Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is the worst AAA game I have ever experienced.

Xenoblade Chronicles X for the Wii U is my definition of “a flawed masterpiece.” It had all the pieces there to make a near perfect game, but didn’t quite connect them. Still, There’s a special place in my heart for it. The first Xenoblade Chronicles is one of the best JRPG's of all time.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is not that. If you are not familiar with the game, it takes place in another world where all civilizations rest on the backs of titans in the sky, endlessly swimming around the World Tree. Besides that you have pretty typical JRPG fare, like unexplained magic, talking animals, and girls with cat ears. It has a some good points to it, but at the end of the day, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is just a bad game.

Look, I love anime. I’ve seen quite a lot of it. Too much, even, my friends tell me. But there is a line, and maybe I’m the one who’s got to draw it. Pyra’s boobs are literally larger than her head. If you watch a video of Pyra, you’ll see quickly how ridiculous her character is. The proportions of her figure are completely inhuman in any way, shape, or form. JRPGs can get pretty bad with this stuff, but look at this shit. This is the most egregiously over-sexualized depiction of a woman I’ve ever seen. And not just the breasts, but the whole costume ensemble. She’s wearing half a pair of short shorts with a metal bikini top. This character is meant to be the awakened persona of an ancient, powerful weapon, the Aegis. I spent 30 hours trying to take her or this game seriously and was never able to do it. Japan does some fucked up stuff, but when your female characters are this unrealistic I’m unable to suspend my disbelief any further. Any character development done for Pyra is thrown to the wayside as I’m trying to figure out how her back isn’t broken. It’s a damn shame too, because Pyra’s voice actor is excellent and probably the only competent actor in the entire cast. The fact that anyone fetishizes human women to this degree is kind of revolting. This is the horniest game I’ve ever played, and I played Danganronpa.

Unfortunately, for many reasons other than Pyra’s chest size, this game can only be described as an anime garbage cringe fest. This game is everything that the general public thinks anime is: perverted, badly dubbed, full of screaming fights and big explosions, all style and no substance. The over-dramatic reactions to every small line of dialogue, the nonsensical gobbledygook language the characters use when describing ancient wars or distant gods that have no bearing on the present situation, the constant reduction of female characters to sex objects. This is the stuff that people who don’t engage with the medium see when they look at anime, even though it only pertains to a small portion of shows/manga. If you’re not an actual weeaboo in possession of a waifu body pillow and you managed to stomach all this, then I applaud you for your patience. I am a lesser man.

There are gacha mechanics, and your rewards are women. Wow. Don't know how much more on the nose you can be with "women are objects", but there are legitimately loot boxes with big-breasted, bouncing anime girls that are often teenagers or younger. I am not lying.

If you have the stomach for this kind of stuff, congrats! Let’s talk about the game. You’ll take control of Rex, a recently resurrected scavenger with a horrible English voice actor, who sets out to return the aforementioned Pyra to Elysium, which is heaven, I guess. Rex is a “Driver,” which is what we call people that can harness the power of Blades. Blades are humanoid people, of which a disproportionate amount are hot teenage girls with big ole anime tiddies. Pyra is a Blade, and is sort of a manifestation of the power of the Aegis, Rex’s big red sword. So long as Rex holds that sword, he is inexorably linked with Pyra.

Pyra wishes to return to the top of the World Tree, so they join up with a cat girl who is riding a talking tiger and a perverted raccoon with a sex robot. I apologize for the bitterness that is so clearly seeping into my review.

The above scene, while only 5 minutes, kind of sums of the vibe of the whole game nicely. This broke me. I think from this point on I was destined to hate the game, and there probably was no going back. I had to call my mom after this, just to tell her I love her. Poppi is indeed a sex-maid robot built in the image of a 10 year old girl that Tora, the raccoon idiot, built to refer to him as Master. What the fuck, MonolithSoft. I will not sit here and let this be normalized.

The game is composed of several small open worlds that are disconnected, and as you progress through the game more of them open up. You can fast travel between worlds to jump between them, but on each one you’ll find plenty of stuff to do. Some are tiny and others large, but the actual design of the landscapes relative to the mobility of your character is great design. MonolithSoft built the map for Breath of the Wild, so it’s not surprising that the map in their own game is so impressive. Even in the first world, you see rolling hills, arching mountains, bottomless lakes, and vividly colored plant life of all kinds. The art direction of the settings is one of the best parts of the game.

The monsters are, as always, amazing. They are carried over mostly from the previous games, and Xenoblade has always had a knack for making believable looking fauna in the right environments. This is the high point of the game. If you want amazing fantasy animals from a distant planet, there is no better place to find them. Seeing new creatures was the only thing that carried me through 30 hours of this game. The music is solid as well, but honestly I really thought it was a downgrade from XCX.

That was the last good thing I’ve got to say. Combat in this game is convoluted beyond belief. There is no way you could understand anything that’s going on without reading about it online, because there are so many systems layered on top of each other that everything you do during a fight loses all meaning. Despite the fact that there are 5 hours of tutorials at the beginning, you’re not adequately taught how to configure your party to achieve the most powerful combos. With accessories, equipment, party callouts, elemental combinations, skill trees, auto-attack cycles, status effects, weapon types, combat arts, art levels, weapon upgrades, and Blade attachments all working in the background together, it takes more than a few hours of mashing buttons in the dark before you have any sense of what Rex is actually doing. I know it seems like a very simple thing, but there’s a huge disconnect between the player and game when your character doesn’t seem to be responding to the inputs you hit. And it’s not because the game doesn’t work, it’s just such an insane explosion of color, badly dubbed screaming, and ugly UI that you don’t actually feel like you’re doing anything.

The UI for menus needs to be mentioned. It moves really slowly for some reason. It’s ugly, it’s hard to navigate, and totally unintuitive.

