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

Bloodborne (PS4 Review)

After the mildly disappointing sequel to Dark Souls, it was seeming like maybe, just maybe, the Souls series could be heading into a slump. Combat was becoming a routine and players could easily best several of Dark Souls II's challenges by exercising a little bit of patience. While the sequel was admirable it lost a part of its appeal. It's great to see that director Hidetaka Miyazaki anticipated monotony. It's an increasingly difficult quality to find a developer that can embrace change while still working much of its core design into the fabric of what made a game laudable. Bloodborne adapts so well to a faster play style that it feels like a rebirth for the series.

Bloodborne is a big deal to Sony, which would worry anyone that’s a fan of Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls. While that might seem like it would be the kind of indication that the game would pull back the challenge and open the accessibility to new players in order to entice sales, the fact still stands that it's going to punish you until you decide to play it smart or play it well. The game still offers many ways to assist players with its challenges and it's always encouraged that new players play the game online so that they can take advantage of the messaging system which has been integral to the design of the Souls series. The community aspect to any of the Souls games is a large part of my reverence for it. A strong, simultaneous player base makes the world feel all the more accessible. You’ll always find players leaving helpful notes pertaining advice, emotions, humor, discoveries, warnings, and directions.

The combat is quicker than its predecessors and as a direct result far more enjoyable. By throwing out shields and adding better evasion, the encounters are frantic and fun. Still, even with the additional speed and focus shifted more toward the offensive, it feels comparable to the first Dark Souls in difficulty. Players will still make decisions based on enemy behavior and positioning is critical. You'll be faced with a few urgent choices that can make a great deal of difference.

The story and the environments remain consistently nebulous and macabre. NPC’s seldom speak clearly and even the more cryptic characters you’ll meet are voiced so exceptionally well that you’ll listen to whatever they have to say. Branchlike paths in the game are either hidden, requiring an undisclosed means to unlock them, or guarded by bosses. There’s blatant inspirations to classical horror, weaving effortlessly through the minds of Bram Stoker, HP Lovecraft, and Stephen King. It’s one of the most bizarre and fascinating aspects of Bloodborne how logical this nightmarish world feels as you progress through various locations, many of which feed into prior locations. In my first play through (which took roughly 27 hours) I missed two bosses, two regions of the world, and had barely scraped the surface of Bloodborne’s chalice dungeons. There’s genuine moments of trepidation, triumph, and discovery with each successive experience sinking its hooks in deeper. If you go in unspoiled, you’ll find small passages and items that access enormous optional areas. You’ll trigger strange, new events to occur by talking with NPC’s. The less you know about Bloodborne going in is directly proportionate to the quality of experience you’ll get out of it. I believe that all of the Souls game share one irrefutable quality: the more you persevere by your own merit the more you’ll fall in love with it.

The worst part about Bloodborne is its invasion feature. Paired with the faster gameplay and the amount of healing items that can be carried at a single time, invasions can go on for longer than they reasonably should and none of it is fun. It’s worth noting that being invaded is uncommon, as most areas appear to disable it. In my entire play through I was invaded only once. Subsequent experience being the invader proved that the system wasn’t something thought out as thoroughly as the rest of the game.

There’s a lot to say about Bloodborne but I feel it’s best left for players to dig into some of the more obscure yet deliberate design choices for themselves. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a Souls game. Despite its changes the series continues to be uncompromising in execution. The challenges that await veterans and newcomers are impressive feats in game design, providing constant memorable moments from start to finish. If there’s any question right now as to whether this console generation has anything that could be considered a worthwhile exclusive, Bloodborne is at the very top of that list.

Grade: A

The Order | 1886 (PS4 Review)

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

The Order has been under recent heavy fire from critics and consumers alike for various reasons. The most damning criticisms have been its heavy reliance on storytelling over gameplay, the lack of replay value, and the length. While I somewhat agree with these complaints, I also consider these complaints expected as the developers have long stated that the game's intent was to provide a cinematic experience over gameplay. The Order is a competent piece of work that set out to do exactly what it intended to do. Consumers should decide for themselves if this is something worth checking out, though I would recommend waiting for the game to lower its admission fee.

