...did we all play the same game?

'cause generic soundtrack aside, i don't even need to hesitate - this is superior to quake ii in just about every way. sure, there's no rocket jumping, but that hardly matters in a corridor shooter; what's important is gunplay and Q2 wishes it had weapons half as good as these. the shotgun? nailgun? the fucking bfg that shoots black holes? get the hell out of town and don't let me see you here again

...that praise being said, i'll be damned if it doesn't put its shakiest leg first

unlike quake ii, the start here isn't slow because of its shooting - that feels fantastic from the get go - instead it's the aggressively invasive 'story' that's constantly trying to pull you from the action. let me shoot. the fucking. aliens! that's all i wanna do, man!!

"nah nah - i hear you", calls tim willits, newly appointed president of the Carmack Fan Club, "here, you can shoot again - in a turret section! and after that, ohoho, mission briefing!! and then - two more vehicle segments!!!"

with one swift motion i knock that shit out of his fucking hands. then i scream, "I JUST WANT TO SHOOT THE STROGG WITH MY SHOTGUN. THAT'S LITERALLY ALL I WANT TO DO. I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR SET PIECES (besides the mech one - that was pretty cool) OR YOUR SPACE MARINE STORY - I DON'T EVEN CARE THAT I COULD PERSONALLY WALK FASTER THAN MY CHARACTER WITH WEIGHTS STRAPPED TO MY LEGS. THE GUNS FEEL GOOD, TIM. PLEASE JUST LET ME USE THE FUCKING GUNS!!!!"

i think he took that bit about space marines harshly given the events that transpired shortly after, but all of my prayers had been answered nonetheless! no longer was i walking back and forth through areas i'd already visited just to report to some dumbass military man that the elevator got unjammed or steve blum #3 successfully completed filing his tax returns; i was actually playing the game - uninterrupted

when quake 4 gets its shit fully together after the first 1/3 or so, it shifts from stop-and-go into maximum overdrive. there's zero bad weapons, enemy types continue to vary enough (not to mention there's actually a couple decent bosses - a rarity for shooters) and ironically even the mission objectives become significantly more engaging when they're things you're doing and not just details off sgt. pvt. blum's shopping list

environments start looking a lot cooler too. Q2 toyed with body horror in small doses, but ravensoft went all-in here. call me simple, edgy, whatever - i think giant entrails breaching through space corridors and limbless (but still alive and wiggling) bodies being used as power supplies are pretty fucking rad. say what you will about id tech 4 - doom 3 looks fantastic and this is no different. hands down the most underrated shooter engine

misguided start aside, this is the best fps (barring quake 1, obviously) that i've played in a considerably long time. can't wait to receive matthew kane's next orders in quake 5!

wait fuck

Take “boomer shooter” out of your vocabulary; the term has been rendered meaningless.

I knew this entire little sub-genre of first-person shooters was cooked the second that the joint advertising teams of Games Workshop and Focus Entertainment all came to the conclusion that “boomer shooter” is a marketable enough selling point to tie your multi-million dollar IP to. If, indeed, it ever did mean something, it doesn’t anymore. What a boomer shooter is, in a post-Boltgun world, is “a shooter with pixel graphics”. That’s all. And if that’s all that it was — just a Doom Eternal demake — that would be forgivable. But the reality is that Boltgun is a completely miserable experience made by people who have zero fucking clue what they’re doing, chasing after trends without so much as an inkling of understanding as to why those trends are popular in the first place. Sure, fuck it. The new Doom games are gory shooters. Throwback games made popular by studios like New Blood seem to sell well. All we need to do is put the two together, boom! Free money! Paint it all in space marines and warp and chaos and we’ll be billionaires before breakfast tomorrow. How hard could it be?

I can’t fucking stand Boltgun. For some ungodly reason, someone in charge decided that the best people to put to work on a first-person shooter would be a crack team of board game and strategy developers from Auroch Digital, all of them completely unqualified to get to work on a project such as this. Consider this your first warning sign, long before you even boot up the game; why would Focus hire out to the studio behind Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics and Beermaster: Beer Brewing Simulator to make what’s intended to be a fast, brutal, tightly-paced shooter? Is it because they genuinely believed that these were the best people for the job, or was it because some tiny management-game studio from Bristol wasn’t asking for as much money as the next guys who knew what they were doing? I don’t blame Auroch, necessarily; I know what it’s like to be way in over my head under the guidance of a boss who doesn’t know enough to understand how badly I’m fucking up.

Boltgun is a game of numbers, and not of much else. “Suit your weapon’s strength to an enemy’s toughness rating,” reads one particularly cheery loading screen tip. As requested, I take aim at a Level 3 Nurgling with my STR 5 Boltgun, and the taste of bile in the back of my throat gets harder to ignore. Locking your reticle on an enemy will give you every detail about them you could ever want to know: their name, their level, total health, current health, social security number, bank password, browser history, the works. You swap between the weapons on your hotbar and each of them tells you the exact strength and name of the equipped gun: STR 4 Boltgun, STR 3 Meltagun, STR 7 Plasma Gun. Poke around levels for long enough and you’ll find secret pickups that’ll boost the power of your weapons, adding all sorts of little tags like “Kraken Round Magazine” and “Dragonfire Round Magazine” or “Machine Spirit Upgrade”. Your HUD gets flooded with all of these details, paradoxically taking up so much space on the screen that it’s near-impossible to read any of it. One pressing question remains, throughout all of this:

Why?

What do we gain from having all of this worthless fucking information on the screen at all times? Seriously, what the fuck is the point? I don’t need to know the enemy’s level. I don’t need to know exactly how much health they have. I don’t need to know a numerical value for how strong my weapons are. I don’t need to know what type of ammo I’ve got loaded into my boltgun. I don’t need to know the maximum amount of health that an enemy could theoretically have. I don’t fucking need any of this. How are you getting lapped in your UI design by the original Doom, a game that came out three fucking decades ago and realized then that you didn’t need to tell the player all of this completely fucking worthless information? If you didn’t know before playing that Auroch were strategy game developers and not people who make shooters, this is what gives it away; such a fucking obsession with showing numbers to the player in a situation where they’re worse than useless.

