This game is beautiful, there is absolutely no arguing that. The landscapes are breath-taking and makes exploring them so worth it! The story is interesting, the characters lovable, and immersion intense. The only true gripe I would have is the gameplay. There are a few different sections of the game. One is explorative, where you can find collectables and little prompts for Nate to have little quips. This section is great, full of life and has amazing sets for you to explore. The downfall is the parts were you need to be trekking through the wild. The game has you set on a very specific path, and you can't do anywhere else. For a game that encourages exploring, there isn't much of it throughout. Which is disappointing, though I guess the hardware at the time couldn't handle the environments AND being able to climb wherever? I'm not sure. Regardless, it's a grand adventure that could be fun for a patient, inquisitive or history buff gamer.

A game that needed a good editor. The gorgeous graphics and scene direction cannot mask the glut of cinemas, talking sequences and automatic climbing. The pacing of the game is all over the place and theres way too much time between gameplay and cutscene. A good story would justify it, but the one here is mediocre melodrama with nice looking but mindless action set pieces. Even then, the shooting and stealth sequences are not fun or well designed to be more than a "just fine" experience.

Play the vastly superior Uncharted 2 or Lost Legacy if you want a better paced, fun time.

I'm glad to report that nearly every complaint you might have had about the original 'JWE' has been corrected here in the sequel. And the new features, including botanical feeding, staff management, dinosaur herding, and medical services, are truly additive. The content distribution is unlike the original, in that the campaign plays more like a three- to four-hour tutorial, and the bulk of your time will be spent on Chaos Theory story maps (one for each of the six films in the franchise) and on Challenge maps. Building and perfecting in 'JWE2,' whether it is theme parks or wildlife preserves, is just FUN. I played only this game for six weeks and only tore myself away from it to move on to other games in the backlog. A very worthy sequel to an already great game.

Brutal. Cruel. Unfair. Bitter. Bleak.

All words that can be used to describe The Last of Us Part II. And rightfully so. This isn't an easy game to get through. By the end of it it'll straight up force you to do things you don't wanna do in the name of it's narrative. And I kind of love it for that.

I recently revisited this game as a part of my replaying of games that had a huge impact on me and boy oh boy, this one was probably amongst the hardest.

The gameplay is excellent, definitely up there with the best I've played. The graphics/animation is stellar, even holding up well into the next generation. The main characters are engaging and the story compelling. And that's where the sadness comes in.

This is not a game about happiness. Or even a game about catharsis. It's a dark tale of a woman you've come to love and care about destroying herself in order to avenge the death of a man whose heart would break if he could see what she'd done to herself in his memory.

It is also a game about the woman who killed that man realising that the violent revenge got her nowhere, bought her nothing. And this realisation leads her to try and find a new purpose to live for as she helps a child from an enemy faction escape persecution.

It's a story about a character you love becoming a shadow of themselves, and a character you hate becoming a better person. And that's not an easy pill to swallow. But it nearly always works.

The pacing of this game is definitely off, suddenly rewinding time right at the climax to three days you JUST experienced but from Abby's POV is a bit jarring, I personally think having each day contain both stories. back to back would have worked better. Some deaths, particularly Yara and Jesse feel almost pointless and really the only one of Abby's friends i'm sad to see die is Owen, but the game still sticks the landing. By the point Ellie forces Abby to fight her in the ruins of Santa Barbra by threatening a child, you hate her for it BUT you still cry with her. People ain't black and white and this. game shows it.

This is an exercise in Misery that works 90% of the time, and that 90% is a masterpiece. Not Naughty Dog's best, but definitely their most complex.

In Chorus, you are Chekhov's gun, floating in a vacuum, having self doubts.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was not a game I found much enjoyment in, but it did at least spark my imagination. It was without a doubt the best open world game yet at the time of its release, and it still wasn't very good, but it did at least hint at future possibilities. With all its natural trenches and canyons connecting small enemy encampments, I drew comparison to Rogue Squadron. I imagined Konami using the Fox Engine to create sprawling topographies for Vic Viper to cruise above and weave between. In Chorus, a part of me genuinely got my hopes up when I realized what kind of game it was.

In Chorus, you'll find a sort of open-world-ish flight game that leans more towards the arcade side of things than true simulation. It's also quite focused on its narrative, whenever the main character is not talking to others, she is almost certainly whispering an internal monologue into your ear. In Chorus, there are waypoints, there are sidequests, there are Halo-style regenerating shields that take more damage from laser weapons, there are trailing missions. There is ray-tracing that one can enable if they desire; as with all other applications of ray-tracing that I have experienced firsthand, it looks almost exactly the same, and runs a whole lot worse.

The opening cutscene is like a wiki synopsis for a game with a much more interesting narrative. Every single sentence in this opening could be a full chapter in a good story. Relegating these plot points and character-forming moments to 2 minutes of monologue is such an absurd pratfall that it's hard to care about whatever else could possibly happen in this game. When our protagonist's ambitions and relationships are told to us at point blank, when the player character being responsible for billions of deaths is not a surprise reveal or a plot twist, but a plain, known fact in the second minute of a fifteen hour game, before the player presses a single button, I cannot even pretend to give a shit.

