Forza Horizon 5 (2021) by Playground Games

Forza Horizon 5 is pure fun.

That's it, that's all there is to it. Oh, and lots of cars.

The Horizon spin-off games have always reminded me of the Fast and the Furious films. They aren't exactly "thinking man's" franchises; there are very few big ideas or serious themes to dig through. No big morals to the story, no ethical struggles, no big ideas to consider or difficult decisions to make. They're just pure bombast, fun, and positivity. And sometimes that's perfectly okay. We could all use a few more smiles in our daily lives, I think.

The design of Forza Horizon 5 is clear right from the get go: Get the player smiling ear-to-ear, and don't have them stop until they're finished playing the game. Horizon 5 is packed to the brim with ostentation, ridiculousness, colorfulness. It's an adrenaline rush and a feast for the eyes. Above all else, this game wants to make you feel good. And it constantly succeeds in that.

This is happening? This is happening.

If you have even a passing interest in motorsports and you're looking for a sandbox to play around in, you'll enjoy this game. In my past I dabbled in automobile modification (with my Supercharged 355 LT1 Camaro, near two decades ago now), and I have even participated in a few proper drag races at the local strip back in my younger days. But I'm more than a decade removed from my last "official" race and I haven't turned a wrench on my own car in nearly as long. I've retired into a quiet life of middle age, in which I drive a ten year old Toyota Camry and pay my mechanic to change my oil so I don't get too dirty. But Forza Horizon 5 brought those old years of cruising up and down the highway and taking trips to the racetrack screaming back to me. While Horizon 5 is focused mostly on being an open world sandbox, it also provides copious amounts of tuning possibilities and car customization options for those more knowledgeable about such things. You can fine tune your suspension, purchase modifications by the individual part, customize the look of your vehicle down to individual parts if you want—or you can absolutely ignore all that and let the in-game mechanic do it for you, and spend your time instead cruising around Mexico and looking for various shenanigans to get lost in.

The actual racing is smooth, responsive, and overall excellent, and the game runs superbly for me, keeping between 80-90 frames per second at 4K on high settings. There are few things that equal the adrenaline rush of taking a jump at 100+ mph, other cars screaming around you, an airplane soaring overhead. The environment is equally compelling and varied, as you'll race through different locales within the beautiful Mexican countryside. And all along the way, the game is drip-feeding your points with which to buy new cars, unlock new abilities, purchase more mods, all so that you're better at getting more XP in a vicious, addictive, well-designed gameplay loop that will keep you driving through the game's content. No pun intended.

The one caveat I have with the game thus far is that it has a tendency to crash on me. Usually within menus, and mostly while editing car modifications. However I chalk this up to launch day jank and I expect these crashes to be patched out very soon, as Playground Games have typically been excellent with post-launch support.

That complaint aside, I really can't say enough about the sheer fun factor this game provides. If you want something to put an endless amount of hours into, something that will make you smile as winter sets in here in the Northern hemisphere, something that will take your mind off a hard day of work the second you launch the game, then buy Forza Horizon 5 without a second thought, because this game will make you happy.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Octopath Traveler (2018) by Square Enix

Although Octopath Traveler is breathtakingly beautiful and has a really fun battle system, I can't recommend it simply because the way it manages its characters is so completely broken that it ruins the entire experience.

The game's often a joy to wander through, as the 3D pixel graphics and high depth of field serves to sculpt its atmosphere exceptionally. Each biome offers its own unique feel and enemies, and the pixel art bosses are often stunning to behold. It's clear that a lot of careful design went into making this game the visual powerhouse that it is, and it does a lot to carry the experience. Even something as minor as the art style and menus conforms to this general art direction; taupe, earth-tones, bold lines. I love it. The game looks amazing, plain and simple. I haven't been this enamored with a game's art style since I first played Darkest Dungeon. I really can't say enough about it.

The turn-based battle system is also quite fun. Each enemy having a weakness and a break state is quite compelling, and forces the player to think tactically and make difficult decisions as to when to use their boosts, or instead preserve them to break (the game's term for 'stun' for a few rounds) a tough damager-type enemy. It's very satisfying to navigate efficiently through a battle, and each character has their own utility, which I found a driving force to keep building my team and progressing through the map to find new buddies.

