The Surge 2 Review – A Satisfying Slice Of Action

Publisher: Focus Home Interactive

Developer: Deck13 Interactive

Release: September 24, 2019

Rating: Mature

Reviewed on: PlayStation 4

Also on: Xbox One, PC

In the opening moments of The Surge 2, my character looks like a walking junkyard. He had ridged red armor on his left arm, a bulky yellow metal casing on his right, grey leg braces, and a jumble of circuitry on his chest. His weapon of choice is a spinning sawblade that looks like it should be used for construction work. Flash forward dozens of hours, and my character stands tall like an angelic being outfitted in unified white armor, a gold halo on his back, and a staff that sizzles with magical power. This strange rags-to-riches journey is just one reason why The Surge 2 is notably better than its predecessor. Developer Deck13 Interactive sticks to its guns on what The Surge is, yet improves upon the predecessor’s systems and flow to create a thrilling pursuit of power backed by excellent combat encounters.

Much like Resident Evil’s Umbrella Corporation, the through line between Surge installments is CREO Industries, a tech conglomerate that may not have the best intentions with its breakthroughs. CREO’s latest blunder leads to a plane crash that you just happen to be on. You awaken months later in Jericho City, a once-thriving metropolis overrun by a CREO-produced nanite plague. Jericho is now at war – monsters roam the streets, and citizens fight to protect what is theirs. This narrative hook has more flesh on the bone than the original entry’s, which primarily explored the innards of CREO’s facilities. Jericho is a city filled with people to talk to, and far more interesting areas to explore than new sectors of a facility. The dialogue made me cringe at times, and some of the side missions are a bit strange (like planting flowers for a robot), but the overall vibe established in Jericho is engaging, which enhances exploration.

Taking inspiration from the Dark Souls series, The Surge 2 is a difficult game – but it isn’t just enemies that you have to worry about. Figuring out where to go is part of the challenge, and the cluttered environments don’t make it easy. My progress frequently came to a screeching halt because I didn’t know where to go next. Getting stuck is frustrating, but it also comes with benefits; being forced to explore every darkened corner and questionable pit meant I was grinding through enemies to earn currency I could use to enhance my gear and level up my character. Deck13 also rewards thorough exploration with meaningful shortcuts that extend from the safe zones. Clearing out a zone completely can create four or five shortcuts leading to different sectors and directly to bosses.

Any foe can give you a run for your money if you aren’t careful, but The Surge 2’s combat offers a deep well of strategies that should give you the upper hand. You can even change from a heavy weapon such as a hammer to something agile like Wolverine-like claws with just a press of the button, giving you the option to essentially change classes on the fly. Evasive maneuvers are handled well, and enemies are fairly easy to read, although their lunge attacks are a little to magnetic and can make odd turns to hit you. Some foes can also power up with a rage ability, and others carry shields that require different strategies. In addition to switching weapons on the fly, you can also create several loadouts with specific foes or regions in mind.

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The Surge 2 introduces a powerful (but difficult to master) directional parry that stagger almost every foe if you can time it right. I relied more on my drone to knock adversaries off balance, but it the parry is a nice defensive technique to try to use when you have your back against the wall.

Most of the enemies (of which there is a nice variety) are outfitted in different gear, and if you like what you see, you can target the limb holding the desired item and lop it off as the final strike (a returning feature from the original). You send heads, arms, legs, and torsos flying in almost every battle, making The Surge 2 extremely violent in an oddly strategic way. Given just how tight the combat mechanics are and how aggressive the A.I. is, getting a new piece of gear always feels good, as does reaching a safe zone to bank your scrap. You also earn dozens of invaluable implants that can enhance your base skills and give you small advantages, such as having more healing options.

Deck13 included a number of new weapon and armor types, all of which can be upgraded extensively, again putting heavy weight on the act of grinding, which is a bit excessive, but thankfully it ends up being fun. If you like the idea of cobbling together armor sets earned by felling difficult foes, give The Surge 2 a try. You may get a bit lost in the world at times, but every encounter is fun and well thought out. The bosses in particular are nicely designed, exotic in look, and push you to play with brutal precision.