And none of this would matter, really, if the game were fun. If this was all just pointless, ignorable set-dressing for a game that otherwise works fine, then I could forgive it. I can’t, though, because Boltgun commits the mortal sin of being abjectly fucking boring. This might be one of the most pathetically easy games I’ve ever played, even with the difficulty cranked as high as it can go. Enemies feel like they’re shooting at you only as a formality, firing projectiles that move in slow-motion across the screen that’ll land in a different zip code so long as you strafe left. This is true for just about every enemy that can fire something at you. All of them are so sluggish that it’s as if they’re only pulling the trigger at you because they’d get fired and lose their health insurance if they didn’t. The flamers might be one of the most unintentionally hilarious monsters I’ve ever seen in a game like this; I think doctors test for brain activity by whether or not you’ve ever taken a hit from a fireball a flamer has thrown at you. You could only ever get clipped if you were comatose. Exterminatus difficulty does seem to make projectiles go a bit faster, and spawns more numerous and more powerful enemies, but I imagine most people who have played a game before could do most of this in their sleep. Not because they’re god gamers, but because Boltgun never stops drowning the player in goodies.

Pickups are peppered fucking everywhere in all of these over-long levels, littering the floor with every single type of ammo, every single grenade, and more health and armor kits than anyone could ever possibly need. There’s a section on the right side of the screen dedicated to telling you which pickups you got, and you should get used to seeing it be filled with nothing but “Boltgun ammo full, Boltgun ammo full, Heavy bolter ammo full, Krak grenade full, Health full, Health full, Health full, Boltgun ammo full, Plasma gun ammo full, Health full, Heavy bolter ammo full, Shotgun ammo full, Health full”. Outside of Exterminatus difficulty, I don’t think you ever even need to switch weapons; you get so much ammo for every single gun that you’ll never get so much as an opportunity to run a weapon dry. Armor needs to drain to zero before enemies can start dealing direct health damage, and armor caps out at 300(!!!!!), meaning you’ll always have plenty of +100 health kits to backtrack for in the unlikely situation that your foes manage to break through your 300 armor and get to your 200 health. I walked out of every stage with more supplies than I walked into them with, even after certain stages would force me into a minimum of four purges before I was allowed to move on.

In addition to your usually loop of finding color-coded keys and unlocking color-coded doors, Boltgun takes a page from the new Doom titles with the purge mechanic, where all of the doors lock and you aren’t allowed to progress until you’ve killed everything inside. New enemies will constantly spawn in, so it’s mostly just an exercise in strafing around and firing at the teleport particle effects. Enemies spawn in slowly, and the purge arenas are often big enough that you’ll be running around trying to find where the fucking enemies actually are so you can shoot them and progress. A big part of what makes these encounters so slow is that enemies spawn in waves, where more of them refuse to teleport in until you’ve killed everything from the first wave; there’ll be some shit gunner who dies in three shots from the Boltgun meandering around two continents away, and it’s up to you to go and find him so that you can get the momentum going again. There’s no challenge, there’s no pressure, it’s just blindly wandering through these enormous arenas trying to figure out if everyone else went home and didn’t tell you.

A part of me is grateful that this is on Game Pass, because it means that I didn’t need to spend a cent of my own money beyond what I was already paying to find out how atrocious this really is. The other part of me is annoyed, because I never would have bothered trying this out had it not been offered to me as part of a package deal. The only thing it cost me was my time; the one resource I can never get more of. What a complete and utter waste. You know a game is really bad when it ignites the flames of existential dread. There were so many better things I could have done with my time, and I instead allowed this game made and marketed by clueless people to suck it all away and leave me with a taste in my mouth like I ate two servings of dirt. The bar for Warhammer games is on the fucking floor. Do yourself a favor and try to forget that this even exists. I’m sorry for writing this review and reminding you of it if you’d gotten it out of your mind.

I can offer no greater condemnation than by stating that this is a sprite-based game with vertical mouselook.

Shout out to small rural towns overtaken by an evil or dark presence that corrupts them or brings hellish creatures. Gotta be one of my favorite genders.




Deemon, the incompetent reviewer, started off his write-off with one of his usual jokes, so unfunny that one might wonder if he was doing it on purpose or if he really has such poor comedy taste. He was trying to hide the fact that he really didn’t know where to start; the path to take might seem clear, but like the streets and forest of Bright Falls, it’s more deceiving than it may look at first, like a maze that’s also a downward spiral.

Deemon pondered, searching for a way to salvage the review, desperately trying to find out which step he should take, what words he should use. He sighed. He decided to let the words write themselves, to let out all the thoughts that had formed while the darkness and light of the town surrounded Alan Wake. He surrendered himself to the unknown, one that might be already written after all… Though he knows he had to talk about the music for sure, that selection of bangers had to be celebrated somehow.




Ambition almost killed Alan Wake, in more ways than one. I mean, I may not know much about Remedy Studios, in fact, it is the very first game of theirs I have ever played and beaten, but I do know the story of Bright Falls and how it was initially going to be something else, an open world of sorts, something that didn’t quite work, as it seems. Translating an already crafted open world into a linear style of game is such a monumental task that if I were in that predicament, I’d have considered outright scrapping everything and starting from zero, but that probably wasn’t even a realistic option for the team to begin with.

But that’s not even what I’m specifically referring to. Alan Wake, the game, the package, the copy made out of code and specific sections, is riddled with hiccups and bumps; it’s filled with padding, sections of trees and mist than don’t offer much aside from one or two manuscripts pages and combat sections that can feel overbearing at times, the remnants of its troubled production remain in aspects such as the barren areas and driving sections that don’t have much of a place and are so frustrating to playthrough even if you ignore any cars I just wish they were taken out —tho it’s kind of cute how it also uses the same light mechanic as the rest of the game—,  the encounters with the Taken or the groups of mad crows often lack imagination and enemy variety or don’t jam very well with how the camera works in the case of the camera, and at one point I just kept thinking how much the experience would have benefited if some sections were repurposed in different ways or outright removed.

