Persona 3: Dancing In Moonlight Review - Remix My Dread

Returning to lengthy RPGs can be daunting, but just listening to the soundtrack can often bring back our favorite memories. Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight offers a more efficient way to relive those memories by dancing to the beat of remixes of composer Shoji Meguro’s great score. The nostalgia trip mostly works, even as it’s bogged down by a clunky interface and short setlist.

Dancing in Moonlight rewinds the clock on Persona 3, summoning the SEES team to the Velvet Room (remade into Club Velvet) on a random night before the end of the original storyline. Elizabeth, jealous that Margaret’s guest (the player character in Persona 4) managed to solve a mystery by dancing, engages with Caroline and Justine (the Velvet Room attendants from Persona 5), in a dance competition to see which cast comes out on top when it comes to busting out moves.

The dancing itself is straightforward as you tap or hold buttons in time with the music, though the interface can be too stylish for its own good. It prizes the J-Pop dance routines the Persona 3 cast performs in the background as much as the music itself, which means notes originate near the center and move toward the edges of the screen. The layout works well enough on lower difficulties, but as tougher songs introduce more intricate note patterns, it can be hard to discern what note to play as they drift apart. Notes that require you to tap multiple buttons at the same time are connected by a giant pink bar and clutter up the screen, and I even failed to notice a note completely in the chaos a few times. I got used to the interface and was able to have fun with it after a few hours, but it’s a case of form over function that emphasizes something I wasn’t paying much attention to most of the time.

You never have to play too seriously to progress, and a number of fun modifiers alleviate that frustration. Want to play any note using any button? Go for it. Think getting a “Good” rating on a note shouldn’t break your streak? Done. Unlocking and using these modifiers makes for some neat twists on the normally pass-or-fail rhythm genre, and some even increase the challenge by making notes disappear as they near the edge of the screen or having them randomly speed up or slow down. The helpful ones ding your score, but I still enjoyed how much I could tune the gameplay to my liking.

 

Some fans may be disappointed by the emphasis on remixes over originals, but there are plenty of standouts on the soundtrack; the new renditions of “Wiping All Out,” and “Want To Be Close,” in particular are fantastic, and the good songs more than make up for some of the more boring covers. The overall setlist suffers from being a little short (just over two dozen songs) and focusing on the same songs a little too much (including three versions of “Burn My Dread,” and two versions of “Mass Destruction”), which is a shame when songs like “Master of Tartarus” and “Iwatodai Dorm” are ripe for remixing.

Replaying songs unlocks new social-link conversations with the SEES team, which comprise most of the narrative in lieu of a proper story mode. As you finish more songs and wear different outfits, you get to have lighthearted chats about dancing, life goals, and more. Elizabeth frequently butts her way in throughout, and her naiveté about the real world (and its turns of phrases) make her the standout character. The plot is fairly bland and pointless, but the little moments along the way make up for it.

Dancing in Moonlight mostly does right by Persona 3’s soundtrack, eliciting fond memories of the entry that started this series on its path to mainstream stardom. Being able to tailor the rhythm-based gameplay to your liking makes it easy to dive in and nod along to your favorite songs, even if the setlist is short and lacks a bit of variety. If you’re eager to catch up with the cast or music of Persona 3, Dancing in Moonlight is worth a few excursions into the Dark Hour.

Persona 5: Dancing In Starlight Review - Wake Up, Get Up, Dance Out There

As a rhythm-based spinoff, Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight’s premise for getting the Phantom Thieves back together to dance is a bit of stretch, even by the series’ standards. But Joker and company are no strangers to absurd situations, and Persona 5’s soundtrack is strong enough that I don’t mind suspending disbelief to enjoy watching The Phantom Thieves dance to a slew of remixes, even if the rhythm-based gameplay at the heart of it all doesn’t quite hold up its end of the bargain. 

Dancing in Starlight takes place some time after the end of Persona 5. This time, the Phantom Thieves return to the Velvet Room to compete in a dance contest against the cast of Persona 3 to see which guest of the Velvet Room has the better moves. The first couple of scenes make it clear the events of this story won’t matter, however, as the contest takes place over the course of a single night everyone will be forced to forget as soon as it’s over.

The dancing itself is straightforward as you tap or hold buttons in time with the music, though the interface can be too stylish for its own good. It prizes the J-Pop dance routines the Persona 5 cast performs in the background as much as the music itself, which means notes originate near the center and move towards the edges of the screen. The layout works well enough on lower difficulties, but as tougher songs introduce more intricate note patterns, it can be hard to discern what note to play when as they drift apart. Notes that require you to tap multiple buttons at the same time are connected by a giant pink bar and clutter up the screen, and I even failed to notice a note completely in the chaos a few times. I got used to the interface and was able to have fun with it after a few hours, but it’s a case of form over function that emphasizes something I wasn’t paying much attention to most of the time.

You never have to play too seriously though to progress, though, and a number of fun modifiers alleviate that frustration. Want to play any note using any button? Go for it. Think getting a “Good” rating on a note shouldn’t break your streak? Done. Unlocking and using these modifiers makes for some neat twists on the normally pass-or-fail rhythm genre, and some even up the challenge by making notes disappear as they near the edge of the screen or having them randomly speed up or slow down. The helpful ones ding your score, but I still enjoyed how much I could change the game to my liking.

