Assassin's Creed Valhalla (2020) by Ubisoft

I'll always remember the first time I played Assassin's Creed Valhalla.

It's been another hard few months of COVID-19 lockdown here in the greater New York City area, and I've been looking forward to this game for a long time. I even bought a new TV for it—my first ever 4K HDR.

The first few hours of playing this game were an absolute dream and I found myself melting into its world, wholly immersed and embraced by the wonderful art direction, the gorgeous visuals, the carefully crafted environments, and the sense that there was something new to discover around every corner, past every crevice, down every well.

Odd, then, that now—a couple of weeks after my initial reaction, which was so adoring that I was almost brought to tears a few times— my feelings are far cooler than they initially were.

A tale of two teams

When reviewing some old opinions on other games in the series prior to writing this review, I felt so damn strongly that my complaints about Assassin's Creed Origins in my review (which is now infamous on Steam, with dozens of comments and thousands of votes) were the same ones I've now had with Valhalla.

I don't think that's a coincidence. A whole lot of stuff in Valhalla is a huge step back for some of the new evolutions in systems and some of the additional polish introduced in Assassin's Creed Odyssey—a game I really loved, which made incredible improvements on Origins, the game that came before it. This kind of improvement between is something that's happened before in this series, most notably with the games Assassin's Creed Unity (2014) and Assassin's Creed Syndicate (2015). Syndicate improved Unity by leaps and bounds, and Origins ended up being a step back from some of those improvements.

And now it's happening again. Odyssey (2018) improved on Origins (2017) by leaps and bounds, and now those improvements have been set back once again by Valhalla.

There's a reason this kind of thing keeps happening. The way these Assassin's Creed games are made requires two separate teams working simultaneously to make these games, and each of these two teams has vastly different strengths and weaknesses.

Team A (featuring people such as Ashraf Ismail and Darby McDevitt, the brains behind games like Black Flag, Unity, and Origins, and the team which made this game—Valhalla) features strengths in storytelling, large-scale gameplay/feature innovation, and art direction. Their games are typically very ambitious—especially on the design-side (things like basing the entire game around ship combat with Black Flag, incorporating massive crowds which literally break the game in Unity, and certain features such as Senu the bird in Origins)—and they tend to look unbelievably stunning and have downright jaw-dropping worlds which feel real, mysterious, and beg you to dig into them. The art direction and cinematography of their games are managed with a superb eye, and the writing is generally far better than Team B's efforts.

Team B (headed up by devs like Scott Phillips and Alexis Cote, responsible for games such as Syndicate and Odyssey) tends to feature strengths more unique to the medium of video games: smoother, more polished core gameplay (eg. free climbing, level design, encounter scenarios); far better designed systems such as skill trees, loot, and gear; and designing compelling abilities for the player to use in combat situations. Team B's games aren't usually as innovative or as artistically relevant as Team A's, but they are far, far better at implementing classic video game systems such as loot, skill trees, and active abilities. Their games always seem to have smoother gameplay from moment-to-moment when doing things such as traversing the world or clearing enemy encampments, and far better designed stealth arenas and levels than Team A's games do. There are noticeable instances of Team B's games fixing some faults I have found in previous Team A games, eg. Syndicate fixing some of Unity's issues with its climbing and its stealth encounters, and Odyssey greatly improving on Origins' skill trees and loot systems. But Team B almost always tends to tell poorer stories, and they lack the sheer artistic muscle and otherworldly feel that Team A's worlds always seem to blow me away with.

It becomes, generally, an experience of Team A's beautiful, immersive worlds versus Team B's polished, satisfying gameplay.

The more I play Assassin's Creed games, the more I get a feel for this dynamic between the two teams. They have starkly different strengths and weaknesses. Prior to release, my great hope for Valhalla was that it would incorporate some of the vast steps Odyssey made in terms of its systems creating a far more compelling loop than Origins', and, you know, actually being fun to play. 

Sadly, Valhalla mostly fails in this.

Full immersion

When I try and consider my feelings about Assassin's Creed Valhalla as a whole, I veer wildly between the things it does really well which left me drooling in nirvana, and the things it does really, surprisingly poorly which left me cursing at it in disgust and setting it down for days at a time. It's not often I have such a strong, polar reaction with just one games, but Team A's Assassin's Creed games always seems to bring it out in me. The cliché of the mixed bag has never been more apt a label than it is when describing this series.

When Valhalla is on, it's on. In its first few hours I felt the constant pull of the next new 'thing' on the horizon. A statue in the distance, a crumbling Roman ruin, a crevasse leading to a cave below me which I spotted with my raven. When this game manages to immerse you in its world and impart its mood to you, it hits you in the chest like a reverberating sack of bricks. So much of my enjoyment of this game is based on mood and feel. The entire experience is brilliantly crafted towards this end—it's the one thing the developers have fully succeeded on executing.

It's not so much that it's technically impressive, either; Ubisoft's AnvilNext 2.0 engine is showing its age a bit (I believe the first game to be built on this engine was Assassin's Creed III, which released back in 2012). Rather, it's the game's art team—led by extraordinary industry talent Raphael Lacoste—which more than picks up the slack. There are dozens of moments each time I sit down to play the game in which I'm blown away by some kind of artistically engineered aspect of the setting. I'll turn a corner and see god rays shining directly onto a statue in front of me, perfectly illuminating it and casting shadows around me. Or I'll leap from a viewpoint and emerge from the pile of leaves which cushioned my fall with a picturesque street view on both sides of you. So much of this game has been staged in this way, and it's probably not consciously noticeable for most players who lack the eye for it, but it's something that does a lot to subconsciously bring you into its world and increase your immersion, no matter who you are.