However, the buddies are where the game completely falls apart. The way this game handles its characters is mind-bogglingly awful that it makes the game, as a whole, feel unfinished. It's not that the character dynamics and interplay are bad, it's that they almost don't even exist at all. It's so, so awful I can't believe the game shipped in this state.

The entire point of the game is to recruit eight (hence the "octo" in "Octopath") main characters—each of whom has their own unique story—and join them together in a traveling band. What's so absolutely befuddling about this is that there is almost no character interplay whatsoever! You will come across a new character, they will say perhaps two lines to your main character, then simply offer to join up. And that's it. These characters will never speak to one another again outside of some awfully unnatural canned scenes in which you must press a button to have them play out. It's such an unnatural, obtuse way for party interaction to happen that it renders the entire game dry and sterile, which is quite the accomplishment for a game that looks as good as Octopath Traveler.

This game could easily have been a superb example of a JRPG revival title if it had just had some brief, organic character interplay that regularly occurred. Instead, everyone is silent for the vast majority of the game. Most of the time it's as if the other characters aren't even present. There's a huge missed opportunity here as each character is relatively unique and interesting, but in a vacuum, they read as very standard. It's such a massive disappointment and such a puzzling design decision that I can't believe the developers decided this was the best course of action. It kills the experience of the game for me.

If this game ever receives a sequel, it absolutely needs something akin to the Support system introduced in recent Fire Emblem games. Allow these characters to get to know one another, interact with one another, and be true comrades rather than simply individual stories all occurring in a vacuum, apart from one another. Without something like this, the entire experience is dead and worthless, and the party banter feature doesn't do nearly enough to alleviate things. These characters need to be engaging with one another in story sequences.

Prepare yourself for another boss fight that's going to take 30 minutes!

On top of this fatal flaw, the game also gets more and more tedious and grind-heavy as you progress. Not in that you're required to fight random battles to get stronger, but in that enemies seem to get higher and higher HP boosts, leaving boss fights to drag on for a catastrophically long time, and even forcing general random battles into taking far too long. The game abuses its battle system by keeping the player roped in to certain fights for far too long and upsetting its balance of exploration and battle. There were certain bosses which took me near 30 minutes to complete, the end of which I was ready to quit the session and simply play another game because I had grown so bored of the particular fight's formula of wearing down the boss's guard, disposing of whichever minions they happened to summon, building up boost, healing, rinsing, and repeating, ad nauseam. The game ends up leaning a bit too hard on its battle system, and although it's good, it can't support the entire game by itself, and it's constantly let down by its narrative, which carried no enjoyment for me whatsoever.

This is a pretty game that ultimately lacks heart and is forced to lean far too heavily on its good combat and jobs system. What results is a disappointment unless you're solely looking for a visual masterpiece with a decently entertaining JRPG-style turn-based battle system. If you want even the barest bit of quality story and characters, or find yourself tired out by the more tedious aspects of JRPGs, you'd best look elsewhere.

This is a pretty game that ultimately lacks heart. A catastrophic disappointment unless you're solely looking for a visual masterpiece with a decently entertaining JRPG-style turn-based battle system. If you want even the barest bit of quality story and characters, look elsewhere.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 37 hours

Life Is Strange (2015) by Dontnod Entertainment

Life Is Strange does a lot of things really well, the strongest of which is the game's commitment to its 'vibe', for lack of a better word. It's at its absolute best during its quiet moments; moments in which the tedium of its gameplay and its wonky, cringeworthy, how-do-you-do-fellow-kids dialogue are relegated to the backseat and no longer permitted to ruin the experience. Sitting on the swing in Chloe's parents' backyard as the neighborhood dogs bark and the children play in the background. Lying on Chloe's bed with light rock music twanging along in the background. Walking through a massive party as the grooving, ambient club music plays and the red lights flicker. These are by far my favorite portions of Life Is Strange; the parts where it sucked me right in and made me want to do nothing but stand around and take in its atmosphere.