 

Dancing in Starlight does a good job of increasing the BPMs of Persona 5’s soundtrack to make each song more fun to play, but I can’t help but nitpick at some of the choices made in the setlist. It feels limited with just over two dozen songs, and it doesn’t help when the same songs come up multiple times. “Rivers in the Desert” is a fantastic song, but I don’t need the original, a remix, and a live version of it. What’s here is fairly strong, however, and aside from one or two clunkers, I was nodding my head along to every song.

The main reason for going back through these songs is to get the series’ trademark social links going. By completing certain objectives, you unlock new conversations with each member of the Phantom Thieves. Getting to know Makoto, Ryuji, and Ann better, even knowing these conversations with them would have no consequences, kept me going even as the gameplay started getting stale. These conversations also unlock new outfits and accessories to wear on the dance floor, and some of them can get pretty silly (in a good way).

Persona 5’s soundtrack helped define its captivating sense of style when it released last year, and Dancing in Starlight is a good celebration of it. The clumsy dancing interface and short tracklist make it fall short as a rhythm game, but some great remixes and fun progression hooks make it a worthwhile way to revisit the look, feel, and sound of one this generation’s most stylish RPGs.

Darksiders III Review – A Quality Experience From Another Age

The Darksiders series is a pastiche of beloved games and genres that came before it. The first two Darksiders entries wore their Zelda, God of War, Metroid, and Diablo inspirations proudly and generally found success, even if they never quite reached the heights of any of those singular games. Darksiders III is similar in that its main inspirations are still easy to spot, but Zelda no longer serves as the pillar on which the game is built. The focus has shifted away from puzzles and acquiring items, and toward combat and navigation upgrades that help you move through the larger world. The result is a game that feels familiar – and dated – but with gameplay and level design that sing, even when its story is awkwardly clearing its throat.

Darksiders III follows Fury, the angriest and most unpredictable member of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. She is on a mission from the Charred Council to track down the seven deadly sins who escaped imprisonment when the world went to hell. Unlike War and Death from the first two games, she is not concerned with what brought about the apocalypse, making her goals different – at least initially.

Another big change for Darksiders III is the larger structure. The first two games were like Zelda titles, with puzzle-focused levels spread across a larger explorable world. Fury’s world is not broken apart in this way. In fact, I only solved a handful of puzzles across the entire experience. I personally loved those sequences in the previous games, but I did not miss them here. Moving through Darksiders III feels more like moving through a continuous series of interconnected areas with new movement abilities opening up more options for where Fury can go and what secrets she can uncover. The absence of a map is surprising, and I feared it would limit my ability to navigate, but the compass system does a good job directing you to your main objective, and secrets are broadcast well enough in the environment that they’re easy to spot. In these ways Darksiders III stands apart from the first two games and I appreciate the change. It makes it feel more like a well-executed, straight-on action experience.

Fury uses a chain-whip as her main attack, which gives her a wide attack range to take on surprisingly powerful foes. She also unlocks a boomerang-like weapon, as well as a handful of secondary blades. You switch between the secondary blades without entering a menu, and they each grant her specific navigation abilities. The icy swords allow her to walk on water, freezing it below her feet. Her fiery dual blades give her the ability to traipse through lava. Each has plenty of combos, but I had more fun relying on standard attacks and focusing on dodging out of the way to execute powerful, perfectly-timed counters. Fury doesn’t block (and sometimes yells at enemies derisively when they do), and it keeps the action brisk. She’s always on the offensive, which I appreciate as an impatient fighter.

Every enemy, and especially the bosses, pose a substantial threat. Even the early foes can fell Fury if she gets sloppy or overwhelmed. This makes exploration cautious and tense, which I like, but the checkpoints can sometimes be unnecessarily spaced out. A few bosses in particular are plagued by faraway checkpoints that led me to sprint past enemies for long stretches just to give my most recently discovered boss another shot.

 

Hunting the sins is the most compelling element of the story, as Fury’s goal is clear and the personifications of the sins each have interesting and unique designs. When the larger lore of the universe starts creeping in, however, things fall apart. Conspiracy theories run amok and important new characters are suddenly presented without a proper introduction. The final twists of the plot land with a thud, but I do like Fury and much of her dialogue. Among the heroes we have played so far in this series, she has the most personality and is my favorite.

In many ways, Darksiders III feels like a game from the previous console generation. Its art design is distinct, and feels like an old comic book with vibrant colors and villains that personify their names. But that’s an old trope today, and it lacks the graphical detail we have come to expect in modern games. Compared to its action game competitors, the production values are lacking and I did run into distracting graphical hiccups and one full crash that required a reset. With all that said, I was eager to see what was around every corner. The design of the world, the way Fury explores it, the few puzzles, and the combat are all well-designed, elevating it above the elements that make it feel like a game from the past.

Fallout 76 Review – Over Encumbered

Battlefield V Review – Hedge Warfare

They say all is fair in love and war, but Battlefield fans disagree. The lead-up to the series' return to World War II was firebombed by controversies centered on the role of women in virtual warfare, the perceived lack of authenticity in the new soldier customization system, and confusion over what exactly would be in the game on launch day. Once the dust settled and we finally stormed into the battle ourselves, the resulting game is far from the charred husk of Battlefield’s remains many haters anticipated. In fact, Battlefield V is the safest, most calculated release in the franchise’s history. Like a seasoned general confident in his approach to battle, DICE doesn’t make any bold, redefining changes; instead, the studio equips the game with fan-requested improvements that solidify the series’ tried-and-true cooperative, large-scale warfare formula. Battlefield V is more iterative than it is innovative, and when it does push the war efforts into new territory, the results are decidedly mixed. 

