Mass Effect Andromeda (2017) by BioWare

Perhaps the most important part of playing Mass Effect Andromeda is to go into it with carefully managed expectations.

This was a game made not by the flagship BioWare team (they were working on Anthem at the time), but by BioWare Montreal—the team primarily responsible for Mass Effect 3's phenomenal multiplayer component.

Going off of that, you can expect really good combat. Andromeda is easily the best a Mass Effect game has ever played, combat-wise. You are far more mobile than ever before thanks to jump-jets, there are more powers to choose from in your build than ever before, and guns feel almost universally exceptional. They even fixed the original trilogy's notoriously awful vehicles by having by far the best feeling, looking, and controlling vehicle in the entire series in the Nomad.

In addition to the strong combat, the move to the Frostbite engine (although it caused a severely difficult development, as Frostbite was not intended to be utilized for RPGs) looks absolutely beautiful in comparison to the Unreal Engine 3 which the previous games were built on. Perhaps most stunning about this game's visuals are the lighting and particle effects; the way light glows in space, reflects off of surfaces such as ice, and scatter due to particle effects such as fire and explosions is unequaled by any other game in the series. I would even make the claim that space has never looked better in a video game than it does in Mass Effect Andromeda—no exaggeration! It looks incredible.

To top it off, this game sounds amazing. Sound design is something we don't typically notice much, but Andromeda is one of the best sounding games I've ever played. Gunshots echo beautifully throughout the environment, every weapon has pop, the way biotics distort sounds is really impressive. The deadened sound of space is engulfing. Even the effects used for things like reloads or door switches sound really great. Top-notch sound design, and it really makes a difference in the gameplay.

There are some drawbacks to combat, though. BioWare Montreal chose to remove the pause-and-command features from the original trilogy, which is a huge disappointment. I'm sure they chose to play to their strengths—which are real-time—but the tactical aspect of pausing and assessing the situation was a huge feature that made Mass Effect different from every other third-person shooter, and it feels more generic without it.

In addition to this, managing your squadmates loadouts and power usage is also gone, further removing the more tactical feel of the original trilogy.

Aside from these drawbacks, though, the game really does play wonderfully in combat. Being in the thick of it, causing biotic detonations and hearing the amazing gunfire makes combat a joy.

Unfortunately, though, BioWare Montreal are not a team who have ever put together a story or compelling characters, and it shows.

One of my favorite things about the Mass Effect series is its worldbuilding and its strong characters. The original trilogy feels so alive because its galaxy feels like a real place with real political squabbling and real conflict of cultures. The Batarians versus the humans, the Krogan versus the Turians and Salarians, etc. And its characters feel so real and lifelike that their conflicts ring true and really affect the way you view them and the norms of the setting. Sadly, this is not the case with Andromeda, which feels incredibly basic, tacky, and uninteresting by comparison. The entire setting feels so generically space opera that I find myself wholly uninterested with any of its lore.

Peebee's obnoxious nature falls victim to stale cliché.

This lack of writing prowess sadly extends to its characters as well. Although I really liked Drack and Vetra, there were so many crewmates I absolutely detested that I refused to bring them with me in almost any situation. Peebee is little more than an impulsive moron, whose flimsy loner personality feels completely artificial—she feels like a writer tried really hard to give a "character quirk" rather than simply writing her as an actual, complete person with motivations and desires; which is what all good characters should feature if they're to jump off the page at you.

It often seems the rest of the crew hates Liam as much as I do.

And then you have Liam, who is basically just an obnoxious, impulsive screw-up. Liam is such an unrepentant idiot that it even seems like most of the rest of the team hates him as much as I do. Perhaps some of his hijinks were meant to endear him to me, I guess? If so, his writers completely failed on that front. I truly wished I had the option to kick him off the crew in-game, as he did nothing but act like a fool and consistently put everyone in terrible, life-threatening situations. And then you have people whose dialogue is just flat-out annoying, even at the best of times: an example being Gil, the mechanic. Go away, Gil. I'm tired of hearing your annoying, nasally voice and try-hard attempts at wit.

The entire game is permeated with poor dialogue, too. Characters say things that feel awkward and completely unrealistic. Every time I sit down to play this game, I think to myself, "This isn't how people talk! Nobody would say things like this!" None of the writing feels natural or real. The characters feel like video game characters, the world feels like a video game world. And so none of the conflicts or the ideas this game feebly attempts to discuss are interesting at all. They're just busywork; something that's in place because it's a Mass Effect game, and Mass Effect games need to have things like squadmates and aliens. The writing in general is so uninspired that I've never replayed this game—even though I've replayed Mass Effect 3 a dozen times at this point. It's so, so disappointing to see from my all-time favorite video game series.

In addition to this, the quest design really leaves a lot to be desired. There are far too many busywork fetch quests here. BioWare Montreal designed these gorgeous, huge, atmospheric environments which feel amazing to look at and fight in, and then chose to populate them with some of the most mundane, uninteresting busywork crap-quests imagineable. Get ready to scan 32 plants, mine 26 rocks, kill 10 beasts, etc. Over and over. Ad nauseam. Because, unfortunately, Mass Effect Andromeda is that kind of game.

It's really unfortunate that the poor animations (they are bad, but they're nowhere near the biggest flaw this game has) got so much press at the time of release, because, in general, this game really does look excellent. And its biggest flaw—by far—is how it fails the series' reputation by putting together such a mediocre writing effort.

If you're looking for a fun third-person sci-fi shooter with some nice visuals, give Andromeda a shot. That being said, although Mass Effect Andromeda does indeed do some really great things, I still don't think I would recommend it unless you're a very hardcore fan of the series. And even then, it's important to go in with well-managed expectations: Mass Effect Andromeda is certainly not a great game, but, depending on your tastes, it can be an enjoyable experience.

⭐⭐

Control (2019) by Remedy

As someone who loves a game with great atmosphere, I can recommend Remedy's Control wholeheartedly. This game absolutely bleeds style and a sense of otherworldliness. The sound design is exceptional, lighting and particle effects look absolutely fantastic. The design of the setting, too, is carefully crafted—lots of sharp angles, lots of really polished color palettes going on. You can tell the minds at work designing this world had a specific aesthetic quality they were going for, and I appreciate that. They've succeeded in spades, although some of the ham-fisted referential treatments inspired by governmental bureaucracy were a bit hokey for my tastes.

Apart from the artistic design of its spaces and lighting, the game is an absolute powerhouse technically, particularly with its lighting and reflections (check out the reflection of the desk lamp on the whiteboard—chef's. freaking. kiss.) Ray tracing is utterly amazing and some of the graphics I've seen in this game are unmatched by any game I've ever played. Slick, oily gray hallways whose only sources of light are cream-colored desklamps pouring through plate glass; a sickly looking industrial maintenance room lit by wan, elegiac yellow-greens; or inky basalt corridors bleeding with the warm orange glows emanating from the larger room ahead. The stuff they do with lighting in this game is absurdly gorgeous, with a touch of the morbid and weird. I love it. In general, it looks incredible; but I did have to rely a lot on DLSS (Nvidia's cutting edge AI upscaling technology) to do some heavy lifting, and its implementation in this game is not perfect. There are certain instances where textures are mucked up by DLSS, which seems that it can't quite manage full resolution images in certain cases; namely with certain paintings on the wall, and some decals which appear regularly. You're going to want to play in DirectX 12, though, and enable DLSS despite these issues, because ray tracing makes this game look so incredible that it's worth the drawback. I ticked down shadow resolution to help with framerate, but left most other settings on Medium to High. I am playing on a I9-9900K @ 5.0ghz and an RTX 2080 Super at 1440p and saw between 60-80 frames per second with mixed Medium/High settings. Your mileage may vary.

