Imma be real, I don't care about the story here at all. Not even because it's bad, I couldn't even tell you if it was, I just wasn't gonna do all that reading. And while there's strong art design and level design here, the game still has that vibe of an indie studio's first attempt at something at this scale.

But none of that matters because this is one of my favorite souls-likes of all time. The combat here is the exact style of melee I prefer from games like this. I enjoyed my 40ish hours of Elden Ring, and I like the little I've played of Bloodborne and Dark Souls. But I grew up on Platinum games, like Bayonetta and Nier Automata. These titles NEVER make you wait for an animation to play out. The animations are the point of many Souls-likes, but after falling in love with The Surge 2 way back when I was made aware that this does not have to be the case. This is the first souls-like I've ever played that is similarly satisfying to play.

The combat is a mix of Sekiro's parrying and the perfect dodges of something like Bayonetta. And enemies have two health bars to deplete, or really one with a layer of armor on it. Your main dagger does damage to the white bar, which reveals a green bar underneath that can only be damaged with your secondary claw attack. Instead of fights feeling stretched out due to this, the balancing of bars forces you to keep the pressure up, because the while bar will cover back up the green if you don't keep applying damage. However, perfectly dodging or parrying can also keep the white bar from returning as well.

There are also a number of plague weapons/abilities you can use as well. You have a separate meter that allows the use of a giant axe swipe, scythe swing, hammer smash, arrow throw, life leech, or other abilities ever so often. Think of these as ultimate abilities that you need to earn the right to use with successful hits, parries, and dodges.

Also, there are a BUNCH or upgrades. You can bump up your core attributes like health, and you can even upgrade the number of healing charges you have, as well as how much they heal and what additional bonuses they can give you. They even give you multiple types of healing charges to equip, so you can spec for faster, smaller heals or longer, bigger heals. A lot of this game shines due to its customizability. The skill trees let you spec out towards a slower combat pace or a faster one, and when you hit the end of some of these trees, you truly feel powerful.

Now as for why this game rules so much. This game is all about animation canceling, especially after you amass later upgrades. There's not even a stamina bar, so you can really just go ham on your actions. Every time an enemy got a hit on me, it ALWAYS feels like my fault because I'm paying for a mistake I made milliseconds ago rather than several seconds ago. It makes the call and response of combat feel much more immediate, and frankly, more friendly towards spamming. Because you can parry and dodge so fast, I often was able to avoid entire attach strings just by keeping my parries and dodges going constantly. And thank god for it, because just standing back to avoid damage will put you out of melee range and make it harder to keep that necessary pressure up.

But the combat itself couldn't hold the game up alone without great enemy design. Every single fight is worth engaging with, especially after you level up and gain some perks. Once you do, fodder enemies could refill some of your health on execution. And there are a regular amount of more intimidating mini-bosses that all test your skills in new and intense ways. And the bosses, the bosses! All of them are incredibly fun and even the hardest ones were difficult for fair reasons. I never felt like the game was cheap, I could always immediately tell the ways in which I messed up, and it made me even more excited to jump back in to try again.

I just really dig this game. I do feel like it is very gamey, in a way that might be off-putting to people who crave the immersion of Fromsoft worlds. Unlike many of their games, there's less of a sense that upgrades are optional to the experience. You could, in theory, beat the game with just the base character. But many of the unlockable abilities, like counterattacks and new melee moves, feel vital to the experience. In a game like Dark Souls, the core of combat stays the same, but your stats increase and the variety of ways to respond to strikes increases. Thymesia is, on paper, the same, but it doesn't always feel that way. But this is one of my favorite things about the game, as that's an approach more common to the character-action games that I love.

It took me many months to finally beat this one, despite reaching the end in less than 10 hours. It really is challenging, and I took many breaks and backtracked into remixed versions of previous levels to farm more memory shards and upgrade materials. But even when I was away from it, I found myself craving its combat. I really can't wait to see what these devs do next, because this game shows that they are really cooking something special.

You know how sometimes a game gets remade and it looks exactly how you remember the original looking, but then you look at the original and the remake looks WAY better in nearly every way? Prodeus is that for Doom. That's the short of it.

The long of it is that this is one of the best bomber shooters of the last 5 years. It doesn't lean into movement as much as something like Dusk, Ultrakill, or Turbo Overkill. When I say it's like the original Doom, it is almost just as grounded gameplay-wise. But what it lacks in any focus on platforming or areal combat it gains in satisfying secret hunting and gunplay. Not only are secrets well hidden, but many of them are easily found, but are behind high ledges and far jumps that later abilities will allow you access to.