The series reputation for combat that emphasizes teamplay and large-scale warfare across land, air, and sea remains fully intact. Battlefield V urges players to squad up with others and cooperate to achieve success, demanding more from its audience than lone-wolf multiplayer games that encourage running and gunning with abandon. The diversity of play is still a compelling draw – being able to command a tank one round, hop into a fighter plane in another, or put your machine gun to good use as one of four distinct classes is an experience not many other competitive shooters offer.

Small changes can make big differences, and the most noticeable and appreciated improvement in Battlefield V directly affects your primary action: shooting. DICE reworked its ballistics system to remove random bullet deviation and deliver more predictable spray patterns for all its weapons. Gone are the days of simply taming a weapon. Now you can learn each rifle’s nuances and master its use, knowing when to let off the trigger to land a kill. Along with other subtle tweaks to aiming, the time-to-kill feels much faster as a result, finding the sweet spot between the more spongy Battlefield games of yore and the frantic one-shot-kills of hardcore mode. 

Squad play is the heart of series, and Battlefield V reinforces cooperation with a few subtle and smart changes. Health no longer fully regenerates, so you have to apply a bandage yourself or request one from a nearby medic if you get nicked. Anyone can revive a fallen teammate (though medics can do it in half the time), and holding out hope for a revive doesn’t punish your respawn time in the redeployment screen anymore. Soldiers don’t spawn with an overabundance of ammo, either, which means smart teams always enlist a support player in their squad. The reworked spotting system only allows recon players to individually mark targets (others can merely point to general areas), making them more vital than ever to the team’s cause. The class balance between the four roles may be the best it’s been to date; my only major complaints thus far are related to weapons. The medics need more primary options than just SMGs, which prove ineffective on larger maps that encourage more long-range skirmishes. The bipods on support weapons don’t deploy correctly on cover or railings, either, limiting their effectiveness unless you are prone.

 

Playing together has always earned players more points in Battlefield, but this year’s Squad Reinforcements system further encourages collaboration. Each team action slowly nets the squad points, which the leader can use to call in resupplies, order vehicles, or if they save up enough points, unleash a devastating rocket onto enemies. I like the idea of rewarding teamplay, but the system doesn’t share the wealth. Only squad leaders get points for the V1 rocket kills, which should be divided among the entire squad. 

Teamplay gets another boost thanks to the new fortifications system, which allows soldiers to bolster defensive positions at predetermined places with sandbags, barbed wire, and even weapon emplacements. This addition feels long overdue and fits perfectly into the Battlefield motif, giving soldiers who aren’t as comfortable staring down their sights another way to contribute to the war efforts. DICE’s first implementation feels rigid – there is no logic as to why fortifications are available for some spots in the base and not others – but at least it gives defenders cover when buildings around a flag are largely devastated. That said, defense still isn’t incentivized enough; players are still more prone to chase flags in older modes like Conquest rather than hunker down and hold a position. 

No matter whether you are attacking or defending, you can count on a gorgeous backdrop. Battlefield V only has eight maps at launch (much more should come via the Tides of War service), but the settings include wintery mountains, dusty deserts, lush countryside, and bombed-out cities. The weather effects add to the sense of mood; as the wind picks up in the harsher climate, visibility becomes impaired and forces teams to adjust their tactics. My favorite new map is Arras, which has a small French village in the midst of yellow canola fields that provide ample cover for encroaching enemies. The destructibility is turned back up to impressive levels we haven’t seen since the Bad Company games; tanks can roll right through buildings, and most cover can be obliterated with a well-placed rocket.

Each map is compatible with the six game modes Battlefield V currently features (more are on the way). The lineup includes old favorites like Conquest, Frontlines, Domination, and Battlefield 1’s popular Operations (which is rebranded here as Breakthrough). Battlefield V’s signature mode is Grand Operations, which preserves the multi-map battle format of its predecessor but sprinkles in a variety of other modes along the way. This change isn’t for the better, as some modes kill the tension and focused objectives that made Operations such a thrill. When Grand Operations maps open up to include more than three objectives at once, the battles become scattered and lose their intensity. 

Intensity is also scarce in the War Stories, the single-player campaign formatted like short stories. I love the concept of telling seldom-heard tales about war heroes who rose to the occasion in impossible circumstances, and DICE created interesting characters who each educate us about lesser-known fights during World War II.  I also appreciated the somber, revering tone the developers adopt to bring these three tales to life. But presentation aside, the missions feel rote, rarely tap into the Battlefield magic of large-scale warfare, and fail to create memorable moments like the multiplayer does. 

Regardless of which multiplayer mode you are playing, your experience feeds into a complex progression system that allows you to unlock new weapons, specializations, gadgets, and cosmetics for each class. The fashion available is conservative and nothing like the immersion-shattering gear many expected after seeing neon face paint and retro-futuristic prosthetic arms in the promotional footage – you’re mostly unlocking era-appropriate military gear in shades of green, gray, and tan. A currency system lets you buy more cosmetics, but the storefront feels like a conceptual test right now, with only 10 items to purchase. Most of the options available in the Armory are expensive, and it doesn’t populate the smaller cosmetics you can purchase buried deep within customization menus, so you never have the convenience of seeing all the available items in one place. 

