In Doom, I see a world brimming with demons, explosions, and hellfire. I see familiar faces screaming, with bloodthirsty eyes and unwavering stares. Playing it delivers the same cathartic craze the original Doom and Doom II did in the early '90s: overwhelmed by the horrors around every turn, but empowered with an impressive collection of weapons at the ready.
But the new Doom is louder and faster than the old model. Its battles ask more of you, and its heavy-metal soundtrack causes your body to quiver from turbulent surges of adrenaline. From the outset two things are made immediately clear: you were born to kill demons, and you'll do anything it takes. You will wrench countless jaws from their joints and eviscerate the swollen flesh of your enemies between bouts of furious gunfire. These powerful moments carry what, at its core, is a simple game. The cadence of Doom's campaign is unwavering to the point of predictability as you make multiple round-trips between Mars and the depths of hell. Each location bears its own distinct but static identity, and your return trips inspire more deja vu than surprise as you tread familiar ground on either side of the dimensional portal you're charged with dismantling.
Into the belly of the beast we go.
You rarely take an unexpected turn, but any bothersome feelings this gives you are washed away the moment you enter battle. Doom equips you with a range of weapons that start simple and grow ever more elaborate. Not all are created equal, and there are some you will ignore for their lack of stopping power, but many are formidable, and a near constant stream of upgrades allows you to tweak your favorites in order to give them greater functionality and strength--more cause for attachment to, and wonder in, the power at your fingertips.
This power extends to Glory Kills, Doom's contextual dismemberment techniques that can be triggered when you cause an enemy to stagger. They are the embodiment of gore fetishization, offering multiple ways to tear enemies into pieces, dependant on your angle of approach. Glory Kills are also strategically valuable. Enemies occasionally drop health items and ammo when felled by a gun, but you're guaranteed an injection of health when you flay your opponents using your bare hands--and occasionally with a body part of their own. This incentivizes you to rush in even when on the brink, offering hope at the end of a potentially deadly tunnel. Similarly, you also collect a chainsaw that can rip demons in half as a one-hit kill, which causes ammo to spout from their corpses. Your chainsaw requires precious fuel and should be used sparingly, and figuring out the best time to use it becomes a tense mind game of its own.
The rhythm of combat--which almost always begins as a plainly presented lockdown in a room--grows increasingly hard and fast over the course of Doom's thirteen missions. Larger and more dangerous demons appear over time, and in greater numbers. As you weave and leap around maze-like arenas to improve your vantage and search for much-needed supplies, you function like a magnet, drawing enemies toward you. As you do, the once-disparate groups in an arena become concentrated. The effect of this is that you can put your explosive munitions to good use and inflict heaps of damage to multiple enemies at once. But there is a downside: you can quickly back yourself into a corner as you retreat. Despite this danger, herding enemies is par for the course in Doom as it's often the most viable tactic. This plays into the cyclical murderous bliss of Doom: round and round we go.
The tension of facing increasingly durable enemies gives this system longevity despite its repetitiveness. Bipedal imps give way to towering, bloated monstrosities, powerful stampeding beasts, and disembodied flaming skulls. To keep up with the horde, you must use resources earned for your past feats to modify and upgrade your weapons with new capabilities. This steadily feeds into your brash and violent persona in order to maintain the high of combat in the face of your growing tolerance for all things brutal. Where a shotgun blast to the face was once satisfying and effective enough, you ultimately desire the thrill and power of unleashing a mortar-like cluster bomb from your double-barrelled best friend. When he's spent, you'll be thankful you upgraded your heavy assault rifle with micro-missiles that pierce the air with a subtle whistle before lodging under the skin of a demon and exploding, one after another.
Where a shotgun blast to the face was once satisfying and effective enough, you ultimately desire the thrill and power of unleashing a mortar-like cluster bomb from your double-barrelled best friend.
Upgrades can be earned by sweeping maps of demons, or discovered by exploring every inch of Doom's environments. Both techniques demand diligence. Secrets and hidden areas aren't new to Doom, but the variety of rewards you can reap are greater than ever. Every bit of hardware, including weapons, armor, and their underlying software, can be augmented in multiple ways. Nevertheless, you come across your fair share of upgrades even if you stay on the beaten path, and you'll probably want to as the thrill of combat gets under your skin. The process of awkwardly platforming your way across Doom's maps grows increasingly tiresome as your pulse drops to a murmur, and your patience for anything other than combat wears thin. The advent of Rune Challenges mixes this up a bit, offering self-contained tasks that momentarily take you out of missions and into tiny arenas where you need to defeat enemies under strict conditions. As enjoyable as these can be, they don't hold a candle to mission combat and eventually become an afterthought as you seek your next battle.
When Doom funnels you from one location to the next, it introduces brief moments that tell your story, and the story of the energy-obsessed Union Aerospace Corporation. It's the UAC's ill-conceived decision to tap into Hell's energy resources that created the portal between dimensions in the first place, and though you are an agent of the UAC in a way, yours is a reluctant enlistment. The tale of your involvement carries a certain gravitas in the way it speaks of legends and dark messiahs, but it ultimately amounts to little more than window dressing to justify your actions.
Say "hello" to my not-so-little friend.
When your journey comes to a close, you will have spent close to a dozen hours in the thick of it, the last of which are punctuated with riveting boss fights and seemingly impossible odds. With a flush arsenal and enhanced physical abilities, you may opt to return to previous missions and find items you may have missed, or lay waste at higher difficulty levels, but multiplayer awaits those who seek something new. Apart from a few multiplayer-exclusive weapons and the ability to play as demons during portions of a match, there's actually very little new about Doom's multiplayer. Its modes are few, delivering the expected assortment of match types, including team deathmatch and domination challenges, and a couple fun diversions like freeze tag. By and large, you won't find much in multiplayer that hasn't been done before, but what's there is enjoyable in small doses thanks to the fast pace of combat and the explosive nature of Doom's weaponry.
Doom is straightforward and simple, but it serves its purpose: to thrust you into increasingly dire scenarios fueled by rage and the spirit of heavy metal.
More impressive than multiplayer is Snap Map, a mode that allows you to create and share both multi- and single-player maps online. Tutorials walk you through the steps involved in creating a map, which is intuitive to begin with. Beyond ease-of-use, Snap Map will live or die through the creativeness of the community, which has already made a strong showing, delivering a range of maps that range from brutal to absurdly entertaining. More than multiplayer, Snap Map is the cherry on top of the new Doom.
But without a doubt, the loud and chaotic campaign is Doom's strongest component. It's straightforward and simple, but it serves its purpose: to thrust you into increasingly dire scenarios fueled by rage and the spirit of heavy metal. Many shooters chase the thrill Doom delivers, but few are as potent in their execution. It captures the essence of what made the classic Doom games touchstones of their day, and translates it to suit modern palates with impressively rendered hellscapes and a steady influx of tantalizing upgrades. Doom is the product of a tradition as old as shooters, and while it's not the model to follow in every case, modern shooters could learn a thing or two from Doom's honed and unadulterated identity.
Serenity and wonder fill my ears when I first open Stellaris. Pulling from the same lived-in future aesthetic of games like Mass Effect, Stellaris opens with an invitation. It wants you to explore, it wants you learn, to unearth secrets your galaxy has held for millennia. As I do, astral outlines and nebulae dot my galactic map. Carved out into large chunks are the cosmos' remaining empires. The Kalaxenen Order. The Sibulan Core Worlds. The Bruggan Consciousness. And my own nascent superpower--the Reaper Commonwealth.
We'd coexisted with our neighbors peacefully for centuries, but we were out of space and desperate for some breathing room. Our scientists yearned to comb through the rest of the galaxy's hyperspace lanes and long-forgotten ruins. And our priests were compelled to spread the will of the divine. So the galaxy erupted in war.
War always seemed to follow me in Stellaris. That's partly because it's hard to expand indefinitely without frustrating someone, but also because there's a few hitches hiding within the layers of Paradox Interactive's latest grand strategy game.
If you've ever played Civilization or any of its 4X descendants, you'll be familiar with Stellaris' basics. You helm a new civilization at the start of its journey. You can choose how they'll govern, what their guiding principles are, and how they'll develop technologically. If you choose to play alone, each of your opponents will have a randomly generated set of traits all their own- ranging from despotic fantastical pacifists to xenophobic materialists. Human players are just as likely to come up with creative personality combinations too. When you start a match, you're dipping your toes into an ocean of possibilities, eager to yield as your people explore and grow.
That principle is reflected in Stellaris' pacing. Before locking down your starting solar system and working to build out its infrastructure, you'll scour neighboring stars for potential colony sites and resources. Then move in with settlers and engineers to start exploiting virgin territory.
Along the way, you'll find all manner of long-lost technology, pre-industrial civilizations and other space-faring races. Each often comes with a "quest" line of sorts that develops into its own narrative thread. On one of my first planets, I discovered an advanced subterranean people. I had to decide upon a diplomatic strategy for them, whether I wanted to give them access to technology, and if I'd be willing to bail them out if they ran into trouble.
It was a small piece of Stellaris, but my relationship with these people became one of my most valued. In time, they paid me back for all the favors I'd done, and supported the empire at large. But even if they hadn't, I felt connected to them. I caught myself roleplaying my interactions with them, trying to live up to my empire's own benevolent spiritual collectivist beliefs. It's this kind of ongoing, deterministic narrative scaffolding that forms Stellaris' backbone. Where most other strategy titles are content to focus on conquest and victory, Stellaris wants its relationships and the story you weave as your people grow to be the focus.
