Vampire Survivors (2021) by poncle

The indie scene is so strong for video games right now. For every complaint one might hear about predatory practices in AAA gaming, failed promises, broken launches, abuse of fear-of-missing-out mechanics, there's a small indie game which comes along that completely blows one's mind in its compelling simplicity. Vampire Survivors—which is basically Castlevania meets Cookie Clicker with some bullet hell aesthetics thrown in the mix—is a prime example of the golden age of indie games we're currently finding ourselves in.

Vampire Survivors was probably never meant to be anything profound. Although surely the developer has labored a great deal over the balance, it's a relatively simple game. It appears to be a bullet hell, but in reality, there's very little twitch input required from the player. Your player character fires off their attacks automatically so you're tasked mostly with choosing which upgrades and build paths to pursue, while occasionally moving the player character around the map in order to avoid enemies. Enemies have no projectile attacks of their own; they're relegated to contact damage only, which is a great choice that ends up facilitating this more passive style of playing. So describing this as a bullet hell game, while it might appears accurate from the game's aesthetics, is not really all that accurate. This is a more passive, casual experience in which you are mostly tasked with planning rather than taxing your mechanical skill as a player.

Personally, I love that. I'm not a huge fan of bullet hell, and roguelikes are often unappealing to me because I dislike their randomness and the lack of any permanent, long-term upgrades most roguelikes eschew in favor of appealing to the crowd which prefers RNG and chance coming together to facilitate a successful run. Vampire Survivors does have a built-in permanent progression system of unlocking stages, player characters, weapons, and permanent passive upgrades. This all serves to dampen what I dislike about roguelikes, and drew me in to Vampire Survivors even further.

In the beginning you'll find yourself mostly bewildered as you experiment with new weapons and tactics, but as you grow more familiar with the game you'll begin to gravitate toward specific playstyles, and putting together the pieces and acquiring evolutions becomes intensely addictive and rewarding.

If any of this sounds the least bit compelling to you, then take a shot on Vampire Survivors. Although it's in Early Access, I believe the game currently offers more than enough to warrant the $3 USD price tag, and I'm shocked the developer has kept the game at such a low price. It's an absolute steal with at least twice as much value as the current price tag, so there's really nothing to suggest against purchasing this. I'd go even further and urge anyone considering this game to jump on it now before the developer comes to their senses and raises the price.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Playtime: 40 hours

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.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

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.