Battlefield V’s new Company hub is your one-stop shop to customize your weapons, apparel, and vehicles, but doesn’t offer the flexibility longtime Battlefield fans expect. To reach its potential, we need to be able to save multiple configurations for each class so we can quickly swap between loadouts. For example, we should able to swap an Assault soldier armed with a long-range scope for one better suited for close-quarter battles on the fly.

Minor but persistent annoyances are also common on the warfront. While the new movement system looks good, soldiers have problems vaulting over small embankments and they sometimes clip through cover when prone or during revive animations. DICE’s stubborn approach to squad spawns means soldiers still appear out of nowhere in the middle of battle; this is especially annoying when you are engaged in a one-on-one firefight and suddenly you are vastly outnumbered. Occasionally, the explosives needed to destroy objectives fail to spawn, leaving attackers no chance to win the war, or the loading hangs in the middle of rounds, forcing you to restart the game altogether. DICE also removed the ability to switch teams, which some players abused in the past for a score advantage, but this means if your friend spawns in on the opposing team you have no immediate remedy at your disposal other than quitting and finding another match. Also, tanks are not fast or deadly enough; right now they are hulking machines that crawl across the battlefield at a snail’s pace, and panzerfausts carried by infantry are more dangerous to tanks than the hulking cannons of their counterparts.

Battlefield V is a hard game to critique at this stage. Many of the minor tweaks improve the overall gameplay, which is still fun. But the majority of the innovations have yet to arrive, and new systems like the Company and Armory still need to be fleshed out. This game’s legacy won’t stand on the content currently in the game. Ultimately, Battlefield V will be defined by the success or failure of the pending Combined Arms cooperative mode, Firestorm battle royale mode, and whether or not DICE can continually provide new and engaging content. On day one, the game feels a few reinforcements short to pull off the overwhelming victory we’ve come to expect given the series’ strong lineage.

Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu & Eevee Review – A Classic Evolved

After two decades on dedicated handheld platforms, the Pokémon franchise is finally relocating to the big screen. While we wait for the first full-fledged RPG to hit Switch, Pokémon: Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee are remakes of the first generation of the series with modern graphics and updated gameplay. Exploring Kanto, building your team, fighting Team Rocket, and challenging gym leaders remains as thrilling as it was 20 years ago, but inconsistent motion controls ensure the transition to Switch isn’t seamless.

Let’s Go pulls you in with the same hooks as every other Pokémon game: You travel the region, collecting Pokémon, battling trainers in fun, turn-based combat, and earning your place in the Pokémon League in a lighthearted adventure. The series mantra of “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” holds true to this day, as finding a ton of unique monsters remains rewarding as you fill in your Pokédex and build your dream party.

Let’s Go remains faithful to the first-gen Pokémon games (specifically Yellow). I knew exactly where to go to complete optional quests, and still remembered the solutions to most puzzles. Despite being remakes, the Let’s Go games effectively move the Pokémon franchise forward with crisp visuals that recreate the familiar creatures and cities of the Kanto region. Seeing the battles play out how I originally pictured them in my head is a thrill. In addition to upgrading the visuals and sound, Let’s Go streamlines many of the more tedious elements of the original games.

Despite tasking you with exploring a faithfully recreated version of Kanto, a few surprises and tweaks keep the experience fresh. From riding Pokémon for faster travel to swapping your party on the fly without having to visit a Pokémon Center, myriad modern conveniences make these remakes feel right at home in 2018. Let’s Go isn’t challenging, but if you need an extra hand, a second player can shake a second Joy-Con to drop in and out of local cooperative multiplayer. This updated approach is further demonstrated in Let’s Go’s modern evolution of one of Pokémon’s oldest conventions: wild Pokémon encounters.

Not only are random encounters gone (now you see wild Pokémon roaming in the map), but you no longer must battle wild Pokémon to weaken them prior to catching (with a few exceptions). Instead, you simply flick your Joy-Con in their direction to land as accurate of a throw as possible – no battling necessary. Some players may miss having to weaken wild Pokémon you intend to catch, but after the initial shock of the simplification, I appreciated how it kept the pace of the game up. Not only does this separation make wild encounters feel distinct from trainer battles, but it makes the few wild Pokémon you do need to battle first feel special.

However, the motion controls for catching Pokémon, whether you’re using a Joy-Con or the Poké Ball Plus peripheral, are unreliable. On multiple occasions, I flicked my controller directly at the screen, only to have the ball sail in the wrong direction. Playing in handheld mode tones down the motion controls; you just aim with the gyroscope, then press a button to throw a ball. This makes handheld mode the best way to play Let’s Go, effectively deflating the excitement of the series being on consoles for the first time.

While you can find rare Pokémon in places you couldn’t before, other avenues of collecting uncommon species have been removed. You can now use lures to draw out rare Pokémon, but I’m disappointed the Game Corner no longer lets you play for items and Pokémon. My personal favorite, Safari Zone, has been replaced by Go Park, which lets you connect your Let’s Go save file with your Pokémon Go account.