The imperfections of Alan Wake mostly come from this, factors outside of the game itself, of its story, but they still impact it negatively; I can’t scratch off the feeling of something being lost a bit when all of the boss enemies behave the exact same, the only thing that changes being the creepy lines they spat out and the character model. If the game wasn’t anything more than a series of levels where you shoot at things, then these issues would have rotted its pages…

…luckily, it has a dragon.

Wouldn’t it be funny if I started to praise the actual combat itself after spending two paragraphs criticizing some gameplay sections? Yeah, it would be hilarious! ... ANYWAYyeah I fucking adore the way Al controls. It occupies that same space as Simon from Castlevania, where how slow and imprecise it feels actually benefits the gameplay. You truly get the feeling Alan has never picked a gun in his life in any major capacity; he’s slow, clunky, imprecise, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. The tense dance of using light to weaken the Taken and gen emptying the chambers of them, or hell, simply using a flare and trying to activate the closest generator, it’s a super straight-forward system, and I love it. It’s incredibly satisfying to come out of encounters on top, because even if there isn’t much scarcity in resources (even if you start off each chapter with nothing each time), they are still somewhat limited, especially the most powerful weapons, and little things like mashing X to reload faster or the camera panning out to warn you of nearby enemies are things I didn’t know I needed until now.

It would be a far cry to call it a survival horror, but it’s tense; it’s tense to try to manage the purge while a bulldozer is charging full speed at you; it’s tense to try to outspeed a force you cannot do nothing against; and Alan gets progressively more and more tired. I can make the argument that there should be less of it or at least more variety in what it offers enemy-wise, but nothing will take away from the fact that the core itself is some fantastic shit.

Like… there’s something about fighting against waves of enemies on stage while the sickest rock tune ever plays in the background and the lights and flames fill your eyes that I can only call ‘’fucking awesome’’.




Deemon knew that wasn’t just it. He could talk about flaws and shooting Taken all he wanted, but something else lied within the light. He ran into it.

‘’But there’s something else’’, he said




But there’s something else.

A story already written, touched by the darkness. Written already as a part of it before birth, its muse trying to corrupt it. An ending yet to be typed out.

I have never seen a videogame story that trusts so much that the player will be intrigued enough by it to stick with it and engage with it all the way through. The tale Alan Wake, Alice, Barry, Sarah, and the whole town get tangled into is not intriguing; it is fascinating. I have never felt such closure from getting answers to questions I never realized where there in the first place. From being pretty disappointed about how Nightingale and Mott had such a poor presence as antagonists to being in awe of how their actions fell into place after the truth of this unfortunate series of events was revealed. Alan Wake offers a hell of a mystery. Alan Wake solves it.

The pages of the manuscript are as essential as the cinematics and interactions, so many pieces of the puzzle fit, it’s almost like getting spoiled before something happens, which in a way is exactly what’s happening. At first, I felt pretty disappointed that this would be a jarring light vs darkness story mixed with a thriller. Then it ended up being a meta-narrative within its own meta-narrative. The fact they did that without it feeling overcomplicated or screwing it up is ovation worthy.

But I also feel a huge sense of admiration for the micro-stories at play; hearing and talking to the inhabitants of Bright Falls, listening to Maine’s night radio, the echoes of the Taken and stellar ambience sounds ringing through my ears, the fucking incredible Night Springs shorts that had me HOOKED... It was the little things scattered in the trees and buildings and the small talk that gave this spiraling world even more meaning.

It ends with the darkness hungry for more, just like me. I’ve seen people call Alan Wake ‘’the most 6/7 out of ten game I’ve ever played’’, and even though I do not sympathize with that statement at all because it feels reductive in any context, I kind of get what people mean by it. Alan Wake is profoundly flawed, but most of them do not come from the game itself, but rather from the complicated production it had to go through.  In the face of such adversity, I’ve never seen such confidence, such talent, or such a desire to tell a tale like this. Alan Wake isn’t just *a* story, there’s more to be written and read, but at the end of the day, it’s also its own story. And what a story it is.

Maybe this isn’t what the champion of light could have been if the circumstances were different, but the hardships cannot be avoided, and even after going through them, they really sold me on this novel.

This is one of those games where if I have gotten it on release and paid full price for this game. This game would suck and be heavily disappointed this is the 1st 3D Guilty Gear game.
Looking at it in 2024 where the game is $4 on steam a lot. The license battles they had to face makes for the lack of characters from the series seen. Those very license battles would create another goated series, Blazblue. Xrd and Strive came out and GG is successful it’s ever been. I think this game is decent!

I love how the game as legitimate boss battles even if a few are more “woah” factor to any actual gameplay intensive. Which the gameplay I feel mix about, you can do combos and do some wild stuff. Or you can button mash and get the same results on playthroughs. Abusing the I-frames from some of the tension moves leads to some interesting set ups and dodging. As blocking and dodging/side stepping in this game is awful. It’s better to use a tension move to get out of something than to try to block something.

I love early 2000s games mood and this game is no exception. Give it a try! Campaign is a few hours long and playing the other modes with characters non playable in the story are cool.

(This game added in Valentine and she’s adorable along with the other Valentines. So the game rating gets a bonus point.)

I didn’t even know it was even possible to get combo-ed in Russian Roulette, but the Dragon Ball FighterZ shit the Dealer pulled on me proved VERY wrong. Seeing him with his crooked grin using the magnifying glass into cutting the shotgun’s barrel for the first time felt like being shot in real life.

Buckshot Roulette’s main story is pretty simple; on the first round you learn the most basic rules, and it’ll be the part where luck will have the easiest time to fuck you up, on the second you are given the items and the lenience and strategize with what they provide , and the third one is the final dance, in all the ways. Claim victory, and the bounty is yours, you’ll be done and free… But why not stay for another round?

