Recent reviews by mezz

Oh hey, new Tom Francis game, it's been a while. In Tactical Breach Wizards you follow a growing squad of wizards, witches and a cat (you cannot control the cat), who work together to breach rooms and knock out everyone inside them, each with their own unique style of magic.

The game is played in turns, first you get to move your wizards and have them cast spells, then enemies get to react to your moves. You can rewind every move in your current turn, whenever you messed up something or didn't plan well. Before you commit to end your turn, the "foresee phase" will show whether your wizards will get hurt by enemies or will be safe. You're encouraged to experiment and see how things turn out and aren't stuck with any mistakes you make.

Combat largely involves "knockback", a simple mechanic at its heart. A spell that does X amount of knockback to an enemy sends them flying X tiles in a particular direction, usually depending on the angle you cast from. If they hit an obstacle, the remaining knockback is taken as damage. If they hit a window, the window breaks (also they fall through it and cease to be your problem). Much time is spent pushing enemies around, keeping the dangerous ones away from you and trying to not get hit yourself. Every level is a hand-crafted encounter that feels like a puzzle where the solution is finding the best way to make the environment hurt your enemies. Many will seem overwhelming at first, until you think outside the box and discover a nifty opportunity or a neat trick you didn't see before.
There is no randomness involved in the resolution of moves, you have all the information necessary to know how things will turn out. Not unlike chess, it's all up to how well you can plan ahead and exploit your environment.

As the game goes on and enemies become more dangerous, your crew and toolset will expand. New characters bring along their own unique tricks, opening up your tactical options. Each excels at a particular role, some are good at pushing everyone around, others are better at support and making tougher enemies more manageable with debuffs, which makes them more vulnerable to attacks; then there are some that are just really good at moving around the map. They all play very differently from one another and have their own strengths to master, though they are introduced throughout the campaign one at a time, so you won't get overwhelmed and can slowly get used to them. All levels have optional objectives you can try to complete that require making the most of your squad's abilities to pull off great feats. They help a lot with learning some of the hidden potential of your wizards that you may not have realized at first glance. The reward for your characters is simply some costumes which have no bearing on gameplay, so if they become annoying or difficult to do, you can simply skip them for the time being and come back later whenever you feel like it.
The progression of what characters and spells you have available is strictly determined by the story. However, you are rewarded with perk points between missions, which allow you to upgrade spells in small but significant ways. There isn't an overwhelming amount of them, and they all feel worthwhile. You can't unlock all of them in one playthrough, but still enough to make your spells significantly more useful.

The campaign progresses strictly linearly (outside of "dream missions" which are optional). There is plenty of dialogue between the main cast, usually about the mission at hand, but sometimes also just about plain personal things and the past. A lot of the dialogue is funny and very tongue-in-cheek, but the characters and the world itself still feel genuine and well thought through. Sometimes you get to pick a dialogue option to get a different flavor of a conversation, but there aren't any long lasting decisions to be made.

I've been waiting for this game for a long time and it's been worth it. It plays quite differently from Gunpoint or Heat Signature (both of which I love), but it still very much tickles that part of my brain that likes to indulge in experimenting with weird strategies that end up working surprisingly well and making me shout out loud "WAIT I CAN DO THAT??"

Honestly I've been struggling to think of anything resembling a flaw really. The game is just realized so damn well. It's a good example of how far you can take mechanics that are simple at their core and make them shine through amazing level and encounter design. What elevates it to greatness for me are all the little moments in the story that I don't really want to spoil for you.

Tyrannical Beach Witches is easily my favorite game this year so far, and I am almost kinda sad that I will probably be done with it soon. It is easily worth its full asking price, and when my money situation allows it, I am probably gonna grab the special edition at some point as well. I will have 15 years before Tom Francis releases his next game anyway, so I probably won't be in a rush.

Project Wingman is a post apocalyptic combat flight sim. As a mercenary employed by the Sicario corporation you're hired by a country fighting for its independence against a global federation with imperial ambitions. If you're familiar with the Ace Combat games, you will feel right at home.

Over the course of 21 missions, you will be tasked with destroying (almost) all enemies on the map, which includes targets on the ground, ships, other fighter jets, as well as enormous airships, which carry many heavy weapons and can be dangerous up close. There is no time limit and you can take them all on at your own pace. There are no mid-mission checkpoints whatsoever, so a death means a restart. This does encourage more cautious and thoughtful strategies, however it can also lead to being stuck and frustrated rather easily, especially since missions take up to 20-30 minutes at a time. There is not much of a tutorial, so if you struggle to figure out what you are doing wrong, it can feel like hitting a brick wall. Multiple friends of mine gave up on the game because of this.

The bread and butter of combat is shooting missiles at other planes. If you are within lock-on range and have a target in your sights, you can send up to two guided missiles out to destroy them. Enemy planes will attempt to dodge them, so there is no guarantee that they will hit. They will also shoot missiles back at you. Missiles are a big threat, you can't take more than 3-4 hits from them before you die, so dodging and throwing them off is crucial. Most of the time you can simply out turn them when you hear them coming your way, but you can also equip your plane with flares. Flares are a very effective option, as they simply throw off ALL missiles currently locked onto you, regardless of proximity. This makes them very helpful for making it through missions with large amounts of enemies with as little damage as possible. They do have some cooldown, so it's sometimes a good idea to wait until multiple missiles are on their way to you before launching them. The alternative to flares is the AOA module, which allows extremely sharp turns at the expense of some speed.

The other main weapon on all planes is the machine gun. Bullets are not guided at all and are affected by gravity. If you are within close range to a target, a circle indicator appears on your HUD, showing where you need to keep the target if you want to hit them with your gun. Although the indicator only appears at close range, the bullets can actually cause damage at extremely long ranges, if the pilot is skilled enough to make that shot, which can be particularly helpful against ground targets that are far away. The machine gun also helps against targets, that are able to dodge your missiles proficiently, since bullets travel much faster. Compared to Ace Combat it's a very good alternative to missiles.