That runs straight to the core of Stellaris, too. As you encounter new species, you'll be able to integrate them as citizens in your civilization. And you'll have to balance their prejudices and ideologies against those of your own citizens, decide whether they can vote, and even help them settle new planets that might be tough or inhospitable for your own race. These dynamics can have massive effects on intergalactic politics as well. If you enslave or purge (read: genocide) another race, other civilizations will remember your sins and hold centuries-long grudges.
If you catch yourself sandwiched between two stronger empires, you'll have a tough time of advancing the game without creating some powerful alliances or risking a costly war.
These dynamics start coming into play when you hit the mid-game. After you've got your basic group established, as your borders and those of your neighbors start grinding against one another, you'll have to find more creative ways to keep up the early game's strong momentum. If you're not careful, you can be boxed in by ancient and powerful civilizations. Grand strategy games often devolve into war at some point, but conflict with these giants is a quick path to eradication. Instead, it helps to build a multi-racial empire with several disconnected settlements. When one front stalls, you can push another and keep your populace moving so that there's always something to do and someone to manage. It also helps to play on a map with few other empires so you can grow a quite a bit before you start running into problems.
It's not easy, and it's a bit strange that you have to finagle the game into maintaining a solid pace, but those problems also stem from some of Stellaris' best decisions, even though they don't always work out the way they should. For example, research in Stellaris works quite a bit different than in most 4X games. There's no static tree you climb, moving from agriculture to calendars and then to crop rotation. Instead you'll receive several "cards" from a deck of possibilities. Some, like sapient artificial intelligence, are rarer than others and represent major leaps forward in tech that can also help you break away from the pack.
Others are weighted to show up more often to give everyone the same basic tools to start with. In theory, this keeps any one game from feeling too similar to any other. That works to a point, but it also means that you can pass up some critical piece of infrastructure tech and you might not see it for a while, or if you're unlucky, never again. It forces some tough decisions that, while engaging, don't always make sense. There doesn't seem to be any real reason that I have to lose out on colony ships for a better research facility. On balance, though it's a welcome change, and I got more out of it than I lost.
Stellaris is filled with intrigue and promise.
Technology plays into galactic diplomacy as well. Some hyper-advanced civilization may find your development pathetic and offer to bring you under their wing as a protectorate, giving you major bonuses to research and a benevolent overseer that can keep you safe from the big bullies on the block--or at least try. The catch here, is that if you develop past a certain point, you become your overlord's vassal. With that, they can, in time absorb your civilization completely. Or, you can request--and likely fight--for your independence, often at a time when their resources are spread thin with another war or even a recession.
It's here--with warfare and diplomacy--where Stellaris takes the most risks, and their payoffs can vary from match to match. Those with pacifistic civilizations might try to form strong bonds with others and form powerful peacemaking coalitions. Others will, no doubt, flex their muscles and conquer all the can. Bringing everything from psychic warriors and specially designed war ships to bear down on their foes. And while these two outlets for Stellaris' systems each work well on their own, their dependent upon so many of the game's other novelties that they don't fit together all the time.
Stellaris is strange in that it wants you to play on its terms, but within that you have amazing latitude.
The semi-random nature of research means that you won't always be able to guide your people to what they need. Plus, negotiating federations can be difficult when meeting new races depends upon you breaking out of your starting area--something that can sometimes be impossible if you're surrounded by super-hostile enemies. When it works, though, an alliance can help you leap ahead and match your elder rivals. Trade with someone who pities you can provide a massive influx of cash to fuel your economy, and, within short order you might have a diverse enough population to colonize a dozen or more extra planets. That, in turn, gives you more people to crew ships, drive research, and more complex internal politics to manage. But that's just it, it's based on chance. You can tilt things in your favor and increase the likelihood of a more exciting game, but that's never a solid guarantee.
Stellaris is strange in that it wants you to play on its terms, but within that you have amazing latitude. Its emphasis on exploration is exhilarating. It makes each run feel inviting and special. But that doesn't always hold. Some games run through to the end and hit all the right notes at all the right times. Others are best left running in the background as you crunch for better technology so you can break free of your narrow corner in the galaxy. This could be helped if you could sneak, or stealth ships through enemy territory to colonize far-flung worlds. Or, if you could have finer control of research. Or, if you could overwhelm enemy fleets with superior tactics, despite a massive technological disadvantage. Instead, you're at Stellaris' mercy. It is fortunate then, that more often than not Stellaris doesn't just work, it excels, but that makes its breaking points feel that much more agonizing because it wouldn't have taken much tweaking to smooth them out.
Soft Body is a playable kaleidoscope, an ever-changing symphony of motion, color, and sound. It's a mixture of different genres, combining the best aspects of bullet hell games, puzzle games, and Snake to create a challenging and mesmerizing experience.
You control two snakes that either move in unison or independently, dependent on the given level. The control inputs typically only require the left and right analog sticks. Using them, you guide snakes around a geometric landscape filled with angular enemies that emit waves of projectiles. You have to complete a collection of small objectives in order to beat each level, which usually involves moving a small ball or circular object around a maze, "painting" borders by touching or merely coming close enough to them, and destroying nearby enemies. The objectives remain simple and straightforward throughout, but the layout and challenges vastly differ from puzzle to puzzle. Despite their variance, none of the puzzles stray too far from Soft Body's established rule set, and each design features the similar visual stylings and effects while also introducing new colors and contrasts.
While minimal, Soft Body's controls can be disorienting, particularly when you have to control each snake independently. It is a game of trial and error, requiring precision and careful navigation. In its worst moments, some puzzles devolve into a series objectives with no apparent connective tissue, including levels with two maze-like objectives located at opposite corners of the screen and divided by a large barrier that needs to be "painted" in order to complete the level. The void in between each of these objectives was basically a minefield of projectiles and enemies that felt added in for sheer navigational challenge alone and gradually grew more tiresome. These moments are rare, but their design still comes across as haphazard when compared to more organized levels whose puzzles follow a more logical flow.
Tiny visual and aural flourishes breathe life into Soft Body's two-dimensional stages. When the snakes under your control come into contact with objects, particle effects spout onto the screen. When you complete your objectives, decorative background shapes spin and shake in excitement. These elements are enhanced by Soft Body's sound design, which is just as minimalist yet striking as the visuals, adding impact to each interaction between snakes and their environment. Every touch, hit, or movement around borders generates electronic chirps, and both the sights and sounds blend together to create a captivating, Zen-like experience.
Visual and aural flourishes breathe life into Soft Body's two-dimensional stages.
For such a bizarre, abstract game, Soft Body has a consistent visual language that communicates when and how enemies will act. Your foes take the forms of circles, squares, and triangles, each of which has a specific animation telegraphing its upcoming attacks. One circular "turret" latches its aim onto your snake and follows its movement for several seconds before the line representing its aim solidifies and the turret fires a projectile. Squares have a core that slowly swells toward the borders of the full shape, releasing a wave of deadly, circular projectiles once it reaches its edges. These enemies never break from Soft Body's established rule set and language, making it consistent to solve despite its ever-changing presentation.
Experimentation and identifying the reactions of the environment are essential to solving Soft Body's puzzles, since new elements are sprinkled in throughout, often without any explanation. In one level, I saw a triangular border surrounding an enemy inside. Despite not having seen triangles in the game prior to that point, I swam up alongside it and discovered I could paint it to be my color. This speaks to the strength of a well-designed puzzle game: when the rules are consistent and the challenge is set up around that core rule set, solving puzzles remains satisfying in the long run. Soft Body embraces that concept while refusing to limit itself to being one predictable string of levels.
Soft Body is captivating. It's the fish tank to my inner cat, a fascinating display of methodical movement, clever sound, and unusually satisfying puzzle solving. It's a minimalist, meditative arcade throwback whose simplicity sometimes backfires into chaotic design, but more frequently delivers challenging and beautiful puzzles.
In Tastee: Lethal Tactics, your plan is more important than the action that follows. It's a game of bets and bluffs, and if you telegraph your next move, you'll likely lose. Tastee doesn't always communicate its ideas effectively, and there are frustrating barriers to hurdle, but there's a tense, layered, turn-based strategy game waiting on the other side.
It all revolves around simultaneous turn-based combat in two phases. In the planning stage, you direct the stance, movement, vision cones, and attacks of four individual mercenaries fighting your opponents. In the action phase, you watch your plan unfold--all while the enemy does the same.
This forces you to think on several levels as you extract briefcases of money, defend control points, and eliminate enemy soldiers from an overhead view. You not only have to plan out your own attacks--you also need to consider the route your opponent might have in mind. So while your sniper may have one doorway covered, and your grenadier is ready to move around the corner of that building to get in position, this could all fall apart in the action phase if your opponent anticipated it. The resulting clashes are whiteknuckled displays of who saw the bigger picture in the planning phase.
This structure isn't new--Tastee borrows from games such as Frozen Synapse and Laser Defense Squad, which use similar phase-based combat systems that emphasize careful planning over reactionary tactics. As was the case in those titles, you spend most of your time in the planning stage, your squad members frozen in place, trying to think two steps ahead of the opponent. Facing another human exacerbates the tension of the missions. Tastee's AI performs well, but matches become cutthroat poker games when you can relate to, and exploit, another player's perspective.
Vision cones are essential to your battle plans.
Considering the numerous mechanical layers at play, and the nuance they display on each level, there's a steep learning curve to Tastee's combat. In fact, its tutorial only teaches the bare fundamentals of movement, aiming, and attacking before thrusting you onto the battlefield, either in multiplayer or the single-player missions. Because of Tastee's unforgiving difficulty--characters can die from only one bullet--most of your learning is based on trial and error. I spent almost two hours before I completed a mission without any casualties.
