Stardew Valley (2016) by ConcernedApe

Stardew Valley is a towering achievement not in so much that it's a really fun game (spoiler: it is), but that it was made by just one person. And not only it that it was made by one person, but that every single aspect of the game was so expertly crafted.

The game looks and sounds beautiful, and from what I understand Eric Barone crafted both the art and the music himself. By itself, that's impressive. Then you consider that he programmed the entire game, balanced everything, wrote the characters and dialogue, and filled out this world head-to-toe with fun, satisfying, and interesting activities. If you have any interest in games as a medium beyond just playing and enjoying them, Barone's story is mindboggling.

There are numerous small examples of Barone's craft that make themselves known beyond what normal games of this type display. For example, the way people will allow you to pass them with a small shake if you press into them enough, or the sound effects that play when navigating the menus. These might seem trivial, but they're indicative of the quality of experience here. There is so much polish and character to every aspect of this game, and all of it adds up to make Stardew Valley a masterful experience.

Another example of this depth of quality are the character interactions. I'm a sucker for good character writing. In Stardew, each character that populates the town is expertly written, with deep character backstories that surprised me. Even the characters I initially disliked proved to have more going on underneath the surface. I went into Stardew expecting a pretty straightforward indie farm management experience and I got so much more.

Each pursuit is gratifying as well. I initially hated fishing, but soon grew to enjoy it once I gained basic acumen. Mine-diving and battling monsters provided a satisfying progression as well. And, of course, farming and building your home and land up from being overgrown to being a palace is not only incredibly satisfying but works exceptionally for what you'd expect. I put down Fallout 4 because its settlement system was so awful, Stardew Valley's--although it admittedly has much less going on--Is an absolute dream by comparison. And tying this altogether is the Community Center system, which requires you to plug in specific types of "loot" for various rewards. It's what finally got me addicted to Stardew, staying up way too late trying to catch that elusive catfish, or reading the wiki while at work so I could find out how to get specific Artisan goods.

If what you've seen of Stardew Valley has interested you in even the least, you should probably just give it a shot. I thought I knew what it was, but it proved far deeper and more polished than I ever expected a game made by one person could be. And if you liked its spiritual ancestor Harvest Moon, then you owe it to yourself to play this game. It's a phenomenal example of the power of a singular vision when creating art, and another example of the flourishing indie scene that's developed in gaming over the past decade or so.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Total War: Warhammer (2016) by Creative Assembly

I'm not a classic fan of the Total War series.

The only game I've played in the series was Rome II, which is referred to by many of the series' longtime fans as the overall worst game in the series. I actually liked it quite a bit, but just couldn't get around the various glitches, bugs, and jankiness and eventually stopped playing the game in frustration of having battles stolen from me by units glitching out and getting slaughtered.

I decided to pick up Warhammer after seeing it on sale last week for $15, and boy am I glad I gave the series another shot because I'm really enjoying this game.

I have no attachment whatsoever to the Warhammer world. I'm such a neophyte that I didn't even realize a fantasy element to this fiction existed; I thought for almost a year that this game was a Total War based on the Warhammer 40,000 variety because I didn't know there was anything else. I believe that coming from such ignorance allows me to judge the game purely based on its merits rather than viewing it through the rose-shaded goggles of a Warhammer fan.

The things that ruined my experience most in Rome II are completely removed from Warhammer. The bugginess of combat and the convoluted way that some of the strategic layer worked are gone, all refined and streamlined into a system that's very easy to understand when compared to that game. I find myself greatly enjoying battles now that they aren't plagued by units bugging out on walls or geometry or getting themselves killed when they don't do what I'm telling them. The scale is also far longer here. In Rome II, you can only have units be so powerful when at the end of the day they're all just, at most, human beings riding horses. In a fantasy setting, though, you can go balls-to-the-wall. You've got nearly indestructible emperors riding huge winged beasts, wizards that can blast apart entire enemy lines by themselves, giant cannons capable of raining destruction upon enemies. Which is great, because you're going to be fighting some pretty terrifying, giant monsters on the other side of the map. It adds an entirely new level of flavor to the Total War system. It's fantastic.

