Everything you've heard about Cuphead is true. It is a difficult side-scrolling shooter with relentless boss battles that demand rapid-fire actions and reactions. Think for too long, and you won't stand a chance against the game's toughest enemies. Battles may only last three minutes at most, but they feel far longer when you know that you can only absorb three hits before you have to start from scratch. When you are navigating your way around bullets, smaller enemies, and pitfalls, while simultaneously trying to damage your primary target, toppling Cuphead's imposing bosses is both a monumental and rewarding task.
But difficult battles only tell half of the story. Cuphead's 1930s cartoon aesthetic is endlessly charming, popping with color and expression unlike anything seen at this scale in a video game before. The sheer variety of characters and settings yields consistent delight as you go from one stage to the next, with everything bearing the telltale signs of grainy '30s film and rudimentary production techniques. Cel-shading means something to a lot of people, but Cuphead truly re-creates the look of hand-drawn cel animation.
The characters and bosses that are clearly inspired by cartoon legends like Betty Boop break free from the expected to surprise you with something new. Never mind that Betty's lookalike is a mermaid now; it's the moment her head breaks free from her body and spews caustic skulls that gives you pause. If you can appreciate the unique animation style, you will be doubly impressed when you see what developer Studio MDHR has brought to the table. If its technical execution wasn't enough, MDHR's creativity puts Cuphead in a league of its own.
A world map sets the stage for your adventure. As a Cup-thing who gambled with the devil, you now must go around collecting debts from the devil's other acquaintances--the game's bosses. Outside of one-on-one fights, you also have a few opportunities to run and gun through less-imposing platforming stages. These help break up the action and give you a chance to collect coins that can be cashed in for "weapons" and passive buffs. Coins are in short supply and can only be collected once, so farming to gain an advantage is out of the question. These stages don't compare to Cuphead's main attractions, but they add valuable substance nonetheless.
The mix of ammunition for your hand gun--character fire from their fingers--includes the likes of a spread shot, a charge blast, and a boomerang round. There are six in all, and each comes with a secondary attack that's tied to a meter that fills when you successfully land shots on enemies. You can also earn meter by parrying pink projectiles and enemies, a task that requires you to jump towards an enemy and then tap jump again at just the right moment before impact. These range from a fireball and a ring of damaging gems to a burst of bulky, short-range arrows. Finally, you have a super art, which can only be fired when your entire meter is full, as opposed to spending one section of that meter to fire your weapon's secondary attack. The one catch here is that when your meter is full, you can't perform a secondary attack--you are inconveniently forced to unleash your super art, which isn't always desirable.
Given that you are able to equip two weapons at once, the variety of loadouts you can equip before a fight allows for flexibility on your part. While you may benefit by bringing a specific set of arms into some boss battles--say, using tracer rounds to pick off minor enemies swarming overhead--you can still carry whatever you wish into battle so long as you have the confidence and knowledge meet the challenge ahead.
Learning the bosses' attack pattern is oftentimes half the battle, and it's typical to run through a fight multiple times until you see everything that might get thrown your way. Every boss fight consists of multiple stages or forms. Bosses will change shape, position, and behavior with each new phase. And within an individual phase, you may see as many as four different attacks, though you aren't always guaranteed to see them all during subsequent fights. When bosses begin to mix multiple attacks at once, the potential for various deadly combos keeps you on your toes no matter how familiar you are with the fight in question.
The fear of the unexpected is part of what makes Cuphead such a thrilling game, beyond the frantic moment-to-moment tension. You only have three hit points per stage by default--you gain a fourth if you equip a charm that also weakens your firepower. But when the only question in your head is, "In what order will the boss' attacks appear?" fights take on less-appealing light after the dozenth attempt. It's in these moments you start to identify a few places where Cuphead could do a slightly better job of keeping you informed of your own progress and capabilities.
You never can tell exactly how close to death--or a phase change, for that matter--bosses are. At best, you can see a plotline of the battle after death, to loosely gauge your relative progress. In the face of defeat, you may begin to question if you're carrying the right tools for the job. Beyond revisiting old fights, which is more arduous than it should be as you traverse the map slowly and can't fast travel, there isn't a great way to familiarize yourself with new weapons. And there's unfortunately no way to tell exactly how much damage one weapon does compared to another. Vague descriptions are all you get.
If Cuphead's fights were indeed puzzles with one correct solution, this would be incredibly frustrating. As it stands, there's only a small amount of frustration to be found while fumbling with new weapons and dying in the process. It may sound like a minor thing to praise, but the fact that boss battles reload in one or two seconds is a godsend when it comes to trial-and-error tactics. And no matter how frustrating a boss may be, you can't escape the draw of their expressive animations.
Cuphead does support two-player local co-op as well, but it's pretty evident that this makes life more difficult for you and your partner. Despite the intricate chaos that you face alone in any given fight, when you add another character and more projectiles on screen, playing with a friend makes it far more difficult to discern your surroundings, and much easier to slip up. You do have a small window of time to revive a fallen comrade by parrying their ghost, but it's a mere few seconds while it floats up to the top of the screen before disappearing for the remainder of the fight.
