Neon White pulls from many genres, and yet it's a wonder how it wasn't already made before. The marriage of first-person-shooting and platforming isn't entirely novel--insert Source Engine game here--but when you wrap those tight movement mechanics with linear, hyper-focused level design with bright, angular enemies, it feels like its own thing. Sure, Neon White maybe takes inspiration from those that came before it, like Mirror's Edge, SUPERHOT, or even Katana Zero, but there is a very strong sense of confidence and style imbued in the 120 levels of Neon White that are a joy to play.

I can appreciate and admit when things are my fault. Throughout this game when you fall or die there's no one to blame but yourself. Accept this fact before even booting up your system. But recognize this as a major kudos to the developers who ground out 120 levels to just the right amount of polish so the player can feel good about speedrunning a level. Lots of times I got the Ace medal first try, but I definitely squeaked by with a few silvers and bronzes on my initial attempts as well. It only made me want to play it over again and do better.

I won't remark on the story, which does in fact have a moral and is voice-acted nicely, albeit with minimal visual emphasis. Regardless of some shortcomings, you should feel immersed into the arcade limbo that is "heaven" between the angular graphics of the level and the breakbeat/industrial dnb that Machine Girl pumped out for an aesthetic that is nothing short of badass. Ben Esposito and company focused on where it counts.

The important takeaway is that it was fun to replay levels. Neon White is all about optimization and replayability. If you don't like bite-size levels, platforming, or speedrunning, maybe stay away from this (or Super Mario Bros 3 for that matter), but otherwise, you're in for a great game that shouldn't take too much of your time unless you want it to.

Perhaps it's how it plays on the nostalgia of Y2K aesthetics, or how it evokes a positive sense of futurism in a rather bleak point in history, a game like Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is special.

What should be understood is this kind of game rarely seems to come out because it's probably hard to tackle. With obvious influence from games like Jet Set Radio, the THPS series, and SSX, developing Bomb Rush Cyberfunk probably took a lot of care on how it interpreted extreme sports. I'm more than happy they approached it with a more comic book stylization, something that is outlandish, imaginative, and most importantly fun. It's cool when a new character is introduced and it's stunning when a new level shows twisting rails and big landmarks to trick off of. I believe this was very intentional from Team Reptile and it was executed so nicely. And to prevent any potential gameplay fatigue, they implemented inline skates, skateboard, and BMX all for you to pick up and just go. Sick.

With an emphasis on collectibles (clothing, music, and characters) you explore a distant-future, colorful piece of earth that's run by punks, at odds with systems like the police and enemy crews, with only one goal in mind: conquer every zone. That is so beautifully simple and video-gamey that I almost forgot that's what video games are supposed to be like. I won't rant about the greater state of games, but reigning in the focus of this project's story to focus on stylish trick mechanics and platforming, ease of traversal, and enjoying the art of your graffiti is a welcome idea. I'm attempting to 100% this game not only because I really want to, but I feel like it actually CAN do this too. That should tell you something about other games...

The only other thing that this game offers and is worthy of touching on is how it explores some psychology of expressing yourself. Interviews with one of the lead developers has shown this was an important part to include in the game because it's important for participating in these kinds of subcultures irl, ones where art and dance, rule-breaking, and team loyalty converge at an intersection that only you, the protagonist of your own world, can find inside yourself and put back out. As dense and deep as a topic as that is, I would disagree with anyone that this was ever overstated or overexerted throughout the entire Bomb Rush Cyberfunk campaign. It only adds a layer of personality to an otherwise standard plot.

I think this game deserves its hype before and after release, and it probably even deserves a sequel. However, I would just as equally love how it exists as is, cemented in 2023 as a successful indie release which made some waves and was fun to play. I maybe didn't justify every point or star for scoring, but the best way to see what I described above and justify for yourself is this: launch the game, get on some inline skates, find your way to the top of a tall building, and do a 1080 California Roll off of it. Now you'll understand why this game rules.

I think I spent too much time away from this game before writing this, because the only thought I can formulate is: Spider-Man fun!

It's good. It looks great, it plays great. It's got some nice improvements. It's more Insomniac Spider-Man, which has yet to be a bad thing. I liked the story more than the first entry, but nothing in it hit quite as hard as the Miles Morales entry. Polished, but not quite perfect.