A big change that I love is that the leaders of armies are now single units with upgradeable equipment rather than elite groups of spearmen, cavalry, etc. There is truly nothing more bad-ass than watching the Emperor swoop in on a giant, man-eating Griffon to save one of your infantry units that is about to rout by smashing half of the enemy's and routing it almost instantly. I also like that there is no concept of passing time in this game, as it allows you to become more attached to your leaders rather than levelling them like in Rome II only to have them eventually die of old age even if they're your best units. It's wonderful and the light RPG leveling system adds a lot of attachment to units that could otherwise remain pretty generic.

The different factions in the game operate so differently from one another that it's almost unbelievable. The way Chaos and Greenskin factions work is so different from the humans and dwarfs that it may as well be another game. It's really astounding just how much meat is on the bone with this game. I never had much desire to play units other than the Empire or Bretonnia, but the sheer variance in their gameplay styles provide literally hundreds of hours for somebody who wants to try them all. That is an amazing amount of value considering I paid $15 for this game.

But the thing I love most about the game so far is the incredible tense feel it has. You're told pretty much from the beginning that there is a Chaos invasion coming and that you'd better prepare for it. As a Warhammer noob, I had no idea what that meant. But holy hell did I find out. Your first campaign in this game is pretty much doomed to fail, and I kind of love that. Rather than leaving me deflated and frustrated as I would have expected, it left me feeling challenged. Could I play again and, knowing what I know now, succeed? It also left me with a completely different feeling playing through a second time, like there was a dark shadow on the horizon, and I better get my crap together and be ready for it. It adds one more additional quirk to what is already a very competent turn-based strategy/real-time tactics game and makes it a truly great one in my opinion. I've seen some people complaining about the Chaos Invasion mechanic, asking for an option to turn it off, and I can see how it would be frustrating if you're a fan of the series and are looking for not much more than what you've gotten in the past. But for me, it led to an extremely tense, dread-inducing experience, like the pressure was on and I was the only one on the map who could deal with it. It feels very much like Mass Effect 2 on Insanity; a creeping sense of being completely outgunned and wondering how the hell you're going to deal with the onslaught that's coming your way, and desperately trying to make the most efficient moves possible to tech up as quickly as possible and equip yourself for the great challenge ahead.. From a narrative perspective, it feels remarkably like the oncoming invasion of the Others in Martin's ASOIAF fantasy series, or Sauron's and Saruman's war in Tolkien's LOTR series.

I found the Warhammer fiction to be really intriguing as well, and far more inspired by reality than I expected it to be. While Tolkien's Middle Earth is not tethered to anything but his own imagination, and Martin's Westeros is loosely inspired by British history, Warhammer seems to be clearly inspired by the early Holy Roman Empire and its struggle with the Viking invasions of Europe, at least from what I see in this game. I'm lukewarm on fantasy but a huge fan of historical fiction, and Warhammer piqued my interest enough to make me want to pick up a few Warhammer fantasy novels and see what they're like.

I do have some complaints about this game, though. Though not as bad as Rome II, it still runs somewhat poorly on my GTX 1080, with most battles hovering somewhere around 50 fps at 1440p. Additionally, this game has some of the grimiest DLC I've ever seen. Blood and gore has actually been removed from the base game to sell at a $3 price point, which is just as ridiculous as it sounds. I've got a feeling that this is more on the publisher side rather than the developer side, but whoever is responsible for this reprehensible practice should be ashamed of themselves. That said, a lot of the DLC is actually really good, as the additional factions freshen the game after a few playthroughs.

