2 reviews liked by Armagon


My buddy is on a quest to play every mainline Mario Kart and rank their courses against each other, so I decided to join him on this adventure.

Mario Kart 64 is one of those games that's best played at parties where alcohol is flowing and no one has to drive anywhere for hours, because the controls of this game handle like a drunk driver. The drifting is so sensitive, I only ever found it useful on tracks with wide open turns. Attempting to drift on narrow, hairpin turns will magnetize you to the nearest wall/edge. And because someone at Nintendo hates fun, they decided that if you steer too hard in one direction or attempt to change steering directions too fast, you'll spin yourself out, because that's totally fitting for an arcade racer.

It's not just the karts that are working against the player, the items are, too. The items are straight up unfinished; their programming was completed 50% and Nintendo shipped the game yesterday. Sometimes red shells will chase your target to the ends of the earth [SHOOOOCKEEEEEEEER!] and sometimes they'll decide existence is pain and end their own lives against the nearest wall a foot from where you shot it. Sometimes a banana peel will slip you up as normal, sometimes it'll maintain your momentum and slow you down for a second before returning to your top speed. During our playthrough of all four cups, I straight up out sped my own green shell and hit myself with it. And this isn't even to mention how wonky the physics can be sometimes, how picky it can be with what constitutes out of bounds or not, the CPUs that straight up cheat with their rubberbanding, and the goddamn hell nightmare that is Banshee Boardwalk. All my homies hate Banshee Boardwalk. In 150cc, the game goes from an easy first two cups to a difficulty wall for the last two. It won't let you advance unless one of you get top 4, and places 5-8 don't get any points, meaning getting 5th is just as bad as getting last place in a game with eight racers.

With all that being said, this game sucks to play by yourself, wallowing in your own misery with no one to scream out to... but multiplayer... this game gets good again. Obviously the more the merrier, but when you have a friend (and maybe a buzz going around the room) the game's worst aspects turn into its funniest moments, and you'll be shouting in anger and excitement all the while. It's too hard for me to get upset about the game's faults when I'm too busy laughing at watching my friend get wombo combo-ed by multiple items back-to-back, causing him to miss a scripted jump and die. And Battle Mode? Oh man: get four friends, boot up Block Fort, and the war is on.

Mario Kart 64 gets a big bump for its multiplayer, as playing it alone will induce feelings of unalive. The aesthetic and theming of the game based on advertisements and sponsors a la professional racing is also neat. It's far from perfect, but if you want tight controls, just play 8 Deluxe. If you choose violence, play Mario Kart 64.

Whew, lordy. What an experience It Takes Two is. In a time where co-op games are as lively as Queen Elizabeth at a rave, the spirit of cooperative gameplay is carried on by the funny Fuck the Oscars guy over at Hazelight Studios. This is probably the greatest thing EA has ever put out.

The first thing to applaud It Takes Two on is the fact that you only need one person to buy the game, and then the other to download a launcher to play the full game together. Oh yeah, and you HAVE to play this game with a friend. Attempting to experience it in any other way is a massive disservice.

At its core, the game is a puzzle platformer. The controls are surprisingly smooth, albeit a tad floaty. Thankfully, the platforming you do is never so precise that it makes the slight slipperiness an issue. While the game is a puzzle platformer most of the time, it occasionally becomes every other genre of game in the world. 2D fighter, dungeon crawler, 2D platformer, rhythm game, third-person shooter, Souls-like; it'd take less time to name all the genres this game doesn't become throughout its time. Even the platforming and puzzle-solving gets shaken up drastically by introducing a bevy of new mechanics, such as reversing time, magnetism, growing and shrinking, and becoming a plant, among many others. Thankfully they split the balance of cool and slightly less cool powers between the two player characters evenly so one character doesn't feel more fun than the other.

Seemingly either to drive a wedge between your player two or just to flex, Hazelight packed this game to the brim with optional competitive minigames. Shuffleboard, racing, sports, whack-a-mole, musical chairs, and even just straight up chess. They even got a snail race that rivals Undertale's. These minigames serve no purpose other than to bring out the true epic gamer in both players, and provide short breaks between level missions.

But it's not just the minigames that provide a sense of wonderment and fun, because this game has goddamn Nintendo levels of polish. So many incidental events, or environmental interactions or features that you could easily ignore, and I'm sure my buddy and I missed a few, but every time we found one, we stopped dead in our tracks just to try it. Like, there's this spa in the garden that is easily missed and serves no point to the narrative or the gameplay, but you can get massaged by bugs and have unique character animations and dialogue in a sauna and it feels like it was put there just to make the world of the game feel more alive and authentic. These little touches can also lead to laugh-out-loud moments for you and your buddy, including one moment so perfectly comedically timed, set up and executed, that it left both of us in tears from laughing so hard.

