My existence on this earth has been a hard one so far. I have been put here with the sole purpose of playing every single game about terraforming ever made, and while some of them haven’t been too bad none of them have tackled the core concept of transforming a planet from barren wasteland to lush paradise well at all. Surviving Mars was way more interested in being a mediocre city builder than it was any terraforming elements. Terraforming Mars is a literal board game adaptation, and necessarily limited by that fact – your terraforming activity is limited to placing a very limited number of ocean and forest tiles onto a map. Per Aspera is… not good, would be the very short version, and the longer one is a 6,000 word angry rant. Last year’s Terraformers is probably the best attempt I’ve played so far, fusing a terraforming game with a simple 4X that still allowed it some satisfying mechanical depth, but the games tended to finish early before you completed the terraformation process and so it still felt like there was something missing. Which sums up my experience with these games in general, really; I play them all in the hope that they’ll scratch the itch, but they all end up disappointing me in one way or another.

I mention this all so that I can put the next sentence in its proper context: Planet Crafter is not disappointing. Planet Crafter is the first game about terraforming that I’ve played that’s actually sold me on the fantasy that I’m terraforming.a planet. And, weirdly, it’s done it by being much more mechanically light on the terraforming than even Terraforming Mars – instead, the bulk of its effort is spent on showing the player how the environment changes around them as their Terraforming rating improves. And this is an approach that pays off in spades.

Planet Crafter is very different from the games I just listed. All of those games are strategy games, based on the logical reasoning that if you’re tackling a problem on the scale of terraforming an entire planet you need a global outlook. But maybe that’s where they all went wrong; it makes the terraforming process too mechanical, too impersonal, too about watching a series of numbers go up. Meanwhile Planet Crafter is a game that is literally all about watching a number go up, but you do it from ground level — Planet Crafter is not a strategy game, but is instead a survival game that takes some very heavy inspiration from Subnautica.

Planet Crafter starts with you being dropped onto a Mars-like planet with a small chest of supplies and given the goal of getting the planet’s Terraforming rating from its starting value of zero all the way up to the “complete biosphere” score of five trillion. You have the standard selection of slowly-decreasing survival meters — food, water, oxygen — that need topping up as you work, and there are mineral resources scattered all over the ground that you can use to build structures and machines. So you start, as is normal with these games, by building a living compartment and storage area next to your landing site. Around the outside you scatter some windmills for power, and small drills that liberate gas from the planet’s crust, raising the atmospheric pressure. Each drill makes a pathetic contribution to the Terraforming rating, increasing it by a fraction of a point per second, but they’re still useful because your overall Terraforming rating is split into the standard categories you’d expect in a game like this: Pressure, Heat and Oxygen, and later on there’s a separate Biomass counter that also contributes that’s split into Plants, Insects and Animals. The drills may be doing almost nothing to the big terraforming number, but they’re making more substantial progress for you along the Pressure track, and progression in each category unlocks more and better terraforming tech.

So, having the drills running for a bit gets you solar panel tech, which produces about four times as much power as a windmill. They also unlock a bigger oxygen tank, allowing you to venture further in your exploration of the world. There’s some cool stuff in the Heat category, so you build a couple of heaters (bizarrely, these go inside your buildings rather than outside) and this gets you a better variant of the vegetube – these are machines that you can put plant seeds inside, and then they’ll produce Oxygen. All of the new unlocks are between four and ten times more effective at terraforming than their more primitive variants, but they demand more advanced materials; pretty soon you’re wanting to build tier 2 heaters that require Iridium, but there’s no Iridium in the starting area. So you embark on an expedition to find some; mine was to the crashed spaceship wreck I could see nearby, one of several scattered around the world which are full of all sorts of advanced materials that you do eventually get the ability to produce yourself, but which are scarce and limited until you do — including Iridum. If you do go in that direction you’ll also likely find a cave entrance blocked by a huge ice wall that melts once the overall planet temperature gets to 100 nanoKelvin¹ – why, that’s another reason to try and increase the Heat level!

The first hour or two of the game is like this: scrounging up materials, building terraforming machinery so that you can unlock new and better terraforming machinery, and then trying to find out where to get the materials to build the new stuff. The steady trickle of new items you unlock, and the challenge of figuring out how to build them, will keep your brain occupied to the point where you might even forget about the overall Terraforming rating — but this is important too, as not only does it have its own very long line of unlocks, it also governs how the planet changes over time. The target value of 5,000,000,000,000 represents a completely terraformed world, but you’re given a slightly more modest goal to hit when you first land on the planet: 175,000. This is the point where you progress from the initial terraforming stage, Barren, to the second one, Blue Skies. Perhaps not that immediately arresting, I’ll grant you; they’re nice to look at, but it’s ultimately just the skybox being gradually switched out, and it’s this kind of weak terraforming representation of painting the planet a different colour that turned me off of all of those other games. But in Planet Crafter Blue Skies is just stage two of fifteen. The third stage is Clouds, and the fourth, Rain, is where I really started to like Planet Crafter.

You see, the Rain stage is the first time Planet Crafter shows you that it’s not just switching textures around, and that it’s actually pretty serious about this whole terraforming thing. Every other game I’ve seen that’s done terraforming has done it in a pretty coarse fashion; Per Aspera is an extreme example, where a full third of the planet turned into an ocean overnight, but the others aren’t much better. In Planet Crafter, though, once I’d been in the Rain stage for a bit, I started to notice small pools of water appearing on the ground. After a bit more, I noticed a much bigger pool of water accumulating next to the landing site – and it didn’t stop. Fortunately I’d already relocated my main base to somewhere more central and higher-altitude (one nice thing about Subnautica is that it was pretty easy to plop down a basic outpost for storage and oxygen, and Planet Crafter inherits that); I could have moved the tier 1 drills and windmills but it honestly wouldn’t have been worth the effort as they were fully obsolete, and so they were left to be swallowed up by what eventually became a massive lake. I am sure that the initial landing site being on the bottom of a lake bed is 100% intentional on the part of the developers because it’s a brilliant demonstration of how the world changes in response to your terraforming efforts — gradually rather than immediately, but significantly.

It certainly worked on me. From this point onwards I was hooked, and hooked in a way that games don’t often manage these days.

Planet Crafter’s map changing as the Terraforming rating increases is its biggest strength and most impressive achievement. Watching the planet blossom around you is tremendously rewarding, but it also has significant mechanical implications as new routes are opened up by melting ice and growing vines, and new resources are brought to the surface by plant roots. Sneakily this change works both ways, since the rising water level and (eventually) foliage spread will also conceal caves and wrecks that are otherwise quite easy to find when the planet is still in its Barren state. You won’t miss anything critical, but it’s still a good idea to get some of your exploring done early. The change is gradual in most places — you can even watch the enormous ice walls melt in real-time if you’re willing to wait for about half an hour — and there’s overlap between the different terraforming stages that makes it feel a bit more organic, so fish don’t magically appear in your lakes once you hit the Fish stage; you’ll see increasing numbers of them swimming around in the preceding Breathable Atmosphere stage if you’re in a lake that’s deep enough. There’s a few rough edges, such as exploring areas towards the edge of the map that look like they’re unfinished – but in reality they just haven’t had terraforming effects applied to them yet, and the un-terraformed version hasn’t had much time spent on it because most people wouldn’t make it out there that early. In general, though, it’s a smashing success, and the amount of change – and the variety of it – was always surprising, all the way up until a couple of hours before the end of the game.

In terms of how you as a player change the way you play in response to the changing environment, Planet Crafter also succeeds, albeit in a more qualified manner. A key element of survival games is mastery of the environment; at the start you’re scrabbling for food and water and put in a significant amount of time obtaining both, but ideally by the midgame you’ve built machines that automate that away and have moved on to more interesting problems. For example, Subnautica gave you a knife that automatically cooked fish and a water filter machine that automatically produced filtered water. But because it’s a terraforming game, Planet Crafter has an additional challenge/opportunity, in that as you change the world to make it more suitable for human life this should make obtaining basic survival resources easier. (Per Aspera screwed this up badly, eventually covering half of Mars in an ocean but still forcing you to get drinking water for your colonists by mining out aquifers.)

Let’s take water as the first example. At the beginning of the game you’re picking up chunks of frozen ice from the ground and taking them to a crafting station to melt into water. Pretty simple, but still annoying. After five or six hours of this, you’ll unlock a machine that condenses water automatically from the brand new atmosphere you’ve created, and shortly after this happens you’ll be forced into using it because you’ll reach the Liquid Water terraforming stage and all of the ice that was previously just lying around on the ground will have melted – its terraforming science might be nonsense, but Planet Crafter is at least grounded in basic logic. But wait, if there’s now a big lake where the initial landing site used to be, can’t you just go and drink from that? Well, yes you can. Eventually. You need to equip a water filter item that doesn’t unlock until about halfway in, but once you have it you can just slurp water directly from the surface of any pool you find. It’s still a good idea to have a couple of water bottles in your inventory just in case, but it’s much less of a headache to keep yourself topped up.

Oxygen is a similar story. You make oxygen refill canisters from cobalt, and your buildings automatically replenish your oxygen with no requirement to even power them. As the game progresses you make successively larger oxygen tanks that extend the amount of time you can spend outside before refilling – this is nothing that Subnautica didn’t already do, though. However, just after you unlock the water filter you also unlock an air filter item; this reduces the rate of your oxygen consumption by filtering it from the atmosphere, and the reduction is increased as you improve the terraforming level. Eventually you reach the Breathable Atmosphere stage (which is stage 11 of 15, so quite late in the game) and you don’t need oxygen any more except when you’re swimming underwater.

Food is the sole sore point where the basic survival mechanics are concerned. You initially survive on “Space Food” meals that you land with and that you can subsequently find in chests scattered across the surface of the planet. You’ll also find plant seeds, and one of the first things that you unlock is a Food Grower machine – put some eggplant seeds in this, and ten minutes later you’ll have an eggplant. There’s no need to restock the seeds and it’ll keep producing eggplants indefinitely, so this is admirably low-friction – the problem is, this doesn’t get replaced by anything. At the end of the game I was still having to periodically grab food from my food growers to keep my food levels topped up, just as I was at the start; there’s a V2 of the food grower that grows it more quickly, and an outdoor farm that grows more of it, but neither of these are significant upgrades over the basic food grower, and so this is the one survival activity that does not change no matter how much you’ve terraformed the planet.

Planet Crafter’s gameplay evolves in other ways, but these aren’t related to the terraforming level at all and could be found in any other survival game. There’s no hostile life in the game – and in fact very few ways you can die outside of letting your survival meters run out — so the major overhead that you have, aside from keeping your food/water/oxygen topped up, is travel time. There are no vehicles in the game and so you have to go everywhere on foot; you gradually unlock modules that make you run faster, and one of the earlier unlocks is a jetpack which has basically zero vertical movement capability, but which will give you a significant horizontal speed boost, as well as letting you scoot up steep surfaces you’d otherwise be unable to climb and fly over lakes instead of having to swim across them. Even with these maxed out, though, bringing back rarer resources from far-flung areas is a bit of a pain; my exploration sessions were always punctuated with building supply caches so that I could dump the less valuable/less used items for later, but I’d always have to head for home whenever I was full up on Super Alloy. The oxygen and water upgrades you get at least make this easier, as in the early-midgame you’re also having to make sure you have enough oxygen and water for the trip, and it’s not a massive overhead as with decent mobility upgrades and a good knowledge of the map and the shortcuts opened up by your terraforming it takes no more than 5 minutes to get from the centre of the map to any of its edges. Still, it’s not until the lategame that this pain goes away, as you unlock two very useful things:

• A teleporter. Gated by a rare material that you can only find in one very specific cave, so you won’t be able to build more than 2-3 until you can manufacture it yourself, but I found that that was enough.

• Logistics drones.

The logistics drones are super useful when combined with autocrafters as they eliminate the other major painpoint in this kind of game: having to run around your various storage lockers to find the materials for a specific crafting recipe, going back to the crafting station, realising you’ve forgotten one, going back to the storage lockers… this isn’t a huge problem until you start crafting later buildings that require several tiers of crafted item, and even then you can find enough of those materials in the environment from wrecks etc. that you can get a few examples up and running before having to resort to making them yourself. Still, when you’re making the final push through the last few terraforming stages you will need to properly scale, and it’s at this point that having effectively unlimited stocks of materials that are brought to you by the drones is absolutely invaluable. It’s a simple system, too; set your ore extractor in a remote location to supply Uranium and a storage locker back at your base to demand Uranium, and the drones will take care of transporting Uranium between the two – just so long as you have enough drones, as they can only carry one item at a time.

The only catch is that the drones aren’t truly useful until you have the maximum tier of ore extractor unlocked (which lets you select which sort of material you want to mine instead of having it mined randomly and filling up the extractor with unwanted junk – crucial for setting up a stable production chain), and this is sitting at the end of the Pressure unlock line, and to get there you’ll need the maximum level of drill, which is a long way up the Biomass unlock line. It’s nice that they made things interconnected like this, even though the connections don’t make a lot of sense; however, it also means that while you might unlock the ability to build drones about halfway through the game, you won’t be able to actually use them properly until about 3-4 hours before the end of the game. This is probably fine; I do wish it had been pitched a little earlier as I was thoroughly tired of having to carry things around myself by the time my Super Alloy and Pulsar Quartz production lines came online, but those broke nearly every single constraint on what I could build so it’s probably for the best.

So in terms of survival mechanics and production chains — the bread and butter of a survival game — it’s mostly good news. Planet Crafter makes a better fist of it than most of the examples I’ve played, and it ties the result of your terraforming into the survival mechanics decently well. Where it falls down, though, and falls down badly, is the terraforming mechanics themselves. Which I’ve already alluded to a couple of times, but it’s time to talk about it in detail: at the start of the game, to generate Pressure, I built tier 1 Drills. At the end of the game, to finish out the Pressure unlocks so that I could get my maximum level ore extractor, I built tier 5 Drills. The method did not change throughout the 25 hours that it took me to finish Planet Crafter; the drills just got bigger. It’s the same for Heat – in fact I thoroughly ignored Heat past the halfway point and built exactly one tier 4 heater, not even bothering with tier 5, and still got all of the unlocks thanks to passive Heat generation from my ore extractors. Oxygen generation is the only terraforming process that encounters a step change, and only because of how it gets combined with Biomass.

When you start the game you have access to just the three basic terraforming mechanisms: Heat, Pressure, and Oxygen. Once you get to the Liquid Water stage, though, you unlock Biomass generation, split into Plants, Insects and Animals. Insects and Animals are completely locked off until you get to their corresponding terraforming stages, so you’re mostly concerned with Plants here. Previously you’ve been generating Oxygen by sticking seeds into magic vegetubes which are somehow producing enough oxygen to oxygenate the entire planet; once you can grow plants the vegetubes are totally abandoned in favour of Algae Spreaders and Tree Spreaders, which generate both Plants and Oxygen at the same time. Algae Spreaders just work, but do not scale well; Tree Spreaders on the other hand produce an order of magnitude more Plants and Oxygen than Algae Spreaders at their first tier, and they have two more advanced tiers. So you build a couple of Algae Spreaders to get you across the Biomass gap separating vegetubes from Tree Spreaders (and also because algae is a key component of mutagens), and then you solely focus on Tree Spreaders. These need a tree seed that you need to fabricate inside a DNA Manipulator in order to function, but once they’re online they produce a ridiculous amount of Plants and Oxygen. Unlike the rest of the terraforming mechanisms, Tree Spreaders – along with most of the rest of the Biomass machines — visibly change the environment around them, with the tier 3 Tree Spreader eventually creating incredibly dense forests whose tree type depends on the type of seed you inserted to kickstart tree growth.

Now, I don’t want any misunderstandings here: I think this is good. I think this is very, very good; in fact it’s how I wish the rest of the terraforming mechanics in the game worked. The Insects machines, when you get them, work the same way; there’s a slightly convoluted process of creating bee and butterfly larvae, but once you have them you’ll see bees and butterflies everywhere, and if you add in a few Flower Spreaders you can make your base into a pastoral idyll. It’s a much more involved process compared to splatting down Drills and Heaters everywhere, and it’s got a good payoff: it’s extremely satisfying to see all of this life where a couple of dozen hours ago there was a barren wasteland.

Here’s the problem, though: the Terraforming rating doesn’t give a shit about how nice your planet looks. All it cares about is the number, and the Number Must Go Up. And the slightly mad decision Planet Crafter has made is to have all terraforming mechanisms contribute to the global Terraforming rating equally, with no regard given to how complex they are. There’s no weighting to say that actually having 1,000,000 tons of plant life is more valuable than a few more parts-per-million of oxygen in the atmosphere. And once you reduce it to a pure numbers game, you see that the numbers are wildly lopsided. Here are some examples:

• A tier 5 Drill produces 295 pK of heat per second and 3950 nPa of pressure per second. The units do not actually matter, only the numbers matter, so this drill is contributing a total of 4,245 per second to the Terraforming rating.

• A tier 2 Beehive produces 358 grams per second of Plants and 390 grams per second of Insects. It contributes 748 per second to the Terraforming rating.

• A butterfly farm with the absolute rarest type of butterfly in it (which provides a 1400% multiplier) will produce 1,050 grams of Insects per second, for 1,050 total terraforming per second².

So already this is wildly unbalanced away from Insects; in terms of contribution to the Terraforming rating the Drill is between 4-7 times better. But the reason I didn’t finish the game by spamming Drills is because of the existence of the tier 3 Tree Spreader, which with the most basic type of seed in it will still put out 10,625 oxygen and 1,562 plants per second, for a whopping 12,277 Terraforming rating per second – nearly 3 times as much as the max level Drill! And this is before adding other multipliers; better tree seeds add a multiplier to the output, stacking Machine Optimizers nearby with Oxygen-boosting fuses in them add another multiplier to the output (no such booster exists for Insects), and finally for all terraforming resources you can launch rockets into space to provide a stacking 10X global multiplier to that resource – and the Oxygen-boosting rockets are much cheaper and easier to build than the Insect-boosting rockets.

So there’s absolutely no reason to go into Insects — or by extension Animals, since this requires progression down the Insects line to unlock the Genetic Extractor. The optimal configuration for reaching 5 trillion terraforming points is eight Tier 3 Tree Spreaders with high-quality seeds clustered tightly around a collection of Machine Optimizers, and then spamming as many Oxygen rockets into space as possible. And it’s not like this isn’t still a lot of work to build, but I’m annoyed about it for two reasons. One is that it encourages degenerate play; I’m never really concerned with the appearance of my bases in survival games so I don’t bother with cosmetic furniture etc. and every spare scrap of wall space is occupied by a crafting station or a storage locker, but I would have expected variety or layout or surface coverage to matter somewhat in a game about terraforming. Here, though, every single mechanic is encouraging me to go all-in on the most effective thing, and I’m not even being incentivised to spread the Tree Spreaders out a bit; instead I have them all clustered in the same area for the Machine Optimizer bonus and the result is a ridiculous-looking super forest in the middle of an otherwise-empty field. The other is that, well, I could have just completely ignored Insects and Animals, which feel like fairly major aspects of the game. The only reason I even bothered with them was because I was curious about the mechanics, and I did have some time to kill while waiting for the overall Terraforming rating to tick up to its final goal. And it turns out they’re nice to look at! But that’s all they are.

And for a game whose major strength is managing to get you to suspend your disbelief as the world around you believably transforms over the course of about an in-game month, not encouraging the player to actively contribute to that transformation through smart building placement — and in fact encouraging the opposite — is a big failing. It’s by no means a critical one; I wouldn’t care about it anywhere near as much if I saw it in another game, but in Planet Crafter the change is the point, and so it’s a nagging irritant here where it wouldn’t be in something like Subnautica, especially when the rest of the terraforming process is so well-handled.

I guess the fact that this bugs me so much is partly a reflection of how smart Planet Crafter is almost everywhere else, though, like making sure the player can’t accidentally consume all of a limited resource and leave themselves unable to build key machines to progress by periodically delivering more materials via asteroid strike. I also very much appreciated the lack of peril from external sources (as fun as the Reaper Leviathans were in Subnautica, they wouldn’t be a good fit for Planet Crafter) and it was relaxing and stimulating to explore its ever-changing world in search of secrets while planning out my next goals. I think there’s quite a lot for the players who do enjoy the more cosmetic base-building aspects of survival games to engage with here, in spite of the game’s failings; you can craft a planet in this game, or at least a small chunk of one, even though you don’t particularly have to. For me, though, it was more than enough to see the process of terraforming finally done right in a game, and Planet Crafter pairs that hook with survival gameplay that’s never less than competent and, more often than not, extremely well thought-out.

The post Thoughts: Planet Crafter appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Now that we’ve covered the highlights of 2023, here’s the “Everything Else” category. Again, I should state that there’s selection bias at play here: none of these games are lowlights. All of them were good enough that I put in the time required to finish them, and in several cases that was quite a considerable amount of time. These aren’t bad games. Some of them would even get a grudging recommendation from me, if you like what they’re doing. But I don’t think I’ll particularly remember them a year from now, which is the whole reason I’m taking the time to write them up in this post in the first place.

Once again, in no particular order:

Titan Quest Anniversary Edition

I was struck by a weird compulsion to play an ARPG at the start of the year, and since Diablo 4 wasn’t out for another five months I looked through my Steam backlog and found an unlikely candidate: the 17 year-old Titan Quest. I’d never been able to stick with it beyond the opening region of Greece, mostly because the one time I did and made it to the second region of Egypt only to discover that it was exactly the same except all of the enemies were Scarabs instead of Harpies, I promptly quit. This time I stuck with it, but while it’s not a completely lost cause — slaughtering your way through ancient world mythology is a pretty good concept for an ARPG (hell, it works for God of War) and the visuals haven’t aged all that badly for something from the mid-00s — that initial assessment wasn’t wrong, as all four of the original game’s zones were incredibly samey. It’s not exactly helped by the skill system, either, which looks flexible and interesting at first in its potential for mixing and matching, but because of the way skills work in Diablo 2-style ARPGs (you’re never, ever going to want to put just one point into something unless it’s on the way to unlocking something else) you’re extremely disincentivised to experiment by spreading points around, especially when respeccing is so expensive. Also I took all of the minion skills and wound up with a poxy four minions, and I hate ARPGs that do that. Titan Quest is surprisingly playable in 2023 thanks to the Anniversary Edition, but no more than that; it’s probably more fun in co-op, but then most things are. Still, it was good to tick it off my to-do list after 17 years.

Returnal

I really did want to like Returnal. I got on very well with Housemarque’s last game, 2017’s Nex Machina, and by the time the PC version of Returnal rolled out at the start of 2023 it had already been out for a couple of years as one of the earliest PS5 exclusives, where it had done very well for itself. Given that Housemarque were dangerously close to closure prior to Returnal I’m quite happy that they’ve seen enough success with it to ensure some future games from them.

Perhaps not if they’re all like Returnal, though. It’s an adaption of the arcade arena shoot ‘em ups Housemarque were previously known for, except this time the perspective has been changed to third-person, there’s some roguelite elements that have been spliced in because roguelites were all the rage in 2021, and a completely incoherent story that’s trying to channel a Remedy game, but which simply illustrates that Remedy are actually doing a couple of things right because Returnal’s story falls totally flat. The roguelite stuff is pretty standard – you walk into a room, the doors lock, enemies spawn, you kill them, you loot chests containing new weapons that will hopefully define your run, and then you move on to the next room to do it again. The only reason you know it’s a Housemarque game is because the enemies all attack by shooting laser beams or clusters of gigantic slow-moving ball projectiles that you have to dodge between — the exact same stuff that made up their prior shooters, except this time you’re looking at it from ground level.

This is not, on the face of it, a recipe for disaster. I think the roguelite elements of Returnal are profoundly misguided but the basic shooter game could work if it had been handled just a little differently. Unfortunately you need mobility to dodge all of those swarms of angry red projectiles properly, and Returnal doesn’t give you a grappling hook until halfway through the game. This means that the most reliable way to survive is not to dodge, but to hide behind big chunks of rock; yes, unfortunately my first few hours with Returnal did feel distressingly like a sub-par cover shooter. Once I got the grappling hook things perked up considerably, but then Returnal ran into its second big problem: it’s a roguelite, and it seemed to expect that I was going to replay it more than I actually did, except what actually happened was that I died in the first or second areas five times, then I made it all the way to the fifth area (out of six), and then I finished the game. That’s just seven runs with a wildly uneven distribution of content; oh, in order to get the true ending I’d have to do it all again several times, but the story’s not good enough for me to care about that and as far as I can tell I wouldn’t experience meaningfully different levels while doing so. The world design is pretty generic despite some of the bosses being pretty striking, and certainly not worth replaying for its own sake.

And that’s the big irony of Returnal. It’s Housemarque’s shift to roguelites. Roguelites are supposed to be replayable. And yet I got considerably more replay value out of Nex Machina — a classic shoot ‘em up with none of this roguelite shit in it, where the only real pull is going for a high score — than I did Returnal. So even though it appears to have been much more commercially viable than their previous boutique shooters, I can’t help but feel that Returnal is a bit of a misstep for them.