If you're looking for a good third-person action shooter, you're going to love this. The game seems to balance its pace between exploration—in which you exist within this compelling, affecting atmosphere and learn more about the lore behind the game's events—and all-out gun battles with challenging enemies, including boss fights that should satisfy most players. There's a significant ramp-up in difficulty here from other shooters you may be used to, and that leads me into my biggest criticism of this game.

The checkpoints. Oh, the checkpoints. Those buggers.

For some background: I hate checkpoints. I hate them universally and I hate them fiercely. I wish they didn't exist. I wish every developer allowed me the opportunity to save whenever I wanted, as many games do.

Checkpoints are always bad in my book. But! Sometimes checkpoints are not horribly, experience-destroyingly bad. Unfortunately with Control, this is not the case. Your checkpoints are limited to certain areas within the game, and the setting tends to be a bit convoluted and not so easy to navigate. While this imparts a genuine, lived-in feel for most of the game, it really becomes frustrating when you spend a lot of time hunting for goodies, checking all the nooks and crannies and not paying much attention to where you are... Only to get killed and have to respawn across the entire level to where that one point you saved at was, back 45 minutes ago.

These checkpoints are putridly awful because, not only do you have to traverse across territory you've already seen, but you've now got to fight additional peon enemies to get back to where you were. I'm all for challenging the player and punishing them when they make a mistake, but so much of my enjoyment of Control came from being fully immersed in its weird, creepy atmosphere, and helped along by its incredible visuals. Many times I found myself manually walking, fully in character, trying to figure out what the heck was going on here. When I died and was forced back to where I was half an hour ago, I was immediately pulled from the engrossing experience I was having and simply sprinted through these amazing environments, no longer caring about it and just wanting to get back where I was. It wasn't something like in From Software's Dark Souls, where each route was a challenge to be overcome by learning more and more—rather, in Control, it's a jarring interruption filled with disposable enemies, and dying, instead of being a learning experience, only served to make the gameplay a jagged, regular shift between being fully immersed and doing busywork walking from place to place. It seems the devs insisted on aping the bonfire system from Dark Souls without realizing what made that system so compelling and addictive.

This is a problem solved relatively easily. Checkpoints in Control are too few, too far between, and, in my opinion, it harms the experience as-is. A simple way to fix this would be to rely on a more precise, arbitrary checkpointing system rather than the rigid system in place. Remove the respawn functionality strictly tied to Control Points, and use them just as fast travel beacons and level-up hubs (which they already feature), and simply spawn the player at the beginning of the room before which they just died, and allow them to continue their progress sans tedium. But perhaps this would make the experience a bit too easy? Again, your mileage may vary! This may not bother you, but it substantially harmed a lot of the experience for me. I'm a bit embarrassed to say I've used the Assist mode more than once to bypass these frustrating instances so I could get back to doing what I enjoyed most in this game: Wandering around, being weirded out, and being constantly made tense by this wonderfully crafted setting. I know, I know: I'm not a real gamer; I'm a disgusting loser and I should get good. Noted.

Despite some of my harsher criticisms, if you're looking for an action-packed technical specimen of a third-person shooter, a graphical work of atmospheric art, or a weird, creepy story penned by Sam Lake which will keep you guessing, you should pick this up. It's worth it—if your machine can handle it, and if you can handle its putrid checkpointing.

⭐⭐⭐

Rimworld (2018) by Ludeon Studios

I have very little experience with basebuilding/colony sim-type games. The closest thing I've played to this is probably the extraordinarily popular Stardew Valley, which I loved, but which features some big differences from Rimworld.

One of the things I loved about Stardew was the added focus on the characters and their interactions, versus simply the cold, calculating efficiency of building a "base" (a farm in Stardew, of course, and a colony in Rimworld). The characters injected a welcome human aspect to the game, and Rimworld takes this approach one step further—and that's what makes it great, and what makes it stand out.

Rimworld eschews a more developer-handcrafted approach for a random, emergent system which guides its characters. The interactions between colonists and the game's encounters aren't scripted, but rather randomly generated. And while this typically feels far more artificial and less compelling in most games, it somehow works beautifully in Rimworld and really gives your colony the feel of an actual social ecosystem, rather than a bunch of video game systems mechanically and robotically at work. This is due to how deep and interweaved the systems of backstory, traits, and skills are, and how varied the social interactions between colonists can get.

I don't think I've ever played a game which facilitated my own 'head-canon' so strongly as Rimworld. This game's pseudo-random characters feel anything but random. For example, my prison Warden recruited a young native woman who was passing by, eventually fell in love with her, and married her. She's now one of my best shocktroopers, and as a great shooter, has an ongoing rivalry with my melee berserker, Linda, who wears heavy armor and beats people with a mace.

Doc Red doesn't care much for clothes, aside from his trusty helmet.

Then there's my colony's surgeon and doctor, Red; a medic with superior skills in medical and plants, but who is also a nudist, and is very unhappy unless he's treating his patients and tending his crops completely naked save for a steel helmet, in case of bandit raids (he switches to a winter hat when it's cold, but still prefers to be otherwise naked—even at temperatures of -5 celsius).

Or how about my father-and-son duo, Kaito and Dunc. They're two of my best colonists; they have some of the highest skills and are the most reliable workers. But despite being father and son, they have a pretty strong rivalry. They got into a fight in the workshop once, during which time Dunc bit off his father's ring finger. This was such an event in the colony that a separate colonist later built a wooden dresser with beautiful artwork depicting this fight and the climactic finger-biting.

The infamous Father vs. Son fight was a noteworthy occurrence in the colony.

Or, the colony Labrador retriever, Saffron, whom I mistakenly walled off from her kibble supply, which meant that she was forced to eat drugs to survive. Eventually, she developed an addiction, and then got pregnant with puppies. So now we have a drug-addicted, pregnant dog roaming the premises, constantly high and vegging out in the middle of the hayfields we grow for the horses.

The random events, which are variable in how frequently they occur, can be challenging and sometimes impossible. They add another layer to the lived-in feel of the world. I captured a promising native woman with a great skillset and successfully recruited her, only to have her brother and his friends come and attempt to raid me later on as retaliation. The fact that they were related, and that I was given time to get to know the woman before her brother appeared, made this such a more compelling episode than if I had simply been randomly raided by warlike natives.

These kinds of emergent stories are what make Rimworld so special. They somehow feel real and handcrafted despite their randomness, which is a really incredible accomplishment. You get a different story with each colony, and the options allow you to craft them to be as chill or as brutal as you like via the bevy of difficulty settings provided. You can turn off nearly all the challenge and just relax and build a nice colony, or you can crank them up and wallow in misery as your colonists experience firsthand the futility and hopelessness of building a colony on a rimworld full of deadly dangers such as death robots, cannibalistic raiders, and monstrous insects eager to consume their flesh.

And, of course, it goes without saying that the systems at work with the basebuilding are exceptional; the tech tree is very in-depth, the economy guiding your progress is stout and gives you a sense of 'earning it', and the supplies you must keep stocked are extensive enough to be challenging but not so overwrought as to be overwhelming. The caravan system, which I didn't even dig into until after 50 hours of playing time, also adds a mid-game system which is surprisingly deep and well-crafted itself. The Priorities system is incredibly addictive, and probably where I spend most of my actual gameplay time; there's something so compelling about endlessly tweaking my colonists' activities to try and gain the most efficiency possible.

If I did have a knock against this game, it's perhaps that it's got a steep learning curve. If you've played a game like this before, you're probably already halfway to learning its systems. I, however, had not, so I had to grind out the first 8 hours or so before I had a grasp of what I was doing, and I was often frustrated as I learned how things work by making drastic mistakes. My first colony starved to death due to my inexperience.

So, is it worth a purchase? Well, Rimworld is notorious for never going on sale, but that's not a huge deal in my opinion because it's such a compelling, deep, satisfying experience that it's worth the purchase at full price in my opinion. If you feel overwhelmed at the beginning, just push through. Soon it'll start clicking for you.