The introduction of this nasty-ass setting is priceless, I for one love the rusty warehouse this is probably taking place in and bathrooms with the same amount of hygiene that those of my university, all while hearing the music of an unseen party at the very bottom, so far away yet so easy for its sounds to reach your ears. Then you immediately decide to point the gun to yourself, immediately get fucked, and from that moment onwards you know which type of game you are dealing with.

You don’t have much time on your hands, Buckshot Roulette knows very well that this particular little game of theirs can’t really go on for more than its worth, and so it makes the most out of its time. It takes a lil’ bit to take off, as I said the first round consists mostly on you, your ability to count a bit, the Dealer and the gun, so even tho our friend sitting by the table hasn’t entered insane mode yet, luck can really mess with you for a while and not letting you get into the real ‘’good stuff’’.

Die & Learning can only get you so far on here, with the introduction of items, it may not hit as much at the start how useful they just really are. Apart from the phone, which I found to be too unreliable and more of a waste of item slot than anything, every single drug or tool you can get your hands on works fine on their own, but together the options are insane. I only realized this after the Dealer made me wish I had smoked that cigarette, and from there on out is a tense, cathartic mind game, your opponent is not holding back anymore, and neither should you.

Perhaps I’m putting my heart through too much stress, but it’s worth for the rush that you feel in the final round, where it’s all or nothing, either after pulling off some insane-ass trick that works or when backed against the wall and without tricks, going for the gamble of the fucking century and it actually working, those moments are both hysterical and fulfilling as hell… tho… don-don’t go testing your luck unless you need it, i-it can go REAL wrong.

Winning that final bet on the first time and coming out alive on the double or nothing mode (and promptly getting the fuck out), that’s what’s fun, that’s what makes it worth, that’s what will make you keep coming back… true fun for all ages!

The core in here is excellent, it can really grab you beyond the normal mode and I’m really glad ‘’Double or Nothing’’ exists, but it still isn’t more than it is, a rush of adrenaline that lasts as long as it needs you, and welcomes you with open arms if you do decide to come back or stay for a little longer, and some of the achievements are a riot, so it also has that going for it!

When multiplayer gets released it’s gonna the funniest thing ever oh my god, if I already lost my shit wheezing against an AI opponent, with friends this is just gonna be straight up fucked up…

Welcome Back

I think a term commonly associated with romance/sol animanga and games is “wish fulfillment.” Now, from my experience, it's a term usually met with some level of disdain or condescension. “Wow what a loser, they need this thing to feel good about themselves.” And, sure, I can understand where that attitude comes from, in fact I'm like that sometimes too. But I feel it's not that simple. People come from different backgrounds, places, and circumstances. Sometimes what we need is comfort from something, even if it isn't real.
Clannad, among many, many other beloved visual novels is boiled down to the common “your friends and family are important, your life is worth living” morals, but is it a bad thing to be so commonly communicated? I would assume that Maeda and the many other writers at Key are trying to convey this, and even if they were or not, intention does not always align with found purpose. Tomoya Okazaki, our protagonist, is a great stand in for players like me to some degree. He's still his own character, but I think him being a loner to align with the usual “wish fulfillment” protagonist role really works to its benefit. No matter your background or role, there is worth in finding friends and family, whether it be genetic or found. It finally gives us purpose to those who feel so aimless in life. Clannad is not simply “wish fulfillment” at play. It's inspiring us to fulfill those wishes ourselves, and fulfill the wishes of others.
I’ve seen complaints about Clannad’s core structure before, as for some people the routes are “not interconnected enough”. But is that a problem? In my opinion, anyway, Clannad is an anthology of the multiple “what if” scenarios surrounding Okazaki’s journey in life. While Nagisa’s route is what leads to the true ending of the story, it doesn’t make the other routes pointless. Regardless of what is the “true” outcome of the story, your experiences and how you see these characters develop will always live on with the player. You get to see Okazaki give these people true happiness in life, and by the true ending, he is repaid for everything he’s done. While in gameplay the route system is a little rough around the edges with much needed polish, I think playing with a guide allows for a very smooth experience.
Playing this after my most prior Key visual novel experience, that being AIR, really opened my eyes to how well thought out and executed much of Clannad is. While AIR suffers from an overly ambitious but ultimately meaningless structure, Clannad takes a safer approach and cuts out any filler. Jun Maeda and his team really wanted to make up for the mistakes of AIR, and you can really tell from how much more polish is applied to this game. Despite this being one of the longest games I’ve ever played, Clannad rarely falls victim to artificial padding. The game gives you and makes proper use of the “skip already read text” feature, which makes hopping into your next route a very quick and easy experience. It helps that the game is split into 10+ routes that all vary in length, meaning I don’t think the game can ever burn you out from a scenario. Each route (with two exceptions, one being entirely optional) is very different overall so nothing is samey either. I’d also like to make note of the amount of content on offer, Clannad is not only long from the main game but has TONS of little secrets and extra blurbs of dialogue to discover, it really feels like the team wanted to put as much as they could onto the disc.
And that’s the overall thing I love about Clannad: it’s very polished. Not perfect, but very damn close. Clannad may seem safe or tropey, but it uses those aspects and pushes them to a wonderful and engaging extent. The current top review tries to make fun of fans of this game and I’d have to say that this person probably has never experienced joy in their life. None of the huge visual novels I’ve played so far have been flops, and Clannad is no exception either. In fact, out of the three (Higurashi, Tsukihime, Clannad) I would say this is my new favorite, and knowing that Key still has some fantastic games in their catalog for me to still try out (Kanon, Little Busters!, and Rewrite) has me so immensely excited. But none of those games, or any visual novels in the future will take away what a special experience Clannad was for me. I had taken a long break from reviews and I needed to get out of that slump, and this game was what inspired me to write a little something again, especially seeing how none of the longer reviews about this game on this site are in good faith. I wanted to fix that. Thank you for reading, and if this review manages to get even one person to fully play through this game, I’ll be happy.