The 30 single-player missions focus loosely on a band of 12 misfit mercenaries fighting against the drug cartels in a desert wasteland. The story is sparse and and repetitive, and serves mainly to introduce new characters, complete with unique abilities to use on subsequent missions: flashbangs, door breaches, ricochet grenades, and enhanced sniper rifles, to name a few. They're some of the game's best aspects, as they create stronger attachments to their respective owners.
The loss of each soldier isn't permanent, but reverberates throughout the rest of your mission --losing a mercenary means losing a useful superpower, as it were. Augustus' Scout ability, for instance, lets you spot nearby enemies through the fog of war. If you can deduce which direction a soldier is running, and where he'll emerge from behind cover, you can set a sniper's sights on that exact spot. These abilities seem simple at first, but reveal deeper uses as you learn them.
There are numerous mechanical layers at play at any one moment.
Tastee's stellar map design is the catalyst for all of this planning and subsequent action. Missions span a variety of sandswept urban locales, from construction yards to abandoned shanty towns. Concrete walls funnel soldiers through choke points, wooden boards create complex sightlines, and low barriers provide opportunities for cover. The environments present a fine attention to detail, both in how they force your squad into precarious scenarios and how they allow you to master your surroundings. There's a sadistic thrill to circling your opponent's squad, eliminating them one by one, and setting up ambushes to stop their attempts at escape.
Maps can become something of a conundrum, however. Tastee's bigger arenas play host to numerous smaller encounters and nuanced skirmishes, lending a sense of cohesion to the separate huts, garages, and gas stations. The problem is, these bigger maps add to the confusion that sometimes rears its head in Tastee.
During the action phase, it's usually useful to zoom out from the map to see your overall plan unfolding. But the bigger the map, the less I understand the tactics of Tastee's world. There are more opportunities for distant snipers and random grenadiers to kill you on a whim. Often, I have no idea where I went wrong--what mistake sent things south. These sprawling locales are well designed in how they encourage tense individual encounters, but when they keep you at a distance from the action, it's hard to see what's happening on a minute level. The grasp I usually have on the tactical situation dissipates, leaving me confused.
Tastee's user interface doesn't do it any favors either. Instead of crowding the edges of the screen, characters' abilities and commands manifest in an arc above their heads. While this streamlines the process of selecting a mercenary, giving them a chain of commands, and setting waypoints throughout the map, it leads to several more frustrations. For one, characters' selection boxes often overlap. In close-quarters battles, it's often tough to target the wrong character. Secondly, cancelling commands or waypoints is laborious, forcing you to parse through tiny buttons on a small list for sometimes minutes on end, in an effort to finalize your plan.
Despite these annoyances, it's hard to deny the thrill of Tastee's firefights: moving your mercenaries into position, covering almost every sightline, worrying about that one you can't cover, and wincing as a shotgunner misses his target by a few inches--this is Tastee at its best.
Tastee is also clever in the way it disguises its systems in order to teach you through experience. It's an intelligent, difficult game with a high barrier of entry, and without patience, you might not see how great it can be. But once you see the layers hidden beneath the surface, Tastee Lethal Tactics becomes an intricate game of cutthroat poker. It just takes a bit of frustration to buy in.
The Magic Circle is another entry in the burgeoning but fascinating subgenre of games about the process of making games. Most games in that niche tend to aim small, often taking up the perspective of underdogs struggling to make tiny personal games in an industry filled with multimillion-dollar productions. The Magic Circle, on the other hand, aims big. It's the product of AAA veterans, evidenced by some impressive technical wizardry, but also by the tone and timbre of its commentary, which pointedly deconstructs the egos of business types that tend to rip creativity up by the roots during big-budget game development.
The titular Magic Circle, in-game, is an old-school series of text adventures whose reboot has been mired in development hell for years. It's finally beginning to take shape as a triple-A, first-person, Skyrim-like RPG, but the creative direction of the game is being split three ways. The game's original creator wants to go ambitious and artsy; the game's creative director just wants to push out a game that will actually sell in the current landscape; a scheming, passionate intern with the support of the series' fanbase wants to put out a game that's basically the original series, repackaged, and will do whatever it takes to see that happen.
In the middle of it all is you, a lowly tester, forced to play a constantly changing rudimentary build, all while watching the creators float around the landscape, squabbling over the game's minutiae. A playable demo is set to appear at a thinly-veiled version of E3 in mere days, and the creators are trying to push out something that will keep everybody happy, to virtually no avail. Their game is barely functional: the planned painterly landscape is still rendered mostly in black-and-white; creatures and objects lack proper behavorial programming; and the persistant remnants of a previous, cancelled build from the 32-bit era remain in place. One of the team's older testers, however, has decided to take action, and since you're the only player with boots on the virtual ground, he grants you access to a few developer tools. Your task is to explore the unfinished game world in hopes of finding a way to lock the actual developers out of the game and craft something playable out of the mess.
With the in-game creators calling the state of the unfinished build a disaster, the irony here is that it takes serious ambition and programming chops to render a game world like The Magic Circle, which has to come across as broken, lazy, and unfinished, but still functional enough to suit a playable fourth-wall breaking experiment. Despite a long initial load time, the fact that you can transition between three distinct aesthetics without so much as a stutter is truly impressive. But even then, not as impressive as the game's bread-and-butter mechanic: the developer tools.
You're given the ability to recode the attributes of any object or enemy in the game, changing the names, movement, attacks, AI, and elemental weaknesses/affinities. The number of possible combinations allows for a lot of creativity. If you want to strip some of the mean little dog-like enemies of all their powers so they wander around aimlessly, you can. If you want to give a stationary rock the ability to walk and set its "Ally" setting to yourself so you have a literal pet rock following you around, you can do that. If you want to arm a bunch of spider-like enemies with laser rifles and the ability to fly, that's also an option.
Remember this next time an E3 presentation glitches up on stage.
Most of the fun of The Magic Circle stems from the sheer joy of experimentation, solving the game's tricky environmental puzzles in an open-ended God Mode. That mandatory experimentation does have a tangible downside, though, as the game does a poor job of explaining how to weild your control over the world early on. There also a number of seemingly unintended technical issues. Reconfiguring attributes is a mechanic that feels like it would be far more suitable to control with a mouse and keyboard rather than a controller, as the UI for making edits can get terribly twitchy since the same button you use to jump is used to make selections on the edit screen. With automated characters getting stuck behind walls or turning invisible when there's too many onscreen, there are glitches that you have to contend with. But none of these complaints are enough to dilute the overall joy of flexing your creativity as a virtual developer. Most of the games of this ilk tend to settle for being rather linear interactive narratives. The game is better for executing something new and distinctly enjoyable in how it ties its gameplay and story together.
The only major disappointment is that there's not enough of either. Only about half of the game is built around exploration and the edit function, though an extended climax does something unexpectedly magical with the idea. But even if you get meticulous about the endgame, The Magic Circle is on the short side, and just when the game truly settles into a groove, the narrative kicks into high gear and your time with the development tools is stripped away.
If only this was a menu for people.
Thankfully, the narrative is well-crafted, often funny, and salient about how much strife goes into even the smallest decision about a game's design. The game's storytelling apex is a five minute rant by the in-game Magic Circle's creator about the impossible expectations of the industry, presented through an ingenius interactive gambit. There's irony in the fact that the actual game's greatest idea is eventually overtaken by an overambitious story, especially considering that one of the characters argues that the game's audience doesn't care about story to begin with.
It's hard to definitively say if The Magic Circle succesfully achieves its high-minded aims. Those expecting to play around with the physics of an open video game world will find themselves lamenting the lack of control and additional objectives after a short period of time, and those wanting nothing more than to find out where the narrative goes will be discouraged by how frustrating the gameplay can occasionally be. The essence of The Magic Circle is somewhere in between. As a piece of work meant to comment on modern game design, it's wholly successful at creating a scenario perfectly illustrating just how Herculean a task it is for developers trying to create a game with a perfect balance.
Housemarque has produced action games with an old school pedigree for years, but Alienation may be its most intense release yet. The epitome of the retro-style, overhead four-player shooter done up with new school technology, this is a game that clearly shows off the developer's skills at crafting intense action experiences. Alienation isn't that far removed from Housemarque's Dead Nation; the aliens you fight here frequently move in a zombie-like fashion. The overhead, isometric perspective and focus on team-based survival feel very familiar, too. However: the devil is in the details. There's a decided focus on refinement over Housemarque's past games in Alienation.
The world has been overrun by aliens, much of the population has either been killed or mutated, and the only hope for turning the tide rests upon a squad of four heavily modified soldiers. Levels have plenty of space to explore, with mission objectives that force you to scour maps from end to end. Exploring the game's side pockets and out of the way places is a rewarding pursuit, with items, weapons, and currency in abundance, allowing you to level up both your soldier and weapons in an RPG-like fashion.
There are three distinct classes to choose from before you get started, each offering a different style of gameplay. The tank is just what you'd expect—big, bulky, and tough. He can generate shields and unleash massive bursts of energy for special attacks. At first, the saboteur seems like an odd choice for a decidedly non-stealth focused game, but he ultimately proves to be a valuable asset during coop. They can turn invisible and sneak past aliens, double dash, and unleash a devastating aerial bombing attack. Lastly, the bio-specialist is a valuable assist character that can heal teammates and choke enemies with clouds of poison. Alienation's three classes compliment each other well on a full team, with the tank taking the direct approach and shielding his teammates, while the saboteur handles outliers quickly, and the bio-specialist backs them up with healing and the poison cloud attacks that whittles enemies down.
All three offer a range of upgrade options; every ability has an upgrade path with sub-choices that can be switched on the fly. You might opt for a slightly faster recharge rate for a special attack, or slightly more attack damage. As you progress, new weapons can be picked up from fallen enemies or scattered crates. When you acquire a new weapon, you can either equip or salvage it. Salvaging weapons rather oddly lets you "re-roll" the stats of your guns, so you can potentially get them powered up without actively adding upgrades to them.
