There's a moment early on in Tokyo 42 that makes it clear the kind of world in which it lives. A local gang wants my blood and are hot on my tail. As I'm being chased through the stark, minimalist city, I leap down a flight of stairs into a peaceful garden lined with trees and waterfalls. This is where the blood spills. My mission is to lead this gang, the Punks, into another's turf. Specifically, the Skins--a nudist gang that carries assault rifles. After about 30 seconds, the Punks are slaughtered, the Skins go back to sunbaking, and I'm off to collect my fee for a job well done. It's a hilarious, amazingly crafted series of events.
Played from a distant or close-up isometric perspective (your preference), Tokyo 42 is a cat-and-mouse murder-puzzle experience that takes place on a colossal piece of art. Meticulously constructed with boldly-colored beauty, the futuristic city is the main attraction and the true star of the game. Executing contracts takes planning, and shifting your viewpoint on a three-dimensional plane sometimes results in the most delightful moments of discovery and opens up different ways to complete missions.
Whether it's the hidden staircases, gorgeously designed flying cars, and improbably huge cat statues, this vision of Tokyo is visually stunning. The hallmarks of cyberpunk are ever-present, with floating barges selling the latest weapons and slow, tense electronic music filling the streets. It is both meticulously designed and appears as clean as a freshly-wiped mirror.
The glory and excitement of desperate video game violence---the kind you can barely survive--is what Tokyo 42 swims in. One shot and you're dead, and every confrontation could be your last. Whether it's by sniper rifle, shotgun, grenade, or katana, you'll come to a very fast end if you rush into combat.
Colourful tenement buildings give way to fascinating monuments
That's where the world design of Tokyo 42 comes in. In this sparkling future metropolis, different factions fight for control. You play a nameless citizen framed for murder, and your best friend Tycho decides the best way to prove your innocence is to become a hitman. That's a strange road to take for someone on the run from the authorities--however, the bare-bones story is just a clothing line from which to hang blood-soaked missions. The plot and meager characters are there to serve the combat, which can swap from tense strategy to breakneck carnage in one swipe of a sword.
The skills required to execute your contracts are all there from the beginning. Unforgivingly, however, Tokyo 42 leaves the learning process and decision-making up to you. Certain missions are brutal in their difficulty, sending two dozen enemies--and many more bullets--across your path. After being cut down for the 15th or 20th time, you need to re-plan or relent. The game typically offers multiple directions to approach a target, but if an alarm is raised, there's a good chance you'll meet an abrupt, untimely death.
The missions of Tokyo 42 can be unnecessarily harsh--yet simultaneously intoxicating. Your contracts include rooftop sniping and stealth assaults to riding motorcycles and leaping atop flying cars to reach a target. While the difficulty can be high, each mission reveals another section of the city that's extraordinary in its design. More than a few times, you'll find yourself distracted from your task to take in the beauty of the neon lights, skyscraper-high artwork, and complex architecture.
The city is bursting at the seams with unique artwork
That's why it's so unfortunate that Tokyo 42 fails to leave its own mark on the genre its developers so clearly admire. It literally wears its cyberpunk influences on its sleeve (your default coat, Deckard, is named after Blade Runner's iconic protagonist), but it fails to cultivate a unique personality during its various missions. Carving up henchmen with a katana or raining down multiple grenades on an unsuspecting gang is exciting, but it begins to lose its appeal when you have to question why you're doing it in the first place. The gorgeous look of every street, every building and every statue outshines character's motivations--and, as such, you can't ever decide if those reasons are righteous or selfish. You're a faceless avatar, existing only for the next mission.
Surviving the corruption and violence of the big city is a bedrock on which cyberpunk builds its foundation. It's a genre in which millions of stories can live, but only the truly extraordinary ones rise to the surface and escape the grime, the filth and, the gutter. Tokyo 42 stands as a monument to intricate, beautiful design, and its tense, unpredictable combat is a highlight. But somewhere along the way it forgets to walk in the dirt.
