Shadowrun: Dragonfall (2014) by Harebrained Schemes

I greatly enjoy tactical RPGs when they're done right. I'm a big fan of the Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics series, and that plus an affinity for cyberpunk novels are mainly what drew me to Shadowrun despite never playing the original SNES or the tabletop RPG.

I played Shadowrun Returns and enjoyed my time with it save for a few key complaints, mostly around the pacing, shallow combat, and characterization. I'm pleased to say that all of those issues are cleared up with this game, and that it's an utterly fantastic title. I went so far as to recommend that people skip Returns completely in my review of that game and proceed onto this one instead. It's that much of an improvement.

The pacing problems I had with Returns often caused me to lose interest in the game and stop playing it for weeks at a time. Those issues are completely alleviated here. The game seems to have taken some inspiration from the Mass Effect series, as missions are structured in a similar manner in Dragonfall. Something happens in the first mission of the game that creates an overarching plot, and you're gradually working towards the solution of that by taking odd jobs to build up your bankroll. You're also conversing with your regular allies--something else that Returns lacked that I disliked--and completing missions specifically regarding their background. It worked excellently in Mass Effect, and it really works well here.

The combat has taken even more inspiration from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and it now feels far more fleshed out than it did in Returns. Each class has far more depth than it did in Returns, and there are more opportunities to utilize the environment in interesting ways. Some of my favorite missions in the game involved the opportunity to have your computer hacker operate in the Matrix, simultaneously fighting a tactical battle in a cyber world with the aims of unlocking doors and disabling or even turning the security systems to your teams side while they proceed with a battle in the real world. There are some incredibly compelling race-against-time type missions in this game that require that sort of thing. It creates a ton of suspense and allows you to take combat in exponentially more directions than the first game did.

The characters and the story in this game is the largest improvement over Returns, though. Your squadmates have obviously been crafted with a caring touch, and they feel like well-rounded human beings (or metahuman beings), which is a far departure from the hire-a-mannequin system that Returns did. They've got their own motivations and their own reasons for being there, and they're not always going to agree with the path you're taking. I even feel like I got a deeper roleplaying experience out of my player character than in Returns. I felt like I had more opportunity to inject my own desired personality into him, which I hadn't realized I was missing in Returns until playing this game. Even the minor characters are compelling, from the civilian engineer dwarf roped into a job she has no interest in doing to the loving Grandfather who works as an accountant but also moonlights as an assassin for a loanshark named Meat Grinder, who he hilariously refers to as "Mr. Grinder". Writing is the strength of this game, and it would have compelled me to continue onward and finish even if I didn't really like the combat.

I should also mention the music, which was of quality in Returns but seems improved here. I read somewhere that the composer for the music in the original SNES game did this one as well, which was interesting to me. It's very good, and it properly encompasses the mood of a world that's caringly built as an homage to William Gibson's in the Sprawl trilogy.

Gibson, for those who have never heard of him, is to cyberpunk what Tolkien is to fantasy. His novel Neuromancer, released in 1981, inspired a great many of the ideas included in this game, particularly the Matrix, which is nearly unchanged from those novels. I'd highly recommend the fans of this game pick up a copy of Neuromancer and immerse themselves in the grassroots of the cyberpunk subgenre.

The only real gripe I can think of is the way the game depicts corporations. It's utterly cliche, uninteresting, and tiresome. Look, I'm no fan of stodgy, bureaucratic, inhuman multinational corporations. But not every company is Comcast. Literally every corporation in this game is depicted as maliciously evil and self-serving to the point where the player is dealing with atrocity after atrocity. The one "good" CEO in the game is promptly fired for not putting the bottom line first. That's just boring storytelling. There's great value in turning the cliché on its head, and it would have been nice to see a depiction differing from norm since the writers did such a good job of that otherwise.

In conclusion, this is an excellent tactical RPG set in a well-crafted world. It's beautifully presented, beautifully written, and just a hell of a lot of fun. Hairbrained Schemes has met all of the potential set forth by Shadowrun Returns, as this is probably the best RPG I played in all of 2014.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Playtime: 52 hours

Shadowrun Returns (2013) by Harebrained Schemes

I was excited to play Shadowrun Returns simply because I'm a big fan of both tactical RPGs and cyberpunk. I've read William Gibson's work and liked him, and Final Fantasy Tactics is one of my favorite games of all-time.

This game is obviously influenced on the combat side by XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which I loved. But I found it to be a bit light as far as tactical RPG depth. The robustness of the different systems in play in XCOM, including the greatly varying types of enemies and huge differences in classes and abilities, is just not present in this game. Now, a game that relies on a very basic combat system is certainly not always at fault for doing so, but it's got to be a strong enough core mechanic to carry the weight of the entire combat system, otherwise is just gets boring. This game is nearly there, but I just don't feel that the tactical combat in this game is solid enough at its base to accomplish that. It requires a more robust, deeper experience.

RPGs will always grapple with their pacing. It's easy to leave a player a bit too long in a hub world, and make them feel bored with some of the more tedious tasks they're assigned there. The pacing in this game suffers from that problem. You're spending too much time running around aimlessly, chatting people up, and doing other miscellaneous things. Again, there's just not enough depth here. I don't feel like too many of the things I'm doing actually matter. They don't interest me. I'd be itching to get into more combat, but then I'd actually get into and get bored of that, too.

The writing is there, but I didn't find any of the characters particularly compelling save for Sam Watts, who doesn't get much screentime.

Shadowrun Returns is not an offensively bad game by any means. It's actually a very promising one. It's a portent of what's to come from Hairbrained Schemes. This title is one of those examples of a developer getting their feet under them with some nice basic design and then releasing an initial effort. The obvious emphasis is on core systems: The building blocks are here, and they've got a lot of potential. But the combat system, the characters, and the pacing leave a lot to be desired.

The emphasis on community developed content is a strong one as well, so there's a lot to do here outside the main game. But as a standalone game, I can't recommend Shadowrun Returns simply because I highly recommend its standalone successor, Shadowrun Dragonfall. Dragonfall succeeds in every category of Returns that I found wanting. I'd recommend to anybody considering Shadowrun Returns to skip this title and play Dragonfall instead. It's really a fantastic game.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 18 hours

Splinter Cell: Blacklist (2013) by Ubisoft

Ubisoft quietly releases the best Splinter Cell game in years

Splinter Cell Blacklist is the best entry in the series since Chaos Theory, and one of the best pure stealth games I've played in years.

Traversal is a dream. Sam moves fluidly and intuitively. You feel like a cat prowling around these levels, stalking enemies, and darting quickly to and fro outside their paths of patrol. Sam Fisher's hand to hand takedowns are superbly satisfying, particularly the deadly variants with his karambit knife. The choreography there is spectacular, and unlike some stealth games such as Human Revolution, the takedowns never get old. The game is also designed in a way that rewards you for your playstyle, no matter how decide to play. Want to play ghostly, never touching enemies, and never leaving a trace? Me, too! You get a lot points for that, which you can use to unlock better gear and weapons. Want to take down every single enemy you come across, alternating between fighting, popping off a couple of shots, then throwing down a smoke grenade and disappearing into the shadows? They give you quite a few points for that, too. Want to just go balls out and play the game like you're John Rambo, throwing incendiary grenades and fire an unsilenced heavy gun? Totally viable way to play the game, and, yup: They give you a boatload of points for that, too. This game has succeeded in allowing the player to drift between full stealth and action shooting in a way that many stealth games have tried over the past couple of decades, but few have succeeded in doing. It does exceptionally well at allowing you to play the game the way you want, and seamlessly transitioning between different styles. I's an amazing accomplishment, and it's the biggest reason why this is such a good game.

Yup, it's a Splinter Cell game.

The replayability I touched on is another asset of the game. Sam Fisher is so customizable that this game could also be described as having RPG features. You can customize all of his gear and weapons to help him better perform either at stealth or combat. You receive money for accomplishing things like takedowns or disappearing after alerting enemies, and then use the money to purchase pants, better goggles, better guns, and more. It does more to allow you to play the game the way you like, and that's something I can always get behind, especially from a company as typically reprehensible to consumers as Ubisoft generally is. It also creates a ton of replayability and does a lot to keep you coming around. Just look at my stats: I've put 60+ hours into this game and have replayed it several times. That's more than I've put into any Splinter Cell game since Chaos Theory.

