Breath of the Wild. Just the name alone, the picture of the logo, sends a shiver down my spine. It almost moves me tears as I flash back through the 200 hours I spent in Hyrule. I can still hear it. The eerie still that came on top of a mountain as darkness fell over the distant horizon. The soft cry of the bunnelbees as I discovered their secret garden. The bleating of a mountain goat rushing to protect its child. The satisfying crack of a tree as I felled it for wood to build my house. The zip and sizzle of a bomb arrow flying towards a Stone Talus. The roar of the great dragons as they circled overhead, surveying their domain. These sounds mean more to me than I can put into words.

Breath of the Wild is a third-person action-adventure game where you traverse a post apocalyptic open world where nature has retaken the land and robots rule the earth… fine, I admit it. I have a type. Sue me. Everything that made Zelda what it was is thrown out the window for something better, something stronger, something freer. The physics engine of this game allows for a near infinite number of unpredictable results from interacting with the environment, and your imagination is the limit. Equipped with just 5 simple spells you are tossed off the Great Plateau with one quest in your log: Defeat Ganon. Wow, right to it. You can attempt to go defeat Ganon whenever you’d like, actually. But without the weapons, armor, stamina, health, and food you obtain while playing the game… well, I wish you good luck.

There’s not a lot else I can say about this game, being that it’s the one of the most circle-jerked games in the world, but the fact is everything you hear is true. This game is both a technical and artistic masterpiece. The Ghibli-style artwork, the solo piano score, the wonderful creature and architecture designs — it all comes together so effortlessly to create something you couldn’t have dreamed up yourself. It is as near perfection as a video game has so far been. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want. Nature is calling. Answer it.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the best game of the decade, and has a decent shot at the title for greatest of all time. For now, let’s look forward to the sequel. Nintendo has a huge responsibility on their hands following this one up.

This is one of those rare comedic games that doesn't ever fall flat. The entire game experience is probably about an hour and a half to two hours, and I suggest you play it with a group of friends in the room. It's fun having everybody argue about which door to take and what direction to go. The game is clever all the way from start to finish and I applaud the Developers for creating what is essentially one sustained a joke for 2 hours that doesn't ever feel old. In addition to being funny, it also provides a weird sort of existential dread that will have you questioning why you keep going back to work at your office in your cubicle everyday. Overall it's a great experience and I'd recommend it for whatever price you can find it at.

Celeste is one of the best video games ever made, full stop.

The game is separated into rooms, much like a dungeon crawler would be. Each screen is a “room” for the most part (although there are larger and longer rooms scattered around). When you get to a new room, there are one or two clearly marked exits to progress to the next room. Each room is filled with unique obstacles, and using a combination of jumping, air dashing, climbing, and wall jumping alongside simple puzzles you progress through the room to the other side. Seems simple. And it is, at first. The game does a great job of letting you learn how it works without telling you.


I’ve been holding out on this last mechanic, because it is the most important piece of the game – every single room is a save point. That’s right, every time you progress through a room the game is saved. Some of you are breathing a sigh of relief right now, while others are pursing their lips wondering where the challenge is. The challenge is that you are intended to die, hundreds, even thousands of times during the course of this game. And you will die. This game is brutally difficult. It has found a very special and difficult line to walk, balancing the constant trial-and-error deaths of Dark Souls with the forgiveness of something like a Kirby game. Your death count isn’t a negative though – the developers treat your death count as a badge of honor. If you died 21 times in a given room, all that means is that you came up with 21 different ways to tackle a problem – and that’s a badge you should wear proudly.
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The impossible task MMG has accomplished here is not making you feel bad when you die, but still making you feel like you genuinely accomplished something when you don’t. I found myself throwing up a fist pump when I finished a particularly hard room, and sometimes even doing a little victory lap in my room. The completion of these rooms requires a healthy mix of mechanical control and intelligence, without leaning too heavily on one. And if you’re not too stoked about “gitting gud” to have to enjoy this title, you’re covered as well. There’s an assist mode where you can specifically set which parts of the game you’d like to be easier, so you can still have a cohesive and fun experience, no stress required. Although I personally request you at least give an honest attempt at the regular game - I beat it, and I can’t get past world 1-4 of Super Mario Bros.