Danger Zone is an attempt to recreate the magic of Crash Mode, the discontinued Burnout series' claim to fame. It's the product of a young studio founded by Alex Ward, former head of Burnout developer Criterion Software, no less. Your sole objective--then in Burnout and now in Danger Zone--is to send a vehicle rocketing into a busy intersection to create a massive-scale vehicular horror show of fire, screeching rubber, and shattered glass, punctuated by a player-controlled explosion for maximum chaos. At first, it's gratifying to have a semblance of Crash Mode back in our lives--but the honeymoon period eventually wanes, revealing issues that prevent Danger Zone from maintaining its appeal.
For better and for worse, Danger Zone keeps things simple. You're given a massive holographic space in which you ram a single stock stunt car into simulated traffic patterns. The car rolls out with a single bomb, called a Smashbreaker, which can be triggered after enough cars have met their untimely end in the given pileup. Success is measured in sheer damage in dollars, tallied after every car in every intersection has run its course. Icons strewn around each intersection can either give you additional Smashbreakers or more money added to the final total.
For at least the first couple of intersections, Danger Zone's formula is gleefully basic for anyone who just wants to drive up and cause some mayhem for a few brief minutes, though over time, the game's austerity works against it. Crashes and explosions themselves are beautifully rendered with all the power Unreal Engine can muster, but the sparse crash environments make for a boring backdrop, stripping away a small-but-crucial bit of personality from the whole experience.
Later, when Danger Zone gets more complex, the crash intersections start requiring less appetite for destruction than a utilitarian precision that winds up being the opposite of fun. Many of the later levels are multitiered monstrosities that require perfect timing, placement, and movement to block traffic on every bit of floating highway. The initial hit has to be impactful enough to stop both your lane and the opposite flow of traffic. That's strangely harder than it should be, since many times, vehicles don't stop, swerve, or even react when a car is out on the road--only screeching and stopping when a direct hit is imminent.
In early stages, your initial Smashbreaker is all you need to rack up enough points for a high score. But later on, it's imperative that you create an explosion with enough force to send you down the block to another intersection, and hopefully a Smashbreaker icon that allows you to keep the carnage rolling even further. You do have a modicum of control over the vehicle once it's in the air, but directing your wreck is a loose and inconsistent process made worse by Danger Zone's camera. You can look left and right, but not up, down, or farther away from the action to get a decent look at the surrounding area. This in turn leaves you prone to encountering unexpected events. Some, like hitting a fresh batch of cars, work in your favor, but you're just as likely to fly into open space, cutting your crash spree short.
The other major problem comes down to the game's scoring, which is weighted less for the number of vehicles you impact than how many get caught in a Smashbreaker explosion, which not only takes the fun out of just plain causing a pileup, but seems to lead to some aggravating bugs in the process. One particular stage requires triggering a head-on collision with a semi-trailer to start a sequence of pileups on the other side of the road from you, and time and time again, my car hit the trailer dead on at full speed, and the trailer kept rolling on like nothing happened, unless I racked up enough damage to trigger the Smashbreaker first.
The old magic of Crash Mode rises to the surface often enough for Danger Zone to be a fun diversion, but this excitement is ironically muted when the game decides to turn up the intensity in its later levels. Danger Zone is the beating heart of a concept in search of a full-fledged game to pump life into. While it won't satisfy your lust for chaos the way the Burnout games once did, Danger Zone provides enough thrills to make you want that hypothetical successor more than ever.
Perception is technically a scary game. You explore a mansion in near darkness due to the limitations of blindness, driven by the curiosities of a brave young woman. The persistent scarcity of light creates the illusion of a labyrinthine home which complements the spookiness of both its harmless and homicidal spirits. It's an environment that especially caters to those fascinated by the things we leave behind and the often disturbing stories these objects can tell. Yet, despite what my goosebumps can attest, Perception made me realize that it is possible to not care about being scared.
A series of dreams has compelled protagonist Cassie to visit a house in New England sight unseen. While this is a solitary investigation, the supernatural forces that draw her into the depths of the estate--not to mention her boyfriend who is a phone call away--adequately convey the positive message that while she lives a life in darkness, she is never alone.