A big part of the success here is how bad-ass you feel while playing the game. I mentioned how strong the hand-to-hand takedowns are, which is a big part of it. Another is the mark and execute feature that's been carried over from Conviction, which I absolutely adore. It functions in this game as an excellent "Oh, shit" tool to use if you're about to be spotted by an enemy. Check out the surroundings, mark the enemies, and commence sneaking. Take a wrong turn and get spotted? Hit the button and Sam instantly takes out anybody within range that you've marked, bailing your dumb ass out and giving you another shot to keep sneaking. It's a great way to incorporate a kind of undo button into a genre as unforgiving as stealth. I'm not sure whether the developers purposely intended for the feature to be used in this fashion, but it works great, especially considering that you can now use mark and execute at extremely long range when equipped with sniper rifles, which is a neat feature.

I've played several Ubisoft games the past few years, and none have run very well aside from the Far Cry series. This game, happily, runs like a dream. It looks great, too. Textures are excellent, and motion capture for the actors is terrific. I do think the game loses quite a bit without Michael Ironside, though, and I question why Ubi even deigned to put Sam Fisher in the game to begin with. The justification was that they needed a younger actor to do the motion capture, which is understandable. But Sam has to be in his late 50s by this point. Why not just reboot with another character altogether, and relegate Sam to the Lambert role of the older games? Ironside is an excellent voice actor, and the series is worse off without him.

Anybody who has read my reviews in the past knows that I have a big problem with checkpointing in stealth games. There's nothing more frustrating than sneaking through nine tenths of an area, getting caught at the very end, and dying, only to be put right back where you started and having to follow everything you just accomplished again. It's unbelievably frustrating, and it has no place in modern video games that could easily provide a free save feature. If you don't like save scumming, then don't do it. I don't. But not having free saves is a terrible design choice and it harms people who play the game on the hardest difficulty, which I frequently choose when playing stealth games. This game, sadly, does feature checkpointing, which is one of my few complaints about the game. However, the checkpoints are frequently very manageable, which does some mitigating to the repetitiveness caused by their presence. They are still annoying, though, and I have no idea why game designers continue to use them.

The story is another weak point with this game. It's your typical Call of Duty-esque American military story, with the gruff hero saving the world from the sneering villain. I thought Conviction actually had a really great story, but unfortunately this game doesn't continue what they shot for with that one. Gone is pretty much all of the Tom Clancy flavor out of the series that was present in the first three games. This is all Hollywood action movie, which is disappointing, but doesn't matter much in the long run since the game plays so fantastically.

I also found the music wanting. Chaos Theory had what I consider to be the best soundtrack in any video game, ever, and this game lacks Amon Tobin's stunningly beautiful score that that game featured. Tobin did such a great job with Conviction, despite having only two songs present in the game, that I would linger on that game's menu just to listen to the excellent menu track that he composed (see below video). The fabulous sound design in Conviction does not return, either, but it's manageable here. Seriously, Ubisoft, Amon Tobin is a god. Bring him back, please. We miss him.

Another complaint I've got are the stupid first person shooting segments of the game. I can see the value of using them to break up the pacing and add something different, but come on, people who buy Splinter Cell games buy them for stealth gameplay. If I wanted a shooter, I'd play Battlefield. I'd rather Splinter Cell sticks with its strengths.

The multiplayer and co-op features in this game are some of the strongest since Chaos Theory as well, and I'd be doing a disservice to the game if I didn't mention them. I don't play much competitively, but I had a blast with the co-operative segment of the game. I only wish it were a bit more meaty -- It's easy to blow through all of the co-operative levels in just a few hours.

Overall, you could do way worse than Splinter Cell Blacklist. If you're looking for a pure stealth experience, this is your game. It looks great, it runs great, and it plays great. It's got great replayability. The minor nitpicks I have with it do nothing to really damage the experience. This is a great game, and it's a promising return to form for the Splinter Cell franchise. If you're a fan of the stealth genre, you'll adore it. If you're not, it's still worth playing, as it's a solid game even when played just as a third person shooter with some stealth features.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (2014) by Kojima Productions

Kojima's latest effort is an ill-advised cash grab that's not worth the cost of entry

We'll start off with what's obvious from the get-go: This is a drop dead gorgeous game. It's beautiful. There are some really neat lighting effects and water looks great. Solid textures and some nice depth of field effects as well. It also runs terrifically on my setup. It's probably the single best PC port I've played since Splinter Cell Blacklist. It's a refreshing change in an industry that's given us duds like Assassin's Creed Unity that are hardly playable at high settings even on a strong setup like mine.

That being said, I have a number of complaints about the game. I finished in 4 hours. It's absurdly short, more a demo than anything.

In a lot of ways this franchise hasn't changed much since the second game, which is admittedly fine in some areas. I consider myself a longtime fan of the franchise -- Metal Gear Solid is probably one of my single favorite games of all-time. Fans of the series love the exclamation points, the cardboard boxes, and the weird, preachy stories. I'm no different. I love all that stuff, I eat it up. And it's important that the series doesn't lose its identity for the sake of progress. But there are some features of the series in this game that just plain haven't aged well, and that's where most of my complaints come from.

My biggest issue with the game comes from the foolish way checkpointing is laid out. Imagine you carefully and meticulously move halfway across an open yard of tents, taking care not to be spotted, only to slip up near the end due to hitting the wrong button. Now your last checkpoint forces to restart a football field (about 100 meters for our European friends) away and retrace your own steps. You also get to hear the same introductory codec message every single time, too. Not good.

Ground Zeroes runs exceptionally and has a drop-dead gorgeous lighting engine

Checkpointing is a holdover from older games that really does a lot to damage the experience here. There's no reason a semi-open world stealth title shouldn't have a save anywhere feature. Hell, the option to save via a codec message isn't even present in this game, so why even have checkpoints at all? It doesn't make sense to use them over a manual save function. This isn't even a question of save scumming, it's just a matter of modern convenience that Kojima seems to have forgotten. I have the same issue with the Far Cry series. It's 2014. There's no excuse for these games to use checkpointing when they'd be far better served by utilizing a dynamic save system. Bad checkpoints are some of the most frustrating things in gaming, and it puzzles me that developers still use them when there are obviously better systems available. Seriously, checkpoints are down there with escort missions. Game developers: Kill them immediately. Please. I despise them in games, especially in stealth games.

I had some serious issues with the camera as well. There are times when you've got a roof or some kind of structure far over your head, and the camera needlessly zooms straight into the back of Big Boss's head. Why? It's nowhere near the ceiling. It doesn't work well with cover, either. It was frequently a pain to me when I would be creeping between small spaces, such a between cargo boxes or tents. I'd stop at a corner, move up into cover, and try to get a peek around the corner to see if a soldier was there. And more often than not, the camera would refuse to comply, just sitting closely behind Boss's head. They obviously knew that this was an issue because they included a shoulder switching camera mechanic, which rarely seems to do much. I was detected a few times simply because I was frustrated with the camera and decided I was sick of fooling with it, so I moved out. It's ridiculous to me that the camera is an issue in a game these days. I can't remember the last time I even had camera issues in a game at all. A poorly controlled camera is an issue that belongs 20 years ago in the N64 era. Not in a modern, next generation game. It's inexcusable.

Another holdover from the old games that seriously bothered me was the control scheme. There are menus within menus within menus when you've got a guard grabbed or when you want to customize weapons. You're holding a bumper, or flicking a stick, or pressing some random arbitrary button that just doesn't feel natural. The worst part about these menus is that there frequently is just no need for them. Games like Blacklist have featured the same types of things but made them vastly more simplified and intuitive. I find myself having to check the controls screen multiple times per session because I can't remember how to do something. That's a sign of having an unintuitive, overly complex, poorly designed control scheme. Movement, furthermore, is hampered by having a weird crawl/crouch/stand system, including a weird button to dive to the ground, which I didn't really understand or ever feel any need to use. Then there are a bunch more controls for when you're crawling. You can roll to the left. You can roll to the right. Hold a button to crawl more quickly. It's all just needlessly complex, and it feels tacked on when it's not really necessary.