A game should always be judged on its gameplay and I think that this is something that will be on the forefront of anyone's mind. The Order has gameplay and what it does is entirely average. There's nothing spectacular about the combat outside of the graphics - it works fine and there aren't any real complaints worth mentioning. Shooting feels tight and responsive, the combat and stealth segments are mindless fun, and they try to make the quick time events as little of annoyance as possible. It does a reasonable job of pacing the gameplay along with its story segments but it's not enough.

The player is provided most of the story through cutscenes that cannot be skipped. Visual storytelling elements outside of cutscenes are empty in comparison to exposition that you'll be provided through admittedly strong voice performances from every actor. You'll see a lot of gorgeous things, but the world is lifeless in contrast to the characters that inhabit it. You're never provided a meaningful way to interact with the world around you and the linearity as well as the incessant lack of control can break the fourth wall. Players can find a few collectibles that are scattered around the environment but none of them carry any sort of significance whatsoever. I believe that this is The Order's greatest missed opportunity. A sense of the player's individuality is inherent in game design, so to rob the player of that is a fault that deserves heavy criticism. The story may take precedence, but the player should still feel as if they're driving the narrative in a game, otherwise the story suffers.

The Order is, and I mean this as kindly as I can, the most well-polished tech demo that has ever been released. It feels like a game that should've been a pack in with the PlayStation 4 when it launched. There's a lot of things in here to love, but the gameplay will easily be forgotten and as a consequence the story has difficulty supporting the weight of its cons and heavy handed design. There's nothing about the game that's bad - its's just that there's nothing about the game that comes out of the experience as wildly memorable. I remain hopeful that this series will continue because I like everything that they've managed to create. The Order's greatest task going forward will be finding a way to provide a better paced story with better gameplay and less reliance on its cinematic prowess. It's the only hope it has if it ever wishes to be taken seriously as a system-selling exclusive.

Grade: C

Lords of the Fallen (PS4 Review)

When I had first heard about Lords of the Fallen I couldn't wait to give it a try. I'm a huge fan of Demon’s and Dark Souls, and developers Deck13 and CI Games both openly admitted that their game was meant to be inspired by this revered series. It had a masterful blueprint for game design in its hands. The trail had been blazed. So what was the result? You can definitely feel the inspiration Dark Souls had on the developers in the controls, the systems, and the combat. What differentiates this game, so heavily inspired by its source material, is that it lacks the most rudimentary understanding of what made the Soul series such an iconic entry into modern games.

Looking back, Dark Souls is nothing all that "new". It took old practices and concepts of difficulty and death and modernized them to a contemporary audience. Instead of artificial difficulty settings, the Soul series was based on the principle that players needed to learn about their environment and their enemies to succeed. It's not the only game that does that today - it wasn’t the first game to do it and it won't be the last. That’s the main reason why the Soul series are games that are so highly praised - it's an opposition to more casual game experience that also happens to play quite well. We can argue all day whether or not the Soul series is difficult or isn't and honestly it's not a very interesting argument to have. What matters is that it played well, had a fair challenge, and stands as a testament to the modern appeal for games of the past.

When browsing through user videos for those that received Lords of the Fallen early, one person referred to the game as "clunky souls". The term is pretty much spot-on. The game feels like Dark Souls and yet feels heavier, slower, less responsive, and as a consequence of all that boring. Where Dark Souls is a game based around learning to avoid hits entirely, Lords of the Fallen would rather play the less interesting route of taking hits and giving them. Players that find themselves wanting to remove all of their armor and dodge roll throughout the game will find that it just doesn’t work that way. Enemies respond in such a way that feels like you’re constantly knocking against a tank that flinches seldom to your offensive presses and returns attacks that deplete stamina severely or knock your character down. You also don’t get enough of a trade-off advantage from removing the armor because enemies respond so quickly to your movements that you can’t get a quick attack in before they recover. The most effective way that I found to deal with enemies in the game was to overpower them. If you attack enough times with a powerful weapon you can either break their guard and mow them down or at least get a few good hits in. Essentially the gameplay boils down to attacking first, wearing enough armor to absorb that chance hit that lands before you stagger them, and rinsing and repeating that process for the entire game. There’s something far more exhilarating with dodging an attack rather than letting the armor mitigate it. I’m not saying that you can’t play these other styles successfully, but they don’t feel balanced in any sort of way that feels like you’d want to suffer through it. I also found the hit detection bizarrely off. I could occasionally hear a hit land and either the enemy wouldn’t take any damage or it would block from an angle that was obviously exposed. It was exceedingly frustrating given how drawn out certain fights could be.