As with its predecessor, Origins, Valhalla nails exploration and the sense that you've just submerged yourself into a wonderful, curious world that's begging to be explored and learned about. The first time I stumbled across Roman ruins, I was spellbound (see left). Venonis, an early Roman ruin in the game bordering the Thames, is bathed in earthy Autumn browns and reds and coated audibly in the low burble of the river nearby. There's a sub-boss enemy patrolling on horseback nearby, a few other encampments of NPCs, and a bunch of nooks and crannies to explore within the ruins. Creeping through this area with the ambient music pumping is one of my lasting memories of this game. Valhalla's world is a character all to itself, one which inspires great curiosity and transports you into its world. Who were these people, who built so high, and are now brought so low by age and weather? In this way I was transported into the player character; feeling their emotions, thinking their thoughts. I became of a single mind with Eivor.

My first time discovering a ruined Assassin Bureau was rather by mistake, as I wandered through the city of Ledecester merely taking in the sights and sounds. I don't even remember how I stumbled across the place, only that I had been making my through several tunnels of the old catacombs (because if the Romans were great at one thing, it was moving shit... literally). My torch flickering and sputtering beside me, I continued through sets of claustrophobic, crumbling, cobwebbed corridors. Eventually I turned to a corner, entered a small vestibule, and up on the wall in front of me was an aged black banner with a familiar symbol (see right). Commence fanboying.

This is the kind of thing this game does so well. It's constantly pushing you to explore and making you wonder what nugget of interesting stuff lies just around the corner. I played about half of the game with nearly every UI component turned off—including waypoint markers—and simply moseyed through the world, using my raven to spot interesting stuff nearby, and then making my way there to see what it was. The game is constantly framed by fantastic art direction, lighting, and staging which makes this sort of exploration a dreamlike endeavor, and players who like this sort of thing will probably love it in Valhalla. The game's spaces often have a poignant feel of ruin; of something once great, massive, extraordinary that has fallen woefully and disgracefully into ruin. The emotion and beauty baked-in to this experience is often a reward just by itself, and makes exploration worthwhile without any dopamine-spurring rewards in the form of loot or level-ups.

Further, the game hides these nuggets—things your own curiosity demands you search out—behind intelligent barriers you must worm through, but which never manage to feel chore-like. In prior games, you would simply seek out a point of interest, or a map marker, go there, and check it out. Valhalla implements new minor challenges to discovering these points of interest; a locked door, or a walled up entrance. Something that takes only a few seconds to solve, by pickpocketing the guard with the key, or tossing an explosive jar at the barrier, but something that makes you feel you've earned your entryway into the musty, abandoned room you're licking your lips to ransack and learn more about.

Asgardian cacophony

Helping all of this exploration and immersion along is a positively stunning original soundtrack by Jesper Kyd and Sarah Schachner (see above. Seriously, click it, and let it play as you read. It's incredible).

Kyd, a series legend, cut his teeth on the first four games of this series, even producing one of the greatest video game soundtracks of all-time in Assassin's Creed II. Schachner, however, has her own chops—her score for Assassin's Creed Origins is one of my absolute favorite soundtracks of any game I've ever played, and her work stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Kyd's. The two come together magnificently in Valhalla, which is one of the best scored games I've ever played. The soundtrack is wonderfully versatile; it nails its orchestral highs, leaves you swimming in its ambient depths, and Einar Selvik's vocals do a lot to add a unique feel during raids. I can't say enough about it. It's phenomenal, and it's one of the best components of the entire game.

There are times when playing this game that I'm melting into this world, incredibly happy I've dipped my toe into it once again. Traversing the environment, allowing the music and its visuals to wash over me like a warm bath. It's that beautiful of an experience at its best, and its worth playing sometimes just for that feeling alone.

Sadly, though, this feeling is always fleeting. It never lasts for long, always reliably broken up by one of the many, many things which Valhalla does so poorly, so clumsily, that it sometimes beggars belief the same group of people who so carefully sculpted its world also created some of the things which make me outright despise this game.

The quality of this world carried me along on its back for dozens of hours. In the first two-thirds of the game, I found myself clearing every single map marker and leaving every shire I visited completed to a 100% tic, driven along by my love of the setting and the wondrous, compelling imagery I was constantly discovering.

But one killer feature can only carry the entire experience for so long. And, sadly, in nearly every other instance, Assassin's Creed Valhalla fails to design meaningful rewards to entice the player to keep driving through its world and completing its story and side content.

Boring, broken, badly designed loot

A lot of my love for the medium of video games is based on character building; the dopamine rush you gain when discovering a new piece of loot, or how a level-up excites you with the possibility of new, more effective abilities with which to affect the world around you. It's in these things that Valhalla fails so utterly, so spectacularly, that I'd go as far as saying it may even be worse than its predecessor, Origins, in how it handles these features. It's certainly worse than Odyssey—so much worse that it's puzzling as to why the developers who made this game did not take proper inspiration from the game which came directly before it.

Loot sucks

I can very easily describe how woefully inept the design of Valhalla's loot system is, in one sentence: I didn't change any of my gear for nearly the first 60 hours of which I played this game. Not a single piece. I continued using the same, un-upgraded hand axe and the same basic Raven clan armor, simply because none of the new gear you gain seemed enough of an upgrade, nor did any of it look visually compelling enough to warrant a change. In a game such as Valhalla, which relies on loot being the main 'carrot' which the developers reward you with to try and push you into continuing to play and discover new areas, this is an absolutely damning failure. Very few of the weapons feel different enough to warrant a change beyond their (admittedly very well-done) combat finishers, and the armor pieces all offer very little difference from one another, both cosmetically and in terms of stat differences. It's all extremely disappointing.