So, yeah. Spider-Man fun!

The perfect Summah game. There's no stakes, no struggle, just you and the open skies and the rolling blue waves. The kind of game you throw on during a hot Summah month, basking in the buzz of your CRT in your tank top and shorts, AC roarin', window open so the whole world can see how you live, no shame in your soul because you've given yourself over to the Summah Vibes. Why does this grown man own so many toys? Hey pal, you're lookin' through my window into my home, maybe you should get yourself a tangerine push-up and a copy of Pilotwings 64 and learn to live a little.

Wait, what do you mean rent is due? Nah man, rent is like, a Spring or a Wintah concept. Rent's not real when you're havin' a Summah! Comin' to collect is a violation of Summah Law. What do you mean Summah Law doesn't exist? Are you trying to tell me, as I roll my bare toes through a kiddie pool full of sand that I've brought into my living room, that you're going to evict me and take my deposit? Take my Summah?

ah shit, i'm in trouble. can i crash at your place for a few nights? i'll bring Pilotwings 64 and we can have ourselves a little Summah, just you and me. i know i promised not to do this again but i have nowhere to go please don't hang up plea

it's kinda like A Goofy Movie if goofy was down for murder.

GOW2018 interesting to think about. It is full of the callmarks of sony quadruple A games; You can feel a sorta "design by committee and an insane amount of focus testing" philosophy, but where most of these sony games just feel mediocre all around aside from production value, GOW2018 was... good? fun? i enjoyed the experience?

Combat is remarkably enjoyably and the combat encounters really make you use the most out of your toolkit. While you're not really doing complicated or long combos most of the time, especially against bosses, your movelist by the end of the game is pretty long and I was using a majority of it in encounters. Enemies all do a shit ton of damage (playing on hard) and isn't afraid to put 5+ enemies on screen at the same time, and there's a good variety of enemies all with their own rules of engagements, so aside from some shit enemies (FUCK the witches), combat was kinda fuckin fun all the way around.

Bosses are... good. The fights themselves are fine but there's actually not a lot of unique bosses. You fight the Troll boss like 5+ times, and despite their best efforts to mix up the fights themselves its still pretty groansworthy for the game to hype up a boss you gotta go to HELL to take down and you see that fuckin totem. Valkyries are a similar deal; they're the optional bosses in their game and while they have their own moves and mix and match between them, you cant help but to feel like you're fighting the same dudes 7 times. There's probably only like 3~ completely unique boss fights in the game.

Story is fine. It's fun to make fun of sony for Sad Dad games but turning Kratos into a Not Very Good Dad With A Lot Of Baggage But Is Truly Trying is probably one of the best paths you could take with a character like him. I personally tend to not like The Kid Character in this stuff but I think Arteus worked on the grounds that, he is difficult, but Kratos is also a difficult person, and them both being difficult people is how this kind of father son story can work. They both get good character arcs too. It is however hard to look past how blatant a story about a father and son trying to reach the top of a mountain is.
By far the biggest problem with the story however is that it's basically 1/3rd of story. You get the end of the journey the game sets out on but it doesn't feel like an actual ending, there's 14 million plot threads still left over when you finish and the game might as well jsut say "hey we'll see you in 4 years for ragnarok to continue this lol" when you reach the end. They literally namedrop the sequel. It's such a nothing ending it took me really out of it.

Minor things: Dialogue is fine when it matters but the character quips in gameplay is pretty grating. How many times must the boy let me know "i think he's dead :/" after i cleave a dragr's skull in. It's definitely at its worst when dialogue just becomes the game not so subtly trying to give you hints because if they werent there their focus test group would get immediately lost and say the game sucks.
A lot of the rpg element stuff feels tacked on. You can have "builds" and the gear level IS your level so the gear does matter, but idk i just went for the gear/enchantments that gave me most strength a lot of the passives i wasn't paying attention to in combat.

