Previous entries in the Sniper Ghost Warrior series have been justifiably criticized for their stifling linearity. Missions would regularly guide you by the hand through one cramped corridor after another, with a succession of targets ripe for elimination along the way. It wasn't a formula conducive to the type of freedom and choice one might hope to find in a game focused on the act of long-distance sniping, and Polish developer CI Games has seen the error of its ways with the latest entry in the series. Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 ditches the restrictiveness of its predecessors by shifting the action to the gritty open world of a separatist-controlled Georgia. With an increase in scale and the flexibility inherent therein, it's a positive direction for the skull-splitting series--albeit one that's still frequently disrupted by myriad flaws rearing their ugly head.
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The jagged cliffs and dense forests of the Georgian wilderness are notable for their expansiveness, yet the muted color palette, lackluster lighting, and some muddy, low-quality textures do little to inspire awe. Conceptually, this is also an open world without a clear, defined purpose. There are a few nebulous activities dotted across its three maps--like rescuing civilians and capturing outposts--that net you XP, money, and materials that can be used for crafting. But I gradually ignored these minor distractions and still had a surplus of cash and materials on-hand to acquire the weapons, ammo, and items I desired. With little in the way of interesting locales to entice exploration, it's also a particularly barren world. Pockets of civilian life do their best to present the illusion of a living, breathing society, but their nonplussed reactions to a burly marine barging into their houses aren't exactly believable. Ghost Warrior 3's depiction of Georgia is neither a convincingly realized place, nor an emergent sandbox like the Far Cry games it shares many similarities with. This slice of Eastern European landscape is little more than a glorified path to get you from point A to B without a loading screen interrupting the flow.
For as disappointing as this is, it matters little once you've reached the whereabouts of your active mission. Each one is generally contained within a single, sizable location, whether that's a decrepit block of apartments or a busy airfield. Objectives are refreshingly varied, and there are often optional tasks to complete if you're up for, say, retrieving a downed drone or completing the active mission with no alerts.
Ghost Warrior 3 is at its best, however, when simulating the methodical precision of being an elite marksman. There's a rhythm to the planning and execution that goes into these missions. You usually begin by sending your pocket-sized drone up into the Georgian sky to get a lay of the land, using it to tag enemies and make note of any advantageous vantage points. Once you're comfortable with the layout, you infiltrate the perimeter, using your sniper vision to reveal a climbable surface up the side of a nearby cliff. At the top, you go prone on the cold, hard granite, and prop up your rifle on a tripod for extra stability. With the target firmly in your sights, you twist the dial on your scope to 400 meters and adjust your aim to compensate for bullet drop and a gusty wind coming in from the east. Then you take a deep breath and pull the trigger. The bullet arcs through the strong breeze before darting downward and colliding with your target's temple. Blood spatter covers the bedroom wall behind him, and a convenient zipline covers your exfiltration.
Sniping is the winning card in its deck, and yet CI Games regularly plays other hands to the game's detriment.
While this sounds short and sweet, missions like this can take upwards of 20 minutes to complete if you're willing to take your time. Sniping is all about being cautious and taking a measured approach, and you're rewarded for your patience with some immensely satisfying killshots. For first-person shooters, it offers a unique approach that sets Ghost Warrior 3 apart from its histrionic contemporaries. Sniping is the winning card in its deck, and yet CI Games regularly plays other hands to the game's detriment.
There are three binary play styles for you to adhere to: Sniper, Ghost, and Warrior. Completing actions in each group (sniping for Sniper, performing close-quarters stealth kills for Ghost, and going all guns blazing for Warrior), nets you XP that can be spent on some humdrum upgrades in each, like auto-looting bodies or increasing the effect of health items. It's not the most exciting system, but the added emphasis on different play styles makes them all viable options. The ability to react to an ever-changing situation and completely alter your approach adds a sense of variety to each mission. Sure, the stealth is incredibly simplistic, and open gunfights are ponderous, but as minute complements to the sniping, they serve a functional purpose.
Where this falters, is when these styles take center stage. There are missions where your sniper rifle is taken out of your hands, and others where the tight confines of the level render your sharpshooter too unwieldy to seriously consider. These missions dilute the game's strengths and put it on a playing field with the likes of Call of Duty and Battlefield, where it does not compare favorably. AI issues are more noticeable here, too, as enemies reveal their idiotic tendency to follow each other into a killzone. And in the latter half of the game, new enemy types adopt a bullet sponginess that makes the close-quarters shooting even more of a drag.