Presentation-wise, the game looks great... when you're in the doll worlds. Because the human models are a bit PS3-era uncanny. They don't animate too smoothly or naturally, but thankfully you're looking at the dolls and other doll world characters for like 95% of the runtime so it's not a big deal. What is a big deal (or rather a small one) is the gorgeous aesthetic of the game overall. I'm a sucker for "tiny people exploring our relatively enormous world" settings, and It Takes Two runs the Olympic 500m dash a thousand times over with these settings. You explore a tool shed, a snow globe, a cuckoo clock, musical instruments, and more. Visually, the clock world was the highlight for me, because it's set in what I can only describe as "clockpunk" or maybe "gearpunk" world where you fly on owls made up of gears and towers made from clockwork, complete with a but of a Tim Burton-esque moonlight ambience. The amount of times "oh that's so cool" left our mouths was too numerous to count... it also never left the mouths of our protagonists.

The only thing holding this game back from a perfect 10 masterpiece status is the story, mainly the writing. While not outright awful, it's not very clever and constantly beating you over the head with the point. I get it, Josef, this couple has fallen out of love and want a divorce, you don't have to have your hilariously racist stereotype therapist book outright tell me their issues and how to fix them, I much prefer being shown their issues and how to fix them. The gameplay highlights their teamwork and complimenting each others strengths more than the writing, which would be serviceable enough if there wasn't so much dialogue, and man, do Cody and May have almost nothing to say aside from "whoa this is amazing!" and "I hate that fucking book!" The times where do speak to each other like actual people or interact with the fantastical characters of the doll worlds is when they're at their best, but man, take a shot every time Cody and May say "this is the coolest!" or anything similar and you'll be dead by the end of the second hour. You'll be dead even faster if you took a shot for every time the plot progresses by them falling down something like a hole or a trap door. Cody and May fall in this game more often than Facebook stock.

Finally, the ending is kinda weak. I mean, the emotional climax in the final chapter is pretty good, but then there's like one more cutscene and the game decides that everyone would live happily ever after and both my friend and I were left feeling a little empty inside. The ending is more rushed than a running back, and the game leaves you feeling hollow not because you can't play it anymore, but because the payoff to the story was unsatisfying. It's like taking a leisurely stroll around the neighborhood for 10 hours and then when you're just 100 feet from your house you start sprinting like you forgot to put your antique fork collection away from your toddler who found it and wanted to show their favorite electrical outlet.

Ultimately, as I walk away from It Takes Two, and I do stand by that it is an amazing game that is absolutely worth playing, I am left with one big question: who exactly is the target audience for this game? Despite its family friendly vibe, there's a bit of an adult tinge to it with mild but not infrequent cursing, the decidedly rather mature topic of divorce and couples reconciling, and even fucked up moments like this one part where you set out to literally drink your daughter's tears in one of the most uncomfortable segments I've ever played in a video game. So I wouldn't let my hypothetical kids play it, and I also wouldn't play it with a significant other I might be on the rocks with in hopes of strengthening or relationship because I'd imagine one of them yelling at the other to solve a puzzle they already know the solution to, or one might be pelvic thrusting in the other's face every time they beat them in one of the minigames. While on the subject, I don't know how solid a message this game is putting out. Yeah, divorce is touchy and every case is different, but I wouldn't base a story about divorce around staying together for the sake of the kid(s), because that just sets a bad precedent. Granted, there are moments in the game where Cody and May rediscover the reasons why they fell in love with each other throughout the game, but by the ending, it looks more like they stay together to keep their daughter happy. But, this is likely due to the rushed nature of the ending.

I have yet to play other big name releases from 2021 like Metroid Dread, Rift Apart, or Psychonauts 2, but from all the games I have played this last year, It Takes Two is my 2021 GOTY. While I wish the narrative was stronger, that gameplay is undeniably fun and the worlds you explore are breathtaking. Despite being published by EA, this game exudes charm and passion that's sadly so rare to see in gaming these days, especially from bigger companies like EA. While I have no respect for the company as a whole, I'll concede that their "EA Originals" line has been their best decision in their entire history. Between games like this, Unraveled, and Knockout City, providing bigger budgets to smaller studios and helping to market their games to wider audiences is a very good thing. If every game released by EA were as inspired and as good as It Takes Two, they'd be the best studio in the game.