For anyone interested in getting a taste of Cuphead without facing almost-guaranteed defeat, there are simpler versions of every boss that you can fight--but you won't be able to access the final battle unless you beat every standard boss on the normal difficulty. And in reality, you may as well stick with the standard fights as Cuphead is relentless no matter how you play.
Cuphead has been a longtime coming, and it's great to see that it lives up to its initial promises. It's beautiful to look at, and with a pitch-perfect soundtrack, it flawlessly captures the era its developers so clearly revere. It's also an intense action game that pulls no punches. It could benefit from a few tweaks, and two-player co-op doesn't feel like the valuable addition you might imagine, but Cuphead remains a rare, unique game that truly stands out.
When I describe Danganronpa to people, I usually start with the murder part. The series' main draw is its battle royale-style killing game, its participants high school students trapped in a school (or an island, in the case of Danganronpa 2) and unable to contact the outside world. The game master is a sentient teddy bear named Monokuma, and he tells them that if they want to leave, they have to get away with murder. But, if they're caught red-handed, they'll be executed, leaving the innocent ones to survive and continue the killing game.
Solving each murder in Danganronpa's bizarre, darkly funny world has always been my favorite thing about the games. But the mysteries extend beyond the murders to the fate of the outside world, the truth of the killing game, and whether hope can truly defeat despair. While the first two games are mostly light on details about the world at large, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony focuses much more heavily on the bigger-picture questions. A surprising twist in the first case is followed by a series of rather lukewarm murders, but they're a slow setup for greater mysteries that lead to a fantastic and unpredictable ending.
Like the first two games, V3 is divided into chapters, each with visual novel storytelling, first-person exploration of the school grounds, a murder investigation, and a trial. It takes a while to get to the first murder, mostly because the students need time to wrap their heads around the killing game, and there's a lot of back-and-forth as they decide what to do. Of course, that also gives you time to get to know the characters and figure out which ones are suspicious (or most likely to die). Once each murder happens, you're launched into a point-and-click investigation, where you gather evidence in the form of "truth bullets" that you can use to literally shoot down contradictions and false statements during the ensuing trial.
Mechanically, Danganronpa is a bit all over the place. It looks best in its dialogue sequences and while exploring its 2D environments, its characters like cardboard cutouts that follow you wherever you look. 3D exploration is a bit more janky, reminiscent of an old corridor shooter. But the trials, especially, mix in a series of minigames and a ton of instructions designed to help you select answers. An anagram game has you spell out murder weapons or methods; a driving game cleverly called Psyche Taxi has you drive over letter pickups to form questions; the debate sections have you shooting down "white noise" statements to clear the path for your truth bullets. It's a lot, but it's charming in its weirdness and gets easier to handle with practice.
The biggest addition to trials is the ability to lie. Holding down triangle will convert your truth bullet into its opposite--for example, you can take the truth bullet containing someone's lack of an alibi and turn it into a lie claiming you saw them, if you don't think they're the culprit. The idea is to use lies to direct the debate toward the truth, and it adds another dimension to the trials that keeps you on your toes.
Danganronpa's murder cases are always extra bizarre in some way, and that often comes from its eccentric cast of characters. Each has an "Ultimate" talent, like the Ultimate Detective, that drives much of their personality, though they're all deeper than that--and most are hiding something. V3 is no different. At first glance, even, V3's characters seem a lot like reskins of past ones. There's the gung-ho leader, the mysterious tsundere, one that's so creepy that it almost makes them less threatening, the pervert, and the chaotic evil lunatic. The parallels aren't just there, they're suspiciously overt, down to the over-the-top dialogue that hits anime archetypes hard. It feels off somehow.
But in true Danganronpa fashion, anything that feels wrong is almost definitely that way for a reason. The first trial is proof of that; because the characters seemed so familiar and therefore predictable, I saw the false conclusion the game was trying to lead me to and figured the twist was obvious. The actual explanation for the murder, though, completely blindsided me. It was fresh, completely changed my perception of the characters, and set the stage for a shocking, exciting series of murder mysteries. That's why the next few chapters were a bit disappointing.
Compared to the first two main games, V3 feels exceptionally long. The "daily life" sections, where you get to know everyone around the academy while you wait for another body to turn up, take up more time than they need to. Most chapters took around eight to ten hours to complete in total. The cases in the middle of the game are drawn out, the trials long and winding (though not slow or boring, at least). Even when the culprit is totally unclear, the explanations lack the revelatory feeling of the first case. There are a few standout moments, especially when revealing the hidden depth to different characters, but it mostly plateaus.
It's hard to explain why that works without spoiling the ending, but it becomes more clear when you focus less on the individual details of each case and more on everything else around them. There are a few things that still don't work regardless, like the unrelenting, grating vulgarity of one of the characters, but the things that felt almost great turned out to lead somewhere much better. The ending payoff is more satisfying for it, even if it takes 40 hours to get there.