Similarly irritating are the glitches and rough edges peppered throughout. In the PlayStation 4 version, I had enemies T-pose in front of me, disappear in the middle of a stealth takedown, and repopulate before my eyes, inside what I thought was an empty outpost. The game also crashed on four separate occasions. Whenever you boot up the game or change regions it takes almost five minutes to load, which is excruciatingly slow. And even something as simple as tagging enemies is frustratingly inconsistent. Sometimes the ability won't work when you're directly aiming at someone from a few yards away; other times you'll pull up your gun and inadvertently tag someone in another room. The framerate is also consistently shoddy, whether you're simply walking or popping in and out of your sniper scope. Sometimes sounds don't play, and pop-in is a constant eyesore.
There have already been three updates pushed out before release, yet I still encountered these issues with the most recent patch installed*. CI Games is certainly working hard to iron out the kinks and address what needs fixing, but after multiple delays, it's disappointing that it's still arrived in such a buggy, unpolished state.
Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 feels like a B-tier, budget-priced game. Even the predictable, profanity-laden story is reminiscent of the type of gritty B-movies Steven Seagal is known for. There's certainly merit to its accomplished sniping mechanics, especially when missions hone in on the planning and precise execution that makes playing as a sharpshooter so thrilling. Yet it falters whenever it veers away from its strengths, and the plethora of nagging glitches and technical problems are a persistent nuisance that make Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 difficult to recommend.
*[Editor's note: CI Games has released another patch in time for Sniper Ghost Warrior 3's launch. This review was conducted prior to the patch's release. GameSpot will update this review after testing the patch.]
Dragon Quest Heroes II is a JRPG on fast forward. The gradual addition of new party members, the rollout of plot twists, and other typical genre roadmarkers come at you at a fast clip. If it normally takes 100 hours to amass a kill count of 10,000 enemies, this game lets you reach such milestones in less than 10. And, as one of the many spinoffs of the 20-year-old Dynasty Warriors series, it retains the best elements of the franchise's trademark combat, where you decimate armies with rudimentary, albeit flashy, combos. Dragon Quest Heroes II distinguishes itself from its equally great predecessor with its free roam-friendly fields of battle, which feel like an homage to the open expanses of mainline Dragon Quest games.
Though it's a sequel, you don't need any context from the first game or Dragon Quest in general to appreciate this one's story and gameplay. Of course, there are a handful of design similarities that fans of the last Dragon Quest Heroes will recognize. (For example, your two selectable male and female heroes aren't childhood friends this time around, but rather cousins.) And this sequel's premise doesn't involve the brainwashing of once-friendly monsters--instead, you're concerned with unexpected invasions of neighboring kingdoms.
It is when you embark on your journey to solve the mystery of the warring lands that you first realize how this game is influenced by the wide open areas found in many JRPG world maps. These lands are vast and filled with infinitely respawning monsters, but you can wander aimlessly with no problem; unlike typical JRPGs, Dragon Quest Heroes II doesn't have random encounters. Rather than exterminate every imp and zombie in your field of view, you can focus on high-value targets and areas where there are tight clusters of foes, who are often tormenting some unlucky NPC. Equally unlucky are the myriad endearing creatures minding their own business, particularly in the lush hills of Greena Pastures. Murdering slime knights while they nap on the sunniest of days is downright sadistic and never gets old.
By reaching the other side of these rolling battlefields, you're greeted with smaller but equally intense "war zones"--maps and conflicts that resemble the story-driven encounters from the first Heroes. Alternating between the larger spaces and these more intimate combat zones provides a level of diversity seldom seen in Warriors games.
The rollout of new regions as you make progress through the game's compelling story feels orderly, but the events that unfold as you explore these territories are rich in variety. In a given hour you could be navigating through a labyrinthine swamp with brain-teasing teleportation portals, or you could be hunting down a mischievous shape-shifter impersonating townsfolk or even your protagonist. Yes, there are straightforward objectives like taking out bosses or escorting NPCs, but the game's exploration-focused, JRPG-inspired segments avoids the tidy but boring chapter-based story progression common in many subpar Warriors anime spinoffs. And Dragon Quest Heroes II isn't above occasional Dynasty Warriors-inspired battles, which are easy to enjoy given their infrequency.