The game also runs at 480p undocked, leaving all the tiny onscreen text literally unreadable. Are we meant to scan through three different onscreen menus during fights without being able to even read the text? The game also runs at 30 FPS maximum but is bugged with constant frame rate drops. I don’t think I made it more than 20 minutes in handheld without a single digit frame rate drop. Maybe that’s been fixed by now, you can correct me if it has.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is both a technical and narrative failure. This game absolutely fails its predecessors and has cheapened the brand. While the worlds and monsters are imaginative and beautiful, the cringey anime garbage stuff is enough to turn off most people. If you overlook that, the actual gameplay creates a huge disconnect between the player and Rex. Combat relies on over a dozen different bloated systems and feels like button mashing, even when you do it strategically. The characters are impossible to relate to or care about, even setting aside the unacceptable designs of the female characters. The English voice acting and dubbing is the worst I have seen in a decade. If I have to watch Poppi, the robot sex-slave maid modeled to look like a 10 year old girl, call that alien raccoon “Master” one more time, I will throw up. Do not buy this game.

Excerpt of full review: https://gameluster.com/?p=101209&preview=true

When you’ve been in the video game review business for over four years, as I have, it’s hard not to compare a game you’re reviewing to other games you’ve played. It’s something I try (and usually fail) to avoid, because ultimately my goal is to inform you, the reader, if the game in question is worth your valuable time and hard-earned money. So, sometimes that means saying a new game is like Dark Souls meets The Legend of Zelda; if only someone would be brave enough to be inspired by these games! So here I am, hat in hand, unable to find a way to succinctly tell you about Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth purely by its own merits. Infinite Wealth is a love letter to the entire medium of video games.

The latest entry in the Like a Dragon (formerly Yakuza) series is at once fifteen other games you’ve already played, but better, carefully sewn into one of the best games I have ever had the joy of playing. But even ignoring all that, Infinite Wealth stands on its own story and gameplay among the best RPGs ever. I also don’t want to bury the lede here – ignore the pulse-pounding narrative, intelligent mechanics, amazing graphics, and best-in-class music for a moment. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is fun.

With no repeating quests or grinding, it’s over 70 hours long – there’s just that much game to play. I’m so excited for players to discover what it has to offer; perhaps both the best story and combat in video games. That said, I want to make an earnest recommendation to play Yakuza: Like a Dragon before dipping into Infinite Wealth; you will not be able to follow the story otherwise. It happens to be one of the best games of all time too, so that’s just a bonus for you. I am simultaneously awestruck, confused, and enamored with what RGG has done with Infinite Wealth. With gameplay this good, a narrative this gripping, and punches that will hit you straight in the heart, this is the apex of gaming as I know it. Echoing Kiryu and Ichiban’s struggles, Infinite Wealth keeps one eye firmly focused on gaming’s past, with the other on a bright horizon for its future.

This is the first ever 11/10. Sorry, video games. And our base-10 number system. You are now both obsolete.

One day maybe I'll come to grips with the fact that Nintendo dropped one of the best games of all time, went radio silent for 6 years, and then dropped an even better sequel. When I played Breath of the Wild, I called it a 10, so I'm going to leave it at that, but frankly Tears of the Kingdom improves every single aspect of Breath of the Wild so much I don't think I could ever bring myself to play the first game again.

I think Eiji Aonuma has earned a long, happy retirement after this, and he's obviously trained Hidemaro Fujibayashi to adequately take his place in the future. Zelda is at its best when it has reinvented itself, it always has been. Tears of the Kingdom is a reinvention of a reinvention. It's hard to believe video games will ever get better than this, but that's what I said 6 years ago - and how delighted I am to be proved wrong.

Pip-boy is dead. Now, I am Pip-Man.

My first playthrough of Fallout 3 was entirely mod-free, so I’ll be reviewing it through that lens. Strap on your Pip-Boys, grab your Todd Howard collectible bobble head, and follow me into the wasteland!

It is no overstatement to say that in 2008, Fallout 3 changed the course of the entire video games industry, rerouting seemingly every project in development that may have been a linear game into an open world adventure. Oblivion was great and all, but what Fallout 3 did with its open world was unprecedented, even in Grand Theft Auto III (often credited as the father of the genre). Followed by two other open world hits, Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim, this game proved that players didn’t need or necessarily even want direction in their video games. Go anywhere, do anything. It just works.

The game begins with a quick history of what happened to the world — in 2077, the Chinese dropped bombs on the US, we returned fire, blah blah blah world is ended in a nuclear holocaust. The world of Fallout isn’t our own, though; it’s a very different one in which the transistor was never invented, cars run on nuclear energy, and 50s Americana vibes dominate popular culture. Suddenly, you’re born! (Don’t feel too bad about being born. It happens to the best of us).

Your father, Liam Neeson, pulls you from your mother’s womb as you enter this exciting new world of nuclear mutants and wasteland horrors. Your mother dies in childbirth, and your Liam Neeson dad raises you in the safety of Vault 101, one of the few underground safe havens that protects from the creatures on the surface. Your best friend, Amata, is the daughter of the Overseer, the tyrannical leader of the vault. You go through some typical growing up stuff, from baby to prepubescent teen to a grown ass 19 year old. You see some glimpses of the trials and tribulations of growing up, choosing a career, and getting bullied. Tunnel Snakes rule! This whole section is quite interesting but only lasts an hour at most, so hold on to your hat and we’ll get you out into the open world in just a bit.

Like I said, in 2008 this was a literal game changer. Leaving the vault to chase after your missing father, you step out into the world for the first time and see the expanse of the Capital Wasteland. The visuals have not aged well, but a few mods will definitely make it more bearable. I won’t get too much farther into the story of Fallout 3, of which there isn’t much. I want to focus on the world. This game, much like Skyrim, is a sandbox for you to build your own post-apocalyptic story.