I really enjoy the game despite having no attachment to its fiction. It's deep technically, well-balanced, and a whole lot of fun, with a great setting and an excellent, tense campaign. And if I, someone no real interest in RTS or Warhammer, am enjoying the game this much, then I can confidently recommend it to pretty much anybody. This game is worth paying full price for in my opinion, but if you find it on sale for around $30, you'll be getting a steal. There are potentially hundreds of hours here, so if you're a fan of turn-based strategy, real-time tactics, or anything in between, pick this up without a second thought.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Playtime: 96 hours

Firewatch (2016) by Campo Santo

I'm a huge fan of story-driven, atmospheric experiences and this is a game I really, really wanted to like.

I was immediately intrigued by the prologue, which seems a simple enough choose-your-own-adventure type portion, but does very well to invest you in your player character, Henry. After doing some research I discovered this game was made by the same people responsible for The Walking Dead Season 1, which I adored and consider one of the best written games I've played. Walking Dead Season 1 had characters that you ended up growing incredibly attached to, and the same ended up being true of Firewatch. Unfortunately, that did just enough to get me to finish the game, because I was disappointed with pretty much every other aspect of Firewatch, including the story's resolution.

Firewatch looks really good for an indie, but it didn't run so great on my system (i7 4790, gtx 1080, 16gb RAM). I would experience pretty regular frame drops through my nearly 6 hours of play. And while the game looks very good, I never felt much drive to explore after the first couple of hours simply because there just isn't much to find. Aside from some notes in caches, I never found anything more interesting than a slightly larger tree or a nice viewpoint, and soon I began avoiding any exploration altogether because the characters and the dialogue had grabbed me so much. Any actual "gameplay" (ie. "walk here and then click the radio for a dialogue option") became a chore, a barrier behind which the game would reward me with some more bits of dialogue from these two characters that I had really grown attached to. There was a specific moment about 2-3 hours into the game where I was informed that I had to cross the entire map in order to find somebody to help me through a fence, and I came very close to just quitting because I almost didn't feel driven enough to take the next step. That's how dry and unfulfilling I felt the actual gameplay was in Firewatch. But I ended up doing it anyway just to hear more of Henry's and Delilah's story. I was fully invested in these two characters.

And that's really saying something considering how short this game is. The ability of these writers and the voice cast to grab me so quickly is pretty impressive now. The big problem I had with this game is simply that nothing else even came close to being as compelling as the relationship between Henry and Delilah. There's an overarching mystery that drives the plot forward, but once you actually begin to uncover what's going on it just felt too hokey, too clumsy, and just not believable enough despite being pretty grounded in reality. One of my issues with this mystery was that I simply wasn't feeling the isolated paranoia that my avatar within the game, Henry, seemed to be feeling. His actor seemed close to completely losing it, whereas I was just making my way to the next task and hoping for some interesting Delilah dialogue. The game failed to impart any sort of anxiety due to the setting and the isolation, possibly because it was so short, or that it had to skip days in order to keep things interesting due to a lack of any real gameplay systems outside of walking to an area indicated to you and pushing a button, or reporting back to Delilah via your radio.

Firewatch reminds me a lot of Gone Home. Both games offer an interesting setting and premise with some well-written characters, both try to impart a feeling of creepiness which succeeds at first but both ultimately fails to amount to anything substantial and becomes overly hokey after just a couple of hours. Additionally, the resolution of both games' mysteries are wholly unsatisfying, and the endings in general are not very good. Firewatch, in particular, really dropped the ball and left me feeling unfulfilled; like I had wasted my time despite really enjoying the characters and dialogue. It's the type of experience that will you have you saying, "Really? That's it!?" as the credits roll. If the ending had been a fulfilling conclusion for these two characters then I believe I'd have recommended this game just on that strength alone. But squandering the story of two compelling characters left a sour taste in my mouth, and for that reason I can't recommend it to others until it begins selling at a sub-$5 price point.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 6 hours