Frankly, even at their most prestigious, the story in video games really is quite similar to story in porn, in that if it does not serve as straightforward reinforcement of the purpose of the onscreen subject (whether that subject is a nude body or a gun pointed at a monster), it serves as a faux subversion of spectator desire. To see a person nude or to fire a weapon is a kind of obvious social faux-pas, though it also contains an obvious thrill, and it's never unclear why it is on the screen or what its purpose is. The porn narrative of a particularly inappropriate or fetishistic sexual encounter exists for the exact same purpose as the video game which characterizes its violence as uncomfortable, rather than pure hedonistic indulgence. The taboo, performed by the viewer, the player, is sublimated into the fictional guilt of the in-universe perverts and murderers. Video games, rather than embrace their own strengths or aspire to any sort of true literary merit, are often rewarded for recording the same scene again and again and asking the actors to look a little bit more embarrassed this time.

In Half Life, you play as a gun. Gordon Freeman, and every other character or narrative device, exist for the purpose of confirming to you the player that the things you do with that gun are the right things. Even if you kill innocent people, the game won't punish you unless you do something that makes your ultimate goal of saving the day impossible. If you needed to kill a guard to get some more ammo, if you blew up a scientist because he was in your way, or even just for the hell of it, that's acceptable collateral. The ends always justify the means, because the entire story exists in the first place to justify the dozen or so hours that you'll spend pretending to be a gun.

In Chorus, as in a typical first or third person shooter, if is possible to stay completely still and look around. The game doesn't outright encourage this and it's definitely not a good way to approach things like combat encounters. The fact that is action is even possible at all though says something about what kind of game this is. It's a subtle but extremely important decision in a game about controlling a flying object: in Chorus, moving is a consequence of aiming, rather than aiming being a function of maneuvering your ship.

Rogue Squadron had power ups that you could find in levels to get extra torpedoes and such, something that seems like it would be sort of distracting and "gamey". However, they never really detracted from any sense of continuity bother because they were solely a gameplay mechanic (not something that had to be collected for narrative purposes), and because there were so few of them and they were often so well hidden that you were unlikely to find one unless you were deliberately approaching the game from that sort of "gamey" angle. It wasn't distracting to fly into a glowing yellow cube to "pick it up" because by the time the player ever did this they had already long since bought into the fiction. In Chorus, the very first thing you do is fly through and "pick up" about a dozen "power cells" as your starting mission.

A few missions into the game, your character tasks herself with reclaiming her ship, the one from back in her planet killing days as opposed to the dinky one you've been using up until that point. I imagined a scenario where a game could set up all these trite systems, weapon upgrades, an extra few seconds off your cooldowns, defeat fifty enemy ships to do 2% extra damage to shields, only for the game to give you The Badass Ship that doesn't need to worry about any of that crap. Fuck the scrounging around, pierce the heavens and screw the bad guys! Unfortunately, the only meaningful difference between the junk you use in the tutorial, and the sleeker ship apparently capable of genocide, is the ability to do Mario Kart-style drifts in midair. Drifting in a space ship is a cool enough idea, but instead of giving the player am accommodating space to play with the mechanic, they just have you try to maneuver through repetitive winding corridors and shoot timed switches that require you to turn on a dime. Couple this with the fact that for all intents and purposes you're never really controlling the ship, your controlling the camera, and it's just one of the most confoundingly disappointing "upgrades" I've ever received in a game.

Something about it, that camera, it kept bugging me. Why does a flight game have a button for realigning your vessel with the horizon? What's next, a racing game that automatically aligns your car with the road? But after playing a bit of Ace Combat I realized that this game prioritizes aiming over movement to such an extreme degree that you do not have any direct control over your ship's roll. Games like Star Fox and Rogue Squadron also automatically align you with the horizon, but most of the levels in these games take place within a planet's atmosphere, where the horizon actually exists. In Chorus, you spend much of your time in outer space, where the "horizon" is more of an abstract consensus than something you can actually see.

If you play most flight games you will notice something immediately: when you move your ship, your crosshairs will drift around the screen. You are controlling the vessel, not the camera, and the heads-up-display has to accommodate for this. In Chorus, the crosshairs are glued to the center of the screen. You are not controlling the ship, you are controlling the camera, and anything else that happens is a side effect. I tried inverting the Y-axis, I tried toggling the automatic roll adjust, nothing could stop me from feeling motion sick while playing this because the problem is so deeply rooted in the most fundamental aspects of the game.

Part of me wants to go easy on the game, because this appears to be the first major release for a modern console from a developer known mostly for mobile games and Switch ports. Part of me wants to be particularly negative, because it seems that literally every notable game that Fishlabs have ever put out, including this one, has more or less been iterating on a J2ME Star Wars game from a decade and a half ago, and it seems like this should be quite familiar territory by now.