Let’s see how well you can fly on borrowed wings


Call this game V.IV Rusty, ‘cause it never fucking misses

Armored Core VI has been one of the most positive surprises I’ve had when it comes to pieces of media, and I already went into it expecting to love it or at the very least like it, mind you, but it seems that my fate wasn’t to come out of this with my expectations set ablaze and built a new.

And thing is, not really knowing the extent of what I was getting into was completely my fault, Fires of Rubicon is the sixth numbered title in the AC series and the- HOW MANY NOW?!. It’s certainly not lacking the pedigree, and yet, probably because of the 10 years of radio salience the series has gone through, and 11 of a wide-world phenomenon that has changed the videogame industry forever that is the ‘’SoulsBorne Demon Ring I, II and III: Shadows Die Twice’’ saga, my understanding to Armored Core as series wasn’t as rich as I wanted it to be, and that kinda left my expectations for IV in a weird spot .

This not to say I expected Fires of Rubicon to be ‘’just like Dark Souls’’ or something like that, I knew this was going to be completely different; I knew a bunch of stuff and how the series worked, I knew how the series worked…

Except I didn’t.

I expected a fun mech game with deep customization options. I got that, yes…

But also so, so much more.

What’re ya buyin?

Welcome to your new living space: four cold and oppressive metal walls, a store that sells weaponry that I’m pretty sure breaks every Geneva convention both existing and yet to be written down, and like 5 different disembodied voices telling you in different ways that you gotta do some killing… joy!

You make home in different bases throughout the game, but you really wouldn’t know unless the game told you, they all serve the same purpose in the end: to make your mecha the ugliest piece of junk imaginable.

I’ve heard people say that you’ll spend the same amount time buying parts and building your mech as you do going ‘’pew-pew’’ in your comically big killing machine, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. The down time and management are the spine of ACVI; there’s a reason every time you die while in a mission the game gives you the option, to change your mech, you are gonna be taking a lot of work and not every question has the same answer… but you can make them be close enough! Even when the game poses some extremely daunting challenges, you can still say ‘’fuck capitalism’’ to the store and keep trying with your current build if you feel comfortable with it, I started using a Dual- wielding medium to light build pretty early on and even after all the upgrades and changes, that idea was kept intact even after the credits rolled.

Still, the game invites you to experiment and actively rewards you: the number of possible combinations is so humongous I don’t think it’s even possible to quantify from the essential legs which can define your entire giant robot to seemingly smaller things like add on and secondary weapons, but just as equally important, every single piece counts, and you are never punished for trying stuff out. Even if you create a mech that doesn’t even make sense of whose weapons don’t synergize with each other, doesn’t matter even if you spent all your money making it, ‘cause you can always sell those suckers for the same price you got them, ‘cause there are no obstacles to have fun in war!

But even with that freedom to try and fail, I imagine many players will center around one overall idea, and how not to when the game is equally as rewarding in that way? I feared that I’d treat my mech as a sort of ship of Theseus, making builds so specific that I’d have to constantly change it to the point it was unrecognizable from what it originally was, I waited for that moment to come sooner or later… but it never really did. Even against the end boss of the first chapter, an enemy that seems scientifically designed to make new players get into the idea they need to buy new shit, and probably the boss I struggled against the most… I ended up defeating them with the ol’ and reliable.

Building up a mech is important, but it’s equally as essential to knowing them. It doesn’t really mean much to understand some numbers if on ground you don’t know how anything works, and that’s what I found fascinating about the system; a system that rewards those who wish to experiment and those who wish to perfect themselves, plowing through enemies or figuring them out, sometimes both at the same time in both cases. Even if your robot starts as a Wall-E and ends up an Mazinger Z, your relationship with it feels the same, it feels as you made it grew and change, just as much as you did as pilot with it.

And that reminds me, speaking of the battlefield…

Got a job for you, 621

Oh boy!

You know what’s better than preparing to do cool stuff? Doing the cool stuff! If by cool stuff we mean committing acts that will forever hunt our darkest nightmare and make our consciousness eat us, of course.

Fires of Rubicon is not an action game, the game is the action. You know those dumb ‘’imagine showing this to a small Victorian child’’ memes? Well, Armored Core VI is that but like if instead of ‘’Victorian child’’ was ‘’any person during any age of history, even the current one’’, and I mean that the highest compliment I could thing of. There’s so much stuff happening at every single moment at every single second that the fact is all perfectly understandable must be some kind of deep dark magic shit. The freedom in this 3D movement goes beyond giving you space to shoot and gives you some damn crazy movement options, and you either have to use them or you better have good shields, because in this battlefield nonstop attacking and quick thinking are imperative.

Bullets flowing like traces of light or giant lasers impacting at full force, it’s a constant onslaught which you WON’T come out unscathed, but certainly victorious. This is the anthesis of ‘’You only do cool shit during the cutscenes’’, because you are the cool shit, and every time a character points out how fucking insane you are I don’t feel like the game is patting me in the back, I feel like… Yeah! I actually did that cool shit! Give me that trophy I deserve it!

The variation on missions and the places you visit feels so vast and natural I really couldn’t care if they get repeated, because even when they do, if feel warranted in the broader context and it’s always so fun to repel the forces of basic mechs, destroying or defending the objectives or facing off against enemies equal to you that I kind of secretly wish there was even more of it.

Battling against other ACs is such a pleasure, and whoever came up with the idea of the Arena deserves a goddam golden medal; not only it’s a perfect excuse to ‘’meet’’ other pilots and ACs you may or may not encounter in the game, but it’s also the perfect connector to make the OS system even more rewarding and to test your abilities as well as to learn from other builds. But it’s when you get to encounter real ACs in the wild that the true dopamine starts running wild; some of the hardest battles in the entire game are those against pilots that feel like other protagonist, with access to the same crazy weaponry and the ability to heal. It’s incredibly rewarding knowing that you defeated someone that was basically another you with different equipment, almost as much as when you defeat someone that’s straight up stronger than you.