For all you collector nuts out there, don’t worry, you’re covered. There are dozens of secret strawberries hidden in each world, along with a B-Side tape. No matter how thorough you are with your first playthrough, you WILL NOT find them all. But if you’re dead set on hunting down these tasty trophies, they’ll provide you a challenge and add a lot of replayability. I will also throw out a note here, if you can play this on the Switch, do it. It’s worth whatever money you have to pay for it over a cheaper PC version. This game was made to be picked up and put down after 5 minutes. Get through a room, set it down, come back a few hours later and do another room. It’s perfect. Also a quick note about the music – it’s gorgeous. Lena Raine has outdone many a more seasoned composer with this one, and you’ll find yourself humming the main theme while washing the dishes after setting the game down.

So that’s the game. But what about the experience? Celeste is a story of a girl named Madeline trying to climb a mountain. As the story goes on, you’ll find yourself loving the characters (especially Theo) and cheering for Madeline to reach the top, to prove to herself that she can. She is shadowed on her journey by the dark part of herself, representing her anger, her depression, her fears, her failure. You’ll, of course find yourself relating to her struggles, and feel her victories and failures as your own. You’ll understand the dark part of her when it tries to lull her into giving up, because you’ve heard that voice in your own head a thousand times. But the moral of the story, tying in so perfectly with the game mechanics of dying over and over, is this: no matter how many times you fall down the mountain, you can always get back up and climb it again.
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I won’t say more on the story so as not to spoil it, but the ending is not what you imagine, and the penultimate level was maybe the most moving thing I’ve ever experienced in a game. This game helped me push through some rough events in my life, and I remember every day to keep climbing the mountain. It’s not about getting to the top, it’s about continuing to climb. But I will get to the top one day, and maybe when I do, we’ll all sit down and reminisce about the journey over a hot slice of strawberry pie.

Celeste taught me an invaluable lesson about never stopping the fight. No matter how far you fall, you can get back up and climb twice as high. No one is stopping you but yourself. Not to mention the gameplay is challenging while also very forgiving. This a must play, no matter what platform you’re on, though I recommend the Switch version. Celeste is the best indie game I’ve ever played, and my personal Game of the Year for 2018. Let’s see if Matt Makes Games can top themselves in the coming years – they’re certainly going to try, and that’s the important part.

Zero Time Dilemma, the final piece of the trilogy, is a good game. It is not great, but it is good. If you have played the first 2 games I don’t need to tell you that you need to finish the story out. The puzzles are better than the last game yet again, but this time the story and time jumping mechanics are a little too esoteric for their own good. And good news: this time, all the characters are hot anime teens (and one child).

The “gimmick” of this game is that it is played entirely out of chronological order. This time there are three set teams, C, D, and Q, and they last all the way to the end of the game. Each team can only navigate the underground bunker by relying on the other teams to take certain actions in isolated situations, so again there’s a lot of guesswork on what others will do. You will play “scenes” from the game’s many timelines seemingly at random, slowly learning more about the narrative. Eventually it will click, but the journey to get there is barely worth it. Some closure is needed at the end of this trilogy tho, and you’ll get enough to be satisfied.

You’ve probably heard people recommending this game to you but are kind of unclear on why you should play it. It’s hard to sell without spoiling it, but there are essentially 5 “endings.” Endings A and B are 10–15 hours each depending on how many side quests you want to do (do them all), Endings C and D are about 3 hours each, and ending E is about 30 minutes long. Don’t let that dissuade you — you’ll get the same story from totally new angles and find out a ton of new information, each piece of data more sobering than the last.