 

Using Go Park, you can transfer previously captured Gen 1 creatures from Pokémon Go into Let’s Go. I love being able to move Pokémon from the mobile title into the Switch game, allowing me to further fill in my collection. After that, you enter Go Park and encounter these Pokémon as you would normally a wild Pokémon – you still need to toss a few balls at them to add them to your team in Let’s Go. While I enjoy this integration, I still miss the surprising nature of Safari Zone encounters, and I’m disappointed you can’t transfer Pokémon back to Pokémon Go once you’re finished. I hated losing my shiny Charizard in Pokémon Go so I could have him in Let’s Go. Also, if you’re hoping to start your playthrough with a full team of awesome monsters from Pokémon Go, you may be disappointed as you can’t use this functionality until you’re in Fuchsia City in the latter portion of the story.

Even if you’re not interested in the Pokémon Go integration, Let’s Go adds multiple reasons to keep playing after you finish the story. Throughout the adventure, you encounter coach trainers that put up a stiff challenge and reward you with move-teaching technical machines and stat-boosting items. Once you defeat the Elite Four at the end of the game, master trainers appear to put a specific Pokémon to the test. If you think your Charizard, for example, is better than the master trainer’s Charizard, they serve as an awesome challenge. While these special types of trainers are among the most difficult in the game and sometimes give you good rewards for beating them, the most meaningful reason to keep playing is to continue filling in the holes of your collection, with Mewtwo serving as the ultimate post-game addition to your collection.

Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu & Eevee are strong remakes of the original games. The feeling of amassing a giant collection of monsters and customizing your team never gets old, and the timeless turn-based combat is still fun to this day. Shoddy motion controls aside, Let's Go is a great time whether you’re a die-hard fan or a newcomer to the series.

Overkill’s The Walking Dead Review – A Camp Not Worth Defending

Sometimes a game just doesn’t work out. Despite lots of time, a strong property, and capable development talent, the experience fails to solidify. In the case of Overkill’s The Walking Dead, major technical problems and connection issues, baffling gameplay systems and controls, tedious combat and stealth, and poorly structured missions all contrive to halt the fun.  A deep and rewarding upgrade and progression path hides behind the mess, but you’re unlikely to enjoy it, as the game fails to offer meaningful engagement.

In this four-player, first-person survival shooter, players take on new characters in The Walking Dead universe, but face gruesome challenges similar to those seen in the comic and TV shows. Working as a team, you scavenge for supplies and face off against enemy survivor groups, then defend your camp from those that would take what you have. The story is too bare-bones to hold up to scrutiny, though I appreciate the effort to surprise, including at least one cool character twist.

While purporting to be balanced for solo players or teams of various sizes, most missions are profoundly disheartening with anything less than a full four-person team. That’s a big problem, because matchmaking is spotty, and it is often unable to find me a matching team. Load times are long, and failure in a mission means starting over from the beginning. This can result in losing 30 minutes or more of time, with paltry rewards to show for the effort. When the games does manage to find a match, I’m often thrown in halfway through with the team already most of the way to failure. I’ve also encountered many hard crashes, together amounting to hours of lost progress.

Enemies are a mix of mindless undead and nearly mindless enemy survivors. The human enemies lack any of the tactical complexity you’d expect from any FPS of the last 10 years, often standing together in groups as you gun them down, even as they fail to animate in response to a hail of submachine gun bullets.

Gunplay is stiff and unresponsive. More prominent and frequent are lengthy sections of unsatisfying melee engagements. Whether bashing with a baseball bat or slashing with a machete, the close-up battles lack variety or panache, and regularly devolve into long stretches of standing in a doorway and repeatedly smashing the left mouse button for minutes at a time. A lackluster stealth system may as well be absent; it lacks sufficient cues to help you be successful, and the level design and enemy placements provide too few opportunities to be sneaky. A punishing sound meter discourages the use of your more interesting weapons and abilities, since it means that the zombie horde will soon descend. Upon death, an infuriatingly long respawn timer gives you just enough time to fume about the futility and loss of your free time.

The relatively small number of environments are confusing to navigate, with procedurally placed elements that frustrate as often as not, as you scramble around attempting to find the necessary jumper cables or gasoline. You’re encouraged to spend increasingly boring stretches scouring for additional bullets and supplies, slowing down any momentum a mission might have had.

The lone standout success is a rewarding progression system, which offers a lot to explore and plenty of opportunities for experimentation. Classes have their own leveling trees to improve abilities, though I would have liked more flexibility to customize what weapon skills each character can improve. As it is, if you like a particular ability, like the Scout’s smoke grenade, you’re obligated to go with her crossbow and pickaxe. Additional supplies let you upgrade your camp in a variety of ways, but you must balance your expenditures against the ongoing upkeep needs of your survivors, which makes for a compelling tension. As you gather more survivors, you can alternately send them out on missions or set them to work in the camp for some handy bonuses. Finally, a wide variety of weapons can be modded and improved over time. I appreciate the feature, but it also means that you’re wielding especially clumsy weapons in the early hours. Nonetheless, the growth of your camp and characters provides a sense that your missions have meaning, and may be enough to push you back into another banal scavenging run.