Score: 8.5

Summary: Deck13 Interactive's sequel showcases notable improvements and plenty of limb chopping.

Concept: A direct sequel that turns limb-chopping into an art within a sprawling (and confusing) world

Graphics: Environmental architecture is more varied than the first game, taking players into the wilderness, sewers, and into run-down city streets. Enemy designs are easy to read, giving you a good idea of which limbs hold the most valuable loot

Sound: All about the clanking of steel and grinding of gears. Combat is rightfully loud

Playability: Battle mechanics are fluid and filled with strategies, even allowing players to switch weapons on the fly or call upon a drone to attack a distant target

Entertainment: The Surge 2 is challenging, but finds ways to continually reward the player, whether it’s a new piece of armor, weapon, or a life-saving shortcut

Replay: Moderately High

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Code Vein Review - A Simulacrum Lacking Soul

Publisher: Bandai Namco

Developer: Bandai Namco

Release: September 27, 2019

Rating: Rating Pending

Reviewed on: PlayStation 4

Also on: Xbox One, PC

Code Vein is trying to be anime Dark Souls, and there’s no way around it. This title attempts to pull every possible mechanic and feature from From Software’s heralded series, then add a bit of its own flair. Developers taking inspiration from other games is common, but Code Vein shamelessly goes all-in; several levels and a boss fight will be immediately and eerily familiar to Souls fans. The end result feels rough around the edges. Combat lacks weight, fights are forgettable, and byzantine stages desperately try (and fail) to capture the things that make Souls-like games interesting.

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Everything in Code Vein feels like an off-brand knockoff. Combat, which is one of the foundational components of this genre, is lifeless; attacking enemies feels as if you’re beating on a rudderless chunk of meat with a blunt object. Bosses and stages don’t have flavor, impact, or style. The occasional framerate drops do nothing to help, and further drag down the core experience. These major issues put a limit on how much anyone – even Souls-like veterans – can enjoy Code Vein. But surrounding these critical failings are some interesting ideas that keep the experience from becoming a total loss.

As a blood-starved revenant, your journey begins in a fallen world where these vampiric entities must feed to survive. Revenants are trapped in a closed off-prison shard where humans – and their blood – are rare prizes. The story begins as indecipherable, off-putting gibberish, though essential information is revealed as you dig deeper via the acquisition of blood codes. These serve to both convey information as you dive into a character’s memories in cool segments and give you new abilities and archetypes to play with from a functional standpoint. 

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The blood code system allows you to keep your level and simply swap to another core class, like a mage or an assassin, at any time. Since it also takes care of the necessary stat allocations, it’s a great tool for trying out new strategies to get past areas or bosses. You can even take skills from one class and place them on another with ease, letting you create your own customized build. Experimenting is fun and quite expansive as you get farther in the game, with lots of choices to mix and match. 

The biggest move away from the Souls-like template is the fact that you can always have a companion by your side. Your collection of A.I. companion choices expands as you progress, and you can pick sidekicks that fit whatever your playstyle calls for, whether it’s some potent ranged damage or a brutal melee assailant. These characters do real damage to bosses and can even bring you back from the brink of death, and you can rely on them to provide valuable assistance. Your friends are still fairly fragile, and bosses will punish and kill them if you try to rely on them too much, but they’re an incredible boon and fun to work back and forth with during intense fights. You can also build up relationships with your companions at your continually developing home base to unlock powerful items, adding an additional engaging wrinkle to your friendships.

Code Vein has some cool things to enjoy along the way and some nice ideas that shake up the core formula, but they are all incidental details. The heart of Code Vein remains overburdened by stale scenery, boring bosses, and tiresome trudging, and all of that is beyond what some nice touches can redeem.
 

Score: 6.5

Summary: Code Vein has some cool quirks to explore, but lacks any of the magic that inspired it.