There's no free climbing in this game like there is in other stealth games of the past few years -- And I'm not saying that it needs it. But movement in open-world or semi-open world stealth games like Blacklist, Dishonored, or Assassin's Creed, for example, has way more dimensions than it does in Ground Zeroes due to the distinct verticality in the form of climbing (or blinking, in Dishonored's case) up to platforms or roofs. It's nearly always present no matter where you are, and you know so intrinsically how to accomplish it that you don't have to think about it. Dishonored teaches you to blink once, and you've got it down. Assassin's Creed teaches you to free run once, and you remember. In Ground Zeroes, you can only really move up or down when there's a ladder present. Otherwise, you're moving simply on the ground, back and forth, to and fro. It doesn't have the verticality of those games. So why are the controls so damned complex and involved? It's how it's always been in the series, but with the advent of newer games with great traversal systems, Ground Zeroes' controls feature so many aspects that just seem totally unnecessary, and it only serves to muck everything up. I can't help but feel a simpler approach would have been far more successful here. Having an intuitive understanding of movement and being able to act without thinking is absolutely paramount in stealth games where being seen can lead to a very quick death, and I never feel like I have that down when I play this game. It's something that would come with practice, sure, but why should I have to practice at something that I can intrinsically pick up and do in pretty much every other game in the genre?

Look, I don't want Metal Gear to become Splinter Cell. I'm not saying that at all. But the step forward that Guns of the Patriots made in 2008 was excellent, and it breathed new life into the gameplay of the series and really saved it from becoming too dated. Gunplay was far better in that game. It was always wonky and unintuitive in the older games, with its weird go-to-first-person-and-then-aim thing. It never felt natural. You always felt like a bumbling idiot when you were trying to shoot somebody, and Solid Snake was supposed to be an expert with a firearm. Guns of the Patriots completely fixed that. They updated their gunplay to a more modern, third person shooter type system, and it worked fantastically. That is the type of step Kojima needs to take with things like movement and checkpointing. Ground Zeroes, unfortunately, doesn't take that step. It just feels like a way prettier Guns of the Patriots. Which is certainly not a bad thing, and don't get me wrong: This is not a terrible game.

If you're a Metal Gear fan, buy it. You'll like it. But if you're just looking for a stealth experience, I'd heartily recommend Splinter Cell Blacklist over this game.

⭐⭐

Total War: Rome II (2013) by Creative Assembly

Attempt to divide and conquer in Creative Assembly's thoroughly broken, poorly optimized strategy sequel

I'm a huge fan of history, particularly classical history. I spent my time in college studying Roman Civ, so the game was hugely appealing to me. But I'll try and take a step back here in order to review it from the point of view of someone who isn't completely infatuated with history.

I'm a big fan of the old tactical JRPG style games, like Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics. I haven't done much gaming with its cousins in the subgenres of military strategy and real time strategy, but I really enjoyed how this game seemed to blend both of those genres together, and I respect that Creative Assembly is basically designing two games in one, here. There's the overarching strategical game in which you're managing your cities and towns and moving your military and spy/champion/dignitary units, and there's what is obviously the meat of the game in the battle system that occurs once you engage in combat with an enemy unit. They flow together quite nicely, allowing you to build up the efficacy of your units via upgrades in your cities and towns. It scratches the RPG itch in that way while at the same time providing a great strategical and tactical experience. You can easily find yourself dumping hours upon hours into this game, thanks to the patented "Just One More Turn" addiction technique made famous by the Civilization series. It's quite enjoyable, and there's quite a lot of it -- One campaign can take nearly 100 hours to complete.

There are some really cool features to the game. I got the most enjoyment out of it simply due to the fact that it strives to be historically accurate, and it does a great job of it. The Roman military is clearly split between the Manipular system of the middle Republican era, and the Marian reforms later on that transformed the army from the group of levied farmers it classically was into the group of professional, disciplined fighters that would eventually conquer most of Europe and all of known Africa. The historical accuracy of the military units also extends to the Celtic tribes of Gauls and Britons, the Iberian tribal fighters, African and Asian horsemen, etc. It's all really enjoyable given my interest in history.

There are numerous little touches that are really nice, as well. The art on the unit cards is really awesome. It's clear they went for an antique style with them, and it really works well. The Celtic tribes look particularly cool. Another thing I found really enjoyable was the pre-battle speeches that the general can be heard giving his troops. They're phenomenally well voice acted, and they make accurate references to religion and state. It's enjoyable down to the cornua that the centurions blow whenever you tell a unit to move. It matters a lot that they get the little things right here, as they do a lot to immerse you in the time period, and Creative Assembly has absolutely succeeded there.

An historically accurate depiction of Caesar vs. the Gauls

The actual combat, and being able to zoom in and out as your units go to battle against others, is absolutely phenomenal. You can zoom in and see each unit, in great detail, fighting against the enemy. Or you can zoom out and take in the entire battle from a colossal scale. Watching your cavalry charge the rear of an opponent is immensely satisfying. I had one situation where one of my legions was caught in enemy territory. I had had the foresight to send my units into a defensive stance, so the battle began with them entrenched in a wooden fortress. I was heavily outnumbered, and didn't have many units to do anything with other than just station them in the doorways of the fortress and hope they could hold off the enemy. They ended up succeeding, breaking the enemy waves at the entrance in true Roman legionary fashion. It was awesome, and easily my most memorable moment in a game filled with them. The problem is that about half of the most memorable moments are due to terrible bugginess, and those memorable moments always caused battles to end in disaster for me. Imagine fighting a battle for close to 40 minutes, and having it suddenly turn because one of your key units got stuck on geometry and slaughtered since you could no longer maneuver them. It's just as infuriating as it sounds.

I've gotten into this game somewhat late, playing it a full year after it originally released, and I've read quite frequently that people say it's become way better, that it's been fully patched and is now recommendable to everybody, but my experience with it has not proven this to be correct. I've had units refuse to enter a breach in a wall literally a dozen times, which has caused me to stop knocking down walls altogether and just use siege ladders. But then I had units get stuck on a wall and do nothing but continue to climb up and down the siege ladders, which caused me to lose an extremely important battle. I've also experienced a bug where my cavalry has run in the completely opposite direction from which I've ordered them. There are numerous other things like this that really destroy the experience for me, but it's also incredibly poorly optimized, even after Creative Assembly has patched the game several times and repackaged it into the "fixed" Emperor Edition. I'm running 780ti SLI and I see dips down to around 20 fps at times, which is absolutely ridiculous.

It really hurts me to give this game a thumbs down, because I did enjoy it quite a bit. But the frustration from dealing with its bugs and its poor optimization make it hard for me to recommend to anybody outside classical history buffs and hardcore Total War fans. If you fall into either of those groups, then by all means, take the plunge, because you'll get quite a bit out of this game. I surely have. But if you're not, then you should probably just pass it up altogether, because the frustration will likely outweigh any enjoyment you'd get out of the game.

⭐⭐

Assassin's Creed Unity (2014) by Ubisoft

Assassin's Creed Unity can be beautiful at times, but the experience is destroyed by poor optimization and instability

I'm a huge fan of the Assassin's Creed series. As a history nerd and a huge stealth genre fanboy, these games are always right up my alley.

Now I'll tell you why Assassin's Creed Unity is, flat out, one of the worst games I've played in years, and why it's absolutely unrecommendable to everybody who owns a gaming PC.

I want to start off by saying that I was absolutely hyped for this game. More hyped than any Assassin's Creed game since Assassin's Creed 2. I had watched a few gameplay videos that sold me due to the fact that the devs seemed to be going for the classic Assassin's Creed experience: An emphasis on stealthy gameplay, an intriguing historical period, and a stripped down approach to weapons and gadgets. It hearkened back to Assassin's Creed II, which is an amazing game and probably the best in the series, closely followed by Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and Black Flag.

