Note: Review made shortly after launch

Of all the things for this Takeshi's Castle battle royale to remind me of, I was not expecting it to be Rainbow Six Siege. Rainbow Six Siege of 2015, that is. A cool idea and a good heap of fun, piled over by about as many issues and terrible decisions.

Any time I hit play on Fall guys, there's like a 60% chance the game is going to deliver one of it's really bad games. Fruit matching, any of the variants of tail tag, Jinxed, Hoarders - games that vary from being trivial to being boring to feeling like you have little direction over the outcome of the game - usually more than one of those. And it can absolutely suck. A couple of these games, particularly tail tag, feel so poorly thought out i have no idea how they got through any rounds of playtesting unchanged.

And then there's the technical issues which compound this. As of writing, the servers are working half the time, and when they are, the tickrate feels like it's somewhere below 10. More importantly, however, I feel it controls pretty poorly. There's noticeable input lag (feels about 200ms) on seemingly all actions, and for a game about falling over, the game bugging out whenever you do so and being arbitrary about you getting up sucks.

But for all those problems, Fall Guys somehow remains pretty fun. Just like Rainbow Six Siege in 2015, the base concept is just fantastic and the execution has a lot of things going for it. It's the first battle royale i've played where it doesnt feel bad to lose, thanks to very quick queueing, short round time and the comedic nature of it all. At the same time, winning still mostly feels great, and most of the games balance the amount of bullshit and the amount of skill in just the right amount to never feel like you havent deserved it.

There's a long way to go for Fall Guys. I've heard the Human Fall Flat devs are possibly working on a similar concept, which could leave Fall Guys looking like the PUBG to it's Warzone. But if the development goes the right way and more games are brought up to the standards of Slime Climb and Hexagone, this game could go the same direction as Siege.

Also wtf this developer worked on Hatoful Boyfriend?

There's only really a few tweaks stopping this game from being one of the great Turn Based Strategy games, to be deserving of being in spoken in the same breath as something like FFT or one of the better Fire Emblems. And whilst I say that with a tinge of dissapointment, for a sequel to an ancient cult game with a clearly shoestring budget, Brigandine is a great experience.

The first time I heard this game it was described to me as a Grand Strategy FFT. And whilst that's a terrible way of describing it, the general gist is similar - it's just a Macro Level resource/troop management layer above the tactics layer, and its ultimately very limited in what you can do, especially as the way battles take place means you typically have very few resources to be messing around with.

Ultimately, the Macro portion of the game boils down to maximising effectiveness of your units by managing risk. And it's good, especially as the game encourages risky plays and the consequences are blatant - sending some units the quest for resources and getting surprise-attacked with limited defensive forces can be great, for instance.

And the Tactics level is also good - if very conventional barring it's hex-based system. It's basically just a slightly simplified FFT with some thrown in positonal elements (enemies can't move past your area of presence sort of thing). It's nothing mindblowing, and I think most units probably have just a touch too much survivability, but it works well for what it is. It's main strengths are it's ties with the Macro elements - due to the ease of being able to retreat your units and the heavy unit limit in all battles - which can encourage interesting, and often risky and aggressive strateiges. Taking a risk with a weak defensive army to see if you can inflict damage to make a counterattack easier is the sort of good stuff the game's mechanics encourage.

All of this good stuff, however, is very nearly scampered by the game being slow as shit. Until you really get the Macro level down to a science and work around the dozens of quirks with the menus, you'll be spending an insane amount of time in the Macro layer, and it's probably too much even once you've done it. The tatics layer is also really shit for this. Armies start about 3 turns of movement away from each other, the cursor is really slow, the hex based nature makes it difficult to quickly snap units to exactly the right location, then because this is switch exclusive you have to wrangle with the joycon drift, the animations are slow, and then the relatively high HP draws out fights even longer. QOL fixes are apparently on the way but right now calling it anything other than garbage would be a lie.

There's also a few issues with the core gameplay. The Snowball-y nature of the strategy side only really comes together in the endgame if more than one nation snowballs, which can lead to some blowout victories (challenge mode solves this element substantially though). On the Tactics layer, some maps do tend to lead to massive balls of death where both sides just wail at each other until the statistically better one wins, which kinda suck. Doesnt happen too often though, and mostly on the lower difficulties.

Oh and there's also a story. It takes a backseat for the vast, vast majority of the game and is clearly not the focus, so it takes more of a worldbuilding approach, which benefits it when it's actually turning up. Nothing too amazing, but it's definetly not the focus.

In the end, I think your milage will vary a lot with this game depending on your patience for it, but there's a lot to like here for TBS fans. FFT Grand Strategy it is not, but I'd say well worth a look.

I've started writing this review on Darius Gaiden 3 times now. And I havent finished them not because I don't know what to say, but because every time I end up in a rabbit hole of listening to music from Zuntata, Taito's sound team, and by the time I'm done this page has timed out.

Gaiden's soundtrack is really special on it's own. A wild, weird soundtrack that sets this ethereal, almost dream-like tone, as well as just being very enjoyable listens. VISSIONERZ and SELF in partiuclar are great bookends to the wild concept album that Gaiden's OST basically is.