The art style, much like the gameplay, is heavily borrowed from better examples and then unapologetically implemented. Everything looks like a generic fantasy world. Bosses look practically identical, locations bleed together with their color and settings, and the character armor looks like they literally copied the design of pauldrons from World of Warcraft and changed the color schemes.
The design of the world is also poor. Many of the objectives are very unclear and looking around the world to find out where to go can result in doubling over locations you've visited before. It's baffling because when you take into account how short the game is (my first playthrough clocked around 17 hours) and realize how small the map ends up being, this shouldn't be much of a problem - but it is. I can't help but wonder if this is just another inspiration that Lords of the Fallen is taking from the infamously vague Soul series - but it's hard to say. Match the world design with the environments looking all identical and this world is as confusing as it is bland.

There is an interesting souls system in Lords of the Fallen that could be worth expanding on. Unlike the Soul series, maintaining the souls (experience points) on your person grants you multipliers that allow you to collect more souls at a quicker rate. If you die, the souls gradually deplete as they remain on the ground, so urgency to return to the last place you died becomes a part of the gameplay. It would work if the map wasn’t so small. Returning to your souls is generally too easy and convenient to make any meaningful difference to this otherwise intriguing addition to the system.

There’s not much to say about Lords of the Fallen without bringing up a better example of how to do it right. Lords of the Fallen feels, well, soulless. It has no discernible style, it’s entirely outperformed by its inspirations, and any fleeting new concepts that it brings to the table are squandered by poor design choices. “Inspiration” is a difficult word for me to agree with when I think back on this game. I’d suggest that Lords of the Fallen is a shameless consumption of source material that was then then regurgitated back out to the world and became, as expected, a poorly executed mess in the process.

GRADE: D

Dying Light (PS4 Review)

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

Dying Light was a pleasant surprise given the foreboding sentiment it telegraphed with its lack of a review embargo. Usually that's a telltale sign of a bad game. What we got instead was an intriguing open world game that despite some flaws does a few things that I found worth checking out. While I find that the zombie theme has been nearly picked clean in video games over the past years, it was shocking that Dying Light managed to introduce a level of nuance I didn't expect. It introduces some believable zombie apocalyptic scenarios that I've yet to see handled with the same level of attention. I mean sure, The Walking Dead series handles some interesting scenarios, but Dying Light offers a perspective that feels better suited for a situation so horrifying. Games often run the misfortune of casting aside a lot of the things that make a zombie apocalypse so scary. Dying Light isn’t by any stretch a game that reinvents the wheel or makes me want more zombie games, it just handles it with an unexpected amount of care.

The parkour mobility is both awesome and frustrating. There are times when it works exactly as intended and you’re very glad that it does, but when it doesn’t it’s infuriating. With more freedom to climb the environment Dying Light runs into the problem of occasionally putting up exceptions where it doesn’t make sense. You’ll find some objects are simply unclimbable even though you swear that they can be climbed. Or even things like being unable to shift around corners while hanging onto a ledge. It can be a bummer, but otherwise the system works well enough. One thing that I found pretty bizarre was how difficult is was to climb down environments as opposed to climb up. The addition of a “hang to ledge” feature would’ve made a world of difference, but there are methods to get down quickly and unharmed. They can just be occasionally hard to find.