Take control of androids 2B (aka 2Booty4Me) and 9S (aka my real, sweet, human son) and try to keep the last dregs of humanity from going extinct against an endlessly growing sentient AI. Hundreds of years after the AI rose up, humans fled to space, forsaking their home back on earth as robots infested it. This game will slowly suck the life out of you, driving you into one existential crisis after another, questioning what was ever real and if anything ever mattered — and then put you back together at the end with the promise that you are not alone. You are never alone. There is always someone out there willing to help. I hate to do this, but for the sake of my mental health I need you to play this game.

You may remember that when the first leaks appeared for this game about a month before E3 2017, the internet went berserk. All of the Nintendo subreddits were incredulous with rage - “How could they poison the glorious world of my sacred son Mario with these disgusting discount minions?” They typed angrily, adjusting their fedoras and wiping Cheeto dust off their neckbeards. Oh, how they raged. This is why leaks are bad. People decide what something is before they know and make a decision about it with no basis in fact.


When Ubisoft’s conference came around, everyone was braced for the worst - a Raving Rabbids game where Mario maybe jumps on some goombas and farts on Luigi, or something. What we were shown was incredible. A turn-based tactical strategy RPG? Starring Mario??? This hadn’t been seen since the last time Nintendo rented out Mario to another studio (Square Enix in 1996 for Super Mario RPG) 20 years ago. And Shigeru Miyamoto is here? Mario’s father?? Fans ran out of reasons to be angry quickly as the presentation continued. Tactical overhead strategy cameras, skill trees, weapon upgrades, status effects, party composition strategy, 16 completely different weapon types - no one had expected any of this. And people started to get hyped. And they were not disappointed.

The raving Rabbids have been known as the “Minions of video games” and to some extent, yeah, that’s true. But they have a certain charm to them in that they haven’t become the face of excessive, all-consuming capitalism like their yellow, one-eyed counterparts. Yeah, they’re wacky and dumb. But that’s why they slide so easily into the Mushroom Kingdom and feel like they were always a part of it. Mario games are about a plumber and his cowardly brother that go on adventures crushing mushrooms and turtles, sometimes riding a dinosaur, in pursuit of a princess who’s been kidnapped by the turtle king for the Nth time. They’re already wacky and dumb, and that is part of what makes them great.

So, the game. As stated above, this an overhead camera tactical strategy RPG… it’s XCOM. It’s XCOM, but this time, Mario and is friends are here. And the Rabbids too? First of all, the story is exactly wacky enough that it is self-aware, but not so far that it becomes a parody of itself. A big Nintendo geek scientist (I related closely to her) creates a machine that combines items into one. The Rabbids predictably get up to their shenanigans and combine themselves with all of her Nintendo merch, creating a Rabbid-infested Mushroom Kingdom. You’ll take control of Mario, Rabbid Peach, and Rabbid Luigi at the start of the game, looking for your friends and a way to rescue the Rabbid with the combining power from the villain, Boswer Jr. It’s cute, it’s funny, it’s non intrusive, and it doesn’t involve a lot of farting on Luigi. A little, but not a lot.


There’s two modes: exploration and combat. Exploration mode is a simple jaunt through the kingdom, with funny remarks on the Rabbid monuments and puzzles ranging anywhere from “my hamster could solve this” to “I can’t believe I’m googling the solution to a puzzle in Mario Rabbids.” Collect coins and do some minigames for extra skill points. Simple stuff, beautiful environment, and wonderful musical arrangements by Grant Kirkope. He does a great job on the base game, but his work for the Donkey Kong DLC is even better.


Combat mode is of course the meat of the game. The turn based strategy combat pits you against a wide variety of enemies with different abilities and weaknesses, and a healthy amount of unique bosses across the 4 worlds. You pick a party of 3 characters from the ones you’ve unlocked, upgrade their individual skill trees, upgrade their weapons if you’ve got the cash, and then head into battle. Each turn consists of movement, an attack, and a special attack.These are fairly standard trappings for this sort of game.The completely undersold revolutionary mechanic in this game is called the Super Jump. Sheer brilliance.