Good art direction is consistently hampered by poor technical performance; see the aliasing and low-res textures above

The first drawback is the one everybody already knows about: The game is nearly totally broken at this point. Bugs are everywhere, the game hard crashes quite often, and it runs like a dog even on the most beastly of rigs. For me in particular, the most damning graphical drawback was some kind of weird frame stutter that I would experience literally every 4 seconds without fail, even in menus. I'm not sure what's causing this, but the game is nearly unplayable with it unless you're incredibly determined. As you can see, I have managed to bludgeon through several hours of the game, mostly due to its amazing recreation of Revolutionary Paris, which is by far the best aspect of the game. Most of that is wandering about the landscape and gathering collectibles, which has been the peak of my enjoyment of the game, because any missions are so difficult to get through thanks to the fact that it's maybe the single most broken game I've played since Obsidian was forced to release Knights of the Old Republic II in it's half-finished state way back in 2004. And that's saying something, because that game was a broken mess.

There's been enough said about the games broken, poorly optimized state. I'd like to talk about why it would be a bad game even if it were to run beautifully. I'm going to talk about the past couple of AC games here, so bear with me.

I hated Assassin's Creed 3. Absolutely despised it. I thought it was terribly designed. It had muddy control and poor line-of-sight mechanics that often resulted in instant game over detections, it had awfully designed stealth sequences that forced you to follow people at ridiculously close lengths, and it had bad checkpoints that compounded both of those issues. A number of the missions (the midnight ride, the Charles Lee chase sequence) were just horribly designed to the point where they were frustrating. To top it off, the writing was utter trash, all of the characters were cardboard cutouts, and nothing was even worth following.

Then came Black Flag, which was a complete redemption for the series. The game was so much fun, it was beautiful to look at, and, most importantly for me, IT FIXED THE SERIES STEALTH AND GAMEPLAY DESIGN PROBLEMS! Control was smooth. Stealth sequences were designed well. Free running and climbing was nearly bug-free, quick, and intuitive. Trying to achieve 100% stealth in the plantation sequences were probably my favorite missions in the game. Playing Black Flag felt like the Assassin's Creed series had truly taken a step forward, like it was ready to get back to being the stellar franchise that Assassin's Creed II had promised it would be.

Enter Assassin's Creed Unity.

The reason I contrasted AC3 and Black Flag is because playing through Unity gave me the distinct feeling that I was playing a game designed by the AC3 team. It has the same exact pitfalls that I just described in AC3. Controls are muddy and you never truly feel totally in control of Arno. He lumbers to and fro in the vague direction you send him. A cover mechanic has been introduced that's way too sticky, way too close to guesswork, and generally hampers stealth so poorly that I completely stopped using it except in sequences when the game forces you to. And, to top it off, they've redesigned free running and climbing with a system that seems like it should work beautifully, but fails miserably in every aspect of its execution. The days of your jumping off into odd directions, taking the wrong path up a building, and even inexplicably stopping in place and having to recenter the stick, then hit up again to continue moving HAVE ALL RETURNED FROM ASSASSIN'S CREED II. Seriously, bugs from a game that was made back in 2009 and were just solved last year have miraculously reappeared. How do you mess up that badly?

Add in that the music, something that was unbelievably atmospheric and really made the experience of Florence in Assassin's Creed II, and lent you sea shanties that stuck in your head for hours in Black Flag (and was utterly forgettable at best and terrible at worst in AC3) is absolutely unnoticeable. In fact, I didn't think about it once until, midway through this review, I remembered how much I loved Jesper Kyd's work in AC2. That's how forgettable it is.

There are also several instances of immersion-breaking content, including chests that are only open via the Unity Companion App, and microtransactions that are so hamfistedly jammed in they pull you right out of the experience. It's a basic example of an immersion murdering mechanic, and it boggles my mind that developers have not learned why you don't do these things in games. Hell, even the publisher and the money people should know why immersion is important for a single player gaming experience. There's no excuse for garbage like this.

My face when the 3rd bug in a row loses me another hour of playing time

You can also consider Ubi's utter failure to maintain some semblance of business ethics by setting their review embargo to 12:00 PM of release day, rather than the day of or the day before as is common practice. Why would they do this, you say? The only obvious reason that comes to mind is that they knew their game was an unfinished, broken piece of garbage, and they decided that their best course of action was to lie to their customers for as long as possible in order to prevent them from canceling their pre-orders. Despicable.

It really disappoints me to tear this game apart so viciously because I've been such a huge fan of the series. I'd like to believe that this was rushed out the door by Ubi, and that the team would eventually have produced a good game if they were given adequate time to have worked on the things that fail here. But at the end of the day, blame lies with the developer as well as the publisher.

"A delayed game is eventually good, a rushed one is forever bad."
- Shigeru Miyamoto

In conclusion, there is very little redeeming quality in this game. Unless you're an absolute history nerd or a super hardcore Assassin's Creed fan, this game is completely unrecommendable in its current state. Furthermore, even if the game were totally fixed, even if the graphical issues and the bugs were completely ironed out and the game ran beautifully, this still isn't worth a purchase because it's easily the worst Assassin's Creed and just not a great game period. The dev team here has an eternity of failure to look forward to, as people will forever think of this game as an exemplary pillar of Ubisoft's descent into the basement of video game development and business ethics. Hell, at least Watch Dogs had some interesting mechanics and some competent stealth sequences. This game brings absolutely nothing to the table. Just replay Black Flag instead. Or burn $60 in your backyard while punching yourself in the face, because that's a more valuable, entertaining experience than playing this game will ever be.

⭐

Watch Dogs (2014) by Ubisoft

Lots of Watch Dogs feels like the most phony-corporate depiction of techno-punk you can possibly imagine

If I could describe Watch Dogs as one thing, it would be the combination of Grand Theft Auto and Assassin's Creed.

That sounds awesome, right? So why isn't the game?

I typically enjoy open world games, but I'm a ridiculously huge Assassin's Creed fan. That being said, Watch Dogs bored me to tears. I've put hundreds of hours into 100%ing the Assassin's Creed games, but I just didn't feel the same drive to do so with Watch Dogs. The main issue I have with the game is that nothing feels interesting enough to spend time doing. I mean absolutely nothing. I didn't give a damn about the storyline, and none of the minigames or subquests ever rewarded me with anything that I felt like had any value. I was excited for a leveling system because I always felt like the AC series should have one, but even that doesn't give you anything of real substance to change up gameplay.

With the Assassin's Creed games I constantly felt like I was affecting the world around me. In ACII, for example, I felt a huge change in the cities as I progressed by clearing towers, making money and investing it, and gaining new equipment and wardrobes. Things like the constant rebuilding and enriching of my family villa, unlocking new costumes for Ezio, new character upgrades, and new items to use was what created the uncontrollable desire to keep playing. It was a Civilization-like addiction of "it's 12AM and I have work tomorrow? Damn... Well, I can do just one more bank deposit".

The main problem with Watch Dogs is just that none of that stuff exists. Everything feels completely arbitrary, like there was a producer hovering around the designers' desks repeatedly telling them to make sure that they had vigilante missions like Grand Theft Auto, or to make sure they had vantage points like Assassin's Creed. There's just no point to any of it. None of it affects the world or your character in any way that feels meaningful. And none of it felt cohesive at all. As a result the entire game feels like something patched together by a team of people that know nothing about game design. Like they put a bunch of popular titles on a wall and cherry picked certain features from them to throw into Watch Dogs.

It wouldn't be an Ubisoft game without some classic open world bugs

It's not a bad game, it's just a bland one. It's something that could have been saved and pulled along by a strong story with good characters, which is how I feel about BioShock Infinite (a game that, in my opinion, has poor gameplay design but becomes greater than the sum of its parts due to a great story, excellent characters, and amazing voice acting). Watch Dogs even has a great, pulled-from-the-newspapers theme regarding technological surveillance and privacy. But it completely fails to capitalize on any of it, making zero meaningful points about it. The characters are paper flat, boring, and in the case of Aiden Pearce, flat-out unlikeable to the point that they're actually dislikeable. How you fail that miserably in writing a protagonist is mystifying to me.