There are some things that just feel right about Dying Light from its limitations. While the game is based around a parkour system your stamina is limited. Climbing takes time, falling can cause staggering and immense damage, and you can’t run forever. Also, your character begins quite weak, only managing to salvage some planks and pipes from the city streets. Eventually those weapons break if they’re brandished frequently enough, and you’ll find that killing even the weakest and slowest of undead to take several hits before they’re bested. Considering the amount of hits you have to get in to kill a single zombie and the scenarios often involving far more than one enemy at a time, fighting sounds like a fool’s errand. But don’t worry, you’ll get better, because Dying Light introduces a similar leveling system to Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in that every time you perform an action (climbing, killing, jumping from rooftop to rooftop) you’ll gain experience attributed to that action. Oblivion was abysmal in implementing this kind of system because the total of categories you could level up was somewhere in the 20’s. Dying Light reduces them to three: survival, combat, and agility. As you garner more experience in each skill you’ll gain access to perks that will increase the level of tricks and tools that you have at your disposal - but in the beginning, you’ll need to scavenge and scrape by in the city slums to improve your chances of surviving.

Ultimately that creates a series of situations that will leave players considering the best way to tackle a scenario that seems unfavorable while learning to get around the game and accomplish quests unharmed. If there’s a shop you need to get into and there’s twenty undead right outside the shutter, you need to consider how you’ll get in there, open the shutter, grab the necessary items, and get out without them swarming you. What if entering the store triggers a security alarm? Suddenly a slow and stupid series of zombies becomes a problem, and that problem can be panic-inducing.

Outside of the slower zombies are a few varieties that include brutish undead, faster and more tenacious undead, and the nocturnal volatiles which are far more of a problem. Dying Light works entirely around a progressive day and night cycle, where weaker enemies wander the streets during the day and tougher enemies are thrown into the mix once the sun sets. The onset of nighttime is an unsettling concept and it works quite well. The lighting in general is marvelous. It might not sound that interesting but watching a single line of light begin to recede while inside a building is unnerving. It’s moments like these that punctuate the experience Dying Light has crafted - small little details that you could miss if you care not to look or mind. I remember encountering one of my first runners, a female. Running zombies are recently turned and still maintain some of their mobility and coordination, so they’re far more aggressive. As she’s screaming and thrashing I hit her over the head with a wrench to gain distance. Instead of continuing to relentlessly attack until she falls, she cowers down with her hands covering her head and says, “Please don’t hurt me”. It’s this humanistic touch reminding the player that these were people and that maybe a part of them still unwillingly exists within their bodies. I found that all very well done and adding a layer of depth to their take on a doomsday pandemic.

Another thing that I found interesting was how the quests were designed. Usually in an open world game a player will visit a town, find someone that’s lost their dog or something, rescue the dog, receive some amount of experience and an item, and never see this person again. In Dying Light some of these side quests span practically the entire game parallel to the main story. One of the first quests you’ll pick up lasts for a large portion of the game, constantly calling back to it. Even the briefer quest lines seem to add a level of commitment to them that’s wildly uncommon compared to other contenders in the genre. It touches poignantly on the hardships that come with living in such a world while simultaneously making the characters more than a vein of experience to mine; hardships like how to find insulin for a suffering diabetic in a world where every pharmacy has been looted, or sheltering the minds of children from the nightmarish reality outside on the streets. The side quests follow natural progressions that I found more than just fetch quests, because they seemed to be able to add an urgency, a struggle, and a logic as well as a committed level of production to the side content.

The sad truth is that there is a point of diminishing returns that comes with the balancing of the game. Some of these experiences I touched on earlier become diluted or cease to exist once your character becomes the badass he’ll surely transition into if you play the game long enough. When you unlock enough skills and gain access to more powerful weapons, you’ll be lopping the heads off of zombies faster than you can say “Ichabod Crane”. The game really takes a hard left turn when this happens. It becomes something completely different, more hack n’ slash, and there are people that will definitely prefer it. For me the game became a lesser version of itself when the threat had transformed into pesky weeds for my electrical fire machete to cut through on a path to the next objective. There are other perks like the grappling hook that make world traversal far easier and, regrettably, less interesting. Once I got to this point I decided to bum-rush the main story and complete it. I then tried to pick it up again and had little to no desire to keep playing. It sucked me out of the game entirely. I enjoyed the change of pace for a time, but after awhile, the veneer falls off and reveals just another generic zombie game.