Unfortunately, actually playing the game is more often a chore than not. Its gimmicky time-rewind mechanic is something which, on paper, is a fantastic fit for this sort of adventure/RPG game, but its actual, practical use in Life Is Strange is so limited that it's barely ever used interestingly, and never even comes close to living up to its full potential. It's at its most tedious during fast-paced action and suspense sequences—which ought to be when it's at its best. Instead of allowing the player to search for creative solutions to the problems at hand, they're left mostly fumbling around looking for the correct HUD pop-up out of several in order to properly progress the scene, which often leaves you failing the game's scenarios repeatedly and continuously rewinding until you've found the option the game deems 'correct'. It's a clumsy, obtuse, tedious experience which requires zero creative problem-solving from the player. Ironically, all you need to progress through these sequences is time.

There are a couple of moments in Life Is Strange in which this mechanic is used well, particularly a conversation with my favorite character in the game, Frank, in Episode 4. This conversation is focused mostly on dialogue options and does a phenomenal job of incorporating past decisions the player has made in prior chapters. I found using rewinds to be thrilling and compelling in this particular scene, and I really enjoyed the way the game factored in my previous decisions into the outcome of this particular conflict, while allowing the player to have an open-ended progress state (for the most part—there is still one outcome in the conversation which leads to a forced rewind, which I hated). I spent a significant portion of time rewinding, trying different approaches with both Frank and Chloe, and being pleasantly shocked at the amount of differing outcomes that were possible. I didn't feel nearly as much tedium when free to take my time and progress the conversation as I did when it was an action sequence, and the game was rushing me to click different options, despite having infinite rewinds and ultimately being able to arrive at the correct one through sheer trial-and-error since, in contrast with the Frank conversation, there was only one outcome in these action sequences which would progress the game. The rewind mechanic is far more enthralling when you're free to progress the story with whichever outcome you deem appropriate (or, perhaps more appropriately, the best outcome you can manage given prior decisions, or the best one you can find), and I wish the game had used its gimmick like this more frequently than it does.

The characters are probably the most engaging part of Life Is Strange's writing, though they're frequently hampered with awful, cheesy dialogue which always ends up sounding embarrassingly like a 40 year old man trying his best to write 18 year old girls. I didn't jive with Max, the main character, very much, nor did I find Chloe to be much more than a whiny, entitled brat. But some of the side characters have some real texture to them that I quite liked. Nathan and Victoria are excellently written and grow as the series progresses. David and Frank, likewise, seem initially to be rather one-dimensional, before sprouting into dynamic, well-rounded people with engaging histories and clear motivations. Life Is Strange does its best work when it allows its characters to be human and fallible and gives them real motivation for being why they are, but it tends to let its most one-dimensional, least engaging characters occupy the majority of the spotlight, which was a shame.

Life Is Strange will probably appeal to folks depending on how strongly they can relate to its main characters. I found them to be whiny and I thought the game was trying a bit too hard, and I found the plot to be a bit contrived in certain circumstances—as if the writers knew where they wanted to go, but were at odds with exactly how to get their story and their characters properly in-place. Ultimately, what sinks the game for me is its tedious, dry, and grinding moment-to-moment gameplay, and I wish the developers had chucked out the majority of this and chosen to rely more, instead, on polishing Life Is Strange's plot and characters, because that's where I feel the majority of the impact is.

Moments of Life Is Strange do continue to stand out for me, but I can't recommend it just due to how much I hated the act of actually playing the game. There's lots of "walking simulator" criticism out there today, but I'd much rather a walking simulator with good dialogue options than the ineffective time-rewind gameplay that was jammed into Life Is Strange as "gameplay". No gameplay at all is a much better option than bad gameplay, in my book, especially with a game that aspires to quality storytelling as much as Life Is Strange does. Just look at games like Disco Elysium for a solid example of how to chuck out sub par systems and lean heavily into things like story, character, worldbuilding, and dialogue. Life Is Strange is not that, of course, and likely never would have been. But all the same, it could've been a far better game if its developers had chosen to trim some of its fat and rely more heavily on what it does well.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 27 hours

The Forgotten City (2021) by Modern Storyteller

I was pretty underwhelmed by The Forgotten City.

I love narrative- and character-driven games, but The Forgotten City just didn't do it to me. The premise of time-warping back to an Ancient Roman city is perfectly in-line with my tastes, but the setting was far too fantasy-based for me and not nearly as historically based as I'd have liked. The setting did not feel like a "city" to me whatsoever; more like a very limited arena in which to interact with a select few NPCs.