Tyranny (2016) by Obsidian Entertainment

This title is no graphical powerhouse, but the environmental design is very good. There's a clear emphasis on the late bronze age here a la The Iliad, and it's really wonderful. Though I actually like the late middle ages as a setting I recognize that it's beginning to become tiresome to constantly set fantasy in that time period. As a classical history major myself I found the influence of Hellenistic culture in Tyranny to be more refreshing than even I'd have thought before getting into it. Merchants sell olives, the Disfavored fight in a phalanx, etc. It's surprisingly refreshing not to have knights riding around on horses, swearing fealty to dukes, while everyone attends the coronation of the boy king. Instead we're dealing with emperors, heavily armored infantry spearmen and peltasts. It's a welcome change in setting and it makes me wonder why more fantasy isn't set in this type of era.

A great feature of Tyranny is how it smoothly introduces its lore. It begins with "Conquest", a choose-your-own-adventure prologue where you flesh out your player character's backstory in much detail. It affects a whole lot of atmosphere in the game, including how NPCs refer to you, dialogue options, plot options, and even active combat abilities your character has available to them. Conquest is good not so much because of what it affects in the game because of how it smoothly introduces the player to the world's lore. Fantasy games featuring deep worldbuilding are often prone to getting bogged down with too much exposition in the first few hours. The first Mass Effect is guilty of this when it strands you on the Citadel for hours after Eden Prime without much to do but speak to NPCs and read codex entries to learn its lore. Tyranny is able to get around that because you've already been introduced to major past events and characters in the Conquest prologue without having realized it as you made choice after choice. It's really a brilliant way to do things, and it made jumping into the game smooth. There is still some exposition to be had when speaking with squadmates but it's very relaxed compared to many other titles with similarly well-designed lore.

The biggest drawback I noticed with the Conquest prologue is that it can sometimes create jarring, disjointed dialogue in-game. I've had people meet me and immediately praise me for having made a decision beneficial to them early in Conquest, only to have them passionately insult me in the very next window of dialogue for making a later decision in Conquest that was damaging to them. I understand the difficulty in blending so many prologue decisions into the campaign, but this happened too frequently and it was incredibly immersion breaking.

Another drawback is the voice acting, which is pretty bad in general save for certain performances such as Verse and Eb. The Voices of Nerat is particularly awful -- He sounds more like a Twitch streamer reading Nerat's dialogue than a professional voice actor. Barik is nearly as bad; his delivery is universally wooden and awkward. He sounds almost like a teenager trying to deepen his voice to sound more mature. I'd have been fine with no voice acting whatsoever.

Tyranny's combat is pretty standard cRPG fare. I tolerated it for the first portion of the game only to try and dive into the narrative, but it quickly grew boring and served only as something I had to reluctantly push through to try and see more of the story. Not too far into the game I found myself sloppily pushing through most engagements just to get them over with. On the plus side are the spells used in combat. They're the prettiest thing about this game: They're viscerally impactful and feature gorgeous particle effects. Combat is not very good, but it's also not why people are going to play Tyranny, so I don't weight it as much as the writing in this review.

In classic Obsidian fashion, this game lives and dies upon its writing. And this, to me, is where the game fails.

I found too many of the characters to be too gimmicky and, at worst, downright cheesy and contrived specifically to be as unique as possible. It's always good to have interesting, unique characters, but you've got to draw the line somewhere before things start getting ridiculous. There also needs to be a touchstone of relatable characters so that the contrast between them and the more outrageous characters exists. In addition to this, some characters just struck me as "off". For example, The Voices of Nerat is a mage who absorbs the minds of other mages he's conquered. He basically lives with a thousand other minds in his head and a world's worth of knowledge and intelligence. I'd assume a character like this would be wise, quiet, always plotting, with just a subtle touch of insanity peering through every once in a while. Instead he's written as more of a Joker-esque madman, cackling and blathering on about nonsense when he's not hurling juvenile insults at Graven Ashe for no real reason. It's just too much. It seems as if the writers were trying too hard to make his persona notable when subtlety would have served far better. A lot of the writing warrants exactly that criticism: It just seems to be trying too hard, as if Obsidian is aware of its reputation for sterling writing and is struggling to live up to it.