Add in the fact that it runs poorly on PC and you've really not got any reason to consider this. I will say that the game looks absolutely beautiful with the E3 2012 mod, but that's about all it's got going for it. The rest just feels like busywork.

Right now, basically all it is is a game that has the potential to turn out a great sequel. Aside from that, I'd steer clear of it.

⭐⭐

The Wolf Among Us (2013) by Telltale Games

Telltale creates yet another engulfing, narrative-driven experience for the player to affect

Even though the horror genre is generally lost on me -- especially zombie fiction -- I'm a huge fan of Telltale's The Walking Dead. The writing, particularly dialogue and characterization, really sets the bar about as high as it can possibly get in video games.

I was naturally excited to play The Wolf Among Us, though I decided to wait until the summer sale this year to play it so I could experience it in a binge, like I did when I played The Walking Dead Season One last summer.

This series lives up to the high standard set by The Walking Dead, and it appeals even more to me than that series does. The characters are fantastic, the dialogue is expertly written and even quite humorous at times, though the story itself is really quite dark. The characters are all very relatable, and they've got their own issues they're dealing with. At the core of the story is the conflict between who people are and their struggle between their nature and who they ultimately wish to be. It's deep stuff, and the fact that the game is populated with a number of very real personalities makes it hit all the more harder. I particularly liked characters like Woody and Gren; people who come off as your typical villains when first introduced but eventually develop into fully rounded characters with very real flaws, should you allow them to. And, of course, Bigby. Though he ultimately is what you make him, I found that each path you could potentially take is a totally fleshed out, meaningful one. Kudos to the writers, because producing that kind of a narrative can't be an easy thing to design a video game around.

The gameplay is pretty sparse, just like it was in The Walking Dead. All quicktime events, with some very stripped-down '90s style point-and-click adventure exploration thrown in as well. I could understand how that may turn some people off, but if you're here for story and characterization (as I am) then it shouldn't bother you much. This game doesn't shy away from what it's strengths are to fit other expectations. It's a story-driven experience, first and foremost, and it's not self conscious about that, which is relieving. I think that trying to shoehorn in some shooting or deeper gameplay would have just distracted from its strengths.

The art style is, at its core, the same as The Walking Dead. But the color palette here is spruced up in various shades of warm oranges, neon reds and pinks, and cooler purples. Nothing is really gray or brown. The streets are a cold slate, buildings mimicking the streets, with glowing yellow windows throughout the buildings. Most of the game is set at night, and the artists are obviously shooting for a noir feel, which is helped along by a pretty solid soundtrack. While the basic art style is familiar to Telltale's other efforts, I have to say that it's much improved from the drabness that I felt hurt The Walking Dead. This is a really, really fun game to look at, and though the writing is utterly fantastic, it doesn't have to rely only on that to keep it standing like The Walking Dead did.

If you're a fan of Telltale's The Walking Dead, you already know that you should probably buy this. If you're unfamiliar with that title, but you're interested in a strong narrative with a good atmospheric feel, then I can't recommend this game enough. I'm really enjoying it, and I can't wait to play the finale this upcoming Tuesday. But if you're looking for more action, or a more "gamey" game, then you'll probably want to look elsewhere.

And man, I really can't wait for their adaptation of Game Of Thrones.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Transistor (2014) by Supergiant Games

Supergiant Games is back to challenge anybody who thinks this medium isn't ready to be called art.

This is a beautiful, engrossing game. The oversaturated, colorful art style combined with the ethereal soundtrack provide an incredible feel for the game.

The art is incredibly colorful, ranging from extremely warm to extremely cool, and it's all hand-painted. The "cutscenes" (if you can refer to them as that) are incredibly beautiful, and prompted me to take several screenshots in order to preserve them. Red's character design is excellent, and the enemy models and city are both really creative and interesting. A lot of cyberpunk art is cool, hard, metallic; you don't see that here. There's a lot of blur, a lot of soft edges, a ton of bloom. It's a game bursting with color.

If you've read any of my other reviews, you already know that music and sound design play a big part in shaping the experience for me. This game has both in spades. The excellent soundtrack ranges from jazzy and uptempo, to soft and bluesy, to straight downtempo ambient (see right video). The sound design is utterly phenomenal. When paused, the game continues playing the background music, but at a slower tempo, and muffled, as if it were being played inside a car next to you with all of the windows and doors sealed tightly. Click out of the game's window, and you get a very quiet, bassy hum in the background. I've got the game paused in another window as I type this review, and I feel the quiet bass rattling on and off in the cans even now. It's a really phenomenal effect. Whoever worked sound on this title definitely earned their wages.

There's also an extremely simple, yet very likeable feature that causes Red to hum along to the background music merely by holding down a button. This is just as simple as it sounds, yet I found myself sitting for minutes on end with the left bumper on my controller compressed; mesmerized and staring into my screen as my focus slowly deteriorated.

I feel like I'm floating drunk in a hot tub when I play Transistor. It's that kind of game.

As someone with an overclocked 1440p display the lone criticism I have with the game is the lack of 1440p support, but this qualm is rendered moot by the fact that these are hand-painted designs. It's difficult to justify creating these designs with a 1440p resolution in mind considering how small of a userbase it is, so I can forgive Supergiant for locking the display at 1080p. That's what the art looks best at, and I experienced the game at this resolution in windowed mode.

It has a voice acting schtick similar to the narrator in Bastion, though in Transistor it takes the form of a speaking sword rather than a narrator. So if you liked that kind of thing in Bastion, you'll like it here. The voice acting is very well-done, but it rubs me a bit wrongly; about half of the lines feel like they're jammed into the game in a very hamfisted manner. I seem to be the only one who felt that way about Bastion, though, so take this criticism of Transistor for what it's worth.

The core gameplay is your basic isometric action RPG stuff with a couple of neat concepts thrown in. The ability to pause the game and plot out your next actions -- which happen extremely quickly and automatically once you unpause -- is a key aspect in what keeps the combat from becoming a bit stale. There were plenty of times when I felt I didn't have enough control over where my attacks were headed. Certain "functions", as the game calls your attacking skills, felt like they were a bit too hard to properly line up, and as a result I frequently missed some enemies I should have been hitting. But the nifty pausing function takes care of most of it, and it looks really cool. It makes you feel like the badass that Red is supposed to be.

The other thing I really liked, and the thing that kept me playing most, was the ability to junction functions into each other in order to modify their actions. You have a set amount of function attack and actions and only four slots in which to place them. Each function has an active ability that becomes usable when placed, but they also have a specific modifying ability when junctioned into another active function. This all seems complicated when I write it out, but it's really fairly easy to understand in the game; no tutorial is really necessary after a few minutes of tinkering with it. The combinations are almost literally endless, and I found myself constantly resetting them in order to try new ones. It really adds some meat and some depth to a game that I felt would have easily succeeded on its artistic merits without these systems.

In conclusion, I'd say this game is worth a few hours of play simply for the art style and the soundtrack. But the neat combat and function features here will keep you coming back for far longer than that. This is a very worthwhile experience and Supergiant Games continues to offer some really unique, polished, artistic gaming experiences.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Bioshock Infinite (2013) by Irrational Games

Bioshock Infinite's visuals are undoubtedly the main draw, but it features remarkably little depth within

The good stuff: Amazing character design, very good writing. Think Disney characters stuck in a gritty, mind-bending plot. It's really fantastic. All of my drive from playing this game came from wanting to see Elizabeth's character development. The art direction is absolutely superb and unmatched by anything in the industry at this point, and the graphics support the artistic view. I will say that this game is embarrassingly hampered on consoles -- It really shines in 1440p, which is what I played it on. Absolutely beautiful game is every aspect.