The game's pacing felt terribly off to me. On arrival I felt a bit overwhelmed with all of the people I was sent to speak with, and did not feel the strong pull of any narrative hook investing me in any of their struggles. As I grinded through and dug a bit deeper I began to feel more invested, but this took several hours of running around and clicking through dialogue that I didn't find very interesting. It was a struggle to get through the game's opening hours, as I was simply wandering around, talking to NPCs, with no real investment as to why I was even in this artificial-feeling place, with these artificial-feeling NPCs. This problem compounded when proceeding through one of the game's "dungeons", in which you first begin to engage with the game's combat system. To put it simply; it's not good. The developers do their best to work in creative solutions to being confronted with enemies, but in the end, it's a relatively simple bow mechanic, enemies which react in very few ways, and corridors which don't divert very far. There are also some brief platforming sections which I found horribly tedious and unengaging. I believe this would be a far, far better game if there was no combat whatsoever and it relied more on better execution of dialogue and characters.

Before my purchase I had heard a great deal about how great the character writing is, but unfortunately I can't agree. The effort is there, but the characters feel far more like video game characters than real people. Most of them will have a very obvious quirk, and little else aside from that. I wasn't really touched or motivated by any of their needs or desires, and the way the game tasks you with speaking to them all right off the bat felt a bit clumsy and unnatural to me. Rather than entering a real city, I felt overwhelmingly like I was entering a staged video game world where each of the characters was a cardboard cut-out, spitting lines at me. One character is a stoic, and quotes regularly from famous stoics. One character is a gladiator, and is predictably brutish and reliant on violence. A few are Christians. A couple are homosexuals. One's a humble, down to earth farmer. One young woman is relatively stuck-up and arrogant. On paper, all of these are fine, but they ought to be treated just as starting points for putting interesting twists on these characters and challenging them; pushing them further toward change. However these facets are really all there are to these characters, rendering them rather token and uninteresting, so I left The Forgotten City a bit puzzled as to how the character writing garnered so much praise. Maybe I'm missing something.

The most intriguing the game gets is in how it facilitates the player's freedom in solving its problems and experimenting with new attempted solutions. It must have been a real pain to try and program these quests, many of which intersect with one another, and may be done in any order. I give the developers lots of respect for that. The game worked perfectly for me: No broken quest flags or bugs, and that's significant.

I hate crapping on indie games because I love the hard work indie developers put into creating things that new and unique like The Forgotten City, but this one just didn't connect with me for whatever reason. That being said, I don't regret the purchase and I'm happy to keep supporting indie ventures like this, and I do think the development team behind this game has interesting goals and motivations and I look forward to seeing what they do next.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 7 hours

DEATHLOOP (2021) by Arkane Studios

Deathloop's often an artistic masterpiece that's a lot of fun to play and features a wicked hook. That being said, it's a severely flawed game, and the vast majority of praise I have for the game comes from its higher level philosophy and design and not necessarily in its execution.

The game is an artistic powerhouse. It looks phenomenal due to the incredibly talented artists at work on developing this game. Its sense of style is really unmatched by most other contemporary games. Its color palettes, its character designs, its setting, and its music are all phenomenally good and work to craft a really unique feel for the game. The fact that it looks so good is really impactful, because Void Engine is—there's really no other way to put this—a god-awful garbage heap of an engine on PC. The game frequently chugs in certain environments, and huge frame drops of double digits are overwhelmingly common. This is even more unforgivable considering all of these problems were present in Dishonored 2 when it released back five years ago. Most damningly, Deathloop isn't even that technically pretty, so there's even less excuse for such huge, arbitrary drops in performance. Luckily for Arkane, though, the art at Deathloop's core is more than good enough to carry the experience along.

The game is also quite fun to play. I was surprised to find out how close it plays to Dishonored 2. Many of the powers are simply carry-overs from Dishonored 2, and that's not a bad thing. The player is pushed to use them in a more wide-open fashion in Deathloop than they ever were in the Dishonored games, and it works exceptionally. The shooting is also much tighter than it was in the Dishonored games. Further, the core gameplay loop of replaying levels to gain more infusion points to improve abilities and equipment in order to better replay levels is really compelling and addictive, and Arkane's level design supports repeated playthroughs of the same area—at least, for a time.