Company of Heroes 3

It’s a real shame that there are so few RTS specialist developers left over from the boom of the 90s and early 00s. It’s even more a shame that one of the last holdouts from that era, Relic Software, has produced such unfailingly mid output over the last decade. Company of Heroes 3 did look for a bit like it was going to buck that trend, blending classic CoH skirmish gameplay with a grand strategy layer where you maneuver the Allied armies during the invasion of Italy. It’s at least refreshing not to do Normandy for the five millionth time, and while the series has never been particularly concerned with historical accuracy there’s a loose restriction to 1943-era tech allowing some less iconic units to take centre stage; this is a battlefield where Matildas and Stuarts are main battle tanks and the Sherman is an end-of-tech tree heavy tank that outguns 90% of the German roster. The RTS gameplay is as solid as ever, helped along by the ever-characterful voice lines from the troops under your command — I’d even go so far as to say this is Relic’s best game since Chaos Rising, although that’s not really saying much given how CoH 2, Dawn of War 3 and Age of Empires 4 all turned out. Unfortunately Company of Heroes 3 came in far too hot with multiplayer that was missing too many key features, a skirmish AI that was much too stupid to be an effective opponent, and a campaign layer that was packed absolutely full of bugs; I think it’s got a lot of potential, but it was a commercial flop and Relic suffered swingeing job cuts shortly afterwards that mean it’s not going to get the level of support it needs to be polished into something that’s unambiguously good. And that’s the biggest shame of all: Relic have finally done something right, but they weren’t given the time or resources to do it right enough¹.

Undead Horde 2: Necropolis

Looking back at it there’s a common theme running through a lot of the games I played in 2023: I clearly had an itch to play a Diablo 2 Necromancer again and so I duly rolled up minion classes in Titan Quest Anniversary, Everspace 2, and Diablo 4. However, since modern ARPG designers are cowards they’ll never let me completely replicate my skeleton armies because of the misguided belief that pushing one of four buttons to make monsters explode is a more engaging experience than watching my minions do it for me. It’s unsurprising, then, that the game that came closest to replicating that experience wasn’t any of the big-name ARPGs, but was instead this indie game whose entire premise was, well, that you are a Diablo 2 Necromancer. In fact since Undead Horde is a full-on strategy game rather than an ARPG it can go rather further with the concept, allowing you to summon sixty or seventy skeletons at once to steamroll the enemy while you support them with spells and buffs. The story is non-existent and the visuals don’t have much character to them, so the exact amount of mileage you get out of it is going to entirely depend on how much you get out of watching an army of blocky skeletons (or zombies, or ghouls, or undead chickens — there’s many monster types available) mash itself into enemy settlements, but I thought it was a perfectly serviceable take on the concept that provided a decent enough distraction for a few hours.

The Last Spell

On the face of it, a really good turn-based tactical strategy game: control a party of up to six heroes to fight off hordes of zombies and flesh monsters at night, while rebuilding your town defences and fine-tuning your heroes’ stats and itemisation during the day. There’s a lot of really interesting decisions to be made around character builds and tradeoffs between plopping down More Ballistas Now or blacksmiths and armourers that will take a while to pay off but which will sustain you into the endgame; there’s good enemy variety in the regular enemy waves that keep you on your toes; the pixel art presentation is really nice (it looks better to play than it does in screenshots); and the soundtrack is an unusual fusion of techno-rock that fits perfectly into what the game is trying to do. Unfortunately despite all of this good work The Last Spell has an absolutely massive flaw: it’s opted for a sort-of roguelike structure where you’re supposed to fail a few times so that you can learn the levels, experiment with hero builds, and build up the meta-progression to make winning easier, except a single run of one of The Last Spell’s levels can take up to fourteen hours. For just one level. I can fit multiple games of Civilization into that! I’ve lost patience with even normal roguelikes that ask me to invest a few hours into a run because I only have so much time remaining on this earth and if you’re going to test my build against a selection of final bosses that are rock-hard (and also not all that well tuned) you’d better be asking me to throw away less than an hour of my time. The only reason I made it as far into The Last Spell as I did is because I never actually lost until the final level, at which point I quit and never looked back because I couldn’t face doing that again.

Everspace 2

Often referred to as Diablo in a spaceship, I think Everspace 2 has inherited a few too many design ideas from Ubisoft open-world games. To me, it has two major selling points: first is that the one thing it unarguably does bring across from Diablo is that each different ship corresponds to a specific RPG character class and one of them is the Necromancer, and I had great fun siccing hordes of drones on my enemies before blowing them out of the sky with a flak cannon while they were distracted. Second is that it looks a lot like Freelancer, and its implementation of the ship controls is a logical, modernised continuation of what Freelancer pioneered with its mouse-and-keyboard setup (except with gamepad options if you really want, although I didn’t because it felt weirdly unplayable that way). You could take the basic setup of Everspace 2 and make a very good Freelancer sequel with it. Sadly this is Everspace 2, not Freelancer 2, and so instead we get a generic, static universe filled with a collection of sixty-second random events and the ubiquitous question mark symbols infesting the map. There were some side mission chains that had had more effort put into them than I expected given that obvious design objective, but the worst thing that I can say about Everspace 2 is that it’s otherwise totally unremarkable once you understand what it really is. You’ll probably have a good time if you pick it up knowing that you’re in for a space version of Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed (and to be completely fair to Everspace 2 it’s doing it better than Ubisoft themselves managed these days as it’s a far better implementation of the concept than bloody Valhalla), but if you go into it expecting Freelancer 2 — or even Diablo in space — you’re going to end up sorely disappointed.

Dead Space

A successful remake of the original Dead Space, in that I actually finished it this time; it modernises and improves without compromising on the spirit of the original game. For better or worse it’s still Dead Space, with everything that implies: in the “better” column we have the exploration of the environment, the great zero-G sections and the absolutely hysterical dismemberment system (exactly why sawing off a foot kills the necromorphs when repeatedly blowing off their head does nothing is, alas, never explained); while the “worse” one has boss fights that feel like they’ve been ripped directly from the 2007 original with no modernisation, an also 2007-appropriate number of cutscenes where characters talk to Isaac from behind unbreakable glass windows, and having the same encounter copy-pasted throughout the game where you pick up a key item and the lights go out and it spawns two necromorphs in front of you and one behind you. The gameplay improvements are mostly subtle enough that they go largely unnoticed except for the whole thing feeling much better to play this time around, with the one exception being an increasingly-annoying tic of modern AAA gaming: Isaac talks now, and it’s pretty much just so that he can look at a door that’s shutting way too fast for him to get through and say “hmmm, maybe I should use stasis on that door…” I’m all for making games more accessible, but I’m not sure what the point is in putting a puzzle into a game when you’re outright telling the player what they should do to solve it. Still, this Dead Space remake is solid and competent, which are not the worst adjectives I’ve ever used to describe a Dead Space game, so it did something right.

Resident Evil 4

Given that I hated the original Resident Evil 4 it’s a pleasant surprise to me that I liked the Resident Evil 4 remake as much as I did. I’ve had twenty years to accept that the later Resident Evils are silly action shooters where you blast zombies rather than tense resource management games where you try to avoid them, and Resident Evil 4 has had a lot more time and resources put into it than the similarly action-oriented Resident Evil 3 remake. Combat encounters are much better-designed, gunfeel and enemy damage feedback are far more satisfying, and the bossfights.. are there, I guess (there’s not really any chance of making a bossfight in a third-person shooter that I’ll actually enjoy). Crucially there is still a bit of resource management to think about in Resi 4 in the form of your ongoing search for money to upgrade your weapons so that you can dispatch zombies more efficiently; you might have enough bullets, but you’ll never have enough pesos to buy everything you want. This propped the game up admirably during its slower sections, and I also have immense respect for the developers for putting a rocket launcher in the game, telling me it will one-shot any enemy that it’s used on, and sticking to that promise when I chose to use it on the final boss. It’s still a long way off of the brilliance of the first two Resident Evil games — it’s a theme park ride instead of a haunted house, which I will never see as anything other than a sad downgrade for the series that did so much to establish the survival horror genre — but for the first time ever I can see that Resident Evil 4 is pretty enjoyable in its own way.

Like a Dragon: Ishin!

I’ve established a bit of a love-hate relationship with the Yakuza series. I loved Yakuza 0 and still think it’s one of the best games of the last console generation. I was broadly ambivalent about Yakuza 2, as this introduced me to the reality that nearly all of these games are basically the same, just with increasingly stupid storylines. The Western rebrand into Like a Dragon (which would otherwise have been called Yakuza 7) briefly sparked my interest again, as it showed that the series could function adequately in a different genre and without its central protagonist, Kiryu Kazama. And then I played Like a Dragon: Ishin!, which is not the worst game I played in 2023, but which instead lays a very strong claim to being the most boring one. It’s a standalone story that takes place in late 19th century Kyoto, and this is a huge downgrade from the bright lights and arcade sounds of the modern-day Kamorocho district. All of the characters are 19th century versions of characters from the mainline series, except there’s five or six games’ worth of characters stuffed into Ishin and nobody gets anywhere near enough screentime — and to make matters worse they re-use some of the boss music from 0, so when you fight the Awano analogue and With Vengeance kicks in it has absolutely none of the emotional buildup Awano got in 0 and feels completely unearned. As usual there’s about ten thousand minigames to distract you, but Ishin takes it further by making one of them — the stupid repetitive roguelike dungeon one — key to levelling up and progressing your character. (Who is a version of Kiryu that has way less of the signature wry humour to him — also this one most definitely does kill people.) The game in general has much less of a sense of humour than the previous Yakuza games, instead preferring to lean into the tortuous political wrangling of the main storyline — and that’s the thing Yakuza has never done well, even in 0. Usually the series has a great sense of how to build a storyline and its characters to an emotional crescendo, but I could not give the tiniest iota of a shit about the actual details of the plot, so when Ishin decides to put that front and centre over and above its character work it’s no wonder I ended up bored out of my mind..

Diablo 4

“Reactionary” is a fun word. When I think of reactions, I think of chemical reactions, and so when I first came across “reactionary” I thought it carried a sense of dynamism and liveliness, the kind of thing you’d get if you dropped a bar of magnesium into a beaker of water and stepped back to watch the fireworks. It was several years before I learned that what “reactionary” actually means, when used in a social or political context, is someone or something that desperately wants to push back against progress and return to the status quo ante of how things were when they were younger and had more hair — basically this classic Abe Simpson moment, but with zero self-awareness.

Still, while “reactionary” might be an unnecessarily confusing term it’s a very useful one for describing Diablo 4, which is in some ways one of the most reactionary games I’ve ever played. You might remember Diablo 3 copping a hell of a lot of criticism after its initial gameplay reveal for daring to include actual colours in a franchise that was previously known for endless spelunking through gothic, moody dungeons. Diablo 3 might have sold 37 million copies, but it’s clear that that criticism is still very much on Blizzard’s mind 11 years later because it’s the only thing that explains Diablo 4’s visuals, which are a murky, desaturated mess. There is nothing about its world, or its visual design, that is remotely appealing; I don’t get excited about exploring a pitch-black dungeon where a collection of the most generic monsters on the planet lurch out of the darkness to be slaughtered, and then teleporting back to a small collection of washed-out mud huts to sell the loot — and yet this is inexplicably the core loop of Diablo 4. I perhaps would have enjoyed it more if, I don’t know, I could actually see what was going on. I also perhaps would have enjoyed it more if the skill system didn’t feel utterly parsimonious — it is possible to make very OP builds if you understand it, but the up-front offering is that each skill point invested gets you a 3% increase in damage, or something similar. The big innovation of a permanently online, shared world where you see other players running around adds almost nothing to the experience aside from occasionally catching a glimpse of BonerLord666 hurrying to their next dungeon, and the only bright spot was that the combat felt more kinetic than I was expecting given how regressive the rest of the core ARPG experience was. It’s not like Diablo 3 launched in a perfect state either, but at least there I didn’t fundamentally disagree with the core game and visual design; there’s too many decisions made that are fundamentally, well, reactionary, driven by a yearning for the good old days of Diablo 2, and which are now baked into Diablo 4’s structure in a way that’s going to be very difficult (if not impossible) to undo. I wasn’t expecting anything special from Diablo 4 and it’s not exactly a bad game, but it is still a very disappointing one.

To The Core

To The Core is a bit of an oddity. It’s a clicker game that is not a clicker; an idle game where you can’t be idle; driven by the same core concept of Number Go Up but which demands some active thought on the part of the player. You’re put in control of a drill and dropped onto a planet, and your objective is to drill out as much of the crust, mantle and — eventually — the core in order to gather materials to fuel your metagame upgrades. Smashing your drill into the planet surface at high speed depletes your health, so you need those upgrades to drill through tougher materials while taking less damage, and those tougher materials are used to buy more upgrades, which let you drill through even tougher materials etc. etc. There’s a fun power curve where you start the game barely able to drill through a few metres of crust before exploding, and you end it by making an entire planet disappear in just a few seconds; I don’t think the metagame upgrades are particularly well set up, but the drilling is undeniably satisfying and kept me going for the 7-odd hours it took to get me to the end. Unfortunately To The Core is seriously let down by performance issues as the planets get bigger and the number of particle effects and exploding blocks increases at a geometric rate, and the final level tested my patience more than any other game this year as I had to control a slideshow where I was precariously balancing my drill above the surface of a black hole for upwards of fifteen minutes. I think that with a bit more polish in both the metagame design and the performance To The Core would be an unambiguous recommend for people who like clickers, or idle games, or autoshooters; in its current state it’s more difficult to do so, but I can’t deny I got a good few hours of fun out of it.

Dredge

This one was a bit of a disappointment, as I played it just before Christmas after hearing good word of mouth and seeing it appear on several GOTY lists. Imagine my surprise, then, upon discovering that Dredge is simply… fine. It’s at least a bit more focused compared to the other fishing game making regular appearances on GOTY lists this year, but it’s also much more joyless and mechanical about the act of exploring the ocean and finding new and interesting places to fish — perhaps understandable, seeing as it’s buttressing its fishing minigame with a Lovecraftian horror plot that means it can’t make the waters too welcoming, but underwhelming nevertheless. You do a circuit of the cliff island, then the lagoon island, then the swamp island, then the volcano island, completing a fishing quest in each one to progress the paper-thin story, and then the game ends. Indeed, if not for the requirement to grind fish to upgrade your boat to catch more advanced types of fish I think Dredge would be about two hours long. This core loop is compelling enough and there’s enough detail packed into the environments to give exploring a bit of a pull, and the presentation is adequately charming; the spookier elements strike me as profoundly misjudged, though, especially since nothing bad can actually happen to you just so long as you aren’t stupid enough to be out on the open ocean after midnight, and so despite its admirable focus in comparison to Dave the Diver it’s Dredge that ends up feeling like the shallower game.

 (the) Gnorp Apologue

I was quite taken with Gnorp at first. It’s yet another idle game, with exponentially increasing numbers and the concept of prestiging baked into the game’s core — where you reset all of your hard-won progress in exchange for permanent metagame upgrades that make the next run easier — but Gnorp at least appeared to introduce two interesting innovations to the formula. First is that it deigns to surround the otherwise shallow Number Go Up gameplay with some actually pretty great set dressing; you’re in control of a settlement of little circular creatures called Gnorps who are obsessed with smashing a rock, and every single upgrade that you buy produces some tangible rock-smashing effect in that settlement. Housing appears and spawns more Gnorps, who can then be gainfully employed in a number of professions to pound the rock to bits. Bombers jet up above it and piledrive it from above; Gunners wander into the Gun Shop and are handed rifles — or a gatling gun — to blast it to smithereens; all while Runners scurry back and forth to hurl the chunks into your stash so that you can use them to buy more upgrades. Every upgrade having a dedicated piece of pixel art with accompanying detailed animations as the Gnorps hurl themselves at the rock makes for a much more charming presentation than most idle games. In terms of gameplay it initially seemed like Gnorp had innovated there too, as the prestige points you can spend open the door to some interesting synergies between different Gnorp professions and the potential for different builds to optimise your rock smashing. Unfortunately this ended up being a bit of a false promise, as while there’s different synergies available I think there’s only one that’s capable of finishing the game (it’s the one that involves spamming rockets), and Gnorp’s failure to offer multiple viable builds makes it once-through-and-done — I still prefer that over idle games that spiral into infinity hours, but it’s a bit of a missed opportunity in terms of replayability.

The Talos Principle 2

The generous way of looking at Talos Principle 2 is that it didn’t annoy me quite as much as it could have. That’s actually saying quite a lot considering that I loudly swore at my monitor when I saw the announcement trailer for it; the first Talos Principle is a great puzzle game with surprisingly on-point delivery of its philosophical storyline, and one of the most powerfully satisfying endings in videogames. And that’s why the very concept of Talos Principle 2 pissed me off, because the first game stood alone very nicely and there was absolutely nothing a sequel could do, story-wise, that could possibly be better than the open-ended sense of possibility left by its predecessor. Unfortunately those fears did ultimately turn out to be well-founded, as both the story and the storytelling in Talos Principle 2 are much more in the vein of a Generic Videogame Plot — a not-particularly-coherent excuse for the puzzles, where your silent protagonist is constantly suffering the indignity of having people call them on the telephone so that they can desperately attempt to explain why what you’re doing is important, and which ultimately ends up being so much sci-fi codswallop².

Now, in Talos Principle 2’s favour I did initially enjoy the puzzles; I think Talos Principle’s mix of line-of-sight, positioning and sequencing puzzles are the best that any of these first-person puzzle games have come up with, and the sequel does at least continue that trend. I had a great time during the first half of the game just buzzsawing through puzzle after puzzle, with none of them taking more than 5 minutes and most of them taking less than 60 seconds. It was in the second half of the game that I started to get slightly uneasy, though, as the puzzle complexity just didn’t ratchet up at all despite the new gimmick to be found in each area that’s supposed to mix things up a bit and keep you on your intellectual toes. Usually when you walk into a puzzle room there will be an obvious solution that’s apparent after a few seconds of looking at the layout, and the surprising (and underwhelming) thing about Talos Principle 2 is that the obvious solution is almost always the actual solution, and it just takes a bit of fine-tuning to get the sequencing right. The satisfying thing about a puzzle game for me is when I can eventually make connections that aren’t immediately obvious, when I’m being pushed to actually think about something for a bit, and then when I figure it out I feel very smart. Talos Principle 2 doesn’t do this for me at all, preferring to try and stun the player with quantity of puzzles (it’s nearly twice as long as the first game) where I think it would have done far better to focus on quality. It’s still a cut above most first-person puzzlers and comfortably in the upper 50% of games I played this year, but when you’re following up a stone cold classic like The Talos Principle — a game that really did not need a sequel — I don’t think it’s enough to be simply “okay”.

Dave the Diver

I bought Dave the Diver pretty much sight unseen because it turns out I’m just as susceptible to advertising as anyone; I saw a very attractive full-page banner on the Steam store homepage promising endless blue oceans filled with charming pixel art fish and slammed the Buy button pretty much as fast as I could. And to its considerable credit Dave the Diver’s core loop does live up to that promise; the idea is that you catch fish via the surprisingly visceral methods of harpooning them, shooting them, stabbing them, or blowing them up with a grenade launcher, and you load up your inventory with as much fish as your portly diver avatar can physically carry. Once you return to the surface you use the fish to make dishes for a Diner Dash-style sushi restaurant minigame, and while I don’t think this part of the game is particularly well-executed it’s done competently enough to provide the other half of the loop; you catch basic fish to sell in the restaurant for money, which you use to upgrade your diving equipment so that you can dive deeper and catch more advanced fish to sell in the restaurant for more money.

Ill-advised QTEs aside, Dave the Diver’s fishing segment is truly exceptional, a rare example of something being delivered almost exactly as advertised, and I can see why it’s made a lot of people’s GOTY lists. It would have made mine if the game were just the fishing and the sushi restaurant bits, but sadly Dave the Diver turned out to be one of the most unfocused games I’ve played this year, instead choosing to tie the player up in a whole host of throwaway minigames that aren’t anything to do with the fishing. There’s stealth segments that pay homage to Metal Gear Solid, a Guitar Hero-esque rhythm game, a farming minigame, a seahorse racing minigame, a shoot ‘em up segment, and probably half a dozen others that I’ve forgotten because they’re so disposable — but all of them substantially diminish the experience because the entire time I was stuck in one of these minigames I was just wanting to get back to the fishing, and I ended up resenting Dave the Diver for repeatedly wasting my time. The problem isn’t so much that these distractions are necessary because Dave the Diver doesn’t have confidence in itself, but rather that it has far too much confidence in itself to add these minigames where most other dev teams would drop them for lack of resources — this certainly doesn’t strike me as a dev team where anyone was shouting the magic word “NO!” whenever one of these things came up — and so the game ends up feeling bloated, overindulgent, and overall a bit of a mess.

Freelancer

Freelancer is a fascinating glimpse into what might have been for the space sim genre. It’s very fondly thought of by those who played it at the time of its release, who it turns out are the only people who have played it legally since it’s not available on any digital distribution platform. (I do have a Freelancer disc somewhere but I no longer have a disc drive to put it in – fortunately the ISO is readily available with a simple Google search and the game works almost flawlessly on Windows 10.) Twenty years is more than enough time for nostalgia to work its heady magic, though, and the reality of Freelancer in 2023 is more than a little bit… mixed.

Freelancer is best thought as two games in one. One is the multiplayer version played on a persistent server, where you have a sandbox environment to explore, trade and fight your way up from Space Bum to Space Ace. Apparently it’s very good, and it’s where a lot of that nostalgic reminiscing comes from. Unfortunately for me, I’ve never played it; I’ve been stuck with the single-player story campaign, where you can see a few scattered parts of the multiplayer sandbox gameplay — like pirate stations not being marked on the map, but still being able to figure out where they are based on where pirate attacks take place — but you have much less freedom to explore. You’re railroaded from one region of the galaxy to another as the plot demands, with jump gates being locked until you’ve progressed the story far enough, and each region offers just three ship models: light fighter, heavy fighter, and cargo freighter. Freelancer is supposed to be a freeform space game like Elite where you take jobs to upgrade your ship and equipment so that you can take on more valuable jobs, but here you just grind freelance missions until you get the next variant of the model of ship that you’re flying, and then you do the plot missions, and then you move on to the next galactic region to do it all again. There’s some fun voice casting and the universe being split into regions based on national and cultural stereotypes is taken to such batshit extremes here it’s actually brilliant (the very idea of the UK having a galactic space empire is utterly bonkers), but Freelancer had serious problems during its development and the story becomes increasingly threadbare the further you get with it. No, it’s got some interesting ideas but I don’t think I could recommend Freelancer for its straitjacketed single player campaign.

The interesting part of Freelancer, though, is the control scheme. Up until Freelancer space sims had all been controlled via first-person view from the spacecraft cockpit, with one hand on the keyboard and the other clutching a joystick. Oh, you could try to play them with a mouse, and in fact that’s how I played TIE Fighter back in the day, but tight turns would require you to pick up and drop your mouse multiple times as you repeatedly swept it across your mouse mat to try and get a bead on your target. This was hardly ideal, especially considering that every single computer on the planet came with a mouse but a joystick was something you had to specifically had to buy. Freelancer is the first — and as it turns out, only — space sim from that period to try to address that problem by marketing itself to mouse-users first and foremost. The game is controlled via third-person perspective, and moving the mouse rotates the camera around your spacecraft. Holding the left mouse button down, though, locks your view forward; moving the mouse in this state makes a big arrow appear on the HUD in the direction that you moved it, and your ship will start to turn. The further the arrow is from the centre of the HUD, the faster your turn rate, and once you have it at the edge of the screen you’re turning as fast as possible and you don’t need to move the mouse any more.

Coming to it in 2023, I was struck by how natural this control scheme felt. It’s easy and intuitive and feels a hell of a lot like the modern gamepad controls used in arcade space shooters today — except Freelancer was doing it in 2003, with a mouse. Digital Anvil might have had problems with development but they were thinking years ahead of everyone else and Freelancer should have been a genre-defining game, one of those rare titles that does something so groundbreaking that everyone else scrambles to copy it. Unfortunately Freelancer was released a year or two after the death of the space sim genre as a whole, and so there was little left to define, and certainly no scope to follow up with a more polished sequel; thus Freelancer is doomed to “historical curio” status instead of the revolutionary space sim it could have been

Stronghold: Definitive Edition

It’s Stronghold.

No, really. It’s an attempt to give Stronghold the same kind of makeover that Age of Empires 2 got with its Definitive Edition a few years ago: it’s the same game, but with redone music, re-recorded voices and unit and building animations that have all been updated to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second. Which is all fine and welcome — Stronghold has always been presentationally very strong, and these updates enhance the best part of the game — but the problem is that the Definitive Edition does precisely sod all about Stronghold’s dodgy balancing and (surprisingly) several persistent bugs around common interactions like unit selection. So every defensive map is still winnable by walling off the enemy spawn points with towers full of archers and/or crossbowmen, and it’s only the offensive maps that pose a challenge as you try and figure out how to use your limited troops to crack the enemy castle.  Even here it’s not a particularly satisfying challenge, as I spent far more time trying to work around the terrible and/or buggy unit pathfinding and targeting than I did strategising. The Definitive Edition is a fun blast from the past, to start with, but the more time I spent with it the more I remembered why I’d never bothered to finish Stronghold’s single player campaign when I first played it back in 2004.

Age of Wonders 4

I’ve been pondering  it on and off for the last 8 months, and I think I’ve finally figured out why Age of Wonders 4 didn’t really land with me. What I’ve historically liked about the Age of Wonders series has been the more RPG-esque aspects of the gameplay — role-playing as an evil wizard blighting the world with death magic and sending forth skeleton hordes to exterminate the living, that kind of thing. I liked playing up to a race’s theme. I don’t think they’re particularly good 4X games from an empire-building point of view, it’s the blend of 4X with recruitable heroes and magic spells (and maybe some might scattered around in there for good measure) that makes the series special.