Concept: Discover your mysterious past while attempting to salvage a devastated world

Graphics: Flashy style accents characters and moves, but many environments and bosses are bland

Sound: The soundtrack pumps up the action, but tunes are limited and overused

Playability: Familiarity with Souls-like games helps, but new players can ease themselves in with a leveling system that supports customization without consequence

Entertainment: You can have some fun with the stylish anime accoutrements, but Code Vein leans far too heavily on its inspirations and fails to capture any of the associated magic

Replay: Moderate

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FIFA 20 Review – A Well-Worn Institution

Publisher: EA Sports

Developer: EA Vancouver

Release: September 27, 2019

Rating: Everyone

Reviewed on: PlayStation 4

Also on: Xbox One, PC

It’s hard to know what FIFA is anymore. Like EA Sports’ Madden or 2K’s NBA 2K, FIFA has been absorbed into the larger sports culture. It’s been adopted by the athletes themselves, and is a symbol for video games in general. FIFA may be everywhere, but where does that leave FIFA 20? The game is not any worse off than it was a year ago, but it also feels anchorless. It has noticeable little improvements in every corner, but it lacks a strong core. FIFA 20 feels like a team without a captain.

Volta, the new small-side football mode (sometimes with sideline walls), is not strong enough to carry the torch for FIFA 20. The optional story (which you may as well call Volta: Hold Square to Skip) isn’t compelling, and the mode’s relatively confined spaces only accentuate some of the weak points in FIFA’s gameplay. Loose ball pickups, ball physics, and poor teammate A.I. can all go wrong; when they do, Volta’s small playing spaces mean the loss of possession can lead to a swift goal against. Similarly, I don’t get fancy with the ball much (apart from passing it off the walls, which is fun) due to the risk involved of coughing it up. In fact, you don’t even get bonus points after a match for stylish play, which makes me even more reluctant.

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When the gameplay is on a normal-sized pitch, which allows wingers to run free and more team strategies to develop, FIFA 20 feels more at home. Smart passing opens up attacking opportunities. Playing defense, while not as overpowering as last year (in fact, calling over a teammate for help doesn’t do much), feels rewarding. I like to take control, cordon off an opponent’s attack, and clog up passing lanes. One of my favorite things to execute – given the time, skill, and teammate movement – is to pump the ball into the wide channels for the wingers. This puts immediate pressure on the opposing fullbacks, and is something that the A.I., to its credit, does right back at you.

FIFA 20’s gameplay produces satisfying moments, like addressing the ball with small touches to maneuver the ball and keep possession, but it’s hampered by foibles like inconsistent/sometimes-floaty ball physics, bad keeper rebounds, and players comically falling down or feeling like they’re on ice. The latter happens even though the actual jostling command is well executed.

As usual, these kinds of eccentricities are magnified in Ultimate Team mode, when chemistry and other variables are involved. While this mode is the financial powerhouse of the series and EA as a company, Ultimate Team in FIFA 20 isn’t a destination mode. The new season format doles out linear rewards for your activities, but the rewards (coins, cosmetics, the occasional pack, and more) are often shrug-worthy. Unexciting things like balls and team badges are placed on steep ascending tiers that bake more grind into the mode.

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Ultimate Team’s multiplayer may be hyper-focused on getting the right players, but even the mode’s bad pack odds are preferable to the fact that Volta only gives out cosmetic items (at launch, anyway). Sadly, it’s more exhilarating to try and survive in Ultimate Team’s piranha tank for player cards than it is to play Volta for throwaway cosmetics. Unfortunately, this is where this series is at: Asking fans to put up with less-than-ideal aspects for morsels of fun.

Other modes like Career (player or manager) and Pro Clubs are also stingy, including a few new elements that may solve long-standing problems or address fans’ requests (like being able to practice in Pro Clubs) but which simply cannot disguise that these modes haven’t been fundamentally improved. For instance, the new manager interviews/conversations during career mode are a thin way to address player morale, which is a system that behaves erratically. Some players demand more playing time when they’ve already been in the starting lineup for months. The career-mode A.I. also falters in managing its rosters correctly, keeping the transfer market stocked, and fielding the right lineup alongside you in the player-centric version of career mode.