Overkill’s The Walking Dead plans to dole out content in seasons, so the current batch of missions will soon expand. But dramatic reworking of most core combat and mission systems are necessary before the game could be worthy of a recommendation. The premise sounds promising for fans of cooperative play, zombie action, and the taut survival storylines implied by the license. The execution fails to meet the needs of any of those groups. You’re better off heeding the warning – keep this menacing door closed, and leave the zombies to their gnawing hunger.

 

Spyro Reignited Trilogy – Purple Reign

Hitman 2 Review – A Worthy Investment For Expert Executioners

Tetris Effect Review – A Dazzling Reimagining

Whether on CRT monitors, HDTVs, or the Game Boy’s monochromatic display, Tetris has long been a reliable source of entertainment (and jaw-clenching stress) for puzzle-seeking players. Its elegant simplicity has made it an enduring success, but with Tetris Effect, Monstars Inc. and Resonair shows that it’s possible to wring a few surprises from the classic game while respecting its primordial core. Tapping into their mastery of melding flashy audiovisual presentations with interlinked gameplay, the team has created a breathtaking interpretation of Tetris that makes the game feel fresh.

In Tetris Effect’s showcase mode, Journey, you travel through a variety of vignettes while playing Tetris. The sound builds and morphs as you play, accompanied by dazzling visuals. A wintry theme might incorporate the rhythmic sounds of crunching snow as you set blocks in place, with jingling bells sounding with their rotations. You delve deeper into a space capsule while you clear lines, as snippets of transmissions play in sync with the thumping soundtrack and your positioning of the blocks. The tetronimos change with each level, too, though those are just cosmetic adjustments. Functionally, a block is a block, whether it’s made of shimmering bubbles or rotating cogs. 

It’s hypnotic and wonderful, and a fantastic partner to the “in the zone” sensation that accompanies particularly good games of Tetris. I found myself instinctively rotating blocks in sync with the beat, and while it didn’t offer any benefits as far as scores went, it pulled me deeper into the game. The beats build and recedes like a great concert, culminating in a final level that is nothing short of magnificent. The visuals are amazing on traditional displays, but having your entire field of view enveloped by exploding particles and warping backdrops adds to the immersion – something I never thought I’d be concerned with in TetrThe biggest tweak to the overall formula in Journey is the time-stopping Zone mechanic, which gives you precious time to fix a few blunders or to finesse your way to even higher scores. One of my favorite things about Tetris is how you can extricate yourself from seemingly impossible situations; effective use of Zone makes those moments even more frequent. You have to earn it first, however, by clearing lines the old-fashioned way. Still, it’s a good thing to have in your back pocket for when you need it. 

 

A variety of other options offer further twists on Tetris’ core. In Sprint, you try to clear 40 lines as quickly as possible. Marathon mode challenges you to eliminate 150 lines, which is easier said than done. In Purify, you have to clear dark blocks from the field by clearing lines around them. Mystery mode is one of my favorites even though it made me want to punch walls; random effects like bombs, reversed controls, and other nuisances crop up as you play a marathon session. Even though you’re ultimately just clearing lines in all of these modes, they’re a fun and rewarding way to mix things up when you hit a wall. While I’d argue it would largely be missing the point, you can turn down the visual effects and music and just play a great game of Tetris, too, with a variety of customization options such as how many blocks appear in the preview panes and how rotation works once a tetronimo lands.

The fundamentals may be recognizable, but Tetris Effect feels like something new rather than another reskin of the same old game. The presentation is such a natural fit for the gameplay, and it adds an unexpected layer of emotion. Monstars Inc. and Resonair should be commended for taking a calculated risk and delivering its own unique take on a gaming standard.

The Quiet Man Review – The Sound Of Failure

Not every game makes it as far as release. Even the biggest and most successful studios cancel projects when they aren’t shaping up. Those games may never see the light of day, but curious gamers can find footage of many abandoned titles online – and The Quiet Man reminds me of those videos. With a mishmash of awful storytelling and mechanics, this narrative-infused brawler plays like a failed proof-of-concept prototype. Even though it has technically released, The Quiet Man doesn’t feel finished; the entire experience is a series of cascading embarrassments that make you wonder how it escaped cancellation.

You play as Dane, a deaf man who beats up a bunch of people while chasing after a woman who gets kidnapped by a masked man. She looks like his mom for some reason, and also Dane’s friend and a cop are involved. I apologize for the vagueness in that description, but despite The Quiet Man’s attempt to be a narrative experience, it does basically nothing to convey its story.

For your first playthrough (which takes about three hours), the mixture of live-action and in-game cutscenes have no dialogue or subtitles. You’re left to watch these low-budget exchanges and wonder who the characters are, what they are doing, and how they are related to each other. This leaves you completely disengaged from what is happening. Imagine queuing up a few supplementary webisodes for a TV show you’ve never watched, then turning the volume off; that’s what to expect from The Quiet Man in terms of storytelling quality and production values.

One might argue that the lack of dialogue helps simulate Dane’s own experience with the events. However, people talk to Dane and he clearly understands what is being said to him; he smiles, frowns, and otherwise reacts in most scenes. That means everyone knows what’s happening except you, so the silence only serves to deny players insight. A second playthrough (which was patched in a week after release) adds in the missing dialogue, but here’s the problem: The disjointed, dreamlike tale you weave in your head is probably better than the real story, which is saturated with awful writing and laughably strained attempts at coolness. The Quiet Man is not worth playing even one time, and understanding its terrible narrative better certainly doesn’t make it worth playing two times.

