Category Archives: video game

Fair warning: this review is a lot longer than my usual write-ups, and there are a few spoilers. If you want to avoid those or just wanted a TL;DR version, here goes: I didn’t like it. For the rest of you, sorry I got so long-winded, but this one really rubbed me the wrong way, and I feel a need to overshare.

There’s a very vocal contingent of gamers who insist that among the first person iterations of the Fallout series, only Obsidian’s Fallout New Vegas is worth a damn. The story is more interesting, the system of skills and perks are superior, and overall, the gameplay just feels better.

With all due respect, I strongly disagree on all counts. Fallout New Vegas was ridiculous in depicting its factions, quite frequently forgot where it was going with the plot and thus didn’t offer dialogue options to explore tangents, and copy pasted a lot of the same butt ugly character models. It created the worst Vegas experience, an empty city cut off by loading screens every two hundred yards, and was still prone to crash after progressing too far into the story. When I say crash, I mean freeze the console and corrupt the save files so badly that one must restart from the beginning. “Just use mods,” some folks say, to which I point out, the game is on consoles, and there ain’t no mods to fix that broken, graphically hideous, fumbling mess. What you buy is what you get, and it’s what gets reviewed.

So here we are with The Outer Worlds, which fans have heralded as Fallout in space, jeering that after the disaster that was Fallout 76, Obsidian has effectively out-Fallout-ed Bethesda. Admittedly, I haven’t played Fallout 76 because it looked like a bad deal right from the start, but I do know that The Outer Worlds is no Fallout. Continue reading →

Folks, my disappointed feelings toward Monkey King: Hero is Back are entirely my fault for failing to pay attention to what I was buying. See, a few E3s back, a Chinese company released a gameplay trailer for a game tentatively titled Black Wukong, and it looked amazing. So picture me in a Gamestop, sorting through used titles when I see a very unmistakable Sun Wukong on the cover of a game. I got all giddy, like a kid at Christmas who doesn’t yet realize they’ve got the wrong gift by mistake. Did I check to make sure it was the right game? Nope. The fact that it was just 8 Euros only made me think “Maybe it wasn’t received well here, where not too many people know Journey to the West.”

But no, this is in fact an adaptation of a CG cartoon of the same name from 2015, and like so many film-to-game adaptations, this one isn’t very good. I knew that less than five minutes into the game, but I figured I bought it, so I might as well see it through and finally have something to review. What followed was roughly twenty hours of stale hell with the two worst traveling companions I’ve ever had the displeasure of being saddled with.

I don’t know how faithful the game is, but I doubt it did more than pay lip service to the script before wandering off to do its own thing. The story is simple enough. Sun Wukong, aka Dasheng, is trapped for 500 years in an ice prison before being released by Liuer, a young monk who needs help to discover why monsters are kidnapping children from all the villages. Dasheng initially couldn’t care less, but is forced into fighting by Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, who promises to remove the chains binding his magic if he continues to do good deeds. Although the opening scene is set with a fully animated vignette, many other cut-scenes are shown in still frames or with minimal animation. I’m not sure what the point was, except possibly to save money.
Continue reading →

I’m sure I mentioned in my last post that I was close to finishing a book to review here, and it wasn’t long after that when my bike was stolen, along with the thermic backpack I needed to work, and the aforementioned book. I’m debating buying it again because I’m not sure if I liked it so much that I want to pay for it twice. On the other hand, I did only have 30 pages left…

Anyway, this is a review for My Friend Pedro: Ripe for Revenge (I will be shortening the title to Pedro for the rest of this post), which just came out on Android and I believe also on iOS. It is published by Devolver Digital, whom I have a lot of respect for even if I have yet to find a single game from their collective of indie developers that has fully clicked for me. That’s also the case here, but I want to talk about the game’s better points before laying out why it didn’t always work for me.

For starters, you can download the game for free and play all the levels, provided you don’t die. Doing so will result in the game asking you to buy the premium version before bumping you back to level 1 with all the levels you’ve played locked once again. In theory, if you were a badass gamer, you might be able to play the whole thing for free. I am not, so after a few rounds of making it to level 4 or 6 and dying, I said, “Eh, it’s only 2.49 euros, so I’ll just go ahead and buy it.” (I believe it’s $2.99 in the US.)

(Edit: This was how the game functioned at the time of release, but now the free version allows for saving progress by watching ads. I can’t speak to how that works because the update came out after I had already gone in on the premium version.) Continue reading →

I need to apologize for the long, long gap in between posts and explain myself before I get to the actual review. You see, I’ve bought three games, and in all three cases, I bounced off of them hard before I could get anywhere close enough to write a review. I’m just about done with a book for review, but lately it seems like I only read at work during breaks. Otherwise, I can’t seem to make myself sit to read.

Because of the gap between posts, it annoys me to be making this a negative review, but it can’t be helped. Let me start by saying that I bought Psychonauts around six years back and found the controller support to be pretty bad. I tried playing with mouse and keyboard, but I had major issues with the camera controls, leading to me rage quitting very early into the game. Recently, I saw someone comment that the controller support had been improved, so I loaded it back up and started over. I almost wish I hadn’t.