There’s a lot of reasons to play Dying Light. It’s got a lot of small pieces that set it apart from games that carry similar themes. It’s one of my first true surprises for the year, having all of the makings to be as generic and uninteresting as possible and surpassing those expectations by a long shot before eventually crashing and burning. I think somewhere in the design of Dying Light there was the idea that all of these parts could fit together on a functional sense, but perhaps the greatest misstep was the lack of consideration for what this would do to the experience for the individual. It’s hard to satisfy everyone, it’s just as hard to completely satisfy someone. Within that conundrum is where Dying Light finds itself trapped, rotting inside a corpse’s shell.

GRADE: B

Dragon Age: Inquisition (PS4 Review)

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

If someone were to tell me that Dragon Age: Inquisition would become one of my favorite games of 2014 I would've dismissed it without hesitation. I had tried to play the first Dragon Age and found the experience much to my distaste after a fair amount of time with it. In the 47 hours of gameplay with Dragon Age: Inquisition I can confidently say that my experience was immensely satisfying and so enjoyable that as soon as the credits concluded I hit new game and started all over again. From the political banter to the intricately crafted environments, Inquisition would appear to be a passion project for BioWare - not to mention a game that I enjoyed far more than their popular Mass Effect series.

With a game like Dragon Age: Inquisition there’s a lot to take in. Inquisition isn't without its flaws, however, and I encountered them more frequently than what could be considered negligible. Issues like audio drops, input lockouts, falling into the world, and game freezing were all encountered in my playthrough. It's fortunate that the game auto saves as frequently as it does because if it hadn't this would be a severely less forgiving review. The game definitely comes with its share of technical nuisances, but nothing that would be on par with Skyrim's console problems.

The game plays similarly to other Bioware titles: players band together in a party of 4 where commands can be issued individually while the action is suspended. The game can pose a challenge here and there, but not in any sort of clever way. Inquisition has three classes: rogues, mages, and warriors. You'd think that the Mage would comprise a healing subclass, but the best that the game offers you is a support tree. Practically all of your healing will come from a limited amount of potions with a hard cap depending on your investment into certain perks that you’ll earn by completing missions. Once these potions are depleted, you must return to camp to replenish them. It's a dubious system that seems like an artificial source for difficulty, replacing anything truly challenging or strategic - which is a shame, because the groundwork is solid enough that it should be more than capable of testing its players with tact rather than tedium. The combat can be enjoyable and there are classes such as the rogue archer that benefit from positional advantages while in combat. This helps to add a bit of variety to the combat which can occasionally feel mindless. Nightmare is where Inquisition really shows the full extent of its flawed difficulty design, where enemy health is bolstered to such an exaggerated degree that it shows how exceedingly drawn out and repetitive the combat can become. For anyone looking for more than a casual experience I'd suggest beginning on the Hard difficulty. This should also avoid some of the over-leveling issues people are having in the starting zone.

There’s other inconveniences that litter Inquisition, such as crafting weapons and armor being restricted to the main base of operations. In order to craft anything you’ll need to fast travel back to the inquisition headquarters and perform it there. Similarly, issuing any war table missions, which are non-participant missions performed in real time by NPC’s, can only be issued when in this location. The lack of convenience feels almost pointless, but it does encourage the player to return to town and find new dialogue options that become available with party members and other companions.

The classes are all useful and can make some interesting pairing, but I found myself enjoying the ranged characters far more than any of the close combat options. Some of the fights can involve multiple enemies at one time and, if you’re like me, you’re someone that will primarily be maintaining control of the character you created rather than a party member. Even so, sticking to a ranged class offers perspective over the fight and allows you to more accurately assign commands to individual party members when you find yourself requiring that level of attention. The dual-wielding rogue or the sword and shield classes feel, ironically enough, unwieldy. It might just be a personal preference but I often found that maneuvering characters so close to the action controlled poorly. I defaulted to the rogue archer and mage classes where combat felt far less chaotic and manageable.

One aspect where Inquisition definitely excels is dragon encounters. If you’ve ever played an MMO before and enjoyed the boss encounters then this is right up your alley. Some of the fights can be downright epic, taking place over a large area and involving phases that change up the dragon’s behavior, move-set, and position. Downing a dragon felt like an actual accomplishment and rewards you generously with high-tier crafting components and items.