And the gunplay itself is just SO good. It's chunky in the way shooters of the Build engine were in the early 90s, but enemies just POUR our blood to an absurd degree. Even the smallest dudes shoot geysers that literally end up dripping from the ceiling. I'm no gorehound, but the extreme violence makes the gunplay feel all the more satisfying, with rooms and arenas being covered in various fluids at the end of every combat.

And the game does look like Doom, but it's not strictly pixel-based. I read somewhere that the game uses 3D models but puts pixels around them. Its effect makes it so that each side of every model looks a bit like a 2D image, but has multiple 2D images to show for each possible angle you look at a model at. It's hard to explain, but striking as soon as you see it. But beyond this novelty, there are a lot of really neat visual setpieces to see throughout the game, and despite skipping though all of the text and ignoring the story, these visual flairs were more than enough to keep me engaged until the end.

There's nothing all too unique about the game mechanically, or artistically, outside of what novelty is gained by sticking so much to its old-school shooter roots. But it does a lot with this tried and true formula, and I was very happy to eat this whole bag of comfort food down to the last crumb.

Just picked this up in the Spring Steam Sale, really enjoyed it! Very goofy characters and story, and the movement mechanics are as silly as they are fun. It's a super truckated (I'm talking 70 min to beat) collection platform, and it's a fun ride despite the length. One or two trickier moments, but pretty easy once you get in the flowstate of the movement. Basically, you can slide really fast and turn yourself into a bullet, and they manage to squeeze a decent amount of gameplay out of just those two actions. Each of it's 5 short levels has a time trial attached, which really highlights the potential of these mechanics for speed. The humor is very 2010s Cartoon Network in an endearing way more than an annoying way. I would love to see an expansion on this game's comedy and gameplay in a future game, but this one was satisfying, cheap, and short, everything I could want from a game.

Yep, this game is still incredible.

I wanted another reason to come back to this amazing combat system, and this hit the spot. I played the OG RE4, but never the Separate Ways campaign, so this is my first time seeing this story. It was nice seeing a different side of Carlos, one more earnest and less cryptic. I'll admit though, this portrayal is so different from the main campaign that it can sometimes feel a bit jarring and one-note. And I came to like Ada finally with this DLC. In the main campaign, I found her cold to the point of being off-putting. But here, her more monotone response to the insanity of this game came off as more endearing than anything else. I also came to enjoy how subtly her character's arc is portrayed. The entire game uses subtlety to call us the insanity and cheese of this game, and this DLC is maybe the best instance of that paying off.

Gameplay-wise, this game is still just so fucking good. The new grappling hook makes combat even more mobile and exciting. I went for melee attacks so much more than even the main campaign, but even the focus on blast arrows and machine guns made me swap my tactics in new ways. Plus the treasure and money economy is super truncated, so you get bigger and more consistent rewards, especially if you are throughout in your exploration. This DLC got me to play a lot of The Mercenaries mode because it reminded me just how awesome the combat is.

My feelings on this game are not complicated enough to write a million words about it. But I love this game so much and it was nice to revisit it.

This is one of the first PC games I ever played back when I got my first laptop. I asked for it as a Christmas gift specifically to play Gone Home, and after I did so at 20FPS, I picked this game up and nearly beat it. But for whatever reason, I didn't until what is now a decade later.

This game is basically classic God of War at home. The game has a lot of flash and excitement, but nowhere near enough polish to match the epic scale of the action on display. Most of the cutscenes involve static character models to save on the animation budget. But unlike Bayonetta, which also had certain scenes without character animations but used frequent cuts and voiceover to hide them, this game just slowly pans over its character models and poses them in new positions off-frame, all with little to no dialogue.

This is the biggest example of the low-budget-ness of this game, like Marlow's hands and fingers don't ever move throughout the entire game! There's decent voice acting and the gameplay variety is decently high, especially for a 3-6 hour game. But some of those gameplay diversions feel like mobile-style mini-games, especially with the random inserts of timed and scored challenges.

But with all that being said, there is a strange charm about this game. It's just so unsuspecting on the face of it. You'll likely pick it up for less than $5 or even for a few cents. You may be like me and just don't expect much, and with that expectation, this game is actually lowkey incredible. It might now be as good as any of the classic God of War games, but games like that are so rare nowadays, especially nowadays. And the cheap feeling of the game just makes every single thrill that the game DOES give even more enthralling somehow.