Actually playing the game, however, is an utter disappointment. Totally gone are the best aspects of Ken Levine's first BioShock game: Altering the scenery to your advantage via hacking and trapping is completely absent. Those features, combined with the ability to manipulate the Big Daddies, were what made BioShock such an amazingly fun and unique experience. Now you've got some rails to fly around on. Seriously, that's it. Nothing else. The shooting in BioShock was universally agreed upon as the worst part of the game, but it was bolstered by some great environments that provided plenty of variety to the problem solving inherent in the game. That's nowhere to be found here. You're left with a group of boring weapons, not enough ammo, and no environmental alterations save Elizabeth's powers, which seem completely neutered. You can choose one alteration to make to each environment, out of 3-5 that Elizabeth presents to you. It's a far cry from the dozens of alterations that you could perform in the original BioShock when looking to take down a Big Daddy.

On top of this, the plasmids in this game are nowhere near as interesting and fun as those found in the original game. The combos are far more boring.

In the original BioShock I was constantly tinkering with different hacks and booby traps, and combining them with a variety of power usage to take down my enemies. It was at its best on the highest difficulty level, when you were truly pressed to plan perfectly and execute at 110%. In this game I find myself shooting, camping until my shields recharge, shooting, waiting until Liz throws me ammo, and shooting some more. It's a far more tedious experience than the original game.

In closing: This game is ABSOLUTELY beautiful in every way. The environments are breathtaking, the character design is stunning, the dialogue hits home with every line spoken -- It's both well-acted and well-written. But the gameplay simply is not there to support it.

If there were some way to combine the art design, acting, and dialogue of this game with the pure puzzle-esque gameplay of the original BioShock, it just might be the best video game of all-time. This game, however, is all aesthetics and no guts.

⭐⭐

The Banner Saga (2014) by Stoic

The Banner Saga features utterly fantastic art, especially in landscapes. Beautiful, high-res, hand-drawn. It's just gorgeous to look at. The in-game map is beautiful, too. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the soundtrack here, which is excellent and fits the world and the story incredibly well. The lore is pretty deep. A lot of work went into the world-building, and it shows.

As far as tactical gameplay, health and strength occupying the same function is brilliant, and the way armor and strength affect damage dealt is ingenious. Willpower and exertion are further interwoven, creating depth. It's fantastic and it works to provide the best tactical aspect of the game.

However, combat design overall often feels a too raw and underdeveloped at higher levels. For example, why can't I check out my characters' stats while deciding who to use for the battle? Isn't that sort of important? Why isn't there a range attribute? Am I just missing it? I understand that shieldbangers move more slowly and have less range than other units due to their heft, but it'd be awfully handy if I could tell just how far they'd be able to move when placing them. Same with enemy units. There's just too much missing here. The basic premise involving strength, armor, exertion, and willpower is solid and incredibly innovative to the genre, but some major fleshing out needs to happen in order to get me more invested into the tactical combat being presented here. I often feel like I'm floundering, like I don't I have enough information to even begin to approach a battle tactically. It takes me out of the experience and I just tend to float through battles rather than plan and execute an actual strategy. And that's a very, very bad thing for a tactical RPG.

I also question the system of having each side alternating moves, rather than assigning characters a speed attribute and having that govern when turns are taken and by whom. There's a huge missed opportunity here that would greatly affect the Man vs. Varl unit selection and it would help to balance the two units. Instead it seems they tried to balance them by making the Varl bigger and less maneuverable, but I don't think this works nearly as well. I ended up selecting mostly Varl units in each battle simply because they were the hardiest and I often didn't feel the desire to try and play tactically. Just roll the Varl out there with an archer or two and have them smash heads while the archers wear away the opposing units armor. A speed attribute would have added a great deal of depth: Do you opt for speed and maneuverability and quickly bring the fight to the opponent? Or do you go with a solid front line, advance slowly, and wear the enemy down while tanking through whatever damage they deliver? It would have added a ton of tactical depth that this game is missing.

The interface has some issues. You'd better be 100% on-point with your mouse clicks, otherwise you'll have to try and figure out where you went wrong, select the same unit again, and start from scratch with whatever you were trying to get him to do. It's way too easy to click the wrong thing, and just not intuitive enough to prevent regular frustration from occuring when you're trying to get your units to do what you want. There are similar issues with selecting units and placing them prior to a battle. This is a minor gripe, but by the end of the game it was incredibly frustrating to miss a click on a willpower star by a fraction of an inch, and have to select the character and tell him what I wanted him to do from scratch.

Though the art is very well-done, I felt some of the character designs were too generic and too difficult to tell from one-another. There are a few Varl units who are basically just palette swaps from one another with very minor differences in facial features. Due to this, and not being able to view any details about a unit prior to selecting them in battle, I had a lot of trouble keeping the characters straight and often made mistakes during deployment that could have easily been avoided had I been allowed to view more details about which units I was actually selecting for battle. I mean, it doesn't even tell you which class a unit is on the pre-battle screen -- Just their name, level, and a picture of their face. No class, no stats, nothing.

Weak characterization makes the problem even worse. I often confused Griss and Bersi, and by Chapter 5 I had no idea which one was which and often made mistakes in deploying them. I found it hard to get invested in any of the characters. None of them show any depth, and the only one written with any panache at all was Ludin. Poor dialogue exacerbates the characterization issues.

Decisions are too frequently unclear about what you're actually selecting. I don't mind having things blow up in my face, but I need to be adequately informed on what it is I'm choosing to do. For example, you arrive at a fortress and enter, only to have enemies immediately attack it. You are given a choice as to whether to rest in the fortress, or immediately attack and attempt to break out. This choice is followed by another, in which you choose the actual tactics of your breakout. So you've got two choices to make at the same time, but you have to choose whether or not to rest before you're able to see what your options will be during the actual attack. Jeez, this is getting complicated... Still with me? Basically, you're forced to make an initial choice (whether or not to rest first) without adequate information to make the decision. If I had known that I'd have liked to charge the enemy and attempt to eradicate them all, I'd definitely have rested first. If I was going to try and distract them and get away, I'd have chosen to attack immediately to prevent more from arriving. The character I'm playing would have had all of this knowledge in his mind while making the initial decision as to whether or not to rest -- Why don't I? This kind of thing is present too frequently, and it leads to way too much frustration. It cheapens the decisions you're making.

Losing characters to decisions made through the game, rather than in battle, is something that keeps the intensity up, but overall I don't think it works nearly as well as Fire Emblems system of permadeath within combat. It puts too much of the onus on the story sequences and takes away from the importance of the battles. If you're in this for the story, that's fine, but it lessens the importance of the tactical game and makes it too easy simply to trudge through battles without really caring what happens. Halfway through the game I began to just autopilot my way through battles. I lost my sense of investment in my units and my tactics and started to get bored of the entire actual game. I bought this for the tactical gameplay, not the story, and so I came away very disappointed.

In conclusion, the landscapes are beautifully rendered, the lore is surprisingly well-written, and though the characters are pretty weak, the story is engaging. Unfortunately, the tactical combat as a whole leaves a lot to be desired. It's solidly constructed at its base and its key gimmick (strength and health occupying the same stat, and weaving armor into the mix) is incredibly innovative, but too often I felt there wasn't enough detail or I didn't have enough key information to dig in and play tactically, which lead to me becoming utterly disinterested in the actual tactical gameplay about halfway through. I ended up switching it down to easy and blasted through the game just to see the story.

If you're looking for an engaging story framed in a beautifully constructed world, then you'll probably enjoy your time with The Banner Saga. As a tactical RPG, though, it's seriously flawed. The systems in place are intriguing but ultimately too raw and undeveloped for me to really endorse. So as a longtime fan of the genre, it's hard for me to recommend this game.

⭐⭐

Assassin's Creed II (2009) by Ubisoft

Dip your toes into late-15th century Tuscany

I know there were a great many complaints about the first Assassin's Creed game, and they're mostly well warranted. I, however, had a great experience with the game. The wonder of playing an open world game set in an historical era was such a mind-blowing experience that I found it easy to look past the repetition, the janky climbing mechanics, and the various other problems the game shipped with. Honestly, new IPs as ambitious as the first Assassin's Creed game deserve a little leeway anyhow, since they're attempting to accomplish so much while starting from scratch. Nevertheless, the game was severely flawed, and it rightfully got some flak for it.