There isn’t much of an overarching objective beyond “Find your dad.” There’s one simple reason I still praise this game design to this day: “Find your dad” is exactly the right balance between urgent and trivial. Most open world RPGs, including most of Bethesda’s, suffer from creating a main objective that is so urgent that if you truly want to role play you can’t do any side quests. There isn’t time for exploring when the Dragon God is attacking villages or your son has been kidnapped by the Institute. But your dad, a seasoned wastelander and capable doctor, has wandered outside of his own volition. He’ll be fine on his own, but I still want to find him. But if I stop here and check out Paradise Falls… well, it’s not a big deal.

Fallout 3 features some of the most interesting quests in RPG history. I don’t want to spoil them, but look out for Tranquility Lane, The Mechanist vs. the Ant-Agonizer, Oasis, and Our Little Secret, among others. There are less quests than you might be used to in other open world games, but each quest is a lot more substantial than you’d anticipate, all of them with multiple branching paths and conclusions. Each quest comes to you pretty organically through conversation, environmental clues, or just overhearing something interesting at the local bar. Fallout 3 features a Karma system that disappears from later games, which works just as it sounds. Do something bad and you lose karma, do something good and gain karma. Karma is said to influence events around you and determine how some NPCs interact with you, so stop stealing stuff! Or don’t.

The music is amazing. Inon Zur is as purposeful as always, matching ambient soundscapes to the marching rhythms of war. The main theme is nothing short of iconic, and is still the main theme of the Fallout franchise today. Dun dunnnn dunnnnnnnnn

Although not as fleshed out as the characters in Fallout 4 or NV, Fallout 3 does feature some great characters to team up with. Among the companions, I stuck with Fawkes the super genius Supermutant and Dogmeat, my loyal mutt from the junkyard for the majority of the game. Other characters like Charon, king of the Ghouls, Sierra Petrovita, Curator of the First National Nuka Cola Museum, and the residents of the all-child city of Little Lamplight round out a cast of interesting people to meet. The dialogue is quite well written as well, and conversations are interesting and not something you’re skipping through to get to the “good stuff.” Conversations are, for the most part, the good stuff. Sierra was my first video game wife. Well, you can’t marry her, but we’re all just doing a make pretend here.

The gun play is bad. I don’t have a lot else to say. It’s clunky and it feels bad to shoot. There’s no way to reliably aim your gun in this game that is dependent on guns. VATS is essentially a lock-on system using AP (Action Points) and is the best way to ensure you’re doing any damage to enemies. You can also pick which body part to hit with your shots, and crippling specific body parts is the most strategic way to win fights. Cripple legs to immobilize enemies, or cripple arms to make them drop their weapons. Be aware there is weapon degradation ! But no crafting needed, stop by any merchant and pay them to repair your weapons and armor. I recommend a melee build, this game is a good bit easier with a Shishkebab. The shooting has aged terribly, but again that’s not the good part of the game. VATS is a clever holdover of the combat from the first two games, sitting somewhere between turn-based and live combat.

The settings are amazing. Oasis is my favorite, but I don’t want to spoil it for you. Just head north, you’ll get there. Paradise Falls, the slave city, is very neat for a city built entirely of junk. Little Lamplight is a town of all children and entirely subterranean. Seeing the 70 story Tenpenny Tower in the middle of the desert for the first time is a wonder I will never forget. Rivet City is a whole city build into a dilapidated aircraft carrier parked right on the river. Underworld is a secret city of ghouls trapped underground. Visit the proud Republic of Dave. And when you see the White House in shambles, the Washington monument crumbling… it makes you feel something (if you’re American). It’s all so dismal, wonderful, and hopeless at the same time.

And if you’re unfamiliar with Fallout, the monsters will blow your mind. Fallout has always had some of the best monsters in video games, so this isn’t surprisng, but some of them are legitimately scary while others are simply baffling. Supermutants and ghouls are all well and good, but let’s hang out with a centaur sometime. Whenever I look at it I remember how far we have strayed from God’s light.

More than anything, this game lets you explore. You can go far and wide, or stay on the short and narrow. Care about the story or don’t. It matters exactly as much as you want it to. Find the people, go to the places, shoot the stuff, don’t shoot the stuff, I don’t care. Just go. Any direction you please.

Fallout 3 is a wonderful and depressing trip into post apocalyptic America. Go literally anywhere and do literally anything you please. If that’s scary to you, the main quest will take you all over the map. But I encourage you to stick to the road less traveled- that is to say, don’t follow the roads. Fight for good or evil, for the Brotherhood or the Enclave, for justice or chaos. Just make sure to allow yourself to feel that freedom. They keep telling you that war never changes, but more importantly you’ll find that in some terrifying ways America never changes, either.

Neon White is the most innovative and refreshing action game I have played in years. Fantastic music, sense of speed, and layers on layers of mechanics you feel that you've mastered in seconds, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

I have never been into watching speedrunning, nor have I cared to try it myself, but the compartmentalization of the technique into 15-30 second doses is brilliant. Why did I suddenly care about beating my friends on the leaderboards? It's not something I've ever, EVER cared about before but in Neon White if I saw a friend beat a level a fraction of a second faster than me I'd spend the next ten minutes doing a hundred reruns to beat them.

I will be very open, I think the story is kind of stupid and I did not engage with it after the first hour. The dialogue is badly written and a lot of the VA sounds amateur. This is thankfully not an issue at all, as there's a giant prompt to press the F button to fast forward through every scene, and the game is 100% enjoyable without knowing what's going on. My only other negative is that the game drags for one world before you get the final powerup card.