The problem is that so much of this game seems to lack cohesion, and playing it for an extended period of time begins to feel disjointed. The world, to me, feels remarkably flimsy, which is a criticism I'm really surprised to be making considering how utterly realistic and lived-in Arkane's previous worlds have felt—particularly Dunwall. Blackreef in Deathloop feels like a set of multiplayer levels. They're designed fantastically for gameplay and they're a joy to play through and explore, but nothing in the game actually felt like a real, lived-in place. I never had the experience of poking through an apartment or a building and wondering how these people lived like I did so frequently in Dishonored, and that really damaged the experience in Deathloop for me. I didn't care about the setting or the lore because none of it felt real or genuine, and thus I never lost myself in this game like I did in some of Arkane's previous efforts. I was never really immersed and was always consciously aware that I was playing a video game. I lacked the transcendental experience I often have with some of my favorite video games, and a lot of Deathloop—despite being fun—felt dry and meaningless to play.

Feeding into this great flaw is the fact that almost all of the story content the player will experience is drip-fed through text items which are picked up in the world. The game does not pause as you read, so often the player finds themselves skimming very quickly through such text, barely paying attention in case they are detected by enemy NPCs patrolling the area. This quickly turned into a huge problem, because I was very rarely grasping where I was meant to be headed, or why, even, I was heading there. Several times I would be tasked with assassinating one of the game's primary enemies without having any idea who they are, what they were doing, or why they were doing it. The game does an exceptionally poor job relaying important plot- and character-critical information to the player, which leads you to simply following the marker on your screen and killing everything in your way. The only effort it shows in developing its characters is between Colt and Julianna, and the effort pays off as they're both the only people in the entire game who feel human. The rest are dry, boring, lifeless NPCs, despite some great voice performances. Cherami Leigh as Fia is a particular stand-out, but they're all really great.

The experience of playing DEATHLOOP, in one image.

Pacing is also an issue. Deathloop is the most blatantly offensive "Sorry, Mario! Your princess is in another castle!" game I have played in literal generations. The way this game artificially stretches out its quest lines is absolutely shameless and infuriating. There were several instances in which the player proceeds to the next step in a given questline, only for the game to throw a locked door or a literal wall in your way with a note attached to it, saying something like "whoops! You've got to come here in at another time of day to proceed in this quest!" Great, so I just spent this time period in a completely wasted manner, only for you to tell me in the most gamey way possible that I can't do this right now, and have to wait until the next day to proceed. This kind of thing grew frustrating very quickly, and my joy in replaying areas to explore further or increase my own power quickly turned to frustration with the tedium of the way the game structures its quest design. The quests are given far too many fetch-quest-caliber objectives and end up being stretched out far too long. This, again, feeds into the feeling gaminess that the best games do a great job of hiding from the player. I eventually went from having trouble keeping a grasp of the game's quests due to the poor way in which it relays its storytelling, to simply not caring, because so much of it felt flimsy and meaningless when I did grasp it, which is a real shame considering some of the character designs are so good, and the voice cast bringing them to life are all exceptional, particularly the game's two leads. There's a real missed opportunity to create some memorable characters here, because the player will end up simply not caring since it's too much of a chore to really become invested in them in the first place.

My issues with the way the game imparts its story and designs its quests won't be a problem for everyone. If you're looking for a rip-roaring time in a combat arena where you can play in a fast-paced manner and kill everything in sight using a variety of weapons and powers, all while being surrounded by exceptional art and level design, while great music plays, then you're likely going to love Deathloop. But if you're looking for a more cerebral experience where you can explore, learn about the world you're in, and piece together things for yourself as you proceed—like you did in a game like Dishonored or Prey—you're probably going to have a mediocre, up-and-down time with Deathloop, as I did. When it's firing on all cylinders it's a joy to play, but I never felt I was truly immersed in its world and its characters, and those are by far the most important reasons why I typically play single player games. So for someone like me, I would not recommend Deathloop. It's an ambitious game made by people who clearly care a whole lot about their medium, but it ended up being a bit too tedious and gamey for my tastes, in addition to running very poorly on PC.

