Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015) by Konami

What begins as a unique, enjoyable open-world romp quickly turns to tedium when you realize how sparse the open world is and how repetitive the gameplay begins to feel. There are some notable gameplay quirks and some trademark Kojima touches, but it wasn't enough to keep me playing through this one until the end.

The best thing I can say about Phantom Pain is that the graphics are really solid, once again. I'm coming off spending about 150 hours in Witcher 3, and though this game doesn't quite compete with that one on a graphical level (nothing does, honestly), it still looks really freaking good. The Fox engine's lighting and particle effects are stunning. And it runs amazingly on PC. I'm holding 60fps solid at 1440p. No complaints here.

In the beginning I found the open world progression to be incredibly addictive. That's something that always seems to draw me in. As a minimap completionist games like this, the Assassin's Creed series, and Witcher 3 are absolutely my bread and butter. I hated how limited Ground Zeroes was. The entire game felt like continuous retreading of known ground. It bored me. This game is a step completely in the opposite direction, at least at first. The base building, the weapon and equipment progression, the buddy system... It all tickled my fancy. There was so much to do it was hard to put down. It was melting hours out of my day. However, this all eventually becomes the norm, and you begin to realize that these environments, though large, begin to grow incredibly sparse and your same repeated activities start to become monotonous. I eventually but the game down and didn't finish it after about halfway through. I've come to realize that this world was meant to be much more populated with life and activity than it is. The story, too, has some of Kojima's touches, but ultimately feels similarly sparse and incomplete.

Like my unpopular Ground Zeroes review, I have some notable criticisms of the game. Some will fall on deaf ears, again like the Ground Zeroes review, as Kojima fans love his trademark weirdness.

I dove heavily on the dated control scheme in my Ground Zeroes review, so I won't say it all again here. Instead I'll summarize and just say the control scheme is dated and unintuitive. That's an especially bad thing for a stealth game, because you need to be able to react without thinking if you turn a corner and run into a guard. Too many times early in the game I'd have to actually think about what button did what, and a few times I even had to look up the controls to find out what I needed to know: Example: "How the hell do you sprint on horseback? Oh, the X button? WTF? That makes no sense, why the X button when it's L3 to sprint on foot?" You expect the controls to make sense, and if you play as many hours of video games as I do, you can pretty much pick up anything and play it within a few minutes. That's not the case with this and Ground Zeroes, and while it's not a MAJOR issue since the problem is solved by a few hours of getting used to the controls, it's still a pain in the ass, and something that the Metal Gear team should have figured out between 2008's Guns of the Patriots and now.

Another negative is the cover system, which never seems to function as smoothly as I'd like. There's no button press involved so the game judges when you want to be stuck to cover and when you don't, which never seems to work properly in any video game that tries to implement it. Too often I'd get stuck to a wall when needing to move quickly, and too often it would take too long for it to stick me to cover so I could pop off a quick cover shot or target acquisition with the binoculars. This is just another example of dated game design. Cover systems are figured out. There's no reason for Kojima's team to get it wrong here.

By now most people know Hideo Kojima's style. He's an incredibly quirky guy as a writer and a designer. I typically love his design quirks. They add flavor to the game and keep things interesting. It's why he's great for the industry and why his dismissal from Konami is so disappointing. Even if this game does show some age in the aspects I've mentioned, he still belongs in the pantheon just due to his constant ability to surprise the gamer by implementing completely new, weird things (try playing a certain tape while hiding in a bathroom). He's a boundary-pushing designer. But Kojima as a writer? I know people will hate me for saying this, but I absolutely cannot stand him. Since MGS2 the series has devolved from being a James Bond-esque spy thriller with some weird anime quirks to a nonsensical, incoherent mess. The terribly convoluted story makes little sense. The action sequences are downright cheesy. The characters seem written by a teenager. Full disclosure, though: Campy, kitschy-type stuff has always been completely lost on me. I've never gotten it, never come close to liking it. Perhaps I'm too serious (or boring). It's always made me cringe and instantly turned me off. If you like that sort of thing, then I'm willing to bet Kojima's writing won't be a negative for you.