Even with the recognizable Akira Toriyama character designs and the hearty helping of quests, this is first and foremost a Warriors spinoff. It foregoes the precision of stylistic hack-and-slashers like Devil May Cry in favor of the gratification of killing enemies en masse. This is thanks to straightforward controls, where stringing quick and strong attacks into a single combo can decimate two dozen enemies. Combat shows further depth with the return of minion coins, which temporarily add the monsters you vanquish to your squad. This form of summoning loses some of its tower defense-inspired appeal from the last game to make room for a wider array of enemy powers, including the immensely satisfying ability to transform into some of the game's larger enemies.
For as much as this sequel differs from its predecessor, developer Omega Force wisely preserved many of the previous game's strengths. These include classic and simple experience point-driven character progression, gear upgrades, and item alchemy. The biggest draw, however, are the guest heroes from the mainline Dragon Quest games, despite the strengths and appeal of this game's original cadre of heroes.
This new cast features a mix of Dragon Quest Heroes first-timers like Angelo and Carver and returning characters like Jessica and Kiryl. They're all skilled monster hunters, although some squad combinations are more effective than others. Fan-favorite Torneko, for example, is one of the few teammates who can cast healing spells, which makes him an MVP during the more challenging battles. Experimenting with different party formations is part of the fun, where you're compelled to balance personal preference for certain characters with team composition. You have so much to choose from, in fact, that the newly implemented class-change feature feels both underutilized and redundant. Why retool your main hero as a priest and reset your level back to one when there are already characters with priest-like abilities?
While you do have to choose a main protagonist among two heroes, the ability to switch to your other three party members on the fly quadruples your potential at effective damage-dealing. Rotating through your team in order to make the most of their abilities and strengths becomes its own game of micromanagement. This presents its share of challenges and thrills, depending on the current battle predicaments of each squadmate. However, there wouldn't be this strong compulsion to jump from body to body if not for the modest contributions of your AI-controlled buddies. They never come close to attacking with the same intensity as you. That said, you seldom feel like you're babysitting them, and they never feel like a burden.
To experience a party's true ferocity, you would have to join real-life friends in the game's multiplayer modes, a rarity for a Warriors game. When compared to playing solo, having friends along can have a huge impact on your success rate in battle. That's not to say online play is bereft of challenges. Optional multiplayer dungeons are loaded with Dragon Quest's meanest foes, and these ferocious welcome parties change based on your levels and team size. If you do come out on top in these monster-infested mazes, you leave with useful loot like a ball that temporarily boosts the amount of XP you earn in battle, which can make your next play session all the more lucrative.
Side quests--where you're tasked with everything from exterminating a set amount of monsters to hunting for specific loot--are feel-good deeds that not only make NPCs happy but also serve as rewarding sources of experience. Whatever quests you take on, there are a variety of daily incentives that yield practical rewards. The real world Wednesday incentive, in particular, where there are extra metal slimes in the field, is especially worthwhile; any Dragon Quest fan can tell you that these elusive jokesters yield a ton of experience points, provided you can actually kill them.
Much like its predecessor, Dragon Quest Heroes II isn't short of opportunities for high-volume slaughter while effectively preserving the charm of Dragon Quest. Omega Force's thoughtful mix of familiar Dragon Quest Heroes designs and new features not only makes this sequel engrossing, but it also shows this side series' potential for future installments. It makes for a satisfying hack-and-slasher that is not only a great Warriors spinoff, but also an effective gateway to the main Dragon Quest series.
Video game mashups are nothing new, but Puyo Puyo Tetris is the most interesting one to come along in a while, bridging two puzzle series with distinct mechanics and rules. What you ultimately get are two great games and a surprisingly good mashup with numerous single- and multiplayer options at the ready. It's a robust package, and an excellent revival of two beloved yet stagnant series.