Your characters, as well as the enemies, have the ability to run to a teammate, jump on their heads, and sail through the air to another spot on the map. This means you can effectively double the mobility of your entire team if you are smart about where you position them. Some characters can even be tossed onto enemies’ heads and perform a stomp attack (you guessed it, that’s Mario’s thing). There are ground pounds and other aerial attacks that can only be performed this way. Super jumping off a teammate also heals them of status effects! Super jumps are a very important part of the game and if you haven’t used one for a turn, you probably could be doing better.

Each of the 8 available characters has a totally different primary and secondary weapon. For reference, that’s Mario, Luigi, Peach, Yoshi, Rabbid Mario, Rabbid Luigi, Rabbid Peach, and Rabbid Yoshi. One of my two negatives about the game is that Rabbid Yoshi is not available to unlock until ¾ of the way through the game, and Yoshi is not unlockable until shortly before the final boss. Switching between just Mario, Luigi, Rabbid Luigi, and Rabbid Peach for the first half of the game still gives you surprising versatility though. Luigi is a Sniper, Rabbid Peach is a Healer, Rabbid Luigi is basically a rogue assassin… it sounds insane when it’s put like that, but it is how the game is built.

Now for my only other gripe with this game - you have 3 spots in your party. One of them is always Mario. That’s right, Mario is always on your team. In addition, one of your party members must be a Rabbid at all times. The second thing doesn’t anger me, because this game is called Mario Rabbids. But goddamn, Mario. He’s possibly the weakest character of the bunch, and while sometimes his unique abilities are useful, you’ll mostly be thinking “Why can’t I just use Luigi instead?” This game could have been a perfect 10 if this was fixed. The main reason I gripe about this is that you only get healed every 2 fights, and you HAVE to use Mario for both of them. Meaning that if Mario is gravely injured in the first battle, the second battle becomes “Protect Mario.” And that’s … not as fun. It kills it a little for me. There was actually a time in World 4 where Mario was so hurt going into a second battle that I had to restart the first battle in the set so I could have a chance at beating the second one, which is insane. But I digress.

So how hard is this game? Um, it can get pretty damn hard. There’s luckily an “easy mode” you can activate on a per-battle basis, which I have to admit I used 4 times over the course of the game when I got stuck. I’m not an avid player of these kinds of game, and maybe someone who plays a lot of XCOM found it easy. For me, this was a challenge. I had to restart probably a dozen different battles because I was outsmarted by the AI. Be patient and don’t be afraid to use easy mode if needed.


So the DLC adds a few super hard stages, which I have not yet completed, a ton of co-op stages I haven’t played yet, and an entirely new expansion almost half the size of the base game, Donkey Kong Adventure. I am roughly halfway through DK Adventure as of writing this, and I’ll just say that it is, for better or worse, more of the same. You’ll find all the same charm and wit of the base game, just based in the world of Donkey Kong country instead. New enemies, new heroes, new weapon classes, new game modes - it’s well worth the price of admission. If you get this game, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not playing the DK expansion. If you didn’t like the base game, you won’t like this. I haven’t played the co-op modes because they are local co op only, and my local friends are not really the gaming types. The co op challenges will last you about 30 hours to do all of them, so there’s plenty there as well. So the verdict.

With the exceptions of the two negatives I mentioned earlier (character unlocks being spaced too far apart and having to use Mario all the time), this game is perfect. The world is charming, the jokes are funny, and it’s not too easy or handholdey. Even if you’re not a fan of strategy games or the Rabbids, this is one not to miss. Make sure to get the Gold Edition - the DLC is well worth it.

At the time of Final Fantasy XV’s release in 2017, it was one of my great gaming shames to have never played a Final Fantasy game. Turn-based RPGs and MMOs had never been my thing, but seeing that XV was a live combat, open world, single player experience — well I couldn’t turn that down. I eagerly awaited the PC release and grabbed it on day one, ready to see what all the fuss was about.

Final Fantasy XV puts the player in a world actually unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The cyberpunk skyscraper city of Insomnia is surrounded by miles of desert plains with underground cave networks. The canal city of Altissa sits on the edge of a rushing waterfall, overlooking the river with gleaming gold and silver towers. The Caribbean downtown of Lestallum provides multicultural foods, markets and attractions on the edge of the water. Then there sits on a foggy hilltop just minutes away the skeletal tower of Caem, a strange beacon that watches over the floating Disc of Cauthess, a rotating monolith powered by spirit energy in the valley. How are all these places in the same game, you ask? Magic!