And this is a problem for Age of Wonders 4, because its big innovation is that it no longer has discrete races; instead you customise whatever race and trait combination you want at the start of the game (so you can have angelic orcs or demon halfings or whatever) and while you select a sphere of magic during race creation you’re not limited to it during the game; in fact you can (and I did) research every single spell book available if you have the time and the inclination. In theory this means that if I want my skeleton hordes I just make some undead humans and stick to Death magic, but the tradeoff for every race being potentially able to do everything is that the choices that you do make feel much less meaningful. Most of the games I played — especially the ones which went into the lategame — felt pretty similar, as I first filled out the spellbook for the sphere of magic I’d selected to start with and then branched out into the ones I’d already tried in other games. It’s weirdly bland and amorphous and feels less amenable to that role-playing I liked so much, and the weak 4X gameplay on its own just isn’t enough to keep my attention. I did have one good game which had a bit of a story to it, on a map where all factions are stuck in a permanent hellwar and I had to stall enemies on one flank with hordes of summoned copper golems while desperately trying to mop up on the other before everything collapsed, but after I’d played four games I felt like there wasn’t all that much left to see and dropped Age of Wonders 4 entirely. Which, for a game that supposedly offers infinite variety, is a bit of a failure.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader

An adaptation of the tabletop Rogue Trader RPG ruleset handled by Owlcat. Owlcat made Wrath of the Righteous, which is one of the best RPGs to come out in recent years in spite of all of the bugs, and so I was looking forward to their take on Rogue Trader. But I couldn’t get over a niggling worry I had, especially once the release date was announced: Wrath came out in September 2021, and Rogue Trader came out in December 2023. That’s just over two years to develop a full fat RPG, and Owlcat are not a large studio, and they already have a problem with biting off more than they can chew in terms of scope. (Which is why their games ship with so many bugs.)

Sadly my fears were well-founded: Rogue Trader is a 70-hour RPG, that should be a 40-hour RPG, and which feels like a 40-hour RPG that’s been stretched into 70 hours. Owlcat do their best, with their customary branching paths for the narrative — less ambitious than what you could do in Wrath, but that game had paths that let you literally rewrite reality so that’s unsurprising — and a decent stab at trying to take the Rogue Trader rules and turn them into a half-decent tactical strategy segment. Party combat is kinetic and visceral, while the ship-to-ship void combat minigame is the least insufferable minigame they’ve come up with so far — not particularly deep, but it feels right and I was never displeased to see a void combat encounter pop up. Most importantly, Rogue Trader is only the second 40K game that’s halfway sold me on 40K as a universe; it makes a valiant attempt to grasp the ridiculous scale of the setting in the same way as Battlefleet Gothic 2 did a few years back, instead of using it as window dressing for smashing increasingly colourless armies into one another.

That attempt at scale repeatedly runs up against the reality of Rogue Trader, though, which is that this was a game made on a limited budget and a limited timescale and so in order to have a hundred locations in the game they’ve all been made roughly the size of a shoebox. You visit the governor’s palace on one of your capital worlds and there’s a grand total of two people to talk to, and nothing else to do once you’ve looted the half-dozen containers scattered about the place. If there’s a door that you can open there won’t be a door-opening animation; the screen will cut to black for a second, and then when it comes back the door will be magically open. Most locations don’t even go that far; there’ll just be a rocky pit containing one combat encounter and that’s it. Even when the game does throw a larger environment at you as part of the plot, all it can fill that environment with is enemies and traps (I really hope you like clicking on red squares to disarm traps, because you’re going to be doing it a lot in Rogue Trader). In terms of exploration, Rogue Trader is one of the least interactive RPGs I’ve ever played; in fact it reminded me an awful lot of Tyranny, which was another RPG made on a shoestring budget and which showed it to an almost painful degree.

Couple that with the customary bugs and lack of polish — in particular the UI is an absolute car crash at every turn, which is surprising considering Owlcat had done a pretty good job with their UI and tooltips for their Pathfinder games — and it means Rogue Trader has a much harder job winning my respect. In Kingmaker and Wrath I was excited to explore, to progress quest chains and see what new parts of the map had to offer me, whereas in Rogue Trader I know what the next planet will have on it: a knife-fight inside a cupboard. If you like 40K and you’re curious then I’d say it’s worth a look in a year once they’ve fixed the worst of the bugs, but if you don’t have a particular attachment to the setting then I think you can do better things with your time.

The post 2023 Games Roundup: The Rest appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I mostly took a break from writing about games in 2023. This was only supposed to be for a few months but rapidly snowballed due to a combination of personal reasons and me feeling a bit burned out on the whole “video games” thing. It’s not that I wasn’t playing them, just that I was struggling to find the motivation to write about them – and this made me a bit suspicious that 11 years of doing this blog had made me lose sight of what I enjoyed about them in the first place. I’ve gotten into the habit of mentally composing a review in the back of my head whenever I play something new, and it’s a bit hard to have fun with a game when my brain is constantly in critique mode. So I thought I’d try not doing that for a bit.

Did it work? I’m honestly not sure. I am going to try to write more in 2024, but it’ll probably be fewer reviews and more directed exploration of something specific, like the Lucasarts series I did a couple of years back. For now, though, I need to address the same problem I had last year: the reason I’ve managed to keep this blog going for over a decade is because it functions as a personal record of what I thought about games that I happen to have made generally visible, and I don’t like the idea of 2023 being a void where that’s concerned. So, here’s the customary roundup of the games I played in 2023. Slightly different rules to previous years; first is that because I only did one normal review I don’t have the time or the space to write about everything I played, so this is a summary of only the games I completed (or very close to it). Second is that because I wasn’t pushing myself to carry on playing games I wasn’t enjoying I tended to drop bad games before finishing them, so this list does have a bit of a selection bias to it — and because there’s less of a spectrum of quality it doesn’t make sense to do the four category split I did in 2021 and 2022. This time there’s just two: the Best games I completed in 2023 (and which I’d be happy to recommend to other people), and then the Rest of them, which are mostly decent but which have significant problems that meant I came away from them with a more mixed opinion.

I’ll put The Rest into a separate post. For now, let’s start with The Best, in no particular order:

Jagged Alliance 3

Jagged Alliance 3 was the most obviously-doomed release of the year. There have been no less than three prior attempts to resurrect the Jagged Alliance series over the last ten years and every single one of them has crashed and burned — not only that, but developers Haemimont deliberately took aim at these failures in one of their pre-release trailers and said that this time, finally, somebody would make a proper followup to Jagged Alliance 2. You could have filed that trailer under the dictionary definition of “hubris”, and by all rights Jagged Alliance 3 should have joined Back in Action, Flashback and Rage! on top of that pile of rejects.

Imagine my surprise, then, on discovering that Jagged Alliance 3 is actually pretty damn good. It suffers from some lumpy design and a release version that wasn’t exactly high on polish, but it’s still easily the most fun I’ve had with a tactical strategy game since… oh, probably 2018’s Battletech. It’s got all of the Jagged Alliance bits: wisecracking mercenaries, tinpot dictators, a strategic map where you take over mines to get money and train militia to defend them, and a really interesting take on the tactical combat segment that acknowledges the last 25 years of progress in the genre while retaining enough classic Jagged Alliance elements (like investing additional AP to increase your chances of a shot landing) that it still felt like Jagged Alliance. It even makes some interesting design choices around balancing the game via ammo scarcity — belt-fed machineguns are horrifically powerful, but you’ll easily exhaust your entire supply of ammo for them in a single engagement so you have to carefully pick which fights to use them in — and much of your mercs’ combat power being locked up in their heavily-customised weapons rather than their stats, which I’m not sure I fully agreed with given how it shifts the focus of the game, but which I found engaging nonetheless. The mercenaries themselves are all stereotypes of 90s action movie characters that absolutely shouldn’t work, the joke should get old approximately ten minutes into the 40-hour campaign, but somehow it never does and I grew very attached to my main squad of six. And the music is absolutely phenomenal in places. Yes, I have to admit that Jagged Alliance 3 somehow beat the odds; it’s not perfect by any means, but then neither was Jagged Alliance 2 and it does more than enough right that it’s the first game in twenty-five years that can be considered a worthy successor.

Chained Echoes

“JRPG” is a bit of a loaded term these days, one which carries a hint of Western supercilicism about it and which Japanese devs are a bit nonplussed by, so I’ll try and stay away from it when describing Chained Echoes. It’s going to be difficult, though, because Chained Echoes is very much a love letter to Square’s SNES-era RPGs, including classic titles like Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger. Actually that’s probably being a bit too kind, as Chained Echoes stumbles over the line separating “loving tribute” from “shameless ripoff” several times, and mixes it in with all of your favourite animes plus some incredibly juvenile writing — hey, what if the translation team for FF6 had been able to use the word “Shitface”? Chained Echoes answers that question, and I cringed extremely hard several times when playing it, but I kept playing for two reasons. One is that in terms of visuals and sound Chained Echoes is genuinely quite impressive, preserving enough of the look and feel of those classic SNES games to tickle the nostalgia centres in my brain. The other is that Chained Echoes goes to great lengths to eliminate nearly every single one of the major painpoints typically encountered in a JR… in one of those games. Combat has a fast mode. Your party heals to full at the end of every fight. There’s no random encounters (although there are unavoidable ones). There’s an interesting Overdrive system that stops you from spamming the same spells over and over in combat, Combat in general is about intelligently stacking buffs on your party and debuffs on the enemy and then hitting them really, really hard, not just autoattacking them to death. Couple that with an expansive world that’s packed full of secrets and there’s more than enough here to hold the attention of anyone who has fond memories of Square before they became Square-Enix.

Brotato

Yes, at first glance Brotato appears to be just another Vampire Survivors-style autoshooter to throw on top of the pile. It even looks to be more limited than Vampire Survivors at first, with only one level filled with the same set of 7-8 enemy types that are all coloured purple, and no metaprogression to speak of aside from unlocking new character archetypes. However, these limitations are the result of Brotato actually daring to innovate in the genre; the reason there’s only one level is because a run of Brotato is split into 20 rounds, and at the end of the round you get to spend the cash you’ve picked up from killing enemies on new weapons and stat-boosting items for your character so that they can kill even more enemies in the next round. And good lord are there a lot of weapons, items and stats to play with in Brotato; the reason there’s no metaprogression is because Brotato is almost unique amongst autoshooters in having enough mechanical breadth to experiment with different builds within the space of a single run. Maybe you go heavy on landmines and turrets and explosive damage. Maybe you get six SMGs and rely on the fire rate to heal you through lifesteal. Maybe you pick a bunch of currency-boosting items early on in the hope that you can stay alive long enough to make the investment pay off in later rounds. Maybe you just ignore weapons completely and concentrate instead on making yourself so tanky that you’re literally unkillable — this is a viable tactic since killing bosses is not required and you just need to outlast the timer on every round to complete the run. The high granularity of the different weapons and stats offers a refreshing amount of variety and flexibility compared to the Vampire Survivors approach, which is usually about trying to get the same 3-4 god-tier weapons over and over again. Brotato is far from an endless game despite this, with a lifespan that expires shortly after you’ve completed the game once with each character archetype — but there’s about 50 of those so it’ll take a couple of dozen hours, making Brotato excellent value for its £4 pricetag.

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

I should probably be paying more attention to my Switch. I only pick it up once every couple of years whenever a big tentpole Nintendo release comes along, but nearly every single game I buy from them reminds me that they exist on an entirely different planet from the rest of the industry. This has its good and bad sides; their social features have apparently been designed by a literal alien, for example, but then the actual games tend to bring a totally fresh perspective to genres that I thought had run out of ideas years ago. Breath of the Wild should have redefined the open world RPG back in 2017 with its completely open approach to exploration in a world stuffed full of secrets, but the only lesson the rest of the industry really learned from it was “climbing… good?” And even that got rowed back on a few years later.

I expect Tears of the Kingdom will have even less of an impact than Breath of the Wild. This despite it having not one, not two, but three groundbreaking mechanics that other devs would build an entire game around — but in Tears they’re just stuff you do in the course of another massive and open adventure that’s literally Breath of the Wild Redux. You’ve got Ultrahand, which somebody did make an entire game around (it’s called Garry’s Mod); Fuse, which lets you stick anything in your inventory to anything else in your inventory to come up with new weapons on the fly — stick a Keese eyeball to an arrow to get a homing arrow, or a bomb to a hammer to give it some explosive punch, or even just a long stick to a long stick to create an even longer stick — and the game’s crowning achievement: Recall, which allows localised time manipulation and which is breathtaking in its ambition and execution and completely changes how you approach most of the game’s puzzles. It’s not all hits; the vehicle-building which features in a lot of the viral videos of Tears feels more like an optional extra (albeit an unusually polished and fully-featured one) as it’s not baked into the core gameplay the way Ultrahand, Fuse and Recall are, but I think three impossible mechanics before breakfast is more than enough for any developer.

And that’s precisely Tears’s problem. In order to learn from Breath, other developers would have needed to completely change how they approached world design. They didn’t. Learning from Tears is an even bigger ask; I can’t think of many developers out there who would be technically and temperamentally capable of implementing something with the game-breaking scope of the Recall mechanic, purely because of the vast difference in design mentality between Tears and Breath and every other open world RPG. Other open world games are increasingly made according to a set formula and lean on heavily-scripted set-pieces to liven things up in between robotically clearing the map of points of interest, whereas Nintendo’s approach is to hand the player a set of tools and set them loose in a vast world with very few guardrails to constrain them, because they’re all about experimentation. They’re all about play. Tears might be an example of them trying to do slightly too much in that regard; between Ultrahand, Fuse, Recall, the vehicle building, and separate underground and sky biomes to explore in addition to a remixed version of the Breath of the Wild map, the amount of things that you can do in Tears can feel overwhelming at times, and at others the game feels distinctly bloated. For all of its technical excellence it’s less focused than Breath was and I occasionally missed the comparatively clean simplicity of Breath’s gameplay, but that was only brief snatches of wistfulness in between being completely floored by Tears’s imagination. It’s far from the best Zelda game (it ranks at number four out of the eight that I’ve played) but I’m damned if I didn’t admire its ambition, its inventiveness and its commitment to fun.

Pizza Tower

If you watch the release trailer for Pizza Tower it’s likely you’ll have the same initial reaction I did: it looks like this hilariously overtuned, bastard hard platformer in the vein of Super Meat Boy, and I suspect the reason there’s not more buzz about the game during this GOTY season is because that first impression put a lot of people off of trying it. It certainly put me off trying it; I even refunded the thing on Steam for a month after discovering that the default controls for the maniac pizza chef Peppino are incredibly clunky. Fortunately Pizza Tower is yet another 2023 game with a brilliant soundtrack¹ which tempted me back for a second go, and after I changed the controls to a scheme I could live with I discovered a game that’s actually incredibly forgiving. The objective of each level of Pizza Tower is to get to the end of the level and then run back out again. That’s it. Peppino has no health bar; when enemies hit Peppino, he doesn’t lose health, he loses score. Peppino has effectively infinite lives; when he falls into a bottomless pit he respawns right next to it. There is only one way to lose the level, and that’s by running out of time on the escape run — and that timer doesn’t start until you destroy the support pillar at the end of the level, and it’s very generous if all you’re trying to do is get back to the exit.

But there’s a reason for that. Making it to the end with a few collectibles is all you need to do if you want to progress in Pizza Tower and finish the game, and most levels are easily completable on the very first attempt. If you want to get an actually high score, though, you need to first do the normal escape run, and then when you get back to the level exit ignore it completely and instead go through the secret portal that takes you all the way back to the start of the escape run to do it all over again. This gives you a whole load of bonus points but does not add any time onto the timer, which continues to steadily tick down, so what Pizza Tower effectively does here is give you the choice of Double Or Nothing. To get the highest score, the P-Rank, you have to pick up every collectible, find every secret, kill almost every enemy, only get hit once or twice (more than that will break your combo multiplier), and do the end run twice against that merciless timer. Unbelievably there is still room for very minor errors here, if you have the nerves of steel required to recover from them; Pizza Tower does not demand perfection for the highest scores, just very close to it. But it’s your choice to chase them. It’s the most refreshing approach to difficulty I’ve seen in a long time; there’s no difficulty settings here and it’s the same level everyone else plays, the difference is just a (probably misplaced) sense of confidence in your own mastery of the game that prompts you to go through the teleporter for the second run.

Baldur’s Gate 3

I feel a little resentful about having to include this on the “good” list for 2023. Only a little, since mechanically and structurally Baldur’s Gate 3 is a brilliant RPG. It’s not exactly groundbreaking since it’s a natural extension of the ideas found in Larian’s previous work (to the point where it really should be called Original Sin 3 instead of Baldur’s Gate 3) but since nobody else is really making this kind of game it still feels fresh, open-ended and full of possibility in a way that most RPGs don’t. The combat feels very Original Sin despite being a relatively faithful adaptation of the 5th edition D&D ruleset; there’s a heavy focus on teleporting around and applying massively destructive elemental effects to broad swathes of the battlefield, and the newfound verticality in many of the combat locations means a simple successful “Shove” action can send a tough boss plummeting fifty feet down to a hard landing — or into a bottomless pit that instakills them — allowing for far more creativity and flexibility in character builds than “Tank” or “Damage dealer”. Baldur’s Gate 3’s particular success is in marrying the Original Sin combat up to a seventy-hour adventure that’s genuinely sprawling, with multiple paths available for you to take that significantly change up the narrative to a degree that I haven’t seen since Alpha Protocol. Most of the decision points that shunt you onto an alternative story path aren’t signposted, either; they’re pretty subtle and there’s a lot of them, resulting in an adventure that feels genuinely organic and personalised to you. As an RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 is almost as ambitious as Wrath of the Righteous, and unlike Owlcat Larian actually do have the resources and the time to deliver on that ambition without the player having to fight their way through a million bugs.

Why, then, did I say I resent Baldur’s Gate 3? Well, it’s for the reason you’d think, but not in the way you’d think: the original Baldur’s Gate “trilogy” is somewhere in my top 5 games of all time, but while the decision to take the name and apply it to something that looked like it had nothing to do with the Bhaalspawn saga did initially rankle with me quite a bit, Baldur’s Gate 3 had been in Early Access for three years prior to its release and I’d long made my peace with it. I was ready for something new. I was expecting something new. If Baldur’s Gate 3 had just advanced the timeline by 100 years and used D&D concepts and locations to tell a new story, I wouldn’t be sitting here complaining. And initially that’s what it appeared it was going to do, but as I got further and further into the game the scattered callbacks and references to the original games turned into returning characters and major plot points, and then finally into some absolutely incredible retconning of Throne of Bhaal that would substantially diminish the ending of the OG trilogy if I took it seriously in any way. Fortunately I don’t, but that means I can’t take the rest of Baldur’s Gate 3’s story seriously either; it feels rather too much like somebody’s personal Baldur’s Gate fanfiction instead of something with enough sense and courage to try and stand on its own two feet.

(And then there’s what I’m going to refer to as the “Critical Role” problem, which is more my problem than the game’s but which did significantly contribute to the story failing to land with me in any way whatsoever: the D&D of 2023 is decidedly not the D&D of 1998. No, this D&D fucks, and the game goes out of its way time and again to remind you about it. I remember the original Dragon Age trailers being ridiculed for trying way too hard to be edgy for the sake of edginess, to make fantasy seem cool and adult, but what was ridiculous in 2009 is now apparently normal in 2023 because Baldur’s Gate 3 makes that shit look tame. Times do change, and there’s a lot of people out there who like that kind of thing — Critical Role is super popular for a reason  — but when my character gets propositioned by every single party member during their second camp conversation, well, that’s another big reason why I can’t take the game seriously.)

Anyway, my hating the story isn’t going to stop Baldur’s Gate 3 from winning a whole bunch of GOTY awards, and it isn’t even going to stop it appearing on my own “best of” list. As I said, mechanically and structurally it’s an incredible achievement, and I had great fun min-maxing my way through the combat — and because my standard policy was to kill anyone who was trying to stop me from getting to a quest objective without doing their tedious fetch quests first, I saw a lot of combat. I love that Baldur’s Gate 3 let me do that without any judgement (you can’t do it in the original trilogy unless you enjoy being constantly swarmed by hordes of guards that materialise out of thin air). I’m happy it’s been so successful, as it hopefully means we’ll see future RPGs try and borrow from Baldur’s Gate 3’s open-ended approach to quests and combat.  I just wish it hadn’t been called Baldur’s Gate 3, is all.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

You’ll probably have seen a lot of breathy news articles about Cyberpunk 2077’s “redemption”, that after three years of post-release patches to fix all of the many, many bugs — and to completely redesign the game in some places — it’s now the game that it should always have been. Which, if you squint a bit and substantially lower your expectations, it is. It’s a pretty good first-person open world RPG, nothing more, and nothing less; it’s not the broken mess it was on launch, but neither is it in any way transformative for the genre except for some innovations in how it handles first-person perspective. (And even there I think it’s helped along more by Bethesda having such a death-grip on the genre that any deviation from that formula feels like a breath of fresh air.) You run around doing mostly the same things you do in other open world RPGs, repeatedly driving through a too-large map to clear up an infestation of question mark symbols, and while it’s executed with a bit more pizazz than usual — partly a result of the budget, and partly a result of encounter design that is a significant cut above what you’d find in an Ubisoft game — Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t going to dramatically alter your expectations of what an open world RPG can or should be.

Phantom Liberty, though. I’m not sure if it’s just because 2023 was utterly starved of any decent narrative experiences (mostly thanks to the Final Fantasy 14 writing team taking an extended multi-year nap) but, while it initially didn’t seem like anything all that special, no other game this year came close to the powerful feeling of catharsis I experienced on reaching the end. It’s a spy thriller where you have to navigate a web of shifting loyalties, deciding who to trust and who to betray, and where the major decisions feel genuinely weighty and you never take them lightly. Phantom Liberty achieves this through presentation and narrative structure more than it does any particular spectacular feat of writing, but it’s no less remarkable for this. It’s called storytelling, after all, and there’s increasingly few game devs who can actually leverage the medium they work in to enhance that storytelling instead of just trying to copy a movie. That’s why I reacted to Phantom Liberty more positively than I might otherwise have done; just like Cyberpunk itself I think it’s good rather than great, but even something that’s “just” good still stands out in a field of comparative mediocrity.

World of Warcraft Classic: Hardcore

A Hardcore mode for World of Warcraft? Where you only get one life, and if you die you’re permanently dead with no take-backs, and can thus potentially see dozens (or even hundreds) of hours of progress disappear down the toilet? For Classic, no less –. the much slower, grindier 2004 edition of the game where nothing is handed to you for free? Sounds like a stupid idea dreamt up by MMO masochists. It’ll never catch on.

…is what I thought the first time I heard about it. Sticking a Hardcore mode in Classic should not work. There’s no accommodations made for it aside from tweaking some quests and abilities that either rely on player death, or make it easy to avoid it. It’s the same game otherwise, and Classic can be notoriously unforgiving at times — hell, make that most of the time. It’s all too easy for a single bad monster pull or monster spawn to kill your all-too-fragile character out of nowhere, and embarking on high-risk elite quests and dungeon runs is kind of like asking them to play Russian roulette.

Paradoxically, though, it’s the very fact that it’s the same game that means Hardcore mode does work. Since Classic hasn’t changed and is just as dangerous as ever, it’s up to you — and the wider playerbase — to change how you play it in order to maximise your chances of survival. Classic has always been a slow game (and in comparison to modern WoW it’s borderline glacial), but in Hardcore mode you have to take it even slower than that, sticking to safer areas, taking the time to grind up extra levels, and never, ever taking any risks — or at least, not taking risks without Batman levels of preparation and planning. Remember those crappy Minor Potions of Vitality that add a paltry couple of dozen HP onto your health bar, and which you’d never ever bother with in regular Classic? In Hardcore mode those extra health points could be the difference between life and death. Buffs from passing players are, similarly, an absolute godsend. Optimised quest paths have long relied on using your hearthstone to teleport long distances and cut out some of the grind, but in Hardcore you suck it up and walk everywhere because the hearthstone has a one hour cooldown and it’s your last resort for getting yourself out of a mine that’s turned into a deathtrap. Seeing other players doing the same quests as me annoyed the crap out of me in normal WoW as I’d have to fight with them for mob kills, but in Hardcore it’s reassuring as they’ll probably help you out if a pull goes bad and it looks like you’re about to die — that is, as long as it’s not too risky for them, so if you’re being chased through Darkshire by Stitches don’t expect them to lift a finger.

This is not a playstyle that will suit everyone. It’s slow, it makes an already grindy game even grinder, and it can be dreadfully boring if you’re actively focusing on it 100% of the time. More than that, it relies on a lot of pre-existing game knowledge of what the most dangerous quests and enemies are so that you can avoid them; I definitely would not recommend Classic Hardcore to anyone who hadn’t put serious time into vanilla WoW either on its original release twenty years ago, or upon its rebirth as Classic in 2017. But if you do have that knowledge, and a second monitor to watch Youtube or listen to podcasts on, there’s something weirdly zen about Classic Hardcore. It’s the last thing I was expecting from this mode where I could potentially lose it all at any moment, but being forced to take it slow because of that risk gave me a new level of appreciation for WoW; the base game really was something special, and while the game’s been solved for decades and it’ll never be possible to recapture the sense of possibility and adventure WoW offered back in 2004, Hardcore mode at least presents an opportunity to experience it from a different perspective, and through fresh eyes.