Housemarque's talent for delivering exceptional gunplay is on full display.
There are shiny "cores" to pick up too, which allow you to increase the power levels of guns—everything from damage to clip size is modifiable. Since you can upgrade on the fly, the results of any re-roll or upgrade to your character or weapon are immediately noticeable, adding a huge boost of instant gratification to the leveling system. Each player's loadout consists of three weapons—a primary, secondary, and heavy. In addition, there's a grenade slot that recharges after each use and can include mines and a boomerang, among other destructive toys. Housemarque's talent for delivering exceptional gunplay is on full display; the shotgun has a satisfying oomph and the flamethrower's chaotic fountain of fire is a joy to unleash.
It's probably time to panic.Welcome to Alaska. Slay a while!
Starting off in Alaska, Alienation moves you to places like Brazil, Russia, and onto alien ships. Depending on the number of players, difficulty level, and specific map, its 20 missions can each take anywhere from 20-30 minutes to nearly an hour each.
You're given a variety of 'go here, scan this, kill that' type of objectives within each mission, but the appearance of random events helps mix things up--sudden boss battles or a horde of aliens can appear at a moment's notice. These random events get deeper the farther you go and beating the game introduces new gameplay elements like special assignments, alien hideouts, mysterious artifacts, and other goodies. These extras do a great job of incentivizing you to dive back in.
Though you can play Alienation on your own, it's absolutely focused on its online multiplayer. Levels get blisteringly hard after a while, even with a full team, and coordinated attacks can be a near-necessity later in the game. There are respawn points spread throughout the map where dead characters will respawn. Yet, the game is almost sadistic in its respawning of aliens. Dying means having to plow through whatever lost ground you suffered, which will be completely repopulated--frequently with more and tougher aliens.
Alienation is a refined and intense shooter that looks and sounds great, and offers fantastically chaotic and violent action.
There are a couple odd bits of frustration though. For one, Alienation only supports online multiplayer--local co-op has yet to be implemented. Another annoyance is that, even when playing alone, you can't actually pause the game. Finally, Vita owners will find that the control scheme requires a lot of tweaking to be playable on the small screen.
Alienation is a refined and intense shooter that looks and sounds great, and offers fantastically chaotic and violent action. While the game sometimes feels a little too eager to kill players and lacks local play, with a full troop online, it's easily one of the best all-out action multiplayer games in recent memory.
Galak-Z is a game of tense moments and heavy decisions. Its first expansion The Void, to its detriment, is one long adrenaline rush from start to finish. Galak-Z's frenetic core mechanics are intact, but The Void has sacrificed much of what makes the game so great in the first place.
The Void's main focus is its score attack mode. It thrusts you into the titular abyss as you fight through familiar enemies such as space bugs, pirates, and mercenaries, all in the interest of increasing your standing in online leaderboards. There is no actual end--as long as you survive, you continue.
Galak-Z's Newtonian physics-based combat is still very much at play here. You can strafe, reverse, boost, and leap around groups of enemies within zero-gravity environments, and as is the case with the base game, these mechanics feel fantastic. There's a rough learning curve, but once you master your ship's weapons and thrusters--as well as its alternate mech form--the nuance of each skirmish creates an intricate kind of chaos. It combines tension and dynamism to form something exhilarating.
The expansion's arenas are much more confined than those of the original Galak-Z, which encourage exploration through the innards of asteroids and abandoned space vessels. The Void's new linear locales are bordered on either side by a torrent of purple energy that's damaging to the touch--they create a more cramped feeling, and another layer of danger in this already uninviting world. They increase the need for spatial awareness in more ways than one, however. Not only do you want to avoid them--you can push unsuspecting enemies into the flames along the way.
The Void throws some of Galak-Z's toughest enemies at you.
To further deviate from the base game's design, The Void offers a daily challenge with a specific set of ship upgrades and a preset level layout. By dictating which enhancements you'll have access to, and creating a level playing field for anyone attempting the mission, The Void lures you out of your comfort zone. One of these events focused on mech upgrades. As someone who usually focuses on ship combat, I felt more exposed, and more vulnerable, than ever before.
And Galak-Z's structure is its defining trait. While many modern roguelikes always return you to the beginning upon death, Galak-Z allows for checkpoints at the end of each "season." That is, if you complete five missions in a row, you complete that season and unlock the next one. But die before you finish that chain of victories and you'll lose everything except your ship's upgrade blueprints.
The Void delivers a fun new take on Galak-Z's formula, but relinquishes its exceptional structure.
The Void, on the other hand, fails to deliver the same thrills its base game does. It offers a fun new take on the Galak-Z formula, but relinquishes its exceptional structure, and the engaging risk/reward system it creates.
With the increased focus on score there's less of a compelling emphasis on survival. In its original form, Galak-Z isn't afraid to confront you with tough choices: should you venture off the beaten path in search of ship upgrades, or boost for the exit just to reach a checkpoint? Should you sneak by this group of enemies to maintain your health, or destroy them for currency, and increased survivability down the road? Galak-Z is exciting in the way it uses survival to drive its every aspect. The Void, though, is driven by leaderboard ranks.
The Void focuses on prolonged tension, rather than peaks and valleys.
Strategic long term thinking isn't completely absent in the expansion--more upgrades means better combat abilities in later chapters, and therefore, more points. But in basing The Void largely on score-chasing, it removes the weight of my decisions, which used to be the main thing between me and permanent defeat. I stop to consider my options much less frequently now.
Despite my complaints, it's hard to deny the sheer thrill of The Void: careening through space, leaping over a giant bug, and firing my last missile into a group of pirates before I speed toward the mission's evacuation point. The expansion may take a less engaging approach to survival, but it's still a frantic, intricate display of movement and reaction. The Void attempts to break ground of its own, and in some ways, it has. But the end result is weaker than the foundation it's built upon.
For a game with so many strong personalities, Battleborn somehow lacks a cohesive identity. Every facet from the characters to the progression to the visual presentation feels overloaded with ideas--some good, some bad, some just confusing. Because it throws so much against the wall, the end result is a scattered grabbag of manic gameplay, complex leveling, and cartoony humor. It vacillates wildly between excitement and predictability, innovation and routine, inspiration and incomprehensibility. In short, Battleborn is fun but messy, and while I appreciate its hyper-stimulating approach, parsing the experience underneath can be maddeningly tricky.
The best example of Battleborn's deep-seated identity crisis is its massive 25-character roster. Though technically a first-person shooter, the game's heroes utilize all sorts of preset weapons, abilities, and roles that pull from every influence imaginable. There's a longbow-wielding wood elf, a penguin piloting a mech suit, a cybernetically-enhanced luchador--the list goes on. Impressively, even characters that seem superficially similar inevitably offer something unique that makes their gameplay memorable and enjoyable--be it a particularly powerful super or simply a higher than average movement speed.
This mechanical variety is not only remarkable, it also drives Battleborn's longevity. Where other game's dole out new tools or gear as you progress, Battleborn builds these unlocks into entirely new characters. You'll unlock new heroes steadily and without much conscious effort, so you'll generally have one or two new options by the time you've outgrown your current character. Unfortunately, you might outgrow them more quickly than you'd expect. Testing out a new hero for the first time can feel a bit overwhelming since some abilities' specific requirements and effects aren't super apparent, but as soon as you overcome this initial teething period, each heroes' gameplay loop starts to grow routine.
This is, in part, a symptom of Battleborn's approach to action: its gameplay is fast and frantic, but also light and loose. Forgiving design choices like infinite sprint and ammo, no fall damage, and the ability to reload while sprinting encourage players to move and shoot rather than stop and think. As a result, I found I generally just had to spam the primary attack button, trigger my special abilities whenever possible, and occasionally retreat to let my shields recharge.
This is especially true during the cooperative campaign, which consists of eight loosely connected missions that feel more like Destiny's Strikes than a carefully crafted, narrative-driven story mode. Enemies are, for the most part, brainless and predictable; cutting them down in droves can feel empowering, but it also underscores the repetitive, simplistic nature of the baseline combat. It's also somewhat frustrating that all eight missions repeatedly remix the same three scenarios: defend the asset, escort the robot, and kill the boss.
Thankfully, you can read all about your character's abilities before diving in. It's a bit tedious but definitely helpful.
Thanks to the variety of the characters and frenetic energy of the combat, however, Battleborn can still end up being a blast. Sure, the moment to moment gameplay feels superficial, but when your five-man squad is getting absolutely swarmed and you've already sunk 45 minutes into a mission and you've run out of respawns, the tension and chaos combine to form a powerful engine of fun. Plus, as you get deeper into the campaign, a discernable difficulty arc emerges and helps give the whole affair some much needed momentum. A word of warning, though: if you're playing alone, you won't have much fun. Without other players, combat becomes a slog and certain objectives become nearly impossible. But hey, at least there's split-screen co-op and streamlined matchmaking.
Outside of the eight campaign missions, Battleborn offers three competitive multiplayer modes, and here the gameplay develops a slightly more strategic sheen. Unlike the mindless fodder you fight in the campaign, multiplayer pits heroes against heroes, which forces you to approach combat more thoughtfully. If you're playing a melee character, for example, charging directly at your opponents is suddenly way more dangerous, so you're forced to seek advantageous positions and strike judiciously. Healers and support characters also become more crucial; team composition can occasionally turn a match's outcome into a forgone conclusion, so choose wisely or suffer humiliation.