The final boss of Neon White was so much fun that after a half hour of running it back over and over again, when I finally won, I laughed out loud like a maniac. I can't remember the last boss battle that made me do that, and I'd absolutely list Neon Green as a top 10 final boss of all time. And I got an Ace first try! In addition, the final world is actually the most fun because of a single new mechanic that changes the entire game to make it feel EVEN FASTER. While I wish the story had been any good, it is impossible to deny the sheer brilliance of Neon White. I wish it had gotten more recognition over a certain cat-based indie game, but I'll settle for it residing in the Nirav Hall of Fame.

Abandoned after 2.5 hours.

BAD
- the main character is the biggest asshole on the planet and only gets worse as he goes. He's an asshole to the companion AI 100% of the time even tho the AI is offering actual help, the MC keeps telling it to eat a bag of dicks. He's a misogynistic dude bro to the extreme and i fucking hate him.
- they give you like 4 bullets for your one gun for the first mission and the lowest grunts take 3 headshots to kill so you have to use melee exclusively and it fucking sucks
- there's a lot of sexual assault jokes already, not to mention all of the "satire" in the game is basically just them saying "comrade" over and over while the MC talks about how big his muscles are and how he only plays by his own rules even though he literally is a black ops guy for the russian military
- every fucking room you go in you have to scan 20+ boxes by hovering over them and holding down F and it's miserable in addition to making the game move at a snail's pace between that and stealth sections. This is not a high octane fast paced shooter in any way and it should not have been advertised as such
- i kept dying due to bugs and lost tons of progress because it only saves at checkpoints, and hitboxes are fucked on the enemies
- features the world's worst lockpicking mini game
- the mc literally never shuts up, i want to die, please free me

GOOD
- it's fucking gorgeous. it is one of the best meetings of high fidelity graphics, amazing performance, next gen lighting, and thoughtful curated art design ever
- robo titties

Fallout: New Vegas is, to me, definitively the best RPG ever made. And it isn't close.

The Fallout franchise has a long and storied history that bares repeating for the sake of context. Fallout: A Post-Nuclear Role-Playing Game was created by Black Isle Studios in 1997 as an isometric, tactical CRPG. The point-and-click, turn-based game was one of the first games to rely on clever dialogue and branching quest lines and while not very popular, set a new standard for these niche types of games. Just a year later Fallout 2 was released, using the same engine and graphics as the first game.

Interplay, the publisher, rented out the license to external studios to create two poorly received spin-offs, Fallout Tactics and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. These games attempted to spin the license into a pure overhead tactics game and an action game, but with their failure Interplay shut the franchise down and sold the near-useless Fallout IP to Bethesda Softworks. The rest, as they say, is history; Fallout is now one of the biggest gaming franchises on earth. Fallout 3 was 2008’s definitive Game of the Year. Fallout 4, despite disappointing a lot of fans, is one of the best-selling RPGs of all time, topping Bethesda’s own Skyrim and sitting second only to the juggernaut that is Pokemon. While Fallout 76 holds the esteemed title of “worst launch of all time,” the Wastelanders update has made the game playable and even pretty good. Essentially, Fallout games have a history of being all over the place.

Nestled comfortably in this complicated release history is 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas. Following the success of Fallout 3, Bethesda rented out the Fallout IP to a new studio called Obsidian Entertainment, made up of the very ex-Black Isle Studios employees that had created Fallout in the first place. Bethesda handed Obsidian the Fallout 3 engine and put them to work — and so it was that the planets aligned. All the best parts of the classic Fallout games and the Bethesda version came together to form Fallout: New Vegas, one of the greatest RPGs (and dare I say greatest games) of all time.

A quick cut scene establishes the world of Fallout: war between the US and China escalated in the year 2077 to the point of total atomic annihilation around the world. The bombs dropped and ended humanity as we know it, leaving the survivors to scrounge for food in a horrific wasteland. The Forced Evolutionary Virus escaped containment, transforming everything from scorpions to lizards to humans into grotesque mutants. Over a hundred years later, a courier travels through the Mojave desert to deliver a package. The Courier is stopped by Benny, played by Matthew Perry (Chandler from Friends), and is shot in the head when they refuse to give up the goods.

The player wakes up in the run-down home of one Doc Mitchell, a kindly old man who explains the situation and acquaints the Courier with the state of the world. He then guides you through a clever set of questions in a psych test to determine your optimal character build, but you can of course set your stats however you’d like. After point-buying from your seven S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck), you’ll select a few special skills for your character to have. You design your character in a subpar character creator (but hey, it was 2010) and then it’s off to the wasteland!

New Vegas was the first Fallout game I ever played, and I had no idea what the series was about before that. More than that, though, this was the first open world game I had ever played. And the first western RPG I’d ever played as well. This was all new to me, every piece of it. New Vegas eases new players in to the post-apocalypse by introducing a compelling cast of characters in Goodsprings, the starting town, and having them drip-feed you exposition through well-written dialogue. Sunny Smiles and her dog Cheyenne walk the Courier through the basics of shooting, VATS, item management and exploration if they choose; if the player is a veteran, they can simply exit Doc Mitchell’s house and begin wandering the waste in literally any direction they choose. New Vegas does a near-perfect job teaching new players how to learn about the wasteland themselves, rather than dumping exposition and calling it a day.

The premise of the story is that you, the Courier, were delivering something called the Platinum Chip to the mysterious owner of New Vegas, Mr. House. After being shot in the head the Courier has lost their memory, and remembers only Benny’s smug face as he pulled the trigger. You’ll set out from Goodsprings to track down Chandler and get the full story out of him, dead or alive. Meanwhile, a war is brewing; two huge armies are moving slowly towards the coveted Hoover Dam, the biggest source of power in the Mojave.