The bosses are BY A LONG SHOT the moments where the spectacle is brought to a insane degree, but never to the detriment to the fight itself. It was during the fight against the ‘’gimmick’’ boss of the game and I realized how much fun I was having, and my jaw was dropping that I knew fully that this was a damn good game. Speaking of, I wish I was recording my face when fighting against one of them, it was a crazy-ass battle that feel even more of a bullet hell than any previous one , and I managed to defeat them with only one heal left and with my resources low… and then the fucker started rising again. I felt both so betrayed and happy that I could only nervously laugh, what an amazing bunch of bosses.

If I have to point out flaws, and I do ‘cause there are two things that irked me, would be the seemingly lack of any sort of real punishment and… the lock-on system. Previous AC game featured a debt system that could put you in the red and make you have literal zero money, and while that also seemed to have its surprising gameplay ‘’benefits’’, it was a system that I totally get why it didn’t return and money lost after every mission to pay off repairs is more than enough… but I still think there should have been something that punished you, if not for your using your resources, maybe because of reckless deaths or decisions. Because not every mission has provisions to pick up ammo at a certain point, I found myself letting me be killed or resetting back to the last checkpoint, knowing not much progress would be lost and the punishment wouldn’t be much higher. I only realized this four chapters into the game, but even before that I noticed that the game too lenient considering the setting and how the rest of the world operates, and even if it’s not necessarily a flaw, it felt off in some way… you know that it’s a flaw tho?

The lock-on… isn’t the worst, once you are locked in to an enemy you are set unless it pulls off some whacky stuff, and the red reticle tells you perfectly if you are hitting the enemy or not… but getting to that point is so confusing, so poorly shown, and it’s so hard and cumbersome to change between enemies in a game so fast paced, that I couldn’t help but groan at it every time a speedy bastard attacked me from behind and by the time I was finally locked I had to spend one heal, not even the manual aim upgrade helps much in that regard…

The lock on is probably the worst part about the whole experience, and its something that doesn’t even come close to make the battles less enjoyable, and hell, sometimes I even… like it? In boss fights specially, the little bit of confusion feels warranted and makes you rely more on your control over the camera, which ends up being the right call to evade many attacks. But even when it’s noticeably bad, it will take much more than that to ruin a combat so polished, so fun, so exhilarating and exciting as this. It’s in the middle of the action when I can only think of the battle, it’s in the store when I think of the planning, and everything flows perfectly…

But it’s in those moments in the middle of nowhere, or when seeing the briefing, that I remember.

There’s a greater horror beyond the scorched skies.

A winged mutt

The first mission of the game is to wipe out entire battalion of resistance members fighting for their land, just because they are a nuisance to a conglomerate.

The next mission is to destroy that company’s forces ‘cause another conglomerate told us to.

Welcome to Rubicon.

To be honest, this particular introduction is nothing new for this series, the very first game in fact has a really similar first mission tot that of VI, and this is where my lack of knowledge comes into play since I’m not really able to compare this game’s story to that of its previous iterations in any meaningful way… but I can look it as its own.

I can’t tell you how many times I was hearing the briefing of many missions and the only thing I could picture in my mind was the CEO of Arquebus saying something along the lines of ‘’Human rights? In this economy?!’’

There’s something so uncannily real about Fires of Rubicon horror, a silenced horror beyond the great threat that a possible return of the Fires of Ibis could entail, that threat feels cosmical, a cataclysm humanity has witnessed and its terrible result… but what’s more terrifying than that is seeing two corporations grander than entire system on a race to make that happen once again, a clash to the Armageddon only stopped by their own hubris and the efforts of the rubiconians.

Entire cities covered by snow and decay, their buildings now used as cover for weapons that should have never existed, companies and the PCA creating entire edifications in mere days, in the remnants of the institute of Rubicon, a memory of a series of mistakes that costed an entire solar system. The game tells a lot of this story through briefings and mid-level conversations (Kind of Kid Icarus Uprising, now that I think about it), and it even uses this information to surprise you with the complete opposite or something unexpected, but it’s in the levels themselves, with its amazing visuals and design, where the true tragedy of Rubicon is apparent.

Fires of Rubicon is a story that branches off even beyond the credits, but one that also feels perfectly told in its first run. What I thought would be a backdrop that gives context to why are you shooting ends up being everything, and the reason you yourself question why are you shooting.

It feels so violent, more so than the hectic combat, a story of broken pasts and promises, of lies on top of lies that end up in cataclysmic results, and of those that pursue the truth end up being the most vulnerable.

You arrive with a stolen name and as a dog of many owners, to a world where nobody has a face nor a real name, where they are but numbers from a series of gens of mechs and upgrades, where those who are on top of the world don’t trust those who are a little higher on the food chain, those who don’t even show themselves, as if terrible war they started is beneath them.

Nothing matters if credits are spent; even after you begin wars against them, you still buy parts of your mech from those same companies.

Little by little, I found those to call allies, like Carla or Rusty, and those to hate, like Snail, but even in their misfortune, they at least have a voice, unlike the thousands, maybe millions, of rubiconians, as muted as their cousins of the ever-expanding coral.

But even the end, is those voices that end up joining you against a force so massive it seems impossible to know where it begins or where it ends, so inhumane that knowing people are behind it all makes it even worse, and yet, you fight, you win your wings.

You are Raven.

I love this story, I love how open ended it ends, almost inviting you to explore more, but also being hopeful if you did the right thing, if you improved and knew who to trust and what you needed to do, a story that made each battle have the more meaning, and that made the final decision and the final fight some of the most bitter sweet moments I’ve experienced in a game.

Looking back, I almost feel ashamed, I expected so much less from what it ended up being, an inspiring trust in the player, an amazing combat and movement system, a story that is as grand, as tragic, and as terrifying as it needs to be. But also even more than that.