The modes themselves add an extra layer of strategy as well. Meltdown, for example, requires both teams to guide minions to designated grinders. The more robots reach the grinder, the more points that team scores. This and the somewhat similar Incursion mode borrow MOBA elements to create setups that emphasize objectives over kills. In practice, this equates to action that's less chaotic but far more involving than anything in the campaign, and the combination of distinct characters and MOBA-inspired objectives makes Battleborn's multiplayer feel genuinely fresh.
For some reason, the characters you're introduced to first are also the characters you unlock last, which feels...odd.
This component is by no means flawless, however. The added strategic depth helps but doesn't eliminate the simplicity of the core gameplay, but more importantly, there's not quite enough content to make Battleborn feel totally substantial. The three modes offer just two maps apiece, and while that's not unusual for a MOBA, it's awfully light for a shooter--especially one with a relatively short, unadorned campaign. The game's also missing certain amenities like killcams, and for some reason, you can't simply vote on a new map when a match concludes. Your team is automatically dissolved and you're booted to the home screen every time, which is especially troubling given the game's team-based nature.
There's also an issue with Battleborn's in-match leveling system. The game features several forms of experience and progression--including individual character leveling, unlockable gear, and an overall "Command" rank--but the most impactful system is the on-the-fly leveling that occurs within each mission and match (another concept swiped from MOBAs). In essence, every character has a unique 10-tier skill tree. Each tier contains two mutually exclusive upgrades. As players earn XP while playing, they'll gradually work their up the tree until one skill at each tier is unlocked. At the end of the match or mission, the tree resets.
In the campaign, this system works remarkably well. I never felt hindered starting at zero, but I was always glad to have all my fully leveled abilities back by the end. Many of those upgrades only marginally improve the effectiveness of an existing ability, but others tangibly impact the character's playstyle, and all of them lend a sense of escalation to every mission. In the competitive multiplayer, however, this system can unfairly stack the odds against players who actually need the most help. The better you play, the faster you're able to progress through the leveling tree, which of course makes you even more powerful. This generally isn't an issue in close matches, but when a round starts to get away from you, it can snowball into a lopsided thrashing that gets less and less fun for the losing side.
While it may not be as important as the progression system or multiplayer modes, it's worth noting that Battleborn's writing is, by and large, excellent. The humor can occasionally produce forced, cringeworthy lines, but far more often, it's goofy, witty, and endearing, with a distinct voice that should be immediately recognizable for Borderlands fans. It won't appeal to everyone's tastes, but anyone can appreciate the deep well of one-liners that flavor both the campaign and, surprisingly, the competitive multiplayer. And while there isn't much of a narrative to speak of, the stylized cinematics that bookend the campaign are pretty spectacular.
Battleborn's strong Saturday morning cartoon vibes might actually be the game's single most defining aspect. Outside of that consistent, permeating voice, the game feels like an elaborate patchwork of ideas that compete for attention without necessarily adding much to the experience. The combat is frantic and tense, but often feels samey and superficial. The in-match leveling works wonderfully in the campaign, but can become problematic in multiplayer. The varied cast of heroes adds longevity, but the game still feels relatively content light. With so many moving parts that never quite gel, I found plenty of things to love but just as much to feel confused by and ambivalent about.
Chronos is a game about combat mastery. Hostile encounters lead you through its world, separated only by puzzles and moments of discovery. Understanding your enemies and overcoming them is key to moving forward, while death acts as the teacher that keeps you after class to discuss what you did wrong. Some foes can prove highly difficult, but learning their patterns and how they react to your actions turns such encounters from stilted and daunting to rhythmic and exhilarating. Chronos could be accused of mimicking a number of different games, but what it does with all it has makes for a highly enjoyable experience that stands on its own despite a few flaws.
A third-person action-adventure game, Chronos puts you in control of an 18 year old character, and every time you die and respawn, you age a year. With aging comes changes to your character. While you're young, there's a bigger emphasis on your strength, agility, and vitality stats, but that wanes as you grow older--your arcane stat becomes more significant, as your other three stats grow at a slower rate. Starting at age 20, you earn a trait every 10 years that grants you a significant stat boost in either strength, agility, arcane, or vitality. Getting older is just as scary as it is in real life, so staying alive feels paramount to staying strong and healthy; thankfully, it's not quite as dire as that since I felt like I needed to restart because I had gotten too old--you don't lose any of the points you assign after leveling up.
VR lends an incredible sense of scale to Chronos' world and enemies.
Your options in combat consist of attacking, dodging, and blocking. Your weapon of choice should correspond to where you're putting your skill points; if you use a sword, you'll benefit from more agility, while an axe will become more powerful with a higher strength stat. It's unfortunate that there are more strength-oriented weapons earlier in the game, as I only got a chance to switch up my sword for a worthwhile weapon when I was deep into the second half of my playthrough.
Arcane is Chronos's form of magic, though it acts less like what you'd expect and more like a power attack. However, this isn't a bad thing, as executing arcane-infused attacks is incredibly satisfying. When you get the first arcane stone, it adds a little extra kick to your heavy attacks. Additionally, your attacks become infused with the arcane magic when you dodge at the right time, further enhancing the satisfying rhythm of combat.
Puzzle solutions range from finding and combining the right items to spotting hidden points of interest in the environment. The former works every time, however, the puzzles that require a keen eye can be a pain; an early puzzle that required me to notice a relatively small detail had me stumped for quite a while. The solution consisted of looking intently at something I wasn't yet able to interact with, so I just brushed it off as something I would deal with later. Eventually, after going through every room and tinkering with every little thing a couple times, I discovered the solution and was able to progress--it was a frustrating bump in what was and would continue to be an engaging adventure.
The story revolves around three different worlds, defeating three bosses, and then slaying a dragon. There's more to it, and it even (sort of) explains why you age a year every time you die; however, it's all delivered through computer terminals, books, and other optional articles. It's not the most exciting or interesting narrative, and you won't feel lost or confused if you choose to ignore it--the sparse narrative acts more as a world-building device than anything else. Chronos allows itself to be all about the combat, puzzle-solving, and adventure.
Initially, Chronos didn't strike me as something that would make much sense in virtual reality. However, as I played, my mind was quickly changed. Chronos made things you wouldn't even think about in a non-VR game stand out in effective ways. Gigantic enemies feel huge and made my palms sweat more than I'd like to admit, and there's a type of enemy that only moves when you don't look at it--not your character, you. These seemingly small touches make a big impact when playing in VR.
Chronos made things you wouldn't even think about in a non-VR game stand out in effective ways.
Chronos is played at a fixed camera angle that shifts as you explore the world, similar to classic Resident Evil games. In one room you'll be positioned on top of a table, while in the next you could be looking down on your character from a ceiling corner. This method allows for great scene composition, adding to Chronos' already foreboding atmosphere in an awesome way. One particular moment sets a creepy mood as you--the viewer--are put behind the bars of a prison cell, watching your character move about on the other side. This approach is a defining element of Chronos, and it's a boon the majority of the time, but it proves problematic on occasion when you have to judge the location of pitfalls from an ill-fitting perspective. Enemies can also get in your way and obstruct your view, and while this is a rare occurrence, it plagues your encounter with the last boss, who's otherwise frustrating. It's a disappointing bookend to what is otherwise a game filled with fantastic enemies and rewarding combat.
Chronos' flaws are obvious, but thankfully few and far between. When you push your way through its more annoying aspects, it welcomes you with enticingly grim set pieces and tense encounters. It's a highly-rewarding game that proves you can leverage VR to enhance traditional games, but Chronos doesn't use it as a crutch; it stands tall all on its own.
"We receive the due reward of our deeds." So reads the inscription on an artifact discovered in the early hours of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. It's a passage from the Bible, spoken by Saint Dismas, a man crucified on the same day as Jesus. He spent years robbing and murdering innocent people before being sentenced to death for his crimes. And with those last words of revelation, Dismas earned the title of the Penitent Thief.
This anecdote sets the tone for a powerful game about loss, betrayal, regret, and redemption. In both its momentous set pieces and its intimate, personal moments, Uncharted 4 drives its narrative forward with a rare understanding of its characters, its world, and the gameplay tying them all together. It's a stunning combination of disparate parts. It's a breathtaking marvel of a game.
By this point in the series, developer Naughty Dog has led us across the globe in search of famous treasures from equally famous legends: we unearthed El Dorado in the Amazon rainforest, found the Cintamani Stone deep in the Himalayas, and entered Iram of the Pillars, a sandswept city with a religious history of its own. In Uncharted 4, however, we find protagonist Nathan Drake leading a quiet life with freelance journalist Elena Fisher, who happens to be his wife. They live in New Orleans. They have a three-bedroom house. They play video games together.
But this all changes with the return of Nathan's older brother Sam, who was presumed dead for 15 years. Not only is he alive and well, but he's fallen in with criminals, and needs help paying a debt. He also has a lead on one of history's greatest treasures: the loot of the pirate Henry Avery, which the brothers have sought since their early days of treasure hunting. Now, with Nathan forced out of his calm life, they set off to chase their elusive white whale.
Elena and Nathan are leading a quiet life at the beginning of Uncharted 4.
Sam's arrival not only upends Nathan's newfound domestication, but complicates his emotional life as well. Uncharted 4 gives us insight into his past, and the way it shaped his psyche: how he despises authority; how he uses humor as a shield; how he long ago accepted violence as a justifiable means to an end. Uncharted 4 tells this story with affection, showing an expert attention to detail in the way Nathan's voice falters when discussing his childhood, or how he stares at Elena when she's not looking. These details are painfully human. They bring the characters to life.
This nuanced take on Nathan's personality is reflected in Uncharted 4's gameplay, too. As with previous titles, Uncharted 4 revolves around third-person combat, climbing, and puzzle-solving. But, unlike its predecessors, this game often lets you sneak past enemy soldiers without doing any harm at all. This is a clear influence from The Last of Us, developer Naughty Dog's darker take on a third-person adventure. Stealth requires a patient, measured approach--but it feeds into the idea of a more reserved Nathan. Uncharted 4's action flows seamlessly alongside its narrative. It's a fluid, believable experience when it all comes together.