Valhalla attempts to avoid the sheer volume of loot featured in Odyssey by implementing an upgrade system, which draws resources in order to increase the power of your favorite armor sets. The problem with this system is that it's prohibitively expensive at the upper levels, and prone to gimping the player by having them spend all of their resources on upgrading early sets only to introduce a set of armor they may prefer much later in the game. This left me ignoring the upgrade system entirely until the very end of the game, when I had all of the sets seemingly unlocked and could finally choose which one I wanted to upgrade. The upgrade system is so poorly designed that it leaves the player basically two options: Ignore it entirely, or upgrade a very early armor set at the expense of losing the ability to upgrade anything you might find afterwards. Both, obviously, are very poor choices.

Valhalla also features another layer of upgrades centered on runes, which you can loot and plug into armor. These are hilariously minuscule and almost always outright ignorable, offering you only something such as a 3.0+ damage bonus on a sword which does more than 100 damage, for example. The UI for managing runes is so poorly designed that it becomes not even worth the hassle to deal with it in order to gain a <5% increase to something like damage or health. I played the majority of the game with my armor completely empty of runes and I felt no noticeable gimping from refusing to take part in the system.

"Which piece of boring leather-and-fur armor shall I wear today, hmm?"

The failure of these systems becomes even more egregious when you consider the vast improvements Assassin's Creed Odyssey made with its loot system. Not only did it improve on the new, relatively raw and unrefined loot system from its predecessor, Assassin's Creed Origins, but it completely redefined the way loot works for a game such as this. In Odyssey, you are able to change the cosmetic appearance of every single piece of equipment you have to any piece of loot you have ever picked up, without changing its attributes. This brilliant evolution allows you to seamlessly use whichever equipment you feel matches your playstyle best from a statistical-standpoint, while also tweaking the visual appearance of this equipment in a completely different layer, in order to have it match the way you want your player character to look. The system works perfectly and succeeds in revolutionizing loot for the entire series—Odyssey's loot system is what gear in the Assassin's Creed series has been striving towards since it was first introduced in 2014's Assassin's Creed Unity. Odyssey left me fiending for just one more enemy encampment so I could see what other exciting pieces of equipment might drop for me. All of this is tossed out in Valhalla, whose loot is an empty system which I found myself purposefully avoiding instead of engaging with. It left me scratching my head as to how the team could have gotten this so wrong after having succeeded so extensively with it in the game they released just two years ago.

In no single aspect is this disregard for Odyssey's improvements more glaring than how Valhalla handles bows. Assassin's Creed Origins featured a number of different bows which had different styles: the light bow could fire low-damage arrows very rapidly, Predator bows fired one heavy arrow from first-person perspective, Hunter bows were a mix of both, etc. The problem with this system was that you'd completely ignore all other types in favor of the bow which best matched your play style (stealthy or combat-driven), because it was a huge pain to leave gameplay and have to navigate through the UI to change bow types every time you wanted to. This obtuse system led to effectively negating a vast swath of the loot you picked up; "Oh, another light bow, time to dismantle it immediately without even looking at the stats". Odyssey, though, rightfully realized this error, and made it so that arrows were what was different, rather than the bows themselves, and made it quick-and-easy to change arrow types with just one button press in-game, without having the navigate a menu. It's a brilliant fix to Origins' broken bow system.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla, puzzlingly, has rolled back this change. Bows have reverted to Origins' clunky, obtuse style of having an entirely different piece of equipment for each type. If you want to change to a Predator bow to headshot a distant guard when in stealth, you've now got to interrupt your entire gameplay by navigating through multiple menu screens to switch bows, take the headshot, then do the entire thing again to re-equip your main bow. Ditto to equipping a light bow if you enter open combat. It's mind-numbingly stupid to have gone back to this system and it's one small example which encompasses nearly every complaint I have with Valhalla in one neat package: This game blatantly disregards these sorts of refinements made by Odyssey in favor of earlier, poorer systems. It begs me to question what, exactly, the developers were thinking with these kinds of decisions. You guys already fixed this stuff in Odyssey! Why are these poor design decisions back!?

So loot, something I adored in Odyssey, something which kept me playing that game for more than 200 hours, was pretty much utterly ignored by me for nearly the entirety of Valhalla. It's that bad.

You know, like the Sphere Grid! Except really crappy.

Further adding to the annoyance of dealing with this poorly designed loot system is the fact that the new skill tree is, surprisingly, even worse.

The skill tree sucks, too

The best way I could describe it is that the developers have basically taken Final Fantasy X's sphere grid and made it unintuitive, confusing, and inconsequential. With each level up, you gain 2 skill points to spend on nodes, which you must then connect to others. These nodes often feature relatively minor increases to stats, with each portion of the tree granting different sorts of bonuses: the bear section is more combat focused, offering melee attack and health nodes more frequently; the wolf section focuses on ranged abilities; the raven section on assassination and stealth attacks. Valhalla also locks some of its best abilities behind these nodes, such as Chain Assassination (which allows you to toss an axe at a second opponent after assassinating a first), and Stomp (which allows you to instantly kill an enemy knocked down).

The problem with this is that the entire tree is shrouded in a fog, completely preventing you from seeing any but the most immediate nodes on the tree, and making it impossible to engage in any sort of build planning. This effectively prevents the player from plotting a route to the next new, fancy skill they want to unlock, because they can't even see which skills are available to them. It destroys any drive or desire the player might have to level up, because the game purposefully hides its rewards from you.

Skill trees are inherently meant to drive you forward, to keep you excited and building towards the next big ability which will help you affect the game. By hiding all of this from the player it leaves them fumbling through the tree with no idea what they're unlocking next and nothing to get excited about. Gaining levels goes from a driving force and a reward for the player, to some nebulous, abstract increase in "Power" that will probably make you strong, I dunno? It's an awful design decision and, compounded with how poor the loot system is, serves to almost completely annihilate the fantastic dopamine loop that Odyssey worked so hard to refine and implement with its post-launch improvements. Odyssey also hid some of its abilities from the player, but did so in carefully managed tiers in order to drip-feed the player new data at specific levels. Valhalla takes a sledgehammer to this nuance and prevents the player from gaining a grasp of any of its abilities at all, instead preferring to allow them to fumble in the dark and take little to no agency in developing how their player character grows.