And the kindest thing I could ever say about Gaiden is that listening to this music on it's own is a disservice to it. Because the game is so entwined with it and rises to meet it on it's own, and the combined experience is brilliant.

Gaiden was made partially as a showcase of Taito's F3 arcade hardware, and they went all out. Absurd parralax effects, some very effective looking 3D models (particularly for a number of the bosses) which surprisingly fit in very well with the rest of the visual design.

And the cherry on top is the gameplay. Truth be told, it's not a particularly special shmup purely down to it's gameplay - though still pretty solid, thanks to it's great bosses. But it's fast, tough nature that arcade shmups inherantly possess helps you fall into the flow state and pull you along into the experience that everything in the game is building up.

And it all comes together so well. Director Hidehiro Fujiwara worked very closely with lead composer Hisayoshi Ogura to create a truly dreamlike, wild experience, including timing a number of the stages to the music tracks and vice versa. The way the game achieves it's surreal vision so well is a testament to some incredible game direction.

Gaiden is both more than the sum of it's parts, and made with amazing parts. It's one of my favourite shmups and one of the finest early examples of great game direction with an eye towards presentation. Even if you're not a shmup fan, I heavily reccomend giving it a shot. It's 30 minutes long and there's very little like it.

Spoilers, obvs.

So going into this amidst the flood of toxic waste that is the discourse online about TLOU2, I didn't expect it actually turn out to be something I'd call a fairly faithful sequel to the original. It improves on the gameplay to an enormous extent whilst embracing and evolving on the storytelling concepts the first game brings up. Even as it's tearing down the relationship between joel and ellie, it improves upon it and wraps up that story well. Even if it wasnt particularly neccessary. On top of that, the game goes all in on embracing the way both games don't cast judgement on the characters themselves with the framing. TLOU2 essentially boils down to two of these characters smushing together and truly embracing the consequences of it, which you witness from both perspectives. And at it's best, it's really effective. Viewing these twisted spirals of pointless violence from both sides leads to some really powerful moments. A lot of which involve friends being shot in the face uncerimoniously. Maybe a few too many.

That core conceit is built on a world of absurd levels of violence/consequence and a "no country for old men" degree of 'well you can also just get fucked by unrelated things out of nowhere', which is where things could probably start to fall down for some. TLOU2 teeters on the line between achieving it's hyper-realistic immersion and a shlocky snuff film, and I can definetly see some people's suspension of disbelief breaking and never coming back due to this, along with some more questionable elements (playing with the dog, all the enemies screaming out each other's name as they bleed out, Ellie killing Mel). And since this is such an emotionally driven game, with character actions being dictated by rage rather than logic, once you've checked out looking at it from outside a layer of immersion i'm sure looks a bit stupid. Ellie chasing Abby to santa barbara is blatantly not a well thought out act.

The issues of the story I actually have mainly come down to pacing and a couple of elements not being developed or built up right. Pacing is a particular problem for the first 2 days of Ellie's part, with seemingly nothing happening for a large proportion of the game other than Ellie killing a bunch of people. Whilst Abby has her Sidequests with Lev, Ellie is just left chasing leads and getting into hijinks for an unreasoable amount of time. There's good stuff in these sections but about 10 hours of very little after a strong opening is a bit annoying in retrospect.

On Abby's side, the Scar x WLF subplot feels a little tacked on, and the Scars themselves dont really get enough time devoted to them outside of Lev, who is a great companion and very likeable.

The split campaigns also leaves a chunk of the supporting cast a bit underdeveloped. Dina's relationship with Ellie feels a bit rushed and would have worked better imo as an existing thing before the game's start. Tommy, Owen and Mel could have done with another few scenes each, and even Lev and Yara could have done with more time to flesh them out and build up the relationships. It's not a huge issue and god knows the game has enough quiet time as it is, but maybe the characters could have been consolidated a little bit.

I know i'm rambling but the peformances, animation and general technical prowess of the whole affair really elevates it. The heightened realism approach of TLOU2's visual design is a huge factor in it's successes and it not losing people imo.

Now, gameplay. I wont touch on it much because frankly it's far less interesting to talk about, but it's a massive improvement throughout, with some of the absolute best environments and level design of a thing like this ever. If there's any game that shows the value of production values, its this, as every room of every arena feels handcrafted and like it has it's own cool way of having combat encounters. The differing toolsets of Ellie and Abby are also enhanced over the first game, and are fun to mess around with.

Main problem with the gameplay is the difficulty. It's too easy to lose guards on any difficulty selection and the systems can easily be gamed if you really want to. It's a shame because the thrill of being hunted and hunting can be legitimately fantastic.

But the big issue here? Lack of Multiplayer. Yes, I know it's probably coming at some point in some form, but TLOU1's multiplayer was really the best gameplay experience the game had to offer, if not the best part of the game altogether - and it's a massive dissapointment for me right now to not be using those cool tools the game has in the challenging environment the first game had.

Overall, I think this is the better last of us game, and probably Naughty Dog's best singleplayer experience. I think the story is definetly a milage may vary thing, but the enormous improvements on gameplay and the environements cements it for me. Not a perfect experience, not the best storytelling in a game ever, messy and not for everyone, but definetly worth checking out.