Each plane has its own particular selection of up to 3 additional weapons that can be brought to a mission. Some of them are specialized missiles, with longer ranges and the ability to lock onto multiple targets at once. There are also unguided bombs, which trade the ability to lock-on for a larger explosion radius. This can be useful in circumstances, where you have to take out densely packed groups of targets. The right selection of armaments can make a drastic difference in how difficult a mission will be. If you know what kind of targets you are up against, you can make your life a lot easier by picking a weapon suited for them.

During a mission there are no cutscenes that take away control from the player, however scripted spectacle setpieces still happen. It's a common occurrence to be hearing a loud noise somewhere behind you, and only finding out what it was after turning around, which can be quite immersive, particularly in VR. In between missions there are scripted briefings that detail both the tactical state of what you are about to go into, as well as most of the plot and exposition. During a mission you hear the radio chatter of pilots, both friendly and hostile. It can sometimes be difficult to follow along when your attention is already occupied with dog fighting, but anything important to the plot happens during calm moments. Most of the time it's idle chatting between your colleagues, who you'll get to know better over the course of the game, or your enemies freaking out as you kill them one by one.

I've been playing Project Wingman at the tail end of an Ace Combat marathon, and to me it easily keeps up with its inspiration. I would go as far to say that it's my favorite AC game, that isn't even an AC game. Playing it in VR is quite incredible, simply being able to freely look around while controlling the plane adds so much to the gameplay. Being able to visually "lock on" to a plane with your head while your hands maneuver it is one of my favorite VR experiences of all time. Going back to the desktop version almost felt like it was missing something, but it's still a lot of fun.

The vibe of the world is also pretty great, it diverges quite a bit from the typical "hero ace pilot who saves the day" story that the AC series likes to do, and it feels ever so slightly more grounded, despite its far future setting.

Generally I recommend the game at full price, it certainly deserves its spot among other Ace Combat games. However this comes with the caveat of the game lacking mid-mission checkpoints. Some of the early levels can be quite tilting, since they take a long time to beat and keep adding escalations after each enemy wave. Having to start over after ALMOST beating a mission can be quite the mood killer. I ended up powering through it and enjoyed it once the game "clicked", but I very much was not fond of repeating the same half hour for as much as I have.

Sifu is an intense kung fu brawler that demands a lot of practice and patience to master. Each death you suffer will leave its mark on your body, progressively aging until you are too old to fight. On your path to revenge the only way forward is to master the art of kicking ass.

Every character, including yours, has both a traditional health bar, as well as a structure bar (equivalent to posture in Sekiro). You can defeat any enemy by either depleting their health with plain attacks or damaging their structure. Performing blocks at precisely the right time or moves that throw enemies off balance, will increase the structure bar until it's filled up. This will open someone up for a takedown move that instantly kills them, regardless of remaining health.

Most of the time you will be surrounded by crowds of foes fighting you at once, which means you often can't focus on killing a single enemy at a time. Instead, you will have to react to whoever is the most immediate threat and get them away from you just long enough to deal with the next one. Good situational awareness over your opponents and thinking on your feet are a crucial skills to pick up.

In addition to combos that deal plain damage, some moves have specific utility purposes. Palm strikes can push an enemy away from you to create some space. Leg sweeps knock them onto the ground and disarm them. With throws you can knock someone into a nearby wall for additional damage, or into a crowd to stagger many foes at once. Brute force alone usually isn't enough to do well, but utilizing the environment and choosing the right moves will help tremendously.

Occasionally you will get the chance to pick up weapons like wooden bats or staffs, letting you deal more damage and extending your reach. They are very potent against weaker enemies, who will go down in far fewer strikes. Weapons have limited durability and won't last forever, so you can't rely on them at all times, but in certain troublesome encounters the extra edge can make or break a fight. Throwing your weapon can also stun and massively hurt whoever is unlucky enough to be in the way.

Combining all the various aspects of combat and using them effectively isn't going to come naturally right away. You may start out just circling around groups, trying to play it safe while fishing for lucky hits with some stray punches. The game encourages you to replay stages a LOT, becoming gradually bolder and more secure with your grasp on the mechanics until they become firmly embedded as instinct. This is the point where you will begin making many split-second decisions resulting in impressive looking strings of moves, that knock enemies all over the place and leave nobody in the room with any chance to catch their breath.

Upon death, the game allows you to resurrect right on the spot and carry on fighting immediately. This comes at the cost of your character's age increasing each time you continue. Growing too old means you lose for good and have to restart the level. After beating a level, your current age is saved as a starting point for the next one, so when you die of old age, you only lose progress of the current stage. You can go back to previous ones and try to beat them with fewer deaths, to give you more room for mistakes in the late game, which is very much encouraged.

After struggling to finish the early levels without wasting too many years, it might seem like a monumental task to ever be beating the whole game, let alone replaying it for the true ending. However, you'll find that repeated runs of a level will go by MUCH faster and smoother as your experience grows. Lost health is easily regained with takedowns, and improving at reading and responding to enemies will allow you to do them faster and more reliably.

Consistently playing very badly will eventually force you to start over and try to do better. With overall decently skillful play however, the occasional misstep will not become a serious obstacle. The game is much more forgiving than it makes itself seem, it asks not for perfection, but you do have to grow alongside the game's increasingly demanding challenges.

Bosses are less forgiving, and likely where you will burn most of your deaths on. They tend to react better to some of your "dirty" moves and generally aren't as easily overwhelmed as regular enemies. The emphasis lies more on learning the precise patterns on when to block and evade them. It's a very different pace from the rest of the game and feels a lot more rigid in how you overcome them. Luckily, being able to resurrect means you are less likely to be stuck with retrying a boss forever, unless you want to go for minimum deaths.

Motion Blur and Temporal Antialiasing cannot be disabled easily in-game, it is necessary to edit "Engine.ini" in "%localappdata%\Sifu\Saved\Config\WindowsClient" and add these lines at the end:

[SystemSettings]
r.MotionBlurQuality=0
r.PostProcessAAQuality=0

I would also recommend installing the game on an SSD if possible. The game loads chunks of the level during gameplay when you pass certain load triggers. This causes a noticeable stutter, which is made worse by being installed on a hard drive. Installing it on an SSD doesn't make it fully go away, but it makes it much more bearable. I'm not sure why proper asynchronous loading wasn't implemented, since consistent stutters in the same areas are quite annoying when replaying levels over and over again. Thankfully most of the time they don't interfere with combat. The game runs fine and without hitches during regular gameplay.