Assassin's Creed II is lovingly devoted to the era which it depicts

Assassin's Creed II, when it released, was a perfect example of why the medium of video games is filled with successful sequels. It's difficult for a studio to nail everything in their first try when, many times, they're starting from the ground up by building things like graphics and physics engines from scratch. So much time focused on the building blocks of a game leaves little time to flesh out the more dynamic aspects on top of those, which is why the first game featured so much repetition. Assassin's Creed II, however, improves upon everything that the first game promised. The graphics were superb at the time they released. There were literally no other open world games that looked this good, and they even stand up pretty well today. The cities were beautiful, they were alive. Florence is not a city that's changed much, and they completely nailed the feel of what I imagine it would be like at the turn of the 15th century. Platforming is improved, it's quicker, and it's more intuitive, but it's unfortunately not fully polished in this effort. When it works, it's improved massively over the previous game. The campaign itself is a meaty, lengthy game that's packed with content. You're visiting multiple cities here, you're visiting the beautiful Tuscan countryside, and the game is spanning decades. As somebody who's visited most of the areas depicted in this game, I can confidently say they've nailed the feel of the entire region. Ezio as a character is interesting, he's charismatic. He's an easy guy to root for, and his story begins personally and eventually emerges into a grand scale. He's been dealt a raw deal, but he lets things slide in a way that feels simultaneously incredible and admirable. Combat and player management has been expanded upon from the first game as well, as armor management, weapon and gadget management, and new costumes are all greatly designed. Customizing your Ezio is one of the most satisfying parts of the game. Combat is built upon from the first game, and now feels far more in depth. Probably the single best mechanic in the game is the build-your-own-stronghold aspect with Ezio's family villa. It's very addictive, and the visual change you experience in the small city is one that's immensely satisfying. As you invest money in building up your walled city, the population increases, the streets are cleaner and brighter, and the city is louder and more bustling as a result. I didn't realize quite how much it changed until I began a new game and saw how murky and depressing the place was when you first arrive there.

One specific thing I'd like to highlight here and really stress is just how good the soundtrack of this game is (see above video). It's been mentioned before but I haven't seen anybody truly do it justice, yet. Jesper Kyd absolutely kills it, and sets the bar so highly here that he can't hit the same heights of quality in AC: Brotherhood or AC: Revelations. The music all fits the settings so superbly that I really can't imagine playing this game without it. Half of the reason the world is so immersive is the setting, the ambient nose, the lighting, and the architecture. The other half is all soundtrack. No exaggeration. The music is all ambient, and very low-key, but it flows like a satin ribbon, enveloping your brain and keeping you floating through the streets like you're walking on air. It's just so effective at immersing you into Ezio's world. It breathes life into an already beautiful world, and Kyd's dismissal as the series composer is a big part of the reason why Assassin's Creed III seems dead and less alive to me. The Florence theme in particular is utterly spectacular.

This game, though, is certainly not without its flaws. Free running control has aged poorly since 2009 and can be frustrating at times, especially when attempting to move quickly. This makes any races and chase sequences an annoyance at best, and downright infuriating at worst. Ezio simply doesn't always go where you want him to, and story mission chase sequences are often purely trial and error as a result. Most frustrating would have to be Ezio's tendency to inexplicably stop when scaling straight up a building, and look the left at nothing in particular. This happening during a chase is especially frustrating. At times the camera is a massive pain during combat sequences, getting stuck behind buildings and spires. I also had an issue with the lack of a quick checkpoint restart option and fewer and further between checkpoints. It makes the light stealth gameplay here a frustrating experience at times.

To put it with as much brevity as possible: This game is an experience. It's a thoroughly atmospheric, immersive delight that will transport you straight into this time period and make you want to do nothing but walk the streets of Florence and pole through the canals of Venice for hours on end, with no goal in mind more than collecting a few treasure boxes, seeing the sights, and listening to Jesper Kyd's wonderful score. I love this game.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Final Fantasy VII (1997) by Square

Final Fantasy VII's extraordinary atmosphere will leave you reeling

I grew up as a young child in the '80s playing the first Final Fantasy on the NES with my father. I was too young to read, so he had to read the dialogue to me as we played. As I grew and learned to read myself, I spent hour upon hour with the sequels, Final Fantasy II (IV in Japan), and III (VI in Japan), both for the SNES. I have a strong memory involving the time I walked several miles to my friend's house after school because he had a new PlayStation, and a copy of Final Fantasy VII, a game that I was hugely excited to experience given my history with the series. I had spent the past few months reading about the game in various video game publications and was hyped out of my mind to try it.

It was autumn, 1997, and I was 12 years old at the time. 15 years ago. I've replayed the game a dozen times since then, and mostly recently delved back into the Steam port to examine how the game has aged and how well the port runs.

The very first thing that I noticed about the game was the chasm between how well the audio design and soundtrack have aged versus how poorly the graphics have. It becomes clearly apparent that sprites have aged far better than polygonal characters when comparing this game to an older, sprite-based games in the series such as Final Fantasy VI. Sprites carried a certain charm to them, and remain tolerable despite their lack of beauty. Polygons, for lack of a better description, just look strange and ugly. Their blockiness represents a human character far more poorly than even a sprite can. To compare it to Hollywood, sprites are like Disney cartoon of the '70s, while polygons are like the bad special effects of the '80s. The audio, however, has aged gracefully. Nobuo Uematsu's haunting, elegiac score (see above video) has always been perfect for the game, and I remembered how fond I was of it the first time around immediately upon starting the game again.

The characters are generally well-realized, if not helped by some shoddy translation. Cloud is such a deep and human character that it's worth playing through the game just to witness his growth. By the end of the game you come to realize how deeply flawed a person he is, and having such a flawed hero leading the game was something that was quite groundbreaking for JRPGs at the time. Sephiroth's villainy hasn't shown age, either. He's still one of the best gaming villains in history, a title well earned through his enigmatic actions and intriguing backstory. Some of the characters lean more heavily towards comic relief, like Cait Sith, but are still given the depth they deserve in a game as large as this one. Each character's backstory is engaging. I will always fondly remember being shocked at how much depth was given to Red XIII, a character you meet in a lab early in the game who seems at first to be nothing more than a cool-looking, speaking attack feline. Cosmo Canyon looks amazing, the background music is fantastic (see indented video), and the story it tells about Red XIII will hook your emotions immediately.

It's obvious what to expect from the gameplay. This game is purely old school JRPG. It doesn't bother me, as it's a type of game that I once had a huge affinity for. I can jump back into the more slowly-paced, active turn-based battle systems any time and still enjoy it. To others, it may be a bit more tedious. This is especially true regarding random battles. The tedium of random battles may be intolerable for others that are more used to the real-time fare of old cRPGs or more recent Western RPGs. It's difficult for me to be objective enough to say. I don't mind random battles even now, but I never have.

One thing I will tout is the materia system. I've always loved it. It's my favorite form of character development in any Final Fantasy game, and it holds up. Growing your materia through the management of your weapons is so much fun, and the high-level materia such as Slash-All and Double Cut really make you feel all-powerful toward the end portion of the game. They're scaled very well.

The main complaint from my latest replay is an issue that never seemed to bother me before. The control of Cloud through the various pre-rendered areas is absolutely atrocious. Pressing up on the directional pad will sometimes cause him to go left or right, and pressing right or left on the pad will sometimes cause him to go down. There's no clear indication of when this will happen -- It's unique to each area. This becomes particularly annoying in areas where random battles occur. Very often I'd find myself doubling back due to this, and fighting far more random battles than I actually had to.

I wouldn't be able to conclude this without mentioning the cutscenes and minigames. The idea of rewarding players with a CGI cutscene during certain parts of the game was a fresh, new concept at the time of the game's release. Seeing the devs at Square flaunt their graphical prowess was mind-blowing, and the cutscenes were unlike anything in video games at the time. They truly were rewarding, and I remember being so impressed as a 12-year old first playing this game that I recorded them on a VHS tape for later playback. The minigames were also groundbreaking, but have aged poorly. Bad control plagues many of them, specifically the motorcycle and snowboarding games. But the inclusion of these changed the genre for years; the lack of minigames in a post-Final Fantasy VII JRPG would be a strange omission for a later title.