 

When you aren’t spacing out during wordless exchanges, you’re participating in simple hand-to-hand combat. However, even basic brawling is beyond The Quiet Man’s capabilities. You can kick, punch, grab, and use takedowns, but how you attack is largely inconsequential. Enemies are stupid and lack variety, so you can just pound them with little thought or fear of reprisal. Battles are also short and predictable, so you don’t get a sensation of building up momentum. You usually just beat up a few bad guys – all of which are lazy stereotypes – before triggering the next cutscene or briefly walking through the lifeless environments.

Even worse, fights always have something that isn’t working correctly. Enemies warp to their positions during animations, phase through objects, or stand there waiting to get hit. The controls are sluggish and unresponsive, and the camera seems determined to periodically hide your opponents. While this all frustrated me at first, I gradually became resigned to the repetitive encounters and barely functional combat, and it’s hard to be frustrated when you don’t care.

The Quiet Man’s gameplay package is sloppy and boring, and its story is so bad that it needs to be buried in a second playthrough because it’s more tolerable when you don’t understand it. I want to call The Quiet Man a farce, but farces are funny. This game is just a conceptual catastrophe that does everything wrong and nothing interesting.

Déraciné Review – Stumbling Through A Dark Tale

From Software has made a name for itself with tough-as-nails games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne. For that reason, Déraciné feels a bit like an experimental diversion for the studio. It focuses on narrative moments spaced out between simple puzzles, and asks you to sympathize with orphans, not fight gigantic monsters using your favorite weapon. Sometimes it succeeds and is augmented by the virtual reality platform, but at other times it stumbles, held back by awkward controls and bland fetch puzzles.

Déraciné begins by introducing you, a magical faerie, to a group of orphans. They can’t see you, but they know you’re intervening in their lives at random intervals. You experience life as moments frozen in time; the world is essentially paused when you appear, resuming only occasionally so you can listen to a snippet of dialogue or watch something small happen, like see a pair of kids try to sneak into a window on a second floor. You can also see ghostly memories of the children wandering the halls who share bits of exposition as you piece together what is going on.

This “frozen moments in time” setup is a smart conceit for why you warp from place to place, and it also serves to highlight a strength of the game, which is making you feel like an anonymous spectator. You can take your time to look at what is happening and casually inspect everything around you. Unfortunately, the paused nature of the experience also means characters don’t move much, giving it the feeling of a statue garden or museum. The things that are happening in the world are interesting, but it rarely feels active or alive.

 

Puzzles involve watching the children as they live and work in their home, moving assorted objects between them like a classic adventure game. The fetch-quest nature of these puzzles is rarely rewarding, but closer to the end of the game, when time travel becomes a bigger factor, it gets more interesting as you watch actions in the past affect the future. Those final few final puzzles aren’t enough to elevate the ones that came before it, but I appreciated the change.

In the way its story is told, Déraciné has more in common with Gone Home than it does Dark Souls, but From Software’s ambiguous grim tone is present. You soon realize that faeries aren’t necessarily a good thing. You bring a vague darkness with your presence, and the mortality of the children (and the larger world, surprisingly) is called into question. Bad things happened before your arrival, and since you have some limited time travel abilities, you might be able to fix it. The dialogue of the children and the few adults who take care of them serves only to move the story along in a perfunctory fashion, but the events they describe are engaging and its final puzzle wraps the story up in a novel way, giving your actions a legitimate role in the conclusion.

Déraciné approaches VR in the right way, letting the player soak in the environment at their leisure, but the teleportation movement is awkward and most of your engagement outside the narrative hinges on how much you enjoy picking up objects, looking at them, and putting them somewhere else. The world is interesting, and the narrative features a handful of fun, dark twists, but the ultimate experience is bland, even if it does have its charms.

Gwent: The Witcher Card Game Review - From Diversion To Main Attraction

A lot has changed about Gwent since its early days as a fun, imbalanced minigame in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The goal is still to win two out of three rounds by having the highest total card strength, but years of iteration in beta have changed the game drastically, molding it into something much more interesting and rewarding. Now officially out of its test period, Gwent proves itself a strong competitor in the card game field, offering lots options and strategies while also differentiating itself in exciting ways.

Gwent matches play out like fantasy poker, as you take turns playing a single card from your hand to gain the advantage that round, mimicking the feeling of anteing up. Making the choice to take a loss in one round to win the next can be brutal; do you play one powerful card then fold, potentially forcing your opponent to play two cards and giving you a leg up next round? Or will they immediately destroy it next turn and get an easy win? Few matches are a done deal until the last card is down, and I regularly felt my heart pounding as I waited to see what my opponent played, even when I had a strong lead.

One of Gwent’s biggest strengths is how you can curb the role of chance without making matches stale. Most decks are small, and you can see more than half your deck across three rounds. You also get a number of mulligans that let you optimize your hand every round. Though the right draw can still get you out of a pinch, bad luck rarely prevents you from playing to your deck’s strengths, which makes luck a fun variable rather than a crutch.