This is easily my favorite game that I discovered this year. It captures the vibe of a gritty, chaotic martial arts movie, not only with its combat, but also with the attention to detail. Little unpredictable moments like enemies accidentally hitting each other in a crowded hallway or furniture breaking apart into improvised weapons go a long way to make fights feel immersive. The animations for EVERYTHING are incredibly smooth and incorporate the nearby environment very seamlessly, such as unique takedown animations for slamming someone's face into a kitchen table, should you find yourself next to one.
Everything about this game is executed masterfully and it all comes together to an incredibly satisfying experience, that is going to stick with me for a while.

Sifu is worth full price.

Northern Journey is a first-person shooter, set on a fantasy island that surrounds you in mutely colored nature, offering an abundance of invertebrate wildlife. Armed with a variety of medieval ranged armaments, ranging from slingshots and throwables to bows and crossbows, you venture through a variety of foresty landscapes toward the icy mountains.

The game's weapons require more involvement from the player to use effectively than most other shooters. Due to their primitive nature, projectiles drop far down when shooting over greater distances, making the compensation of aim a necessary skill for almost all gear. With some weapons, shots can also be slow to take off in the first place. The slingshot and bow cannot be kept drawn indefinitely, making it necessary to only draw them before taking a shot, which adds an element of timing and intentionality to using them.

Other than the act of shooting itself, most mechanics are very simple and largely resemble those of old-school first-person shooters. Ammo and health pickups are placed in static locations, and enemies never respawn once killed.
While the game world does offer branching pathways and levels with large open terrains, which would make it easy to expect an open-ended world of some kind, progress is gated fairly linearly behind a sequence of key items, which are required to unlock paths or character interactions that were previously inaccessible. Early in the game, there are a lot of shortcuts that allow fast backtracking to the village where you start, but as you progress there is much more of a straight forward momentum.

Each level offers a unique roster of enemy creatures, giving each environment an organic feeling and novelty when exploring. However, as far as gameplay is concerned, their behavior in combat offers little variety. Most encounters can be overcome either by slowly picking individual enemies off from afar, or by running backwards and shooting straight at a horde of enemies until they slowly thin out in numbers. While each weapon has certain situations facilitating its optimal use, all of them boil down to shooting plain projectiles that can hit one enemy at a time, and in the heat of a fight are prone to missing their mark. Encounters grow more overwhelming in enemy count and toughness, and your arsenal somewhat struggles to keep up with giving you options to deal with them efficiently.

Being a solo dev project, some lack of polish is to be expected and excused. However there are some technical flaws, which although each on their own may not seem like a big deal, do eventually add up to grow frustrating. Here are some, listed in no particular order:

- Enemy sounds are not properly spatialized. The left and right channels are always perfectly balanced, making it impossible to locate threats without a direct line of sight. This ends up being very disorienting when ambushed and surprised.

- There are no autosaves of any kind. You are expected to manually quicksave for the entire playthrough, however the game restricts where saving is permitted. While some of these restrictions make sense (such as during combat or falling), some are frustrating to deal with. Being close to an NPC you have interacted with recently or standing on slightly "uneven" ground can be enough to not allow saving, which can quickly lead to you forgetting about it entirely, and cause a sizable and frustrating loss of progress later down the line.

- Many walkable surfaces are unsmooth and have jagged collision shapes, which can become dangerously unpredictable on narrow walkways or near ledges. Frequently you either launch off a cliff unintentionally or fail to perform a jump, due to the game already considering you to be "mid-air", because you walked over tiny slopes or other uneven geometry.

- Melee attacks from enemies aren't distinctly telegraphed moves. They just approach until they clip into you, and deal damage for every frame they stay in touch. It feels odd and doesn't really allow for much close-range maneuvering and positioning, the best strategy seems to always be backpedalling and keeping your distance at all costs.

After finishing Northern Journey I had quite mixed feelings. At first, it seemed natural to reflect on the various technical issues and flaws in gameplay and come to some kind of negative conclusion about the game, but it wouldn't quite match up with the experience I've had actually playing it.

Despite the various shortcomings and underwhelming combat, I grew fond of it regardless. I find it difficult to express exactly why the atmosphere drew me in. There is something therapeutic about the foggy autumnal environment and its creepy crawly inhabitants, that made me want to keep going forth. The combat overall is pretty serviceable and does a good enough job. While I wish it was more tightly designed, I might have made it sound worse than it really is.

Ultimately I don't regret playing it, it's worth picking up for the environments and entrancing atmosphere, if you can overlook FPS gameplay that's somewhat undercooked, but still playable.

You also get a cool synth ambient soundtrack included for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Cr70QpjqM

You are a commoner from a remote fishing village. The peaceful life is disturbed as an enormous red dragon descends from the skies and attacks your home. As villagers and guardsmen flee to seek safety, you decide to raise arms against it on your own. Ultimately you are no match for the dragon and fall in battle, but your fate is to grow in strength and seek to challenge it again. At first it sounds just like a by-the-numbers fantasy RPG about killing a big dragon, but as I kept playing that impression faded.

Dragon's Dogma takes place in Gransys, a peninsula overrun by monsters and wild animals ever since the arrival of the dragon. The playable world is fairly small compared to many other open worlds, but in place of sheer size it offers distinctively readable and navigable terrains, that can be mastered over time. Through a combination of well-placed bottlenecks and landmarks, the world is structured in a way that facilitates exhaustive memorization of pathways and encounters, allowing you to plan for travels ahead of time, as you learn where to find shortcuts, tough ambushes as well as important crafting ingredients and herbs to make healing items and other supplies. Almost all natural resources and enemies respawn regularly, making it possible to harvest and create alot of consumables necessary for survival out in the field at any time, without having to solely rely on merchants.