The entire game kinda reminds me of the action movie scenarios that I would imagine when playing with action figures as a kid. It's refreshing to play something juvenile in such an innocent way, free of any guilt associated with the objectification of women or with the cruelty of more graphically violent action games. You can feel the effort spent on the game through the cringy charm of the main characters and the bombast of the setpieces.

Sure, there are only 6 enemy types, but the game is short enough for them to not overstay their welcome. Sure, this is the most Unreal Engine 3 game ever made, but it runs perfectly on Steam Deck and likely all low-end PCs. And sure, the game is cheap, but that often makes the game feel like a scrappy miracle rather than a cynical cash grab.

I didn't just ask for that laptop back in 2014 to play Gone Home. I was in my first year of college, and I also needed it for schoolwork. Now, a decade later, I am returning to school after a year-long break. I guess I felt the pull to finally beat this game as I've been feeling like finishing what I've started a lot recently. I assume I picked this game up due to its similarity to the many PS3 action games I grew up with, the DmC reboot and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. But now that I've seen it to the end, it reminds me of that simpler time: when big, dumb, short games were the standard, not the exception.

I bet I would have ranked the game 4 stars back then, as it adequately stands toe to toe with other games in eh genre that I've played. But I'll give it that same score now for how refreshing it feels, thanks to the same attributes that would have kept it from sticking out all those years ago.

This is the first game that I've ever beaten that hasn't been released in this millennium. Been wanting to play something from the past so I could finally say I've played some of the classics. And Quake II is absolutely a bonified classic, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Shout out to Nightdive for the modernizations they've added to the game, as I doubt I would have been compelled to play through the entire game if not for hitmarkers, the weapon wheel, and the compass to show me around. These additions allowed me to fall in love with the chunky gunplay, dynamic enemies, and twisted-level design.

There's barely a story to latch onto, but that doesn't matter when shooting dudes and finding secrets is so much fun. The game feels simple, but that's to be expected from a 1997 game. But the art design of the enemies and the brutal environments are enough to carry me through the game.

I still want to go back and play some of the DLC and use some of those dope-looking new weapons, but this game is just so one note that it can be easy to get tired of it after only a few hours. But it was fun to go back and see some of the origins of the genre I love so much.

Hope I can get around to more older games in the future!

I'm pretty conflicted on this game despite the high score. I adore this game but for particular reasons, and I'm annoyed or bored by it for others.

The gameplay is probably my favorite part of it. Combat is simplified, but while I don't love the lack of challenge, I do love the easier self-expression that is now possible in fights. But traversal is the real highlight. This is just, point blank, the most satisfying traversal system in any game I have ever played. Swinging is just as fun as it ever was, and the added mechanics of Miles Morales are still here, but the Wingsuit makes getting around even more engaging. It forces you to analyze the environment even more and feel more skilled when maintaining and gaining momentum. It's so good in fact that it's wild that you can fast travel at all the game.

But narratively this game is lowkey a mess. Stakes often get raised to insane levels only for nothing to come of it by the end of that very same mission. Conflicts balloon due to characters not making simple, obvious choices. Some of the stuff with Miles that interacts with his cultural heritage comes off as incredibly corny, not to mention his final costume, which I didn't love but didn't hate as much as others. The game early on gives the impression that many surprises are in store, but all opportunities for those surprises are squandered for the more straightforward option. The game just has the desire to do the coolest thing possible, and often it is fuckin cool, but often at the expense of the most interesting direction to take its characters. Hell, even the endpoints for each of the leads don't make much sense.

It's obvious that Insomniac wants to be another Naughty Dog to something if all of the more intimate waking missions are any indication. But the writing on display is often just not good enough to justify the budget and detail they use to bring it to life. This is still Insomniac though, so the game is just absurdly, unendingly fun. But I'm under no impression that the gameplay was worth that $200 million budget. Maybe if that writing was better, or at least more interesting, the cost of the game wouldn't feel so insane, but Insomniac was already making games this fun without having to immerse me in a grounded narrative. Hopefully, they can do both again, like they did in Miles Morales, or just focus on the gameplay that they can't help but continue to perfect.

I love the original, but this remake blew it out of the water. This is just a perfect video game.

One of the most beautiful games of the year, and it somehow looks just as impressive on Steam Deck, which is where I played most of it.

Gunplay is only like 2% less satisfying than the original due to the fact that positional damage & triggering melee takedowns is slightly less consistent than the original. But the gameplay in this remake is still superior due to the satisfying as hell knife parties and the expanded crafting system. And to be clear, gunplay is still incredibly satisfying. If I had the time, this would absolutely be the kind of game I play dozens of times over several months & years. And hell, Mercenaries & the Separate Ways DLC will already have me coming back very soon. Only flaw was with crafting. In the final chapters, I was loaded with grenades and had no craftable uses for them, like explosive ammo, and they were never my first option in combat as I could handle myself with guns just fine.