I don't really regret the purchase because I'm happy to fund Arkane as they keep trying creative, ambitious stuff like this, but I sure hope they do it on a different engine next time, and I hope they put more emphasis into executing on delivering a more cohesive, genuine world and narrative to suit such great style and characters in the future.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 19.6 hours

Mass Effect Legendary Edition (2021) by BioWare

Mass Effect (2007) has never looked so good.

It's very difficult for me to speak in a reasonable manner about the Mass Effect trilogy because of my undying love for it.

Replaying Mass Effect is like visiting old friends from your college years. You haven't seen them in years, you've probably been lax at keeping in touch via social media. You've grown as a person—perhaps drastically. Maybe your life situation has changed as well; you're working a lot, you've gotten married, you've had kids. Yet the moment you enter the same room as your old friends, you fall immediately into common ground. You're laughing at the same old things, sharing inside jokes once again. It may have been years (nearly 15, in Mass Effect's case) since you first met each other, but the moment you spoke once more, it's like you've never left. Garrus makes a calibration joke and you laugh the same way you always have. Wrex smashes something and you chuckle. Mordin sings. Jacob says something boring. In these moments you forget that these are video game characters and that you've already seen these scenes—perhaps dozens of times before. They are real people to us, and they are capable of affecting our lives the way real people do, despite them being aliens in a schlocky space opera.

This is the impact that Mass Effect's characters have on players. There are thousands of stories out there from people who were ill, or considered themselves depressed, or perhaps were even near suicide—all of whom exhibit undying love for this series because these games gave them succor they desperately needed at hard times in their lives. Such is the power of well-written fiction, and Mass Effect succeeds in spades in that regard. Its worldbuilding and character writing are second to none in the medium of gaming. It confronts us with people who feel real and allows us to take agency on their behalf, to try and make their lives a little better. It shows us a world not unlike our own, with its prejudices and its flaws, and gives us the power that we lack in real life to affect change regarding these issues in the fiction. It allows us to become better people in real life by examining serious issues such as bigotry, state corruption, greed, cruelty, and the cost of due process. We see these issues through the eyes of another and decide what our player character might do to right such wrongs. As always, fiction is the great lie through which we tell the truth, and if Mass Effect doesn't cultivate a little empathy in your blackened, shriveled gamer-soul, then nothing will.

But, enough waxing poetic. I know you're all, "Shut up, Jon, you bag of hot wind! Everyone already knows how great the Mass Effect trilogy is. How does it run!?"

The answer to this, so far, is mixed, but I definitely believe this is a far superior version to the original PC port. On my setup I'm holding 100+ fps at full 4k with relative ease. This is a big deal, as the original games were limited to 62 fps thanks to the way they used physics, so the unlocked framerate is a massive plus here. The higher resolution textures look fantastic, and the new lighting and screen space reflections are really something. I expect we'll see some great photos being shared via the game's new Photo Mode relatively soon. The only drawback to the visual improvements that I've noticed so far is the characters seem to get a bit bug-eyed at times. I think this was due to the original game having much harsher, darker shadows, and perhaps covering up some character model issues specifically with the eyes. The animation has also aged notably, especially with the advent of performance capture technology in modern games, so expect some wooden facial animations and unnatural lip syncing, despite the effort made to remaster these games. All three games lack a field of view slider, which is a big negative for me. It's desperately needed since the camera is quite claustrophobic when your gun is drawn. In addition to this, I experience regular, debilitating framerate stuttering when traversing planets in the Mako in Mass Effect. I'm not sure what's causing this, but my framerate (which is typically locked at 100+) varies wildly from 55 to 75 fps in these instances. Fiddling with graphical settings has not alleviated the issue. I assume it's a texture streaming issue, due to the new high-res textures added to the game. Additionally, I have seen some people complaining about mouse acceleration, but the mouse action feels fine to me. Your mileage may vary.

Ultimately, this is very far from what I'd call a great PC port. However, the original PC ports of these games were absolutely awful, and Legendary Edition is clearly superior to those, even with its lack of graphics options and tendency to stutter. It looks fantastic when compared to the originals. If you played the original game or have a high tolerance for older games, you'll love Legendary Edition's changes. The best remasters make old games look like they do in your rose-tinted memory, and Legendary Edition accomplishes that in spades.