Cassie overcomes her vision-impairment with advanced tools to get around and an acute awareness of her surroundings. While she carries two devices that help her decipher objects she picks up, Cassie relies mostly on echolocation, the ability to use sound to determine the location of nearby obstacles. This is her primary means for getting around a pitch-dark mansion. Footsteps allow you to see your immediate surroundings (about two feet in front of you), while tapping your walking cane brief reveals a much larger area. The catch is that making too much noise alerts a hooded spectre known as The Presence. It's Game Over if you're captured--and, judging by the sound effects, eaten--by this phantom. The threat of the Presence functions as a deterrent to mashing the cane button as you move around. This visual limitation is an inventive method that preserves some of Perception's challenge.
Getting caught by The Presence isn't the sort of penalizing experience that would motivate you to take escaping more seriously after each death. You always respawn in the same spot--the foyer--and since this isn't an especially large mansion, resuming your progress toward the next waypoint takes little time. In fact, dying--as opposed to hurriedly searching for a hiding spot--might even serve as a perk, since respawning in the foyer oftentimes brings you closer to your next destination. The end result is a sense of apathy for being caught. You're left wondering why this fail state exists to begin with.
The softening of Perception's difficulty doesn't end there. Cassie also has a conveniently keen sixth sense in knowing the location of your next waypoint. This supernatural talent isn't adequately explained and primarily functions as a hint system for whenever the player gets stuck. At first, using this waypoint detector feels like cheating--that is until you learn that not relying on this sixth sense would make for a frustrating playthrough, partly due to Cassie's limited vision and especially because of the dearth of clues that tell you where to go next. As much as the deciphering of objects presents an often colorful history of this house, they seldom help you reach your goal. So there's no middle ground; neglecting this sixth sense makes progress very difficult, and revealing these waypoints reduces the overall playthrough into a boring checklist.
While Perception's ghosts will convince you that there are supernatural forces at work in this house, the surreal time travelling drives the point home. By solving simple puzzles and completing the main objective for each chapter, you're transported to an older version of the house, each loaded with their own nostalgia-tinged flavor. And with each incarnation of the estate comes new sets of disturbing visuals in an attempt to sustain Perception's idea of horror. Disappointingly, the third, 19th century version of the house relies heavily on one of the lowest hanging fruits of horror imagery: dolls. Perception eventually doubles down on this trope by giving them--of all things--guns, firing at you on sight. Like the tapping of your cane, the gunfire easily calls the attention of The Presence and ruins what would have otherwise been an intriguing sneaking mission as you try to hide behind columns and furniture. If you can put up with these funhouse-style shenanigans, you're rewarded with the creepiest version of the house: a dilapidated colonial abode where the floorboards creak with every step.
Besides the faint surroundings of what the echolocation reveals, many of Perception's actual sound effects add tension to a playthrough that is often bereft of suspense. The positively liquid sounds of treading knee-deep in mystery fluid or the squishiness of stepping in mud can make one wince. The walking cane itself, however, proves to be obnoxious despite its utility. Depending on what surfaces you hit, the cacophonous taps and the repeated clangs produce the kind of noises that would annoy anyone. You can't blame The Presence for wanting you to stop that racket.
Along with Cassie's journey of self-discovery, Perception is also about how we leave traces of ourselves in places we no longer inhabit. Its engaging moments--of which there are few--marry metaphors of regret with heavy-handed symbolism. Much of this theme is conveyed through the objects our heroine discovers and the messages these items retain. Although the various incarnations of each house have their own sense of character, their confining designs and the looming threat of The Presence limit opportunities to savor an exploratory experience that would have been reminiscent of the acclaimed Gone Home.
Perception feels like a lost opportunity to showcase the beauty of mundanity. The routine-like flow of going from goal to goal as you rely on Cassie's sixth sense feels like a series of chores lacking in stimulation. And while reaching the end rewards you with an additional thematic message that no one could have anticipated, it doesn't redeem the game from its lack of nuance and overreliance on hand-holding waypoints.
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