Exploration is the biggest new addition to the game. Now it's not just about going from chapter to chapter, each act has a fully explorable map with areas to backtrack with new tools, like a Metroidvania. These moments were a highlight and definitely got me to lean into the treasures and secrets more than the original. Some of the most fun I had in the game was secret hunting, or finding new enemies in places I've been once before. Only critique I have on this point is that it wasn't always obvious when you hit a point of no return and can't complete a request or have locked yourself from treasures in a certain location. Locked myself out of rewards quite a bit in the first half.

Even narratively the game is better. I didn't care about RE4's story at all, but this new more grounded & subtle approach makes the characters sing. I love how I came to empathize with Krauser, and how Ada & Leon's relationship felt more authentic, and how Ashley's adoration of Leon was more big brother-y than romantic. I even love the additional lore bits added to flesh out the antagonists and the parasitic threat. It really makes me want to go back and finally play Resident Evil 1-3 remakes to see these characters at earlier stages.

I think this game is just so incredible. It manages to do everything the original game did right, but flesh out so much of its narrative, characters and (most impressively) it's gameplay. I'm someone who loves the original despite playing it for the first time on PlayStation 4, and I still can't believe how incredibly well it has aged. But this new game might eventually be even more timeless, but both will always be worth experiencing.

FUCK Resident Evil is so cool!!!

I remember being pretty upset when they announced The Last of Us Part I. That game is already playable on PS5 thanks to its excellent PS4 port, so seeing resources get used on it seemed like a waste, even if the end product was good.

Dead Space, now that I've played it, is a similarly unnecessary remake. It does actually update core aspects of the game rather than strictly remastering it. There are some side missions and they made the Ishumura one large, uninterrupted ship rather than several levels stitched together. But overall, I didn't feel like this remake brought the original up to modern standards in any meaningful way, because the original has still barely aged a day.

It's still satisfying as hell to dismantle Necromorphs. Searching the ship for loot was made a bit more engaging with the addition of security clearances and heavily encouraged backtracking. The story, while slightly elevated by better performances, is still just a bunch of sci-fi nonsense to me, outside of one or two surprisingly emotional moments. I've always liked Dead Space more for its gameplay than it's story, so that last statement isn't a critique unique to the remake.

Overall I like the game a lot, and since the original is unplayable on PS5, it absolutely has a right to exist. But for folks on Xbox and PC, this is still a great game worth playing, but it feels redundant when the original is easily available and just as great as this game.

Really enjoyed this!

The quickest description I could give is this is if Insomniac Games made a fencing game right after watching Road to El Delrado.

The Insomniac vibes are from the cute and colorful world and characters. It has very Saturday morning cartoon vibes, every character and plot beat is a trope but it's all charming.

It's a very pure fencing game, as in there is nothing to the experience outside of combat and light platforming. But the combat is really great! Parries feel great, and you get a sliver of slo-mo for perfect dodges too, which feels amazing. There is a good variety of enemies as well, and the game is short enough that they don't get boring. And even when enemies are too squirrely or armored to take direct damage, you can build up their stun bar with environmental attacks.

The platforming is pretty automatic and requires very little skill, but it is pretty smooth to play. The only skill you could apply to navigation is that there are some secret areas and collectibles to find, only a few of which I found in my playthrough.

What really takes this game up a notch is the environmental interactions during combat. Remember how games like Sleeping Dogs and Rise to Honor would let you bring enemies to certain locations in a level to trigger certain finisher animations? Well, this game is way more dynamic than that. Different items and hazards do different things. Hitting an enemy with a pitcher off the table will open them up for a kick or a string of strikes. Hitting an enemy with a lantern will do the same, but using it on a nearby cannon or box of gunpowder will cause a massive explosion that'll nock several enemies back. Or use a bucket to blind an enemy and keep him occupied when you focus on others. And my favorite interaction is using a bomb on a cauldron, which not only explodes like the connon I mentioned earlier but eventually, the massive kettle comes back down on top of a random enemy.

The environmental actions really inject even more cartoon comedy into the game, and that's not to mention the versatility of the kick. There's a brief status element called "Suprise" that you can cause to enemies that see you do a cool stunt of use and environmental interaction. It only lasts a second, but in that second, it opens all non-starter enemies up to a kick. This means you can kick enemies into other enemies, off of cliffs, off of small ledges for a stunning effect, down staircases for a stun, or into other hazards like pedestals holding vases and firepits.