While much of the game is beautiful and vividly colored, much of the game is also just dry, cracked desert. Nothing to find by exploring but more dirt and rocks. The locations in Final Fantasy XV themselves are magnificent, but miles of empty space exist simply to pad out an unneeded open world. Music is wonderful though!

The monsters that inhabit these places are spectacular. You will see old creatures from the Final Fantasy franchise rise anew in XV as well as brand new creatures. And the scale of the battles is, in a word, epic. Fighting a single Naga down by the river or a herd of Tonberrys with kitchen knives is exciting in its own right. Many of the creatures are herbivores and won’t attack unless provoked, so there are times you’ll be able to sit back in the car, listen to some Final Fantasy VII music and just observe the wildlife.

Final Fantasy XV is the first single-player entry in the series to feature live combat. As such, Square Enix was tasked with finding a way to incorporate the wide variety of conventional weapons, spells and upgrades from past titles into streamlined action. They gave it a very honest shot, but didn’t quite make it. I suppose the worst thing I would say about XV is that the combat feels stagnant. Fighting different enemy types doesn’t feel particularly different, and switching between weapon types as Noctis (the main character) doesn’t seem to alter combat in any significant way. You can utilize elemental spells that hail from past Final Fantasy titles, although they operate in a very different way to fit into live combat. Items and potions work in the expected way, asking players to navigate menus sometimes during combat. It would all come dangerously close to button mashing if not for the key new element, warping.

The open world and smaller arenas are loaded with warp points, sometimes hundreds of feet in the air. Noctis’s special ability allows him to warp across the field between warp points and enemies, so traversal, momentum and altitude become crucial parts of pulling off combos with spells, guns and swords. I genuinely enjoyed warping around the field at lightning speeds, and the high-octane movement made the rest of the monotonous combat tolerable. While the player controls Noctis, they can use the D-pad to issue special attack commands to the rest of the party (Ignis, Prompto and Gladio) that build up metered power over time. Noctis predictably also has an ultimate attack, summoning the weapons of past kings to protect him. Oh yeah, Noctis is the King. A great segue into the story.

At the start of the game, Noctis becomes the King of Lucis. He then sets out with his three best friends on a road trip to reach his betrothed, Lunafreya, for the royal wedding. Luna is an interesting, witty character with whom I enjoyed my time, but Square Enix, for lack of a better phrase, does her dirty. The other characters like Cindy, Aranea and Ardyn were kind of a mess of ideas, but the ambition of telling a story on this scale outweighs the dumb twists and turns the writers seemed to think were clever. The story relies a good bit on the Kingdom Hearts strategy of throwing plot spaghetti at the wall until it sticks and then heaping on some out-of-character meatballs with what’s-going-on-right-now sauce. The plot of Final Fantasy XV is an indisputable train wreck, especially in the second half, but the relationship that Noctis, Prompto, Gladio and Ignis form is the glue that holds the entire project together.

I do not say this lightly; after spending 65 hours with my leather-clad boy band, I honestly feel that the relationship between these four fictional characters is one of the strongest I’ve ever seen in media, across movies and books as well. The power of true love that platonic friends have for each other is something that Hollywood shies away from, but putting it front and center in Final Fantasy XV saved the entire project.

Think for a moment — you love your close friends, and they love you. That love is as true and real as what you have with your family or significant other. Noctis, Prompto, Ignis and Gladio do love each other, and through all their ups and downs, their fights and joy rides, their nights playing video games together on the beach and their battles with the forces of evil, Final Fantasy XV never ever loses sight of that. Although each of these four boys lose their way at some point in the story, they always find each other again. No matter how stupid the second half of the story is, how confusing the decisions of the writers become, you will stick around for these kids.

