Zoe E. Whitten

I got Gotham Knights as part of a Humble Bundle, but I was actually donating to get the full run of Saga as PDF files. The open world adventures of the Bat Family got critically dead-panned so hard that I didn’t add it to my wishlist and wait for a sale. But in a bit of strange timing, the game also released a performance patch the same week that I got the bundle, and I figured I already own it, right?

Before getting to the review, I have a theory for why the content of the game got slammed by reviewers separate from the tech issues. It has to do with quantity drowning out quality. By that I mean, if you’re a reviewer of a major gaming site and you’ve already played ten other open world games this year, Gotham Knights is going to grate because it’s very much more of the same design elements with a different franchise slapped over the surface like a hastily applied coat of Rustoleum.

I haven’t played any open world games for close to a year and a half, so I don’t have any fatigue for the formula. Perhaps because of that, I had a pretty good time in Gotham Knights. I can’t say I loved the whole thing, as some parts were grating or outright aggravating. But on the whole, beating up bad guys as four members of the Bat Family turned into a pleasant surprise that I might even go back to some time in the future, just to goof off, much like I do in Grand Theft Auto V.

Oh, beware mild spoilers after the cut. Continue reading

When the Epic store released Hitman for free, I added it to my list just because it’s free, and as the wise sage Usagi Tsukino once said, “Nothing is cheaper than free!”

And yet, I did not start playing it right away. I could lie to you and say the slow speed of my internet connection put me off of trying it, but the honest truth is, I was scared. See, I played the original PC release of Hitman, and I was terrible at it. Back in those days, I might have spent an hour tailing my target to the loo, cornered and strangled him with a garrote, only to have a random stranger walk in on us and run off screaming at the top of his lungs, “There’s a white bald killer on the loose!”

I bungled my way through three levels like this before admitting that maybe I was just kinda shit at being an assassin. I hung up my guns, garrote, syringe, and knife, and despite lots of Hitman games coming out afterwards, I always said, “Yeah, it’s not you, it’s me.”

But I got this free hit, so to speak, and then we got a much better internet connection, so I downloaded the game and played the tutorial. Without hyperbole, I was fucking amazing at killing targets. The first fake yacht, I went into the target’s office, killed him and dragged him back to his bathroom, and then I left before anyone could notice the body. Continue reading

Watching trailers and reading the Steam page for Firegirl Hack ’n Splash Rescue DX, it certainly looks like my kind of game. It’s a platformer with a unique mixture of 2D sprites in 3D environments. The levels are procedurally generated, and the movement options look exciting thanks to a fire hose acting as both the primary weapon and as a rocket for verticality. Plus, who doesn’t want to fight fire monsters while rescuing people and kittens? Sounds awesome to me.

What a shame that it turned out to be an actual garbage fire. Pretty much from the moment I started playing, the game was ruined by repetition, cheap shots in the place of real difficulty, dull grinding, and terrible writing. I slogged through the early parts in the hope that with some equipment upgrades, the game might evolve into something more fun, but even at “full power” Firegirl never realizes the entertainment promised in its trailers.

The biggest problem is that after the tutorial, there’s only one level to play for an agonizingly long time. Firegirl goes to put out fires in the same “building” (the level actually takes place across a block of buildings) over and over. Even this would be forgivable, except at the start of the game, both her hose pressure and water reserve are so low that she’s frequently left with nothing in the tank to reach the exit. Adding insult to injury is the frequency where the exit is in sight, just beyond her reach, and nothing can be done except let the timer run down. The developers didn’t even think through their design enough to add an option to restart the level or leave early in unwinnable situations. Continue reading

Let me start by saying that I was actually thinking about talking up another game this week, but initial reviews on Tomb Raider Reloaded grabbed my attention because it was being compared to Vampire Survivors, which I very much liked. I liked it enough that I got the DLC just to send more money to the developers, so having another game with the same flavor sounds really good. As an added bonus, Netflix has the game available with some of the live service bits neutered, and I’m a Netflix junkie, so I already have access to this library of games.

I wish I could share some of the enthusiasm for the game’s take on the newly emerging reverse bullet hell genre, but the problem is, no amount of neutering can change the inherently grindy nature of this beast. With Vampire Survivors, it’s okay to keep going back to the first level, because each run is with a new unlocked character, or a new weapon, or even with a new build in mind. With Tomb Raider Reloaded, the first level is a mandatory grind to collect enough resources to level up Lara Croft’s weapons, outfit, accessories, and ammunition. All of these have to be ground for a couple of days just to make it to the end of the third level. I cannot stress how dull the process became even after just a few hours, let alone days.