The gameplay changes are rather minor in the latter two games, but even in the first Mass Effect—the game which received the most attention—they are not groundbreaking. I noticed that Insanity feels markedly easier, so I think there's been some balancing done to level out some of the absurd difficulty spikes in the original game. One change I don't care for is that sniper rifles are now easily usable by all classes. I think this is a bit unbalanced and removes a lot of the value of the Infiltrator class, specifically, but I understand why they did it: It doesn't really make sense to pull out a rifle and suddenly begin aiming like a drunk person with Parkinson's. The Mako is still rather wonky, but the added stickiness does make it feel better. There are also some noteworthy changes to boss fights, but I won't spoil those. Suffice it to say they're all excellent, and bring some much-needed freshness to the significant encounters of the game. Ultimately the changes are quite minor; enough to feel like a marked improvement over the original game, but not so much that they alter the core experience of the games. BioWare did a phenomenal job toeing this line. It couldn't have been easy to do, but they nailed it.

The Mass Effect trilogy is an incredible experience, and this is by far the best way to play it, even when considering the great texture mods available for the original games. If you love the original trilogy and are considering Legendary Edition, I'd recommend you purchase it. If you're a first-time player and a lover of well-written space opera, interesting characters, and RPGs, there's never been a better time to dive into Mass Effect.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Note: For individual reviews on each Mass Effect title, click here.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019) by Intelligent Systems

I've long considered myself a fan of turn-based tactics. When done right, it tickles the section of my brain reserved for improving the efficiency of designs and making correct decisions. I love carefully managing the growth of my units and massaging them into unkillable machines of destruction. I've run cold-to-lukewarm of the Fire Emblem series in the past, enjoying titles such as The Sacred Stones and Path of Radiance, while liking entries such as Shadow Dragon and Fates far less. Turn-based tactics is a genre that's very easy to get drastically wrong, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses—like some of its predecessors—commits several of these cardinal sins, in addition to looking and performing at a level I consider to be sub par.

Three Houses' depth is readily apparent in how it presents you with its three titular houses from which to choose. Each features a set of characters given significant depth that you'll grow to form opinions about. These initially felt relatively shallow, but as you continue your support conversations with them, you begin to realize they've each got their quirks, their pains, and their strengths. Learning about the characters as I progressed was one of my favorite things to do, and continued to fuel my desire to dig through the game's undoubtedly Persona-inspired social sim mechanics.

Some of the new stuff here is a welcome addition to the classic Persona formula. Having a home-base to freely roam in the third person while seeing your units live their lives is a nice touch. Unfortunately, the game leans a bit too hard on fetch-questing to fill out their activities when you're at the monastery. I became unfortunately aware of the grind when, after completing a battle, I'd often stop playing the game rather than having to grind through a bunch of lost items—which I'd imagine are fun little side activities to do when you know all of the characters very well, but become a tedious grind of asking every single character on the map if a lost item is theirs when you're just starting out. The system doesn't really work, and the game should have leaned more heavily on its character interaction than simply having you deliver items to its characters as a way to pass the time.

Being able to increase your character's skills in the classroom while at the monastery is a welcome change to simply grinding out battles, and having your Support levels increased by spending time with these characters is excellent. I, for one, welcome the Personafication of Fire Emblem. Nearly all of the social systems added to this game work very well, and I found the writing for these characters to be suspiciously good. I've criticized the writing in Fire Emblem games very strongly in the past, and although the plot of this game features some of the same silliness as previous games, I found the characters to be markedly better written than those in any other Fire Emblem game I had played before.

Unfortunately, the game's actual tactical play features some pretty deadly warts.

Class parity and good balance is absolutely essential to crafting a class-based turn-based tactics game. And unfortunately for Fire Emblem: Three Houses, its class system suffers from a striking lack of balance.