The New California Republic is the remnants of the governments of six West Coast States that formed a new union upon the destruction of the United States, while Caesar’s Legion is a tribe of barbarian sex-traffickers marching from the midwest, believing they are the chosen army to achieve the glory of Rome. This is to say nothing of the aforementioned Mr. House, sitting pretty in control of New Vegas and all the food, water, electricity, drugs and luxuries that come with it. The underground militia of The Brotherhood of Steel sits quietly in the dunes waiting for their moment while the drug-pushing Great Khans stake their claim in the deserts. The Boomers have taken control of an old Air Force base up north and claimed the weapons, but there are rumors that the husk of the American Government has formed once more into the Enclave. Each and every one of these factions have a relationship with the others, and your actions determines who allies together, who betrays each other and who ultimately is victorious.

It is almost impossible to understand the moving pieces of the world as they change around you in response to your decisions. Shooting one person at the wrong time could have ramifications that reach across the deserts and through to the end of the game. Dialogue choices become available to different players depending on how they’ve statted their character, so it’s unlikely any two people have played Fallout New Vegas exactly the same way. Dialogue is more clever than it has any right to be all the way through to the end of the game, and your dialogue choices can have very immediate ramifications if you say the wrong thing. A pleasant chat can become a shootout in a matter of seconds, but hey, that’s the wasteland, baby.

The shooting in Fallout New Vegas is not good. It does improve upon its predecessor, Fallout 3, by offering a much larger assortment of guns; however, the feel of gunplay has not improved. Guns continue to be hard to aim, and moving targets are almost impossible to hit without using VATS (the lock on mechanism). There are many action RPGs in which players will try to power through the dialogue sections to reach the action, however players will likely find the reverse true in New Vegas. Utilizing the correct weapons, armor, chems and skills will give you the edge in individual fights, but the overall war will be decided by how well you can play your character, whether its a max-strength barbarian or a lucky sonofabitch. The RPG mechanics of this game are deeper than most will care to dive into, but rest assured they are there.

The companions in New Vegas are for the most part well written, interesting people that have discernible goals and will join the Courier if they believe it’ll help them reach those goals. Cass, Boone, ED-E and of course our very good boy Rex are just a few of the great characters that will accompany you, each with their own specific set of powers and skills. Dialogue and interactions with other characters will change depending on who your companion is, but be wary that they’re also keeping an eye on you. If the Courier makes too many decisions in favor of a faction they’re not aligned with, the companion will leave your party or even try to kill you. If you’re trying for a Legion playthrough, I’d advise you to assassinate Boone as quickly as possible.

Fallout New Vegas takes everything that Fallout 3 brought to the series stretches it over the skeleton of the classic games, creating something much more elegant than it has any right to be. Aside from the numerous technical problems and impossible-to-aim guns, Fallout New Vegas is a flawless masterpiece. The player will continue to be astounded that the developers thought of one thing or another and prepared for it; your choices in both dialogue and action do truly affect and alter the world around you. And endless cast of well-written characters with overwritten backstories will carry the Courier through the wastes in search of the truth and land them in a very specific position to determine how the war plays out. Although the player is always in control, most repercussions of your actions are completely unintended and leave you scrambling to figure out how to repair an alliance or take a stronghold to remedy it. Obsidian has created the most intricately crafted game ever written with excellent DLC and well over a hundred hours of content — and I didn’t even touch on mods. Get it.

Each and every one of us has experienced true guilt at some point in our life. Shame because of what we did or didn't do, whether it was our fault or not. Some of you may be able to call to mind a moment in which innocence was lost, in which you saw that your actions had consequences. Neversong is a journey of that singular feeling, that moment of realization, in carefully crafted pieces. It's an adventure unlike any I've gone on before, showcasing the worst elements of the human experience alongside the best ones in pursuit of proving we are more than our baggage.

Neversong, originally titled Once Upon a Coma, sprouted from a Kickstarter by Pinstripe developer Thomas Brush as a sequel to his flash-game Coma. The story eventually developed into something else entirely and grew into new characters, settings, and mechanics inspired by a wide array of games; elements of Undertale, Night in the Woods, Inside, Hollow Knight, and The Legend of Zelda click together surprisingly well in this authentic journey into the monster we call Guilt. Anyone interested in playing this game need not worry about playing the first game to understand it - Neversong does a wonderful job establishing this mysterious and outright scary world in just minutes. This review will be completely spoiler-free, and I advise anyone who wants to play to avoid spoilers elsewhere as well.

12-year-old Peet wakes up alone in a gloomy, dusty room. The walls are laden with pulsating membranes, soft piano music echoes down the corridors, and a shadowy figure smiles in the distance. Neversong launches the player headfirst into the world, giving them just a taste of the supernatural peril they'll come to fear hours later before tossing them into a decidedly normal suburban town. Peet finds himself in his girlfriend, Wren's, decrepit and abandoned house. A single playable grand piano sits in the living room next to an empty grey fireplace. The player steps outside and encounters a whimsical suburban town similar to Night in the Woods, only even more charming. The air of the empty town strikes me with an atmosphere similar to Neil Gaiman's Coraline and Neverwhere.

I cannot stress how beautiful, heartwarming, and relaxing the art of Neversong is. The minimal detail on the character's faces only serves to add to their personalities. Things as simple as menus and the dialogue UI are a pleasure to look at and navigate, and even the sound effects are welcome to the ear. The colors strike me as bright and vivid but restrained as if a colorful Alice In Wonderland-like world has been suddenly drenched in sepia tones. The creatures encountered along the way are, for the most part, quite cute. Every now and then a true monster will rear its ugly head, and at these times the range of the artist's abilities becomes obvious - Thomas Brush has created a world that is so charming it's absolutely terrifying. Brush cites artist Eyvind Earle as his main inspiration, but the best praise I can give Neversong is that it is heavily reminiscent of Tim Burton's masterpiece James and the Giant Peach in artwork, music, and general vibes.