Final Fantasy VII has got its problems. In some cases, it's aged beautifully and become the historically powerful title that gamers expected it to be upon its release. Final Fantasy VII brought RPGs as a genre into the mainstream. The graphics and control, however, will be nearly unbearable to any gamer going back in time to play this game for the first time.

I do have some complaints specifically regarding this Steam port. Every resolution that isn't 640x480 windowed looks terrible. They've upped the resolution on the characters and NPCs, but the pre-rendered backgrounds are the same so they look awful in any other resolution. And don't even think about going to 16:9. All it does is stretch the picture to fit the screen.

There's also a persistent black bar (pictured above) along the bottom of the screen that is only ever filled in when accessing the menu. Imagine you're watching a film in letterbox, except that there's only one black bar on the bottom of the screen and no matching bar on the top. Just awful.

On top of the graphical issues, Square's ridiculous DRM is present. You must log into Square Enix when you first start the game. People already hate Uplay. Why would Square do this? It's an idiotic move.

People have also mentioned the music quality being subpar compared to the PS1 version, but it honestly didn't affect my experience at all. I definitely noticed the music being a bit different, it didn't seem any worse than the original game.

Despite the wear of aging and the shoddy port, I still believe this game is a must-play for anyone who liked the original or any gamer looking for a history lesson. There is still enough depth in the characters, immersion in the environments despite their age due to a phenomenal soundtrack and great art design, and player investment in the story. Like an old painting, Final Fantasy VII continues to be historically relevant and is worth seeing and experiencing if only to recognize the influence it had on present day gaming. The paint has aged, and the artwork is unfortunately not quite as vibrant and stunning as it once was, but with the right mindset you can still experience it and be moved.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Mass Effect 2 (2010) by BioWare

Mass Effect 2 reunites old friends and introduces new enemies

I have a hard time speaking in a balanced manner about Mass Effect 2 because it's one of my single favorite video games of all-time. There are so many good things to gush over, but the bad pieces are really, truly bad and do a lot to ruin the experience of actually playing the game. The most concise way I can describe it is 'flawed masterpiece'. It's a game propped up by fantastic art and sound design and far better overall writing than the much maligned Mass Effect 3, but at the same time, the gameplay is nowhere near as tight and the overall design is way rougher -- To the point where I'd criticize the combat as being unfinished.

To start, the graphics and the engine run pretty smoothly on the PC. It runs easily enough -- I see around 110-120 FPS on my 120hz 1440p monitor, but the textures are often muddy and low-res, a curse of the title being designed with far outdated consoles in mind... Even back in 2010. I had a similar experience with the first Mass Effect, though that game is even rougher-looking than this one is. The textures here are, on average, higher res. It helps that the lighting is far better designed than the first game (goodbye, ham-fisted lens flare!). There are a great many visual bugs, though. Far more than the console version. Glitches with the eyes, characters model inexplicably spinning, etc. But it's saved mostly by the beautiful art design. The use of colored lighting really adds a great touch, and the environments are unbelievably vibrant. There's a lot to 'feel' here just by looking at skyboxes. It's indicative of good art design and adequate design on the technical side to support it. The art team is the MVP here.

The sound! Where to start? Jack Wall is absolutely fantastic, almost up to the level he was in the first game. He's at his best when he's laying down eerie music for the tense missions (see right), but he does a great job with handling the huge change in tone from the first game. Mass Effect 1 was carried by a super-techno, futuristic style soundtrack, whereas this one has touches of futurism but mostly just feels brooding and dirty. It fits the art direction of the game perfectly, and even a minimalist track like the droning that plays during the loading screen really does a fantastic job to impart and augment the overall 'feel' of this game, which is a big part of what I find so enticing about Mass Effect 2.

The writing is probably the games single strongest aspect. I don't mean to exaggerate, or to gush too much here, but there are some of the most well-written characters in any video game I've ever played. It's clear that Walters, Karpyshyn, and the rest of the writing staff were going for a Dirty Dozen, Wild West type feel with the characters and settings here, and they've succeeded in spades. There are a lot of characters that might even fit into a cliche, but the dialogue is so well-written and the voice acting is so superb that the game manages to skip that pothole and cruise along. Thane Krios, the spiritual, regretful assassin, is a stand-out among a cast of solid personalities. His discussions with Shepard and his dealings with his son Kolyat are excellent. Garrus is far more fleshed out here than he was in the first game (in which I found his character to be disappointingly underdeveloped), and the writing here creates a bridge to his being so likable in the third game. Legion, a character who arrives unfortunately late in the game, is another stellar twist and an amazingly well-written and impresses in unexpected ways. It's hard to go into detail without spoiling anything, but suffice it to say that his obsessive 'complex' is wholly unexpected and goes on to completely destroy any expectation I had when I initially learned of the characters presence in the game.

There are some pitfalls here, unfortunately, mostly in the form of Jacob Taylor. He always came off as completely unlikable to me, though that's more a personal feeling and not a general criticism. I think he's a poor character simply because there's not really much there to dig into. He's got some father issues to deal with that feel crammed in mid-game and seem to hover around the outside of his character rather than fleshing out his core, like so many of the other characters side missions are intended to do.

Now that I've gushed over the good things, let's talk about some of the bad.

The game plays as if its half finished, particularly during combat. There's a nice idea and an adequate core design here, but it seems like it could have used far longer in the QA process than it actually had. The core mechanics of taking down the enemies shields/barriers, armor, and then health are really excellent. Each is weak to a different type of weapon, ammo, and power, so each encounter becomes a sort of puzzle where you're evaluating which enemy is the most threatening and thus must be dealt with first, and by using which power or weapon to do so. It's incredibly complex but relatively simple to learn, and getting through some of the more difficult encounters on hardcore or insanity difficulty is amazingly satisfying.

Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, while the game is at its best on the two hardest difficulty modes, it also suffers the most on those modes due to extremely buggy cover mechanics and unbelievably poor friendly AI. The AI is absolutely abysmal, and if you want that Insanity trophy you better be ready for some frustration. It's necessary to completely micromanage your allies by controlling where they're taking cover at all times. The problem with cover also manifests itself here, as there are many times when allies simply refuse to listen to you and wade out into enemy fire only to die immediately. It's so frustratingly idiotic that I find myself wondering how the game ever shipped in this fashion. It's a mess, and having to babysit your idiotic, suicidal squadmates really destroys what would have been an otherwise fantastic gameplay system. The general design is there, but the technical execution is utterly terrible and enough to make you bash your head against a wall. It's much more passable on Normal and Casual, but if you're gunning for Hardcore or Insanity, get ready for a headache.

The overall design of the game, despite these poorer aspects, is excellent. The episodic style of gameplay in which you're recruiting allies just feels right, and the game feels far more organized and direct than the first game ever did. On the harder difficulties you really get a sense of it being a race against time. You've got to plan out what missions you're doing at what time, because upgrades are incredibly important and if you find yourself trying to take on Horizon or the Collector Ship without the good ones, you can actually get completely stuck and be forced to start over. While this sounds frustrating, it actually does a good job to suck you into the situation that Shepard and the crew find themselves in. They've got to get all of this done, and quickly, because the Collectors are on the move and they aren't waiting for you. This episodic style is paced perfectly, and you never seem to experience any of the drag that you see in the first game when you get dropped onto the Citadel after Eden Prime only to find yourself immediately bogged down with a huge area to explore and dozens of sidequests to tackle. It does a far better job with making sure you never feel overwhelmed than the first game. It's open-ended enough without stranding you in a sea of objectives; you've always got a handful of options of what to do next, and it's up to you to decide which seems to be most important.

All of the gameplay here comes to a head in a fantastic final act that sees everything you've done so far in the game build up to one massive conclusion. The suicide mission is truly excellent, and caps off a must-play game for everyone interested in RPGs.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