Or, you know, don't. And stay far away from this damned game. Because it's unbelievably addictive... Seriously. It's swallowing my life. Some people have heroin... I have Rimworld.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Halo 3 (2007) by Bungie

Space bros

This PC release of Halo 3 is a bit of an uneven experience, which surprised me because I've heard some reviews calling it "the best remaster of the bunch thus far". I strongly disagree with this, but I still consider this game worth playing—especially for the $10 asking price.

While Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 both featured extraordinarily remastered graphics, Halo 3 falls a bit behind them. Perhaps this is because the devs believed they could get away with simply porting the newer generation graphics, but the difference is remarkably noticeable when coming from the fully remastered Halo 2 to the simply ported Halo 3.

In addition to this, the awful sound quality from the Halo: Reach port, which was absent in Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 (both of which have great, remastered sound) is unfortunately back in Halo 3. Guns have very soft sounds with extremely low impact, and they sound ridiculously silly when compared to the gun sound effects of modern day shooters.

Despite the poorer remaster granted to Halo 3 than the previous two titles, it remains worth playing mostly due to how strongly it improves on the faults of its predecessors. Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 both suffer greatly from portions of cookie-cutter level design repeated ad nauseam. Thankfully, the level design in Halo 3 is far more enjoyable. Each stage seems far fresher than the last, and the improvements made to the storytelling in Halo 2's campaign continue here. While I personally do not consider Halo 3's campaign superior to that of ODST or Reach, it's still well worth playing as it concludes the stories from the past two games in relatively satisfying fashion.

Halo 3 is well worth playing, especially if you played and enjoyed Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2. It's worth paying full price, and a supreme bargain on a discount. But make sure to manage your expectations properly; don't expect it to look and like a shooter from 2020, despite the remaster.

⭐⭐⭐

Halo 2 (2004) by Bungie

Halo 2's remastered PC port improves noticeably on its predecessor, Halo: Combat Evolved in several aspects, but falls short to some of the same flaws.

The story is more fleshed out here, with a split narrative that is welcomed after the drudgery that was Halo: Combat Evolved's campaign. It's far better paced as a result, but unfortunately falls victim to some of the same level design pitfalls. Often times it seems as if you're running through repeated templates which make up an entire level. There is some added freshness as far as some more aesthetically pleasing levels and some additional variance, but I still found myself bogged down in running through several similar-looking hallways repeatedly. This campaign is also far longer than Combat Evolved's, and while this is welcome in terms of its better story, it doesn't do any favors for the player when it's padded with these kinds of repetitive levels.

Another complaint I have is that the soundtrack seems to ditch most of the incredible orchestral work of Combat Evolved for a heavy, driving rock soundtrack. It's not terrible, but it also doesn't 'feel' like I've come to expect a Halo campaign to feel. Games in this series such as Halo Reach, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo: Combat Evolved have much, much better soundtracks. Reach and ODST in particular are some of the greatest soundtracks of all-time, so Halo 2's soundtrack feels far poorer by comparison than it does in a vacuum.

Those are only minor complaints, though. The remastered work done to the original graphics remains stellar and breathes new life into Halo 2's arenas. Additionally, the newly rendered cutscenes are stunningly gorgeous and impeccably crafted. They're state of the art, adding new depth and investment in Halo 2's story. The story of these games has always been underrated, in my opinion. People seem to find Reach predictable, whereas I found it somber and affecting. And Halo 2, despite its campaign being criticized for its cliffhanger ending back in 2004, seems to have stood the test of time and is now praised with the release of Halo 3 assuaging players' collective hunger for an end to the story. Combat Evolved's story is relatively bare-bones, so Halo 2 is where the story that so many players now love all began.

As with the other two games, this one runs phenomenally on PC. The mouse controls feel fine to me, and the framerate runs rather high without stuttering issues. The sound, which was poor in Reach, is fine here. Gunshots have impact, the score is remixed and well balanced.

Despite its flaws, Halo 2 remains compelling both from a storytelling standpoint, as a gorgeous science fiction adventure, and as a pulse-pounding action shooter. If you're considering playing Halo 2 on PC, there's not really any reason not to pick this up. It's a bargain at full price (currently $10 on Steam) and a steal on discount.

⭐⭐

Kind Words (2019) by Popcannibal

We're all in need of encouragement from time-to-time, even if such encouragement is often brief or shallow.

This is a game in which you write letters to other players (real people) while listening to music. That's all! Kind Words isn't subtle about what it wishes to accomplish, but it's so forthcoming in its earnestness that it's hard not to be charmed by it. I could see loading up this game becoming a sort of morning routine for me, as I drink my coffee before heading off to work for the day. The background, soundtrack, and act of writing letters all contribute to a vastly cathartic feeling that's puzzlingly simple but somehow so satisfying in which to engage. I spent my first moments of the game simply writing out 14-line letters to some of the more thought-provoking prompts I came across before ever requesting any letters for myself.

Somehow the developers moderate strictly enough to ensure that I haven't seen any internet trolling slip through the cracks. Such a thing is no small feat—as we all know by now, with anonymity comes callous cruelty in the form of words. I can only imagine the putrid garbage the devs must sort through on a daily basis to accomplish this, but from what little I've experienced thus far, it works beautifully and ensures that only positive requests and messages are sent out.

While the game appears wholesome and altruistic—and surely does feature those virtues—in the end, it's about you. It's about empathizing with the faceless human being on the other side of the screen and prompting yourself to treat them as you would like to be treated. I can talk all day about the attractive simplicity of the game, its charming art style, or its wonderful soundtrack. But what makes this game so worthwhile is how it spreads kindness and how it teaches people empathy; a valuable ability that we seem to be losing at an alarming rate.

Perhaps most astonishing was that after spending a mere hour playing Kind Words, I found the positivity urged by the game spilling out into other avenues of my life. Suddenly, all of my comments on social media were of an encouraging nature. I was stopping to appreciate my dog on my way to the kitchen. I admired the way the sun shone in through the blinds. The kind of positive thinking prompted by the game is contagious; it weaves its way into your mood and your actions and propagates itself outward. Quite a surprising experience!

This is a wonderful little game, highly recommended at full price. If you like writing (which I do, as you can tell) then you'll love it. And even if you don't, this game will likely have a positive effect on your life—even if only for an hour, or a day. Give it a chance!

⭐⭐⭐

Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) by Bungie

A great remaster that still manages to show its age

Argh, so this is another difficult one for me to recommend against because although I loved it so much back when it released, it is undoubtedly showing its age. Like many old games, it's aged rather poorly and I'm afraid most modern shooter fans coming to it now will not see what made it so great in the first place.

If you—like me—played this back in 2001, and you're considering purchasing it again for nostalgic purposes, then I would probably recommend it. The remaster work done here is pretty solid. The new textures look like the original game does in my idealized memory, which has without a doubt been colored strongly with nostalgia. I'm in awe when flipping back to the original textures, which look pretty terrible by comparison. It also runs extremely well on my machine; I'm pretty much locked at 144 frames per second, no matter how many enemies or explosions are on-screen.

Halo: Combat Evolved featured several groundbreaking new ideas that made it far-and-away the best console-based shooter when it released. It features an epic science fiction story with quality voice acting and a superb soundtrack (see below video)—I'm talking all-time great caliber video game original soundtrack, to the level of something akin to a John Williams film score. It's so good it's half the reason I still play this game. This was also one of the first console shooters to feature wide-open spaces and vehicles, like something you'd find in a PC-style multiplayer shooter such as Unreal Tournament. And the AI in this game was the best console players had ever seen. Watching enemies clash with other enemy factions and with your allies was so entertaining back in the day, and this game helped to inspire other which also include dynamic AI such as this.