The post 2023 Games Roundup: The Best appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Yes, I suppose it’s fitting that it is, once again, the prospect of reviewing a mercenary management game that rouses me from my months-long torpor. I like mercenary management games. I think they have a lot of really interesting gameplay decisions baked into the core concept in ways that other tactical strategy games struggle to justify, or which they omit entirely. Jagged Alliance 2, Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries¹, Battle Brothers, BattleTech – no matter what the setting is, if you show me a mercenary management game the chances are that it’ll be a hit with me. And sure enough, I liked Wartales, too.

For the first 10 hours or so, anyway.

Unfortunately Wartales has a very immediate problem to overcome. It’s a mercenary management game set in a low fantasy² world where you control a company of 5-20 mercenaries travelling around the land taking contracts and slaying bandits. You equip them, you feed them, you level them up, you decide where to go next and what you’ll do when you get there. Armour acts as an ablative extra layer of hitpoints that must be depleted in full before you can start chopping body parts off; damaged armour needs to be repaired after every battle using tools you carry around in your party inventory. Your attack abilities are determined by the weapon you have equipped – so a one-handed mace can be used to bop a single target over the head, but a two-handed mace swings in a wide arc in front of you that can hit multiple people. Your mercenaries need to be paid regularly; if they’re not paid, or you don’t feed them, they will get upset and leave.

Now, this all sounds perfectly fine on the face of it, and is pretty much what I expect when I play a mercenary management game. The problem Wartales has, though, is that this is also exactly what Battle Brothers did 6 years ago, almost to the letter, in almost exactly the same kind of setting. Battle Brothers is an excellent game that I keep meaning to put more time into, and in hindsight I’d rather have spent 40 hours replaying that instead of ploughing more and more effort into Wartales to try and see if it was actually going anywhere — but we’ll get to that in due course. The point is, the release version of Battle Brothers outclasses Wartales in almost every respect, and it’s only gotten better since then thanks to some unexpected DLC support. It has a much wider variety of equipment, giving you many more options in combat and choices around how to build your mercenaries. It has a much wider variety of enemies which require distinctly different approaches to defeat, ensuring that the repeated tactical battles are less likely to become dull. It has a much wider variety of contracts, and a much wider variety of music — in fact it has one of the best strategy game soundtracks of the last 10 years, which is really really important when you’re going to be listening to the battle music in particular for hours on end. (Wartales, by contrast, has 3 completely unremarkable battle tracks that you’ll be thoroughly sick of by the end of the first region.)

In the areas where Wartales can be directly compared to Battle Brothers, then, it feels incredibly basic. Some of this is the result of intentional design decisions, like the combat being a much lighter affair than the individual unit morale stats and armour penetration mechanics of Battle Brothers — I’ll break down the combat properly towards the end of the review, so for now I’ll just say that it’s much more along the lines of something like Expeditions Rome, or Original Sin 2 without the magic. Mostly, though, it feels like the result of a particularly scattershot game development approach, where the development team wanted to do a lot of things, did not have the time or resources to do all of them well or in a particularly joined-up way, and instead of cutting scope to focus on the most important ones they instead just decided to do all of them anyway and push them out of the door in a barely-MVP³ state. As a result Wartales comes across as a not-particularly-focused grab-bag of stuff, some of which works but a lot of which doesn’t, and which has no great unifying vision behind it — and so of course it comes off worse in comparison to Battle Brothers, which was built around its combat system from the ground up and so had a very clear mission statement: give the player interesting fights. (And I’m slightly shocked that that wasn’t also the priority for Wartales given how heavily it does end up leaning on the combat.)

As wasteful as this development approach might be, though, it does also mean that Wartales can come up with an answer to the question “Why should I play Wartales when Battle Brothers exists?” Because while it might be a grab-bag of features that don’t feed into each other in particularly interesting ways, it is a much larger bag than you might expect from one of these games and the chances are you’ll probably find something in there to hook your interest — at least to start with.

The camp is probably the best place to start when describing what else Wartales is doing to try and justify your time. When you’re walking around the world you have a fatigue bar at the top of the screen that’s ticking down. When it runs out, you need to rest; you need to feed your mercs during every rest period and pay them after every 3 rests. You can rest at any time by hitting the “Camp” button, which takes you to the camp screen. This starts out as just a simple fire with a workshop next to it as the only two pieces of equipment in your camp. Mercs can be assigned to each piece of camp equipment to get minor bonuses – the fire gives a happiness bonus for each merc next to it, while the workshop passively generates repair tools for fixing up your armour after a fight. Your mercenaries have set combat classes that determine which weapons they can use, but they also have a second gathering or crafting profession that you can pick and which they level up separately. If you have a Tinkerer in your company you can use the Workshop to craft minor sundries (lockpicks, ropes etc.) as well as other camp equipment – a Cooking Pot to reduce food requirements and which allows a mercenary with the Cook profession to produce more satisfying meals from the raw ingredients you acquire on your travels, or a Tent that grants more action points in battle the more mercenaries are sleeping in it, or a Hitching Post that increases the carrying capacity of your pack horses.

Adding new equipment to your camp and upgrading it to give bigger bonuses is key to building and supporting a bigger mercenary company. It’s not a massive part of the game beyond that as you basically just assign one appropriately-skilled merc to each piece of equipment and then put any excess into the Tent, but it is nice to see your progress as a company visually reflected somewhere as all of your mercs and horses and animal companions will be somewhere on the camp screen. Crafting and gathering is similarly basic-yet-impactful; you can find small amounts of raw materials while walking around in the overworld, but if you want big payoff of iron (for example) you visit a mine and get your Miner to play a clicking-on-the-circles minigame ripped straight out of an MMO circa 2010⁴. If you want to catch some fish, you visit a fishing spot and get your Fisherman to play the exact same keep-the-bar-between-the-two-red-zones fishing minigame you can find in literally every other title with a fishing minigame out there. If you want your Bard to sing in a tavern, you get them to play Guitar Hero. (I am absolutely not joking about this.)

Now, obviously none of these things are at all innovative, but visiting dedicated resource nodes like this does add an extra level of consideration to your overworld travels beyond just beelining for the next contract marker, especially since the equipment that you can craft using these gathered resources is the best equipment available for whatever your current level is. Enemies do drop weapons and armour after a fight, but it’s invariably just placeholder stuff that will get you by until you can outfit everyone in Ghost Brigandine and give them Ghost weapons. They might be mechanically uninteresting, but engaging with these systems does lead to real, tangible increases in power for your mercenaries on the battlefield — it’s the bare minimum I’d ask of crafting/gathering in a videogame, but I see enough games completely fluff it that I’m nevertheless pleased that the Wartales implementation hits somewhere close to the mark.

Continuing on the theme of “mechanics that have been outright stolen from other games”, the way Wartales deals with the more criminal side of being a mercenary is straight out of Skyrim. If you have somebody with the Thief profession in your company you can send them in to steal expensive items from merchants in lieu of actually paying for them; Thieves are also the ones who open locked containers via the standard Elder Scrolls lockpicking minigame. Stealing items in this way raises a Suspicion meter, and once you go over 100 Suspicion you become Wanted and the previously-friendly guard patrols you find out in the overworld will start running up to you and challenging you; it must have been very difficult for the Wartales developers to not have these dialogues start with “Stop right there, criminal scum!” but they’ve somehow managed it. If you fight it out with guards your Suspicion rating goes up further to 200, 300, all the way up to 600, with each threshold spawning more guard patrols, and I’m similarly surprised that Shiro Games didn’t represent this visually with some kind of star system. Still, the fact that you can engage in some criminal activity without immediately triggering a response from the law is welcome; a Suspicion meter that’s completely empty is a resource that’s going unused, and so you might as well engage in a little bit of petty larceny just to save some money.

I like that Wartales succeeds in encouraging the player to be a bit of a dick, regardless of the mechanics used to get there being totally derivative; historical mercenary companies were absolutely infamous for this and so it’s part of the experience as far as I’m concerned. However there is a related mechanic that is entirely Wartales’ own that makes me a different kind of concerned, and this is the Prisoner mechanic. Each region on the world map has a Jail you can visit, either to recruit the prisoners already there or to buy sets of heavy chains; if you have chains in your party inventory you can attempt to capture wounded enemies during combat; if successful, you can take them back to a Jail and turn them in in exchange for a reduction in your Suspicion rating. Since most of the enemy mobs you fight are bandits and outlaws this does make a certain amount of sense, but the more I looked at this mechanic the more my own personal Suspicion rating started to creep up.

You see, there is not a single contract type that revolves around capturing enemies; it’s never a mission objective, and in 40 hours of playtime I’ve only been required to do it once as part of a region’s main questline. This was a bit weird, because there are dedicated structures you can build in your base to make prisoner management easier — but why is this necessary when you’re never asked to do it and you’re only going to be handling any prisoners you do take for a brief period until you dump them in a Jail? It took an embarrassingly long time for this to click, but became too obvious to ignore once I got to one of the later game regions and one of the NPCs in the Jail there was selling utility items you can give to prisoners to increase their carrying capacity as well as a schematic for a whipping post to improve their “performance”: these are supposed to be slaves. They have implemented slavery in the game and are hoping people won’t notice because they’ve changed the name. There’s even an achievement for whipping a “prisoner” to death, for crying out loud! The overriding obsession that developers of low fantasy games have with including dedicated slavery mechanics in their games⁵ continues to astonish me, as does the fact that not a single review of Wartales that I’ve read has seen fit to mention it.

That omission is probably more understandable in light of the game’s overworld design, though, which is the final way Wartales differs from Battle Brothers: instead of being randomly generated, Wartales’ world is entirely hand-crafted. Unfortunately, because Wartales really doesn’t have an original bone in its body, the design principles that Shiro have used to do so have been ripped straight out of a late-stage Ubisoft open world game like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and are therefore deeply tedious. The game world is split into regions, each with its own set of points of interest — denoted by the ubiquitous question mark icons — and main questline that you are strongly encouraged to complete before moving on to the next region. The points of interest are almost all incredibly shallow, being structures like windmills and farms that require you to do nothing more than a couple of conversation interactions with the NPCs there before the inevitable green tick appears indicating that the location has been completed; the one exception are the Tombs of the Ancients, which are a mix of dungeon crawling and puzzle-solving that I really did quite like, but there’s only one of those in each region. Meanwhile the main questlines are a series of five missions that each invariably involves killing a bunch of people, and your main goal in each region is to bulk up your mercenary company to the point where you’re capable of taking on all of those fights plus the the “bossfight” at the end (which is just a regular fight where one unit has a special weapon or something). And then it’s on to the next region, where…

…you get to do exactly the same thing all over again. The first three regions of Wartales — Tiltren, Arthes and Vertruse — are literally identical. They have the same terrain type of endless rolling fields and forests interspersed with the odd bit of mountain. They have the same points of interest; the same set of windmills and farms and mines and fisheries and abandoned towers, over and over again. They have the same enemy types — the fact that you only ever really fight human enemies is an absolutely massive problem for the game, as we shall shortly see when I get onto the combat — and you’ve seen all of them by the time you’re done with the first region. The only real difference is in the content of the region questlines, which are not substantial enough to make them in any way distinctive. I can’t really blame game reviewers who didn’t get far enough into the game to see all of the prisoner mechanic when it took me nearly forty hours to finish fighting my way through these three identikit regions. Then I dragged myself into the fourth region, Ludern, which was finally, finally somewhere different; I actually let out a sort of involuntary crazed half-laugh when I saw exactly what I was dealing with there, because it turns out Ludern is the game’s Swamp Level. I hate swamp levels. I did try to persevere, but the swampiness of it all, combined with the extreme repetitiveness of the game’s combat, had finally broken me.

The thing is, somewhat ironically given how much I’ve mentioned it, there’s not actually all that much to say about Wartales’s combat as the actual combat mechanics themselves are pretty spartan. Not bad as such, just very, very basic. Your mercenaries each get a movement allowance and a basic attack ability granted by their currently-equipped weapon that they can use once. They might also have an additional attack ability granted by their perk tree, but you’ll have to spend a Valour Point in order to use it; this is a global pool of action points that is used across your entire company and which is only replenished when the party rests in the overworld, and it would have introduced some moderately interesting resourcing decisions if the game didn’t also have about a billion ways to generate “temporary” Valour Points that ensure you’ll never not have access to your bonus abilities. Still, one set of movement and two attacks per turn, per mercenary, is not much – especially when your enemies all have bloated health bars (an equivalent-level enemy will have around 20-30% more HP and armour than a mercenary of the same class type outfitted in best-in-slot armour). You can have up to 20 “companions” in your troop, which can be mercenaries, pack horses or various types of animal that you’ve tamed, but I’m reasonably sure at this point that Wartales is adjusting enemy group sizes based on the number of human companions in my mercenary band, as they are almost always the same size as my group plus or minus one – so you’ll never be able to bring a numerical advantage to bear. And trading damage on equal terms with enemy patrols is a losing proposition; even if everyone survives, you’d lose so much armour that the repair cost would massively outweigh any benefits from winning the fight in the first place.

This is why the key aspect of Wartales combat isn’t about leveraging ability combos in clever ways, and neither is it about applying any of the numerous status effects available to you. Instead, Wartales combat is all about abusing the turn order to make sure that the enemy takes as few turns — and thus causes as little damage — as possible. I’ve yet to figure out how exactly the turn order works when one side does have a numerical advantage (which can happen in the enemy’s favour in some Hard contracts or main scenario battles, or in your favour in the later stages of a battle when you’ve killed most of the enemy), but since the sides are almost always equal to start with it’s quite easy to describe: you move one mercenary, then an enemy unit moves, then you move another mercenary, then another enemy unit moves, and so on. The trick is that the enemy turn order (i.e. the order the enemy units will move in) is set in advance, remains static throughout the turn, and can be viewed by you at any time — but you are not bound by any such restrictions, so when it’s your go you can move any mercenary you want.

So, here’s how a typical Wartales combat plays out (for my party, anyway). Enemy parties are usually split into two or more distinct groups on the battlefield, so I set my company up surrounding one of them – this means the other one will probably not be able to move into melee range on their first turn, effectively wasting it. In the group I have decided to kill first, I check which enemy is moving first. If it’s an enemy with too much armour to feasibly kill before they can move (usually a tanky shield unit of some kind), I send in my own shield users to Engage them; this locks them down and prevents them from attacking anyone else except my shield user, who has both passive and active damage reduction from the shield and will take only a few points of damage where one of my squishier units would take 20 or 30. This effectively removes them from the fight until I’m ready to deal with them. If the next enemy to move is a lightly armoured enemy, such as a rogue or an archer, then I kill them with a high-damage unit — archers are ideal for this, and axe users have a devastating area-effect alpha strike ability that can kill two or more enemy units with their first attack of the battle if the positioning is kind.  If an enemy is killed before they can take their turn, they simply drop out of the turn order and it skips back to my turn again. I then repeat the process. As long as I haven’t fucked up my positioning on the initial deployment none of the lighter enemy units will ever survive to take their turn, and this makes fights much more tractable.

But it’s also substantially less interesting. Optimising my party to produce the devastating alpha strikes required to keep control of the turn order was a decent metagame problem for the first 10-15 hours of Wartales, but then I solved it. From that point on every battle has played out effectively the same way; it is a strategy that works against all equivalent-level human enemies and all roving packs of animals (wolves, boars and bears), and because there’s only ever one battle objective — kill all of the enemies — I never need to change it. All I need to worry about is making sure my equipment doesn’t become obsolete to the point that one-shotting weaker enemies is no longer possible. And the thing is, I’ve seen nothing to make me think that playing the game any other way is actually viable. The enemies, on the rare occasions when I am caught out of position and they manage to hit me properly, hit hard enough to convince me that I’d lose quite quickly in a stand-up fight – and it’s not like I’m wearing low-level armour, either! As far as I can tell this is how I’m supposed to be winning the combats.

So this is already not ideal; not only does the game have extremely limited enemy variety to start with, but there’s a one-size-fits-all strategy that’ll deal with every one of the few enemy types that it does have⁶. Here’s the kicker, though: my mercenary party is currently level 7. To get from level 7 to level 8 requires 3,500 XP. Fighting a group of level 7 enemies grants 60-70 XP. Quests and contracts do not grant XP rewards, and so there are no other sources of XP outside of random camp events (and those bonuses are only applied to one or two mercs, not the whole group). This means that in order to get to level 8, I need to fight 50-60 combats. And that’s just to advance one level; from the perk tree I see that it goes up to at least level 12, so if I stick with Wartales there are hundreds of these repetitive, solved combat encounters in my future.

(I just read this back over and just realised I didn’t mention the battle UI, which is absolutely awful. It doesn’t tell you which enemies you can hit from a position you’re thinking of moving to; it doesn’t allow takebacks if you’ve have moved somewhere and it turns out you can’t actually hit your desired target; it doesn’t have mercenary nameplates or any ability to zoom in or out, making it impossible to tell your mercenaries apart when they’re all dressed in the same best-in-slot armour sets; and the Move and End Turn buttons are 1) right next to each other and 2) exactly the same colour, making it very easy to accidentally end your turn instead of moving on to the next target. This is all really basic stuff that even full fat RPGs whose focus isn’t wholly on tactical strategy have had figured out for at least 5 years now, and a large part of my deciding to drop Wartales was not being able to face the prospect of dealing with these UI issues for another hundred combats.)

This means that I’ve very much reached the point where I decide that a game is no longer worth my time. I had some fun with Wartales in spite of everything; I’m never happier than when I’m untangling a set of systems, and Wartales has a lot of systems to untangle, no matter how derivative they might be. The novelty soon wore off, though, and it was a horrible disappointment to discover that the second region was basically the same as the first one, and that the third region was the same as the first two, and by the time Wartales had decided to show me something different it had completely burned through any currency it had built up with me; I was thoroughly sick and tired of nearly everything that it was doing, and I simply could not face the idea of playing it any more. If you want a satisfying low fantasy tactical strategy game, you should avoid Wartales and play the far superior Battle Brothers. Yes, even if you’ve played it already. Don’t make the same mistake I did of thinking Wartales might be meaningfully different in some way, because while it might have a few semi-interesting ideas around the edges it ultimately leans more heavily on its combat than Battle Brothers does — and here it’s far too insubstantial to support the amount of repetition demanded of it, to say nothing of the amount of repetition to be found in the rest of the game in general.

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The post Thoughts: Wartales appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Another year ends, which means it’s time for another end-of-year roundup of the games I didn’t do full reviews for, as well as some approximate rankings because rankings are fun. Last year’s disclaimers still apply: this is all of the games I played in 2022 for long enough to have a serious opinion on, not all of the games that I played that were released in 2022; and also the rankings are highly subjective since they’re Literally Just My Opinion.

(Which is, of course, always correct.)

The Great

Also in this category: Pentiment, Elden Ring, God of War, Return to Monkey Island

Old World

Playing Old World is like suddenly finding yourself in a parallel universe, one where all of the big 4X innovations of the last 15 years — one unit per tile, unpacked cities, empire-wide resource pools, a Crusader Kings-lite character system — still happened, but they were actually done right. And by “right” I mean “with the same general design ethos as Civilization 4”, because this is a game from Soren Johnson’s Mohawk Games, and so it has some staggeringly good mechanical design. Everything flows into everything else in a very elegant way; it feels very different to the later Civilization games because there’s nothing that feels peripheral or bolted-on, and all of the mechanics are instead fully embedded into a wider system that needs to be considered as a whole in order to succeed at the game. This makes the experience of playing Old World powerfully satisfying, like finally eating a hearty 4X meal after years of picking at Firaxis’ bitty scraps. I was expecting to be turned off by the classical antiquity setting since I’ve played through the ancient age in Civilization approximately seven million times now and it’s the least interesting part of the game to me, but Old World’s take on it was so well-executed it still succeeded in drawing me in. The only flaw the game really has is that it doesn’t have the absurd variety of Civilization 6’s range of civilizations and strategies — Old World only has seven playable civilizations to choose from — but then that’s also its main strength since its comparative focus makes it a much more coherent game, and one I’ll be revisiting for years to come.

Vampire Survivors

Why has Vampire Survivors been so successful? It’s a £4 game that, when I picked it up at the start of the year, had a grand total of two levels populated with a mix of store-bought art and placeholder graphics. Even in this incredibly basic state it was fearsomely addictive, though; there’s something incredibly compulsive about piloting your character sprite around while it automatically fires off a collection of increasingly destructive weapons to mulch incoming hordes of enemies and hoovering up the XP crystals they leave behind, kind of like a psychotic Roomba. It’s a phenomenon that’s been written about at length elsewhere, but the hook for me was how refreshingly unconcerned Vampire Survivors was about gameplay “balance”; I feel that most other games would have gotten hung up on fiddling with drop rates and damage percentages in the mistaken belief that rationing out the player’s tools and toys is going to be fun for them, but Vampire Survivors says “Fuck it” and outright encourages you to put together the most OP build you possibly can, because it’s going to spawn so many enemies and so many projectiles that this primitive 2D autoshooter is going to start seriously chugging on the framerate in the later stages of the game. The developer understands precisely what is fun about the game and the Early Access period has been mostly about giving the player even more absurd combos to try out; it does have a shelf life because of this as there’ll be a point where you’ve seen “enough” and put the game down for a while, potentially for good, but Vampire Survivors is bonkers cheap even with the 1.0 price increase so you can’t really say you didn’t get your money’s worth.

Neon White

Teardown was a bit of a misfire with me, but I mentioned in my review that I really liked some parts of it, specifically the level that got you to plot a route through it that had line of sight to a series of targets that you had to shoot before the timer ran out. A few weeks later I played Neon White, which was an entire game of that. You’re a demon exterminator working to rid Heaven of 120 levels’ worth of diabolical incursions, and you do this by running very very fast through each level picking up guns and shooting them in the face. Each gun can be discarded for a one-shot special movement ability – dash, double-jump, firing yourself through the air on a ballistic trajectory — and the core of Neon White is figuring out new routes and sequencing of your gun/ability use that will let you shave a precious few fractions of a second off of your previous level time. Quicker times award shinier medals and there’s full Friends leaderboards integration if you want to get particularly brutally competitive. The movement is incredibly tight once you get used to it, and the level design is outstandingly refined with a ton of clever shortcuts available that make you feel like a genius each time you figure a new one out, and packed with so much variety that you’ll never get bored. If you’re not the sort of person who enjoys time trials then you’re probably not going to enjoy Neon White, but since I do happen to enjoy them it was very briefly on my GOTY shortlist. Only briefly, though, since the game is let down by some infuriating bossfights and the second-worst writing in a videogame this year¹.

Roadwarden

A game that is not quite a text adventure or an RPG, Roadwarden instead combines the best aspects of both to produce one of the most pleasantly open-ended games of 2022. You’re a Roadwarden (sort of a D&D Ranger, except you can just indiscriminately murder the local wildlife if you want) who has been sent to scout out a remote peninsula teeming with hostile creatures, and who has to gather as much information about the country and its inhabitants as you can before your forty-day time limit is up. You pick up dozens of quests while you’re there, and there’s a mystery that spans the length of the game that you can try and solve if you want, but you don’t have to complete any of them as you can leave at any point after the twenty-day mark to report back to your merchant masters. This lets Roadwarden focus on exploration to a degree that most other RPGs cannot, as they’re shackled to a linear story with scripted progression; in Roadwarden it’s not taken for granted that you’ll find anything that’s not directly on the road as you don’t need to in order to finish the game, and so forging a path through the centre of the forest or venturing into a deep dark tunnel is genuinely tense and mysterious as you have next to no idea what you’ll discover down there. The monochrome illustrations that accompany the text are used to great effect here, too, as the maps of each location start out blank and gradually get filled in as you explore more and more of each village and dungeon. Roadwarden is a game about getting to know the landscape and the communities in it, and where it’s important to make friends so that you can gather all of the information required to uncover the peninsula’s deepest secrets. The initial sense of wonder that the game had wore off in the second half once I’d explored most of the map and had figured out how it all worked mechanically, but that first half was magical.

The Good

Also in this category: PowerWash Simulator, Hardspace Shipbreaker, Citizen Sleeper, Regiments, Expeditions Rome

The Case of the Golden Idol

Return of the Obra Dinn with less style, but also much less obtuseness. The Case of the Golden Idol presents you with twelve murder mysteries to solve involving an ancient golden idol of uncertain provenance. Each murder has you examining the murder scene and its immediate surroundings moments after the event in order to gather clues; these take the form of nouns and verbs that populate the lower half of the screen. Once you have hoovered up all of the clues you switch over to a second interface where you have to use the clue words to fill in the blanks on a description of the murder — these start out being simple “X killed Y because of the Z” descriptions, but quickly become far more complicated, and correctly solving a murder requires a full and complete understanding of who everyone at the murder scene is and their potential motivations. Case is a very solid puzzle game that’s mostly grounded in logic and is only held back a little by its art style, which is seemingly intentionally grotesque; I was put off by this for a while but was pleased to see that the few frames of animation each scene has lends it enough liveliness that it’s nowhere near as bad as it appears to be in screenshots. It has a short running time of just over three hours, but I’ll take a short puzzle game where all of the solutions make sense over one twice the length where I spend most of the additional time trying to figure out what’s going on inside the puzzle designer’s head.