Clearly the devs wished to take the off-screen power increases that occurred with each level gained in Odyssey and put that process into the player's hands. That makes sense on paper, but the problem with this is that including each of these minute stat increases blows out the skill tree to a gargantuan sprawl, one which collapses into mundanity with only these minor stat increases incorporated. To solve this, they sprinkle abilities in there, too, which are far more exciting. But injecting these abilities into it necessitates that you hide some of it from the player, and how do you do that in a staggered fashion? Odyssey was able to stagger this with a deft touch, but also because they didn't have to include literally hundreds of minute stat increases, too.

So the solution here needed to be either another layer on which to place these abilities, or to put these small stat increases back behind the veil and simply allow them to be allocated automatically as the player increases their level, as it was in prior games. I really like the how Valhalla features 'skill books' which allocate new abilities as lootable items in the game world, but too many of these abilities were too similar to one another, or too mundane to make a significant difference in gameplay. Perhaps we could have cut down the amount abilities in the game, overall, and shuffled skill tree abilities into the mix? Or simply increased the amount of lootable abilities and kept everything?

What's so disappointing is that literally any of these potential solutions would have been better than what we actually got, which is a ham-fisted Frankenstein's amalgamation that loses the compelling factors of each independent aspect of the skill tree by jamming them all together. Valhalla's skill tree simply does not work as it exists today and it should never have made it into the game in this form. It's yet another awfully designed system that, again, utterly fails in what it should be striving to accomplish—to keep the player engaged with its loop and keep propelling them forward into more gameplay. And it's a system that, again, I ended up ignoring for large periods of time because I just couldn't be bothered with dealing with its obtuseness. It wasn't rare for me to enter the UI menu to check my map and suddenly discover; "oh, that's right—I have 12 skill points, and I haven't bothered to allocate any of them from the past three hours of gameplay". They're so inconsequential that they become a chore. And if that's not a failure of a system whose very purpose is to get you fiending for more of it, then I don't know what is.

That makes two systems I loved from a previous Assassin's Creed game that Valhalla completely dismantles, to its detriment. Perhaps we can find a third?

The mundane, unrewarding reality of growing your settlement

As I've gushed over in numerous reviews from Assassin's Creed II to Kingdom Come: Deliverance to Rimworld and back again, base-building is one of my very favorite things to experience in an open world video game. Having the overarching goal of growing your settlement, or fortress, or city is a nice big-picture motivator for the player to aspire to and to pour resources into, and something which continues to push the player to engage with exploration and other game systems in order to accrue more resources to plug into their base. I was extremely excited to hear that Valhalla was going to feature a settlement system akin to that in prior games of the series such as Assassin's Creed II and Assassin's Creed III. It was one of the new features that had me most pumped for this game.

Sadly, it completely fails to impart any feeling of progress, and ends up being more busywork which offers little reward to the player while also failing to add a cast of likeable characters around the player.

The driest, most uninteresting NPCs in the game appear in your settlement

The problem with growing your settlement is that is all leads to absolutely nothing. It's really as simple as that. The entire settlement system is a completely empty pursuit that fails to offer any significant rewards, in any terms whatsoever. It's little more than a resource-dump that sometimes grants additional busy-work to the player in the form of sidequests with NPCs whom you barely know, or buildings to turn in collectibles for paltry rewards such as tattoo designs you'll never see anyway, or a random settlement decoration you'll promptly forget about.

The settlement grants you new NPCs around your home, which, by itself, could have been a fantastic reward. The problem is that none of these NPCs have much more to offer you than a flimsy gimmick to their character. One is obsessed with Roman culture, another is a hunter and a romance interest. One's an ex-raider who has chosen a life of baking. But all lack any kind of depth, and none of them are very intertwined with some of the thematic elements of the game. You typically see them over one or two minor questlines for about fifteen minutes of gameplay, and then they disappear from the narrative; utterly forgotten about for the rest of the game.

The most frustrating aspect of the settlement system is that, on paper, these rewards should be rather compelling. Indeed, they seem that way the entire time up until you install the house necessary for them. For example, the cartographer; it makes sense that you'd want a map-maker to help you with collectibles on the world map, right? Wrong. He's completely useless, offering only a small set revelations on the map, and for that you must pay him. Hunting and Fishing are similar; both provide you with an arbitrary list of tasks which amount to little more than numerical fetch quests, eg. "Catch 3 large perch and 5 small bullhead", or "Bring me 3 deer antlers and 10 rabbits' feet". If you aren't already bored to tears by such unengaging busywork-like objectives, just wait! You can ignore them entirely, because the rewards for these tasks are so abysmally poor they aren't even worth engaging in at all. You'll spend hours collecting this trivial nonsense for one arm tattoo design (which you'll never see, because your character is always clothed) or a bar of carbon, which you can simply buy one shop over for a measly ~150 silver. I literally never once went into the fishing house or the hunting house after I constructed them. What a complete waste of time.

The only thing I liked about the entire settlement system, 
and they're there from the beginning

Every building is like this. Every single building you'll pour raid resources into completing is completely disposable in every regard. They don't even end up changing the look of the settlement; they merely replace a tent with a similar looking wooden building. The characters they introduce are paper-thin, the quests they give you are neither compelling nor do they grant you any meaningful rewards, and, even worse; you have to pay these people for what they offer your settlement.

Wait a second here, you mean to tell me that I'm attacking two heavily fortified monasteries and encampments to gain the 85 raw materials it takes to build you a damn house totally for free, and you're still going to charge me to use your services!? Just what the hell am I getting out of this deal, anyway!? What kind of a moron crosses the ocean to build a bunch of strangers a literal fucking city and asks for nothing in return?