That said, some of these levels are bad. Like, really bad. They often feel like poor multiplayer designs, shoehorned into a single-player game. Your trek to the control room and through the library are so poorly laid out that the devs had to put giant arrows on the ground to help you find your way. They don't feel organic and they're not at all fun to traverse. Some of them are reused ad nauseam and make up entire stages of the game, such as the infamous library, which is literally just the same room repeated nearly a dozen times, which you traverse repeatedly while being swarmed by the same 3-4 enemy types. The entire game is thus permeated with a feeling of tedium and pacing issues. While the shooting feels good and the assault rifle and shotgun have an excellent impact to them, there are only so many times you can satisfyingly shotgun an enemy in the face, or time your melee perfectly so that an enemy elite's shields break when your assault rifle magazine runs empty and you execute him with a rifle butt to the face. The rest of the gameplay has to rely on its level traversal, or its story which—although inspired—is extremely bare-bones, and the game often falls flat due to that. In the later stages the game throws a seemingly endless horde of enemies at you, which becomes extremely repetitive, tedious, and frustrating. You end up trying to navigate these labyrinthine levels in which each turn looks the same as another while battling a seemingly inexhaustible stream of the exact same enemies. Additionally, vehicles all have some overly floaty physics and clipping issues which make them a chore to use in any kind of environment other than an extremely wide open one.

Despite loving the game back in 2001, replaying it today has left me with a strong opinion that an awful lot of Halo: Combat Evolved is a tedious slog that's severely lacking in fun. Playing this immediately after Reach has been eye-opening. But if you can properly look at Halo: Combat Evolved with 2001-era eyes, you might see a lot of what made it so special back then. It's got a lot of heart. It's got one of the best plot twists in video game history. And every time you're moving from cover-to-cover, shotgunning flood in the face, with that epic soundtrack pumping, perhaps you'll touch a bit of what made this game so special to us old farts, and perhaps you can enjoy it like we did back on the original Xbox in 2001.

But if you're looking for a solid shooting experience, this entry of the Master Chief Collection is completely skippable. Try Halo: Reach instead, which features a far better campaign in my opinion.

⭐⭐

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (2011) by CD Projekt Red

Witcher 2 is a mix of positives and negatives whose positives ultimately far outweigh the minor complaints I have with the game.

It shares some of this roughness with its predecessor, The Witcher, which I find to be so rough as to be almost unplayable nowadays. The Witcher 2 had similarly convoluted, poorly designed levels which make it a chore to navigate to and fro while completing quests and exploring. The forest outside Flotsam is guilty of this. It's exceptionally difficult to get where you need to go without circling around hedges and trees and carving through numerous cannon-fodder caliber enemies. Additionally, looting and interacting with the environment is a huge chore given the cooldown on your amulet scanning ability, and the way the game locks out looting for what feels like an eternity once combat starts. Crafting and inventory management is a gigantic chore due to the obtuse user interface, which I felt like I had to fight with constantly. I also experienced a few lock-ups in which Geralt would get stuck in an animation, and a few crashes here and there. Transitions into different areas of the map are bothersome as well. There are numerous small complaints like this that show some of the roughness the previous game also exhibited, albeit far less of them overall.

But there are significant improvements, too. This game looks beautiful, especially when compared to the previous game. I was surprised by how high a quality some of the textures were, and the art design in general is noticeably improved from the first game. The character and monster designs are fantastic, with some of the sorceresses and Geralt's outfits being particularly stunning. Even just the background of the dice poker board, or the deranged drawings on the wall of the burnt out asylum are artistically impressive. Due to this mix of artistic prowess and a powerful new engine, a lot of the visuals on display in Witcher 2 still hold up today, nearly a decade after its original release in 2011. This is made more impressive by the use of developer CD Projekt Red's in-house REDengine, which they developed and used for the first time with this game, to glorious effect. Although I dealt with a few crashes, the game otherwise runs superbly (I'm near 150 fps at all times with max settings) and it still looks great despite being nine years old. It's a pretty impressive achievement for what was a small studio at the time to develop such a solid engine, and the game is made much stronger than the first Witcher, which used the ancient Aurora Engine, licensed from BioWare.

The combat is also substantially improved, ditching the previous game's ridiculous and shallow faux-rhythm system for classic third person combat which is far more satisfying to execute. It feels a bit loose to me, especially when compared to The Witcher 3, but it's still miles better than the first game's combat and far more intuitive. Enough depth has been added to make things more interesting throughout.

Where The Witcher 2 really shines, though, is in terms of narrative, quest design, and providing the player agency. The strongest thing The Witcher 1 did was weaving its quests together, so you feel especially detective-like once you begin uncovering all the pieces. This is also true of Witcher 2. For example, in Chapter 1 you very quickly obtain a series of side quests very early, simply by talking to people. Almost all of these quests turn out to be intertwined in some way: An incense-maker turned fisstech dealer and a drunken troll turn out to be related. Sounds far-fetched, but the common ground not only turns out to be reasonable and compelling, but also teaches you more about the political situation in the game's setting of the Pontar Valley. And if you're looking for a game in which you have the power to impact the story with your choices, then look no further—The Witcher 2 features perhaps the best example of "your choices matter" that I've ever seen in a game.

CD Projekt Red took a massive chance in the way they designed this game, because there's a significant choice to be made at the end of Chapter 1 that leads to two nearly exclusive routes through the plot. Meaning that no matter your choice, you will end up missing out on about a third of the story content in this game because the two paths moving forward from this choice are so different from one another.

It's a ballsy choice by the developer, because these people had to be designing these entire areas and questlines knowing that half of their players would likely never experience them (unless you're a nerd like me and replay the game to take the other route). The consequences of this choice further reinforces the fact that you are actually impacting what is occurring in the narrative. Few games take player choice to this extreme, and the fact that CD Projekt Red did makes The Witcher 2 something special for that reason alone. Furthermore, the choice is packaged appropriately—you likely won't even realize that you just made a game-altering choice, even though you still realize the gravity of the choice when you made it. The game won't pause and give you any hint that a massive choice is about to occur, which I love. It's an exceptional, ambitious move that is perfectly executed and it makes this game far more memorable and impactful than it'd be without it. Bravo to the developers for making the difficult decision to include two branching paths like this.

If for nothing else, this game is worth playing due to the quality of its narrative. It's a politically-driven game with strong social commentary and genuinely interesting characters, and it gives you the opportunity to pass judgment and act within this world as you see fit. It's constantly satisfying in this manner and it left me thinking about my own moral code regularly. Although Witcher 2 does not feature the classic, epic story that is featured in Witcher 3, I appreciated the narrower scale and the stronger focus on the political machinations of this world's elites. It might take some concentration, but once you grasp what's going on in the narrative, it's quite compelling.

The Witcher 2 is not without its warts, but it shows a staggering improvement over its predecessor and it remains more than enjoyable today. If you're in the mood for a good story, check it out. You'll probably be well-satisfied.

⭐⭐⭐

Dragon Quest XI (2017) by Square Enix

I'm awestruck at the near-unanimously positive reception this game has received.

Maybe this is partly due to its looks. Right off the bat, it's incredibly impressive visually—especially on an artistic level. Toriyama's character designs are timeless. His style has aged like wine, from his Dragon Ball manga until the present day and pretty much everything in between. The game also features surprisingly good visuals on a technical level; the way it renders lighting and water will often surprise you.

Unfortunately, unlike Toriyama's art, the rest of this game has aged like milk.

First, some necessary backstory for context so nobody mistakes me for simply being a JRPG-hater. The original Dragon Quest (called Dragon Warrior back in the '80s here in the states) was one of the first games I ever played back as a young sprout on my father's NES console. I played it at such a young age I had to wait for my father to come home from work so he could read me the text, because I wasn't able. Dragon Quest II introduced companions to accompany you on your journey; a novel idea at the time. Dragon Quest III had you put together a team of various different classes of warriors—whichever you liked! Incredibly novel for back then. And Dragon Quest IV, with its varying scenarios, was probably my first favorite game ever. The shock of the end of chapter 2! Playing as an actual storekeeper in chapter 3! The tragedy of the beginning of chapter 5! What a game. Incredibly inspired, perfectly paced. They executed on everything they sought out to do. To this day I'm a massive fan of RPGs, and turn-based games don't bother me. JRPGs are some of my favorite games of all-time.