Upon speaking to the charismatic and snot-nosed bratty kids in the neighborhood, Peet discovers that a monster came and abducted Wren. Instead of protecting her, Peet fell into a coma and has just awakened. The adults of Red Wind have gone out to search for and rescue Wren, leaving the village full of only children for an indeterminate amount of time. Joined by a sarcastic fairy companion named Bird, clearly inspired by Tatl from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Peet ventures out into six disturbing yet welcoming worlds to find the truth about what happened to Wren. The Booty Bum gang clearly weren't fans of Peet and Wren, and their sarcastic and derogatory remarks make for some great entertainment amidst the awfulness.

The story is framed by a narrator perusing through an old storybook, wickedly laughing as he recounts the events of Neversong in an almost-rhyme with a constantly changing meter that only adds to the creepiness. As the story unfolds, more details about past events will come forward, connecting dots in a clever and thoughtful way. The player feels as if they are learning more about how the world works every step of the way. Nothing is as it seems, no one can be fully trusted and the strange mastermind Dr. Smile seems to be three steps ahead of Peet at all times. This isn't a game for short bursts of play over a week - you'll want to get to the ending as soon as possible.

The single-button combat is simple at its core, and that's why it doesn't get old. Peet's only armament is a baseball bat, later gaining nails to fight off the increasingly disturbing monsters in Red Wind. Peet has a forward, up and down slash technique that propels him in the corresponding direction, very similar to Hollow Knight (who also happens to use nails as weapons). Basic monsters are usually not too difficult to beat, and every enemy you slay yields a heart, making it quite difficult to actually die. Each area houses a boss which yields a new item to take on the new dungeon. This method of unlocking items paired with the environmental dungeon puzzles calls to mind a 2D version of the 3D Legend of Zelda games. I got lost two times during Neversong and the game didn't make it clear how to progress - this is likely a plus for many.

Each boss fight is unique and relies just as much on platforming as actually fighting, which is a mark of great game design. The combat itself is nothing innovative or groundbreaking, but the bosses are another matter entirely. Each one must be defeated using the item Peet acquired for their dungeon, and upon defeat, Peet will obtain a new song. In another callback to 3D Zelda games, playing that new song on the piano will unlock a new item. The final boss fight was quite a large difficulty spike, but as there's a save point right before it that wasn't unwelcome. The ending brings some closure to this excellently-crafted story while leaving a few things to the player's imagination.

Neversong is an adventure that will resonate with anyone who has experienced true, unadulterated guilt. This is not the guilt of breaking a jar your mother loved or forgetting to feed a friend's cat for a day; this is the guilt of destroying something, someone, that is precious. The loss of innocence, the terror of creeping into adulthood, the end of who you were as who you will become begins to manifest - these universal themes pervade Neversong in a haunting choir. Songs of death, life, and all the things in between can be found here. If you know true guilt, you are not alone. This must-play title sits alongside other indie greats such as Inside and Undertale and is recommended for anyone who wants to look Guilt in the eyes, stand tall, and defy it.

I am a musician - I’ve spent my whole life playing various instruments, writing and recording songs, performing very occasionally. But like a lot of you, my first real exposure to rhythm games was back in middle school at the height of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I must have poured a hundred hours into Guitar Hero 4, wailing away on the plastic instruments and singing my little heart out into the mic. I remember that time fondly, joking about Through the Fire and Flames with the boys at lunch in 7th grade, having friends over to blast through some Aerosmith or Paramore, and feeling just for a second that I was a rockstar.

Hi Fi Rush takes that second, the one when you nail the end of the solo, and blasts it into a 10 hour masterpiece the likes of which I have never seen before. Tango Gameworks and Bethesda have pulled together everything good about both early 2000's adventure platformers and Saturday morning cartoons with literally none of the baggage attached to the nostalgia.

You’ll take control of Chai, a cocky, young aspiring rockstar with a heart of gold - sorry, heart of iPod. In an experiment gone wrong conducted by suspicious cyberpunk megacorp Vandelay, his heart is replaced with a Tony Stark style contraption - the iPod is always playing music, and the world and his body always move to the beat of that sound. In an appropriately jokey aesthetic of a whimsical far future world, Chai must join forces with the mysterious hacker punk Peppermint, the gentle giant tech genius Macaron, the enthusiastic and comedic droid CNMN [Note: pronounced Cinnamon], and the musical robot cat 808 to stop Vandelay from mind controlling the entire world. Each of these characters experiences an arc, and every one of them resonated strongly with me. It's funny, charming, and distinctly aware it's a video game.

Right away, Hi Fi Rush captures the exact aesthetic it goes for - this game exists as a monument to the shows you remember on Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney Channel from the early 2000s. A little bit of Teen Titans here, a little Fairly Oddparents there, a splash of Kim Possible to top it off - you know the vibe. You miss the vibe. You miss the vibe so, so much, and you miss that time of innocence, and no one has managed to recreate that nostalgic ecstasy in your adult life without it feeling forced, or like a cash grab. Until now.

Our underground resistance force sends Chai forward as their weapon - his new robot arm turns a wrench into a guitar by magnetizing the gears around him, perfect for rhythmically landing the beatdown on these robo punks. Hi Fi Rush is a linear action rhythm game, set in a wonderfully realized dystopic future city where robots, mechanical limbs, mechs, and laser guns are all standard issue. Each level is called a track, and each battle within is a chorus while each platforming adventure part between them is a verse. At the end of most tracks you’ll encounter a boss battle, and oh boy, I will get to that.

The tracks perfectly mix together the platforming and combat segments, setting the pace so that one never goes on too long. Recall that the entire world is moving to the beat of the music - that includes platforms, enemies, puzzles, and more. Everything. Chai moves completely to the beat as well, snapping his fingers as you stand idle and keeping his footsteps in rhythm as you move. The platforming segments require precision jumping and timing that uses a full kit of moves.