Oh wait, that's right, not 'nothing'. You get to have feasts with all your newfound friends and sycophants! That's right! Each new building you build for your hangers-on grants you extremely awesome bonuses, such as a timed +3.5 assassination damage! Or a timed 10% health boost!

As you can probably tell, I'm being sarcastic. These feast boosts are so completely, utterly worthless that it's not even worth the time it takes you to run up to the bell to do them.

And, in addition to that, you have to pay more silver to have a feast. Even at this point, the game chooses to nickel-and-dime the player. The entire system is narratively illogical in addition to offering nothing of value in terms of gameplay bonuses. 

The settlement system is so poorly designed that utterly fails to be compelling at every single thing in which it strives to do. It's a completely missed opportunity to call back to something like Monteriggioni or the Homestead of previous games; something that provides you wealth and resources and houses interesting characters for you to engage with. It's a massive waste of the development team's resources and an embarrassingly inept attempt at creating a compelling system with which to motivate the player.

If all of these core systems suck so bad, what, then, keeps the player engaged for this game's gargantuan run-time?

Unfortunately, I've got more bad news for you: There are a number of aspects of this game that suffer from the same poor design as the loot, skill, and settlement systems, and continue making it a chore for the player to keep pushing through its narrative and clearing its obscene amount of content once the initial glow of the game's world begins to fade into routine.

One of my favorite aspects of Assassin's Creed Odyssey which kept me coming back for more was just how satisfying it is to stealthily carve through each enemy encampment. The game's bevy of unlockable and upgradeable damn-near magical stealth abilities serve to exponentially increase your power level, and nearly every single enemy encampment is carefully laid out by the level designers in a way which facilitates careful progression through its areas, as you slowly and methodically take out enemies in your way, hide bodies, diffuse defenses, and booby-trap their alarm systems. They all feel suitably believable so as to remain real spaces, but are also littered with entryways, hiding spots, and opportunities for traversal to empower the player. You end up feeling like a legitimate stealth operator, capable of affecting the world around you, as you explore these neat areas.

Valhalla utterly fails in replicating this. Its enemy encampments are not so much designed as they are thrown together. They're often nothing more than wooden-fenced encampments, with multiple enemies grouped together and no clear avenue for the player to progress through them stealthily. I'm not sure whether or not this is deliberate in order to push you into open combat, or simply due to ineptitude on the side of the designers, but there's little to no opportunity to play stealthily throughout Valhalla, aside from in the story missions which outright task you with remaining stealthy. Even then, there's something wonky about Valhalla's stealth gameplay. The player seems to be detected too quickly in some cases, such as being seen by enemies through small windows, or instantly-detected while social stealthing for no discernible reason. Regardless of what quirks cause this, it led me (a hardcore stealth fan) to completely disregard playing stealthily in favor of drily just walking straight into a camp and killing every bad-guy in sight, before ransacking their stuff and moving on. Obviously, this is a horribly straightforward and unsatisfying way to push the player into progressing in a game which should be tasking the player with a variety of tactics to solve its enemy encampments, and this leads to the gameplay getting old very quickly and offering few new challenges along the way. 

Valhalla's improved combat buckles under the pressure
caused by failures in other game systems

This style of design puts an undue amount of pressure on the game's combat system to carry the experience, and the combat—although it's superior to Odyssey's, and although it includes a variety of new and enticing enemy types—is still nothing special in the vast scheme of things, and as a result, the combat buckles under the weight of this pressure before too long. It's still just too airy and the player characters moves too weightlessly and unintuitively, although a lot of work has been done to improve the heft of the combat animations, and it shows. Clearly inspired by God of War (2018)'s impact frames and camera shake, weapons finally have a real weight to them, which is sorely needed. But even granted this benefit, it still cannot manage to put the entire game on its back for a whole campaign, and combat ended up growing disappointingly routine simply because I was doing way too much of it. Although improved, it's simply not good enough to bear the brunt of a 100+ hour campaign.

Improved storytelling fails to carry the load

One of my regular complaints about the Assassin's Creed series is that its writing and characters have never really been much to write home about. In the good games of the series, this doesn't matter much because the world is the real star and the gameplay systems serve to help carry the additional bulk. In Valhalla, however, these systems all fail to hold the player's attention and remain compelling. Like the poor stealth gameplay placing undue pressure on the game's decent combat, the failure of typically compelling loot, skill, and settlement systems places excruciating pressure on the game's storytelling to pick up the slack and provide the player with the drive to continue moving forward with its narrative. And, like the combat, the storytelling is good, but it buckles under this pressure.

If the story were perfect, perhaps it could have taken the experience on its back. But where it occasionally stumbles, it has nothing to pick it up, and it feels as if you're simply drudging through unengaging, unrewarding, clumsy gameplay in order to see more of a story you no longer care about.

Basim

It's no doubt an admirable effort by lead writer Darby McDevitt and the rest of the team, and I'd consider this game to be one of the better written games in the series. I found myself drawn to certain characters such as Basim (see left), fascinated by them due to their grayness and inherent mystery. The dialogue is also shockingly superb, with many quotable instances and lines of dialogue delivered superbly by the game's fantastic cast. I regularly noted how natural and affecting the dialogue was and how it served to make these characters feel more human and relatable, and the writers deserve praise for the increase in quality from Odyssey's awful, fan-fiction tier dialogue which often left me cringing and was one of the worst parts of that game.

Valhalla's story is episodic in nature, similar to something like a Mass Effect 2, and I was pleasantly surprised by certain episodes confronting me with interesting characters and compelling scenarios. The good-natured Oswald attempting to live up to his Danish bride's toughness was an engaging part of the East Anglia plotline. And the plucky reeves from Lunden, Erke and Stowe, their relationship, and the setting of the crumbling, once-great city itself had me hooked instantly. Sadly, the storytelling isn't this good throughout (which is a tough task considering how massive this game is), and I stalled later in the game in places such as Northumbria and Essexe, along with failing to entice me in certain spoiler-ish areas of the game which are extremely bland and unengaging outside of the beautiful vistas they provide. There are definitely some weak parts of this narrative, which such an already flawed game can't bear.