The world itself is smattered with main quests, side quests, fortresses full of mechs, and weird dungeons that don’t quite feel like dungeons. You can find legendary items in these dungeons, so it’s worth it to stock up on elixirs and brave it out, but there was something missing I can’t quite put my finger on. Side quests involve a lot of the traditional open world “go here, kill this, come back” with some fun twists, and of course the best officially sponsored Cup Noodles (TM) quest ever! About halfway through the game, after the “big thing,” the open world closes off. The next 15 hours or so are spent in one dungeon after another (one is a prison, one is a forest, etc so it doesn’t get too samey) but you can time travel back to a time when the open world was okay to explore whenever you like. It’s confusing, but it really just leads me to think the game should have been more linear with smaller open areas to travel around.

Seven DLC expansions were originally planned for XV, but due to restructuring at Square Enix only four of them were produced before the game was abandoned. Episode Gladio, Episode Ignis, Episode Prompto and Episode Arydn were moderately well received but ultimately did little to add to the story or change opinions on the base game. The cancelled Episode Noctis, Episode Lunafreya and Episode Aranea were condemned to a novelization that received extremely poor reviews. It’s a shame, because Episode Lunafreya in particular could have solved a huge problem I have with the plot of this game.

Final Fantasy XV wanted to be a lot of things to a lot of people all at once, and at that I think it failed. What it succeeded at is becoming a heartwarming story of sticking together against unbeatable odds, taking a road trip with your bros, and finding something special in your own failure. This mess of ideas tried earnestly to be one of the all-time greats. The awe-inspiring monsters, the beautiful cities and the land features of Lucis are really going to take your breath away. While convoluted in both game design and story writing, Final Fantasy is overflowing with heart, and I think that’s enough to carry it. It has a ton of problems, but I never stopped being impressed with how epic it all felt, right up until the heartbreaking final scene. In the most platonic way possible, Noctis, Ignis, Prompto and Gladio tell a love story for the ages, and I believe it’s well worth experiencing it with them.

The Far Cry franchise has brought us many games of varying quality over the years. While Far Cry 4 is not as popular as Far Cry 3, as an American-born Indian the concept of an actual Indian being the established protagonist of a game blew me away. To my knowledge there is not a single other AAA game that features a protagonist from the Indian subcontinent, which, if you’re not Indian yourself, you may not have noticed. 1 billion people! I learned a lot about my heritage and my family’s ancestral home, even presenting Rakshasa (a take on the Hindu God of war, Kali) as a boss battle later on. I’ll admit my excitement let me overlook a few of the game’s problems and focus on what I loved about it. The removal of those rose-colored glasses for Far Cry 5 resulted in a somewhat less satisfying feeling upon finishing the game.

Far Cry 5 drops you in to one of the most exciting game openings in years. I will be avoiding spoilers in this review, but even if you’re not intending to play this game, watch the opening scene. It’s about 20 minutes long but well worth it. In addition, check out Amazon’s live-action short film prologue to the game, it is one of the best live action adaptations of a video game ever.

As previously stated, I am an American. I have some experience with places like Hope County in real life (I lived in a small town in rural Kentucky for a year) so I’ll speak to the authenticity of the settings. Ubisoft obviously put in the work to get them exactly right. I believe that Hope County is a real place. Everything is spaced out the right way, the roads are in the right condition, there are run down sheds full of tools all along the water — it is perfectly like real life. Ubisoft sent scouts to Montana when they worked on this to get a feel for the local flavor and personality of the area, and their hard work paid off. The music even has that local flair you’ll find deep in the Mountain States, taught guitars, whining violins and soft harmonicas overlapping into something that feels like the homeland. I’d give some of the Peggie songs a listen. Haunting as they are, they are definitely bops.