With its recent move out of beta, Gwent is more streamlined than it was at first (its three rows have been condensed to two), but still offers a lot variety in both decks and playstyles. Each of the five factions have various leaders who can drastically change how you play, like whether you use a monster-themed deck that sacrifices its own fighters to wreak havoc, or spam the battlefield with weak enemies you later boost into an unstoppable army. So far, only a couple of cards are indispensable across all decks.

Plenty of different deck types and strategies already abound online, though you may want to brush up on the more than basics before you wade into the more competitive side of things. Despite the sweeping changes and influx of new players for the full release, beta-seasoned players already have a firm grasp on deck synergies, though it’s easy (and recommended) for novices to look up strong decks online and use them as a base for making their own. If you’re looking for more casual play, unranked matches make it easier to test new decks, and an arena mode lets you improvise a deck by choosing one of four cards for several rounds, leading to wackier matches where you can’t take losses to heart.  

 

Taking inspiration from its roots in RPGs, Gwent also has a light progression system that ties into its microtransactions. Winning rounds, matches, and various achievements give you progress points, which you can spend in several faction-based trees to unlock small snippets of lore for each of the various faction leaders, as well as the various currencies needed to craft regular cards, their premium versions (which animate instead of displaying a picture), and card packs. Working my way through these trees, and being able to choose what rewards I’d get, made me more eager to keep playing. Most cards are cheap to craft, too, so while plenty of ads push you to spend money, I rarely felt like it would result in a significantly stronger deck. Unfortunately, the arena mode costs in-game currency (or real money) to play, which takes away from Gwent’s fun, casual feel.

 

After years of iteration as a minigame and in beta, Gwent has come into its own as a great card game. It emphasizes keen decision-making over chance, and a great back-and-forth buildup ratchets up the tension across multiple rounds. With a great variety of decks and strategies at its disposal, as well as strong incentives to play match after match, Gwent proves great ideas can come from small beginnings.

Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales Review - Tough Calls, Big Payoffs

Part of what makes Gwent so fun in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is how it is contextualized within the latter’s fictional world. Plotlines have you building your deck across multiple matches, and occasional dialogue branches let you settle disputes with cards instead of swords. Thronebreaker, a new Gwent-based campaign set in the world of The Witcher, takes this concept to its logical conclusion, telling a new tale using Gwent as its core. It works surprisingly well, as the story delivers strong political intrigue, character moments, and tough moral choices. These all hold Thronebreaker together as the standard card-slinging gradually falters across dozens of hours.

Gwent retains its  back-and-forth gameplay (which has since spun off into its own free-to-player multiplayer game) in Thronebreaker, though it’s undergone several changes from its minigame iteration. Although the objective is still the same (build up an army one card at a time to win two out of three rounds), there are several more card interactions and abilities to consider, and spies are no longer the terror they used to be.

Thronebreaker uses these rules as its foundation, but alters cards to fit the campaign (and even lets you skip battles on the easiest difficulty). Many of the cards from the free-to-play multiplayer have completely different abilities, and several new cards offer some great new challenges. A fight against a griffin involves lopping off its individual limbs (represented as different cards on the board); fending off a group of thieves has one of them invading your side of the board. These battles further cement the importance of certain story beats, it was great to see that facing an opponent the story long foreshadowed didn’t lead to a straightforward match. 

Several fun puzzles find more creative uses for Gwent’s rules – or break them altogether. I love the way these they tie gameplay to story, like one that has you moving a character across the board to sneak past guards. I ended up liking the variety of these puzzle-oriented tasks more than the standard battles, since it’s easy to build unstoppable decks after a few hours. This makes your victory in traditional encounters a forgone conclusion, which gets dull as the campaign goes on.

 

Although you spend a lot time playing Gwent in Thronebreaker, the narrative does a great job of propelling you from battle to battle. You play as Meve, Queen of Lyria and Rivia, as she attempts to fend off an impending Nilfgaardian invasion. Meve is a fantastic lead, a defiant ruler who refuses to back down from the overwhelming obstacles she faces even as her subordinates cower before Nilfgaard. Between her steely resolve and her tense, harsh moments with her son Villem, I was captivated by her tale.

 

She’s joined by a strong cast of supporting characters, such as the conniving-but-lovable Gascon and Brouver Hoog, the strict king of the Dwarfs who forces Meve to play neutral with the Nilfgaardians within his realm. Although conversations play out in visual novel fashion, the animated comic-book style looks fantastic, and the performances and character animations are strong enough that I never felt like I was just reading text.

 

Choice also plays a large role in how your adventure plays out. As you explore a handful of large maps for resources that let you build up your deck, you come across plenty of moral quandaries. Some are simple, like deciding whether to spend money to bury a peasant to raise your troops’ morale. Others can have major ramifications on how the story plays out, and even if certain party members (and the powerful cards they add to your deck) leave your side. These decisions can play out in various ways, and I was pleasantly surprised when some decisions I was adamant about came back to bite me.

 

Thronebreaker is a great alternative for fans of Gwent who’d rather not dive into the multiplayer arena. Although some unique twists can’t hold off some late-game tedium, it’s a diverse campaign that emphasizes the strong characters and tough decisions that define the Witcher series, and emphasizes clever twists over turning newcomers into solid Gwent players. Whether you just want to play more Gwent or are simply a fan of The Witcher, playing Thronebreaker is an easy choice.

Call Of Cthulhu Review – A True Test Of Sanity