More players are likely to be familiar with Tetris than Puyo Puyo, but the two share a similar basic concept. Both revolve around objects falling from the top of the board that you attempt to arrange in a particular pattern. Creating a full horizontal line with Tetriminoes in Tetris will clear said line. In the case of Puyo Puyo, however, you're matching colored Puyo blobs--match four or more of the same Puyo types, and they explode off the screen. If your stack reaches the top of the screen in either game, you lose.
Puyo Puyo Tetris features a bizarre story mode with chatty anime-style characters and an absurd amount of dialogue--thankfully, you can easily skip these sequences. Story mode offers 10 acts, with 10 levels each that go back and forth between the two game styles before eventually merging them. While this is a lengthy way to see all the different elements Puyo Puyo Tetris has to offer, there are a wide array of game modes you can jump right into. Newcomers to either (or both) franchise can reference the Lesson mode in order to get up to speed as well.
The single- and multiplayer Arcade modes offer a surprising wealth of game variations. The multiplayer arcade includes a straight-up versus mode, along with four other options. Swap mode actually switches players between the two games during a match at certain intervals, while Fusion is a hybrid of the two, where both Puyos and Tetrominoes drop from the top of the board. Big Bang is a timed race to finish challenge boards before the other player, and Party mode features special items that drop (like exploding blocks) and either help or hurt players. Multiplayer supports up to four players locally and makes for a perfect couch-based party game.
Meanwhile, Solo Arcade lets you play any of the multiplayer game modes against AI, and it also adds a couple of more game types. Endurance is a 1-on-1 battle against the numerous AI characters to see how long you can survive, while Challenge mode is a series of different game types (with no AI opponent) that range from the traditional sprint and marathon modes, to events that change the size of the actual game pieces.
The variations on the standard game are a welcome diversion, but you may inevitably gravitate towards standard versus or endless games without the added novelties. The zen-like appeal of seeing how high a score you can earn byforming lines or destroying Puyos is still the biggest draw of these games. The hybrid mode is the most notable addition here, but it's heavy on chaotic gameplay. The board filling with both Tetriminoes and Puyos feels like overkill, veering too far from the simplistic nature of either game.
Online multiplayer is divided between Free Play and the ranked Puzzle League. Both allow for customization options regarding which game and how you want to play. During our online matches, the only available players were in Japan, and while we had some games drop, most were consistently stable. As with offline multiplayer, up to four players can battle it out online.
Puyo Puyo Tetris is an achievement in that it takes two distinct games and combines them in a way that doesn't feel forced or overly gimmicky. If you love just Tetris, this is an excellent Tetris game, and the same goes for fans of Puyo Puyo. It's also a perfect portable game, so it's ideal on the Switch.
Overflowing with colorful personality, Puyo Puyo Tetris revels in its weirdness. It provides solid versions of both puzzle games and merges the two in bizarre, frantic ways that adds a fresh dash of style to these long-running series. With an array of game variations spanning single-player, along with on- and offline multiplayer, it's an incredibly meaty package that should satisfy gamers for a long time to come.
The minute What Remains of Edith Finch puts its titular protagonist face to face with its slapdash Frankenstein's monster of a house, it seems the game is gearing up for a horror story, closer to Resident Evil than Gone Home. That's actually close to the truth in one sequence, but What Remains of Edith Finch ultimately tells a subtle tale with far more pensive ideas. It plays off a heightened sense of impending mortality, but terror never truly takes a physical form. These are simply the facts, presented as only the victims and witnesses could deliver them.
More specifically, the game follows young Edith on a trip to her family's abandoned, derelict home, built on a rural island off the coast of Washington state. Three generations of Edith's family have lived in this house--and three generations, with a single exception, have died early, sudden, shocking deaths of various causes under its roof. The Finches and those who know them consider this a family curse. Edith, however, is less interested in the possible supernatural implications of what befell her family and more focused on the circumstances that led them to their demise. And so, playing as Edith from a first-person perspective, you explore the house, this living monument to tragedy, not so much to learn the truth about her family but to accept it.
That's an important distinction to make. There's an elephant in the room that becomes clear early on, and it's ever imposing the more Edith explores the house: This is her fate. The specifics are unclear, but if there's one certainty about how Edith will finally die, it won't be of old age. As such, if there's anything resembling an ultimate goal to What Remains of Edith Finch, it's not in solving a mystery or unveiling some hidden backstory about the curse. It's about achieving grace in what's more than likely a graceless end through communion with the lives of her family.