My favorite world event, "Rose"

Perhaps most crippling to the overall writing effort is how world events fit into the narrative, thematically and tonally. Assassin's Creed Valhalla eschews the typical side quest list most RPGs feature in attempts to streamline and make lighter its side content, which is fine for the flow of the game, but usually only serves to make the experience more tonally jarring and thematically inconsistent. Sometimes these events succeed, such as the case with a poignant world event involving an old man who believes you are his long lost daughter come to see him, but ends rather sadly and left me affected. And most of these world events are suitably open-ended and require the player to use their intuition and agency to complete. The issue, though, is that world events too often try far too hard to be humorous. They're clumsily and ineffectually used as forced comic relief which serves only to jar the player out of their immersion with bad jokes and odd references to things like internet memes and '90s music.

I'll give you an example. This actually happened to me:

Yes, that's Nicolas fucking Cage

Imagine you're exploring this wonderful game world. You just exited a thick forest full of hares and deer lithely striding alongside your galloping horse as you sped past a set of Roman ruins. The sun is dipping down past the horizon, sending shards of dying sunlight daggering through the trees just in front of you. You exit the copse and come upon a small settlement of Saxons, and there's a man searching for someone, worriedly yelling a phrase. The entire scene has you transported to the time, the place of this world. You are utterly transfigured and fully immersed. The man's still yelling, he's...

Wait a second. He's yelling a...

An internet meme. He's yelling a reference to a fucking internet meme. It's a world event referencing a fucking internet meme.

And just like that, your reverie is shattered. The carefully crafted atmosphere is long gone—probably for the rest of your gaming session—as you cringe at just how terrible this desperate, misguided attempt at humor is. It's something only a teenager could love. 

There were several occasions where the reference or tone of these in-jokes pulled me right out of the experience by bursting my cloud of reverie I was bathing in while taking in the fantastic, otherworldly atmosphere of the game. It's like something out of one of the worst parts of a Borderlands game; a desperate attempt to be hip and humorous that flies in the face of the feeling and emotion that the rest of the game seems to be eager to impart. The game is already asking its great world to counter some of the things it does very poorly, and now that excellent world has to deal with these imbecilic clashes in tone, too. The quality of the world can't always bear this assault, and the experience of playing this game is poorer as a result.

Lofty ambitions, poor execution

There are just so many things that flat out don't work in Assassin's Creed Valhalla. And I don't mean that they're broken or buggy (although they often are—I got softlocked at one point in Lunden and had to reload a save, losing 3 hours of progress), I mean that the design behind them makes little sense in terms of it actually being a fun or rewarding activity for the player to take part in. Let's consider:

Loot is boring and armor sets are too expensive to upgrade. 

The skill tree is horribly unintuitive and nowhere near as rewarding or conducive to planning as it should be. The entire settlement system is a complete mess which adds nothing to the game. 

Movement is shoddy and unpolished in general. Using the cloak makes you too tank-like. The player character often gets stuck on geometry, and free climbing creates a frustrating disconnect with what you want your player character be doing and what they are actually doing.

Some of the side activities are quite good and fit thematically and tonally well with the game: Cairn building and flyting are both fantastic, and I loved them each time I came across them. Others are completely awful and unrewarding: Paper chasing is an exercise in frustration ported over from the worst game in the series, which puts the game's bad free climbing in the spotlight and rewards you with a worthless, disposable tattoo design for having the gall to engage in such a stupid activity. Collecting a dozen meaningless "Roman artefacts" (which are always just the same boring mask with no flavor text) rewards you with precisely one uninteresting settlement design.

So much of this game is a constant frustration to interact with, and you do so for a reward which is so laughably poor it almost feels like an insult.

The rub is that, were all these systems well-designed, Valhalla would easily be the best game in the entire series. Parts of it are that good. But there are too many instances of systems being woefully designed and the good parts of the game collapse under the sheer weight of the game's massive world and epic campaign, unable to sustain the player for the amount of time the game asks of them.

It's as if this game had a very carefully thought-out framework hauled up in the beginning—a foundation that makes a whole lot of sense. It seems as if the people at the top identified the strengths of this game ahead of time: 

Listen up, everyone! We're going to make a gorgeous, stunning open world for the player to traverse and discover. It'll be beautiful and compelling throughout, and we're going to tell a heartfelt story populated with some interesting characters and conflicts to keep the player interested.

Then we'll keep them engaged and pushing forward via certain systems that reward them as they put more work into exploring the game and progressing its story, such as new loot, new abilities, the continuing build-up of their character's strength, and the growth of their settlement leading to new characters, pursuits, and goodies!

They'll want to continue because we'll have fun and engaging combat, levels that can either be stealthed through or beaten via open combat, and an intuitive and smooth free climbing system.

And then, all this being said, executed on only the first part of that statement, and utterly failed in the second and third parts. It makes me wonder just how much of an affect the firing of Director Ashraf Ismail had on the development of this game, because the game aspires to great things, but utterly fails in the execution of the majority of them.

It leaves me at an impasse. Do I recommend a game which fails more than it succeeds and suffers from the lack of a strong vision and constant inconsistency, but when it does succeed, succeeds in an astonishing, wonderful, fantastic way?

I end up defaulting to asking for clarification on who is asking the question.

Are you looking for a vast, beautiful, stunning, and intriguing world to explore? Do you want to constantly be wowed by the sheer beauty of riding through the countryside, always moving to the next neat thing on the horizon? If this alone is enough to warrant the purchase, then you'll consider Assassin's Creed Valhalla well-worth the purchase.