Terra Invicta

Terra Invicta is utterly mad. The first full game from the developers of the Long War mod for XCOM, Terra Invicta absolutely would not have been made by anyone else. They would have taken one look at the concept and called it unworkable: it’s a game where you control a shadowy Council who takes over nations on a detailed recreation of the planet Earth so that you can use their resources to launch spaceships and fight off an alien invasion on a strategy layer that comprises the entire Solar System. And then on top of that when you encounter an alien fleet you drop into a tactical battle system that simulates everything with full Newtonian physics. Terra Invicta is a game where orbital trajectories and delta-V burns are accurately projected, where the armour penetration of a laser at a certain distance is calculated not by consulting some lookup table but by doing a Gaussian beam equation using the focal lens diameter and wavelength, and where the travel time of your fleets can be measured in years if you’re travelling to the outer solar system using a slower engine. It should be an unplayable mess, but while it is certainly messy it is also incredibly compelling if you’re at all into the idea of what it’s doing; in particular it has the first tech tree since Alpha Centauri that has successfully convinced me that it was a plausible map of the next 200 years of human progress². Even disregarding the theme, which is laser-focused to appeal to me specifically and almost nobody else, there’s some genuinely good design to be found in the Earth and solar system layers — but unfortunately they don’t feed into one another well at all (the Earth layer becomes irrelevant once you get a good foothold in space) and the tactical battles are a disaster area since it turns out Newtonian physics are a real pain to manage. The greatest sin Terra Invicta commits, though, is that it doesn’t respect the player’s time. I greatly enjoyed the first 30-40 hours of the campaign that I played, even in spite of everything that the game did wrong. Unfortunately the campaign went on for an additional 30 hours past this point (for a total of 70), most of which was spent on the fastest speed setting waiting for fleets to arrive at the next planet. This makes Terra Invicta impossible to recommend, but I really can’t fault the developers for trying; it may be a mess, but it’s at least an ambitious one and hopefully one that others will learn from.

Final Fantasy 7

Prompted by my near-disastrous experience with the Remake (see below), I decided to pick up Final Fantasy 7 again for the first time in over two decades to see how well it held up. I’ve never thought as highly of it as everyone else seems to, so I was surprised to discover that the answer is “pretty damn well, actually”. It still underwhelms in comparison to its reputation, and the developers are clearly still coming to grips with the transition from 16-bit consoles to 32-bit consoles, and I do think that coming back to it in 2022 meant it suffered slightly from the game having been completely solved for a long, long time — it had absolutely none of the atmosphere of possibility and of discovery that enthralled me as a teenager. But it’s a solid JRPG nonetheless, especially with some of the more tasteful AI upscaling mods applied — this incidentally let me rediscover just how revolutionary the seamless transition from FMV cutscenes to interactive gameplay was back in the day, as the upscaled versions still look quite impressive and it’s easier to understand just how mindblowing it was to watch on a CRT television in 1997 when you’re not peering through a pixelated fog. But the most surprising thing about my replay of Final Fantasy 7 was how short it was; this game was legendary for being an epic adventure that consumed weeks of free time and yet I finished it in just 22 hours. This felt refreshingly quick and snappy by modern standards (especially compared to the Remake); I still wouldn’t put Final Fantasy 7 in the top tier of JRPGs, but at least it doesn’t waste your time.

Grounded

I hate quite a lot of what Grounded does. I hate the plant and insect-based aesthetic of all of the structures and equipment you can build. I hate the massive health bars on all of the enemies that turn combat into a battle of attrition. I hate that it doesn’t seem particularly interested in providing you ways of automating early-game tasks once you’ve mastered them, meaning there’s always the standard survival game chores around hunger and thirst to deal with before you can do anything interesting. And I hate that it’s now been over two decades since System Shock 2 and game developers still haven’t learned not to put equipment degradation mechanics into their games. Unusually, though, I’m willing to forgive almost all of that, because Grounded’s world design is excellent, and exploring its giant-sized back yard is a joy. It’s bright and colourful and full of things that would otherwise be mundane but are rendered interesting because of your shrunken stature; this is a game where gaining access to the picnic table and the sandbox is a big deal, as this opens up access to new materials that let you tackle new challenges and unlock even more new areas, as well as being genuinely different. There’s a great sense of progression and discovery that’s absent from a lot of other survival games; I’ll always be a bigger fan of fully authored survival game worlds than I am the procedurally-generated stuff, and Grounded is a great example as to why.

The Okay

Also in this category: Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters, Midnight Suns, Battlesector, Sniper Elite 5, Teardown

Metal Hellsinger

Possibly the closest thing I’ve played to Doom 2016 since Doom 2016, which is kind of weird because this is a rhythm shooter where you have to time your shots to the beat of the music for more damage and a higher score – but then boomer shooters always have had a particular kind of rhythm to them once you get into the groove, so making that an explicit requirement actually works quite well. Rhythm or no, Hellsinger’s shooting is extremely polished and I had a lot of fun with it for the three hours it took me to finish the game’s parsimoniously small collection of levels; your overall mileage with this game will vary dramatically based on how much you like heavy metal music (I personally have no affection for it but I’m also not hugely put off by the idea of an all-metal soundtrack), but what knocked Hellsinger down several pegs for me was that very little thought seemed to have been given to replayability. I was expecting all sorts of challenges, score attack modes and a far more coherent set of leaderboards that would get the most out of what’s on offer here, but instead you go through each level once and then there’s no real reason to do it again, so in spite of the excellent shooting the words that most come to mind when I think of Metal: Hellsinger are “missed opportunity”.

Disc Room

An interesting twist on bullet hell shooters. Disc Room puts you in control of a tiny man who is dumped into a room full of spinning, bouncing, razor-sharp discs. The discs gradually multiply in number and doors are all locked and there’s no way to open them, so he will eventually die, but this appears to be no real impediment to him as he has infinite lives, and surviving for a long enough period of time in each room opens the door to the next one. Disc Room gradually ratchets up the complexity, introducing different types of discs that will kill you faster and powers for your tiny man such as dash and bullet time that might keep you alive longer, but it never loses sight of that ruthlessly short core loop of spawn-die-instantly-repeat, which is made tolerable by the majority of its levels never asking much more of you than to survive for around ten seconds. Disc Room is polished and thoughtful — enough so that I completed it on Hard — but I feel it was undone by one major mistake in the design process: the disc spawns are random, and each restart will see them shooting off in wildly different directions to the previous run. This means that achieving a target time feels just as much a matter of rerolling spawns until you get a forgiving arrangement of discs as it does any skill on the player’s part. The random spawns introduce too much variance into a game where the high score leaderboards measure times down to a hundredth of a second, and so Disc Room had no real longevity with me; in other circumstances it’s a game where I’d chase better and better times or gun for the harder achievements, but I didn’t feel that pull at all with Disc Room.

Hitman 3

I don’t know why Hitman 3 left me so cold. I loved Hitman 2, and Hitman 3 is, in theory, more of the same. Its plot is substantially more overbearing and does encroach on the mission content rather too much, but the missions themselves aren’t put together any differently; with the exception of the murder mystery one — a misfiring concept that has nowhere near as much replay potential as the rest of the game — each of them would fit quite nicely into Hitman 2. And yet where I felt compelled to take Hitman 2’s levels apart to see what made them tick, the idea of doing so for Hitman 3’s Abu Dhabi level, or its rave level, simply made me feel exhausted. Whatever energy was powering Hitman 2 was somehow absent from the sequel, it’s not as funny (and when it tries to be funny it’s not as smart about it) and also there was no Sniper Assassin minigame this time, so I went through Hitman 3’s missions once and then never went back. Disappointing.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide

I would like Darktide a lot more if Fatshark had actually finished it. Unfortunately its excellent shooting and melee combat (and outstanding soundtrack) are hobbled by a metagame that makes absolutely no damn sense whatsoever; it’s one of the worst examples of scattershot game design I’ve ever seen. The game (and Fatshark’s PR representatives) appear to think that constantly negging the player is a foolproof way of winning their hearts, incessantly referring to them as “rejects” and “varlets”. You get a message at the end of a level saying that you’ve unlocked the flamethrower. Great! But you can’t use the flamethrower until a flamethrower appears in the shop so that you can buy and equip it, and the shop inventory is randomly generated and only refreshes on the hour, and isn’t guaranteed to spawn a flamethrower when it does so it could potentially be days until you get to use it. There’s a set of ridiculously difficult achievements called Penances, some of which unlock the second most laughable set of cosmetics I’ve ever seen in a game³, and the rest of which give you an achievement score that does absolutely nothing. You collect crafting materials for no apparent reason, as the entire crafting interface was locked off until relatively recently because it wasn’t finished. And the range of levels and mission objectives on offer is incredibly basic — remember the wizard tower or the bell mission from Vermintide? There’s nothing like that here, as you’ll either be assassinating a dude, hacking into a thing, or collecting small boxes to put into a bigger box. They don’t even have memorable place names for their missions! It’s all “Manufactorum H-11B” or “Railway 37-F”. The generic zombie enemies you face are far less interesting than Vermintide’s hordes of ratmen, and worst of all — crime of all crimes — the loot rat has been removed from the game completely. Darktide has definitely succeeded in being a distinct thing from Vermintide, but it’s distinctly worse and not remotely the game I was hoping Fatshark would make.

Orb of Creation

Every year the same thing happens: I download an idle game from Steam, boot it up, and then suddenly it’s 12 hours later and my consciousness is only coming back down to earth because I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast. Orb of Creation is better-constructed than most — in fact it’s almost unfair to call it an idle game, since it wants you to be constantly thinking about where you spend all of the resources you accrue and it gives you a lot of places to spend them. The gimmick this time around is that you’re a mage trying to rebuild reality from nothing, and so you start off with one-shot spells (that you can alter with a host of modifying runes) before progressing on to building passive resource generators and then using an alchemy lab to transmute elements into one another. Even in its Early Access state there’s a very long tech tree to climb up and trying to balance my income via transmutation was a much more engaging problem than most idle games present me with, but the same exponentially scaling formula is present across all of them meaning that they’re ultimately just different coloured numbers, and so Orb of Creation was still unable to avoid the ultimate fate of all such games — which is that I come out of that 12 hour fugue state feeling like I could have used the time far more constructively and uninstall it to protect myself..

Dusk

Dusk was one of the first of the new wave of boomer shooters that have been steadily releasing over the last five years. I bought Dusk because it has an astonishingly high rating of 97% “Overwhelmingly Positive” on Steam, but ended up being slightly underwhelmed because of that. Dusk is solid and competent with some imaginative level design, the sort of thing I would have expected a talented Half-Life modder (what Dusk most reminds me of is classic Half-Life mod They Hunger) to put out a couple of decades ago despite it looking and playing more like Quake. The Lovecraft influences are extremely strong here, but I feel that the Quake aesthetic was the wrong thing for what Dusk was trying to do; it pulls off some wonderfully atmospheric visuals in spite of that, but then the enemies you fight (and the weapons you shoot them with) are all made up of about sixteen polygons each, and that’s not quite enough to evoke the feeling of unknowable horror that’s supposed to epitomise Lovecraft. Mostly they are just FPS baddies, and the vast amount of thought that has been put into the environments just doesn’t count for much when the action that happens within them is so incredibly average. I think it would have been better if I’d played Dusk when it came out in 2017 before I had anything contemporary to compare it with instead of now, in 2022, when the boomer shooter revival is in full swing and there are several competitors that meet or exceed Dusk’s standards. Also, I did replay the original Quake last year and it predictably blows Dusk out of the water. If you’re in the mood for a modern boomer shooter you could certainly do worse than Dusk — but then again you could certainly do better too.

Prodeus

Speaking of competitors, Prodeus is a much newer example of the boomer shooter which came out of Early Access this year. Its general aesthetic and gameplay style is more Doom than Quake, albeit a Doom with much fancier textures; think of a Doom monster and there’ll be a barely-disguised ripoff of it somewhere in Prodeus, complete with a pixelated filter over it that is supposed to make it look like a Doom monster sprite, but which mostly serves to turn it into a blurry, indistinct mess and which I switched off halfway through the game. (I did at least appreciate that Prodeus let me switch it off considering how invested it appeared to be in the idea.) Even then, though, all I could think of is that it was an astonishingly bad idea to draw such direct comparisons to the outstandingly characterful spritework of Doom when Prodeus’s own visual aesthetic is such a bland melange of nothing. The shooting is, again, okay — Prodeus has an excellent shotgun and satisfying gore splatter when you use it, and gets an extremely long way on that alone — but the game waits until the last two hours to start throwing levels at you that aren’t just a collection of corridors and tunnels, and by that point it was far too late to recover; finishing Prodeus wasn’t at all satisfying, and I mostly just shrugged and moved on to the next thing. Prodeus isn’t exactly bad, but also I’d much rather play Dusk than Prodeus, which considering what I just said about Dusk also says a lot about Prodeus.

Rainbow Six: Raven Shield

I replayed this because I wanted to do a full-length post about it, but it turns out that Raven Shield has not weathered the last two decades all that well. It’s the most fully-featured of the original Rainbow Six trilogy — before the series kicked its thoughtful tactical side to the curb in Vegas and was later resurrected into an esport in Siege — and contains many important innovations like a 3D camera in the planning segment that gives you some idea of where your squad will actually be going, the ability to open doors incrementally with mousewheel (allowing you to open them up a crack, toss in a flashbang, and then boot the thing down after it goes off), and fully-modelled weapons in first-person view instead of just asking the player to use their imagination. The campaign levels are a serious letdown, however, as the majority of them are set in comparatively dull environments (an industrial fuel facility! A meat packing plant! A garage!) and the second-generation Unreal engine they’re running on has arguably aged worse than the first one. To my great surprise I also found myself running out of patience with the planning segments; I’ve long considered them to be the biggest strength of the first three games, but they’re painful to interact with in 2022 and I found myself pining for in-mission squad orders that later games such as Brothers in Arms and SWAT 4 introduced. Raven Shield is still respectable and the online mode was a hoot before Ubisoft shut it down, but if God came down from heaven and granted my wish for a modern Rainbow Six game in the “old” style I think it would look much more like SWAT 4 than it does Raven Shield.

Drainus

I picked this up on a whim after seeing Eurogamer give it a Recommended, and to be fair to Eurogamer Drainus is a mostly-enjoyable side-scrolling shoot ‘em up with a couple of decent ideas. You collect powerups to add weapons onto your ship, but the powerups are also your health bar; every time you get hit a weapon falls off, and if you get reduced to zero weapons the ship blows up. There’s a lot of ship customisation available and an Ikaruga-style energy shield that you can turn on to fly through purple bullets and energy beams, while avoiding the red ones which will always hurt you. It’s never less than competent, but unfortunately Drainus has two significant flaws. First is that, well, it’s called Drainus, which is a portmanteau of the words “drain” and “anus”, neither of which are particularly pleasant concepts to think about. Second, and more substantively, is that by the standards of classic shooters Drainus is incredibly easy. I completed the whole thing on my first go in one sitting with no continues, which took a little under two hours, and that’s just not what I’m looking for out of a shooter. Perhaps I have been spoiled by Ikaruga and Cho Ren Sha 68k, but what I want from one of these games is a gradual feeling of mastery as I learn the boss attack patterns and get slightly further in each time⁴, and Drainus most definitely was not that.

Paradise Killer

This was a little bit of a disappointment given the rave reviews I’ve seen for it, but also I’d forgotten it existed before it came out on Game Pass so it wasn’t too much of one. Paradise Killer is a murder mystery walking simulator/visual novel thing set on a bizarre island society that’s basically a sunny resort paradise run by a Lovecraftian cult, where you spend a few hours running around gathering clues and then bring everyone to court at the end in the game’s version of a Poirot parlour reveal. In the plus column, Paradise Killer has boomy splashes of imagination that I don’t often see outside of comic books and a nice visual style where you’re running around a 3D world populated by 2D cardboard cutouts of the various characters; this won’t be for everyone and sometimes isn’t for me (it infuriated me in Heaven’s Vault) but in this case reminded me pleasantly of Pathways into Darkness. In the minus column, it has basically everything else: it overwhelms you with information at the start, spaffing eight or nine murder suspects at you who all have nonsense names like Phallic Disaster; the character movement, while fast, is also heavy and awkward; and it has way too many collectibles that try and leverage this bad movement system in order to retrieve them. Also I was genuinely disappointed to discover the much-vaunted soundtrack is basically just a vaporwave version of the Ceefax music. Still, it at least includes modern quality of life features like “letting me skip through text as fast as I can read it”, which is a big factor in the game not becoming tiresome and is enough to place Paradise Killer significantly higher than certain other critically-acclaimed visual novels you’ll find lurking further down this list.

Stacklands

As the name implies, Stacklands is a light strategy game that’s based entirely on stacking cards one on top of another — put a villager card on top of a Rock card and they’ll mine Stone cards from it, the Stone cards can be stacked with Wood and a Stick card to build a House, and then if you put two Villagers inside the House they’ll create a Baby who will eventually mature into another Villager. Stacklands is basically just a less structured version of a worker placement game such as Agricola, which is fortunate for Stacklands because I really like Agricola and I might not have been inclined to put up with its bullshit otherwise. One sizeable problem with it is that it’s opted for a Cultist Simulator-esque open playspace into which you throw all of your cards with the game doing absolutely sod all to help you organise them, and it’s also got the same proliferation of card-spawning timers that all but ensure you’re going to be staring at a hellish mess of cards thirty minutes into a game. However, my main objection is that it’s paced all wrong; I played two games of Stacklands, and after the end of the second game I’d been playing for just over two hours and had seen everything there was to see in the game. I have no objection to the overall length since it’s only four quid, but I would have preferred much shorter gameplay loops — if I’d played eight fifteen-minute games where I refined my strategy instead of one massive two-hour one I think I’d have come away from it feeling a bit more satisfied than I did getting to the end of that second game and thinking “is that it?”

PowerSlave Exhumed

Night Dive seem to have hit the bottom of the barrel for their ‘90s shooter remasters. Look, we’ve remastered Turok! Yes, fantastic. We’ve remastered Blood! Wonderful. We’ve remastered… Sin? Really? Shadowman?!? This culminated in the release of PowerSlave Exhumed, a game I’m fairly sure I had never heard of prior to Night Dive remastering it. I found this impressive considering “‘90s PC games” is the one topic of my knowledge I’d point to as being genuinely encyclopaedic, so that’s one reason I picked it up. The other reason is that PowerSlave is an attempt to fuse Metroid-esque mobility-based progression with a shooter, so throughout the game you’re picking up abilities like a high jump, or a glide, or the ability to walk on acid or lava, and this opens up previously inaccessible parts of levels and new routes through the game. It’s an unusual combination — in fact it’s so unusual that the mobility parts of PowerSlave and the level design that leveraged them still felt fresh and new 26 years after the game originally came out. Unfortunately the rest of PowerSlave has aged terribly, with awful combat and a too-large player hitbox that’s the same size as the screen, which makes the level designers’ overfondness of instakill laser tripwires that gib you the moment you touch them particularly sadistic. The technology and systems thinking also fails to match the game’s ambition; this is a game designed to run on Playstations and Saturns so it can’t persistently track player progress, meaning you have to play through each level you revisit from the beginning, and that is particularly awkward considering PowerSlave abides by the Doom paradigm of making you collect red/blue/yellow keys in sequence to progress through a level. It’s an interesting historical curio, but no more than that.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake

A remake of the first chapter of the seminal 1997 Playstation classic, playing Final Fantasy 7: Remake is indeed like stepping back through time… to 2008, when all of its linear level design and terrible, terrible plot-contrived writing wouldn’t have stood out at all because everyone was doing it. Remake was released in 2020, though, so it has no excuse. The original Final Fantasy 7 committed many of the same crimes, but got away with them because it was genuinely groundbreaking in a few areas and because it was a lot of people’s first experience of a console RPG. 25 years later I’m genuinely at a loss as to why nearly everything about the Remake feels so incredibly dated — with the possible exception of the combat and materia systems, which are merely heavily flawed. Limiting the game to the first section in Midgar was a huge mistake as it means Remake loses the thing I most associate with Final Fantasy games — an expansive world map — and I just spent the entire game being railroaded through slums and sewers and scrapyards while periodically stopping to engage in mediocre brawler gameplay. In exchange for the narrowed scope Remake is supposed to trade heavily on lengthy cutscenes and expanded character work compared to the original, except there’s so much unnecessary padding in here that what it reminds me of, more than anything else, is another example of an original story that was chopped up into multiple instalments to sell more copies: Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. On the strength of Remake I am actively going to avoid Rebirth, and in fact the only thing stopping Remake itself from dropping into the truly Shit Tier games is the Honeybee Inn dance segment.

The Really Not Worth My Time

Also in this category: Lost Ark, Ace Combat 7, Chinatown Detective Agency

Total War: Warhammer 3

An unwelcome return to their Rome 2 form for Creative Assembly, and a disappointing one too given how much I enjoyed the first two Total Warhammer games. Warhammer 3 released as a buggy, disjointed mess where basic game mechanics such as unit movement had been changed for no good reason and minor settlement battles had gone from tedious, to downright insufferable. (This is a big problem because the AI loves to hide behind its walls and so 95% of the battles you fight in a Total Warhammer game are minor settlement battles.) The thing that I could not get over was loading up my first battle and sending in my daemon prince and his horde of gribblies to dice some unfortunate Empire soldiers… only for the two sides to not actually engage and instead just rub themselves against one another in a mildly unsettling fashion. I couldn’t believe I’d paid nearly fifty quid for yet another game that was broken to the point that it fundamentally didn’t work. I understand that they’ve spent time patching the game so that it’s almost playable now, but since the Total Warhammer team has now succumbed to the same inept project management that broke so many of their other titles Creative Assembly have lost me as a customer unless they do, like, Fall of the Samurai 2 or something.

Tactics Ogre Reborn

I’m sure Tactics Ogre was hot shit in 1995, but the problem with releasing a remaster of a 27 year old game is that the tactical strategy genre hasn’t exactly been dormant in that time and everyone else has taken the best of what it did and improved upon it dramatically. Playing Tactics Ogre in 2022, it just feels way too basic. There’s a massively overengineered class and equipment system that you’ll never understand without spending hours reading a guide, but then when you get into an actual fight you discover that its combat mechanics are laughably simple by comparison: spend turn after turn moving your ponderously slow troops into position, and then when they finally get into melee range you just hit the enemy until they die, remembering to heal as appropriate. There’s no zones of control so the enemy can (for which you can read “will”) just run past your melee line to engage your mages and healers in the back. What little challenge the game has arises from the fact that the enemy troops will always start in a massively favourable position compared to yours — a favourite trick the game has is making you climb a mountain for ten turns while their archers take potshots at you — and I simply don’t have the patience for that any more. I think the reason Tactics Ogre is fondly remembered is because it’s one of the first examples of real branching narrative in a game, but coming to it in 2022 it just reads like somebody trying to do Game of Thrones a year before the first book came out — this is not particularly Tactics Ogre’s fault, but I’m also extremely tired of this kind of gratuitously dark fantasy, and so I dropped Tactics Ogre shortly after it asked me to commit my first massacre.

Serious Sam 4

When I think Serious Sam, I think “backpedalling away from hordes of enemies in gorgeous environments while I blast them with a selection of extremely large guns”. It’s a simple concept but one which Serious Sam did extremely well. It does not need a large supporting cast of tedious characters who have models and animations straight out of one of those increasingly numerous 3D porn games infesting Steam. It does not need every mission to start and end with a five minute cutscene where these Blender models exchange the most tedious and cringeworthy dialogue I’ve experienced since the “authentic” CIA operator chatter from Ghost Recon: Wildlands. It does not need incredibly simplistic and bland level layouts consisting of a series of boxes with scenery that’s mostly copy-pasted in from Serious Sam 3, and it does not need the level designers to try and outwit the player by constantly spawning things behind them instead of in front of them, and it absolutely, definitely, does not need a reload button. And yet Serious Sam 4 chose to include all of these things, and packaged them up in an engine with terrible performance and which has the longest loading times I’ve seen outside of a Frostbite game. I was secretly quite glad when I was halfway through the story and the Game Pass app decided to corrupt the game install, presenting me with the choice of either redownloading all 50 gigabytes of it so that I could continue, or doing literally anything else with my time.

Guardians of the Galaxy

I honestly don’t know what I was expecting. Guardians of the Galaxy had not one, but two powerful curses laid upon it before it even released: it’s a videogame trying to leverage the hyper-popular MCU, nearly all of which have crashed and burned unless they happened to star somebody whose name ended with iderman; and it’s been developed by serial videogame criminals Eidos Montreal, who have both Thief 2014 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider on their rap sheet. I did see several people referring to it as a potential GOTY 2021 in spite of this, so when it turned up on Game Pass I duly downloaded and played through it just to see what they were talking about — only to discover that Guardians of the Galaxy is exactly what I thought it would be: a painfully generic action game straight out of 2009, that thinks it can get away with stringing 15 consecutive combat encounters against the same three types of enemy together as long as it bookends them with some cutscenes and funny writing. I laughed despairingly when I got to the final “boss” and it was just a series of the same combat encounters I’d been fighting all game; Guardians is so creatively bankrupt that it resurrects instant-death quicktime events, for god’s sake, something I thought — I hoped — I’d seen the last of a decade ago. It does avoid the “We’ve captured their stunt doubles!” feeling I got when playing Avengers, but that’s about the only positive thing I’ll say about it. Outside of its cutscenes Guardians of the Galaxy is one of the most boring and repetitive games I’ve had the misfortune to play in recent years, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

The Great Ace Attorney

I have quite a high opinion of the original Phoenix Wright trilogy of visual novels. Said high opinion is based in part on never having replayed them since I went through them the first time in 2006, as I suspect they’d drive me up the wall if I went back to them today. This suspicion was borne out by my experience with The Great Ace Attorney, which is a step-for-step retread of the first Phoenix Wright game except set a full century earlier. The main character is a clone of Phoenix (I think he’s supposed to be his ancestor) and the other Phoenix Wright character archetypes all here — the worldly and assured mentor lawyer who helps you through the first case before dying in the second one, the prickly-yet-honourable nemesis prosecutor, and the young female assistant who is mostly there to stretch out the game’s length by recapping at great length events that happened only five minutes ago in-game. This was a winning combination 15 years ago so I did at least get on better with GAA than I did the execrable Apollo Justice, but my god, I cannot believe I ever had the patience to scroll through this much text one. line. at a time. I read really really fast and was paging through each line pretty much as quickly as I could make it render, and it still took me 18 hours to get through all five cases; given that the game had completely exhausted my goodwill by the start of case number four thanks to its insistence on repeating every description of every event in the game three or four times for the particularly hard-of-thinking, it’s hardly surprising that I came away from Great Ace Attorney with a profoundly unfavourable opinion of it. Perhaps it works better if you play it on a 3DS and chip away at it a bit at a time over the course of a month on your daily commute, but it’s definitely not a game to be played in large chunks on a PC.