I arrived at Rubicon not even knowing what I was gonna fight for.

Turns out, I had to find the answer for myself.

The 1st Armored Core title on the ps2, is a very early installment ps2 as well so keep this in mind for this review. Let’s start off with the setting of the game, Mars, a big red rock planet with heavy weather. This leads to many of the missions and areas in the game being indoors, meaning many areas are laboratories or factories. While it can feel like a bummer to some people as the many open areas are found in the ps1 games. Here it checks out since the missions that DO have you outside, the weather is often rough like being at Mar’s poles, having to search and operate in a snowstorm. I find the areas overall good and fit with the setting, while there’s nothing to write home about for a gen 6 game.

Now let’s talk about the feature everyone loves dearly, the arena! I would sink in hours on end in the arena, going from rank 50 to 1 nearly all at the beginning of the game as there were no restrictions from stopping me. I feel rather conflicted about this game’s arena. On one hand, with the arena areas to choose from, I found myself swapping between them more often than I did with any AC title I’ve played as each has its own pros and cons. I love going to Falna Craters to give a large, almost flat arena to battle a fellow AC for example.

Now on the other hand… the AI in this game is dumb, I mean REALLY dumb. While yes, the difficulty curve for the arena is excellent in its own right. The AI placed in the areas given just doesn’t mix well. As you may know, areas are limited and if you leave the area borders, you fail. This same logic applies to the enemies, so you can beat ALL of the arenas by not shooting a single thing at an opponent. Can totally cheese by ringing out the opponents. The easiest to do this is by playing Abandon Highway. I say to give this a try as it’s hilarious, but the idea of being able to ring out even rank 1 AC by doing this is mind-boggling. This applies to the missions too, I personally have gotten an enemy AC trapped on my head in a corner and we’ll have an awkward moment together. While this is a clear flaw in game design, it being a solo experience makes the flaw not as bad if this problem existed in modern gaming.

Gameplay? It’s literally the same as the ps1 games but with better graphics. Don’t fix what isn’t broken I guess.

Music! The music in this title is good, full techno vibe for this title and great remakes of the 1’s ost. My favorite menu/garage theme without a doubt!

The story in this title is great and far better told than the previous entries. This time, the antagonists feel like a genuine threat and like you’re the only hope for the people on Mars, that feeling of being at a disadvantage the whole way through. Each mission has actual relevance to the story, unlike past and later titles where the plot only happens near the last half. Pleasant story and worth checking out for it alone.

Overall, this being my 1st AC game I tried it out years ago and gave up on it as it was too hard. Now back with 4 AC games under my belt and knowledge now going back into this game. This game is really really fun and what more can you ask from a video game?

I’m at a sheer loss to hype anyone about Armored Core: Verdict Day. And this is coming from someone who loves mecha, even the most dull ones I usually find some aspects worth looking into. Except for Nine-breaker, but that's a topic for another day. Here I am struggling so hard to get into a cockpit let alone function in one. In the end, I'm leaning quite heavily on “Skip this, please. For the sake of your sanity.” There is plenty wrong here, but I'll do my best to give a fair overview for those interested.

Set 100 years after the events of ACV. I won’t spoil what happens in the previous game, but suffice it to say. You control a new protagonist. The “Lone Mercenary.” Accompanying them is an operator Maggy and a transport pilot by the name of Fatman. Yes, I kid you not, one of your handlers' names is Fatman… Okay….Unexpected Kojima character aside You have slightly fewer main missions(Sorties) here than the predecessor with sixty to go through, but only ten have relevance to the story. The 50 are mainly AC vs. AC duels and the occasional eliminate every enemy unit. The Sorties barely drop important plot scenes here, quickly dulling my interest. Sure they can drip-feed you lore pages after duels, but these only talk about the enemy and less about enriching who, what, where, when, and why questions about the ACs we use and less so about the characters, relationships, and plot threads we encounter. Mostly delegated in cutscenes, but these are too small in number when a majority of battles are simply skirmishes without context. So lack of context and exposition here hurts. To give you the bare minimum: “The Three Forces” reign supreme. The Venide, Sirius, and Evergreen Family(EGF). I don’t need to discuss their background because there is hardly vital information to explore. But the gist is that the Forces are in a constant 3-way war with each other for the power to use the Towers. Tall megastructures dot various places around the globe with hidden ancient advanced technology. There is a fourth power; “The Foundation,” a group that claims neutrality yet supplies all factions with weapons and UNACs(Unmanned Armored Cores). And you, my unlucky friend, have to navigate the different assignments from each of these factions.

After completing all the missions offline, I have to say the story is a downgrade from its predecessor. Villains unremarkable of note and meh characters. The inclusion of lore is a nice touch that constantly updates in a sort of digital newspaper; “The Voice of War” or VOW for short. Yet, these ultimately don’t do much to engage players enough to immerse them further into the world. Serving as little more than a footnote, an after-action report after a main story encounter and as a result disinterests me to care for worldbuilding at large. One could easily see this as a checklist the devs did to fulfill a ‘lore’ requirement. Granted, the series isn't known for lore to feed, since we have to piece together the sparse environmental storytelling told through fragments of cutscenes, character dialogue, and morsels of information that may connect with villains. Yet this in itself isn't a strong point to dive into from my time playing AC2 to ACVD. There have been attempts by more dedicated fans on Youtube to somehow connect the pieces of lore, an endeavor I respect and admire. So perhaps there is something to tie knots...

One feature I loved in the earlier title is the workshop sites. These sites allow one to resupply and change their outfits with different parts. Here the devs removed it in favor of larger, wider areas to fight enemies and much smaller levels. However, this presents a more bland design. Now corridors and areas became too samey and copy-pasted throughout. Once you see one AC vs. AC engagement you’ve pretty much seen them all. Dropping you from one wasteland with cliffs to an industrial, and another with broken factories and inoperable war machines. The lack of creativity compared to the tight-knit levels in the preceding one is a cause for concern. This coupled with a meager amount of interesting enemy variety and cool special boss encounters to wow you, are nearly nonexistent here. This is exacerbated by a poor list of worthwhile main objectives beyond defeating all enemies. Sure there are a handful of very uncommon ones, but more often than not the objective is simply "eliminate everyone." Where are the timed limits? Defend against 'x' waves of enemies? Defeat colossus-type machines!?