God of war 2018 was better than I thought it was going to be, mostly because I'm kinda a sony first party hater. The meaty combat really ties the game together into a fun package, but the story ended up falling a little flat to me and it's really hard to escape the whole feeling of everything in the game designed around checking off boxes and being extremely focus test friendly. Still, I grabbed this game for 10 bucks and definetly got my value out of it. When I catch Ragnarok at a decent price I'll definitely grab i- holy fuck that game is 70 dollars base on ps5? I fucking hate the future dog

Instead of writing a joke open im just gonna vent that they patched in a way to disable the motion blur literally the moment I beat this game. Yoshi P i'm going to fanfest I will have my revenge.

I really enjoy this game's combat, even if the game being excessively easy brings it down a bit. I'm alright with the story, its not super great but there's parts and characters that i like, and CBU3 really knows how to make a sick ass set pieces.

The combat is really enjoyable in defiance of its roots of the modern action game of XXXX > Y for Combos, Cooldown Skills, And Platinum dodges. Mostly on the strength of the stances and the skills themselves. You can run up to 3 stances based on the Eikons you face in the game, giving you 2 skills out of 4 to pick from, and with some levels you can crossclass the skills as well, as well as a special skill locked to the stance (phoenix is a teleport, garuda is Nero Grab, ect). It sound limited at first but there's a really solid variation of skills, and the cross classing between skills really opens up a lot of things. Odin Stance is the shit. The game's overall enemy and boss encounter design also uplifts it, there's a good variety in regular enemies and some really fun bosses.

The game's other big gameplay pieces are the Eikon battles; set boss battles where you go Ifrit Mode, often against other Eikons. I was kinda afraid going into this game that these were going to be mostly just cutscenes with QTE prompts and a UI, and while like 2-3 of them basically are, the rest of them are actual boss fights, with multiple phases with unique gimmicks. CBU3 is probably at they're best making big multi phase boss fights, and they are fucking sick so hey props to them. I think it peaks at titan but the rest of them are good too.

I think the biggest problem with the gameplay part of this game is how easy it is. No one in the land actually stands a chance against Clive, he is insanely strong between the incredibly generous Platinum Slowdown dodge windows, enemy's overall long windup + low damage and how even a little basic skill experiment can lead to just brutalizing. Even the Eikon bosses are incredibly lenient, you have a ton of health with 6 heals in the back to use and equally lenient dodge windows. I died 3 times total in this game, and 2 of those was me trying to parry moves that ended up being one shots.
In theory this might be solved with higher difficulty options; there's atleast 2 higher difficulties, but they're NG+ locked. If FF difficult was pickable from the start I probably wouldn't be writing this paragraph, but it sounds like FF difficulty is just higher stats so idk.

Story is fine. I'm not super blown away by it but it's kinda carried by just some good ass set pieces. It kinda half commits to the racism themes (though I cant say i'm not pretty tried of the Thinly Veiled Racism stand in, especially in a game pretty harshly criticized when yoshida got asked why there isnt any black people in it and going "lol") or the more interesting theme of Ruling Class Will Choose To Ignore The The Plight Of World If Itll Cost Them Anything and they basically stop getting mentioned by the half way point for a more traditional FF villain. Said villain is kinda boring imo, He gets some interesting aspects by the end but it's a little too late to get into it. But also if they went in depth more we'd all notice that they're just reusing a 14 plot lol.
It's also really badly paced at times, but maybe I'm just annoyed that you get off the insane high of the titan fight into the most Nebulous Nothing shit for like an hour.

(this is a weird thing, but the game has a thing where if you pause a cutscene and press the ps5 center button it shows blurbs of characters/locations/lore/ect relevant to the scene you're currently in. Obviously it's really useful if you think you forgot about something, but the game depends on this a little too much. a lot of relevant exposition is actually locked to these blurbs, I feel like there's whole scenes of lore exposition that's been replaced with the cutscene lore blurbs, but that's might just be me)

Outside of the combat and story there isn't really too much to talk about! You travel between youre hideout, a series of fairly open zones and "dungeons", which is reality is more like a regular character action game stage rather than a dungeons, and there's some shallow sidequests(which i stopped doing outside of the ones indicated that they give you a permeant upgrade) and some pretty fun Hunts inbetween.