But man, even given all that, the most unfortunate thing about this game is that it feels old. And not in the timeless, classic way that Toriyama's art feels. So much of what this game relies on as its core loop, as its reason for keeping people coming back for more, feels so stale and ineffective that I grew to hate it inside just a few hours. The turn-based combat feels slow and antiquated and made obsolete by games like Persona 5, the music sounds incredibly bland, uninspired, and poorly mixed (despite the game being peppered by some original sound effects from the old NES games, which I enjoyed). And perhaps most damning; the story writing is of substantially poor quality. Although some of the characters are charming and well-acted by the voice cast, the main plot includes some of the most ridiculous, childishly contrived, video-gamey nonsense I've played in years. Most of the characters in the story regularly make stupid and puzzling decisions for no other purpose than the developers creating this story decided it should go in one direction or another without giving any thought as to how plausible said direction felt. It feels like something a child would write. It feels like fan-fiction. No, it's worse than fan-fiction.

There are numerous instances of moment-to-moment actions making little logical sense. A couple of early examples:

The prophesied hero finally shows up! But you know what, we should throw him in jail because his appearance means the bad-guys are gonna show up, too! He's not The Luminary! He's The Darkspawn!

I'm sorry, what? How does this make any sense whatsoever? What human being would make a decision like this?

This thief is in jail, and he's been tunneling through the floor to escape (presumably a process taking many years of painstaking, Andy Dufresne-esque hard work and suffering to complete) but he's able to instantly steal the guard's key to his cell and unlock his door simply punching him in the gut through the bars—punching him through the guard's steel plate armor and chain mail—to knock him unconscious! And not only that—the door's now unlocked and he's free to go straight out, but instead, he'll use the tunnel he dug, which requires going through the sewers and a dragon's den. He'll go that way instead of simply leaving through the door he just opened.

Games are no stranger to contrived writing. But this isn't just excusable as, "well, it's a video game, I can put up with some contrived nonsense if it's fun". Dragon Quest XI's caliber of writing is so bad, so utterly amateurish, that it pulls you straight out of the experience and prevents you from taking anything in the story seriously. And without a compelling story as context to fall back on, this game is nothing more than a series of old, stale systems dragged forth to the present from the 1980s, including archaic turn-based combat, monotonous fetch-quests, and dry overworld travel from point to point through an uninspired, linear, tunnel-and-corridor style map.

Look, my games don't have to be literary. I'm not some high-minded snob who refuses to dirty himself with anything not to the caliber of War and Peace or King Lear. The games I play don't even have to have high-minded themes or make moral or political points. That stuff is completely unnecessary to a medium which puts you straight into your player character's shoes and hands you agency over his or her actions. But what my video games do have to do is make sense! And they have to tell a story with real stakes, with events that seem real, and threatening, and compelling! And they have to give me characters that I can relate to, that I can care about and root for and sympathize with when they fail and triumph alongside when they succeed! They can't give me a silent, d e a d - e y e d protagonist who acts so unnaturally through it all that he may as well be a puppet being moved around by a ventriloquist; an ambulatory anime body pillow with so much plot armor he may as well not take damage in battles!

I have so much nostalgia for this series and I wanted so badly to love this game. It's not even that far-gone! I could have put up with everything else as-is, if only the story was well-written, emotionally affecting, and inspired. The flaws Dragon Quest XI exhibits may have worked in the '80s and skated by on name merit in the '90s, but packaged with such awful writing, it just doesn't float the boat anymore in a world in which games like Disco Elysium, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Witcher 3 exist. And I'm not saying every game has to have the caliber of writing as those games, either. But damn it, can't they at least try!? There's no longer any excuse for the awful writing, for the tinny, uninspired music, for the empty, silent protagonist, or for the lame, busywork chores that are the fetch quests that populate Dragon Quest XI. This stuff doesn't cut it in video games anymore, and people searching for quality Japanese roleplaying games shouldn't be settling for this kind of trite, stale drivel. A charming, well-executed art style is not enough to carry a video game with such uninspired gameplay, sound, and story as Dragon Quest XI.

If you're a Dragon Quest mega-fan and all you want is another formulaic Dragon Quest game, then by all means, purchase this. You'll probably love it. It's exactly the same game Enix (and now Square-Enix) has been making for decades. But this game can't stand with other, modern roleplaying games. It's not even in the same building as the better RPGs being developed today—much less on the same level.

This game is a colossal disappointment and doesn't deserve to have a single minute wasted on it by any player out there.

⭐

Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) by Rockstar Games

Red Dead Redemption 2 provides an immersive experience that's second-to-none

I'll start off by saying that, although I do consider this game worth playing, and though it has had clear effort and care put into its development, it is certainly no masterpiece, and I fought regular frustration with it. I was surprised to see so many gaming publications and fans alike score it a perfect 10 because, in my opinion, it is severely flawed. It's a good open world game with stunning detail, it tells one of the best, most emotionally devastating and bittersweet stories in gaming history with great characters, but outside of that, I actually found it frustrating and shallow.

The open world is incredible and full of remarkable depth. From random events to NPC encounters, a staggering amount of detail has been injected into this world by the developers who really did a fantastic job. There's a stunning amount of handcrafted detail to stumble over that will more than satisfy most fans of open world games, so if that's your thing, go ahead and buy Red Dead Redemption 2 without regret.

I've seen plenty of praise for the graphics, which I think this is mostly due to the fantastic lighting engine. Volumetric lighting and how it reacts with fog and geometry looks incredible, god rays are marvelous, and the glow that permeates the setting from light sources serves to do a lot of heavy graphical lifting here. It's really something to behold, and combined with the fantastic soundtrack it serves to add a lot of atmospheric heft to the experience. This feeds into the high quality and immersive nature of the open world, one of this game's strengths.

I enjoyed how the game gave me hidden side quests to find in the form of Stranger encounters littered through the world. Many of these grow to add detail to the setting and its people and have lots of writing depth to them, despite being little more than random encounters triggered by the player entering a certain area. Despite the strong open world, this experience is at its best during its thrilling, affecting main story missions and when you're getting to know the very well-written side characters in the Van Der Linde Gang via taking on camp side quests, usually in the form of coach robbery, hunting, or fishing with them. However many of the main story missions—although they're often very compelling narratively—are so on-rails that deviating from the set mission path will often lead you to a fail state outright and push you back to a checkpoint, and the checkpointing system is often poor. For one stealthy mission in Chapter 4 I was forced repeatedly to view the same full minute-long wagon ride into the camp over and over, as the game failed me for trying to sneak into a roof window. I later realized the game fails you if you go off the 1st floor, and you're expected to sneak through the ground level. This kind of railroading stifles player agency regularly and pulls you right out of the experience.

Despite these flaws, single player is a strong narrative with good characters, twists and turns that mostly feel earned and are emotionally impactful, well-written dialogue, and fantastic voice acting and performance capture. Dan Houser and the writing team at Rockstar are at the peak of their abilities. This is a well-told story which makes important points about American exceptionalism, frontier expansion, human civilization, and morality. It's all helped along by the fantastic performance of the cast, particularly the player character's actor, Roger Clark. A fair amount of the side content is also quite compelling, but a lot of it does unfortunately fall into typical open world game territory, which leaves you feeling like you're doing tedious busywork for NPCs whom you just met and don't care about. Although I admittedly loved some side quests, I began skipping side content later in the game after one too many "collect 5 bounty posters" type missions, which was very disappointing.