As one might expect, this is an exploration game that stays out of the narrative's way as much as possible. The controls are blissfully simple, with only the two analog sticks and the R2 button needed to perform every action in the game. Every movement--opening a door, winding a music box, using a View-Master, even flying a kite--is performed intuitively, with very little in the way of a tutorial or UI necessary.
Things are a bit dicier with the actual exploration. The game does a stellar job of environmental immersion, with its beautiful tableaus of gothic dread and emptiness interspersed with moments of incredible vibrancy and imagination. But progressing further into the house beyond the first floor involves a rudimentary but unnecessary amount of travel through intertwining secret rooms and crawlspaces that no real people in their right minds would build unless, well, they wanted their house to be the setting for a video game. Once Edith finds what she's truly looking for in each major area, however, the game sinks its hooks in--and deep.
While the game isn't above a sense of humor or whimsy, it never forgets it's in the company of Death, a constant companion through an entire century of misfortunes in the Finch house.
Eleven total family members have died in the Finch house, and once they passed, the family sealed their rooms away, with their belongings intact. When Edith finds a final journal entry, last pictures, or crucial memento from their last days, the game seamlessly shifts to that family member's narrative. These vignettes vary not just in tone and particulars, but in gameplay style.
A father's final hunting trip with his daughter plays out through the eye of their camera, progressing as the player takes the perfect shots along the way, capturing the awkward final moment while on a timer. A little girl's dying fever dream sees her taking the form of various animals, ending up as a skulking tentacled beast taking out sailors a la Dishonored 2. A former child star's death is immortalized in an old-school, Bill Gaines-style horror comic, playable here in bold, cel-shaded, four-color beauty complete with the perfect piece of licensed film score imaginable. While the game isn't above a sense of humor or whimsy, it never forgets it's in the company of Death, a constant companion through an entire century of misfortunes in the Finch house. Its fatalism shapeshifts in every life it takes too soon; it's oppressive in the game's moments of joy, friendly in the face of misery, and never lacking in poetry.
That lyrical quality is where What Remains of Edith Finch finds its greatness: As Edith connects the stories together, weaving in a narrative all her own in the process, the game leaves players with the ultimate task of finding meaning in it all. Edith herself has her purposes, and once the credits roll, her own part to play becomes clear--but what it all means will vary depending on the player. There's no definitive "aha!" moment to definitively say the Finch family is cursed or convey what kind of judgment the game is passing on their choices. And yet, there's power and poignancy putting these final moments in the hands of the player, the knowledge and experiences of generations carried within them as the game plays on. It's macabre. It's often utterly heartbreaking. But it is undeniably powerful.
Developer Giant Sparrow managed to strike the delicate balance between joy and sorrow in 2012's The Unfinished Swan, but What Remains of Edith Finch transcends even the latent sadness of that game, finding the beauty--even sometimes the fun--in what's always fundamentally a tragedy. It's not often that a game's plot slips past the bitterness of grief to finally get to the acceptance, but that's the triumph in What Remains of Edith Finch. Ultimately, if the game has any resemblance of a moral, it's that the bravest, most beautiful thing every one of us does is choose to keep going, despite knowing what's coming.
Outlast 2's maniacal commitment to its core conceit is simultaneously its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Like the original--which helped popularize first-person survival horror when it launched in 2013--Outlast 2 casts you as a hapless everyman with zero fighting skills and no tools beyond a camcorder. Your only option when confronted with grotesque, bloodthirsty murderers is to run and hide.
As a result, every snapping twig, every distant scream, every gruesome corpse grips you with fear even more tightly than it might if you actually had a way to defend yourself. But this also means the core gameplay cannot evolve as you progress--the chase sequences you survive at the start of the game are essentially identical to the situations you encounter near the end. There aren't many new mechanics or scenarios to keep the intervening hours feeling varied and engaging.
To make matters worse, the game's most harrowing moments--those sequences where you're spotted by an enemy and must flee to safety--frequently devolve into trial-and-error tedium. Almost invariably, these chases are scripted, meaning you must get from point A to a specific point B as quickly as possible. Problem is, point B is rarely obvious. It might be a tiny opening you have to crawl through or a bookcase you have to move, but you'll only have a few seconds to figure it out before your pursuers catch up and kill you, forcing you to replay most of the chase in order to return to the apparent dead end where you got stuck. At that point, the game stops being scary and simply becomes frustrating.