Some people complain about the lack of any real RPG mechanics in the game, but personally if they're gonna commit to this game being an action game i'd rather they trim the always really shallow RPG elements that show up in these "action rpgs" and just commit to combat. People compared it to the new GOW games, but really I think I got a lot more out of messing with stances/skills than GOW's gearing. If you're really missing a more traditional turnbased RPG i feel for you truly because I am NOT one of those people who thinks all turned based games suck ass, but personally I do not agree with meriting a game on what previous games in its franchise do, especially when it's clearly going for somethin very different. There's still plenty of turn based RPGs out there anyways.

Music is also good as always, though personally I wish Soken got a bit more weird with it. You really get some of that Soken magic in the titan fight, but there isnt much of it outside of that. It's very strange hearing a soken composed game where most of it has a pretty similar sound, especially if you're a FFXIV boy like me.

It's very pretty. I don't have too much to say graphics wise. It's extremely polished. I think a lot of the designs, especially the eikons, are really strong, and there's some really pretty zones. Performance mode on PS5 having a luxating framerate outside of battle is annoying but it never hits like below 40, and the amount of times combat went below 60fps was like less then 5 times.

One final note, this game as cemented something in my head that Yoshi P (Maybe just CBU3 as a whole? idk) is one of those game directors whose games have "a feel"- something that would've been really obvious if he wasn't exclusively working on FFXIV for the past 10 years or whatever. If you've played a shitton of XIV like I have you can really feel it; an emphasis on core combat and encounter designs over RPG elements, long multiphase fights with some really strong spectacle moments, sidequest names, hell even the dungeons feel like XIV dungeons (which is to say, hallways into circular arenas lol), and more. I would need a completely separate post if I wanted to go into this, and I might do that another day.

FF16 is really fun to play, and if there was a threat of dying I'd probably hit it with a 4 star. everything else is Fine. I will definetly go back to this game and do a FF difficult playthrough at some point, justtt not immediately.


#clivehive

+ Very smart reinvention of stale franchise
+ Fantastic character performances (esp. Kratos)
+ Excellent touching/beautiful story
+ Combat is thrilling + challenging, never grew boring
+ Top notch visuals, environments are gorgeous
+ Way more to do than expected, meaty game
+ Soundtrack stood out (esp vocal pieces)
+ Norse mythology much more untapped than Greek

- Equipment customization too complicated, doesn't add much
- Camera too tight

Why is it that the itty bitty sprite-based Fallouts let me blow up a locked door or pry it open with a crowbar, but this shiny, hundred million dollar PS4 game doesn’t?

I’m implying that Fallout 4’s more primitive than a game almost two decades its senior, but that isn’t being completely fair. In some ways, it’s the most complex one yet. Armour & weapon customisation is the most fleshed out it’s ever been, letting you not only personalise each of your character’s individual limbs or every component of a gun, but also the stat bonuses they offer. Power armour now requires some resource management just to wear it, while also being so heavy that you have to slowly walk underwater rather than swim, causing you to think more carefully about traversal than in prior entries. Settlement building lets you create custom-built homes nearly anywhere you want and set up trade routes between them via procedurally generated NPCs, not only helping the world feel more alive but also allowing you to contribute to its liveliness. So on and so forth.

This is all great; one might even say that it just works. But nearly all of the fresh ideas Fallout 4 introduces either come at the expense of something else or don’t fully capitalise on their potential. The deeper armour customisation would be more impactful if the RPG elements weren’t almost totally gutted, while weapon customisation is enormously lopsided in favour of guns. Power armour excludes you from using fist weapons, which is somewhat accommodated for by having arm pieces that boost your unarmed damage, but still feels oddly limiting and detracts from the power fantasy that it’s trying to sell. Creating settlements adds some much needed dynamism to the game world, but it’s at odds with the story’s urgency and environments are barely interactive otherwise, with invisible walls still regularly cordoning off the slightest of inclines – this one feels especially egregious considering Bethesda themselves already came up with the solution to this in 1996, i.e. Daggerfall’s climbing system.