At some early point in the game, limited fast travel becomes available. Rare consumable items called "ferrystones" can instantly teleport you to the main hub from anywhere in the world. Later on you can set a limited amount of custom fast travel points. The DLC introduces an infinitely usable version of the ferrystone, which was not present in the original game. Making use of it is obviously up to your discretion, however some encounters and events you could miss out on rather easily when fast travelling too liberally. It's worth indulging a little bit in treading the same paths more than just once. A certain sense of vulnerability and isolation when far away from the safety of the city is simply lost, when you have the means to teleport at will always at your side. Getting anywhere on foot is doable in a comfortable amount of time, especially when planning journeys in a way that can get multiple tasks done in one trip. In my impression, the game was made with limited fast travel in mind, which makes longer treks more tense and engaging, and gives the hub town a greater feeling of homeliness and comfort.

Creating a strong and capable party is a major focus of the game. In addition to creating your own character, you also get to make a "pawn", who will accompany and grow alongside you. Ideally, your pawn should possess skills and a fighting style that compliment your own. However you can hire two additional "support pawns", which can be summoned from other players' worlds to flesh out your party.
All characters each select a "vocation" (i.e. a class), which determines what types of weapons they are locked into, aswell as which skills they are allowed. Each vocation fulfills a specific role, they cannot be mixed and matched outside of what the game allows. Rather than making a single character as versatile as possible, you are expected to diversify your party's capabilities as a whole. While vocations narrowly define what a character is and isn't able to do, it can be switched to a different one easily, should you need to adjust.

You level up and equip your pawn the same way as your own character, but they can also "learn" on their own. There are a number of behaviors called "inclinations", that drive what a pawn will do at any given moment. They can range from prioritizing weak or ranged characters, providing buffs and advantages to the main character or simply trying to stay alive. The affinity for each inclination changes over time, depending on what actions the player performs. The system is somewhat obtuse to understand and barely explained in-game, it's helpful to look up precisely how it works online.
Pawns also have a persistent "memory". As they fight an enemy more often, they may learn about a particular quirk or weakness. They will let the player know of this, and also adapt their tactics accordingly, i.e. if they know something is weak to fire, they will grant fire buffs to their allies or use fire attacks themselves, if able to.

Whenever you take your party to combat, things can get chaotic quickly. You will be outnumbered most of the time when treading carelessly into an encounter. Many enemies roam in large packs and can quickly surround and overwhelm you. Knowing the correct weaknesses and prioritizing certain enemies is key to success. But sometimes retreat may simply be your most viable option, until you grow stronger or adopt different strategies.
One of the highlights of Dragon's Dogma is learning to fight large monsters. The option to grab and climb onto any limb goes a long way to make big monster fights feel organic and less videogame-y than many other games. Scaling a creature's back and stabbing its weak spot may sound rather trivial on paper, but usually, a creature will flail around and try to throw you off, all while your party is also fighting it at the same time. It can feel like a genuine struggle, but it makes an encounter feel very authentic and all the more rewarding when you do eventually succeed and take down a foe of enormous size.

Early in the game, the balance weighs very strongly against you. You cannot take awfully many hits and need to flee frequently. You will depend on saving after every inch of progress for quite a while, which you thankfully can do at any moment. A limited set of skills and weapons means that environmental advantages and divide and conquer tactics are key to overcoming larger encounters. However as time passes and you level up more and equip yourself better, the difficulty eventually starts to slide towards trivial, as fewer and fewer enemies stand a realistic chance to overwhelm you.

Enemies generally do not scale differently depending on their area or your own level. Some enemy types have stronger variants, but those are visually distinct and look recognizably more threatening, there isn't a situation where you will be surprised by an enemy you've seen already suddenly taking a magnitude of hits more to take down for no immediately apparent reason.

Elaborating on the narrative of Dragon's Dogma in any manner is probably impossible to do without significant spoilers, which I wish to avoid. You may see sentiments from others that imply that the storytelling is nothing special, but I would disagree. You could very well point out how the quest system is mechanically very conventional and how the protagonist's dialogue choices are restricted to the occasional "yes" or "no" responses, but in my view, the narrative is grander than just the sum of its parts. Many pieces of information may not immediately make any sense until you have gained the full context toward the end, but until then you shouldn't write it off as bland just yet.

When I picked up Dragon's Dogma at a sale recently, I wasn't certain of what I was about to get into. I heard friends reminisce favorably about the game when its sequel was announced. Without much in terms of prior expectations, I decided to take a stab at it, and after 130 hours I do not regret doing so. It's not without annoying issues from time to time, the biggest one being your pawns occasionally deciding to do something frustratingly stupid in a critical moment. But overall it hits that sweet spot of adventuring spirit I seek in RPGs, without getting bogged down too much in the number-crunching aspects. To me, it's easily worth seeking out at the full price, but you can grab it for a sinfully cheap price whenever on sale.

It has been anticipated for quite a long time. To say expectations were high would be quite understated. Being part of its sizable feverish following, you naturally wish for it to fulfill the idea of a game that you have made up in your imagination, which in hindsight often seems foolish.

Elden Ring is FromSoftware's shot at an open world. I avoid most open world games, because I do not care about mindless collection and completion rodent wheels that most of them are built to be. I was hoping for FromSoftware to have the wisdom to steer away from the typical trappings of what they were going to attempt, and to actually deliver on what open worlds have promised to be, ever since they have become the industry's favorite gimmick. No need to make it explicit, I don't believe they did.

I will not go much into the performance issues that have blighted this game so far. They exist and make the game worse, though my gripes lie more fundamental in nature, and unlike the poor technical constitution, they have no hope of being mended. I am also going to assume that you are familiar with Dark Souls III, since this game lifts quite much from it, it is more timely to simply point out where it differs.

The world of Elden Ring is segmented into several distinct zones, each with a "main dungeon" that is relevant for making actual story progress and a variety of "side content", which is in significant part rather generic and repetitive. There are a vast number of random soldier camps and "mini dungeons" that primarily exist to hold certain items of loot, but do not stand out as worth seeking out for their own sake, once you have seen an abundance of them.