Another thing I'd like the mention is the foolish way the game handles the secondary objectives to story missions. They're unknown to begin with, and if you do accidentally trip over one -- such as discovering an item deposit, saving some prisoners, etc -- then they'll become revealed on your objective list and checked off. This isn't bad by itself: It promotes exploration and drives the player to explore the area more thoroughly, which is a necessity in the stealth genre when you often just want to complete your objective and get out quickly in order to maintain your stealth rating and not take a chance of being spotted. The problem I have is that after the you finish the mission, THEN the secondary objectives are revealed. It doesn't make sense for the game to do so. Why now? What changed? Now I'm just magically directed to these other things that I missed? Either keep them unknown until I discover them, or tell me right up front what I need to do. It's a cheap ploy to get you to replay missions multiple times. It feels like the developer is just trying to pad the game's length. It would be a lot more fun to allow me to replay the missions without EVER telling me what the secondary objectives were and simply letting me find them myself.

Finally, I have to mention how awkward Snake/Big Boss is in this game. It's not because he has a new voice actor, it's because his you hardly ever hear his voice! Seriously, could they just not afford to pay Kiefer Sutherland? He puts forth a great performance when you actually hear him, but he hardly has any dialogue at all! Snake is conspicuously silent during most of the cutscenes, and it's really awkward and offputting. It's completely immersion breaking. There must be a bigger story here, because it's obvious that there were some issues with his dialogue when Ocelot and Miller are holding entire conversations with Snake and Snake isn't saying a damn word. Really, really strange. For now my head canon is that Hideo Kojima and Kiefer Sutherland had a falling out when Sutherland discovered Kojima's favorite James Bond was Roger Moore.

What begins as a unique, enjoyable open-world romp quickly turns to tedium when you realize how sparse the open world is and how repetitive the gameplay begins to feel. There are some notable gameplay quirks and some trademark Kojima touches, but it wasn't enough to keep me playing through this one until the end.

I really can't recommend this game to anyone but the most hardcore Metal Gear fans, though gamers with a modicum of interest in the stealth or open world genres might want to take a shot at this game. It's admittedly a lot of fun in the first few hours before it overstays its welcome and starts to become tedious.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 74 hours

Dishonored (2012) by Arkane Studios

Successful new intellectual properties are typically very difficult to produce in the world of game design. The process requires the developers to build all aspects of the video game from the ground up. They have to decide what type of art direction they're going for, conceive all pieces of the plot and characters from scratch, and build all of the technical systems such as graphics and combat from scratch. This is why new IPs are often rough around the edges. Sequels are so ubiquitous and generally more critically acclaimed because the developers already have an existing foundation to build upon from the previous title and they can focus on adding polish.

Dishonored is one of the special few new IPs that manages to avoid most of the pitfalls and delivers a diverse, adaptable, polished experienced right from the get go.

The most noticeable aspect of the game is its art design, which was deftly crafted by one Viktor Antonov, a Bulgarian art director famous for his work on designing City 17 and its outskirts in Half Life 2. His touch is recognizable in Dishonored as chaotic Dunwall shares many similarities with totalitarian City 17. Nothing feels like it was pasted over from Half-Life 2, though. Dishonored is a true steampunk game and Dunwall has it's own feel that's inspired by Victorian era London gone bad. There's a dirty river, loads of industry, and even a familiar-looking bridge. All of it is given a unique touch, and the result is a very immersive world. This is escapism at its finest; be prepared for the Dunwall to suck you in immediately and carve away the hours of your day as you explore every nook and cranny. I haven't been as enamored with a new setting since playing BioShock and first experiencing Rapture.