The slow, laggy way that both the player character and horses control is awful, unfortunately. There were several extremely frustrating moments during combat in which my character would become stuck either on a piece of in-game geometry, or running in a loop, which led to some frustrating deaths. Additionally, inventory management is an unintuitive chore, and you're never quite sure which weapon Arthur considers his default, as you're constantly drowning in dozens of them since the game doesn't allow to equip a main, nor sell those you aren't using. There's something very wrong about a game in which you're a wild west gunslinger, yet half the time you attempting to draw your pistol quickly (by holding right mouse button, then clicking left mouse button), the game fails to respond at all and you stand there like an idiot as you get shot to death. These clunky bugaboos ensured I never felt fully in control of the player character, and some of the game's fantastic immersive quality was lost as a result. I regularly felt frustrated from moment-to-moment while playing this game.

Despite the compelling main quests and companion quests, this game also features some of the typical open world bloat that I've come to despise in games of this sort. I never want to hunt animals for crafting components, for example. Not out of any sort of animal-rights motivation, but because it's never been compelling for me to go out into the woods and spend hours trying to find the right damn animal to obtain materials from. I've also long despised hunting for treasure using only hand-drawn maps—another sin this game commits. I had a particularly poor experience finally finding a treasure location, only to open the hidden compartment and receive another map to decipher: What a kick in the groin it was spending 15 minutes trying to scale Caliban's Seat to complete the first treasure map I purchased, battling bad platform jumping and awkward walk/run controls and falling a couple of times only to finally find it and realize it was ANOTHER TREASURE MAP. This is the kind of boring, time-wasting side content I can't stand, and I was disappointed to see it in yet another open world game which is an otherwise fantastic experience.

Additionally, the camp upgrade options are little more than window dressing. Beyond gaining fast travel capabilities and gaining new satchels, there's almost nothing of value to be gained by upgrading your camp, which is a huge missed opportunity. Because the characters are so compelling, the acting is so great, and the dialogue is so carefully crafted, I found myself wishing for an opportunity to impact the lives of the gang around me by putting some of my hard-earned wealth into the camp. It's prohibitively expensive to do so, and you gain little in-game reward for it other than certain cosmetic flourishes. If I could do it again I'd have instead poured that money into my own clothing and horses. It's simply not worth it, and before long I began ignoring the feature entirely.

There are also several sorts of minigames available, such as poker or five finger fillet, but most of these—although they received obvious care in development in the form of unique animations and lines for the NPCs against whom you play—ended up feeling obviously rigged to me. The worst of this is during the poker game in Saint Denis, which one player always just stomps and led me to think he was cheating in-game. But no further explanation is available, so it instead feels just like he was programmed to take all of your money by winning lucky hands constantly. I gave up on most of the minigames after experiencing this.

Red Dead Redemption 2 lives or dies on its being a great story and a deep, atmospheric world. If you love immersive, engulfing video game worlds or want an amazing story, you're going to love it. If you want great shooting or compelling gameplay in general, you're likely to end up frustrated.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020) by Square Enix

An enormous amount of personal nostalgia can't make up for Final Fantasy VII Remake's shortcomings

Note: My screenshots are rather poor since this is a console game rather than a PC release.

I'll state up-front that I don't have a problem with this being just part one of a remake. It felt like it had enough to warrant the full price tag to me. So, if that is your only concern, you can buy without worry. But if you're interested to hear whether or not the game is good, read on for further detail.

I played the original Final Fantasy VII in 1997. As you can see from the photo above, I still have my original black back discs and jewel case. Some parts of the Remake game carried for me on pure nostalgia. Others were not so good. Others still were so awful that I have no idea how any adult making the game could have examined them and thought, "yes, this is good, this should go in our game."

I'll start with the good stuff. Some parts of the Final Fantasy VII Remake are really exceptional. Number one is that it starts off amazingly well, and feeds fans of the original tons of fan service and nostalgia right off the bat. A tear came to my eye playing the opening few hours. The new combat system, although far different from the ATB of the original, is pretty fun! Animation is amazing- really stunning, and that extends from combat, to NPCs, to cutscenes. Great soundtrack, of course, as the original was fantastic as well. And the art direction is fantastic. Despite the PS4 showing its age and several areas featuring really bad, low-resolution textures, Midgar has come alive for me. It looks phenomenal and feels like the city in the original game did. There's also an exceptional level of polish here. There are very few bugs and there's a deep attention to detail in every part of Midgar.

However, a lot of the game is a complete mess narratively whenever it's not re-creating scenes from the original.

The only time the writing was hitting for me and felt good was when depicting the original characters. Square Enix has a lot of character designers from the original working on this team, and it shows. Not once did the characters say a single line of dialogue that felt out of character for them. The writers clearly still know these characters deeply, and the voice actors nail every single one of them and are casted perfectly.

But that's where the good stuff ends. I won't spoil the game here, but suffice it to say that almost all of the new content added to flesh out the original story is bad. It's full of inconsistent rules and plot holes (being stuck in the area in Chapter 17 after falling and having to spend the entire chapter climbing back up, and then just next chapter watching Cloud jump literal hundreds of feet), full of MacGuffins (Chapter 4 is guilty of this, along with Chapter 13 which makes zero sense whatsoever, and Chapter 14 which could have been cut completely and the game would have lost nothing), and rampant use of deus ex machina for anything and everything whenever the ghosts show up, culminating in an event near to the end of the game that made me roll my eyes and literally groan aloud because of how awful it was.

The real problem with all of the stuff they've added is that it completely torpedoes the pace of the Midgar portion of the original game. I expected this bloat to be represented by the side quests, but those were actually fine. This bloat shows itself in the main quest, which I did not expect. Entire chapters of this game feel like a complete waste of time, and a lot of the writing in these new chapters is so amateur as to feel like fan-fiction. The moment-to-moment scenarios are often just cornball video game nonsense that's impossible to take seriously, eg. "monster stole the key, go chase him down", or "this bridge you are crossing just fell down, now you have to go through this entire level, routed through conspicuous combat rooms with enemies". Lots of random nonsense to move the plot forward that feels contrived and unnecessary and impossible to care about. Compare this to modern story-driven games like Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, or God of War (2018) which are using every single moment, every single line of dialogue, either to tell a compelling story or develop their characters further. Final Fantasy VII Remake feels bloated with tons of fatty, disposable content when you compare it to other titles that strive for great storytelling. It's extremely disappointing, because I consider the original Final Fantasy VII to be fantastic at storytelling, tone, timely comic relief, and pacing. And the Remake fails in all of these aspects.

The textures are absolutely awful in certain cases (click to maximize)

Despite how good this game tends to look, a lot of these failures make it feel old and outdated, which is ironic, of course, because it's a remake of an old game! These are the exact problems the remake was supposed to fix! But these arise not just because it's a remake, because this flaw primarily exhibits itself in the new stuff. The classic scenes from the original game which are re-created here are as timeless as ever and work really well. But the structure of the new portions they have added for the remake feel like they've been designed by a bunch of guys who are stuck with '90s video game design philosophies—Everything feels way too gamey and arbitrary, put in place by a developer's decision rather than organically arising from the story and characters, and because of this it becomes impossible to take seriously and fails to have the emotional heft that good storytelling often does. Look, I don't mind if you make me chase a MacGuffin every once in while, but it has to serve either to develop the mechanics of the game and teach me something new, or develop the core characters or story further, or even lead to a relevant, specatcular set-piece. Too much of the pitfalls of Remake lead to none of this, and the game feels like it spends half its length spinning its wheels as a result.