After about a dozen hours of planning out potential class builds, I realized that skilling in swords is relatively worthless considering there is only one Master-level class which uses swords, and it also requires the character to have high skill in offensive magic. This is a big ask from physical-focused classes, and requires quite a bit of grinding. Additionally, the game features several strong pushes towards Lance- and Axe-focused physical characters, one of which being the ability Deathblow, which grants Brigands (an axe-based class) a whopping +6 Str whenever initiating combat. Class balance is imperative for a successful turn-based tactics game, and Three Houses unfortunately fails miserably at creating parity for its classes, making class builds a rote exercise in which you send all of your physically-focused characters down a nearly identical path.

The game also looks flat-out bad in most cases. I'm usually ready to grant some slack to Nintendo Switch games for running on relatively inferior hardware, but Three Houses looks even poorer than I was willing to expect. I long for the days when Fire Emblem featured charming, hand-drawn sprites, because the polygonal combat sequences have been nearly universally poor in every Fire Emblem game that has featured them. The characters in games like Awakening (which I actually liked) were famous for having no feet—something just as odd as it sounds. And the polygonal characters here, although obviously better than in the past, are still not all that well-done. The character portraits feature exceptionally good illustrations, which makes me wonder what could be if the entire game were done in such a style.

Further, it's not just the execution that's lacking, but the design. Several of the armor sets on these classes look the worst they've looked in several iterations. The Assassin—one of my favorite classes—has lost all of its coolness from older games, instead granted generic-looking fantasy armor. Similarly, the Knight classes have lost some of their thickness, making them look more generic as well. 'Generic' is a keyword, here—for some reason, the class designs of recent Fire Emblem games just don't feature the great art design which initially drew me to these games almost two decades ago. It hasn't been the same since the switch from sprites to polygons, and I wish the series would double back and go for a more classic look once again.

Additionally, the game tends to perform poorly on the Switch. When traversing the monastery (where you spend all of your downtime), the draw distance is relatively poor, and the framerate often tanks to levels below 30. Ditto during combat, during which battalions actions can tank the framerate as well.

These faults are damaging enough to a game of this sort when they all add up, but what finally broke me from the game is Three Houses' tendency to spring 'gotcha!' moments on the player in mid-battle. There were numerous moments in which I felt I was losing units to permadeath due to no fault of my own, but because the game sprung an event on me which was impossible to plan for, such as spawning multiple enemy units literally out of nowhere.

Playing through a combat encounter typically includes a lengthy period of pre-fight analysis, during which the player devises a strategy ahead of time, equips and places their units accordingly, and proceeds to attempt to execute said strategy. Sometimes it doesn't work, and you've got to alter it on the fly. At other times the player makes mistakes, which was fine—that's a part of the game, and often a source of enjoyment as you deal with new challenges on the fly. I personally enjoy living with my mistaken decisions when I enact a faulty strategy, or don't pay enough mind to a certain threat, or even when a sensible plot turn throws a monkey-wrench into the works. But Three Houses' propensity for springing enemy units out of thin air, directly ruining a carefully devised plan, is inexcusable and breaks the entire experience of playing a game like this.

I don't mind when there are doorways or staircases in the environment, clearly visible, from which reinforcements might arrive unexpectedly. The player is taught early that these need to be accounted for. I also don't mind dealing with fog, or forests, which might obscure enemy troops. The egregiousness of Three Houses' gaffes is that you will often send a thief-classes character to pick up boxes, or send only a unit or two on a flanking run, only to have the game drop multiple units literally out of thin air directly in their path, at a point from beyond which there is no return—these units will be ambushed and permanently killed. Now you've got a choice between continuing the game without this unit, or you've got to restart the entire encounter with knowledge of this mechanic in mind. And it's impossible to plan for these occurrences, since they can occur completely separated from any logical expectation. 

This is a terrible design philosophy on a game which lives and dies on how it challenges the player's ability to plan. It leads the player to either closely following a guide to avoid such occurrences, or engaging in multiple instances of trial-and-error as they discover where the game will cheat in order to trip them up—it forces the player either to cheat, themselves, with a guide, or to expect to replay content for no engaging reason.

There's clearly some stuff to like with Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but it can't withstand the assault of such poor design decisions and awful visuals. Hopefully the next entry of this series can straighten some of this stuff out, because it's got real potential. But at the moment, that's all it is—potential. Play Persona instead.

⭐

Playtime: 32 hours