This was occasionally an issue in the first game as well, but you often had more freedom and could play more strategically--if you're trying to avoid one bad guy in a large area while sneaking from room to room to collect valve handles, you can decide, "Okay, he'll see me when I dart across here, but I think I can make it back to this locker and hide before he catches me." In Outlast 2, you generally just need to run from whatever's directly behind you and hope you figure out the one correct path as you go. At least when you do stay on track, it's unbelievably intense and exhilarating. The fact that the game excels at delivering sudden bursts of panic keeps your nerves on edge at all times. You never quite know when hell will break loose again, but you always know it's coming.
Not everyone you encounter tries to kill you. It's creepy.
Tension, really, is what Outlast 2 does best. Its gameplay may stumble in certain ways, but you're always deeply, inescapably immersed in its atmosphere. In place of the first game's mental asylum, new protagonist Blake Langermann finds himself lost in the Arizona desert surrounded by religious zealots and fetid corpses. Though you'll endure a wide variety of environments, desecration follows you everywhere. And while the visuals pack plenty of unsettling details, the sound design is some of the best in horror game history. From the jagged, unnerving score to the harsh whispers that seem to come from all directions, Outlast 2's audio is the single biggest contributor to its remarkable sense of foreboding. The subtle squish and crunch that accompanies every footstep as you cross a pit full of dead infants will likely haunt you forever.
All of these scare tactics get in your head and, in a way, deepen those skin-crawling lulls between the adrenaline-pumping chases. In most games, walking into a room and grabbing an item is about as simple as it gets, but when you're utterly convinced some new horror's just waiting to rip your throat out, exploring for camera batteries suddenly feels like a harrowing trial. And you'll need those batteries. Just as before, your camera's night vision allows you see in the dark, and the new directional mic also lets you (loosely) track enemies through walls.
However, both of these comforts drain your batteries at an alarming rate, especially on higher difficulty settings. You can keep night vision on even when you run out of juice, but your screen starts to flicker and the camera can't focus. It's almost scarier than being totally blind, so it's important to expend your battery power strategically. I never had a problem finding batteries on Normal, but higher difficulty settings turn this aspect of the experience into a legitimate challenge.
Even if you're stocked up on batteries, though, there's another reason to brave exploration: journal entries. As with the original game, there's no traditional story arc with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, you're given a goal--in this case, to save your missing wife--and bad stuff happens as you pursue that goal. The only way to understand your situation is to gather information from, for example, suicide notes and deranged gospel excerpts. The writing is strong throughout, but Outlast 2's primary narrative relies too heavily on trite horror tropes, including sadistic backwoods fanatics, demon babies, and of course, damsels in distress. The ending also falls short of the wild twist that capped the first game.
But there is another side to Outlast 2's story. As you progress, Blake starts to experience hallucinations that seem to depict a traumatic childhood event. They reveal new details at exactly the right pace, providing subtle, devastating hints without spelling everything out. It hooked me early, compelled me through the campaign, and eventually delivered an emotional payoff, all while tying together both halves of the game through shared themes of guilt, abandonment, and the exploitation of faith. Altogether, Blake's hallucinations prove to be one of the game's strongest elements.
In order to unlock certain journal entries, you have to film events as they happen. The timing can be tricky...and frustrating.
In truth, Outlast's "no weapons" formula worked better as a shorter experience. Stretched over twice the length of the original game, Outlast 2's gameplay starts to wear thin, especially since too many of its scripted chases funnel you down preset paths. At the same time, however, I admire its purity, and to an extent, I'm willing to accept its shortcomings for the sake of true survival horror. The campaign is scary from start to finish and delivers on its promise of unrelenting terror in part because it never allows you to fight back. The atmosphere and sound design are expertly crafted, and Blake's hallucinations elevate the game's story above that of the first. It doesn't do much to build on the original formula, but it unquestionably provides a more polished version of the same idea.
Think of it as a ride through a really amazing haunted house: you don't have a ton of control and sometimes the ride breaks down for a moment or two, but it's basically guaranteed to leave you scared out of your mind.
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