But are you instead someone who's looking for an addictive loop, an opportunity to build up your strength as you satisfyingly clear well-designed levels with a variety of stealth and combat abilities? Do you want a stealth-action game in which you have to plan out your assassinations, utilizing smooth and intuitive traversal to sneak around stabbing your targets and sometimes engage with some great combat using fun weapons, valuable gear, and powerful abilities? In most of these aspects, Valhalla is a colossal disappointment which is incredibly messy and fails to properly engage and reward the player for taking part in its systems.

For me personally, I can say that Valhalla is the most disappointing game I've played in years. I was excited and encouraged by the steps Odyssey took, but Valhalla stumbles into all of the same pitfalls as Origins, when Odyssey was right there to be learned from. Although at times it's a beautiful, wondrous experience, it ends up being a huge missed opportunity and an inexcusable step back which has knocked the series down from the lofty peg on which Odyssey had placed it for me. It's a devolution and, based on my experience alone, I would not recommend it to any but the most hardcore lovers of the open world genre, or fans of Viking lore and mythology.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 120 hours

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (2010) by Ubisoft

Ezio returns for another traipse around Renaissance Italy

Coming directly from Assassin's Creed II into Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is like taking a massive breath of fresh air.

Brotherhood is a direct sequel to II. So much so, in fact, that Brotherhood picks up literally the moment at which II ends. Beyond its story, though, it makes a number of drastic improvements on its predecessor. Most notably is that it runs a bit better. Assassin's Creed II has an unfortunate, persistent stutter, in addition to effects pop-in that really draws back from the experience. Brotherhood still features these issues, but they are much fewer and further between, suggesting a bit of massaging of Ubi's Anvil engine between games. This is in addition to having higher resolution textures and better lighting effects in general. It doesn't feature the abundantly thick atmosphere and filters of AC2, but I chalk that up to taste, anyway.

In addition to the graphical and stability improvements, free running animations are much more expedient, and free running in general is much more polished. I notice myself being frustrated with free running gaffes such as making the jump in a wrong direction, or getting stuck on geometry, far less frequently than I ever did with AC2, which could have me singing curses at it when a free running oddity would ruin an assassination approach. Brotherhood seems to have fixed the majority of that wonkiness.

Combat is also revamped in a huge way here. AC2's combat felt clunky, slow, too sticky, and plagued by a poor camera. Everything is streamlined here to great effect. Proper counters, a bevy of tools at Ezio's disposal, and unbelievably slick animation work leads to the new chain-killing feature being extremely satisfying to execute and really making you feel how much of a master combatant Ezio has come since his youth, running across Florence's rooftops to try and get it in with some rich noble dude's wife.

The focus on just a single city is a huge boon for this series, too. There were far too many viewpoints to hit in AC2, and they dragged the pacing out and felt like busywork. The half-dozen areas in AC2 only added to this—most people fondly remember Florence and Venice, but Romagna and San Gimignano are both forgettable at best and only serve to take the spotlight from the better areas. Brotherhood doesn't suffer from this: Rome is front-and-center, sprawling, and it feels far more realized than either Florence or Venice did in AC2, and lacks none of their incredible atmosphere. I also loved this aspect of Unity and Syndicate, and I do hope Ubisoft considers doing a single-city game again in the future. I really feel it lets them stretch their legs and add an appropriate amount of depth that a major European city like Rome, Paris, or London deserves. I don't think it's a coincidence that these three settings are my favorites in the series! But, I digress. Back to Brotherhood...

While I've never considered the stories to be the main draw in any of the AC games, Brotherhood's is easily the peak of the series. The effortless banter, great dialogue, and some of the voice performances (Nolan North as Desmond and Kristen Bell as Lucy are spectacular whenever they're quipping back-and-forth) really carry a lot of the experience here. It also starts with a bang (literally). Each time I replay this game (on console in the past) I always find it hard to put it down until I get through the beginning, because it's such a satisfying roller coaster ride and an apt love letter to Assassin's Creed II, before it moves on to become its own thing.

Leading your own squad of assassins is easily the most addictive and compelling part of Brotherhood

I'd also be remiss not to mention my favorite feature in this game—indeed, probably my favorite feature in any Assassin's Creed game! The Assassin bureau management system and all the perks that come with it are insanely addictive (I once played this game for 19 hours straight back in 2010. Don't judge me. I pay my taxes, alright?). It's so freaking cool to put it to use, too. Recruiting assassin apprentices, sending them out on missions and leveling them up, and then seeing them in action in-game when you call them in to take out a few guards or help you out in a fight is just so damned cool. You are basically summoning an Ezio from the first game to swoop in and stealthily dispatch an enemy. It's always so slick and it never gets old. You instantly feel like chief of the bad-asses each time you do it, and it makes you want to continue going back to the bureaus to level them up some more. Having a full set of master assassins on hand in the late-game to help you out at any time by silently dispatching enemies in front of you as you make your way towards your target is just the coolest thing I've ever done in an Assassin's Creed game. And engaging in an all-out street war with you, your assassins, and a dozen guards is just always so cool. Gunshots ringing, clashing steel. Man, it really never does get old. This game's almost 10 years old and it's still so much fun!

If there is something bad to say about Brotherhood, it's probably that the stupid flying machine level, which is truly awful and frustrating garbage—easily the low point of Brotherhood. The thing controls so terribly, it's just unreal that it even made it into the game. Or, a more general flaw, that this game is just too damn easy. With Ezio's new arsenal, his spectacular countering and chain-killing abilities, it's never been easier to simply carve your way through a dozen enemies with ease. Factor in being able to summon your own assassins to pick off enemies, and much of the game becomes trivial to conquer. But that's how I like my open world games, if I'm being honest; beautifully realized, fun to look at and explore, and just a pleasure to exist in. I don't really pick up open world titles for a challenge, I pick them up to veg out, hit map markers, and discover cool stuff. And in that, Brotherhood succeeds in spades.