The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve

I actually liked this a little better than the first game, but I’m sticking it down here because they’re essentially two halves of one bigger game. This fact is painfully obvious when you consider how much Resolve recycles from GAA; there is a grand total of one new character and one new scene in the first two cases of Resolve, with everything else being a re-use of something from game 1. As I was already heartily sick of a lot of these characters (and their sodding animations, which are repeated over and over again to the point where the shameless padding of the game’s running time can no longer be denied) this did not do a great deal to endear Resolve to me and ensured that it felt even slower than GAA despite being a couple of hours shorter. However the quality upticked sharply for the last two cases; this is mostly because they’re yet another direct retread of two cases from the original Phoenix Wright trilogy, but since the only thing GAA had offered to really hook me up until this point was its unexpectedly good parody of Sherlock Holmes I wasn’t about to complain. I still don’t know why people are so positive about the Great Ace Attorney duology, though. Yes, they’re a better experience than Apollo Justice, but so is root canal.

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The post 2022 Games Roundup appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Oh, excuse me, Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Not that the game will ever let you forget it.

I’m torn over Midnight Suns. My opinion of Firaxis as a developer has sunk deeper and deeper into the Mariana Trench over the last six years, and there was absolutely nothing about the pre-release footage that excited me. Everyone’s doing card games now since Slay the Spire blew the doors off of the genre, and the Midnight Suns take on it looked like a tremendous dumbing-down of XCOM with some of the most generic art direction on the planet. Not only that, but while the MCU has reshaped entertainment in its image (by which I mean almost every single film, television series and video game made today will involve insufferably quippy and quirky characters having cartoon battles over extremely shallow and poorly-defined stakes), Midnight Suns already had the stink of failure on it thanks to Square Enix’s The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy¹ bombing; I’m as surprised as anyone, but people just don’t seem to care about specifically Marvel-licensed videogames anywhere near as much as they do cinema and television.

So my expectations for it were rock-bottom, and that may have actually helped Midnight Suns; it didn’t need to do all that much to impress me, and it succeeded. But the more I played it, the more annoyed I found myself becoming — and not for the reasons you might expect, either. In spite of those low expectations I was surprised to discover there’s a very good game lurking somewhere inside of Midnight Suns; say what you like about the Civilization designers, but XCOM lead Jake Solomon at least still knows what he’s doing. The big problem with it, though, is that Midnight Suns hasn’t just got the Marvel license, it’s actually being written by people who are still fully in the tank for both the MCU (a series I checked out of a mere 11 years and 22 movies in) and Bioware RPGs, and who consequently are far more concerned with making me watch their Marvel action figures kiss than they are actually letting me play the damn thing.

Let’s get the number one misapprehension you might have about Midnight Suns out of the way first: despite looking a hell of a lot like the six year-old tactical strategy game XCOM 2, to the point where I had to double-check a few of my screenshots from 2016 to make sure that Midnight Suns hadn’t just straight up recycled some of the assets, in terms of gameplay Midnight Suns actually has very little to do with it. This is a deckbuilding card game like Slay the Spire or Monster Train, and aside from some vestigial flourishes that Midnight Suns inherits from the Alien Rulers DLC I can’t see all that much of XCOM in here. If you have any doubts about that statement, just go looking for the unsteady foundation that XCOM’s gameplay is built on: its famous RNG. There isn’t any in Midnight Suns — well, okay, there’s some in that you’re drawing cards from a deck, but once the cards are drawn they have static, predictable effects that are the same every time. This shifts the focus from XCOM’s risk management to Slay the Spire’s turn sequencing and damage calculus: given a particular hand of cards, what’s the right order to play them in to maximise the number of enemies killed that turn?

And in order to keep that shift in focus, Midnight Suns eliminates practically every other tactical consideration that you might have expected it to inherit from XCOM. Abilities and attacks can be used at any range, even on enemies on the other side of the map — because the maps are now so small that they comfortably fit within the bounds of a single screen. Movement ranges are similarly infinite, but you only get one pure Move action per turn — as in, you can move one hero, one time, to a new location of your choosing. Attacks will cause heroes to reposition themselves, either into melee range of the target for melee attacks or about ten foot away from it for ranged attacks, but this happens automatically and you have no control over where exactly your hero ends up. Positioning is a consideration for attacks with knockback and area effects, as well as attacks using environmental objects, but because your ability to alter that positioning is so limited it’s rare that it’ll be a major one; the most you’ll do is use your one Move to get a hero into a good position for a nice juicy push attack, and then for everything else you just do the best you can with the positioning that you have. You could quite easily convert Midnight Suns to a 2D game like… well, like Slay the Spire, and it’d play essentially the same way since many of the mechanics that rely on the 3D space have been dropped and it’s mostly just an unusually fancy wrapper for the card game.

How does that card game play, though? You can take three heroes into every fight; each hero has a deck of eight cards that you select beforehand, and all heroes’ cards are shuffled together to form your draw deck for that fight. At the start of your turn you draw up to six cards, and you also start the turn with three Card Plays, which are exactly what they sound like: playing a card will consume a Card Play, and when you hit zero Card Plays you can’t play any more cards until the next turn. The reason they’re a resource rather than a hard limit of three card plays per turn, though, is because there are cards in the game that can refund Card Plays if used in the right context. Midnight Suns uses a keyword-based system for its card mechanics (think Hearthstone or Magic), and cards with the “Quick” keyword will consume a Card Play when you play them, but if that card ability kills an opponent then you get the Card Play back. The catch is that Quick abilities tend to also be fairly low damage, so you’ll need to weaken enemies first and then use Quick attacks to finish them off. There are other cards that apply a debuff called Marked to targeted enemies, and if those enemies are killed by any subsequent card attack then you’ll also get the Card Play back; using these refund keywords to extend your turn is a big part of Midnight Suns, as it’s the best way for you to build up enough Heroism to deploy your really big guns.

If you’ve played a deckbuilding card game before then Heroism will look very familiar, since it’s your standard build/spend resource albeit somewhat simplified compared to the competition. You’ll notice that your heaviest-hitting cards all have a big orange number in the top left hand corner of the card; this is the Heroism cost required to play them, and the card will be greyed out and non-interactive if you don’t have enough Heroism banked to do it. The cards that don’t have a Heroism cost in the top left corner instead have a smaller orange number in the bottom left; this is the amount of Heroism you’ll gain by playing that card. Heroism persists between turns so it’s possible to spend one turn playing skills and basic attacks to build up your Heroism and then blow it all on Heroic abilities on the following turn, but it’s also perfectly possible to build and spend all in the same turn, especially if you’re properly leveraging abilities with Quick/Marked and card draw. And if you have a lot of Heroism but no Heroic cards in your hand, then you can burn some of it off by executing an environmental attack; there’s a bunch of environmental objects scattered across every map, and you can spend Heroism to kick crates into clusters of enemies or drop street lamps on their heads. Environmental attacks only do average damage, but the great advantage of them is that they don’t cost a Card Play to do and so are essentially “free” damage.

Midnight Suns does retain some tactical strategy trappings that are more than superficial, but it’s pretty telling that they look more like Into the Breach² than they do XCOM. Once you hit the “End Turn” button it’s the enemy’s turn, and they don’t bother with cards; instead, each enemy will attack your heroes once. You’re not told precisely how much damage the attacks will do, but you are told which hero each enemy is targeting and whether the incoming attack will be normal or heavy — this lets you prioritise targets on your turn to try and kill the heaviest hitters, or else use Taunt abilities to redirect incoming attacks away from wounded heroes. Some enemies do have additional abilities that they’ll execute after an attack, like deploying a big shield to protect the mission objective, but that’s a problem that you can deal with on your next turn; in general Midnight Suns is pretty good at flagging up the things you’ll need to care about on the enemy turn and letting you plan around them. Midnight Suns has the standard Firaxis-grade UI (that is to say, it’s absolutely terrible)  but it does at least adequately display how much of the enemy health bar your own attacks are going to knock off, and whether a given attack will kill them or not. When you use a Knockback ability the game will show you exactly where the enemies are going to end up, and in fact one of the big things that kept me playing was fine-tuning Knockback trajectories to cause as much damage as possible by throwing enemies into exploding barrels, electrical generators or other enemies. Again, this is a game about planning, not risk management, and Midnight Suns is at least smart enough to have restructured its combat layer around this core conceptual change.

The last thing to say about the combat in Midnight Suns — and probably the game’s most unexpected success given how disastrous the rest of the theming is — is that it does a very good job of making each hero’s card abilities tie into their thing. Captain Marvel is a walking tank who shrugs off everything thrown at her while obliterating enemies with her Photon Beam attack. Spiderman gets cards that grant additional moves and free environmental attacks, so he’s constantly flipping around the map pulling down cranes onto groups of enemies and jump-kicking off of platforms. Magik is a mutant who can summon portals, and every single one of her attacks is about spawning one end of a portal next to an environmental hazard and then punting an unfortunate enemy through the other end like she’s playing interdimensional golf. There are some heroes who are weaker than others (Ghost Rider’s defining thing is that he is fucking useless), but they all feel very distinct and well-themed in how they play, which is very impressive considering there’s 12 of them you can recruit to your team. That also goes for their look and feel; Midnight Suns is not exactly a good-looking game (in fact it might actually be uglier than the six year-old XCOM 2), but every hero has unique animations for every card ability and environmental attack that lend a lot to their character when they’re in the middle of a scrap.

Really, I was very pleasantly surprised at how good Midnight Suns’ combat was. It doesn’t have the depth of Slay the Spire, but it doesn’t need it; this is a combat system designed to provide the player with short and snappy combat problems that, for the most part, last no longer than 10 minutes, and it mostly succeeds in this. The different hero abilities, combinations and the distinctiveness of each hero also helps a great deal in staving off the battlescape fatigue that inevitably crept into both iterations of the new XCOM, and I think the combat system is potentially a very strong foundation for a game, just so long as it’s embedded within a strategy layer (or metagame) that’s had the same amount of thought put into it.

Unfortunately for Midnight Suns it seems that the people who designed the metagame were not able to remain grounded the in the same way that the people who designed the combat layer were³, and instead spent the vast, vast majority of their time geeking out over the fact that they got to play with their favourite Marvel characters. When I started the download for Midnight Suns I was shocked to see that it was 56 gigabytes; that is a chunky install size given that it’s not exactly graphically cutting edge, and I immediately had flashbacks to Age of Empires 4 being almost 100 gigabytes not because it was a particularly huge or expansive game, but because it included multiple hours of HD drone footage of real-life castles. These fears were unfortunately well-founded, because in the first two and a half hours of Midnight Suns the amount of actual gameplay I experienced consisted of the tutorial and two story missions, which took me maybe forty minutes. The rest of the time was spent in cutscenes — not necessarily cutscenes to explain the story, mind you, but cutscenes to introduce the vast, vast number of ways that Midnight Suns has to socialise with your superheroes and dress them up in some truly hideous outfits.

The most offensive thing about this is that the actual plot of Midnight Suns is some of the most disposable videogame trash garbage that I’ve seen in a while. Hydra defrost a big baddie called Lilith who looks like a palette swap of one of the Chosen from XCOM expansion War of the Chosen, and then we’re immediately shunted to Tony Stark and Doctor Strange trying to get a piece of paper off of Ghost Rider I, and then they teleport to Doctor Strange’s mansion where Lilith attacks for reasons that I don’t think are ever really explained, and then Doctor Strange mumbles something about a prophecy and teleports again to a place called the Abbey where they bring the player character — a personality black hole called The Hunter — out of suspended animation to fight Lilith. At no point is it explained why Lilith is so bad or why the Avengers are so scared of her or why, exactly, they need this Original Character Do Not Steal in order to defeat her. Perhaps this was all laid out in a comic at some point, but I doubt it. If Midnight Suns had spent a bit more of its voluminous cutscene time establishing stakes and character motivations I might have… not exactly liked it, but I would have at least accepted them as a valid part of the game.

Instead the vast bulk of these cutscenes are spent on all of the various activities you can engage with around the Abbey, which is your base of operations. There’s the Forge, where Doctor Strange and Tony Stark use a fusion of magic and technology and an imprisoned Babylonian demon to… unlock your card packs. There’s the Training Yard, which Blade does his best to big up but which is literally just a menu where you can spend money to give individual heroes temporary buffs as well as fuse your cards together for upgrades. There’s the CENTRAL computer, where you can give Captain Marvel intel boxes so that you can send heroes on daily missions where they bring back a card. Because all of these things can only be used once per day we’re already getting to that point in every Bioware RPG where you have to run down an itinerary every time you go back to base in case you accidentally miss one – but wait, there’s more! You’re additionally introduced to, in quick succession:

• Superlink, which is billed as “social media for heroes” and essentially functions as the game’s email system. If you want to see Nico from Runaways complain because Tony Stark broke the coffee machine, this is where to go.
• Hangouts. Every 3-4 missions you’ll get the opportunity to have a Hangout with one hero. This is a disposable conversation about precisely sod-all of relevance, and which functions solely to boost your Friendship meter with that hero.
• Havens, special points around the Abbey where you can bring a hero to, uh, paint with them? Or go fishing? I don’t even understand what the hell we’re doing here, but this gives you a big Friendship boost.
• Compliments. I forget how you get these actually, and the game never explains why there’s such a limited supply of them — although I can see The Hunter being so awkward that he has to write them down in advance — but you can Push F To Compliment for another Friendship boost.
• Clubs. The world is facing an apocalyptic (if extremely poorly-defined) threat, and Blade wants to start a book club. There are a few of these, and completing a club event gives you a Friendship boost with everyone who attended.
• Hero Requests. “The life of a hero is complicated”, says the blurb for these, “and sometimes they could use your advice.” Which amounts to them giving you missions where you have to buy them a new hat in exchange for — you guessed it — a Friendship boost.

Midnight Suns spends a staggering amount of time and effort on these events — and the worst thing about them is that even if you do not give the tiniest iota of a shit about asking Blade for help preparing for Magik’s birthday party, you still can’t afford to ignore the Friendship meters because improving a hero’s Friendship upgrades their combo abilities and then eventually unlocks their ultimate ability when it’s maxed out. This means that every time you come back after a mission you need to do your Friendship chores, and then in the morning unlock your card packs and do your training and intel missions. It is totally obnoxious, and totally exhausting.

This is the crux of my problem with Midnight Suns, then: Firaxis’ designers have come up with a good, if not great, combat system with a pretty tight 10-15 minute loop — and then bogged it down in a metagame where you have to do at least an equivalent amount of tedious bullshit back at the Abbey before you can start the next one. And that’s if you don’t get sideswiped by a story cutscene, which are some of the longest I’ve experienced outside of Final Fantasy 14 and where your choices are limited to either gritting your teeth and sitting through it (there’s no dialogue skipping), or just skipping the entire thing and being totally clueless as to what is going on.  The quality of the writing is truly dire; every single hero acts like a hormonal teen that takes turns holding the idiot ball, everyone keeps pointless secrets from one another so that there can be shocking revelations at the end of the story (spoiler: said revelations are not shocking, or particularly revelations seeing as how I’d figured them out thirty hours earlier), and in fact I think Midnight Suns would have worked far better as a Buffy the Vampire Slayer game since the tone (if not the quality) of the writing is very similar and it would at least explain why everyone spends the entire game living in a magical dormitory.

And the game spends hours on this. In fact I can extrapolate from the number of missions I did during the campaign; if we generously say that each mission took an average of 20 minutes (some story missions are longer, and I did dabble in a few of the combat puzzles to be found around the Abbey) then 63 missions times twenty minutes is just under 21 hours. Steam says my total playtime for Midnight Suns is 41 hours, meaning I spent twenty hours in cutscenes, or conversations, or pissing about in the Abbey gathering herbs for Magik. Again, Final Fantasy 14 is one of my favourite games so I have a high tolerance for fetch quest-tier gameplay leading to extremely long cutscenes just so long as the cutscenes are good, but Midnight Suns spends far more time trying to make funny jokes than it does trying to tell a good story and since I counted exactly one good joke in the entire game it was almost entirely a wasted effort.

(And this is all without getting into the entire concept of the Hunter, who is one of the most laughable attempts at a “cool” character I’ve ever seen. You can tell they’re cool because they use two swords and magic and all of the big heroes have heard of them and use words like “legendary” to refer to them and say how cool and awesome they are in nearly every interaction. It is good that the game has told me they are so cool, because otherwise I might think that they were a total fucking charisma vacuum whose single defining character trait is that they are a knockoff of the Groosalug from Angel — again, more Whedon influence showing through on the writing here.)

There’s a lot more in Midnight Suns that I haven’t unpacked, both good and bad, In the good column I did like some of the Metroid-esque exploration of the Abbey grounds, shallow though it might have been, and in the bad column are the mission rewards you get for punching Hydra goons into the sun, which primarily consist of a currency called Gloss that is used solely to buy cosmetics, and further in the bad column is that due to story reasons you don’t get access to your full character roster until about three hours before the end of the game and so there are two heroes who basically never get used. Ultimately I don’t want to go to the effort, though; I think I’ve made my point, which is that Midnight Suns is a very appropriate release for 2022, the year of otherwise-good games that are sabotaged by their own developers’ insistence that their terrible videogame story is so important that it needs to be experienced by the player⁴ at the expense of actually being able to play the bloody thing. It’s a better game than I was expecting, but since I was expecting absolutely nothing that’s not exactly saying much.

The post Thoughts: Midnight Suns appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Josh Sawyer is the Creative Director at Obsidian, and for about ten years now I’ve been calling him “the most cursed man in the videogames industry”. This is because Josh Sawyer came to Obsidian through Black Isle, and so has his name attached to things like the cancelled Van Buren prototype of Fallout 3 — no, not the soulless Bethesda one from 2008, the one where all we ever saw of it was a main menu mockup — and Icewind Dale 2, which was mostly notable for sinking without a trace thanks to coming out two months after Neverwinter Nights. His bad luck streak continued at Obsidian: designer on Alpha Protocol, one of the most criminally overlooked games of the last twenty years; director and lead designer on Fallout New Vegas, which was most definitely not overlooked but which infamously led to Obsidian getting screwed out of a bonus payment it would have received had it achieved an overall Metacritic score of 85 (it ended up with 84); and then director on Pillars of Eternity and Pillars of Eternity 2, the latter of which is a genuinely great CRPG but if you want to know how it did commercially you just have to look for Pillars of Eternity 3. Or the lack of it, anyway.

This is why Josh Sawyer is cursed: nearly every single game he has been involved with has been an absolute banger of an RPG, and nearly every single one of them has been considered a commercial failure (or got cancelled). After Pillars 2 flopped I think I would have forgiven him for just stepping back into his general Creative Director role for all of Obsidian¹ in between posting reviews of shower UX design on Twitter. But Josh Sawyer is made of sterner stuff than I am, and has instead taken the other road: if every game he makes is doomed to be a commercial failure, then he might as well just make the games he wants to make, commercial viability be damned². And this is how we’ve ended up with Pentiment, a game with extremely limited commercial appeal for something published by Microsoft, but which is one of the most interesting and engaging games I’ve played this year precisely because of that fact.

What is Pentiment? It looks like a point and click adventure game, and it is, technically, in that it’s 2D and you point and click on the screen to get your character to walk there and interact with things. But there are no puzzles in Pentiment — at least, not the classic style of point-and-click puzzle where you have to OPEN DOOR and then USE MONKEY ON PUMP³. You don’t even have an inventory in Pentiment; 90% of your activity is just walking around talking to people, and the bits that aren’t are either scripted interludes that are essentially barely-interactive cutscenes, or else simple one-off minigames where you spin wool or put a broken pot back together. Pentiment is almost entirely driven by its narrative, and figuring out what you have to do to progress that narrative is not difficult.  Figuring out how you’re going to progress it — deciding which of the many strands of investigation that the game presents you with you’re going to spend your limited time to follow up — that is the hard part,

So, what is Pentiment’s narrative about? The game casts you as Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist in 16th century Bavaria. Andreas is staying in the small town of Tassing while working on a commission for the monks of Tassing abbey, and befriends the Baron Rothvogel one morning on his way to work, who is also travelling to the abbey to discuss his own commission with the abbot there. Well, I say “Rothvogel” but this guy might as well be called Baron Deadmeat because it’s quickly established that basically everyone in Tassing hates his guts (including the monks) and so it’s no surprise when he turns up dead in the abbey chapter house. Unfortunately for Andreas his monk mentor at the abbey is found standing over the corpse and is the prime suspect for the killing, and so in order to clear his mentor’s name Andreas sets about investigating the murder to try and identify the true culprit.

There’s a number of very easy comparisons I could draw here, nearly all of which would have some truth to them. Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, for one, and Ellis Peters’ Cadfael series, for another; from videogames the way Pentiment handles choice and consequences (not to mention its focus on superb art) reminds me a lot of the better bits of the Banner Saga series⁴. The elephant in the room, though, and the comparison that most people are going to reach for first, is another heavily narrative-focused game based around solving a murder: 2019’s Disco Elysium. And there are some striking similarities between the two, although the murder part is the least interesting one. Both Disco Elysium and Pentiment are fascinated with communities — the people in them, and the stories behind them — to a degree not often seen in videogames, which usually only care about people to the extent that they need a vaguely person-shaped thing to crouch behind cover so that the player can shoot them in the head.  But where Disco Elysium’s study of communities was intended to back some whip-smart commentary about politics and social systems, Pentiment’s focus is a little different: as you’d expect, this historical adventure game is all about the history of a community — how it is made, how it is remembered, and how it is recorded.

To achieve this Pentiment splits itself into three acts, with lengthy, years-long intervals between each one. The murder of the Baron takes up the first act as Andreas familiarises himself with Tassing and its inhabitants in the course of his investigation. The options you are given to shape a conversation are not as broad as in Disco Elysium, with fewer choices available (it’s extremely rare that you’ll have more than three to choose from), no skill checks, and just a few passive background abilities like “being good at sums” that occasionally provide special options — and which often don’t give you a positive outcome if you pick them. However the conversations themselves are much lengthier, and often take place over some communal activity; eating meals with the various families in Tassing is a big deal during the first two acts of the game, and Pentiment cuts to a close-up of the foodstuffs on offer while the participants chat in a more conversational manner than we usually see in adventure games. This serves two purposes, both allowing Andreas (and the player) to get to know the people and their place in the community in a much more natural way than the usual approach of working your way down a list of bullet points, while also providing a little bit of an insight into what people ate during the 16th century and the disparity between the haves and have-nots. If it’s not conversations that take place over shared meals then it’s neat little minigames like spinning wool, or cutting Christmas cookies. Pentiment is very big on showing as well as telling like this, giving you lots of little contextual details about the period at the same time as the information required to “solve” the murder. And not only that, but by participating in these communal activities in the course of his information-gathering Andreas becomes accepted by Tassing’s community in a way that perpetual outsider Harry du Bois never was in Disco Elysium.

And that community connection is something that lends the transition between acts even more weight. Andreas is presented with several major suspects for the Baron’s murder and has only a few days to investigate; he can’t possibly run down all of his leads in the time available, and so you have to pick which ones you think are the most promising/likely and prioritise those. When the time is up you’ll have to make a choice as to who to point the finger at, and if you have what looks like a reasonably good case justice will be meted out swiftly — and as befits the 16th century, it is harsh, with a brutal depiction that’s quite at odds with the relatively friendly town life you’ve been experiencing up until that point. It’s the sort of thing that makes you question if you really made the right decision, in fact; one thing Pentiment does that I’m sure will rub some people up the wrong way is purposely not tell the player who actually killed the Baron, and instead leave it up to them to decide what the truth was. It did bug me somewhat that I didn’t get the catharsis of knowing one way or the other, but the game does successfully make the point that ultimately it doesn’t matter who did it, only that you understand enough about Tassing’s history (as well as a lot of the background detail of 16th century European culture) to understand why they might have been driven to it. The case is closed, if not solved, and Andreas moves on with his life.

…only to return several years later to a Tassing that’s substantially different, both because of his actions in the first act, and because of the simple passage of time. Some of the children he encountered on his first visit have grown into young teenagers, but there are notable absences thanks to the infant mortality rate in early modern Europe and the families that he met before are scarred by those losses. They’re happy to see Andreas again, but this time the connection between himself and the villagers is strained as his affluence stands in stark contrast to their worsening fortunes; the underlying tensions between the community of Tassing and the monks of the abbey, always visible in the first act, are in danger of turning violent.  But most interesting of all are their perceptions of the events of seven years ago — Andreas may have been able to piece together some of the backstory and whichever suspect he fingered has largely been accepted as the culprit, but the villagers haven’t had the benefit of experiencing his investigation and so everyone remembers the Baron’s murder slightly differently, and always through the lens of how it affected their own lives.