Danganronpa V3 doesn't top the first two games overall. Its murder cases generally aren't as memorable, and its slow pace can make it feel flat in the middle. But as a sequel to those two games, it does a great job of tying the loose threads together and remaining surprising to the very end. The characters are interesting, their collective story very long but still engaging, and unraveling the mysteries of Danganronpa is ultimately satisfying--even if, at times, its unpredictability seems predictable.
Rallying is not only stunningly difficult, it's terrifying. Barreling down narrow stretches of bumpy, loose-gravel roads lined with huge rocks, trees or sheer cliff faces at speeds nearing 140mph is about as butt-clenching an experience as you can imagine. It's a sport that requires pure talent, but those who do it professionally manage do so with the same elegance and grace as a dancer performing a heavily choreographed routine. Watching them react to their co-drivers calls with a flick of the wheel and some fancy footwork can be mesmerizing. And with WRC 7: World Rally Championship, KT Racing has delivered a solid and focused test of off-road skill that, despite a few rough edges, puts you firmly in those dancing shoes whether you're ready or not.
For the unfamiliar, Rallying is a series of time-trials run over three days, with each day consisting of a number of stages. At the end of the event, the driver with the fastest time across all three days takes home the championship points and the glory. Set on treacherous, narrow roads which can combine snow and ice, tarmac and gravel, teams utilize co-drivers to describe the road ahead using pace notes. It's a tough, challenging sport that requires total concentration as missing a call can easily see the car launched violently off the road. WRC 7 leans hard into this mentality, taking it more towards the simulation end of the spectrum, and it shows.
Cars themselves can be a real handful. Without assists, of which there are few, you'll need to be on top of your braking and steering, which feel very sensitive by default. Turning down the sensitivity helped alleviate this somewhat, but even with the assists on, you're still in for a huge challenge. A few more player assists like stability control, or stronger effects applied to the ones already available, would have gone a long way in making the game feel more accessible.
In a time where video games focus on making themselves pop with fancy special effects and extra side content, WRC 7 takes a more direct approach to both its presentation and gameplay. All the real-life teams, cars and sponsors are represented across the three tiers of competition; Junior WRC, WRC2 and the WRC, giving you the full gamut of options to choose from when taking on a single rally stage, an entire three day event or a full custom championship.
You can jump into a multiplayer rally, but chances are you'll need to find some friends with the game in order to get the most out of it. Otherwise the best option for those who want to test themselves against others is via the leaderboards and the challenge mode, which picks a car and track combo and challenges you to put down your best time compared to others. The difference between this and the standard leaderboards being that you potentially earn the most points for your first attempt, and fewer points for each subsequent shot you take. It's by far the easiest way to get your multiplayer kicks.
Each of the 13 different rally locations from this year's World Rally Championship are represented, and they are easily the stars of the show. From the densely lined, snowy forest roads of Sweden to the rocky, sun-drenched gravel of Argentina, each of the different locales and stages has a real feeling of character that, while proving an incredible challenge, also serves to visually satisfy. Special stages are deeply packed with foliage, adding a quality and detail to the environment seldom seen in other rally games. Despite some minor shadow pop-in and objects in the distance lacking finer detail, it's hard not to be impressed by the individual character of each venue.
While not quite as awe-inspiring as the numerous locales you plow through, each of the game's 55 different team cars have all been modeled to accurately reflect their real-life counterparts. Slightly less spectacular are the cockpit interiors which, while matching the bare-bones structure of a beastly rally car, fail to live up to the finer level of environmental detail. Similarly, weather effects are present but unspectacular, particularly when driving in snow, which never manages to stick to your windshield.
WRC 7's mainstay game mode is the career, which lets you create a driver and sign them up to a team in the Junior WRC category with the goal being to rise up through the ranks. If you do well enough, you might be given an early shot for a single rally at a team in one of the higher tier championships. Better yet, earn a good finishing spot in the championship and rival teams from the other categories will swoop in and attempt to sign you up for next season.
There's no upgrading your team, car parts or skills. You are a driver, and that's what you're here to do; drive. Your performance can change your team's morale, which affects how efficiently they perform car repairs in the service area at the end of each day. Team morale is also affected by how well you match their preferred approach to racing: some want you to go all-out, pushing hard to go as fast as possible without too much cause for concern about damage. Smaller teams, though, may want you to protect the car, asking instead that you make sure to bring it home in one piece.
Although this is a nice idea in theory, in practice it doesn't show much of an effect, if any, and it would be good to see more in terms of consequences for either failing or succeeding in sticking to the game plan. In line with this, car damage is forgiving both visually and mechanically, despite the ease of which you'll find yourself rolling end-over-end after clipping an embankment. If you beat it up enough, parts will eventually fail or fall off entirely, but the cars can generally take a good beating before you need to worry too much.
For all its minor faults and bare-bones nature in comparison to others, WRC 7 is still an enjoyable, but seriously challenging rally title. It's not the most welcoming game for newcomers, and even experienced racers will find some of the rougher stages tricky. But ultimately, that's also the point. Rallying isn't easy, and KT Racing have taken that much to heart.
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