All of those elements make combat feel super improvisational and, therefore, every victory in the game feels very earned and satisfying. The only aspects that feel slightly annoying are one specific enemy type that forces you to respond in one specific way to its attacks. Normally, you dodge heavy attacks and parry light attacks, but you can always just dodge light attacks as well with no penalty. For these enemies, if you don't parry/dodge when you are supposed to, their stun bar will fill back up. These enemies can only be hurt when their stun bar is emptied, so they can be a pain, especially in groups. I'll counter this pet peeve with the fact that this made me dive way deeper into environmental interactions, which I love, so it's really not that bad. If anything, they came as a bit of a surprise when most of the rest of the game feels so easy.

Can't recommend this game enough. I will say, this is definitely an indie game, which means that the $20 asking price will get you a 4-ish hour game, and despite the great artstyle and fully voiced dialogue, there are no animations in cutscenes, and their absence is noticeable. But you unlock an arena mode halfway through the game that can give you a bit more gameplay. But honestly, the game is worth that price with the campaign alone. This was such a refreshingly unique, satisfyingly challenging, and delightfully cute game that it'll likely be one of my favorites of the year, and I hope Fireplace Games gets a chance to make a more polished and deeper sequel.

This might be the best singer-player FPS I've ever played. Better than Titanfall 2, Doom Eternal, or any other great in the genre.

I'll admit the story is flimsy but it's really only there to set up some increased platforming & action setpices. The gunplay is absolutely perfect and it's arsenal is as inventive as it is functional. I'm going to gush about this game a lot but first some critiques.

This is a classic boomer shooter, so if you're not down for running at 100mph & never reloading, this may be too much for you. In fact, it was almost too much for me and I love these kinds of games. I had to tone down the difficulty from normal to the easiest level twice because I felt I just died too quickly to react. Some enemies, especially near the end when they appear in groups, can wipe away your entire health bar in one hit. You get a dodge, a grappling hook (that can set enemies on fire), a double jump with additional modifiers, and sometimes environmental movement enhancers like jump pads, so it's usually easy to dodge tougher enemies. But when the game purposely locks you in tiny rooms, it can be rough. And that is especially true in the final level when time limits are introduced.

The upgrade systems here are satisfying, though simple. Killing certain random enemies will make them drop money which is used to by modifications for your limbs & head or weapon upgrades. It may seem like it'll take a while to unlock them all, but you'll have all of them early into the final (3rd) episode. This means that for roughly the final 25% of the game leaves you with nothing to spend your money. This is fine because it feels like you've finally reached your final form at that point, but I wish I didn't have a functionality pointless number continuing to go up in the final levels.

There's controller support, and I played the entire game on Steam Deck. It was nearly flawless, but it takes some tweaking to get everything mapped in a way that feels comfortable. In particular, it was hard finding a place to map all of your special powers (slow motion, micro missiles, grappling hook) as at least 2 of them are abilities that you'll need to aim while using. These abilities make sense for the shoulder buttons, but you also have alt-fires & weapon swapping up there usually, so you may have to get creative (thank God for the weapon wheel).

And finally, I understand this is an indie game so I don't want to go too hard on this point, but I've gotten hard stuck twice due to checkpoint-related glitches. Luckily all I needed to do was restart the level, but considering these both happened in the final levels, I had to replay sections that I barely completed in the first place. Plus, because the game is so hard, I find myself trying to outsmart the game and trying to access health & ammo that should have been locked behind previous doors, which is the very reason one of my glitches happened. When the game can be this difficult, it encourages cheesing, so maybe a tweaked difficulty could change that. Hell, it really is only a few specific fights that were rough, so maybe just check those encounters. Also, this game could use some kind of more prominent "danger zone" warning state similar to Doom Eternal. In that game you rarely died in one hit, if at all, in normal. You'd at least get knocked into a fragile state & had a split second to recover. You almost never get that split second in Turbo Overkill, and perhaps if I had ot I never would have been frustrated in certain moments.

But the rest of this game FUCKS SO HARD.

You get every gun under the sun it feels like. A sniper, 2 different shotguns, SMGs, an LMG/flamethrower, a plasma rifle, rocket launcher, and orbital Lazer, & chainsaw arms (which are charged by killing enemies with your chainsaw leg). Every weapon feeling great to use (especially if you turn on hit markers) and with a moderate exception to the plasma rifle, every weapon has heavy utility. And despite how frustrating they were initially, the timed fights forced me to find the most effective weapon for each enemy. I couldn't just pick a weapon and stick with it, I had to react to every specific encounter.