I also found the dialogue to be sub par. It has a tendency to sound unnaturally casual or out of place. The Disfavored are supposed to be unmatched in their discipline, so why do they all refer to their commander by his first name rather than his rank? And Graven Ashe is centuries old but talks in colloquialisms. Good dialogue writing is about getting the little things right. Too many of them are wrong in Tyranny.

It's not all bad, though. The writing is at its best in its allowance for roleplaying. This is a game that will have you staring at dialogue screens for 10 minutes, tempted to alt+tab into your browser to google results of a decision because you're honestly stumped as to which choice is the least of a half-dozen evils. I found myself struggling to roleplay not because it was bad, but because I was constantly tested by the complexity of the pickles it presents, constantly weighing the effects of each choice and the repercussions against each party involved. Balancing the favor of the larger forces at play (ie. your party members, the Disfavored legions, the Scarlet Chorus horde, and the Archons who control all of the above, and more) is the core of this game. And it's what it does best.

I'm not an old school cRPG fan but I have been playing RPGs for nearly 30 years. Even despite that background I only made it about 15 hours in to Tyranny before I simply lost the desire to keep playing. Considering that, I can't recommend this game to the typical RPG fan looking to try out a new title.

Tyranny is a decent game... Depending on what you're looking for. It aims squarely and unapologetically at the cRPG fanbase and provides some solid roleplaying but features quite a few damning flaws. If you're a hardcore cRPG fan and willing to overlook some rough edges, then you'll probably like Tyranny. However if you're just an RPG fan looking for a new game to play, I'd probably pass on this one. It's too uneven an experience with too many flaws that add up to damage the overall experience.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 14 hours

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016) by Eidos Montreal

I feel like I should qualify this review by first stating that I'm a massive fanboy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I recognize that that game has some flaws but the ambiance is second to none, the stealth gameplay is satisfying, and the way the plot drives you forward to its conclusion makes you loath to put it down. It's one of the few games in which I've gotten 100% of its Steam achievements. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is one of the best games of the 2010s in my own humble opinion.

This game just fails to live up to pretty much every level set by the previous game.

The gameplay is returned more or less unchanged from the first game. The only real difference is that Jensen is given several new tools to use, justified by some cheesy in-plot explanation as someone having altered his augmentations while he was comatose after the first game. The problem here is that not enough has changed from the first game. And while that doesn't seem like much of a problem given how much I enjoyed Human Revolution, it's starting to feel quite dated and lacks any further development over the past 5 years.

I'll approach this mostly from a stealth angle since that's how I play the game.

The most glaring issue here is that there's a core problem with the energy system that regulates your use of augments. Jensen has some awesome tools to use to maneuver around the environment undetected, but the problem is how overpowered these tools are. To solve the issue of being an absolute god, the devs chose to reign these in by using the same battery meter from the first, which is replenished by consumables when it gets low. This is a problem simply because you end up playing the game without ever using them, instead choosing to save them for when you really need them. Now that's not a problem by itself, but it is when you realize you're sneaking through entire areas trial-and-error and never actually using the majority of your augmentations. This was a weakness in Human Revolution, and it was greatly disappointing not to see it rectified in this game. There has to be a better way to balance these powers than resorting to consumables. Perhaps a smaller battery meter that recharges more slowly? The battery meter refueled by consumables feels archaic and clumsy in a game that features otherwise interesting stealth puzzles to overcome.