You can also call your companions in during both platforming and combat sections. Through some future tech nonsense, they can teleport to your location instantly to attack or help with a puzzle segment before going on a short cooldown. However, you can flip between your three companions and summon each one the second the last disappears, if you time it right - that strategy is imperative to win later boss fights. Peppermint comes in for ranged laser pistols that break shields, Macaron slams down to bust open armor, and your third battle companion who I will not name brings wind power that puts out fires and knocks enemies around. Using these abilities to traverse the environments is all well and good, but it’s in battle that it all really shines.

Everything is to the beat. All of your attacks as Chai connect on the beat, regardless of when you hit the button. If you do hit the buttons on time, then your attack power ramps up for each consecutive hit you stay on beat. It’s a genius system, because it means that even if you fall off your cadence you still have the feeling of hitting in time, which makes it easier to get right back into it. 808 acts as a metronome, and you can watch the pulsing light on him for the BPM or if you’re having trouble, open a large metronome at the bottom of the screen. Each strike on an enemy adds a harmonic chord to the song playing, so it feels almost like you’re writing the music yourself.

X is a light attack, Y is a heavy attack. B is to parry, RB is to dodge, LB is to hookshot to an enemy, and RT summons your selected companion. As the rhythm flows through you and the wide variety of robots attack, you’ll have to harness your inner rockstar to execute amazing looking combos and the best feeling melee attacks I can recall in years. Are there any other games where you can surf on a flying guitar and ram through an enemy? No? I thought not.

But upgrades! Of course there are upgrades. Silly. The gears you collect as currency can be traded back at base in between levels for health upgrades, special powers, new combos, new permanent items, and chipsets with incremental upgrades you can level up by using them. Here’s a tip - at HQ, there’s a wall you can check to get gears for in-game achievements that I didn’t find out about til after I beat it. 217,000 gears wasted! Regardless, I was able to make it through alright with what I scrounged up in the levels.

Hi Fi Rush boasts several boss battles that I would call all-timers. I would actually put the Korsica fight in my top 10 of all time. I cannot stress how fun they are. During the Mimosa fight, something odd happened - I was actually so happy, so giddy and excited, that I had to stop playing because I nearly threw up. Every boss fight not only takes what you’ve learned previously and puts it to a grueling but doable test - it also introduces a completely new way to understand and express rhythm. Each is visually stunning, an artistic spectacle, and also a mechanical marvel. The final boss fight was the hardest, and I could feel the deranged look in my eyes as I made my fifth attempt to defeat Kale Vandelay and save the world.


I’ve gone a long time without talking about the music, but hopefully it can speak for itself. It is fantastic, top to bottom. A few talented folks at Tango Gameworks were joined by The Glass Pyramids to create a powerful musical score, each track following a different rock subgenre. The boss fights and high moments are punctuated with excellently utilized licensed music from Nine Inch Nails, The Black Keys, the Prodigy, and more. It’s the exact kind of music I love to chill and vibe to, and if you’re like me you’ll be speechless at how good the soundtrack hits. Different songs let you try out different BPMs as well, so each level inherently feels a little different than the last, on top of the wildly different environments.

Hi Fi Rush’s heartfelt story is full of twists and turns that never try to deceive you, only to delight. Wrapped around the core themes of found family, which you know I’m a sucker for, the culmination of everything at the top of Vandelay tower had such a profound effect on me I actually dropped a few tears. There is a part of many stories which I’ve heard referred to as “the theme restated,” when the protagonist realizes and harnesses the power of the story’s theme in the context of their own character. The moment is powerful in Hi Fi Rush, more than it should be.

You can’t see rhythm. No one can. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Whether you can read music or not, whether you’ve mastered an instrument or can’t manage to play Hot Cross Buns, you are a rock star. You may not know it, you probably don’t believe it. But you’ll tightly navigate those progressions, finesse those pull-offs, and slice through those harmonies until you do believe it. Hi Fi Rush is going to make you believe you are a rockstar.

My brother and I used to mess around with Pikmin as kids, and I always loved the little guys, but I think I was not prepared for the level of challenge it brings when I was 8 years old - I'm not sure we got past the second world. Pikmin 3 is one of my favorite games of all time, and Pikmin 4 is not far behind, so I thought I'd head back to the roots of this franchise now that they've made their way to Switch.

Pikmin is held back only by the AI, which I am sure is the best we had available back in 2001. The fact that you can effectively control 100 soldiers on a map for an RTS game with a controller was already a miracle. Pikmin 1 is best described as a well-executed proof of concept - over time, this basic idea blossomed into a masterpiece in later titles. I was thoroughly addicted and stuck to the screen for the 8 hour adventure, looking for new strats and racing the clock to retrieve all my rocket parts. I'm so glad this game exists and existed when it did, and it holds up quite well on its own.

Pikmin 1 is brutal and tests your survival abilities in a way that has faded out of the series, and it's something I think I can live without. The racing clock is stressful, with the threat of permadeath looming over you, but I managed to escape with all 30 parts on day 28 due to careful planning and knowing when to replay the day once or twice (or eight times). I wish the Pikmin were smart enough not to constantly drown themselves, or know when to pick up items, or even know the shortest way back to camp, or understand they can't dive into pits of fire, but that's just life innit. It's interesting to see how Pikmin evolved in this game from mindless, expendable drones that you're expected to lose hundreds of to cherished friends you'll die protecting in Pikmin 4. I can't wait for Pikmin 2! Coming soon.

I think all of us have, at some point, had an idea for a game concept and searched high and low only to find it had not yet been done. Yes, I know — go make it yourself. I have actually started working on my first ever video game with a very similar concept to the one that drives Road 96, and I’m delighted to see that the folks at Digixart Games have made it work better than I ever imagined. This game has been a thrill, a validation, and an inspiration.