There are minor mechanical problems: the cover mechanic can send you to the wrong obstacle or wall in the middle of firefights, and rarely, Nathan will grab the wrong ledge when climbing. But these observations wash away within the grand scheme of things. There's always something incredible around the corner to erase the momentary annoyances.
Uncharted 4's action flows seamlessly along with its narrative.
The game borrows from The Last of Us in terms of structure as well. Much like its cousin, Uncharted 4 embraces a more open approach with much of its level design. There are small sandboxes where you climb towers, learn the layout, mark enemies, and choose to fight through them, or circumvent the group in the interest of a quiet escape. These areas would hurt the pace of a lesser game, but Uncharted 4 keeps tension alive even in its calculated moments, transitioning from open areas to action sequences without halting the momentum.
Speaking of: Uncharted 4's set-pieces are the best in the series, and among the best-coordinated stunts in the medium. There's a heist in Tuscany. There's an acrobatic escape along the cliffs of Scotland. There's a chase through a busy marketplace, and it opens onto farmland as you leap between trucks, slide through the mud, and crash through shacks in the Madagascar countryside. Just when you think Uncharted 4 might settle into a steady rhythm, it throws something new at you with high velocity and incredible power.
One of the game's massive puzzles.
These sequences give you agency, but also enough guidance to maintain the euphoric rush of a car chase without constantly dying. I'm reminded of Half-Life 2's escape from City 17, where you sprint through apartments and over rooftops, controlling your character while the game directs you without sacrificing tension in the process.
The key difference with Uncharted 4 is how it directs you with its camera and lighting, guiding you to the correct ledge or doorway or crumbling wall as you leap through explosions and plumes of smoke. Audio cues also aid you--characters shout over the din of gunfire, telling you when to fight and when to keep running. The dialogue makes sense within the moment.
And then there's the presentation of it all. The cinematography, both in-game and during cutscenes, amplifies the wonder of this gorgeous world. It's not enough to call the jungles lush. They're vibrant. It's not enough to call the game's version of Scotland vast. It's majestic. There's also incredible animation at play, and it sets a new watermark for games in the way it can illustrate subtle emotions like distrust and yearning.
Sweeping camera shots and intimate close-ups tie the characters to the beautiful locales, as Drake gazes toward mythical places he only dreamed of as a kid. Uncharted 4 doesn't root its visuals in the hues of realism, but rather, paints the world as it might look to someone intent on exploring every inch of it--someone intoxicated by the prospect of adventure.
Uncharted 4's cinematography, both in cutscenes and out, amplifies the wonder of its gorgeous world.
Uncharted 4's multiplayer, though, ditches grounded storytelling in favor of all-out chaos: Nathan Drake clones swing from grappling hooks. Victor Sullivans pistol-whip each other. The villains of past Uncharted games lob grenades and fire RPGs and beat one another into a pulp.
This all plays out in multiplayer mode staples such as team deathmatch and zone control. But then there are Mysticals--attacks that make use of the artifacts we've become familiar with throughout the series. El Dorado summons aggressive spectres to attack your foes, the Cintamani Stone revives fallen teammates, and the Djinn lets you teleport short distances, blinking from spot to spot for a tactical advantage. In addition to these fantastical elements, you can earn gold through kills and revives, and find it scattered across multiplayer maps. It lets you add Mysticals to your inventory, but also lets you summon AI snipers and medics to aid your team's efforts. Uncharted 4's multiplayer exhibits the necessary creativity to elevate its already fluid third-person mechanics.
But although the multiplayer works well, and features a progression system that can keep you playing past your first few matches, it is not the primary draw.
The world is bathed in vibrant hues and gorgeous detail.
The draw of Uncharted 4 is its remarkable single-player journey. How each of its parts feeds into the same cohesive whole. This is a narrative that continues in its gameplay, as Nathan places a reassuring hand on his brother's shoulder, or mutters a joke in Elena's ear. Uncharted 4 is so meticulous, you get the sense that its characters are thinking things we'll never hear out loud. "We have a lot of ground to cover," one person says. Is that in reference to the journey, or the first uncertain step toward forgiveness? We can read it however we want.
Uncharted 4's gameplay pushes the narrative forward, the narrative feeds off its gameplay, and every detail coalesces to create something bigger. Uncharted 4 bounces between set pieces and personal moments with such grace, with such skill and poise and affection for its characters, that you don't mind when the guns stop firing, and the smoke clears, and Nathan gets a moment to breathe.
Yes, this is a thrilling adventure through exotic locations, with spectacular action sequences and a pacing that pulls you through with ease. I had a smile on my face the second it began. But it's also a story about family. It's a story about self-examination. It's a story about making sacrifices for the ones you care about.
And most of all, as its final moments make clear, this is a story about storytelling--the importance we lend our idols, legends, and myths. How we pass down the ones that inspire us. How an old photo of three friends sitting on a pile of gold can unleash a flood of memories. Uncharted 4 is a challenge to the medium. In its writing, in its design, in its understanding of what makes games unique, Uncharted 4 is something to aspire to. It's a shining example. And we'll be talking about it for years to come.
How amazing that a turn-based game can feel so urgent. In invisible, Inc., I have as much time as I need to position my agents just so, but I'm always paying attention to the security level at the top right of my screen. That meter tells you when security will be heightened during your heist, and it's a vital part of what makes this stealth game worth the gray hairs it causes.
It's tense and challenging, yes, but Invisible Inc. is also simple, elegant, and always logical. It introduces new concepts in a slow drip, giving you plenty of time to work out the details. The titular spy agency is violently infiltrated, initiating a time-sensitive series of global heists and sneakabouts, each of which you control from an isometric perspective in the style of strategy games like XCOM. You begin with a duo but steadily add imprisoned agents to your roster as you spring them from holding cells. Ultimately, you take up to four agents on missions, which typically involve obtaining sensitive data from a terminal, grabbing ill-gotten credits, and hightailing it out of there.
Who needs trophies, when stealthy success serves as its own reward?
Of course, it's rarely that simple. There is the draw of credits, for one, which you spend on leveling up your agents' skills as well as on gadgets like weapons (both ranged and melee), augments (implants that offer passive bonuses), and other useful objects. Ranged weapons don't come with unlimited ammo--they must be recharged with a one-use charger when they go empty--and agents you rescue don't have weaponry on them. Other mechanics further complicate your economic considerations; needless to say, credits are highly valuable, and while you could engage in a straightforward infiltration, safes and terminals lure you from one room to the next. They have gravity, and escaping it requires superhuman resolve.
But that pesky security meter is always climbing. When it arrives at the next level, security cameras that you hacked into might reset, or additional guards may be deployed. With every agent action, you must weigh a number of possible consequences, each of which is informed by multiple factors. You order Agent Prism next to a door and peek through it to reveal a patrolling guard. If she were closer, you could predict the guard's route for the next turn, but that's just not working out. Do you open the door and risk alerting the guard so you can set up an ambush? And what about that security camera in there? Do you activate Agent Decker's stealth rig and send him in knowing that the rig has a six-turn cooldown, or do you use your portable AI program Incognita to hack the security camera but use up all of your power resource in the process? You need power to fire your weapons and hack terminals, so this isn't a decision to take lightly.
The game lets you adjust all sorts of variables before beginning a new campaign. Here's a time attack variant.
Easier difficulty levels give you a limited number of chances to rewind a turn if you don't care for the outcome, and the easiest difficulty also lets you restart a mission if it goes awry, albeit with a new procedurally-generated layout. Losing progress with a rewind or a restart feels like its own kind of failure, and this negative reinforcement ensures that even easy mode can be stressful, even when you know you can call backsies.
Should you lose any agents, they're gone from the current campaign for good, unless you revive them with medigel. This requires not only having the healing kit on hand, but maneuvering another agent into a potentially disastrous situation. Brilliantly, however, your downed agent may be taken alive by the mysterious enemy organization, which leads to a jailbreak mission. The captured agent may represent an acceptable loss: you have a limited number of in-game hours before the final mission is initiated. Feel free to let Agent Decker languish in his cell; you've got to think about the greater good (if money and revenge can be considered the greater good, anyway.)
You might be more inclined to rescue a captured agent--or to mourn her if she bleeds out during the heist--if you've developed a connection with her. Unit perma-death is another mechanic that invites comparisons between Invisible, Inc. and XCOM, but I was never attached to any given agent. There's a little flavor dialogue between agents here and there, but it's too brief and sporadic to engender any emotional response.
Central is married to her work.
The cool-future visuals and angular character designs are decisively slick, but the vaults and offices you infiltrate look more or less the same as you progress. You know you're in Australia or Brazil, but there's no audiovisual hook to remind you of the international stakes. Strolling guards always mutter the same handful of bland responses when alerted, and the tilesets don't evoke the locale. In Invisible, Inc., I regretted losing agents not because I mourned the loss of a comrade I'd trained and groomed, but because I'd lost a flesh-and-bones tool from my toolbox.
Nonetheless, this emotional distance is merely a minor issue. I don't care much about Invisible Inc.'s throwaway story and its last-minute grasps at meaningful themes, or about my agents' personal backgrounds. Like the game, my efforts are focused on getting the job done, emotionally disengaged but intellectually centered. I bask in the stylish cutscenes and the sharp voiceover, but my attachment is not to the agency or its people but to the sheer pleasure of a successful heist.
