Scorn is an uneven balance of Riven-like alien techno-puzzling and atmospheric existential horror akin to SOMA. The art is a perfect amalgamation of Giger & Beksiński, fleshy organic architecture amassed across the surface of a dying world. The first two-thirds present particularly engaging core puzzles, as you slowly unpick the purpose of the machines you are revving up, often leading to some sort of sacrifice of an innocent(?) being (ranging from tiny weird guys to enormous weird guys) in this abject world. The wordless communication of the narrative through exploration, the environment & your ritualistic puzzling is refreshing (in a time where many games won't. shut. up).

The alien life wandering the flesh-corridors are alluring at first, with some interesting behaviours ambivalent to, & decentering, the player. But their placement and the very awkward feeling combat generates annoyance rather than tension, a very clumsy implementation of what was probably envisioned as a ‘living’ world but grew smaller in scope as they struggled to bring this to release. This is most evident in the very dull final chapter where a (puzzle) boss and most puzzles are solved with blunt-force explosives. Despite my final impressions, Ebb has a really strong foundation here and I look forward to seeing how they grow.

The logline of Helldivers 2 is that a third-person shooter hasn't been this satisfying to play since Metal Gear Solid V. The things it does right sound simple, like your ability to dive to the ground and aim in any direction from a prone state, but their integration and the smoothness of how it all comes together is anything but common even in big titles in the genre. It's a level of polish that should be commonplace and rarely is.

All the way up to release I was skeptical of this game. I mean, how could the series survive a transition from top-down to high budget third-person shooting? Could a team the size of Arrowhead pull it off?

Well, they did. I've played a lot of third-person shooters and this is, on a moment to moment basis, one of the best feeling ones I've played.

All that needs to be said about how good this feels is that even when the servers were broken as shit my friends and I kept trying to play every day. No matter how long the queue was, it was worth it to get in and play. It's that good.

I've been distracted from it by Dragon's Dogma 2, but I've dumped 70 hours into this thing so far. I'll be back for more.

A Mercenaries-like game with the movement and shooting of MGSV, all in service of a persistent galactic war against Starship Troopers-style bugs and Terminators? Yes, please! More Jello, mom!

I'm not sure exactly how we got here from the top-down Helldivers 1, which I found to be fairly rote, with the emphasis on friendly fire being more frustrating than funny due to its perspective. When the trailer for this came out, it gave me flashbacks to Risk of Rain 2, one of the worst games I've played in recent memory. Thankfully, Arrowhead actually put some time into learning how third-person shooters work, and the gameplay loop is satisfying...

As long as you're using the right equipment.

See, the number one problem with the game now is balancing. There are like 3 actually viable weapons, and 4 or 5 viable stratagems (supply drops summoned by inputting a dpad code like you're playing DDR, and they can be extra weapons, like anti-tank rockets, emplacements/sentries, or artillery bombardments) at the time of writing. Most are useless at higher difficulties. Many of the stats shown on weapons and items are outright false.

This isn't a huge deal, as I'm sure it'll be fixed soon, now that they've ironed out the server issues that plagued the game at launch, and it is an entirely PvE game anyway. But it does go against the "use what you think is fun" mantra when I'm basically forced to use a Breaker and Railgun because the higher difficulties spam giant armored bugs at you and armor penetration doesn't seem entirely functional. I do find the Robutts much more fun to fight, anyway.

I'm having a great time with this. It seems there's much more that will be added soon, including mechs, and I'm interested to see where this goes considering the ongoing storyline aspect of it.

[DISCLAIMER: I have only played this with random people, with voice chat off. Sony's insistence on enabling the Dualsense mic by default, with little notification to the player, always results in a ton of godawful noise if you have voice chat on. Also, the only person I know that would play this with me refuses to buy it because he's busy with Crisis On Infinite Aeriths. I'm out here spreading Democracy by myself. And I'm loving every minute of it.

UPDATE: Score (8/10) removed because the recent patch has completely fucked things up. Will update this and add rating again when the dust settles because this might be another Evil Dead situation.

UPDATE 4/30/24 - Settling on a 5/10 for now, as the developers continually tinker with things, often making them worse. Maybe instead of releasing a new battle pass that has One useful item in it every month they should focus on fixing the goddamn bugs that only get more prevalent with every patch.

12 years on from the strange, incomplete original, DD2 is more of the same, uneasily sitting between the uncompromising Souls series & more conventional narrative ARPGs. At times evoking a desolate offline MMO, DD2 is at its best when out in the wilds, the sun setting at your back & two or more beasts landing on the path ahead, all Arising out of dynamic systems.

The main questline unfortunately does not play to these strengths, with much of Act I confined to the capital & some really dull writing. Fortunately, writing does not maketh a game, and side-quests that take you out into the unreasonably huge map are much more interesting, and really need to be sought out in the crowds and corners of the world. Keeping track of these with the bizarre quest tracker is uneven and obtuse: you’re either reading the landscape and tracing clues or just beating your head against a wall figuring out what the game requires of you.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is singular, not quite fully realised, a beautifully rendered physics-heavy oddity. The art direction is profoundly generic, but so deceptively understated it at times resembles a Ray Harryhausen film, full of weight, movement and character. DD2 makes you feel like you have friends, albeit stupid friends, who'd throw themselves off a cliff for a view of yonder.

WarioWare as a light-gun game. Hell, it's WarioWare almost a full decade before the first WarioWare. Just a rapid fire succession of short, wacky minigames all designed around your light-gun peripheral. You have 2 seconds to shoot the correct stuffed animal. You have 10 seconds to shoot as many criminal targets as you can, but don't hit the civilians! Shoot this car 50 times to blow it up like in Street Fighter. Shoot the meteors before they hit you! Over 70 variations of how to shoot at the screen in different, wild ways.

What makes Point Blank 1 special above all else, though, is the adventure mode they added to the home release. It's a full blown RPG/adventure game with an overworld to explore, NPCs to interact with, and the minigames functioning as its battle system. Accosted by an enemy in a "random battle"? You'll play one of the 70 minigames in Point Blank. Succeed and you'll gain some experience, money, and maybe even an item. Fail and you'll take some health damage.

It's a brilliant way to repackage and reuse the minigames in a new form for the home release. This adventure mode is one of the best things I've ever played with a light-gun and I wish there were a dozen more games like.

action is decent; pretty similar to ff16 tbh and feels good to play even on the switch. shame about the levels, pace, writing, performances, cut scenes, etc. not to mention the utter lack of WHIMSY which really defined ff7 for me tonally; the awful zack humor is not cutting it i’m sorry. game basically sucks whenever you aren’t chopping up 100 guys. the aerith levels…god. and even when you are fighting the amount of essentially empty corridors it makes you walk through between encounters can be insane. at its best as an action experience when replaying levels or doing side missions but the main story wasn’t inspiring me to spend more time with the game than was necessary to roll credits so i didn’t do much of that. the way it handles the very last beat is kinda interesting, tho, i’ll give it to them there