The plot is serviceable though predictable. Daud, the conflicted villain of the game, is the strongest and most interesting character. It's a shame he doesn't get more screentime, though Arkane have remedied this with a pair of DLC episodes in which he is the playable character. The player character, Corvo Attano, is a silent protagonist. This is a negative for me since I personally detest the silent protagonist trope in video games. I understand that the goal of the silent protagonist is to allow the gamer to project his own reactions into the game, and I know that many gamers enjoy it, but it pulls me out of the experience when I don't hear my character speaking to anybody addressing him because it's so unnatural. I can't logically connect the fact that my character is mute, yet nobody in the game ever seems to comment upon it. I don't enjoy it in the Half-Life series, and I'm not a fan of it here, either. I will say that the game deserves a mention of its voice acting, particularly the role of Daud as played by Michael Madsen of Tarantino fame. Other praiseworthy roles are played by John Slattery (Mad Men), Chloe Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass), Brad Douriff (Lord of the Rings), Lena Headey (Game of Thrones), and Susan Sarandon (Thelma & Louise). They spent some money on voice talent, and it pays off. The one qualm I do have is the repetitive nature of the guards' canned conversational quips, of which there are few. They repeat themselves regularly which breaks immersion.

The wasted landscape of the plague-ridden city can become tiresome and a bit grating. There are corpses littered about, filth, rats, and crumbling buildings galore. The design is fine but the pacing leaves you in these types of areas for a bit too long. The more civilized settings in certain levels such as the gentlemen's club and the high society party feel special by comparison, but the pace would benefit from seeing more of the inhabited areas of the city and fewer of the burned out, deserted ghettos. There are only so many ways you can depict diseased ruin before it becomes repetitive.

The game's graphical muscle won't blow you away if you're used to games like Crysis 3, but the art direction props up the visuals enough to make them astounding in certain areas. There's an old oil painting feel which permeates the game, and it fits the look and feel of the setting very well. I get a sense of great design while playing this game. There aren't all that many graphical options to tinker with, but there is a field of view slider, which is always cause for celebration with PC ports. The game also runs exceptionally well on PC, so even if you're not wowed by the visuals and the art design like I am, the technical aspects of the visuals won't hinder you from enjoying the gameplay at all.

Dishonored is fully adaptable to your style of play, which is refreshing in a game that emphasizes stealth. If you're a stealth fanatic (as I admittedly am), then you'll enjoy it here. It's possible to finish the game without ever killing anybody or being spotted, and you're able to accomplish this thanks to being provided the tools to move quickly and silently throughout huge areas. Blink allows you to teleport instantly a certain distance across the map, and you can also acquire the ability to see through walls. Mobility is a requirement in many stealth games, and Dishonored gives you the tools to traverse the environment quickly when needed.

The beauty of the strong stealth play is that it's balanced by an arguably better combat system. The combat powers at your disposal (slowing or stopping time, possessing enemies, finishers, etc.) all synergize incredibly well with one another and they allow you to take out your enemies in endlessly amusing ways. It's a sign of the design team having clearly described objectives, and I was genuinely amazed at how well the game flows between stealth and combat. I expected to play this game for its engrossing, artistic setting and ended up getting the biggest kicks out t's combat system. In my opinion it's the strongest aspect of the game, which is indicative of the game's greater value considering its already great art direction. There are multiple reasons to play this title, which helps it appeal to a broad demographic. It's no one trick pony.

The only real criticism I have of the game is the clumsy way in which it handles morality. Great games have been bungling morality mechanics for nearly a decade now (BioShock immediately comes to mind), so it's not surprising, but in Dishonored it becomes a glaring flaw because they get so much else right.

You're informed very clearly that the city will descend more and more into chaos if you kill your enemies rather than avoiding them or knocking them out, and your allies will begin to view you unfavorably the more deadly you are. While this is logically understandable (a lack of law enforcement officials presumably increases chaos in a troubled city), the mechanic unintendedly puts shackles on your ability to transition between stealth and combat. The gameplay seems designed to be freely adaptable so you can move seamlessly between stealth and combat when you're spotted, but it then tells you via the plot that playing stealthily and non-lethally is better. You begin to feel corralled into playing the game stealthily rather than being free to adapt to combat situations if you get caught. The plot punishes you for being spotted and having to fight your way out.