The enemy rosters of the various overworld zones have a disappointing amount of overlap, with soldiers and knights of various factions just being reskins of the same base model, and many lesser foes being ubiquitous across a large portion of the world. Quite a few of the minor bosses also get reused to a silly degree*. At some point you may consider that stopping to fight them just doesn't seem particularly worth your investment and would rather make use of that new horse to skip right past without any trouble.

Overall different regions are primarily distinguished by the looks of their terrain, which do indeed look very pretty, but in the end they largely share a lot of the same stuff and blend together as you keep playing. The moment the game shines however is when you leave the uniformity of the content pastures and enter the main dungeons. These are actually well crafted and intricate large structures that merit your attention and time. They resemble something closer to a FromSoftware level, with winding paths, shortcuts and atmospheric architecture. The addition of jumping has opened up new ways of traversing them, and generally the pathways are more complex than ever before, evoking the feeling of exploring a truly massive place.

If you are familiar with Dark Souls III and its moment-to-moment combat, Elden Ring will feel strangely familiar. The basic combat loop is the same in essence, with many weapons, attacks and spells being completely identical to their older counterparts.

The most notable addition is horse combat, which allows to swing weapons while moving very fast. With a little bit of practice most overworld encounters can be fairly trivialized with hit-and-run tactics, because enemies rarely get a good chance at retaliation before you dash away.

Ground combat has a new shield counter-move, aswell as the ability to "slot" looted weapon arts onto arbitrary weapons. What is odd is that elemental infusions can now be arbitrarily changed at any time now. No longer is it necessary to dedicate a weapon to a particular type of damage or stat scaling, it can be adjusted at any time while resting. It puts to question why such a system still exists if all it does is reshuffle around some damage numbers to whatever seems suitable at the time, rather than being a means to permanently invest into a weapon, like some kind of roleplaying game.

I struggle to really come up with a succinct way of describing how I feel about bosses beyond just being generally unsatisfied with them. There being such a large amount of them really underlines how dependent FromSoftware has become on creating frantic, confusing, difficult to read movesets as a means to create "challenge". For many if not most bosses, I was frequently compelled into long periods of passivity, unsure about when I actually had a valid opening for attacks or actions other than dodging and blocking. It felt less like fighting a creature and more like playing a guessing game with frustrating stakes, which technically has always been the case for Dark Souls to some extent, but never had been this obvious before.
Many moves are designed to force you into a timed roll by cheap means and punish simply maneuvering out of the way. Many melee attacks either have an AOE-blast on them to force you into abusing i-frames, regardless of whether the weapon actually touches you, or worse, simply drag the boss towards you so that an attack hits even if you have pre-emptively backed up. Not only does this make fights feel very one-dimensional, it also looks incredibly silly.
Very few bosses manage to break away from being a moveset that you just have to memorize. The few that do are pretty much recycled concepts from past FromSoftware games**, including everyone's favorite machete wielding giant.

Continuing the theme of eerie familiarity is the story and lore. Elden Ring continues the trend of having characters speak in very vague and cryptic metaphors and item descriptions being the main catalyst for worldbuilding.

[This section may spoil the overall trajectory of the story]

It becomes rather obvious after a while, that the story is almost beat for beat the same as Dark Souls III, with the names of characters and places simply being swapped out. The Tarnished are Undead in all but name, and the quest they embark on has them collect Great Runes instead of Cinders of Lords, to link the restore the Elden Ring, so that life may once again flourish in the world. Or maybe you want to go for the Age of Dark Ending equivalent, which I am going to predict the game will offer, without having actually finished it. Once again, it's not exactly the first time that FromSoftware has repeated itself, but this time feels particularly blatant, especially in context with all the other recycling that has been going on in the rest of the game.

I derive no joy from not recommending this game. I wanted to like it as badly as anyone else. It's not like it is entirely awful, I have enjoyed it early on in the honeymoon phase, when everything was still new and I had no idea where the game was gonna go. But the creeping realization eventually set in, that it really was just stretching a small amount of fresh content over a vast space, and that it was not going to become any better.

The Elden Ring experiment has failed. It has resulted in a shallower, bloated and bland game, but it looks like it's made a lot of money, so there is no reason to assume that this won't be what awaits us in future FromSoftware titles. This is the first one that I shelved before completing it, simply due to being burnt out and ceasing to care, not because of any one particular road block.

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* I have lost count of how many times I've encountered the same dragon boss fight being repurposed by merely applying a different color and elemental damage type. In once instance I even correctly predicted the reveal of an ice-flavored dragon, simply by the presence of a suspicious large open frozen lake.

** There is one boss gimmick that is original to this game, however I don't want to spoil it (though I think it sucks)

Resident Evil is a classic fixed-camera horror game, originally released for the Playstation 1, extensively remade for the Nintendo Gamecube and now re-released for PC. As a member of S.T.A.R.S., a special division of the Raccoon City Police, the player participates in an investigation of a series of gruesome murders taking place in the remote Arklay Mountains. After being ambushed and overwhelmed in the woods they are forced to retreat and take shelter in a seemingly abandoned mansion.

Throughout the game the player has to explore and navigate the many rooms of the mansion as well as solving puzzles and finding keys to progress. Outside of a map keeping track which rooms already have been visited and which doors remain locked, there isn't much explicit guidance which can lead to a lot of time spent simply exploring and picking up various puzzle items without immediately knowing how to use them. Examining an item from the inventory menu can often reveal greater insight into how to use it, but even then it may not be obvious until later in the game.
Much of the game is spent backtracking through the mansion. The player character's inventory is of very limited capacity and has to fit weapons, healing items and puzzle pieces alike. It's not possible to carry all of them at once, making it necessary to stash some in item boxes, which can be found in save rooms. The player has to decide what to make room for and what to leave behind in order to be able to pick up more items as they keep exploring or come back for them at a later point.
While slowly moving from room to room the player will encounter many zombies roaming the halls, who will attempt to grab and bite them. Combat generally is as simple as pointing a weapon at an enemy and shooting until they drop to the ground, however there are caveats. The amount of ammo to be found throughout the game is limited and sometimes a room may not be worth the expense to clean out for a variety of reasons, including that zombies could come back stronger if they aren't appropriately dealt with. It is up to the player to decide whether they want to clear out a route for good or if they only want to quickly pass through, possibly using up a healing item instead of ammo if they get injured. Room for movement is generally tight and claustrophobia-inducing, especially with the control scheme that a fixed-camera perspective enforces. Since the player isn't always able to see what's directly in front of them, some encounters might be difficult to gauge visually, so forethought into how to approach an encounter as well as sometimes just retreating pays off.
The game can be saved only at typewriters placed throughout the game, using up ink ribbons which can be picked up and stored like any other item. Enough of them are placed in the game to allow comfortably frequent saving, if spread out between every other point of progress.