Reuniting with old friends

I love this game, man! Assassin's Creed Brotherhood kicks ass. It's the best the Assassin's Creed series has ever been. But you've definitely got to play Assassin's Creed II, first, to fully appreciate what Brotherhood does so well. Start there so you can feel the full impact of how excellent Brotherhood was when it first dropped back in 2010.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Mass Effect 3 (2012) by BioWare

Like my review for Mass Effect 2, it's difficult for me to speak in a balanced manner about BioWare's Mass Effect 3 because it's one of my favorite games of all-time.

This game exhibits all the strengths in atmosphere that the prior games do. Its worldbuilding is second-to-none in gaming; this feels like a real galaxy, with real politics, and real culture and history, and it's a pleasure to exist in. The soundtrack—although done by Clint Mansell this time around instead of the typical Jack Wall effort—is phenomenal and does a lot to help shape the atmosphere. And Mass Effect 3's characters—carried over from the prior two games (if they survived)—are some of the most genuine-feeling characters in the medium.

That brings me to my first caveat: Don't play Mass Effect 3 if you haven't played the first two games. You're going to be dropped into a strange situation for which you have zero context. You're not going to know any of the characters or the world, and all of the moments which are meant to be emotionally resonant will fall flat for you because you lack important context provided by the prior two games. With this series perhaps more than any other, it's paramount that you start from the first game and play your way through completely. Doing otherwise will rob you of all the great emotional moments and reveals of the later games in the trilogy because you haven't been properly set up for them, and even if you go back and play the earlier games afterwards, you will still be robbed of the genuine reaction you would have had had you played the games in order.

Lots of praise is given to the writing of the Mass Effect series, and a lot of it is deserved. However, with Mass Effect 3, I noticed the writing dip into the unevenness for the first time.

Plenty of fuss has been made about the ending not being satisfying, and I mostly agree with that. But I tend to find the "Mass Effect 3 has great writing and a terrible ending" statement to be untrue. There are some really, really great and satisfying arcs in this game, which I can't really mention by name without spoiling the experience for players. But for each one of those, there's an equally dissatisfying, contrived plot point which seems like it has had too much material cut and fails to make sense without the story. For example, at about the midway point of the game, there's a sudden and drastic attack which feels like it has no set-up and lots of holes. And late in the game, a key battle takes place off-screen leading to a sudden and colossal loss, which is barely even commented on by the characters. It has always seemed to me that this battle was meant to be in the game and unfortunately cut due to development concerns.

In addition to these, does anyone like Kai Leng? Anyone!? He's by far the worst, most artificial character in the entire series. He has no backstory, serves little point other than to rile the player with cheesy one-liners. Go away, Kai Leng. Nobody likes you. In addition to this, the Illusive Man loses all the nuance which made him such a fantastic, morally gray character in Mass Effect 2. This poor character turn was extremely disappointing to me.

Those criticisms aside, the two arcs I previously mentioned as being excellent (one in particular, involving synthetic hivemind robots and certain aliens who must wear suits all the time due to their failing immune systems) are a couple of my favorite stories in gaming history. I've been playing games for nearly 35 years, now, and I still tear up at portions of this game because of how strong the emotional impact of the story is, and how much history I've built up with these characters over the past two games.

With Mass Effect 3's writing, you've got to take the good with the bad. Some portions will fall flat—Sure. But the portions that strike you are so damned good that they're enough to elevate this game for me. It may not be as consistently well-written as the first two games, but it's damn close to hitting the same highs. And for me, that's more than enough to suggest this game.

I'd be remiss not to mention the gameplay, too. Mass Effect 3 plays easily the best of the three games in the trilogy. Shepard is granted added mobility, cover finally works well, and friendly AI is hugely improved from Mass Effect 2. It's so much fun to play as a Vanguard, for example, zipping around the map, blasting enemies here and there while creating biotic detonations. Ditto to Engineers, who finally get detonations of their own now, or Adepts, who are detonation machines. Soldiers are the same as always; lots of firepower and hardiness. And those who play Infiltrator can cloak and snipe all they want. It all works phenomenally well and is rather well-balanced.

In addition to this, Mass Effect 3 has the best set-pieces in series history. The scale is much larger here (for obvious reasons, if you know what occurs in the plot), but the actual enemy engagements are more varied than in previous games. Some of the situations which you are put into make you feel the moment so much more: Engaging in combat on a fallen planet with an orbital cannon firing and shaking the entire screen, deafening you. Or making a mad dash back and forth and trying not to get blasted by a giant laser cannon as an enormous enemy bears down on you. How about spacewalking, in vacuum, down a tube which is falling apart as a space battle rages on just outside. Mix in the fantastic combat with moments such as these and you find yourself fully immersed in an epic space opera like no other game has ever managed before. It's fantastic, even playing this stuff 8 years later. If you like space opera, the stuff in this game will blow your hair back, guaranteed.

There's so much variance with how to play this game. The plot changes due to all of the past decisions incorporated into it, your chosen character class will strongly affect how combat flows and which companions you use, even your Shepard's chosen gender will change things up. This kind of variance has led to me putting hundreds of hours into this game (500+ on console, 250+ on Origin, and now, Steam), replaying the campaign endlessly just because I enjoy the combat and its strongly affecting plot moments so much. I've never played and replayed a single player game like this before and I don't really expect to with any other game ever again. And, man, I don't even have enough space to talk about the multiplayer! It's great! I expected it to be tacked-on crap when I first picked this game up in 2012, but it's actually quite good. Give it a whirl if you get a chance!

Basically: If you've played the first two games, you've got to play this one. If you haven't, pick up Mass Effect and enjoy the ride. Maybe this trilogy will become your favorite gaming experience, as it has been for me over the past decade. And make sure you play this game with all DLC included. There are some really, really important lore reveals packed in with the DLC that should not be missed!

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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.

⭐