FIFA may be more popular than ever, but FIFA 20 is a standard bearer with no clear focus. The gameplay comes up just short of carrying the title, and while Ultimate Team is engaging in its own way, it’s the same grind it’s always been. The next-generation of home consoles is approaching, and I can’t tell if EA has run out of ideas or is running out the clock.

Score: 7.5

Summary: Developer EA Vancouver has made changes across the game, but what does it all add up to?

Concept: Add a new small-side mode called Volta, along with other changes throughout the game

Graphics: Player faces look pretty good, but their facial expressions are limited to the stoic end of the emotion spectrum

Sound: The soundtrack is well-suited to the Volta locations around the world

Playability: It’s worth learning the variety of dribbling options due to their usefulness in different situations

Entertainment: FIFA 20’s finer gameplay moments are overshadowed by the series’ overall malaise

Replay: Moderately High

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The Sojourn Review – A Puzzle Trip To Skip

Developer: Shifting Tides

Release: September 20, 2019

Rating: Everyone

Reviewed on: PlayStation 4

Also on: Xbox One, PC

In elementary school, I remember filling out worksheets full of boring arithmetic problems. I know “practice makes perfect” and all, but once you understand the core concept of addition, solving 1+2 is functionally the same as solving 3+4. The components may vary slightly, but you don’t approach one problem any differently than another. The Sojourn faces an incarnation of the same problem; this first-person puzzle game gradually introduces new ideas, but reinforces each one to exhaustion through repetition, without the escalation that makes you feel like your understanding is evolving.

The Sojourn’s central gimmick involves traveling between a light world and a dark world (and swapping places with statues) to reach the end of each challenge. You start with just one way into the dark world, but that expands – along with what you can accomplish when you’re there. Magic harps, duplicating chambers, and energy beams all come into play, complicating your journey from point A to B. The most satisfying solutions come from piecing together a series of steps; you enter the dark world, activate a harp to play a song that forms a bridge, then swap places with a statue to reach and cross the bridge before your time in the dark world expires.

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In isolation, these mechanics are consistent and well-executed, with a handful of devious scenarios that left me feeling particularly triumphant upon completion. However, the issues with The Sojourn don’t surface in its individual challenges; the boredom collects through the aggregated experience of churning through so many similar puzzles. Instead of feeling like a curated journey with deliberate layering in difficulty and complexity, many challenges play like remixes of previous ones. The layouts and solutions are technically different, but movement from one to the next often feels lateral, with many of the same components and ideas simply reassembled in a new configuration. Unless a puzzle is introducing a brand new mechanic (which is rare), you aren’t pushed to look at situations in new or interesting ways, which makes a large portion of the puzzles feel like busywork rather than a showcase for clever ideas.

While more boundary-pushing scenarios can be found in optional puzzles, the problem is more one of flow than difficulty. Yes, you can engage with the harder puzzles if you want to, but you still have to plow through the mostly linear sequence of mandatory obstacles to progress. That sense of repetition is where The Sojourn lost me.

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The story and setting don’t add much depth to the process. The narrative moves forward through sequences of sculptures that appear periodically, but the tale is so high-level that it fails to establish any real mystery or investment. And while the art is stylish and pretty, don’t expect to stumble upon significant details in the environment; the world, gorgeous as it may be, feels like a purely utilitarian funnel from one challenge to the next. You enter a cool columned chamber, solve some puzzles, and then take an elevator up to … a practically identical columned chamber … and then another. The same thing happens in a well and in a dark cavern, with you moving along almost-copied-and-pasted paths that just lead to different puzzles.

A good puzzle game needs more than a cool mechanic and a few satisfying solutions. Those are important elements, but they should build on each other, teaching you to use and combine your available tools in exciting and surprising ways. The Sojourn has moments where it accomplishes this, but the space between them is dull, leaving you stranded in a sterile world with a predictable rhythm.

Score: 6.5

Summary: The Sojourn accomplishes some cool moments, but the space between them is dull, leaving you stranded in a sterile world with a predictable rhythm.