And on top of that, the new augments present aren't actually all that useful. Aside from remote hacking I never used any of them, instead relying on the vanilla mods from Human Revolution. This could have been dealt with by having a new playable character, or a second one like the route Dishonored 2 went. Anything would have been more interesting than the same exact skillset from Human Revolution with the addition of a half-dozen augmentations that aren't even particularly useful. The fact that Jensen is back reeks of the studio's unwillingness to take a risk, or perhaps it was dictated to them by their publisher that coverboy Adam Jensen needed to be present in the game. I suppose we'll never know. But a new protagonist or at least some kind of change to keep things fresh would have added a lot more flavor to the now-stale gameplay present here.

Ambiance was something that Human Revolution did amazingly well. There were complaints about the gold filter but I really thought it added to the game's ambiance and I never had a problem with it. On top of that, the Michael McCann's absolutely mind-blowing score changed the entire feel of the game and was arguably the single best part of it. Mankind Divided instead goes for a more realistic feel, and the score, while at times comes close to the high bar set in Human Revolution, is far more inconsistent and settles for more subtle, less noticeable score. I didn't feel nearly as blown away by the sense that I was in a different world in Mankind Divided that I did when I played through Human Revolution, and for me that was a real disappointment.

Don't get me wrong; the world in Mankind Divided is good. Very good, in fact. The environmental design and level design is the only aspect of this game aside from its graphical prowess that is clearly better than Human Revolution. But I really missed the blatant, heavy-handedness of Human Revolution's ambiance in this title. In going for more realism they lost some of the weight of Human Revolution's atmosphere. It's now less cyberpunk-comic-book, more hard-science-fiction-thriller. I suppose it depends on what you prefer, but I was disappointed. I'm typically more a fan of subtlety, but I loved the chronically overdone atmosphere that Human Revolution featured.

Lastly, and perhaps most glaringly: The plotting of this game is a cruel joke. It starts off with a bang then slows to a crawl, with hours of exposition and environmental narrative introducing plot points that are barely touched upon later, if even ever mentioned again at all. There are several interesting threads kicked along only to be left completely unresolved while we instead focus on investigating a terrorist bombing. Jensen's mods, the group he's working for, etc. are all left unresolved in an egregious example of sequel baiting. Finishing this game is wholly unsatisfying; I was left completely undriven by the frankly boring plot, and although the level design is great, the dated gameplay itself does nowhere near enough to carry the game on its own. As you can see from my achievements, I got right up to the end and never even finished the game. The side quests were far, far more compelling than the main plot. And once I was done with them I felt like I was grinding out the rest of the game until I decided just to stop and move on to something I'd actually enjoy.

All of these flaws might be passable if only to experience what this game does well: Interesting, well crafted environments, excellent level design, great side quest writing, solid voice acting. But this game, unfortunately, runs like absolute garbage.

I have zero issues running most games in 1440p at 60 fps, however this title barely broke 40 fps in most places with low to medium settings. Turning off SLI actually improved my framerate by 5 fps or so. Not a great sign. Even after turning off SLI and running it on my 1080p monitor I still experienced frame drops to around 50 fps on medium settings. This is simply unacceptable, and had I known the majority of the game ran like this then I'd have refunded it within 2 hours. But, interestingly enough, the entire first area runs quite well and it's only once you get to Prague that the problems start.

Interesting how games are shipping with more polished early areas ever since Valve adopted its refund policy. Quite interesting. And infuriating.

There are also several graphical and physics bugs present, and the game didn't even ship with DX12 (though it was later patched in and is now active). This is a title that clearly needed a few more months of polish, but with Square Enix's dumpster-tier publisher reputation it's not a surprise that it was forced out early. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if this is actually half of the game and the developers at Eidos actually had a full, satisfying plot written but were told to cut it in half so Square Enix could double their profits with two releases rather than one. This is purely speculation, but I surely won't be purchasing Mankind Divided's inevitable sequel until it's well below a $30 price tag. Fool me once...

This is a bad port and a disappointing game. Even as a fervent Human Revolution fanboy I can't recommend purchasing this title at full price. Wait until it gets under $30 and take a shot at it. Just make sure you go in with tempered expectations.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 54 hours