I know it sounds like a myriad of bones to pick with the game but there's much more to love about Inquisition than to dislike, starting with its world. Aesthetically the world of Thedas feels convincingly alive and it all looks gorgeous. Colors pop and lighting hits the environment beautifully. Dungeons and landscapes all feel so uniquely designed that the enormous maps can be recalled from memory by landmarks. Taverns are frequented by bards and musicians that play numerous songs. It’s staggering how painstakingly crafted each environment is. There's very little in Inquisition that feels similar and throughout the entire game I was enticed to explore further. Where many games like this feel as if they recycle textures to cut down production, Inquisition is a love letter to world building, and I found an enormous amount of satisfaction in exploration. That's no small feat for a game of immense scope, and it left me wanting even more.

Outside of the appearance, the world is teeming with interesting politics and factions. Listening to many of your inquisition compatriots discuss their homelands and beliefs can be overwhelming. There’s definitely a lot that’s happening outside of saving the world. In fact, most of the stuff happening behind the curtain is more interesting than the main story. The antagonist is run-of-the-mill bad guy hungering for powers beyond his control. Most of the story beats are predictable or may even cause you to roll your eyes. There’s high points, for sure, but not many. I had much more fun digging into side quests and sifting through hours of dialogue while in the inquisition headquarters. Fortunately there’s a ton of content that makes up for a lackluster campaign.

If you’re someone that enjoys dungeon crawling and exploring, I can’t think of a way that Dragon Age: Inquisition can disappoint you. If you like political unrest, espionage, and betrayal, then Inquisition is poised to please. There’s a ton of things to both love and hate about this game. I know I love it because I cared enough to ponder how the next installment could be better. While I can say that it’s a hell of a game and a personal favorite for last year, I also need to be fair and say that technical issues, shallow but pretty combat, and unintuitive game design choices are a problem - but Dragon Age: Inquisition, if given a fair investment, is willing to at least redeem some of those shortcomings in a way that allowed me to come out of its final product impressed.

GRADE: B

The Swapper (PS4 Review)

The Swapper is a solemn little puzzle-platformer that questions the concept of identity and the existence of the soul. It's also part of the free game lineup for Playstation Plus subscribers this month. While I can recommend The Swapper, I can't speak positively over some of its design choices, pacing, and overall length. I think it comes as a fitting inclusion in January's free game haul and it's worth playing, but I really wish I had waited for the opportunity to play it for free.

Similar to Portal, The Swapper challenges players with a series of rooms that involve an assessment of the layout and then an execution of the correct series of actions in order to solve it. Instead of a portal gun the player has access to a device that can clone the player up to four times. Each of these identical copies can only mimic the actions of one, in which the player is capable of swapping to each clone to enable positional advantages. The player is limited by obstacles (either walls or different hues of light) that may obstruct the device from cloning, swapping, or both. Overall the levels are clever but a large majority of the puzzles are simple and may take only moments to solve.

There are some glaring design choices that surround the centerpiece of the game. While a game like Portal rewards you by allowing you to advance to the next puzzle immediately, The Swapper scatters these puzzles around a space station that you explore freely. Your reward for completing a puzzle is instead a collectible power cell that allows you to advance to new sections of the station and progress through the story. Backtracking and exploring the station outside of the puzzles is dull. It's a slog to the next challenge and never really comes together in a meaningful way. I would have much rather preferred a game that provided denser content, or at least a world that required as much critical thinking as its puzzles to traverse. Instead the swapper device is delegated to an elementary function to get around and it just feels cheap and artificially lengthened to make up for the lack of true substance. What's more disappointing is that the puzzles actually ramp in difficulty but the game is so short that by the time the puzzles become most interesting the game is near completion.

In the end I found The Swapper to be a casual experience that could've been more. I think that it's a game worth playing but not one that left me satisfied. It certainly has a lot of heart to it, but I really wish that it was able to pull together a tighter and more memorable experience with less tedium and more demanding content.