It's a disconnect in design between a plot that wants to make you accountable for your choices and gameplay that wants to be flexible. A potential solution would be leaving the chaos meter to be regulated entirely by how you choose to dispatch your assassination targets. Then it's isolated to the plot and doesn't have any effect on the way you choose to play the game. It's a disappointing flaw, but it doesn't take much away from a game that offers so much to begin with.

Overall, this game is a beautiful, immersive experience and it should absolutely be played by anybody who typically enjoys stealth games, or games that offer rich, engrossing settings. I'm very much looking forward to Arkane's inevitable sequel to this game.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Playtime: 46 hours

Game of Thrones (2014) by Telltale Games

As a huge fan of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice And Fire book series and Telltale's other titles The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, I was really looking forward to this title. However, I've found myself more and more disappointed with each episode I've played. I wanted to reserve judgment until the first season was complete, but playing the game seems more like a chore that I have to force myself to complete.

The first, and perhaps the most obvious negative, are the graphical capabilities. Telltale's games were never very impressive in the graphical department, but The Walking Dead was at least adequate, and The Wolf Among Us had some great art direction and used a bright, attractive set of colors. This game, however, fails to reach even a mediocre level. It has a similar style to The Walking Dead, but the textures are far muddier and at a lower resolution. The colors are unattractive; the artists seemed to rely on only a mixture of earth tones. It's not inspired artistically, and it's inadequate technically. Perhaps the artists felt too constrained by being forced to live up to the style of the HBO series. Whatever the reason, the game looks very poor, and it strongly affects the experience in a way that I didn't expect it to.

This leads me into the bigger problem with the series: Everything in the game seems grating and unpleasant. I play video games for entertainment and escapism, and playing this game is simply not an enjoyable experience. The beauty of A Song Of Ice And Fire is that things feel real despite it being set in a fantastical world. People are human and make choices that often best serve their own interests. It's somewhat cynical, but events occur that feel believable, which is an incredible accomplishment when you're reading about people living through decade-long winters and dragons. Terrible things sometimes happen to good people in the real world, and A Song Of Ice And Fire reflects that. The good guys don't always win, but when they do, it's special. The tragedies make the heroic moments all the more enjoyable. You find yourself grinning from ear to ear and pumping your first when a character you love finds good fortune or acts heroically and things go well. It's all about the payoff.

The problem with this game is that so far, throughout the three episodes of this series, only torturously terrible things have happened. There has not been a single moment of triumph. It actually damages any feeling of suspense or tension the designers are trying for, because I've so far been taught by the game that no matter what decisions I make, something awful is sure to happen because of them. Im fact, I'm not even positive that you can avoid any of the terrible occurrences from taking place, as I've replayed some sections and made different choices and had nothing change. The same people still die, the same people get angry with me.

About halfway through the third episode I found myself deliberately making the most aggressive choices possible despite their likelihood of leading to poor situations for the characters, and when I stopped to consider why, I realized that the game had trained my thought process to expect the worst, and thus attempt to get it over as quickly as possible. This is a very bad thing for a game, and playing through these episodes feels utterly masochistic. Literally nothing good has happened to any of these characters through three episodes. They die, they become grievously wounded, they're insulted constantly, etc. It's all absolutely punishing with zero payoff, and my desire to continue playing wanes with each chapter Telltale releases.

In conclusion: What makes A Song Of Ice And Fire so enjoyable despite its bleakness are the monumental triumphs of characters you've grown to love in the face of so much violence and despair. The writers of this game series simply do not seem to understand this, and as a result playing this game is an incredibly unpleasant experience. Everything about it is unremarkable at best, and ugly and unattractive at worst, from its graphics, to its characters, to its plot.

⭐

Playtime: 11 hours

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.

⭐⭐