I mentioned weapon upgrades and body augmentations earlier and I gotta say they're mostly fucking incredible. Body mods can do simple things like give more mod slots, extend slow-mo times, or give health or armor when killing with your chainsaw leg. Or they can give you crazy useful perks like igniting enemies with your grappling hook, adding a second chainsaw leg, or giving yourself the ability to wall jump once before touching the ground. In some cases, weapon mods just fix an initial flaw with a weapon, like eliminating the chain gun's windup. But sometimes the entire use case of a weapon is changed. For example, x the starting pistols can be upgraded to (after landing enough shots consecutively) transform into a magnum that does more damage than any other gun in the game. And it stays that way until you finally miss a shot. The variety of these upgrades is insane and takes the power fantasy of the gameplay up to 11.

I mention that there's a story, but it's nothing special. It's very campy in an 80s way, and tonally it's humor is very Duke Nukem (but with none of the meanness of Forever). It makes for fun cutscenes at least, and many of them show off the impressive level & character design.

Oh yeah, I forgot that this game is BEAUTIFUL. It has a PS1 look to it, but so many detailed enemies get jammed into such massive & detailed arenas that it's hard not to be impressed with the game in context of modern releases. It might be working with half the polygons when it comes to texture, but they lean on vibrant colors, insane boss design, and varied level design to stick out.

There's even more I could talk about, like how great the platforming sections are and how they feel like if Titanfall 2 & Doom Eternal had a baby, or how satisfying it is to rain fire from above thanks to the forgiving floatiness of its jumps, or how satisfyingly hidden the collectibles are, or how brilliantly the scale & stakes of the game escalate throughout, or how there's apparently community maps to play now that I'm done, or how the audio logs gives some surprisingly tender back story. But, I gotta go to bed I've been up for nearly 24 hours.

So I'll just say that if you've ever enjoyed a Boomer Shooter (any game like Dusk, Doom Eternal, Ultrakill, etc.) then this is a must-play. I'll be surprised if this isn't on my top 10 of the year.

Turns out, this game is really great.

The story bounces between just fine and actively annoying (Vaughn in this sucks pretty bad) and the game has a bad habit of killing off characters to build emotional investment though the plot isn't good enough everywhere else to justify such impact full moments. And the end came out of nowhere and I'm a lil upset that a certain character died so suddenly there, especially as I was beginning to love them by the end. Also, every single vehicle-based mission sucks and I'm annoyed by how many there are.

But holy shit this gunplay is some of the best in any shooter. And while the loot doesn't get all that exciting until the back half, literally every gun feels satisfying to shoot. Plus once you DO start earning purple-orange tier loot, the quirks each weapon has force you to switch up your gameplay habits in fun new ways. Glad I came back to this after dropping it at launch because I had a blast. And I played this entire game on Steam Deck as well, where it ran great with only 3-4 crashes in my 35 hours.

For folks who dropped the game like me, this is absolutely a God-tier podcast game at the very least. And now that I'm done with the campaign, I'm excited to dig deep into the endgame...after I play some other games first.

Great game! As an old school fan of the franchise, I still preferred those old games to the 2008 reboot, but Ragnarok managed to finally surpass those old games in my mind. The combat is improved as the 3rd pillar of combat is held up with an excellent new weapon instead of the unexciting, though effective, bare knuckles. Exploration felt a lot less dull as the world felt a bit more dense with things to do, secrets to find, and stories to hear.

And the story left a much bigger impact on me. The reboot had a great narrative, but with it being solely about breaking Kratos' shell, his character was too one note for a world full of more vibrant characters. Now he feels as vibrant as anyone else, and the new characters he gets to interact with are even more facing to watch. Plus, the story gets way more variety thanks to the additional perspective. I was initially concerned that the lack of one specific goal in this game would have lead to a meandering plot, but it instead managed to build intrigue and deeper context with every seemingly insignificant diversion from the main path.

I liked God of War (2018), and I was excited to like Ragnarok as well. But I'm pleased to report I love God of War Ragnarok. It's my favorite in the franchise now and, while I can't go as far as to say it's one of my all time favorites, I think it might be one of the most satisfying games I've ever played, from it's narrate & world design to it's gameplay & art design. It tries for quite a bit and lands it all with flying colors. Excited to one day return to clear the quest log, max out my character, and get that Platinum.