Grade: C

Alien: Isolation (PS4 Review)

Risks are hard to come by when it comes to AAA titles. When they come they aren't always greeted with the most receptive audience; but sometimes a AAA title needs to take those risks in order to right its wrongs. The Alien video games are a great example of a dire need to take risk in order to rise out of a dark and unpromising past. While it may not be the game everyone is looking for and still waiting for, Alien: Isolation proved to be the game I wanted, and perhaps even my most meaningful experience with a video game in 2014.

Alien: Isolation is an emotionally exhausting game of cat and mouse that's immersive, heart-pounding, terrifying, and memorable. Not only did the experience manage to remain fresh for over 20 hours, it also managed to constantly surprise me with its attention to detail. Outside of the stone-faced character animations, the Sevastopol Station is a forlorn labyrinth of steam, darkness, and fluorescence. By the time you arrive, the station is in shambles, reminding me of a dystopian Rapture. Dark figures skitter in the debris, metal clanks in the walls, and for the first few hours the game draws you deep into its world of survivalism.

Just to touch a moment on that "metal clanking in the walls" bit, the sound design is some of the best I've heard in a game in a very long time. It creates a constant sense of depth. Managing to listen to what is both distant and near is practically necessary. The game is very fair when it comes to audial cues. In fact they're an integral part of the game. They let you know when to be both wary and opportunistic. Of course, that's not the only advantage you have while exploring the derelict Seegson station. The iconic motion tracker from the films can be used to roughly pinpoint threats, whether they're organic or bionic in nature. I found using the motion tracker to be almost like clenching a crucifix, a mild comfort in the unfamiliar corridors of Sevastopol. The motion tracker is not without its faults, however, and relying on it too much can lead to destructive hesitation. Using a combination of technology, careful listening, and line of sight will result in greater success.

The collection of things that will pose a threat to you in Alien: Isolation is a short list. What makes the experience unique in a AAA title is the prevailing helplessness that you possess and the overall humiliation that the gameplay requires. While your pistol may save you once or twice, the majority of the situations you'll face prove that it's a downright awful idea to fight. Your supplies are limited and many of them are best left unused or to serve the greater purpose of deception. Opening fire could result in the unwanted attention of something far worse; but fashioning and deploying a noisemaker can result in that greater threat becoming a fleeting boon. In almost all cases the avoidance of conflict is better than rushing to meet it. That's exactly what makes Alien: Isolation such a rare gem considering its level of production. The game is both a survival horror title and a game that throws action blockbuster empowerment out the window and makes you just another soul clinging on for dear life against all odds. There's nothing conventional about it and it makes the game's mere existence such a commendable and surprising endeavor.

Let's talk about the main attraction: the alien itself, a singular enemy that hunts you for a majority of the game relentlessly and unsympathetically. It cannot be killed and it cannot be stopped. Once you encounter it for the first time you are bound to this ever-looming threat for the next several grueling hours. I'm reminded of a mission that takes place in the first quarter of the game where the creature really begins to hunt you and I remember instinctively recoiling back to a previously visited location simply because of how perfectly executed the introduction was. That feeling persisted for the next several hours. Even though I eventually became more confident and had better tools for the job, the game continuously finds ways to manifest a cautious impression. The alien remains a worthwhile attraction that offers worthwhile moments with its presence. While it's one thing to discuss the inherent risk of such a title in the AAA space, the design of the game is based entirely around risk. Advancing felt like a constant thrill, punctuated by moments where the game forces you to complete tasks for a considerable length of time where you feel most vulnerable. You may need to decrypt a computer or cut through steel, all the while the alien (or anything else that wants to kill you) could walk up behind you before you complete the task. Even saving the game, which requires you to keep a punch card inserted in a machine for a few seconds, leaves you susceptible if you aren't careful. All of it feels genuinely nerve wracking and it culminates into an experience that lingers with you long after. Overall I can't sing Alien: Isolation's praises enough. It's not a game that will satisfy everyone, but I found it to be a game that offered immense reward where I originally anticipated little to none. If you're looking for something outside of your comfort zone but still maintaining that high level of production value, I don't think anything else compares. If you let Alien: Isolation sink its hooks in, be prepared for a long and wild ride.