So a lot of this game is a mess and inconsistent from moment to moment with what it wants to be, whether it wants to be a faithful remake head nodding to its original fans, or a new story all its own. I thought they executed on the former very well, the latter was pretty disposable, standard video gamey stuff. This is very relevant to the game's ending, which I won't spoil here, but suffice it to say that the ending was the culmination of this kind of poor writing, as it seems to go completely off the rails with the most obvious, heavy-handed pseudo-artistic statement to the point where I'm not even really interested to continue playing the next episode. I've heard that Nomura is famous for this kind of stuff, which does no favors for his talents as a director and a writer in my eyes. I really hate disliking the ending because I just know people are going to rag on anyone who doesn't like it for being perpetually angry gamers or whatever, but it's seriously bad. Think Game of Thrones Season 8 bad. I honestly cannot believe that the game got out the door with this ending. Someone high up at Square Enix needed to tell whomever was responsible for writing this ending that it was not going to work. It's a failure of epic proportions.

To summarize: All of the best stuff is from when they re-create the original scenes, most of the stuff I didn't like was new writing injected into the framework of the story which already exists. So if they're going to tell their own story now with these characters, from here on forward, I'm really not interested in that, because I don't find their storytelling up to par in most cases and the bombastic, campy style with which they tell it is really not for me. Others may feel differently.

Basically, it's neat that this thing even exists, and it's got a lot of polish. But it's very inconsistent, and I'm surprised it's been so well-received both critically and among fans new and old. Maybe it's because it starts off so well, and ends so poorly, and most of the hearsay surrounding the game is taken from statements made when players are still in the first half of the game? Nevertheless, if you were a fan of the original, it's still probably worth playing—warts and all. But it disappointed me greatly by the end.

⭐⭐

The Witcher (2007) by CD Projekt Red

I feel really bad doing this because I absolutely love CD Projekt Red and I enjoy later games in the series such as The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, but I just can't recommend this game. It's not a terrible game, but its age and some of the mistakes made by the developers working on their first game do a lot to make it a terrible experience to play.

Most notably is that the combat is awful. It's incredibly easy for the most part, but also very bland. Potions are all but useless, leaving you to whack with your sword repeatedly in its faux-rhythm game. I was completely exhausted of it by the beginning of the second chapter and was beginning to choose just to run past enemies.

There are a number of side quests that are worthwhile as far as story and character development, but too many are simple fetch quests and just not worth your time despite the experience and money they reward you with. Too many "fetch 10 wolf pelts", and "find the 10 sephirahs" here—the latter of which broke me for good and had me uninstalling the game.

Probably most tiresome is the fact that the maps are some of the worst designed playing areas I've ever seen in an RPG. I am not exaggerating when I say that 90% of my gametime here was spent running around the map. They are not cyclical at all, but require you to run end-to-end, which is incredibly boring and frustrating. The maps that are open, such as the swamp, often have shrubbery and fences blocking paths that you might use to get somewhere more quickly. I don't mind padding out some gametime, but you've got to be smart about it; give me some good dialogue with NPCs, or entertaining combat. Here even the skill trees—one of my favorite parts of an RPG—feel ineffective, and like a waste of time.

There are minor annoyances as well, such as the awful character models, or poor dialogue writing. The game also starts off about as terribly as possible, with awful, generic, clichéd fantasy dialogue, and bad animations and storytelling.

I used to think of this game like the first Mass Effect—a good game, but very rough around the edges. But while it does do some good things, it's nothing like Mass Effect, which has competent levels, character building, and far better writing and dialogue.

Pretty much all The Witcher has going for it is some interestingly complex quest design and a great setting. Aside from that, this game is nearly completely skippable. Witcher 2 is a far better game, and probably even a better starting place for the series. But if you're dead set on playing the entire trilogy, you can give this one a shot—It's going to be all but impossible to play once you've experienced the later, better games and CD Projekt Red's maturity as one of the best game developers on the planet.

⭐

Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus (2018) by Bulwark Studios

Most immediately striking about this game is the absolutely phenomenal sound design. The ambient sound is superb, making you fearful and near awestruck each step of the way. The soundtrack fits the setting well; it's an industrialized set of organ songs, with heavy electronic and ambient touches. It's the perfect window-dressing for what is essentially a game about transhumanist cultists. Had the Western Roman Empire never fallen in the 5th century, perhaps this is what it would have grown into. I love the strong inspiration of the Christian late Roman Empire here. The usage of faux-Latin for the character's names and their garbled, mechanical voice effects does a lot to impart a certain mood: that of a dark, dreary future populated by these mechanical monsters who seek to eradicate alien life and steal their technology. The entire thing gives you a sense of otherworldliness, like you're witnessing something that's just utterly beyond you. It's difficult to explain until you jump in. I don't know the Warhammer 40k lore very well, but I do enjoy what little of it I've experienced.

Probably my single favorite thing about the game is something rather minor—the aforementioned voice effects. This game does have actual voice acting, but it is relatively rare. The vast majority of the dialogue is read by the player rather than listened to, but the characters speak in their own native language, which is depicted here in sound effects sounding something akin to garbled Latin, and then put through an extremely disorienting voice filter. It is probably a relatively simple process, but the effect goes a very long way to helping the mood of this game resonate as incredibly unsettling. It's amazing, and I wish more games would do something like this if proper voice acting was not an option.

A lot of what I like about this game is in how it manages the mood. The art style, specifically regarding the characters' portraits (see right), is excellent. It reminds me a lot of the art found in Darkest Dungeon—something I loved about that game. In general, there is such a Gothic, uncomfortably dusty and masonwork-like feeling to the entire thing. A lot of the cutscenes feel as if you're witnessing some great cultural crime of epic proportions. The characters each express their own quirks, providing nice wrinkles in this mood; one of them is extremely dogmatic and is constantly citing scripture, which I loved. Another speaks in a computerized set of faux-programming commands, which is equally characterizing. There are so many nice little touches like this that make the moment-to-moment gameplay come alive for me. I think these things are necessary, especially in turn-based tactical games, which can become rather dry if they focus too much on nuts and bolts aspects of the gameplay. You need the impact of these artistic touches to balance things out and give some color to the blueprint of the game.

Perhaps the only thing I'd criticize on these grounds is the actual, in-game graphics. The hand-drawn illustrations used in the portraits are fantastic, but I found the actual polygonal characters during gameplay to be somewhat wanting. The animation is not very good, and they seem like pieces on a game board rather than the semi-living, semi-mechanical abominable personae they exhibit in their character portraits. I would love to see a sequel go all-out with the hand-drawn style, getting rid of the polygonal characters altogether and rendering the entire game in this art style. The artistic effort here is that strong.

As far as the gameplay, I suppose I'm a bit biased, as turn-based tactics is probably my single favorite subgenre of RPG—and a woefully underutilized one, in my opinion. I am glad to see games such as the XCOM revival series, and Divinity: Original Sin using this playstyle. It's not for everybody—particularly the turn-based nature of it—but for those of us who love it, this game definitely scratches that itch. There are a bevy of different abilities, passive perks, and gear to keep the game dynamic and flowing forwards. I've always considered the sign of a good turn-based tactics game to be getting absolutely wrecked in an engagement, then reloading a save and trying it again with slightly differing tactics, only to succeed easily. It's a sign that the emphasis is where it should be—on how you approach each battle—rather than on something like getting an overpowered weapon. The tutorial mission is actually a great example of this: I went from getting both of my tech priests killed, to adjusting my tactics and sending my peon units at Argolekh in suicidal charges, and was able to kill him without taking any damage. It was immensely satisfying.

Sadly, though, the difficulty scaling throughout the campaign seems to be somewhat off. I believe this is due simply to having so many different abilities and so much different equipment present in the game, which had to have made it difficult to balance everything. The beginning of the game seems very difficult; you have small pistols which do 1-2 damage, and if you try and face up a Necron Destroyer with those weapons, you're going to get your butt kicked. However, once you get to mid-game, you are cruising; if you know what you're doing and you've thought about your Tech-Priests' builds, you're probably going to be able to deal with everything that comes your way rather easily. And by the time you get to the late game, you'll be steamrolling everything. This is definitely not scaled like XCOM 2, which is quite difficult and punishing. It felt rather like Final Fantasy Tactics to me, or any other game in which you can break it completely if you progress your characters the right way.