The game allows to choose from two playable characters who apart from having their respective gameplay differences, also have unique cutscenes and interactions with other characters. The main plot remains largely unaffected by this however.

Cutscene interruptions are fairly rare and usually only happen after major progress milestones. Most of the lore is conveyed through diaries and logs left behind in the mansion.

The original game used a tank control scheme (D-PAD Up = Walk Foward, D-PAD Left and Right = Turn Character), which makes moving around initially feel rather awkward and takes a while to get used to. However the game's encounters have been designed with this in mind and are decently playable after some adjustment period.
The remaster added modern omni-directional analogue stick movement, which generally is much easier to control, however due to the fixed-camera perspective the walk direction corresponding to the stick direction can suddenly change when transitioning between screens. Both control schemes can be used at any time by simply switching the thumb between D-PAD and stick on the fly. It should be noted however that using analogue movement controls can trivialize portions of the game, since they weren't expected to exist back when the game was originally conceived.

Widescreen support has been added with the remaster, however it may be worth considering disabling it. The original pre-rendered backgrounds were made for an aspect ratio of 4:3 and in order to make them fill the screen the game zooms in on them and pans the screen according to where the player character currently is visible. This can look very distracting because the perspective isn't properly preserved anymore. The game allows sticking with the original 4:3 ratio which will add black bars to the sides of the screen, but have the actual image remain in a static position, as well as allowing a wider field of vision, because the entire image is shown at all times.

Some people have encountered a "slow motion" bug, with the game randomly stuttering and playing poorly, it appears to not be known what causes this and how to fix it when it happens. I personally have never encountered it in my entire playthrough, but it may be something to look out for.

New costume options for the player characters have been added, one each, modelled after their appearances in Resident Evil 5. They can be selected before starting a new game.

I've only recently discovered Resident Evil for myself, and while you can certainly tell that it's a product of its time, it still conveyed an intriguing atmosphere as I was uncovering the mystery of the mansion. The fixed camera perspective might be somewhat frustrating to deal with at times, such as getting injured when you cannot really see what is moaning and swiping at you immediately in front, but it also brings a certain creepy mood to the environment that would have been lost if you were allowed full control over the camera.
Some of the puzzles can take a while to figure out, often because it can be a long time before an item actually becomes relevant or because you forgot to properly examine it, but the solutions themselves are not so otherworldly that it is ever a requirement to bust out a walkthrough if you pay enough attention to the hints that the game already provides you with.
The visuals of the environment have aged incredibly well. Although while under strict scrutiny you can tell that the backgrounds are pre-rendered and that live-rendered characters stick slightly out, it is practically never noticeable while playing normally (unless you play in the bad widescreen mode). This game made the most out of its old rendering technique back in the and still holds up rather well because of it.

Recommending at sale price.

In the WW2 RTS Radio General the player assumes the role of a Canadian army general, leading troops into battle from a tent far away from the fighting, using only a radio and a tactical map. Unlike other games in the genre, the positions of units do not update automatically, the player has to regularly communicate with their own troops to learn where they are and what they are dealing with, and manually place small tokens representing the units on the spot on the map where they have last been reported to be.
The game also advertises itself with a voice recognition feature, allowing to issue orders over a microphone, however while at the time of writing improvements are still being worked on, it currently just isn't a very reliable way to play and slows the game down more than it augments it. Fortunately non-voice controls are an option, and work perfectly fine.

The scale of the game is fairly large, with levels spanning dozens of kilometers and units being organized into companies of hundreds. Towns and structures are represented as single points on the map, and serve more as strategic locations which can be garrisoned by troops for better defense, rather than layouts in and of themselves. The strategies asked of the player revolve around getting into favorable positions and picking when and where to fight, rather than micromanaging individual skirmishes. Different types of terrain need to be taken into account, as they greatly affect which paths and movement options are viable to approach a target, aswell as visibility towards the enemy. While roads are typically the fastest way for any type of unit to get somewhere, they are easily bottlenecked by hostile units and can become a priority to clear. Hills and forest aren't quite as quickly traversable, but tend to offer more room for maneuvering and reaching more advantageous positions for an engagement. Certain unit types can handle some terrains better than others, and making efficient use of them can greatly benefit in accomplishing the mission.

In order to develop a good plan of action, it is important to know where hostile troops are stationed. Mission briefings offer some limited information about enemy strength and sometimes even positions, but very often it is necessary to either have some units scout out a location manually or to make educated guesses about where an enemy has positioned certain types of units. Major threats like artillery and tanks may need to be taken out first before assaulting another fortified enemy held position, as to not needlessly hemorrhage troop numbers and be put at a scathing disadvantage. Minefields similarly can greatly reduce a unit if they are not properly dealt with, by having combat engineers disarm them first and clear a path for the rest of deployed units. However even if an engagement goes wrong, retreat is an option most of the time, allowing both to save units from being wiped out and to reassess a situation.

After each successful mission, troops are awarded experience and an opportunity to level up certain stats, like movement speed, sight and attack range, damage, defense, aswell as a variety of unit specific ones. These can help with specializing units into certain roles or to offset areas which they are lacking in. However if they lost too much in troop strength, they will take some time to recover, and may not be quite as effective right on the following mission. However even "fresh" and unupgraded units can do a decent enough job and don't feel like they are bottlenecking the performance of the mission, like it is the case in a certain popular turn based tactical game series. Most missions dictate which types of units are allowed to be deployed, although as the campaign progresses, the less strict the selections become and more options open up.