Grade: A

The Evil Within (PS4 Review)

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

A glance at The Evil Within is not enough to really understand what it's all about. Even after playing it I can't necessarily be certain of that. I've gone back and forth with a couple of ideas. Perhaps it's a tribute to horror or maybe it's just Shinji Mikami letting loose. Whatever the case, The Evil Within manages to dance above disaster gracefully despite its identity crisis and bewildering distance.

The Evil Within certainly has a distinct look compared to a lot of games coming out as of late. I had heard many complaints about its use of widescreen and I honestly can't say that I found the letterboxing to ever be a problem, but I can surmise that the issue becomes more of a concern as display size gets smaller. There's nothing particularly "pretty" about The Evil Within, but to deny its appearance seems shameful. It's got a little bit of everything happening, whether it's by filters or scenery or design, and that's what really surprised and impressed me most. It manages to weave so many different things together at once and never feel ham-fisted. At first it comes as jarring but eventually it just feels like another turn down a maze where you've completely forgotten the turn the came before. You begin to submit to the plunge, delving deeper and deeper into a subconscious state of existence. It's a psychological struggle, true to form and executed rather well. It's an eerie spectacle with plenty of moments throughout that keep you playing.

The Evil Within plays much like Resident Evil 4. That comes as no real surprise and it isn't unwelcome either; but Sebastian Castellanos, our leading man, is no Leon Kennedy. As you explore you'll come across jars of green ooze that allow upgrades to various things including accuracy, ammo stock, run duration, and the effectiveness of weapons. The game makes a point of showing you how helpful these upgrades will become. In the beginning you'll find that Sebastian's weapon sway is drastic and his ammo reserves are severely limited, so playing stealthily is wise in early chapters. Keeping out of sight and throwing bottles and stabbing enemies in the back of the head is key. A plentiful amount of traps can be used to your advantage in the environment when things get out of hand but they can also work to ruin you if you're reckless. Calm and collected crowd control seems to be the initiative in The Evil Within. The game offers you a plethora of options in disposing of enemies and choosing the right tool can make a world of difference. If you end up picking the wrong tool you may burn ammunition that could've been used in a later fight. There's nothing quite as satisfying as knocking down a group of zombies with a shotgun and torching the pile of corpses with a lit match before they rise again. Both subtlety and gunplay are enjoyable and utilizing both lead to greater success - at least that's the experience I had playing on survival. Boss fights are also memorable but some do eventually become recycled in the latter part of the game, losing significance and never quite living up to their original tension.

"Tense" is definitely the best word to describe the overall mood of The Evil Within. There weren't many times that the game outright terrified me...and admittedly that adrenaline rush from fear is part of the reason I was looking to play it. It suffers gravely in that department, and maybe it's because the game feels so detached. The voice acting is empty and none of the characters are memorable or approachable. They all feel like shades. Whether that's by design to suit the story or not is beyond me, but it doesn't ever feel personal or real. The most we ever get to learn from Sebastian is through scattered journal entries but they're really not that effective despite their heavy context. Sebastian is just a cold person...all of it is, really. Maybe that's just the price that has to be paid when the psychology is so deeply rooted in the story. The abrupt changes in scenery cause the game to suffer from the consequence of never really feeling fully immersed. Horror benefits from time, so incessantly shaking up the atmosphere agitates the player rather than letting an unsettled feeling arise naturally. It's not without a few jump scares, but as far as that nagging dread for what's to come, The Evil Within simply cannot sustain that sensation enough to make a lasting impression.

There's something about The Evil Within that I wasn't expecting that stayed with me even when I wasn't playing it. I think that giving it a fair shake is appropriate. It gave me a solid 13 or so hours of gameplay and has a high replay value due to weapon unlocks and multiple ways to approach situations. It also gave me a deep desire to sit down and play Resident Evil 4 again for the tenth time. Take that however you want, but for anyone that's craved something like Resident Evil 4 but doesn't want to play Resident Evil 4 again, The Evil Within is a firmly grounded spiritual successor that proves itself worthy despite its shortcomings.

Grade: B