This is the question that Pentiment keeps returning to again and again: the consequences of Andreas’s actions have long since passed into history and are talked about quite naturally as part of that history – but whose version is the “true” one? Andreas’s is true to him, but that doesn’t invalidate anyone else’s experience, and a big part of history is taking these disparate accounts of the same event and deciding how to represent them — what your version of the truth is. That truth — that history — is ultimately mutable and lies somewhat in the eye of the beholder is the core theme of Pentiment, reflected in several different strands of the narrative. You’ve got the surface level of the murder investigation, where you’re not told the truth about the Baron’s murder and have to make your own mind up; you’ve got the differing recollections and opinions of Tassing’s inhabitants years after the event; and then Pentiment also delves into Tassing’s much more ancient history, with the legends around the saint whose relics are stored at the abbey having been told and retold so many times by successive settlements and cultures that figuring out where they all started, and what the true story of the saint is, is an exercise in futility.

This is one half of why Pentiment has resonated so deeply with me. If it were just a historical murder mystery with well-written and well-realised characters then it’d still be a good game, but it’d be one that I just played and enjoyed and then moved on from, instead of still thinking about it two weeks after I played it. But that’s not enough for Pentiment; it wants to explore the nature of history itself, and while it hasn’t quite reached the same level of rewiring my brain as Disco Elysium did, it has succeeded in making me think about its narrative on a much deeper level than I did for other contemporaries such as Citizen Sleeper.

Ah, but even if you find yourself disengaged from these overarching themes that Pentiment presents you with, then there are still some very good reasons to stick around. It’s worth playing through just to see all of the visual flourishes, as Pentiment is an astonishingly pretty game. The style is based on medieval illustrations of the sort that Andreas is working on in the abbey scriptorium, except with concessions made to consistency and legibility. It’s not so much that the game looks like one of these illustrations come to life, since it’s not afraid to depart from that style in places (mostly in the landscapes), but that there’s little details from them that constantly jump out at you as you’re playing, like the way the women hold their hands or the curve on the abbot’s cassock or the pigs and sheep, which are of that particular “artist had a pig described to them once but has never actually seen one” style of the time. The relationship is made explicit in several places, such as the fantastic interlude where Andreas appears as a living character inside some of the books that he’s using for reference material for his commission. And there’s other flourishes too, like the clock that tracks time being a dial with some great visual representations of the monastic hours of Matins, Vespers and Compline.

One visual flourish that didn’t land quite so well with me, though, are the fonts. Even here it’s not so much a problem with the concept as it is the execution; the idea is that different classes of character have their dialogue written in fonts specific to that class. (There is no voice acting in Pentiment.) The peasants and townsfolk speak in flowing handwriting, written by a pen, while the monks of the abbey do so in illustrated gothic font of the sort that you’d see in a monastery-produced book of the time, and the printer and his family speak in blocks of printing type which are set inside the dialogue box and then removed to reveal the printed words. It’s very cute, and there’s even a couple of neat tricks like the handwritten stuff having occasional spelling errors in it that gets removed and corrected, and ink splotches appearing around the words when a character is angry or upset, like they’re writing with such emphasis that they’re leaking ink everywhere. I really like the concept and it’s a big part of what makes Pentiment such a joy to look at — unfortunately it also makes it something of a pain in the ass to play, since my reading speed is much much faster than the fastest speed at which I can make all of these fancy writing animations play, and so once the novelty had worn off I mostly just felt frustrated as I had to wait around time and again for dialogue to appear.

That’s just a bump, though, and Pentiment is far from the worst offender for wasting my time with slow dialogue speeds this year. At least Pentiment is trying to do something with it, providing context for the class and status of the people you’re talking to and immersing you a little more deeply into its 16th century world. The general level of historical detail is really quite something; it’s impossible to play Pentiment and not come away from it having learned something new about the period, even for somebody like me who has already done a fair amount of reading around it⁵. Pentiment isn’t concerned with emperors or battles, but in how everyday people lived during this time; the closest it comes to real politics are some conversational mentions of Martin Luther’s tracts and the Swabian peasants’ revolt, and it’s otherwise entirely focused on Tassing.  Religion is a huge part of the townsfolk’s lives, but so is tradition, and there are times when Christianity takes a back seat to lightly-rebranded pagan festivals that feel like they’re straight out of The Wicker Man. (Although nobody gets sacrificed.)  The religious life of the monks and nuns at the abbey is explored thoroughly, as is the feudal relationship between the abbey and the town, and even small details about the town can be revealing — Andreas observes that the miller is rich enough to have glass windows installed in his house, which is (again) both a good piece of historical context (that glass windows are extremely rare outside of the cities) and a potentially important clue for his investigation. And the really cool thing about Pentiment is that it never feels like you’re sitting through a lecture about life in the Holy Roman Empire; all of this information is relayed to you quite naturally through exploration, and through conversations. Playing the game, in other words. I’ve not seen a game do stealth history lessons this well since Microprose died off⁶.

If Pentiment does have one non-trivial flaw, it lies in its replayability. That Pentiment is a game designed to be replayed is unarguable, as the first act of the game has five possible outcomes and the second act has three, and you can’t see all of them (and their consequences for subsequent acts) on one playthrough. I will probably replay Pentiment at some point, as I did very much enjoy its narrative and its rich world. However, I was put off from the idea of an immediate replay by two things. One is the dialogue animation time, which I was already struggling with at the end of my first playthrough but which was rendered 100x more obnoxious when I already knew what people were going to say; the game needs a little time to breathe, and for me to forget some of the details, before I can deal with that again. The other problem is a structural change in the way the third act of Pentiment is put together, as it removes the time limit that’s been forcing you to make difficult decisions up until that point, and in fact there’s barely any decisions to make at all; instead you just run down all of the hanging investigation threads one after another, and then when they’re all finished the game is over. While that’s still reasonably engaging as a narrative it’s much less interesting to me as a game, and I feel like it would be difficult for me to get through that again on a replay no matter how long I left it.

Even if I do only ever get the one full playthrough out of Pentiment, though, I think it was still an incredibly worthwhile experience. It helps that it’s a game that overlaps solidly with some of my core interests, but balanced against that is a mechanical structure that would feel alarmingly light if it weren’t backed up by such excellent writing and presentation. The team that worked on Pentiment appears to be tiny even by the AA standards of Obsidian, but every single one of them hit it out of the park here; this weird adventure game about an artist solving murders in the Holy Roman Empire comes across as a labour of love for everyone involved, not just Josh Sawyer.  Pentiment is a tremendous achievement that I was briefly convinced would be the best game I played this year. It might still be, after I’ve had a little more time to digest it. For now, though, it’s at least top three, and a game I’ll remember for a long, long time no matter where it ends up.

The post Thoughts: Pentiment appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

When you look at it a certain way, the opening 10 minutes of Return to Monkey Island are an incredible meta-joke 30 years in the making. I have spoken at length about my hatred for the theme park ending of Monkey Island 2, which was the last time I touched a Monkey Island game made by Ron Gilbert¹, and various interviews in the run-up to the release of Return to Monkey Island didn’t do anything to shake my impression that Ron Gilbert has theme parks on the brain. This did not bode at all well for Return, and so my heart sank when the very first screen of Return that you see, 10 seconds after clicking that “New Game” button, is this:

Oh, no. If you’re not familiar with this screen, it’s a very direct and literal continuation from that much-loathed ending to Monkey Island 2. You’re controlling a miniature version of Guybrush as he runs around a theme park with his brother Chuckie, and Gilbert opens the game with some gross-out humour straight out of an Adult Swim animated show as you go into a toilet to look for money so that you can buy snacks. This is followed up by an actually-not-that-bad tutorial as the game teaches you how an adventure game works (if you’d somehow forgotten), but those first ten minutes looked almost exactly like the kind of game I was afraid Ron Gilbert² would make: that he wouldn’t be able to let go of the past, and that he’d just repeat his worst excesses from a series that was somehow already feeling pretty tired just one sequel in.

But Return is smarter than that. It’s so smart, in fact, that I can only see the decision to open the game with the ending from Monkey Island 2 as a deliberate fake-out aimed at forty-year-old Monkey Island series veterans, because it makes no sense otherwise. That goes for most of Return in general; I’ve seen it described as a love letter to the series, but I don’t think that quite captures what Return actually is. It is a game that seems almost exclusively targeted at people who played the original Secret of Monkey Island as kids back in the 90s, and who have since grown up and are now approaching — if not already fully entrenched in — middle age, and who want to revisit the classic adventure game series from their youth. Return delivers on this — but it’s far from a lazy nostalgia trip that simply includes all of the same locations and characters and jokes in a modern 2D point and click adventure game. I mean, it does do all of that, but the context in which it is presented to the player was quite unexpected. To me, anyway.

After spending the first ten minutes yanking my chain, Return to Monkey Island settled into a much more familiar routine. It’s an adventure game split into five parts, and once again stars Guybrush Threepwood as he makes yet another attempt to discover The Secret of Monkey Island. He starts the game in exactly the same place as he did Secret: on Melee Island, talking to the lookout on the hill in front of the big fire. But something’s very different this time around: this is a visibly older Guybrush, sporting a grey fuzz of stubble on the lower half of his face and some highlighting above his mouth that hints at laugh lines. He sounds older too, thanks to voice actor Dominic Armato also having aged along with Guybrush. Just like in Secret the first task he gets is to go to the SCUMM bar and talk to the pirate leaders, but when he gets there he’s in for a shock: the grizzled old pirate leaders from Secret have been forced out and replaced by a younger set of highly-qualified modern professionals who think he’s a joke, and who aren’t interested in the Secret at all beyond its monetary value. There are a couple of other leftovers from the old SCUMM bar like Cobb (AKA Mr “Ask Me About LOOM”) and the cook, who both bemoan the changing times but feel like they have no other choice but to go along with them.

Once you get out into Melee Island proper it’s a similar story: everything is the same, but different. The locations you can visit are identical to the ones in Secret (although Meathook’s and the sword trainer’s shacks have been removed from the map) but they all show signs of the relentless march of time. The Voodoo Lady’s shop is going out of business. The general store already has. The church is a boarded up derelict. Stan has been arrested for fraud and imprisoned in the jail, and all of his ships have been impounded. Elaine is no longer governor, having been replaced by Carla the Swordmaster. Her old shack is now the Museum of Pirate History, where items from Guybrush’s previous adventures are all treated as relics of a lost world straight out of a storybook, one which no longer exists.

Return has a slightly odd relationship to the other Monkey Island games. There’s a scrapbook accessible from the main menu that gives a three or four sentence description of each of 2, Curse, Escape and Tales, ostensibly for the purposes of catching you up on the story so far, but outside of the intro the only game that actually matters to the plot of Return is Secret. Every other game is ignored beyond the odd scattered reference here and there; in the case of Escape there are large portions of it that are indirectly retconned. Even 2 barely features beyond the intro, Guybrush’s blue jacket,  the returning character of Wally, and a joke about the Kate Capsize puzzle (of all the things to call out…).

And this is important for understanding what Return is, when you get down to it. It is very specifically a revisit of Secret of Monkey Island, and none of the other games — but it is a revisit, not a retread. The opening act of Return is the old saying about how you can never go home again, but in the form of a game. The world has moved on, and while Return has a sentimental streak a mile wide and does enjoy bringing back old characters simply for a one-off joke much like any other Monkey Island game would, this sentiment is tinged with a bit of uneasiness, or sadness. Video game protagonists are usually immortal and ageless — Mario would be drawing a pension by now if they weren’t — and the worlds they inhabit are similarly unchanging. If they do age, as the protagonists of series like Uncharted and the Assassin’s Creed Ezio trilogy do, then we at least get to see them do it in regular increments as successive games are released. It’s bittersweet to Return to Monkey Island after a 20 year absence and see every one of those 20 years all hitting at the same time.

(Before I get a bit too sentimental about this myself: some of this is my reading of the subtext of the game and will be coloured by, well, this being my exact experience with a lot of stuff in my life at the moment. However some of it is also outright stated as text by the writers of Return after you finish it, so it’s not entirely my own overactive imagination doing the work here.)

This acknowledgement of the passage of time is one half of what elevates Return above any other modern adventure game I’ve played. I think that if Return did try to just pick things up where they left off it’d be a much more mundane experience — just another Monkey Island game, for all that it’s been a long time since the last one. But it is trying to say something, to be a little more than a funny pirate adventure this time around, and while it occasionally does fall flat on its face I appreciate that it didn’t go for the safe option of just remaking Secret of Monkey Island all over again.

The other half of what makes Return stand out from other modern adventure games is its puzzle design. I have just finished playing through all 13 LucasArts adventures so I’d like to think I have a pretty good handle on what good puzzle design looks like now, and the puzzle design in Return is absolutely outstanding, some of the best I’ve ever seen. Hell, it might actually be the best I’ve ever seen in terms of challenging the player without frustrating them. It helps that it’s the beneficiary of a lot of work other games have done in terms of verbal hints and subtle signposting in object placement and descriptions that nudges you in the right direction; nevertheless, I can’t really think of an instance in Return where the solution to a problem wasn’t at least partly obvious after a few moments of prodding at it. But only partly, since a full solution usually requires visiting multiple areas to get all of the pieces, whether those be inventory items or nuggets of information from other characters, and it’s figuring out how exactly everything fits together that takes time. Part 4 of the game is a particular highlight for this, where the puzzles sprawl across multiple islands and locations and you have three or four puzzle strands to work on simultaneously. Sometimes I did get distracted and go off down a blind alley for up to ten minutes, but once I got the solution I never felt like it was cheap or illogical; the biggest crime Return commits is occasionally not making it obvious that certain characters have gone from a non-interactive to an interactive state, or bringing characters into one act of the game who aren’t relevant until the following act, and it doesn’t do it that often. Remarkably, I think Return is the first adventure game I’ve played that didn’t have a single instance of Adventure Game Logic in it. Not even Secret can say that.

I think this otherwise admirable focus on mostly-logical puzzle solutions does come with a tradeoff, though: Return has a decent sense of humour that fits with the drier tone of the original trilogy, and it did elicit a chuckle from me once or twice, but on the whole it’s not quite as funny as Secret or Curse. I’m not going to castigate it too much for falling short as those are both brilliant games with some very clever jokes buried inside them, and what’s present in Return is perfectly fine, especially since, having just finished Escape, I know that it could have been far, far worse. It’s just that, while the puzzle solutions in Return are logical, they’re also not particularly memorable. There’s nothing here on the level of the drowning puzzle in Secret, or the Game Over puzzle in Curse, and I felt that loss rather more keenly than I probably should have given that I tend to get really frustrated when “funny” puzzle design goes wrong (as with the monkey wrench puzzle in 2).

In terms of look and feel, I think Return falls into the “good, but not great” category. The game’s paper doll visual style was very polarising when it was first revealed and I was one of those who initially had a negative reaction to it, but I also remembered that I’d had the same reaction to Curse’s visuals in 1997 and I now think that it’s the best-looking adventure game ever made, so I resolved not to let Return’s graphical style dissuade me too much — and I was pleasantly surprised. Return’s characters and environments all look good — the redo of Melee Island and the locksmith’s shop are particular standouts — and are only slightly let down by the slightly primitive animations; the characters all look like paper dolls, and they move like them too. The real weak link is the close-ups the game goes for whenever it feels the need to provide the visuals with a bit more detail, as these usually end up achieving exactly the opposite as the game zooms in on Guybrush’s face and it becomes a blurry mess.

Return’s interface is an… interesting attempt to balance the stripped-down controls of modern adventure games with the tooltip humour of Monkey Island; in terms of controls the game only has “LOOK AT” on the left mouse button and “USE/PICK UP” on the right mouse button, but it will always give you a context-sensitive tooltip popup containing a description for the particular action you’re trying to accomplish, and the writers have fun with custom descriptions for a lot of otherwise pointless interactions. Double-click makes Guybrush move at double speed to your cursor location (although there’s no teleport-to-next-area behaviour here) and full stop skips through dialogue lines just as it did in SCUMM – you can even page back through dialogue history if you’ve skipped too much and think you missed something important. And while Return makes the mistake of having a screen-blocking inventory panel just as Curse did, it at least only blocks half of the screen this time instead of all of it, making it reasonably painless to deal with. It’s very pleasant to play, and while I don’t think that the tooltips quite work (I think it’s the font that bugs me most of all) I’m happier that Return attempted to come up with a solution that let it keep them instead of just throwing them away.

The sound, on the other hand, is a bit more hit and miss. I have absolutely no complaints about Return’s voice acting, which is delivered with great energy by a surprisingly high-powered cast who all fully grasp the mythical concept of “comic timing”. It’s the music, of all things, that lets Return down; Monkey Island is a series full of absolutely incredible music, where even the worst game had a soundtrack that would probably make my top 100 (I’ve been listening to Escape’s soundtrack a fair bit over the last week and it’s grown on me), and yet the best thing I can say about Return’s soundtrack is that it is there. It’s mostly a set of low-key orchestral remixes of other Monkey Island themes — Melee Island at night, Woodtick, LeChuck’s theme etc. etc. — but because of this every single remix just feels like an overly watered down version of the original. I can’t think of a single standout track from Return that felt like it had its own identity, and while it does the job of filling dead air and providing an appropriately Monkey Island atmosphere I think this is one area where referencing the past was very much the wrong thing to do.

That aside, though, up until the last ten minutes Return was a game that felt astonishingly free from shortcomings. Nearly every single part of it felt well-thought-out; it looked good, felt good to play, had a decent sense of humour, and the puzzle design had me scratching my head without feeling like it was wasting my time. It helps that it’s been delivered with production values significantly over and above what most of the other developers in the modern adventure game space can deliver; it doesn’t match the comparative highs of LucasArts in their prime, but it blows any recent competition out of the water. (This can’t have been a cheap game to make and, given the economic pressures that eventually did for LucasArts adventure games, I’ll be interested to see if it recoups its budget.) Most importantly of all, it felt like a dramatic return to form for Ron Gilbert; in spite of the opening, the bulk of Return feels like it was made by the guy who came up with Secret rather than the man responsible for the worst parts of Monkey Island 2.

Which made the ending rather more of a punch in the gut than it should have been. I really should have seen it coming, and I think I’d be significantly more okay with it if I had been in any way expecting it, but I’m ashamed to say that, with Return, Ron Gilbert managed to bamboozle me twice.  He fooled me into thinking this was going to be a self-indulgent repeat of his worst excesses, and then he double-fooled me into thinking that actually he’d learned how to moderate himself since Thimbleweed Park – or at least that he had the equivalent of an editor smacking his hand every time he tried to type the words “THEME PARK” into a keyboard. But it turned out there was a third layer to it, and that the entirety of Return is intended to lull the player into a false sense of security so that when the standard Ron Gilbert-brand Bullshit Ending turns up it’s as obnoxiously annoying as it possibly can be. The previous eight hours had been some of the best adventure gaming I’d done in years so, while I’ve had a few days to come to terms with it and am less incandescently angry about it than I was immediately after finishing the game, I still think it’s absolutely tragic that he was allowed to end it this way. I guarantee it’s going to be the most divisive thing about Return, something that will be argued over for years afterwards just like Monkey Island 2’s ending, and I’m really worried that it’ll eclipse the excellent work that had been done up until that point.

For me, I think it does materially diminish the rest of the game — but not by that much; we’re talking about the difference between Return being a top 3 game or a top 5 game this year. It helps that I fall squarely into the target market for it, and it also helps that I played through Secret of Monkey Island relatively recently; if neither of those things were true, then I think I would have enjoyed Return to Monkey Island significantly less than I did. Fortunately they both are, so I had a great time with it. I think I’d put it in third place behind Secret and Curse, but it’s a close third place. That’s not something I ever expected to say when I bought it; Return to Monkey Island handily demonstrates that it’s very possible to make something that can stand alongside the old classics, and sets the standard for modern adventure game developers to follow, just like a Monkey Island game should. Return is a worthy successor to the name, and a great game.

The post Thoughts: Return to Monkey Island appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I must admit to some skepticism when the Microprose trademark got rudely disinterred a few years back and slapped on top of a brand new publishing house. I think very highly of the Microprose of the early ‘90s — to the point where my In Praise Of columns were just the Microprose Nostalgia Hour for a couple of months — and after watching other zombie trademarks shuffle along for years (Atari is the big one, which is currently trying to go big on cryptocurrency) I wasn’t looking forward to the same thing happening to Microprose. To my considerable surprise, though, the new owners have been somewhat smart about this and have kicked off their revived label by publishing… well, pretty much exactly the kind of game the OG Microprose would have been interested in publishing back in the day: a selection of strategy titles that sit halfway between the accessibility of an RTS and a grognardy war sim, which both supply a hefty digital manual (another fine Microprose tradition) and expect you to actually read through the entirety of it in order to learn the game¹. Last year they published Highfleet and Carrier Command 2, which both appeared to be reasonably solid efforts even if they didn’t manage to hook me in for more than a couple of hours. And now this year they’ve published Regiments, which has.

Regiments will look somewhat familiar to long-term readers of this blog: in terms of look, feel and theme it’s a carbon copy of Eugen’s Wargame trilogy, which I very much enjoyed playing between 2012 and 2015. All of these games focus on late 1980s “Cold War gone hot” showdowns between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in eastern Europe, and all of them involve ordering formations of tanks and mechanized infantry around to capture victory points, and all of them blend rather more detail into the gameplay than your typical RTS does — things like unit morale, armour thickness and armour penetration, and ammo supplies are all modelled and have a big effect on how you play the game. Where Regiments starts to differ from Wargame, though, is in its scale. Wargame had you handling brigade or even division-level engagements involving thousands of troops, but — as you might have guessed from the name — Regiments focuses on smaller regiment-sized formations of hundreds.

In gameplay terms, this means you have to control no more than 10-14 units at a time; a unit can be a platoon of four tanks, or four infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) transporting thirty infantrymen inside, or a pair of Shilka self-propelled AA guns, but you can’t control individual tanks or soldiers. Because your forces are comparatively quite small this means you have more time to think about and manage each platoon, but it also means that you have to because swamping your enemies with sheer weight of numbers — as was sometimes possible in Wargame — is no longer an option. You have to maximise the combat effectiveness of every unit that you have in order to win; no longer is that group of outmoded T-64 tanks only good for soaking up anti-tank missile fire so that your actually-good tanks can advance behind them and destroy the enemy. Often the T-64s are all that you’ll have for armoured support, so you have to learn how to use them effectively — and this means properly getting to grips with Regiments’ take on the wargame-lite combat mechanics pioneered by Wargame.

There are many different subtypes and models of unit available to you in Regiments. For example, the West German forces have access to Leopard 1A5s, Leopard 2A1s, and Leopard 2A4s, and having this variety is something that I’m sure will please a certain segment of the Regiments playerbase. Despite this, though, it is not necessary to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of late Cold War military technology to play the game, because the differences between each model of Leopard are statistical only; they all behave the same way in the game. All you need to know to get by is the general unit type; it’s this that’ll dictate how you use it, and then you can just apply a general “higher numbers on the end = better” rule that’ll hold true 95% of the time.  In this case the Leopard is a main battle tank, and so you can use it the same way as you would a T-64 or a Chieftain or an M60, which are also main battle tanks. The actual in-game unit models may look different and the newer variants may be qualitatively better, but the basic capabilities don’t change.

With that in mind, it’s probably best to explain Regiments combat mechanics by explaining what each general unit type does and the niche it occupies on the battlefield, because I can explain the importance of things like terrain, stealth and line-of-sight by proxy as I go through the list:

Infantry. These always come with armoured vehicles of some kind to transport them around the map, but unusually (I think it’s a development limitation) the infantry can never be separated from the transports; when the infantry dismounts they’ll advance and fight with the transports as a single unified group² that can bring more guns to bear on a target but which moves more slowly. The transports can be either APCs, which are completely useless in a fight, or IFVs, which can pack a significant midrange anti-armour punch thanks to their anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs). The infantry themselves have access to ATGMs as well as short-range anti-tank and anti-air missiles that will shred anything that gets too close, but they’re outranged by nearly everything else on the battlefield. Infantry are used either to ambush unsuspecting enemies by hiding them in forests or cities, or to hold victory point locations thanks to being the only unit in the game that gets a double entrenchment bonus — all units will dig in and get a basic “hasty” entrenchment bonus if left in one place for long enough, but only infantry can establish prepared positions, and they become extremely tanky to anything attacking them from the front if allowed to do so.

Tanks. Contrary to what you might expect, these are not the classic RTS tanks that would normally form the lynchpin of your force. A shocking number of units in Regiments have access to ATGMs, and tanks don’t have great vision; they will not be able to see the unit firing the ATGMs at them until it’s far, far too late, and so unsupported tanks fighting at even medium range are going to die very quickly no matter how thick their armour is. However, what tanks do have are main guns with an extremely long range — much longer than the tanks’ vision range — that are effective against every single type of ground target in the game. If there’s another unit spotting for them they’ll obliterate targets caught in the open in short order, and even targets in covered positions like hedgerows and urban areas won’t last that long unless they’re entrenched. So what you do with tanks is sit them back in a wooded area that’s in range of the area you want to attack but out of range of any potential ATGM fire (you get quite good at judging this after a while), and then send in the…

Recon. Light armoured vehicles that are equipped with, at best, a piddly little autocannon that’ll give away their position when it fires in exchange for lightly scratching the paint on one enemy IFV.  The first thing you do when you call in a recon team is to set them to Hold Fire mode, since they’re prone to immediately exploding if somebody even looks in their direction and so firing their main gun is just an elaborate form of suicide. From then on, though, they’re advancing ahead of your main force to scout out enemy positions; they don’t have X-ray vision and will not be able to see units hidden inside cities or forests, but for anything else their high vision and good stealth rating means that they have a very good chance of spotting targets before they get spotted themselves, at which point you park the recon team up in a hedgerow somewhere while you call in other units to eliminate the threat. The major limitation of recon is that you’ll never have access to more than two recon units at a time (not that you’d necessarily want more as they’re effectively non-combatants)  and if you want to explore cities or forests you’re much better off probing with a dismounted infantry platoon.