Let’s start with the gameplay when it still feels good. Lara is controlled with a single virtual direction pad. When she moves, she can’t shoot, and when she’s stationary, she decides what to target. Killing enemies gives her XP, and with each level up, Lara is given a choice of three power upgrades. A lot of these options are really nice, like bouncing bullets that bound off walls or other enemies, one power that makes defeated enemies explode in a shower of bullets, or just pure damage and attack speed boosts. In the first two levels you might be forgiven for thinking, “Hey, this is kinda fun,” because it really is scratching that same power creep itch that makes Vampire Survivors so satisfying. Continue reading

My efforts to find anything decent on Play Pass that isn’t just free crap with the microtransactions removed has finally hit a mostly decent game with Starman, a good old-fashioned puzzle game with no energy meters, gimmick items to let you skip intentionally unsolvable situations, or timers to limit what you can use or when you can play. If not for the last few levels, I’d have bestowed a full five stars on it. But we’ll get to those qibbles in a bit. First, let me tell you what Starman does right.

The game is mostly monochromatic, like a less dark version of Limbo. The titular star man is an astronaut who solves puzzles to power up locations, grab a little orb, and take it to an island, where he burns the orbs and they turn into butterflies. I know what you’re thinking: The fuck did I just read? It’s great stuff, really. This is a game that exists solely to service some puzzle, and there’s not a story or any real world sense of logic to why this little guy is doing these things. You just get some puzzles of varying difficulty with no hints, and the reward is a little pride at finally sorting out what the fuck that one level was on about. Continue reading

Hey, would you look at that? I’m back in the metaphorical saddle with another contest. Just as with the battle between Fallout Shelter versions, this contest began on my phone. I found Runescape Old School on the Google Play store, and had been playing a few weeks before a random quest sent me looking for the wiki. It was then that I found out the game was also on Steam, and from there, I found Old School side by side with the “newer” version.

I played both on alternating days at first, though often one or the other got extra attention because I became focused on a certain goal or quest. Unlike previous Versus entries, the question in this case was never “Which is better?” This is because both are fun, through often for different reasons. No, this time, the question was, “which version would I rather pay for a premium membership?” That being the case, it’s not even a tough decision. In Texan dialect, this would be described as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest. That’s how uneven it is. Continue reading

Completely unrelated to the proper review, I’d like to mention that I got Google Play Pass to see if it was worth the subscription, and so far, it is not. The first game I tried, Party Hard Go, kept glitching and popping up a developer’s debug menu warning of a bunch of unplayable sounds. This happened so frequently in the first level that I just deleted the game and moved on. Almost everything else I’ve tried has turned out to be the free shovelware prevalent on Google Play, but with ads disabled and all the microtransactions made free. And you know what? They still aren’t fun games.

It was in the midst of rifling through unsatisfying titles that I remembered Donut County, a game I’d meant to play, but that got pushed to the back of my mind in favor of larger games. First I searched to see if it was part of Play Pass, and it was not. But it was only €4.29, and that’s cheap enough that if I didn’t like it, at least I didn’t have to be angry about losing too much cash. I’ll drop spoilers right now and admit that I liked it quite a bit.

Donut County is a game told in chapters. The first is a prologue set in the present, while many chapters speed forward to the future and tell their parts as flashbacks revealing the slow destruction of the town. The final chapters return to the present, culminating in a final chapter with not one but two boss fights, and then there’s a prologue of sorts added to the closing credits.

So, what’s destroying the town? I don’t want to spoil too much, but it involves a racoon and an app that summons holes. You move the hole around to collect small objects, causing the hole to grow, and the larger it gets, the bigger objects you can collect. This escalates in every level to taking people, their cars, and their houses. (In many cases this includes the surrounding rock formations, warehouses, and even a skyscraper.) Continue reading

You know, I honestly did not expect to go this long without reviewing anything, but as I’ve mentioned before, a series of crises month after month left me with no free funds to buy new games. It wasn’t terrible for me, as I’ve got maybe a hundred old games to keep me entertained. But it’s been hell on my poor blog, and my dipping interest in my TBR pile hasn’t really helped matters much. (To be clear, I am trying to read. I just keep hitting points in each book where I add them to the Did Not Finish pile, and I don’t review what I can’t finish. In my mind, it isn’t fair to the author for me to go in swinging with a half-formed opinion.)