As someone who is usually turned off by RTS in general, this one actually worked really well for me. Inbetween troop movements and engagements, plenty of time is given to consider the next move and to try and predict where the enemy will be, and the introductory portion of the campaign does a good job teaching the different unit types and how they are best to be used. While the scenarios grow larger and more complex in layout, with restarting a mission being an occasional necessity, I feel they never quite reached the peak in difficulty that I was looking forward, although at time of writing a new "hard" version of the campaign had just been released in an update, which may perhaps sate my need for more.
I easily recommend the game at full price for the RTS aspects, however if the voice recognition is the primary draw for you, I would keep in mind that it's still subject to improvement at this time.

From Software is largely known for creating Dark Souls, a series infamous for its unforgiving difficulty. While Sekiro still follows that particular trend, it departs quite a bit from the formula that those games established and will be quite the readjustment for many. It's more adequate to judge Sekiro with some amount of distance from From Software's previous work.

The player assumes the role of the shinobi (read: ninja) known as Wolf who failed to protect young Lord Kuro, the last of a mysterious bloodline, from being captured by an obsessed warlord. After a grave defeat he makes his way through the wartorn land of Ashina, sneaking and fighting his way past anyone trying to stop him.


The game's structure follows a sequence of areas, typically with an implicit start and an endpoint (although they may branch into multiple paths every now and then) but with plenty of open and detailed space inbetween to traverse and explore freely. Checkpoints, called idols in the game, are placed along the way near choke points, which serve as fast travel destinations, aswell as a spot to recover to full health and to recharge the number of uses of the main healing item, a magic water gourd.
Areas in the game feature a large amount of hostile soldiers and creatures, who will attack the player on sight and try to kill them. The player can attempt to sneak around them, to avoid confrontation or to weed out their numbers and take out more dangerous enemies first to tilt the odds of winning in direct combat in their own favor. Most unaware enemies can be killed instantly when stabbed in the back, ambushed from behind cover or when leaping onto them from great heights. There are quite a few ways of traversing any area, such as climbing up or along ledges, leaps across quite some distance and using the grappling hook to reach mount points in high places. The player is made to be very mobile and can cover alot of distance fairly quickly, which is very useful to get into advantageous positions or to make an escape, should a situation go bad. Fall damage is also fairly low which further encourages creative traversal.

As agile as the player is however, it isn't always practical to rely on stealth. Sooner or later they will have to engage in direct combat. Combat is designed around achieving a deathblow on an opponent, which could be accomplished by just traditionally draining their hitpoints. However most enemies are very good at blocking blows and are hard to deal direct damage to. It is usually necessary to break their posture, in order to stagger them and open them up for a deathblow. Attacking an enemy (regardless of them successfully blocking or not) will fill up a posture damage bar, which once completely filled, will allow to finish them off. The player can also time their blocks to enemy attacks, just as they are swinging towards them, which results in a deflection and deals posture damage to the attacker aswell. Posture damage recovers when left idle, so it's important to keep up the heat and stay aggressive enough to not let an opponent rest, which can result in very frantic exchanges of swings.
Some enemies might perform "perilous attacks" to spice up the fight, such as grab attacks, forward thrusts or large sweeps, which usually can't be blocked and require the player to react quickly to avoid serious damage, usually by precisely dodging, jumping around or above or running away from the attack.
After having dealt with common enemies one way or another for a while, it will eventually be time to face stronger foes. Every now and then a boss will prevent progression until they have been defeated. Bosses have unique movesets and usually require multiple deathblows to defeat. They typically take numerous amounts of attempts before the player learns how to effectively deal with them and figure them out.
Alot of the game's mini bosses can be sneaked up on, but since most of them require multiple deathblows to die, they usually still will have to be beaten in a fight, although it can cut it much shorter. Running away from a mini boss and letting them return to an idle state will fully restore their health, so you can't cheese them by performing more than one stealth deathblow.

While the player uses the same sword throughout the entire game in combat, they have a secondary prosthetic weapon which can be outfitted with auxilary weapons to aid in a fight, such as a shuriken launcher, to deal small damage from afar, firecrackers to distract or scare some enemies in the middle of a fight, or a small spear for longer range attacks. Using them consumes "spirit emblems" which act as ammo, of which the player can only carry a limited amount between rests at an idol, but they can be bought limitlessly and stockpiled for later.
For each kill the player will earn experience points and currency. Earning enough experience grants skillpoints, which can be invested at idols in a fairly conventional skilltree to unlock both gradual passive upgrades, aswell as new moves for combat.

Due to the game's difficulty and need for the player to master its systems, death will be an inevitable occasion. However upon their first death after their last rest they get a chance to resurrect right where they died to carry on fighting. This however usually just means that; there are few opportunities to use this to fool enemies into forgetting about them and pulling off a sneak attack, as they will notice the player rising up, even if they are not facing them. It is technically possible, however hesitating too long to revive results in a proper death.
Dying for good penalizes the player by taking away half their current experience and currency if they haven't spent it. Each death also has a small chance of afflicting a random NPC in the world with a story relevant condition, that might impede progression on their quests until the player reverses the condition, the means of which are finite. It otherwise has very little impact on gameplay however, so dying frequently while fighting a particularly difficult enemy is still possible without much consequence.


Most of the story is conveyed through dialogue and cutscenes, however most of it takes place when talking to NPCs or to introduce boss fights. They never forcefully take control away from the player in the middle of a fight and are spaced out between long stretches of travelling and fighting. Some enemies can be eavesdropped upon to learn more about the world and some item descriptions provide additional lore.
The protagonist is fully voiced and has his own established personality. The player very rarely gets to pick dialogue options, usually only when a quest relevant decision needs to be made, not so much to add flavor to the character.


After some initial difficulties and having to unlearn some habits from Dark Souls, the game started to click with me, and I had a great time with it ever since. While I still died plenty of times, I never felt quite as frustrated as I did with most of the Souls series, which has a tendency to draw out repetitive and dull periods, that would sour moments of victory more than making them satisfying. Sekiro manages to keep me in the fighting spirit, despite being stuck on difficult encounters every now and then. The rush to finally finish off a boss and perform the final deathblow is easily one of the most cathartic feelings I got to experience in games since Bloodborne.