At their heart, adventure games are about delivering a narrative. They're mechanically simple. At their most complex, they offer puzzles that give the player some agency in the world, and slow their progression so they don't just blast through the narrative content. This means that in order to be successful, adventure games need to precisely execute on the few attributes they offer. There isn't anywhere for developers to hide weakness or inexperience.
First-person adventure games have received a lot of attention over the last couple of years. Releases like Firewatch, Gone Home, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter deliver strong, emotional narratives through high quality writing and environmental design, with artfully crafted atmosphere.
The recently released P.O.L.L.E.N (or Pollen for short) by Mindfield Games fails in this regard.
Retrofuturistic.
Pollen tells the story of a nameless protagonist sent to Saturn's moon, Titan, to investigate a corporately-controlled research base studying something called "The Entity." The game opens with you sitting in a dark room at a retro-futuristic computer terminal. A robotic voice asks you to answer a series of personality test questions, each answer causing another row of pips to be added to a punch card produced by the computer. The scene quickly establishes the corporation, Rama Industries, as large and powerful enough to ask entirely unreasonable things of its employees, dressing the requests as boons or favors handed down to the "lucky" employee.
The introduction then moves to the interior of a lander craft on approach to Titan. Over the intercom comes the voice of a Rama Industries representative from HQ, reciting a well-rehearsed schpiel detailing the mission. Their tone artificially jovial, at odds with the perilous activity of hurtling toward the ground. After a successful landing, you head to a nearby comms array in order to make contact with the ground team, who seem surprised by the arrival. As they begin to explain why, the Rama rep's voice returns, drowning out the details with extraneous mission parameters. Immediately you're taught that something is amiss on Titan, and this ominous obfuscation of the details cleverly makes you aware that Rama would prefer for you to remain in the dark.
Pollen's atmospheric introduction sets the tone for the rest of the game beautifully, but what follows fails to live up to its example. From there you're asked to explore the research base, to investigate and uncover what's really going on. All exposition is delivered via audio logs, cassette tapes found throughout the environment. Audio logs are a tired expository method, made even more frustrating in this instance by forcing the player to stand still next to immovable cassette players in order to listen to them.
Thankfully, you can tweak that stick to speed-up playback
You don't encounter any other humans during Pollen--all exposition is delivered via disembodied voices. This is a limitation that other games have used to great effect. But in Pollen, it feels counterproductive. You quickly discover that The Entity is causing people at the research base to go insane, and to kill themselves and/or one-another. You only ever discover remnants of these encounters, meaning that your level of patience and attention to detail will determine whether or not you fully comprehend what had happened. Without ever witnessing the effects of The Entity first-hand, the impact of Pollen's premise is greatly diminished.
Pollen's primary interactive mechanic is an unexplained phenomenon which allows you to travel between two alternate versions of the research base. You can leap forward into the future, to sometime after the Entity's effects have reduced the crew to a single mourning scientist. This allows you to transition between timelines in order to solve traversal puzzles, such as bypassing otherwise locked doors by moving into the dilapidated future, or returning to the past to bypass debris. This mechanic is a neat departure from simply traversing a static environment. It's still clearly a linear experience, but changing timelines provides the illusion of a more complex path. An explanation of the how and why of the ability however, is strangely absent.
As the game's two to three hours wind on, three separate methods for destroying The Entity are teased in audio logs. The tools for enacting these methods are also provided, but it seems none of them were viable. No matter what was tried, The Entity remained unperturbed. Perhaps this was intended as a statement about the inevitability of the events that transpired, or about the unknowable nature of The Entity. Unfortunately, it merely resulted in frustration. The teased solutions are presented like foreshadowing, but were little more than flavour.
Red, green, and blue keys acquired. You may now enter THE STORY ZONE.
Pollen's visual design is beautiful and the atmosphere it creates is strong, but the game falls short when the narrative and storytelling method fail to give it substance. The game ends with a bizarre 10-minute cutscene, which explains little. Short games are wonderful when they leave the player something to ruminate on, but they need to leave the player with something to ruminate on. They can sometimes take on a poetic quality, not in prose but rather in function, a musing on the nature of some aspect of human experience. Pollen seems to want to do this, but is too vague in its delivery to be successful.
Like failed empires of the past, I found myself caught in a hyperbolic debt spiral in Offworld Trading Company. My Mars-based colonial corporation had invested into energy production, and one of my rivals detonated an EMP through my plants, disabling them. As the market for electricity boomed, I had to purchase it at increasingly higher rates to keep my company afloat. Within a few minutes I'd gone from a solid AAA credit rating with negligible debt to a lousy D and millions in the red. But hope wasn't lost. Even as it seemed like my neo-capitalist empire was on the brink of collapse, I was plotting my comeback.
I bought up some land on prime locations, taking care to keep them far apart so I couldn't lose control of my critical buildings all at once. Then I built some new geothermal plants--the most efficient and productive energy producers available--before employing hackers to jack up the price of power even higher. Then I used a series of black market options including labor strikes and dynamite to disable the power plants of my competitors. Soon I was the only supplier of power around and I was selling it for ten times what I'd paid just a few minutes before. My debt evaporated in seconds and I crippled my foes, causing their stock prices to tumble. I sold off some assets and bought my competitor's shares up. And it was all over.
The campaign will have you investing in a series of colonies to maximize your weekly income in the hopes of building the first Martian monopoly.
Offworld Trading Company isn't like any other strategy game I've played. There's no combat. There is only the free market. You assume the role of a CEO of a new company eager to take advantage of the virgin Martian landscape and turn massive profits. But you're far from the only company on the block. Much like the colonial trading companies from the Age of Sail, your aim is to outsell and out produce everyone else. Stock and commodity prices are your tools, and hostile corporate takeovers your strongest weapons.
In that sense, Offworld works like a microcosm of real-world economies. Your first move is to pick a founding location--and get to work organizing your supply lines. From there you'll sort out which goods would be most productive to crank out given the situation at hand. And just about everything factors into that decision. If you found your company near good supplies of carbon, but you need to send transports halfway across the map to access silicon, you'll need a lot more fuel. More fuel means you need more money to secure the same resources as another company and that cuts into your profits. Even with only a smattering of basic resources--water, power, carbon, silicon, iron, and aluminum--you'll find a complex web of interesting choices and decisions that you'll have to make on the fly.
Offworld's black market system exponentially magnifies your strategic options, making each round different from the last.
A big piece of that is the black market. While trading resources for profits would be great on its own, Offworld mixes in some less than legal tactics that you, and each of your competitors, can bring to bear. Whether it's destroying critical structures with dynamite (everything is fair game except for your opponents' headquarters) or deploying an underground nuke to reduce resource yields for your competitors, there are more than a dozen nefarious options for the unscrupulous trader.
As games progress, the black market and its affiliated thugs become practical necessities. Even if you can maintain your company without the aid of goons or pirates, you won't be spared for long. This is the price of unfettered competition, and while it'd be a frightening reality, in this context it's a non-stop stream of brinksmanship that encourages sophisticated and nuanced tactics. Shady though it might be, Offworld's black market system exponentially magnifies your strategic options, making each round different from the last.
Every bit of text in the game is loaded with hilarious, sardonic humor.
Playing off these options are a series of advanced buildings. Most of your early structures are bare essentials: farms, water pumps, mines, etc. But once you've got your company going, you can start developing patented, advanced technology or create a bunker to house a cadre of hackers that can manipulate prices. These bleeding-edge structures are your proximal goal. They boost your ability to stay competitive and give you an ever-expanding field of options to leverage. If you're losing goods because of piracy, you can research more efficient ways to produce those resources. If prices have tanked on Mars, you can launch oxygen and food to eager consumers in the asteroid belts.
Once you start playing with these toys and blending their abilities with those offered by the black market, games get cooking. If you need to keep your hacking clandestine, you can use an illegal hologram to disguise your programmers' barracks. Or you can disable or wrest control of a profitable Offworld Market to pull in some serious capital without having to invest in the expensive launches yourself.
When you pack eight players onto a map, you'll have so much corporate reconnaissance and sabotage that it can be a bit tough to keep track of it all.
If I had one complaint from this system, it'd be that when you pack eight players onto a map, you'll have so much corporate reconnaissance and sabotage that it can be a bit tough to keep track of it all. You'll have a news ticker in the bottom right that will try to keep you updated on who's been hit with what, but it's not enough when things get crazy. If you're overwhelmed though, you can always tune the game speed down a bit to help you take control of the chaos, so it's more of a nitpick than a foundational problem.
When all of these systems play together, it's absolute magic. There's a thrill in knowing that no matter what happens, you always have a response. Offworld gives its players an exceptional spread of options so that they can always think their way through a problem. The questions then become, can you think faster than your opponents, and if so, can you adapt as they shift their strategies to match your own?
Victory isn't simple or easy in Offworld, but it's always satisfying.
Offworld is ruthless. It is fast, and it is brutal, and with so many possibilities available at any time, the game teeters on overwhelming. This is saved, at least in part, by a stellar series of tutorials that introduce you to all of the game's major features. It teaches you how to manage hostile takeovers, how to protect your own stocks from buyouts, how to combine the abilities of your buildings for maximum effect, and how to plan your corporate campuses so they run at peak efficiency. And it does all this with an acerbic wit that parodies hyper-capitalistic figures of the 1980s. Item descriptions and character dialogue are a treat If you're a fan of apocalyptic tongue-in-cheek humor. That penchant for cleverness runs through to the core.
The campaign does plenty of heavy lifting to acclimate new players to the game's complex gameplay. It introduces you to some other core concepts, switches up the victory conditions a bit, and gives you a string of skirmishes that help you build a planet-spanning oligopoly alongside your rivals. This lets you test out some of the game's more complex tactics in a scenario that otherwise resembles a protracted multiplayer match stretched over a much longer period of time. By the end, you're well-equipped to tackle ranked games and competitive play. It's a splendid difficulty pitch that serves as the ideal introduction.