Thanks to all of this, it’s tempting to think of Fallout 4 as a game which takes a step back for every step forward. A more unambiguous step back, though, is its use of a voiced protagonist. I’d carefully modelled my character after Waingro from Michael Mann’s Heat in the hopes of getting it on (read: being a murderous nonce), but my motivation to carry this out was killed pretty much off the bat. The Sole Survivor isn’t some malleable blank slate no-name from a nondescript Vault, or tribe, or post office – he or she’s very much their own set-in-stone character, a pre-war ex-military family man or woman with a tone of voice so affable it puts your local Tesco staff to shame and a love for their son so integral to their identity that it’s the catalyst of the story. There’s not much room for imagination. You have to set up a bunch of mental barriers before you can really treat Fallout 4 as an RPG, whether it be handwaving the fact that much of what you plan to do throughout the game is going to be grossly out of character or trying to ignore the inherent disconnect between you and the Sole Survivor if you happen to not particularly care about Shaun.

To this end, Fallout 4’s dialogue system’s gotten a lot of flack, but I don’t really mind it; if nothing else, it offers more variety on average than Skyrim’s did. Part of where it really falters, I think, is the contextualisation of skipping through dialogue. Interrupting people with bored “uh huh”s as they suggest where you might find your kidnapped son is kind of hilarious, but as far as immersion goes, it’s something the game would’ve been better without. The dynamic camera angles during conversations also could’ve used some work – my introduction to the mayor of Diamond City was an extreme close-up of a blurry turquoise girder, and the camera haphazardly cuts between first & third person often enough that it sometimes feels like watching Don’t Look Up with fewer random shots of Jennifer Lawrence’s boots. What doesn’t help things is that conversations themselves just generally aren’t up to scratch with the pedigree of this series; it’d be easy to look past all of this if Fallout 4 had any Lieutenants, or Masters, or Frank Horrigans, or Joshua Grahams, but it doesn’t really. At its peak, the dialogue and voice acting only ever feel vaguely acceptable, which is a bit of a shame considering it claims descent from the game that popularised the concept of talking the final boss to death.

I generally prefer to avoid being a negative Nancy unless I can use it as an opportunity to draw attention to things I love, which is why I keep bringing up Fallout 4's predecessors. I can't help but feel that Fallout used to be more than this. Fallout 1 was so laser focused on delivering an open ended role-playing experience that it’s (deservedly) credited with revitalising the genre; there are a lot of things Fallout 4 does well enough, but I don’t know if you can really say where its focus lies. It’s competent as a looter shooter to turn your brain off to, but it’d be a better one if it wasn’t also trying to be an RPG, and it’d be a better RPG if it had gone with just about any premise or protag other than the ones it has. Despite having so much more money behind it, it feels so cobbled together in comparison.

Looting plastic forks from decrepit buildings while fending off mutants and ghouls is fun, but if that’s the kind of experience you’re after, I’d recommend just walking around Belfast at night instead.

In a bygone age where “See you in Rayman 4!” had yet to morph from an innocuous sequel hook into the cruellest lie since the Trojan Horse, Ubisoft were on a hot streak that few developers can claim to have had. It's not uncommon to scoff at them now, but much of the key talent that brought us so many instant classics of this era are still there, including Chaos Theory’s very own Clint Hocking. The personal touch of developers like him has become harder to parse with Ubi’s exponential growth and shifting priorities, but it’s hard not to retain a bit of goodwill so long as at least some of those who made Chaos Theory are still there, because it’s probably the best stealth game ever made.

Contrary to what one might think, Splinter Cell’s chief influence isn’t a certain other tactical espionage stealth action series, but rather Looking Glass. It’s not hard to imagine why – to this day, Thief has better sound design than any game that isn’t either its own sequel or System Shock 2, but the need for its state of the art reverberation system stemmed out of its first person perspective. If immersion is the name of the game, nothing sells it quite like having to track where enemies are through carefully listening the same way Garrett would, as opposed to having a disembodied floating camera that can see around corners do the work for you. How does Sam’s game measure up to that, given it’s in third person?

The answer is through a different kind of genius. In Chaos Theory, every individual part of Sam’s body is affected by light/darkness independently. You might not initially notice this until you arouse suspicion by peeking his head just a little bit too far out of a crawl space into a brightly lit area, or accidentally position him in such a way that his leg’s poking out from around a corner. Even now, it’s exceedingly rare for dynamic lighting to be anything more than window dressing, and yet Chaos Theory was making full use of its potential gameplay applications when N-Gage ports still existed. It goes further than this, too. Heavily armed enemies can not only light flares, but throw them in the direction they last saw or heard you, while others can flick on a torch that they’ll point at various angles as they follow your tracks. No other stealth game can match the anxiety Chaos Theory instils as you cling to a wall and hope that the guard a hair’s breadth away doesn’t turn in your direction while he's holding a light.

