God of War Ragnarök is truly excellent. Quality seeps out of the thing, with so much effort put into even its less consequential elements. Richly detailed, terrifically written, all with a massively entertaining blend of combat and puzzles. The overwhelming amount of content can most certainly grow tiring at points and there are moments of disruptive meandering. Nevertheless, for a game to offer so much and retain such a high caliber is worthy of applause.
Sonic Frontiers is broken beyond belief with mechanics that barely work and a camera so disastrous it’s literally sickening. The “Open Zones” are disjointed, unpopulated wastelands that do less than nothing to justify their depressing existence. An unpleasant mess, looking and feeling like a mishmash of disparate assets duct taped together, and that’s before we consider the damning amount of recycled content. It’s honestly embarrassing that any professional studio could have made something so cheap, so sad, and so thoroughly incompetent. Even by Sonic Team’s low standards, this is pathetic.
Fundamentally, Signalis is an accomplished emulation of PSX survival horror. Its graphics are both authentic to the era and perfectly disturbing. Taking place in a fascinating world and populated by threatening creatures, it’s a game I very much wish I could enjoy more than I did. The crushing limitation on the player’s inventory coupled with a reliance on memory puzzles that represent a genuine accessibility issue put me off wanting to ever play the game again to get an ending more satisfying than the rather unfulfilling conclusion I got. That’s a real shame, because it’s still one of the best retraux survival horrors out there. It’s just not good enough for me to love it like I want to.
Bayonetta 3 is a good time when it allows itself to be. It consists of an excellent core experience buried under superfluous bilge, an otherwise quality experience interrupting itself to such a degree as to drag down the entire experience. The high notes are high enough to ensure a genuinely quality game, but the incessant sidetracking into mediocre stealth gameplay, mundane alternate characters, and half a dozen other deviations holds it back from being truly great. Thank god for trainsaws and spider women though, because they do a heck of a lot to keep this game entertaining.
Cultic’s shameless revelry in gore is delightful. Its array of guns is conservative in number but tightly focused in design, each weapon built for purpose and tangibly effective as a result. Pacing is a little one-note and insistently dingy visuals can be offputting at times, but the whole package remains a top notch retraux shooter. I had tremendous fun throughout, and while I’d like to see a little more unique personality from future installments, I haven’t had my fill of the action on offer here.
A Plague Tale: Requiem is definitely a game worth playing for fans of the original despite my criticisms. Overall I enjoyed my time, thanks in no small part to a vastly superior second half. I lament the loss of better directed linear stealth in favor of messier open environments, but the core of what makes A Plague Tale great - strong characters, bleak horror, and tons of squicky rats - remains firmly in place.
Gotham Knights takes the concept of inconsequential open world busywork to a ludicrous extreme, exquisitely culminating years of creative laziness in the genre. Nothing can adequately convey how monotonous, how unimaginative, how fucking banal this thing is. It manages to be offensive in its structural mediocrity, and that’s before we consider its enervative combat, inadequate controls, and threadbare world. Wearing the flayed skin of a live service and managing to be worse than any one of them, this sorry mockery of the Arkham series will rightly be forgotten in a year’s time - sooner if we’re lucky.
So much about Scorn feels like a trap. It’s designed to cost you progress, to waste your time, and some might think this burdensome despair is some sort of brilliance on the part of the developers. To someone who values their finite time on Earth, it’s snide crap that shows contempt for its audience at every opportunity.
As for me, I can’t say I was hooked. Dreamlight Valley is a world of cardboard, its inhabitants little more than set decoration and animated sources of material gain. It’s a game about menial labor for menial labor’s sake, the most monotonous elements of a life sim emphasized and weakly justified by the shallow inclusion of marketable Disney characters. It masquerades as a game about friendship while portraying personal relationships as little more than means to an end. Worse than all of that, though, it’s simply boring. Dreadfully, interminably, boring.
Combining multiple genres and examining the relationship between game and audience, The Hex is a poignant, witty, cleverly written adventure spanning six protagonists and six very different – but smartly cohesive – stories.