You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about Insomniac lately. Before Spider-Man, they’ve made great games for over two decades, many of which are all-time favorites of mine, but our collective perception of them seemed to have changed. Early on, they were known as a fun developer, known most for their whimsical worlds, wacky weaponry, and vibrant color palates. This made their games just that, fun and the quality of their catalog earned franchises like Ratchet and Clank and Spyro that description. But making a game that was just fun wasn’t enough for the dawn of the PS3 generation.

Games like Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction were still highly rated and sold well, but with a taste for mature content becoming more prominent, it would have been considered insane to reward a Game of the Year award to a game about a talking alien and his robot friend. Insomniac knew this, and attempted to branch out; sometimes successfully in the case of Resistance 3, and sometimes unsuccessfully in the case of Fuze. Yet, these experiments still left the developer in that tier just below the Naughty Dogs and Biowares of the world.

Spider-Man Miles Morales Photo Mode
Credit: Insomniac
But, with the creation of Sunset Overdrive, Insomniac began to understand something, a thing they would come to fully realize with the release of Marvel’s Spider-Man. And that is that they never needed to abandon the whimsy, color, and diverse weaponry of their older titles to finally be seen as a prestige studio. All of those elements appear in Marvel’s Spier-Man: Miles Morales as well, and the game remains fun and produces oodles of serotonin because of that. But with Miles, they’ve managed to do something that I didn’t think Insomniac could pull off: deliver a grounded story and characters without sacrificing any of the unique flavor of the developer. But, they don’t pull that off without issue.

Now, what about that whimsy and vibrancy I went on about? Miles has that in spades. Ganke’s jokes and puns in Miles’ ear always produce a smile, if not an outright laugh. Miles’ teenage naivete often leads him to humorous situations. And even the incredibly fluid animations found when swinging and flipping through the skyline of New York instill a sense of wonder. And of course, the game is a looker, even on the PlayStation 4, where I played the game. And if you are lucky enough, despite an unstable economy and limited stock due to a pandemic, it looks even shinier, and smoother, on PlayStation 5. And while it gets those good looks due greatly to Insomniac’s mastering the hardware, the warm and inviting, yet grounded and modern, art direction does a lot to deliver a game that’s pleasing to the eye.

But the game is more than a pretty face, it’s a hell of a lot of fun, too, and another Insomniac hallmark comes into play to make it so. The usual arsenal of punches, kicks, throws, and acrobatic variations of each are brought over from the original Spider-Man. And much like that game, the move set is given added spice due to that aforementioned vast arsenal. Though, here, that arsenal isn’t as vast, with only 4 different gadgets on Miles’ weapon wheel. But the Gravity Well, Web-Shooters, Holo Drone, and Remote Mine all complement the core combat and stealth in the same ways that the wider selection of gadgets of the first game did, just in a more refined way.

But the biggest addition, new electric ‘Venom” powers, is the most interesting new feature. If the gadgets of the first game improved mainly stealth and then melee combat, then the Venom powers of this game improve mainly combat, and then also traversal. The moment mechanics of the original game were already great, but the Venom Jump and Venom Dash make it a lot easier to maintain high and momentum. But in combat, these venom powers make combat with large amounts of enemies more manageable. In the first game, fighting dozens of enemies at once felt like spinning dozens of plates at once. With the Venom attacks, you can deal damage to multiple enemies at once, and even more when upgraded. This time around you are not only spinning a few plates, but it’s easier to balance each of them.

And speaking of keeping things manageable, the scale of the game is thankfully about half of that of the original. The campaign is barely eight hours long, and the number of collectibles and side activities to do has been halved when compared to the original Spider-Man. Now, despite how much fun I had getting the platinum in that game, it was full of several hours of busywork. While I’ve yet to get the platinum in Spider-Man: Miles Morales, I’ve crossed 50% completion without even realizing it and without an ounce of fatigue. If not for the requirement to replay the game on New Game Plus, I’d say completing the game’s platinum would be way less repetitive. But, if you are like me and have yet to play the game on PS5, you can transfer your PS4 save and experience the game with raytracing or a higher framerate and breathe new life into that second playthrough.

But if you’ve known anything about Insomniac’s catalog, you could have expected all of the last four paragraphs of praise and descriptors. But as for the thing I didn’t expect from the developer, that would be the way they’ve portrayed Miles and the folks he calls friends and family. Now, no offense to fellow Peter Parker fans, but everything about Insomniac’s portrayal of the character is aggressively generic. Not to say their attempt at him was bad, but to me, having been exposed to half a dozen versions of the character through games, movies, and TV shows, it came off as incredibly safe. Sure, I still love the game despite that, but I’d attribute all of the biggest narrative twists of Marvel’s Spider-Man to everyone but Peter himself.