Can’t even go online since the servers are offline on PS3. I wanted to try some cool Sorties I hear you can undertake with others, especially battling an old special enemy type from AC V. Now that’s not possible. The servers were gutted, which comprises I would say a 3rd chunk of content left to peruse. Wish I could play that… Somehow… sighs

Anyway, there must be something here worth experiencing?! Right!?

Thankfully, there is. For such a bleak world, the soundtrack composed by longtime AC composer Kota Hoshino with Yuka Kitamura is surprisingly uplifting, not full of edge and hardcore rock. Instead, I am treated to a slew of tracks keeping the beat, full of techno, violins at times with bass during heavy moments, and chaotic musical mayhem. Not seeking to increase my anxiety, instead the music pumps me up to be efficient, keeps my spirits up, and despite overwhelming odds stacked against me, I persevere through heavy damage. Vocals are carefully sung in a beautiful tone sometimes in the background rather than the foreground. Where prominent instruments like the drums reign supreme in precision tempo to not destroy the beat too much. Not with an intensity to the extent they’re drumming without end, but utilized carefully to keep tracks soulful, pleasant, and full of good rhythms. Although, some tracks raise the tension and suspense to full throttle. Giving rise to my anxiety, but even so, it is still not enough to delve into despair. Some of these tracks for some reason feel triumphant with hints of melancholy. In effect, the composition of the whole soundtrack is eclectic, with controlled chaos, and a dash of oozing coolness here and there.

There is a neat addition here I haven’t seen in all the AC entries I’ve played thus far and I dearly wish the feature will become a mainstay for future installments. In that upon dying. You don’t automatically head to the results screen. Instead, you are ejected from your mech with two big tanks equipped to your body to hover. From here you can spectate the skirmish as an active participant. Did you bring along a UNAC with you? Let’s see if they can defeat your enemies... If they can. You. Win. The. Mission. Oh my god. This single-handedly saved my playthrough and made repeating assignments upon failing them not a chore, but something I'm interested in witnessing since my buddy could finish the enemy AC or remaining mobs right? Yup! I lost countless times my ally finished the job when I couldn’t. They are a constant companion when you hire them during your main campaign progress. So fighting alone isn't so lonely when you have a buddy along!

Aside from that you can even upgrade these guys and make your own customized A.I. And even go above and beyond by allowing users to tweak their chipset to prioritize what to do during combat. I’m astounded at the sheer depth to have full control to tweak our A.I. companion into becoming a super killing machine. I didn’t delve into the option too much since I only found out during my repeated attempts at the final battle. But even without tinkering. The default UNACs you can use do more than enough damage to help you to victory. I’ll never forget SIGNS UNAC D/01. The dude carried me through countless fights, even when I used my previous build from importing. Salutes o7

As with certain entries in the AC series. You can import your saves from the past game to grant you additional parts, use your loadout, emblems, etc. I was able to use the build I had before the final boss painlessly. So it's a good idea to import if you do have a save. Fast process and you don’t need to have a struggle in the beginning.

That’s pretty much the only thing I could say positively to defend Verdict Day. I could sprout suggestions on what not to do, but I think FromSoftware learned from their mistakes here and is actively working hard to improve with the next entry coming soon. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. All in all, I’m incredibly soul-crushed to say, ACVD is a deteriorating mecha full of rust. And I shudder to enter the cockpit of one. The sum of its parts is not enough to redeem the underwhelming gameplay, poor level design, no noteworthy boss types, barebones story, weak worldbuilding, questionable feature replacement, missing online connectivity, and meh cast and villains. Customizing your AC remains satisfying, but everything else bogs my enjoyment. With very few positives for me to confidently recommend to newcomers or veterans. It’s a shame the last Armored Core the devs made before diving into a hiatus goes out not with a bang, but with a whimper. There is potential here, and I wish the servers were still online for me to play the multiplayer component. To anyone who enjoys this title, I triple salute your dedication. When I had only a little. I would only recommend this to super dedicated fans who want to try the last AC before ACVI by FromSoftware, but honestly, you're better off playing the past games in my honest opinion. AC2, AC3, Nexus, and AC4, are all better starting points.


4/10

Additional Material:
ACVD Tutorial Document for new players
Information, Explanations, and Q&A for Armored Core: Verdict Day (And 5th Gen)

A gigantic, triumphant improvement over Armored Core V, Verdict Day beats the odds to merely be very bad.

I already went on an unhinged rant about my problems with ACV, most of which were just barely less severe this time around, but I do want to say that Verdict Day has plenty of content laid over this totally irredeemable framework that I would love to have experienced in pretty much any other game. Like... there's some pretty decent writing, in an old-school AC way; you get character profiles of AC pilots after killing them in missions, which is a small thing that does (relatively) a lot to make the campaign feel less like an afterthought. Missions are also no longer atrociously long and samey (though the difficulty has been ramped up considerably), there are better and more varied maps, some of the new frame parts they added aren't as ugly. Strides have certainly been made.

The final boss gets hyped up a lot and: genuinely yes, it's an absolute standout as the best thing in the game visually, conceptually, and even mechanically. It's a pretty fun fight! I liked the actual gameplay of it! But like... I don't know if it's "play all of Armored Core Verdict Day for this" good. You can watch it on Youtube, frankly, it's not like the context of the rest of the game adds much. (The context of having played For Answer, however...)

If it wasn't obvious, I didn't fuck with multiplayer at all. There are a variety of reasons for this, but there's only a couple of months left that the multiplayer will even exist, so if the idea isn't as repellent to you as it is to me, you should probably hurry.