Road 96 is a pretty high-concept work, and that makes the elevator pitch much harder to conceive. Perhaps the best description is a narrative roguelike, where finishing a run progresses the overall story and players take control of a new character for each run. The story is somewhat procedurally generated, but in such a way that each of the chapters in each run can happen in any order and events will play out slightly differently depending on what your previous characters did on previous runs. No combat here — which way you choose to act branches the story into a road trip that feels completely unique to you (even though it isn't).

The world of Road 96 exists parallel to our own, where an authoritarian president who is an obvious analogue for Trump (they even have the red baseball caps) has ruled the nation of Petria (America) for decades under an iron fist. Our story begins in June 1996, as we quickly approach Election Day in September. Presidential terms have been extended to run for ten years in Petria, so the election of ’96 is the first chance people have to overturn President Tyrak’s reign by electing the liberal candidate, Florres.

Unfortunately, through a mass campaign of years of fake news, radicalization, retraction of voting rights, banning of immigrants, destruction of the lower classes and climate change-induced drought, Petria has reached its apocalypse point. Although it takes place in 1996, Road 96 is in a way a historical fiction piece on what America would look like after 10 years under Trump’s rule.

Tyrak has built his famous wall, but it’s not on the southern border to keep Mexico out — it’s on the northern border to keep Petrians from escaping to the fictional analogue of Canada. The alt-right extremist party in charge has created a veritable nightmare of a nation, and teenagers are fleeing the country en masse as the democratic rights of adults are slowly stripped away — and most people seem to welcome it.

If teenagers are caught trying to escape, however, they are sent to labor camps (The Pits) to work until they die. The scariest part is that most parents welcome the enslavement of their children; after all, if President Tyrak says it’s right, then it’s right. This world shows America in its final death throes, and you may begin to clock more similarities to our current country than differences.

Calling the story of Road 96 totally procedurally generated would be doing it a disservice — probably better to say the structure of the narrative is procedurally generated. Each run, you take first-person control of a nameless, faceless teen that is trying to flee the country. Each run, the overall narrative progresses in accordance to your actions, since they each take place chronologically after the previous one. Your character has a stamina bar as well; consuming food or drink or resting recharges stamina while different activities cost different amounts. You’ll also need to collect money to make purchases, pay for transport or information, or to access new areas with bribes. Riding the bus the next 400 miles may cost 2 stamina and $7, but hitchhiking will cost you 3 stamina even though it’s free.

There are seven main characters that recur in the story (if you count idiot crime brothers Stan & Mitch together), but each time you meet them on a different run you are playing as a different person. In addition, they change dynamically during the story based on what you have done during interactions in previous runs. Meeting each of the wonderfully written characters this way on each run is distinct and different, and calls into stark relief how different we become when around different kinds of people.

For instance, one of my teens didn’t make it, and was killed tragically at the wall in order to save another character, Zoe, in the climax of the run. My character’s death was co-opted by the right wing media in the next run as a terrorist attack by the Black Brigade (the resistance group) while he was actually gunned down by Tyrak’s border patrol. This opened up new avenues, new dialogue, and new relationships with characters I’d met previously. On one run, you’ll know Sonya as a radical alt-right talk show host; the next she’s a drunk party girl seeking validation; the next she’s a broken woman who lives on the edge of suicide due to her inability to save a young girl’s life ten years ago.

Each run is made up of seven chapters, each scripted dynamically so that it changes depending on what your previous characters have done. The way you progress between chapters generates the contents of the next chapter; if you choose to walk alongside the road, the end of the story will be very different than if you were kidnapped by Stan and Mitch again.

This style of presentation allows for no two players to ever experience the same story, but still showcases the excellent writing and character work within each chapter. Uncovering the secrets of how each of the characters are connected to each other, to the terrorist incident at the wall ten years ago that killed hundreds of innocent citizens, and to the upcoming Election Day is exhilarating. It feels scripted and directed, but the beauty is that it is not. It’s your story. No one else gets to live it. It should be noted that in reality, there actually is not much choice involved. Playing that game a second time is basically the exact same as the first time, just with scenarios in a different order. While still great, it's very much an illusion of choice situation.

The music is absolutely top notch in Road 96. The soundtrack is comprised of original music from many different artists, all with their distinct own vibes and styles. My personal favorites are The Road by Cocoon, Chase by Volkor X, and Sonya’s Mind by Xilix, but I assure you it’s bangers all the way down. The sound mixing is incredible; the way Road 96 controls and shifts the tone with its music is impeccable.

One of my very few issues with Road 96 is the mediocre quality of some of the voice actors. The actors playing John and Zoe in particular were obviously inexperienced, and it did take me out of the game a little bit. Some voice acting, like for Stan and Mitch or Sonya, was fantastic. Overall, it’s mostly good voice work with a few standout duds. My other small issue is that textures were constantly clipping, but that can likely be fixed with a patch in the future. Another note I need to make is that I played Road 96 on PC, at 1440p 60 FPS without a single frame rate drop. The Switch version, however, as of this writing, is pretty unplayable. If you don’t have a mid-range or better PC, I’d wait on a patch before getting the Switch version. It’s rough.

I’m not surprised by the 7s and 8s that Road 96 has been receiving — I can understand that this type of game for most people would result in a “hey, that’s pretty cool” reaction. For me, this is the manifestation of my dream game. A set of narrative building blocks that you can keep continually stacking in new ways, but always in a way no one else is doing. You may know my love of the Arkane Studios games like Dishonored and Prey ; my favorite type of video game is the kind that no two people will ever play the exact same way. Coupled with decision making and amazingly written characters similar to Life is Strange or the Telltale Games, and Bethesda-like tools to build a narrative that I (in some capacity) created and still brought tears to my eyes — this is the video game I always dreamed of, and Digixart finally made it. I know this game won’t hit you as hard as it did me, but I think you’ll still find it well worth your while to play.