This is not the case with Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Miles himself is no longer the innocent, nappy-headed kid we knew, but a young adult, with the appropriately clean hairline any self-respecting black adolesent would have. His home was full of items and details depicting his Hispanic and Black heritage with care to not fall victim to the common stereotypes of either. Despite me not knowing Insomniac to be a studio full of diverse voices, they surely did their research here. Even outside of the house, characters like Miles’ Uncle Aaron were tastefully done, with an undying love for his nephew only complemented by his appreciation for hip hop and advanced cloaking tech.

These details, including the newly trap-infused score and swinging animations infused with the exaggerated swagger of a black teen, add a certain spice to Miles that makes the experience much more enjoyable. Plus, the game’s brevity and improved gameplay also add to that enjoyment. But it’s pretty hard to enjoy these narrative and theming elements and how they ground the universe of the game with how the real world is right now.

Mile’s mom, Rio Morales, is running for city council by the time we see her in this game. She’s running on the platform of changing policies to ones that would do right by the people of Harlem. Well, for the last few decades at least, Harlem, and the rest of the New York area, has been infamous for its corrupt police force, and black and brown folks, like Miles and thousands more in Harlem, are the ones that most commonly fall victim to them. The game doesn’t interact with this at all. It might reference how Miles is truly their Spider-Man, as he gives Harlem the true care and help that the city police force doesn’t always provide. But the game doesn’t mention exactly how that police force has failed them. That’s really hard to ignore in 2020, where most of America has seen, especially recently, how police forces have failed them, and the rest of us have experienced it firsthand.

I’m not sure if it’s because Insomniac still wants to hold up Miles’ father, a deceased police officer, in a heroic light. I’m not sure if it’s because they didn’t want to heavily contrast the intimate relationship that Peter Parker has with the city’s police force. I don’t know if discussing systematic racism in the police force would simply just put too much of a damper on an inherently light-hearted game. But no matter why they made this decision, the choice does make the game feel a bit uncomfortable to play at times. The game still produces enough serotonin for me to know the game will be one of my favorites of the year. But for as much as they ground the game in aspects of Black and Hispanic culture, it sticks out that they ignore this aspect so completely.

But that is truly the only, admittedly huge, blemish on what is otherwise a fantastic piece of art. As a launch title for a new console, an entry in a massive superhero franchise, and the 37th game from a beloved developer, the game has to be easily consumable. And thanks to its brief runtime, engaging and rewarding gameplay, and beautiful visuals, it is exactly that. But because it is so easily digestible, it fails to examine the unpleasant parts of the urban lifestyle that it loves to wear as an aesthetic. The gamer in me doesn’t mind that fact and overlooks it more with every perfect slo-mo dodge and impactful narrative moment. But the black man that I can’t help but be can’t let that fact go completely. It’s still a fantastic game, one I love even more than the original Spider-Man, but I still can’t get over that issue, even if similar stories like Into the Spiderverse have a similar problem at times. But don’t let that stop you from playing one of the most consistently enjoyable, respectably paced, and narratively compelling games I’ve played this year.

I beat this game around 2010 because people wouldn't stop gushing about this series thanks to a friend letting me borrow it. It's the only Kojima game I beat, and the only one I've played outside of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow months later and Ground Zeroes years later. This game is mid.

Mechanics try to cater to both stealth and action combat which lead to neither feeling very satisfying when compared to contemporaries in other genres. It's got a lot of polygons, but it rarely goes outside of its oppressively brown color palette. And some gameplay sequences are used once and never iterated on ever again. I understand that's done to enhance the story, but to me, there barely was one.

The plot was as off-puttingly convoluted as it was long-winded. The game just refused to clarify most of its baseline framework. I understand that's what the prior 3 games are for, but considering the perfect scores this game got, and the fact it wasn't advertised as an episodic game, I was hoping to not be completely lost. And I really could see myself enjoying the insane characters and over the top highs of the story, but the plot slows to a crawl so often that I really had to push through a lot to see the positives.

So, yea, I can see why everyone loves this game. It's weird, which I can really respect. But nothing about this game is accessible or inviting. Blame that on the fact that you have to be deeply familiar with 3 earlier games (and at least 2 other prequels that released later) to fully appreciate the story. Blame it on the fact that it's gameplay can't really decide what genre it wants to cater to. Blame that on the fact that the game is artistically bland or so long winded that I fell asleep 4 times during its final cutscene. Or just blame it on the game just not clicking with me.

But just because everyone else likes it, I don't have to as well. At least I gave it a shot tho.