I recommend Sekiro at full price, however if you are new to From Software's brand of difficult games, you might want to consider whether or not you are ready to be met with repeated failure until you can make yourself learn how to deal with the challenges the game throws at you. It allows almost no cheap tactics whatsoever and doesn't offer an easy way out, but with enough patience, observation and ingenuity any seemingly hopeless situation can be overcome.

[Disregard steam displayed hours, played plenty on a boxed copy]

In the 3rd person stealth game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory the player infiltrates and spies on offices, military positions and protected residences all over the world as Sam Fisher, a highly trained spy, employed by a top secret subdivision of the NSA. Equipped with high-tech gear and assisted by a remote intelligence team over radio, he is being sent into the field to gather secret information or take operative action, when utmost secrecy and deniability is required.


Over the course of the game, the player will have to navigate tight spaces without catching any unwanted attention, while either avoiding or neutralizing any guards that might be in the way. The levels are largely linear, with occasional alternate routes available for very short sections. As a result guards tend to have short patrol cycles, which the player won't have to terribly much worry about, once they get past them. This also means that hiding bodies of knocked out or killed enemies often won't have to be hidden very elaborately, if they have been the only ones patrolling the specific spot in which they got taken out.

The movement system allows for a variety of additional ways of getting around beyond just slowly walking and crouching. Most ledges can be grabbed and climbed along, which is helpful to hide from approaching enemies on narrow walkways. Pipes can be traversed in a similar way, allowing to hide above enemies instead of below. Both of these stances allow for special contextual kill/KO moves, should a guard be unfortunate enough to be nearby. Other ways of getting around include small vents, zip lines and rappelling ropes, all of which however are more restrictive and strictly contextual, typically serving as shortcuts.
Movement speed can be adjusted with the mousewheel and becomes important to control the sound of one's own footsteps, the loudness levels of which can be read off a bar on the HUD, which also comparatively displays ambient noise, which could be used to cover ones own noise, as long as it doesn't exceed that threshold.

Staying hidden is largely accomplished by staying in unlit spots of an area or room, which impedes the enemies' ability to see the player, making them basically invisible in pitch black darkness. Another bar on the HUD will inform the player about the light levels of their current position. The player's multifunction goggles include night vision sight, which becomes essential to navigating around environments in which the enemy becomes basically blind. Additional lights can be disabled either temporarily by their corresponding switch, remotely with a pistol mounted techno gadget, or permanently by simply shooting it. Guards will generally however notice disabled lights and investigate them, possibly even bringing their own light if necessary.
Among the player's toolset are an optic cable and an amount of sticky cameras, which can be deployed with the underbarrel launcher on the issued rifle. These allow to peek under doors and into rooms further ahead respectively and are handy to assess threats before exposing one self to new areas, thus reducing the risk of getting caught off guard by enemies.
Once an enemy is alarmed they will start shooting at the player. The player can attempt to shoot back, however their firearms are weaker, have limited ammunition and aren't particularly reliable to aim in a direct firefight. For the duration of an alarm the enemy exactly knows where the player is aswell, rendering any cover by darkness useless, leaving escape as the only viable option, unless perhaps if the player only has one enemy to deal with.

Should guards turn out to be difficult to maneuver around or distract, it might become necessary to take them out of the picture. A melee attack on a guard is as straight forward as sneaking up to them and stabbing or punching them in one hit, which is a purely contextual action only available when actually in range of an enemy. Shooting an enemy is quite risky, because even though the player's weapons are suppressed, they still make quite considerable noise which can cause nearby enemies to go into full alert immediately. However the player will usually carry a very limited amount of non-lethal ammunition, which can silently and effectively take out an enemy at distance, should the need arise.
Whether or not a player employs lethal or non-lethal means does not have hugely varying consequences. Unconscious guards maybe be woken up if they are found by their comrades, but it's trivial to hide them out of sight. Beyond that it only becomes relevant in some specific missions, where lethal force is strictly forbidden. Other than on the mission end stat screen choice of force is never particularly acknowledged.

Each level has a set of secondary objectives, that can be optionally completed, however they don't have any impact on the success on the mission or bring any reward and usually only consist of doing the same generic task multiple times (e.g. "Find all secret weapon crates", "Upload X spoofed emails" etc.). They pretty much only exist as filler.


Most of the important plot is delivered either as cutscenes and briefings between missions, or as radio delivered dialogue between Sam Fisher and his remote support team, which is never forcefully interrupting any ongoing gameplay. Some computers that can be accessed contain emails, which might sometimes reveal information about characters involved in the plot. Sometimes guards will reveal information by either chatting among themselves, or when the player ambushes them from behind, grabbing them with a knife to their throat, interrogating them.

Paying attention to the story is generally not required to finish any of the missions, it is rather rare that any important characters are directly interacted with, and even when that's the case, the player is usually told how to deal with them.


While Chaos Theory, and Splinter Cell in general, doesn't quite provide as much liberty and complexity in its levels as some other stealth games do, it still has enough mechanical depth and atmospheric environments to make up for it and be worthwhile. The systems are actually well made and surprisingly detailed. Coming from some more modern stealth games, enemies are very perceptive and will react to the smallest amounts of noise or suspicious sightings. It probably has one of the best "feeling" stealth mechanics when purely looking at it on a low and immediate level, but definitely lacks in the layout of stages. Recommending at sale price.


This game includes a separate 2-player coop campaign, however at the time of writing official online support seems to be discontinued, only leaving the option to play over LAN or VPN. It also has a bizarre netcode issue, where framerates appear to be synchronized between players and locked to 30 fps by default. This might be somewhat fixable via ini magic, the details of which you will have to research for yourself.

The included versus mode might be similarly difficult to be properly played, but shouldn't suffer the same framerate issue, as it is running on an entirely different client.

An unofficial widescreen patch might be required to make the game render properly on modern resolutions:
https://thirteenag.github.io/wfp#scct