Anyway, the gaming sites all released their Game of the Year lists, and Vampire Survivors kept popping up. I wasn’t sold on the sales pitch given by most writers at launch, but when it showed up on so many lists and is apparently crushing the most played lists on Steam and consoles, I figure maybe there has to be fire under all that smokey hype. I went to Steam and saw it was on sale for 3.99, and I thought, Hey, if it sucks, it’s only 4 euros, so there’s no need to be angry about not liking it.

So how do I like it? Let me give you the short version first: I just unlocked all of the in-game collection to get the final character, Queen Sigma, and tonight I’m buying the DLC to keep playing. Yeah, it’s good stuff, y’all. This is a rogue-lite where every round can only last 30 minutes before you’re booted back to the main screen. (Although later on you can turn off that timer if you want.) But it’s that short “bite-sized” chunk of gaming that inspires so many late-night “just one more run” sprees. Every run can unlock something new, or provide its own unique challenge, so the temptation to keep dipping back in for “just one more” is super strong.

Without knowing the developer, in early playing I imagined some programmer at Konami going into a meeting and pitching a new Castlevania game during one of those down times when Dracula was still sleeping off his last Belmont-induced defeat. Said programmer pitched it as such: “The survivors of Dracula’s last attack must clean up all the roaming monsters infesting their lands, and to do so, they’ll level up a bunch of weapons and become walking bullet hells!” Then the Konami execs said, “It’s too crazy and will never work. Get out of here! Baka!” So the programmer left the building, turned around, and yelled, “I’m not crazy, and I can make it work! It’ll sell like chocolate dorayaki! You’ll see! Kusou!” (That last curse being uttered because they looked around and realized that to all the gathered observers, it looked like he was shouting at the building, and thus was thoroughly insane.) Continue reading

I need to apologize for the lengthy delay getting this entry posted, as it was finished last month as a Word file. said file has been sitting on my desktop, hidden in the clutter of game tiles, often overlooked and forgotten as I search for what to play next. Then yesterday, I was starting to think of my next review when I thought, Crap, did I ever post the Fallout battle? I did not, so here we are.

For me, the Fallout series (or at least the 3D iterations of the series) are kind of like Borderlands 2. I don’t really like the overall story, and a lot of the details “under the hood” annoy me. So why would I play them? Well, it’s because I like how the shooting feels.

Both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were games my husband bought to play on our Xbox 360. I remember trying Fallout 3 for the first time, entering Megaton, and meeting Mr. Burke. As he was offering caps for killing an entire town, I told him to leave. He said he would, and then he just sat there, staring at me. I pulled out a 10 millimeter pistol and shot him in the forehead. He immediately stood up and shouted, “Uh, you’ve got blood all over my suit!”

I shot him six more times in the head before he died, and then I shut off the game and walked away for almost a year. Mr. Burke is not wearing an armored helmet. He does not have a metal plated skull, but the damage of a Fallout gun is so pathetic that a fedora can count as effective armor.

I would later bounce out of the game again for side quests that made no sense, for the godawful way Karma works (or doesn’t, in so many cases), or for random bullshit like VATS firing all of my selected shots through the doorway behind the gun instead of the target just two inches in front of the barrel. Continue reading

I actually had another versus match planned between Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4, but I was still debating who gets the win on that trio. At the same time, I’ve been continuing to play through the DLCs of the Dark Souls games when it struck me that for as much as I love the vanilla games, I mostly just suffer through the DLC to get the extra loot.

I think it comes down to the design philosophy that goes into balancing the main game versus the ones used for end game content. The directors want to keep your character on the back foot in the DLC, so everything, even little minions do massive damage. You’re feeling confident coming off a well earned win against The Nameless King and his giant thunder turkey and yet, the moment you step into The Dreg Heap, pathetic crawling imps rise out of the ash and with a weak ass swing lob off half your health. The very first boss is a pair of demons, and when they both fall, one rises for a second phase fight. Doesn’t matter which one you kill, they both have massive super attacks in their second phase. Where you were dishing out 500 points of damage per swing of your OP weapon of choice, suddenly it’s only doing 100, and that Demon Prince is damn near one-shotting your character with every attack.

I think in most cases, the developers wanted you to do the DLCs co-op. The number of minions and the sheer density of them suggest that they didn’t want players to go it alone. For instance, in Ashes of Ariandel, there’s a forest with over forty soldiers as well as some dire wolves and a few giant warriors just to sprinkle a little extra pain into the mix. Frequently, once one enemy is alerted, it starts a train of new arrivals, and as a single player experience, it’s frustrating to have killed twenty enemies in a single area, only to turn around to see three more running up to join the fight. Continue reading