Concept: Bend reality as you jump between light and darkness to solve a series of puzzles

Graphics: Though the environments aren’t incredibly detailed, stylish art creates a beautiful (but inert) world

Sound: Contemplative music and appropriate sound effects do their job, but don’t steal the spotlight

Playability: The mechanics and rules of each challenge are solid, so you never have control-related issues when executing a plan

Entertainment: A few puzzles are exhilarating to decipher, but too many others beat the concepts into the ground through repetition without offering enough to keep the solutions fresh

Replay: Moderately Low

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Untitled Goose Game Review – The Joys Of Goosing Around

Publisher: House House

Developer: House House

Release: September 20, 2019

Reviewed on: Switch

Also on: PC, Mac

Making mischief can be fun, but imagine doing it as one of nature’s biggest pests: a goose. Untitled Goose Game is a simple-but-amusing experience about being a goose and harassing unsuspecting humans. While there’s something charming and delightful about that, the game shows all its cards upfront and never reaches outside the initial thrill of the premise. Untitled Goose Game is a lighthearted jaunt that I’m glad I took, but it left me without much of a lasting impression as the credits rolled.

Whether they’re lazily meandering across the road in front of your car, chasing unsuspecting children, or leaving their “presents” on sidewalks, geese can be real jerks. This is why assuming the role of one and doling out the inconveniences is so satisfying. Your goal is to advance through different areas of a town by completing objectives, which nudge you toward your evil deeds. Maybe you need to steal items for your goose picnic, or chase a terrified boy into a phone booth. You accomplish this with only what nature gave you: your beak to honk and pick up items, and your wings to get attention.

Untitled Goose Game combines light stealth and puzzle elements. As a goose, you need to watch people’s routines and routes, looking for things like tables and decks to hide under. You can also pick up items and place them wherever as a way to distract humans, which is essential; if you get caught, they chase you out of the area and take back whatever item you’ve stolen. Every place becomes its own puzzle, forcing you to think like a goose to complete some of the tasks, such as pretending to be a statue, or honking right as someone is about to do something to startle them for hilarious results. Some of your actions are just plain devious and depend on careful timing, like pulling a chair out from under someone right before they’re about to sit down. All of this is plenty of fun, especially as you watch the reactions and consequences of your actions, like causing two neighbors to argue or seeing a lady who was shooing you break her broom.

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You quickly fall into your routine of raising hell, and watching townspeople chase you as you waddle away for dear life is a sight to behold. Some puzzles take additional effort and can’t even be completed until you gain access to a new area and go back later. Once the credits roll, you also get new, more complex objectives in the same areas for replayability; some hijinks even have timed conditions for added pressure. That being said, Untitled Goose Game is a condensed experience, and the first run only takes a few hours. I don’t have a problem with short games, but even at that length, your tasks get repetitive by the end. There are only so many times you can steal items, move things from one side of the area to the other, and run from townsfolk. Also, for all this frenzy, nothing really stands out as over-the-top silly or extremely memorable. The gags are fairly standard and safe, and only a couple post-game objectives are intricate enough to require serious thought, which is disappointing.

Untitled Goose Game is a great concept, and ends in the same charming way it started. Pranking people is fun, and doing it as a goose just adds to the thrill. Most people will play it for the silly premise, complete it in a few hours, and go on their merry way without touching it again. If you just want to mess with people as a goose, here’s your chance – but the shallowness and repetition hold it back from being a truly engaging game.  

Score: 7.5

Summary: Untitled Goose Game is a simple-but-amusing experience about being a goose and harassing unsuspecting humans.