I don’t have any nostalgia for this game, or for Double Fine. I’m coming at this as someone who’s heard endless praise for this title as one of the greats, and went in mostly flying blind. What I found was a mess that gathers all the worst habits of early 3D platforming and covers them in an oh-so-wacky wrapper. Continue reading →

It’s funny that in my last blog post, I mentioned The Binding of Isaac for both being aggravating and entertaining. While searching for a new puzzle or card game to play in between shooters and more hardcore stuff like Dark Souls, I randomly ran across The Legend of Bum-Bo on sale on Steam. The description for it is a deck-building puzzle RPG, and a prequel to all the various flavors of Isaac. Having seen trailers and gameplay preview videos, I had some idea of what I was going into, but I had no clue how fast the gameplay loop would hook me. There’s still problems that bugged me, but this is for sure going to be one of my more positive reviews in a while.

Before getting into the details, I think a warning of sorts is fair. Edmund McMillen games all have a certain level of shit in them. I don’t mean a bad game element. I mean feces and urine are quite common in his stuff. If I ever interviewed Ed, one of my early questions would have to be “did you get trapped in a sewer while tripping on acid or shrooms?” This game is no exception, so if you find weaponized poo and pee offensive, Ed’s games are not for you. And that’s okay.

But to begin with, Bum-Bo’s game isn’t so much a direct prequel as it is a setting imagined by Isaac before his mother’s psychotic break with reality forced him into hiding. Each level is made inside a diorama with puppets dangling from strings or sticks, and pretty much every element is constructed from paper and/or cardboard. It sounds dumb described in mere words like this, but in practice, the treatment gives most levels a kind of charm that was missing from Isaac’s top-down twin-stick shooter. Continue reading →

All right, so this is not a review because Dreamgate is still currently in early access. As such, many or all details I share with y’all might change before the game goes gold and launches for real. But really, in this modern era of gaming, updates and patches post launch might radically change any game after it’s reviewes. Take Dead Cells for example. I gave that game glowing praise as an early access offering, and after going gold, the developers have continued to shit on the game with new unbalanced biomes and one-shot enemies that cater only to the hardcore crowd while telling those of us who supported them in early access that we can kindly go fuck ourselves for enjoying their product on a lowly casual level.

*Sighs* But I’m not bitter about it or anything.

Anywho, Dreamgate is a card game merged with a dungeon crawler. It’s similar to Slay the Spire, but offers more player classes, and boasts on their Steam page that there’s no mana or energy required to play cards. (I’ll be coming back to this selling point soon, because it’s the main reason I bought the game.) You start out with one passive skill and a tiny deck, and then you slowly collect more cards through winning battles and leveling up. Defeated enemies give XP, and each level-up offers up three new cards. Don’t like any of the new options? Hit Skip and hope for a better pull on the next level-up or dungeon room victory. (Though it should be mentioned that certain low-level rooms don’t drop cards, so it’s entirely possible to win four and five battles for no reward.)  Continue reading →

Oh, my, Gawd, y’all. It feels like I have been playing this game forever. Steam says I’ve played 200 hours to reach the end, but in my mind, it feels so, so much longer. It isn’t because the game sucks or looks bad. Let me be clear, it just feels like an eternity since I first started up my first run through Borderlands 3 because there’s so much packed into this package. That should come across as a ringing endorsement, and yet here I am, feeling fatigued and a little sick of having too much to do.

I had to wait for the game to come to Steam, as Epic’s storefront is a bit meh, even if they keep giving out nice free games to try and entice me over. Steam’s interface is still shit, bit Epic is even more shit, so I had to be patient. In the meantime, I read all kinds of middling reviews about how Borderlands 3 just wasn’t that good, and I worried that after all this time, it wouldn’t be worth the wait.

So now I’ve had the chance to play it, and what is my own verdict? Well…I mean, it’s good, but it’s just so fucking long. Continue reading →

20XX was added to my Want To Play list right after I saw the first trailers for it. Basically it can be summed up as “Mega Man, but roguelite.” I’d just completed Mega Man X on my Vita for the first time, and I was ready for something else to fill that platforming action void.

But then a lot of other games caught my attention, and it wasn’t until a random YouTube hiccup brought the game back to my attention that I tried it out. Now I’m deeply conflicted about how to review this. In short doses, it’s great, scratching that old school itch with just the right level of challenge and action. But it doesn’t take long to notice there’s not enough variety of environments or bosses to keep this from getting stale quickly.

In classic Mega Man style, the story casts you as Nina the good robot versus a squadron of evil robots and their minions. You defeat robot bosses and can choose to take their powers. But as an added twist, you might opt to get some extra currency instead, or you might select an extra augmentation to help beef up your robot’s health, energy, or their basic attacks. Continue reading →

These days, no game is a static object, with updates and patches optimizing or fixing different features, or overhauling the gameplay in radical ways. Because of this, a review written at the launch of a game might not apply a year down the road. Old complaints or praise might need to be readdressed as a result of tweaks or changes.

This is most certainly the case with Dead Cells, a game I initially reviewed positively, but which has lost a lot of enjoyment with each new update since it has come out of early access. What started out as a fun platformer suitable for all levels of gamer has now catered itself almost exclusively to the hardcore fans while abandoning everyone else.

During early access, it was clear that certain weapons and skills were just preferable. For instance, the Sinew Slicer and Double Arrow Trap both had short cooldowns and a steady rate of fire, making them damned handy in every boss fight. Grenades, on the other hand, had crap damage and a ridiculously long cooldown rate. To counter this kind of dependence, the game makers nerfed the useful traps and put a limit of only one trap of any kind. Sounds good in theory, except the grenades are still garbage and have a stupidly long cooldown, so they still aren’t an option. Continue reading →