but it’s just so far beyond dead in this iteration that I find it hard to give it any sort of praise, let alone recommendation. Just play Shovel Knight or Bastion or Axiom Verge. Do not pay $15 for this.

Grade: D