Helicopters. Helicopters are some of the most powerful and flexible units you can field: they move fast, they ignore terrain, and they have long-range anti-tank missiles that can put out a lot of damage in a short space of time. They’re even relatively safe from return fire as most units don’t have the appropriate weapons to usefully engage helicopters; dedicated AA units will blow them out of the sky in two or three salvos if you’re not paying attention, but otherwise they can act with relative impunity as long as they don’t get too close to any infantry toting MANPADS. Most of their drawbacks come from the resource management side of the game: you can only deploy units up to a certain amount of points cost in each mission, and helicopters are expensive, with a pair of attack choppers costing just as much as 8 IFVs and their supporting infantry. They also run out of missiles very quickly and need to be retreated off-map to resupply, so while they might be fast and mobile they tend to spend most of their time travelling to or from a deployment zone instead of actually fighting. Ultimately helicopters are a nice-to-have in spite of their power: they’re very effective when used to support your pushes and as a roving reserve that can quickly shift to counter enemy pushes, but there are many situations where the points would be better spent on something with a bit more staying power.

Anti-air. The most niche unit in the game, since gun AA is practically useless against ground targets and missile AA is actually useless against ground targets — it can’t shoot at them at all. However you’ll still want at least one unit covering you, for two reasons. One is helicopters, which might not be able to fight for long but which are just as devastating to your forces as they are to the enemy’s; if AI attack helicopters show up you’re going to lose a lot of troops unless you can get an AA unit over to that flank quickly. The other is attack runs from enemy jet fighters, which are one of the area-targeting call-ins available to each side; these range from artillery barrages to smoke screens to illumination flares for night-time battles, but the jets are the most dangerous of all since the pilots will actively target units caught in the attack zone instead of just going for a dumb saturation bombardment, and their cluster bombs can wipe out whole armoured platoons in a single run. AA guns are your only defence against this, as they can open up on jets at much longer ranges than they can helicopters and they’re almost certain to put out enough fire to panic the pilots and make them break off before they drop their ordnance.

Artillery. Your classic indirect fire unit for softening up dug-in enemy troops. Comes in a few flavours: mortar carriers that need to follow along just behind your main force to stay in range and which aren’t powerful, but which have enough ammo to fight for a long time without resupply; larger self-propelled artillery guns which can hit anywhere on the map and which do more actual damage, but which run out of shells quite quickly; and rocket artillery, which will dump everything they have onto a single target point before having to retreat off the map to reload. No matter what sort of artillery you’re dealing with, though, you’re really not going to be impressed with their damage potential. Mortar rounds will bounce off of tanks, and even the heavier stuff won’t do much more than cause a minor dent in the target’s overall HP total unless you go in for a really protracted bombardment. However, some form of artillery support is still essential since an artillery attack causes a disproportionate amount of morale damage to a unit; anything under fire has a stress bar that starts to fill up, and as it fills the stressed unit will fire more slowly and less accurately. A fully panicked unit is far less effective in combat, and so using artillery to inflict morale damage is key to making sure that you can attack a fortified point without taking a disproportionate amount of casualties.

(There’s also a few units that are hybrids of these basic unit types, like recon choppers and ATGM-armed tank destroyers, but this list covers around 90% of what you’ll see in a typical game of Regiments.)

The final thing to talk about is unit veterancy. Regiments is a single-player-only game with two game modes, Skirmish and Operations, Operations are the Regiments version of a campaign; there are seven of them, and each Operation has you taking command of a single regiment with a preset selection of units as it fights a protracted series of up to four separate battles. In between battle phases you can spend currency acquired from taking objectives on upgrading your regiment — buying new task forces to fill gaps in your unit roster, expanding your deployment points pool, replenishing combat losses — and the general idea is that everything is persistent until the end of the Operation. This includes unit veterancy, which works much the way you’d expect: units get combat experience as they fight and destroy the enemy, and periodically level up from Green recruits all the way to Elite shock troops. There’s lots of RTSes which have done unit veterancy like this, but I can’t think of many where it was quite so important as it is in Regiments thanks to the limited deployment pool. Because you can only field around a dozen units at a time the difference between an Elite unit and a Green one is much more noticeable and impactful; Elite units are significantly more accurate and less prone to combat stress, and an Elite unit can successfully hold off enemies at a one-to-two or even one-to-three ratio so long as it’s properly supported.

In short, high veterancy units can be a tremendous force multiplier for you and critical for winning the Operations, where you’re almost always at a numerical disadvantage compared to the enemy. This is one reason why Regiments has an unusual emphasis on force preservation. Sure, you could have that outflanked infantry platoon fight to the death, and then call in another once it had been destroyed (you can only call in one instance of a unit but have enough spare vehicles to replace losses several times over, even total ones) but then you’d be down four IFVs and the unit would lose any veterancy bonuses it had acquired thanks to the previous crews being extremely dead. For this reason, if you have a unit that’s getting slaughtered it’s much better to retreat it off-map, which is an automatic process that you trigger by selecting the unit and then mashing Q twice. Once you do this the unit will pop a smoke screen (if it has one) and start reversing at full speed back towards your deployment zone; once it has spent a sufficient amount of time out of combat the retreat is assumed to be successful and the unit magically disappears from the map, and back into your deployment pool.

But not immediately. Retreating has a few beneficial aspects to it; combat damage will be repaired, ammo supplies will be replenished, and any destroyed vehicles will be replaced (if you have spares available). Running out of ATGMs is often a good reason to retreat and resupply units even if they’re otherwise untouched; you do have supply trucks available that can be invaluable for keeping an assault going long enough to take an objective, but they’re slow and vulnerable and can only be in one place at a time. However, these benefits come at the cost of time: the time taken to retreat in the first place, the time taken to repair and rearm (represented by a countdown timer on the unit in the deploy menu), the time taken to for the deployment points you originally spent on the unit to trickle back into your points pool, and, once you call the unit back in, the time taken for it to travel back to the front line. It’s always better to retreat a unit than it is to lose one, but retreating still means that unit is going to be unavailable for at least five minutes, possibly more, and so it’s not something that you do lightly. There is a judgement call to be made, with half-dead platoons being pushed forwards onto one more point because the mission timer is ticking down and you can’t afford to refit them before it expires.

Grasping the fundamentals of the six basic unit types, how they are used together, and how to keep them alive in the long-term via timely retreats is the key to succeeding at Regiments. It’s a true combined arms game as no single element on its own will win a battle for you. In order to take a point held by just a couple of units of entrenched infantry you’ll need at least three of the following.

• Good scouting from Recon units to let your units fire from long range and improve their accuracy.
• Artillery bombardment to suppress the enemy and protect your troops on the way in.
• A smoke screen – the enemy can’t shoot you if they can’t see you.
• Supporting fire from tanks to stop any reinforcements moving up.
• An extremely wide flanking manuever, as entrenchment bonuses only work against attacks striking an entrenched unit’s 180 degree frontal arc.

If you do all of this, a single unit of veteran infantry can easily defeat a force several times their own size with negligible losses. If you don’t, then at best you’re going to be fruitlessly chipping away at fortified positions until you run out of ammo, and if you’re stupid enough to actually try and close with an entrenched enemy without doing anything to even the odds then you’re going to start thinking that Regiments is a very unfair game as all of your tanks and IFVs spontaneously explode.

If it wasn’t obvious, I quite like Regiments’ smaller, slower and more cerebral take on the Wargame formula. There are some bits that feel a bit unpolished or anaemic, like AA units feeling like a waste of a deployment slot unless a helicopter happens to turn up, but in general everything works together quite well and provides a good level of tactical challenge. There’s a surprising amount of variety in the Operation mission design, too; I was expecting them to be a series of attack-focused missions where you systematically clear enemies off of objective points, and Regiments has its fair share of those, but it’s also quite good about leveraging those regimental unit rosters to do interesting things. Iron Tide is an operation where you’re given a Soviet armour formation with no less than three units of T-64 tanks plus a bunch of mechanized infantry and told to take ground, with the catch being that they aren’t veterans and base T-64s kind of suck compared to the NATO tech they’re going up against, meaning you really have to learn how to make the most of tanks in that mission. Then there’s the operation that puts you in command of a Belgian regiment of light tanks that’s trying to destroy Soviet artillery positions; you have a few units of Chasseurs with ATGMs that can sting tanks that come after you, but if you get into a stand-up fight with any of the Soviet forces on the map you’ll probably lose. Instead you need to use the night-time environment (and your superior night vision equipment) to avoid everything except the mission objectives and bait the enemy into coming to you.

In spite of all of this good design work (or perhaps because of it), though,  there was an annoyance at the back of my brain that I couldn’t quite get over while I was playing it, and it has to do with the AI. The Regiments AI isn’t exactly bad at the game, as it understands how to maneuver and use its artillery and call-ins pretty well; it’s also quite good at sending units to attack you from unexpected angles. My problem is that with all of the thought and consideration that I have to give to combined arms and force preservation, the AI isn’t bound by the same rules. When it attacks you it does so using preset waves of troops that it gets for free, and when you wipe those out it’ll call in another wave in a couple of minutes. It doesn’t fight the same way you do, driving its infantry and tanks straight into the teeth of your prepared positions, because it doesn’t have to. In your first couple of missions it feels good to leverage tactics and combined arms to come out of it with a four to one kill ratio, but this feeling quickly vanishes as it becomes apparent you’re fighting an unfeeling robot with access to infinite troops. From that point on it just feels mildly frustrating to have your attempts to advance repeatedly stymied by attack wave after attack wave; it would be very different if I knew that there was some end to them, that I could exhaust their reinforcements and reserves the way they could potentially do to mine, but as far as I can tell this is impossible.

And as engrossing a tactical challenge as the Operations might be, there’s also no real meaning behind your victories. Your goal in each Operation is to score a target number of victory points by completing mission objectives, and there’s three victory point thresholds that can be thought of as Bronze, Silver and Gold ratings. The issue here is that that characterisation I just gave them is far more than Regiments bothers to do; it refuses to acknowledge your actual mission results in any way, or even to save your high score, and that really cuts down on the replayability of the game. What’s the incentive for me to try and get a higher victory point score on an Operation if there’s no functional difference between a blowout win that gives me maximum points and just barely scraping through with the lowest score possible? When combined with the naked artificiality of the enemy forces, this makes Regiments very much a once-through-and-done game for me (there’s no multiplayer); the Operations might have presented some interesting problems to solve, but having solved them once I feel zero desire to go back and solve them in a different way. This is one area where I really do wish Regiments had taken a bit more of a lead from classic Microprose strategy games, which were always very good at contextualising your victories.

Nevertheless, Regiments remains an impressively solid strategy game — all the more so seeing as it’s mostly the work of a single developer³. The game has numerous shortcomings that I haven’t mentioned because 1) they’re comparatively minor and 2) they’re also largely understandable when you learn that they’re the result of extreme resource constraints; it’s still far from a flawless experience and I don’t think it has much in the way of replayability, but that doesn’t matter to me so much since it still took around 12 hours to play through all of the Operations and my brain was fully engaged for all of that time, in a way that it hasn’t been for a little while now. Twelve hours of fun is a perfectly decent length for a computer game, and while others might want more from a strategy game I personally find myself pretty satisfied with what Regiments has to offer.

The post Thoughts: Regiments appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Okay, so I’ll state up front that I have been goaded into this review a little bit. This goading was not caused by anything Sniper Elite 5 did itself — at least not directly — but prior to playing it I read multiple reviews that favourably compared this iteration of the series to Hitman 2 and Metal Gear Solid V, two of the best sandbox games of the last decade¹. Which sounds great, but unfortunately for Rebellion I have also played Sniper Elite 4, so I knew that one of two things had happened here:

1. That Rebellion had massively, massively upped their game, investing a ton of money into hiring a team of crack designers to shape the emergent gameplay while throwing away the old, dated Sniper Elite engine and starting again from scratch to properly enable all of these modern sandbox features.
2. That these reviews were talking complete bollocks.

I am sure that it will not shock anyone who has actually played one of Rebellion’s games to learn that, rather than being a Hitman or a Metal Gear Solid, Sniper Elite 5 is instead the next Sniper Elite game after Sniper Elite 4. It is basically the same game, except this time it’s set in France instead of Italy. And the reason this gets my goat slightly — the reason those unjustified comparisons irk me so much — is because I think Sniper Elite 5 is what you’d get if you went back in time and described a modern sandbox game (of which there aren’t that many which aren’t tainted by the open world RPG curse, but Hitman, MGS and Breath of the Wild are the most obvious examples) to a game developer from 2002. Sniper Elite 5 is definitely aware of these games, but every single time it tries to integrate one of their ideas it falls flat on its face because of a profound lack of imagination in their implementation, an ignorance of the context behind them, and a game engine that feels like it’s at least a decade behind its competitors in terms of things like player movement and level terrain. What’s made it through into the final product is so basic, shallow and limited that the only comparisons to Hitman or Metal Gear Solid that I want to see in a review are the ones talking about how much better those games are.

But hey, this is nominally supposed to be a review of Sniper Elite 5 itself, so let’s talk about what this game actually is. Sniper Elite 5 is a third-person action game set during World War 2 where you’re playing a SOE sniper who infiltrates a series of Nazi facilities, shoots all of the Nazis, and then blows everything up. The SOE sniper has a name — Fairburne — and Sniper Elite 5 in fact spends a lot of time and effort on its story, which is curious to me because it’s not only completely disposable videogame rubbish where the Nazis are putting together a superweapon to bomb America and you have to stop it, it also happens to be exactly the same as the story behind Sniper Elite 4. Fairburne’s characterisation is non-existent, the NPCs surrounding him are even worse (not to mention having the worst collection of accents I think I’ve yet seen in a modern AA videogame), and nothing of any interest whatsoever happens in any of the lengthy cutscenes bookending every mission.

This is not necessarily a big problem. True, exactly why Sniper Elite 5 feels the need to spend so much time and effort on static, scripted storytelling techniques straight out of 2005 (this is one of the many reasons Sniper Elite 5 feels like an early Xbox 360-era game rather than something released two generations later) is somewhat baffling to me, but to be honest I don’t really care why Fairburne ends up in any of the eight levels comprising Sniper Elite 5’s campaign, just what he does while he’s there. The levels certainly look pretty big when viewed from the map screen, and Fairburne is inserted into each one with one or more yellow sabotage targets and one red “kill” target already marked. Further optional mission objectives are uncovered as you play through the level, and I think one reason that Sniper Elite 5 has been mistaken for a sandbox game is that it does afford you a measure of freedom here. You can take any route across the map that you want and do the objectives in any order that you want, in any way that you want — the catch (or catches) being that:

1. You can take any route across the map just so long as it involves walking there, because while the Nazis ride around in a selection of trucks and cars and bikes, Fairburne apparently doesn’t know how to drive and so has to hoof it on foot.
2. You can do the objectives in any order that you want, but this lack of structure means this is essentially a choice between walking around the map clockwise or counterclockwise from your starting position, hoovering up the objectives as you go.
3. You can do the objectives in any way that you want, just so long as it involves shooting a lot of Nazis in the face.

This is where we start to get to the core of my problem with Sniper Elite 5. It is not Hitman, where you’re a covert assassin who is liable to die extremely quickly if you get discovered. And it is definitely not Metal Gear Solid V, which handed you a vast array of tools and toys and sent you off to cause absolute mayhem in an open, dynamic environment. The Sniper Elite engine, and the toolset that is available to you within it, is designed to allow you to do one thing, and one thing only: kill Nazis. You go into every mission with three guns: a sniper rifle, a submachine gun, and a pistol. Your utility items consist of two types of healing item and five flavours of explosive, which are mostly used to set up traps for unsuspecting Nazis by either planting mines or booby-trapping corpses — this is a fine idea, but one which is slightly undermined by Sniper Elite 5 making it far easier to shoot somebody in the face than it is to put a mine down and then lure a Nazi onto it, because the latter requires a bit of setup and the former is a single mouse-click and the outcome is the same either way. Your final utility item slot is taken up by a decoy, and that’s it for the tools the game offers you to solve problems. There’s not much in the environments that you can leverage, either, aside from the standard collection of exploding barrels and heavy things that you can shoot to drop them onto a Nazi’s head.

Now, ordinarily I would not call this all that much of a problem for Sniper Elite 5 either. Yes, this is very much an action game, and one that usually has you finishing every level with the vast majority of the Nazis in it having being shot in the face — but it’s not like it does this badly. In fact it’s the one thing the game actually does quite well, thanks to being what the engine is geared towards; this is supposed to be a cover shooter with some light stealth elements and a sniping mechanic, not an open world sandbox experience. If Sniper Elite 5 focused all of its time and effort on being the best cover shooter that it could be then I think I’d actually quite like it (or at least respect it) since it’s somehow been a half-decade since I’ve played a game that let me indiscriminately murder my way through a big pile of Nazis and I feel that’s a gameplay theme that’s criminally underserved these days.

But its attempts to cram in ideas and mechanics from other, better, more imaginative games end up being counterproductive, since the half-hearted implementations here are treated as bolt-ons instead of core gameplay elements. For example, those kill targets? They’re just random NPCs stashed in a corner of the map with zero characterisation and no attempt made to build them up or explain why they’re on Fairburne’s “kill list”, so they’re essentially just a standard enemy that’s been marked as a mission objective for some reason. Each one attempts to ape Hitman by having a special kill method, but unlike Hitman these are all incredibly basic — the most complex one asks you to poison someone’s drink, and then puts the poison literally in the next room inside a house with no guards or anyone to stop you — because there’s no room or budget to do anything else. And because the game wants to encourage you to do these optional kills the targets are always inside a sealed room with no sight lines from the outside, meaning you can’t even snipe them! In a game called Sniper Elite! This is a textbook example of how the game’s lack of focus really detracts from the things it actually does well.

And this is something that is repeated throughout the game. Every mission ends with the Lethal/Non-Lethal Assault/Stealth chart that’s been stolen from Dishonored — wait, non-lethal? First of all your options for non-lethal for the first half of the game consist of choking people out via melee takedowns instead of shoving a knife through the base of their skull, and then towards the end you get access to special boxes of “non-lethal ammo” for your guns — these work identically to the lethal kind, but their exact method of functioning is, alas, never explained. This is not a particularly interesting way to play the game, to put it mildly², but more than that, it doesn’t make any sense. This is a war, for crying out loud; Nazis are one of the three universal videogame baddies that it’s absolutely fine to kill in every scenario³, and there’s no reason to go easy on them. I could maybe understand if the game gave bonus points or XP for ghosting through a level without killing anyone as you are supposed to be somewhat sneaky, but it doesn’t; it’s explicitly for Nazis that you manhandle into unconsciousness but leave alive in the hope that they mend their ways later.

(And every single sabotage objective gives you a choice of how you accomplish the sabotage, except the choice is between turning two small valves or pushing one big button, and the valves and the button are both right next to each other. Again, this is a game called Sniper Elite – could I not perhaps blow things up by, I don’t know, sniping them?)

As you might have gathered, one of the reasons I’m annoyed about these things is because they all detract from the sniping, which Sniper Elite has several dedicated systems built around but which end up being almost completely ignored in favour of these one-dimensional distractions. Your sniper rifle is very loud and will alert all Nazis within a 150 metre radius when you fire it, but there’s a sound meter at the top of the screen that lets you wait for ambient noise from the environment (such as a plane flying overhead) that’ll mask the sound of your shot. Bullet drop and wind speed are both modelled by the game but are somewhat abstracted away by the Iron Lung mechanic, where you hold your breath to make a little marker appear in your HUD that shows you where your shot is actually going to land; the amount of time this takes to appear is related to how well you’ve dialled in the range in your sniper scope beforehand, so it’s still a good idea to spot a target with your binoculars first to get the range and adjust the setting accordingly before taking the shot. Bullet penetration is modelled, and you can shoot through wooden walls to nail the Nazis crouching behind them if you’re smart; if you’re using AP ammo you can punch through stone and metal, and you can even take out armoured cars and tanks if you shoot the right spot.

In short, taking sniper shots requires a bit of time and forethought on how you do it and is, as you would expect, the most interesting thing about Sniper Elite 5 by far. This is why I think it’s really, really weird that I don’t even need my fingers to count the number of mission objectives that actually use the sniping mechanics; I can just use my thumbs instead. Sniping is something that you almost exclusively do in combat with the bog-standard Nazi mooks, to try and thin their numbers before they can get in close to you. It is good that it does at least remain your most useful combat tool, especially given how much combat there is in the game — semi-stealthy runs are possible, but because your tools for it are so limited it’s very difficult to completely ghost a level and you’ll be forced to go loud when fighting big clusters of guards at least a couple of times per level. I did eventually get tired of the game’s infamously gratuitous X-ray cutscenes where you get to watch your sniper’s bullet bore its way through the internal organs of whatever unfortunate Nazi you’ve fired it at because there’s a surprisingly limited number of outcomes there, but the dramatic zoom on Fairburne as he fires and the slow-motion cam following the bullet as it flies 100, 200 or even 300 metres to its target never did get old, and neither did the sniping over the 8 hours it took to finish the campaign.

It is curious, though, that while your scope can be dialled out to 500 metres (and the training level has a challenge where you have to hit a target 1,000 metres away), the maximum range at which you’ll find an actual live target in one of the campaign levels is around 350 metres. This is down to the level design, which I’m somewhat torn on; I think the theming and the look of several of the levels is very good, being particularly taken with the level modelled after Mont-Saint-Michel and the one set in a steel foundry on top of a dam. I liked these because they were ripped out of classic war movies like Where Eagles Dare and I think Sniper Elite 5 would have done a lot better had it channelled that kind of energy more. However, while they are nice to look at they’re not particularly interesting to explore — partly this is because of the traversal, which I’ll get into in a second, but it’s mostly because while the levels might look nice what they actually are, functionally, is a big container for about 200 Nazis. There’s nothing else in them except for the standard collection of tedious collectibles and a few workbenches that unlock new weapon attachments, and in fact there’s very little in the way of alternate routes either. They feel static, stale and weirdly repetitive, like a collection of smaller boxes of enemies stuck together with little regard for level flow and few of the sightlines that actually let you do the cool long-range sniper shots. I replayed the Mont-Saint-Michel level to see if I could approach it a little differently, but because the environments are so unreactive it was essentially the same experience the second time through.

But while the level design is another thing that might feel like it’s straight out of 2007, the level traversal somehow feels even older. As mentioned earlier Fairburne can’t drive any of the slightly-bloodstained Nazi vehicles he comes across in his travels and is reduced to having to run everywhere, which is a big part of why the levels feel so straitjacketed and restrictive; the other part of this is that because you’re running everywhere you are constantly dealing with Sniper Elite 5’s shitty, shitty movement. Fairburne can’t run up steep slopes; he can’t jump; he can’t drop down more than a couple of metres without shattering both of his legs; he can’t mantle ledges unless they’re specifically marked with the genre-standard white paint; when he’s hanging from a ledge he can’t climb around corners; he can’t vault walls if there’s any vegetation on the other side; and this is because a string of small bushes is an impassable obstacle for him, often enforced through the hilariously blunt measure of an invisible wall that prevents you from even getting close This last one makes getting around the levels an absolute nightmare, as you look at the map to plot a route to your next destination and end up having to make a series of massive detours to get around seemingly innocuous scenery that other games have treated as fully-traversable for decades. These are solved problems, and I do not understand why Sniper Elite’s movement systems have apparently remained untouched for so long, especially when fluid movement options are such a big part of the sandbox games that it’s apparently trying to emulate.

(One area where I will give Rebellion some credit though: the Sniper Elite engine may be almost old enough to vote, but it is extremely well-optimised with fast loading times, no dropped frames, and good netcode. I played through the whole campaign in co-op and it was seamless with zero connection/desync problems. It’s sad that I have to praise a game for its basic features simply working as advertised, but that’s the state of modern game development these days.)

In spite of all of these issues, though, Sniper Elite 5 is the epitome of the perfectly-calculated mediocrity that has made Rebellion so successful over the last two decades. I’m annoyed by its distracted design, its lack of focus and its wasted potential, its best bits are essentially inherited from previous iterations of the franchise, and its good-looking levels can’t hide how dated the engine feels to interact with in 2022. It is, however, a difficult game to stay annoyed at; it’s not worth it when the production values and general design ethos all but scream that this is an entirely disposable game that you play through once and then forget about until Sniper Elite 6 comes out in four years’ time. And by those standards it’s a success; the levels look striking enough and the combat is satisfying enough to sustain the game for one playthrough. That it falls apart when you attempt to replay it — to do anything that goes beyond shooting an endless procession of Nazis in the face — is only a problem if you’re the sort of lunatic who is attempting to compare it to Metal Gear Solid V with a straight face. Because it’s not. It’s Sniper Elite 5. Nothing less, and very definitely nothing more.

The post Thoughts: Sniper Elite 5 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.