I did read that they patched the game to make it more difficult, and it isn't a total breeze, but if you build smartly, you'll still probably watch your power level grow considerably as the game continues onwards.

Although this might be a controversial opinion, I don't believe that completely breaking a challenging game by becoming overpowered via intelligent character building is necessarily a bad thing. While this is a detriment to enjoyment for those who like to be challenged, it can also be quite rewarding; there's a sense of growth in power when you go from getting killed against one Necron Destroyer, to slaughtering everything in your path just 20 hours later. It imparts a sense of what the Adeptus Mechanicus do within the fiction: they may be ill-equipped at the start, but they will learn more and more about your technology and adapt it to their purposes to such an extent that they will use it better than you will. And then they will kill you all because you had the nerve to exist in the first place.

If I did have a complaint, probably it would be that some of the tomb events feel a bit arbitrary. There are sometimes instances of selecting an option in an event room and having the results of your choice play out in an unexpected way that felt rather arbitrary.

I know nothing about Bulwark Studios but this is such an engrossing, carefully crafted game that I'm very excited to see what they do from here on. I'll be watching their future games closely, and I'd recommend Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus to any fan of the genre of turn-based tactics. If you like the Warhammer 40k setting and you're not too averse to turn-based gameplay, give it a shot—you might enjoy it. But if you dislike other turn-based games, this one likely will not sell you on the subgenre, and there will be little for you to enjoy here unless you're an absolutely rabid Warhammer fan.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Dota 2 (2013) by Valve

I finally feel qualified to write a review of Dota 2, since I'm just exiting the stages of being an absolute beginner in Dota 2 and finally progressing into the "novice" stage.

After nearly 1,500 hours over a period of 6 years.

I remember reading a news story a while back during the release of the hugely popular Witcher 3 in 2015 that was speaking about how many other games had lost thousands of players, all of whom had flocked to the big new game and were engrossed by it. Except for Dota 2 players, who continued to play to their normal numbers and weren't distracted by another game releasing. The writer came to the humorous conclusion that Dota 2 players are probably just not aware of the existence of other games.

Although I love other video games, that's still easily understandable for me, because Dota 2 is by far the best competitive game I've ever played. It sucks people in and devours them, dominating their every waking moment. I know people who don't play any other games, just Dota. And I understand why.

The sheer amount of variance between games and the bevy of differing mechanics enables the player to continue playing for thousands of hours—as I have—and still feel utterly amateurish. There's so much to learn, and so much to think about while you're in the game. The game isn't so much a test of how mechanically skilled you are, or how fast your reflexes are, but your ability to multitask and make a multitude of complex decisions in a small amount of time. Do you have vision? Are smokes of deceit available? What's your next item? Who is killing you in fights, and what can you do to prevent that? Have you used your shovel when it's off cooldown? What about midas? If you win a fight, should you Rosh, or take objectives? When's the proper time to split up and farm? And those are just the in-game, micro-decisions. You've got vaster ones to make as you continue to play the game. Which heroes feel stronger this meta? Which items? Which strategies are working?

Friends and I often talk about our "forever games", ie. the game that you will probably play for decades into the future, because you'll just never get tired of it. And that's Dota 2, for me. I began playing in 2014 and I've taken a significant amount of time off here and there (most recently, for the past 2 years, only to come back once again). If you're looking for a forever game, Dota can certainly be that for you. But there are a few significant hurdles in the way.

First off, I don't think I've ever engaged in anything with a steeper learning curve than Dota 2. There are more than a hundred heroes, of whom you must learn every single thing. All of their abilities, the items they will build, their power scale timings. And then there are hundreds of items you must learn as well. And you've got to apply all of this thinking on the fly to how it affects not only your hero, but your teammates' heroes. It's such a massive amount of knowledge to compile, and it's changing all the time. Nine out of ten players will try this out for 5-20 hours and set it down, utterly bewildered by what they're doing wrong as they get mercilessly brutalized over their first 10 games or so. So it certainly helps to play with a more experienced, exceptionally patient friend who can show you the ropes. And if you stick it out, and play a few hundred hours, you'll find that you can begin to gain an appreciation of why this game so dominates the passions of so many players around the world.

I can talk about how the sound design is fantastic, how I dislike some of the character designs, or any other of normal-video-game-things, but the real focus on reviewing Dota should talk about two things: 1) The incredible job IceFrog and Valve do at balancing a game with so many disparate parts and how having such a deep set of mechanics to learn keeps players coming back for tens of thousands of hours, and 2) the infamously cancerous community surrounding the game.

Dota 2's infamously contemptible community is easily the games worst aspect

I'm not going to blow smoke; many of the players populating Dota's servers are unkind and delusional. I've had literally hundreds of games in which I've watched a player roam into the enemy jungle, try and fight 3-4 enemy heroes, die stupidly, and then proceed to flame their teammates for not following. Or the players who, the moment you die, will jump on your mistake and adopt an air of superiority in scolding you, and trying to correct the way you play—despite being the same rank as you. Everyone playing Dota 2 seems to believe that they belong at a far higher rank than they are, and everyone else is at fault for their placement.

The core component to the toxicity surrounding this game is a stunning lack of awareness of the player's own deficiencies, and the deflection of blame towards anyone else possible. Sure, there are trolls who run down mid, and there are people who refuse to actually support. But these are relatively rare in my experience. What wears me down from playing Dota consistently is the sheer amount of toxic communication and blame-game playing. If you play this game, you've got to have a thick skin. You'll be criticized mercilessly and blamed incorrectly. And it's constant. This happens nearly every game, even if you have a decent behavior score (8000+), as I do. Even I'm not exempt from this behavior—there have been plenty of times in the past when I've engaged in bitter exchanges with teammates. It's something that just comes with the territory of playing such a difficult, highly competitive, intensely human game. Emotions run high and we say things we regret.

That said, I do believe the game's in a better place now than it has been in years past. Supports are more likely to pull, gank, and buy smokes and deward. Individual couriers have done a lot to improve player relations in-game and prevent arguments—it's hard to believe now that you'd sometimes get games in which supports would refuse to buy a courier. And, perhaps most important, Role Queue is a huge, fantastic development—you now no longer have 5 carries every single game. And to deal with such rampantly poor communication etiquette, all you've got to do is mute other players liberally. My personal rule of thumb is to mute anyone who begins suggesting items to other players (these people often have a false sense of superiority that leads to flaming teammates when things go poorly), or begins to broadcast the slightest amount of negativity. I've never regretted muting a player, but I have frequently regretted not muting them. I've even gone through dozens of games with everyone muted on both sides, just enjoying the game itself in lieu of any communication whatsoever. Learning to use the mute buttons liberally is the fastest way to truly enjoy playing Dota 2. But you'll still likely end up having days where Dota 2 is the best game you've ever played, and days where Dota 2 is the worst game you've ever played.

There's also the esports scene around Dota, which is incredible. The International is the best esports tournament in the world, and the Dota client itself has amazing features for spectating games by high-level pros, whenever you want to. I personally enjoy spectating games from Player Perspective, so I can analyze what high level players are doing differently than me when I play.

Reviewing Dota 2 is not like reviewing any other game. It's the deepest, most rewarding competitive experience I've ever had with a video game. But it's also the most infuriating and mood-ruining. Striking a healthy balance between these things is key. If you have the determination to learn the game, a thick skin, and a modicum of intelligence, you'll probably adore this game. And, best of all, you can get all these thousands of hours of enjoyment out of the game without spending a single dime. All the heroes are free so you have a complete playing experience right out of the gate, unlike other, similar games on the market.

And maybe you'll play it forever, like I will. Give it a shot. It's free, after all.

⭐⭐⭐⭐