It’s important to note that despite its influences, Chaos Theory isn’t an immersive sim ᵃⁿᵈ ⁿᵒ ᴴᶦᵗᵐᵃⁿ, ᴹᴳˢ⁵ ᵃⁿᵈ ᴮʳᵉᵃᵗʰ ᵒᶠ ᵗʰᵉ ᵂᶦˡᵈ ᵃʳᵉⁿ'ᵗ ᵉᶦᵗʰᵉʳ ᵇᵘᵗ ᵗʰᵃᵗ'ˢ ᵇᵉˢᶦᵈᵉˢ ᵗʰᵉ ᵖᵒᶦⁿᵗ. It instead opts for a middle ground between their emergent problem solving and its own predecessors’ affinity for pre-baked scripted set pieces. This may sound eclectic on paper, but it works remarkably well in terms of pacing. Relax one moment as you clamber up and down several floors of an office block in any order and through whatever means you please, but be ready the next when you have to switch the power back on and quickly scramble out of the now gleaming room as a squad of guards floods in. Granted, there’s a slight degree of inconsistency in this respect. The bank level’s famously bursting with alternate pathways to accommodate more play styles than you can shake a stick at, while the end of the bathhouse level could drive even an actual Third Echelon agent to forsake his non-lethal playthrough, but this balancing of peaks and valleys overall allows for lots of creative, freeform solutions while still ensuring that there’ll always be segments which demand your attention even on repeat playthroughs.

The fact that Chaos Theory manages to stay so engaging from start to finish without giving you any new equipment along the way is a testament to this, but other areas of the game deserve as much attention as its level design. For instance, no matter how many people are aware of how much Amon Tobin outdid himself with this game’s music, it’s still not enough. This series of chords is Splinter Cell, as much as thick shadows and green goggles, and if it were distilled into a person they would assuredly be skulking about in the dark. The extra instrumentation which dynamically fades in and out according to enemies’ alertness level (my favourite example being this absolute tune) not only drives home his talent even further, but also acts as another way to communicate important information to the player if the increasingly copious sandbag checkpoints throughout the level hadn’t already clued you in. To put things in perspective, this may be the only example of Jesper Kyd’s involvement in a soundtrack not being the highlight.

Chaos Theory’s also a beneficiary of the time when different ports of one game would have exclusive features for no particular reason. I can’t speak for how it controls on console, but I can say that adjusting Sam’s movement speed with the mouse wheel is a fantastic alternative to the standard method of protagonists instantly becoming silent as soon as they crouch (to my surprise, it doesn’t work that way in real life). Combine it with a camera that gently shifts about to give you the best possible view depending on which direction Sam is moving in and the game feels like a dream to control. On PC you also have the added benefit of being able to toggle whether enemies speak in their native languages, a bit akin to Crysis’ hardest difficulty, which despite being such a minor feature seems like a really underutilised concept.

I’d be remiss not to mention the writing as well. While it’s fair to say that Chaos Theory probably isn’t a game you’d play for the story itself, it’s equally true that it wouldn’t be so beloved if its characters weren’t so charming, including the guards, whose responses to being interrogated are not just genuinely funny but also a glaring counterpoint to the notion that this series takes itself too seriously. Few voice actors understand their characters as well as Michael Ironside gets Sam Fisher. Every delivery of his is golden, whether grumbling in response to his support team constantly bullying him for being old or in the plot’s more cathartic moments. Given both that Ironside has now dabbed on cancer a second time and his recent-ish reprisals of the role in the form of Ghost Recon DLCs, one can only hope they get him to work his magic again in the first game’s upcoming remake.

Regardless of how that turns out, it’s nice to know that Splinter Cell has some kind of future again. Bringing back something old can have just as much value as creating something new, and while asking it to be as good as Chaos Theory is probably a tall order, all it really needs to do is be good enough to prove that pure stealth games still have a place in the mainstream. Sam has saved us from WW3 several times over by now, so hopefully he can also save his genre from the plague of waist-high grass.

Hedging my bets on this one – see you in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell® (TBD)!