Concept: Be a goose out on the town, making mischief and toying with humans

Graphics: Outside of a few hiccups like clipping issues, the simplistic and colorful art style is pleasing and fits the tone well

Sound: Tense classical music plays if a human catches you in the act, appropriately adding to the frenzy of chase scenes

Playability: Easy to pick up and play, though sometimes it can be hard to pick up items when they’re close to one another

Entertainment: Untitled Goose Game leans into its lighthearted, silly elements, providing plenty of chuckles and capturing the joy of figuring out how to mess with people

Replay: Moderate

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Sayonara Wild Hearts Review – Chasing Neon Demons

Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

Developer: Simogo

Release: September 19, 2019

Rating: Rating Pending

Reviewed on: Switch

Also on: PlayStation 4

A broken-hearted girl is transported into the sky, where she takes on the role of a masked biker. In this dreamlike world, she races along neon streets and other surreal landscapes, picking up collectables and navigating shifting paths, all the while accompanied by an electronic soundtrack. This is Sayonara Wild Hearts, a beautiful trifle that seems to end just as it’s gaining momentum.

Sayonara Wild Hearts is mesmerizing to look at, but unfortunately it falters as a game. The first few stages get you acclimated to weaving your character left and right on the tracks, picking up heart shapes and other collectibles to earn higher scores. And really, that’s just about all there is. The perspective shifts in some impressive ways, with a camera that pulls back until your rider is a tiny speck or rotates woozily in tunnel sections where you ride freely on the walls and ceilings. Camera trickery aside, you’re doing the same basic thing throughout the short experience. A few moments break from that format, such as a VR-inspired game-within-a-game that plays a bit more like an arcade shooter, but these deviations are unfortunately all too brief. 

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You’re hurtling along at a breakneck pace much of the time, but instead of feeling exhilarated, I was reminded of those moments in the early 3D Sonic games where you’re being propelled along on a ride that’s barely interactive. Sure, it looks neat, but if you’re not going out of your way to pick up the objects that flash by, you aren’t missing out on anything beyond medal rankings upon stage completion. Most of the time these things flash by so quickly that acquiring them is more reliant on memorization and repetition than reflexes. 

Music is an integral part of Sayonara Wild Hearts, though the action and soundtrack aren’t tightly syncopated most of the time. Instead, the two elements support each other thematically, much like a music video. There were moments where I picked up collectibles that chimed in time with the music or hit a speed boost that whooshed along with the beat – as well as some timing-based cues against a handful of bosses – but you don’t need to have a strong internal metronome to succeed.

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The story is mostly alluded to in pantomime, and I’m still not confident that I fully get what it’s trying to say. Is the girl coming to terms with past relationships? Is she becoming more attuned to the various facets of her personality? Is it something entirely different? I’m certain that the last section was intended to be a triumphant coalescence of everything that had come before, but without having any real emotional attachment to what was going on, it falls flat.

I quite enjoyed looking at Sayonara Wild Hearts, even though interacting with it left me cold. In fact, I probably would have liked it just as much if it were just a short film. As it stands, it’s an impressively stylish title with a disappointing amount of substance.

Score: 7

Summary: I quite enjoyed looking at Sayonara Wild Hearts, even though interacting with it left me cold.

Concept: Take a broken-hearted heroine on a dazzling, musical journey at 200 miles per hour

Graphics: The visuals are simple and striking, even as they zoom past you at blinding speeds

Sound: Every stage is accompanied by a melodic electronica and pop soundtrack. The tunes may not be everyone’s preferred jam, but they’re undeniably catchy

Playability: You don’t often have much time to react to obstacles or collectibles, and success depends equally on memorization and pure reflexes

Entertainment: Sayonara Wild Hearts crackles with style, but is an ultimately inconsequential ride

Replay: Moderately low

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Daemon X Machina Review – Mission Failure

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Marvelous Entertainment

Release: September 13, 2019

Reviewed on: Switch

I can forgive myself for concluding that my enthusiasm for sci-fi, giant robots, and high-concept anime might make Daemon X Machina a good fit. However, after playing it, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I didn’t warn others of similar inclinations to stay away. Though its components might seem initially appealing, Daemon X Machina fails to deliver on gameplay, story, or any other facet that might have seemed interesting at first glance.

In a vaguely defined post-apocalyptic world, giant manned mecha do battle across a desolate landscape, fighting against each other as well as the looming threat of malevolent artificial intelligence. Competing consortiums, governmental entities, and the motivations of individual mercenaries all compete for narrative attention, and it is all nonsense. None of the dozens of named characters coalesce into interesting personalities, but virtually all of them speak in hushed tones about their mysterious purpose for fighting, even as I shake my head at the meaningless babble of their prolonged conversations.