Every moment from that initial decision until the final stock purchase is incredible.
I had feared, when I started, that Offworld Trading Company would wear thin after a few games. But that moment never came. I still find every match exhilarating. From the time I bought stock in my opponents, sold them quickly to crash the price and then bought them out a few seconds later, to the time when I managed to keep three launch pads going all at once to reach stupendous riches, every game is memorable. Each map is randomly generated, and with four factions that have distinct strategies that all work with different resource distribution patterns, even the opening is never quite the same. Echoing the classic Civilization question of whether it's best to found your nascent country where your settler begins or to explore for better options, you'll only be able to see certain parts of the map at first. You can either scan for better drop locations, or take what you see. But if you wait, another company can claim vital real estate before you, and you may find yourself with precious few options for critical resources later in the game. Every moment from that initial decision until the final stock purchase is incredible. I haven't even scratched the surface of all that you can do here.
It's a bit chilling to think that in Offworld you're playing out the same obsessive pursuit of capitalism that led to the fall of its finctional Earth--an event hinted at in tutorial dialogue--yet it's so recklessly entertaining and biting with its satire that I couldn't help but get lost. When combined with truly deep and intricate strategic options, Offworld is a revelation. It's almost unparalleled in the genre. Each and every game is thrilling. Every moment is a challenge. And the brutality of the free market ensures that you can never rest on your laurels, less you be quashed by the invisible hand.
The second episode of Hitman opens with Agent 47 lounging on a bench in the idyllic vacation destination, Sapienza. With a newspaper in hand and a crisp Italian shirt on his back, you could be forgiven for mistaking Agent 47 as a proxy of Daniel Craig's James Bond--if it wasn't for his shaved, barcoded head.
Sapienza's laid back atmosphere is almost the antithesis of the first episode's bustling fashion show, and this shift comes as a breath of fresh air. There's a greater variety of events to behold and more ground to cover, and you're afforded more opportunities to explore, unfettered by potential threats on the streets. While familiarizing yourself with the area, you'll regularly stumble into amusing scenes and personalities. Whether it's a street performer entertaining a group of tourists, an off-duty waiter taking a leak, or a priest who's flustered to see you barge into the middle of a confession, there are numerous vignettes that made me snicker and buy into the idea that Sapienza is a functioning community. It's disappointing that you can't enter every building given the potential advantages and entertainment they could provide, but episode two's world feels intricate and alive.
It didn't take long for me to warm up to the sunlit streets and coastal views, which provided a relaxing buffer from this episode's dangerous destination: a mansion with a secret underground laboratory, protected by mafia-like guards and professional security. Your mission is to infiltrate the home, kill two targets, and destroy an experimental virus located in the heart of the lab. In traditional Hitman fashion, there are disguises to steal from unsuspecting NPCs that allow you to pass through security checkpoints and fool hired hands into thinking you're just another employee, toiling away in the opulent villa. A keen eye--or a finger on the button that triggers the x-ray vision-like Instinct mode--will help you locate tools to unlock doors or items that take out enemies, such as an exploding golf ball.
Hunting for opportunities in your environment is just as critical to the Hitman experience as the act of assassinating targets. You spend most of your time sneaking and procuring said items, and while you need to be ever vigilant to avoid detection from suspicious NPCs, Hitman's unreliable AI can be easily fooled once you learn how to manipulate the way the game handles line-of-sight. It's reasonable to expect that rounding a corner and making a sharp turn in an unexpected direction would throw off a hapless guard, but it's a little silly that you can avoid detection by crouching and walking circles around objects, despite Agent 47's head poking out in plain view.
Even though the enemies you circumvent aren't the brightest, there are enough of them to make your job difficult once you infiltrate the mansion's perimeter. Anyone who played the first episode will feel right at home, and potentially more at ease, despite staring danger in the face on a constant basis. Whereas the mansion in Paris was brimming with people and stuffed with hallways and tiny rooms, Sapienza's has more open space and fewer twists and turns. This looser layout potentially presents fewer hiding places--with no crowds to confuse guards and fewer windows to jump through--but this also makes the moment-to-moment action feel more manageable. That is, until you see what lurks under your feet.
Some men just want to watch the world catch a cold.
The underground laboratory is a totally different beast compared to the mansion. It's small and jam-packed with professional security and doctors in a space that's only big enough for a few medical trailers and crates. It's a scene that's tough to navigate and even harder to crack, but its concentrated nature makes victory all the more rewarding. With a swap of an outfit, an errant keycard, and a handy hazmat suit, you can make it into the virus' containment facility, but it requires extreme patience--any amount of aggressive behavior in the lab is met with extreme force.
Though you can still rely on Hitman's forgiving radar-meets-map--which automatically tracks movements of targets and NPCs--you can use infiltration and reconnaissance across the entirety of Sapienza to locate your targets on foot. NPCs often engage in conversations that reveal the habits or locations of specific characters, but you can also pursue mini-objectives that lead you right into the lion's den, such as playing the part of a target's golf instructor. However, it's not unusual to turn a corner and organically cross paths with your target. However, they have routines, and once you realize your target is simply following a pre-programmed path rather than living in and reacting to the world as a real person might, their mystique takes a nose-dive.
The mediocre AI and animations return, as does the need to repeat the same old spy tricks, but they take a backseat this time around as Sapienza and its colorful denizens take center stage.
Indeed, once you understand the movements of your targets, the limitations of Hitman's enemy AI and the locations of critically useful items, the sense of wonder and immersion fade, and Hitman begins to feel more like a puzzle game. This is most evident when you dive into escalation missions.
These multi-stage missions come in five parts, stacking new objectives with each round. The added challenges--like not pacifying NPCs--make completing these challenges more difficult with each round, but not necessarily more enjoyable, as you already know how to complete the unchanging objectives. It's possible to clear the first few stages of an escalation mission in a couple of minutes using the knowledge you gleaned from the episode's main mission, and it doesn't take long to grow tired of walking the same paths and resorting to the same tactics. You can look for new solutions, but it's up to you to drum up the interest in doing so as the game doesn't go out of its way to mix up the variables and guide you in new directions.
Despite having a few distinct locations to explore within Sapienza, your main mission won't last long, but the variety is appreciated, with the lab feeling different from the mansion feeling different than the streets. In that regard, this episode feels far more well-rounded than the first. The mediocre AI and animations return, as does the need to repeat the same old spy tricks, but they take a backseat this time around as Sapienza and its colorful denizens take center stage. Episode two doesn't fill your plate, but it's a satisfying experience nonetheless.
What We Deserve feels personal, a narrative so steeped in familial heartbreak that it almost plays more like a visual stream-of-consciousness diary than a choose-your-own-adventure zombie apocalypse story. What started as a typical tale about how to survive the zombie apocalypse shifts in its final episode into a fascinating tale that asks the most relevant and important question of all: why bother?
The fallout of the second episode is dealt with, for sure--and how to leverage that outcome in order to please Norma and the remnants of the shantytown Michonne helped ruin. Once it's figured out, however, Michonne is left as the only true adult in a house of abandoned children. The time with them that follows can be played coldly, but the cruelty of Michonne keeping distance from those in need, given what she has and will envision, doesn't feel right. To take Michonne this far is to accept that the mother she was did not die with her daughters, and more than the machete at her back, this is what will keep her alive. And so much of the first half of the episode goes, with Michonne carefully preparing her unconventional family for the worst. Aching, mournful moments lie within: a mother's last letter, having to explain to a child what happened to his father, the decision to spend precious time to conduct a burial. And yet, it is all to the benefit of Michonne herself, showing strength far beyond the ability to lop of zombie limbs.
An unconventional family, but a family nonetheless.
It's because of this that when the zombies do show up, it's almost incongruous. The people add depth, tension, and terror all on their own. The Walkers look increasingly boring in the face of the human drama that surrounds them. Sure, the action is kinetic and brutal, as always, and one particular death gets especially gross, but the relevancy of these moments in the face of Michonne's layered story is diminished. It's a problem exacerbated by graphical hitches, with faces disappearing, and jitters during QTEs at points where precision is crucial--issues that weren't apparent in the first two episodes.
This episode's strengths still lay in its human element. The climax--a prisoner exchange with Norma--would be an anxious affair by itself, with Michonne's actions potentially hinging on a massive bluff. The scene becomes more impactful when you realize Norma's concerns mirror Michonne's, albeit with Norma fighting for the sake of a far more awful person. Telltale pulls off a minor miracle here: keeping the villains just empathetic enough to second-guess every action, which raises the tension in this sequence even higher.
The real action occurs later, as Michonne loses her grip on reality and flashbacks and hallucinations cloud her judgement at the worst possible time, forcing a funhouse mirror redux of the reality-shifting intro in Episode 1. It's hair-raising in the moment, and an example of excellent direction and planning.
Drastic times call for drastic measures.
With the miniseries now complete, the game's biggest flaw is in its structure. At least a half hour shorter than the other two episodes, What We Deserve nails the story Telltale has been tiptoeing around since first minute, and it's something that only begins to present itself towards the end of Episode 2 before taking off here.
As a complete story, Walking Dead Michonne is, truly, a story about family, in a way few game narratives are. Familial loss and the forced adoption of new members isn't new for Walking Dead, but in Michonne--barring choosing to be cold during a moment of sorrow--we have someone who finds power in parenthood, instead of living in constant fear of it. Her weakness is in having already failed at it. It's in finding out whether the weight of that failure should be allowed to break her or not. Of course, that's the question that drives anyone stricken by loss. It's an easy question with hard answers, and this is a game that doesn't flinch from either.
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