The broader storytelling is nearly as unintelligible, spending many hours lost in an incoherent mash-up of anime tropes and the teasing of revelations that seem never to arrive. Meanwhile, players adopt the role of the “rookie,” a woefully silent protagonist without a will of their own, spending the bulk of the plot tripping happily between missions, regardless of which side of the conflict that places them on. As a player, you learn not to care what’s happening, and just push on into the action.

At first, I was heartened by the attractive and sharp lines of the sophisticated mecha designs (“arsenals,” in the game’s parlance), and the wide variety of mission locations which you visit over the course of a lengthy tour of duty through the campaign. But even those surface details fail to impress as the real-time combat grows tedious and uninteresting. The lock-on weapons systems and constant target strafing never advance in sophistication. The quick speed of movement in both the air and ground encounters can be exciting, but it also means that tracking onscreen action, especially against the other fast-moving arsenals, is an exercise in futility. That problem is exacerbated by an unhelpful battle UI, which fails to monitor fundamental details like the altitude of the many targets on your radar.

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Difficulty is also uneven. After several early hours of simplistic fights, the later hours of the campaign fluctuate dramatically. In one, the fight is so easy that I finish off the boss before the in-mission dialogue even concludes. In another (including some dreaded protect missions), I hammer my head against the wall of repeated mission failures, or batter enemies for extended fights in which high hit point totals replace actual challenging attack patterns. I’m struck by how much everything feels like similar mecha games from more than a decade ago, but in none of the good ways.

Between missions, the hangar bay provides opportunities to upgrade. Body modification of your pilot gives some mostly minor bonuses. The tech implants are presumably meant to scare you about how they are slowly stealing your humanity; that effort fails, since the hero is already robotic and lifeless. My mech improves through new weapons and armor purchased and developed with funds earned during missions. I appreciate the detail and wide variety of options here, as well as the cosmetic features that unlock with time, and a deep devotion to stat min-maxing can yield returns. Even so, the customization of your arsenal is poorly explained, and you rarely have a clear sense of what aspects of your equipment best suit a given fight. Individual weapon and armor pieces are challenging to compare without immaculate study, blurring the process of deciding whether a new piece is even worth the price. The accumulated effect is that any sense of progression is suffocated. I rarely felt like I had experienced meaningful growth even after multiple sessions of play.

If you push past the game’s failings, a four-player cooperative multiplayer option lets you partake in designated missions with friends or other online enthusiasts. These battles are often easy and seem not to have been rebalanced for multiple living players, but the parade of different weapon effects on display is rousing. Setting up a lobby and hopping into a lobby is relatively easy, and I like that you can designate some of the A.I. pilots as teammates for times you’d prefer not to hop online.

I kept waiting for Daemon X Machina to pull the curtain back and reveal some sophistication in its gameplay, or some narrative twist that might make the uninspired combat worth slogging through. Those things never arrive. While the game ostensibly scratches the itch for players who have longed for something like Armored Core on the Switch, it’s a model that feels out of step with recent innovations in the sphere of action games. There are better worlds to save than this benighted future. 

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Score: 5.5

Summary: Attractive mecha designs and plentiful missions can't save the plodding narrative and archaic gameplay of this sci-fi adventure.

Concept: Fly futuristic mechs in fast-moving battles in the midst of an ill-defined narrative

Graphics: Attractive but familiar mecha designs are featured across an impressive variety of locales, but everything blurs together in the rapid-fire pace of play, and the UI obscures more than it reveals

Sound: The incessant music is so bad and repetitive I was forced to turn it way down after the first few hours. Anime-style voice work nails all the tropes you could ask for

Playability: Interacting with this game is deeply problematic. The menu and upgrade systems are hard to parse, and control mechanics in combat feel loose and without weight or depth

Entertainment: An easy skip, even if you like mecha-infused action

Replay: Low

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