The player begins with a bare-bones character creator to make our protagonist, an unnamed Rookie from the Sheriff’s department of Hope County. You, the Sheriff, and the Deputy accompany a US Marshall who has come to take Father (the antagonist) into federal custody; the church (see: cult) he runs is now known to be responsible for the disappearance of a group of film students who were attempting to document cult activities. You arrive at the compound of the Project at Eden’s Gate, which is a hell of a name for a cult, and your attempt to peacefully arrest Father goes awry. You’re stranded in the deep country of Montana, 50 miles from the nearest town, and must defeat Father, destroy the cult, and rescue the Sheriff before he catches up to you. Now I know what you’re thinking: why don’t the police, or national guard, or FBI, or US Military show up? Ubisoft was asked that same question:

“You’re stranded behind enemy lines in cult-occupied Hope County, Montana, and nobody’s coming to help you. Eden’s Gate, a veritable army of fanatics, has finally made its move and locked down the area, leaving you and every Hope County resident in cult territory. Now you’re standing alone against deadly odds in Big Sky Country, with no bars on your phone and only one way to stop the madness: take down Joseph Seed, the self-styled prophet of Eden’s Gate, and free Hope County from his campaign to save souls by force. And if you’re going to survive long enough to do that, you’re going to need to make some friends.”

Sort of a non-answer, but in any case cult has shut down the cell towers and internet and locked down the roads leading out of the county. For those that aren’t American, Far Cry 5 just has an unfeasible premise. If a U.S. Marshall went missing on a potentially dangerous arrest in Montana, the idea that the U.S. army wouldn’t break into cult territory and blow them away within 24 hours is laughable. And then there’s Nick, a companion who has a plane and could easily fly to a city to get help from the FBI even if he couldn’t get a signal from his phone or radio. Surely people in neighboring counties noticed the armed, robed men blocking off every road with an artillery truck? It’s Far Cry. Don’t think about it too hard or you’ll hurt your head.

Far Cry is famous for having a charismatic villain be the star of the show rather than the protagonist, and that trend certainly continues in Far Cry 5. Father, formerly known as Joseph Seed, is so maniacally faithful in his own power that the player will begin to wonder if he actually is an avatar for God. You’ll be gunning down a seemingly endless supply of Peggies (cultists) to reach him and his three siblings, John, Jacob and Faith before they take over the entire county. Dealing with the three of them before reaching father just isn’t very fun, unfortunately, and out of the three only Faith seems to have any real personality.

The gunplay is excellent, better than it’s ever been. Each weapons feels great to hold, but personally I play all Far Cry games exclusively with a bow and arrow. This series, despite the focus on gigantic guns, has the best-feeling bow and arrow physics in all of gaming, even better than Horizon Zero Dawn. The wide selection of weapons available from the start is a blessing, and the vehicles feel better than ever to drive. Despite all that, there’s something stale about the scenery, despite how accurate it is. One might argue that the recreation of middle America is so accurate it has looped back around to being boring to explore.

The characters, both heroes and villains, range from memorable to human potatoes. The companions are mostly flat characters with one defining trait each, with the exception of Nick, just by way of him and his family having a major quest centered around them. Jess is a lone wolf who’s a tracker/scout/ranger. Grace is a cold, unfeeling sniper hardened by war. Sharky likes to explode things. It’s mostly that all the way though.

The animal companions make for better allies, though; Cheeseburger the bear is so named because he loves cheeseburgers, despite them being quite bad for bears. Something humans have in common with bears, I suppose. Peaches is a sassy cougar that jumps on enemies and rips their necks out. Boomer, who is a good boy, is your faithful canine companion that jumps on enemies and steals their guns. I mostly stuck with a combo of Boomer and Jess unless I needed a companion’s specific talents.

Far Cry 5 is what it says on the tin. At a time when it was desperately needed, this would have been a great place to make a statement about alt-right shit heads, and Ubisoft just didn’t. There’s nothing groundbreaking going on here — this game takes a lot of features of the previous games and perfects/streamlines them but offers very little that’s new. You will get to travel around a beautifully rendered open world recreation of rural Montana, blow shit up, use cool guns, handle probably the best feeling in-game bow and arrow ever, and hunt some crazy animals with your friend Cheeseburger, the diabetic bear. Joseph Seed holds the plot together single-handedly with sheer charisma. If you enjoyed the others, get this one. If you didn’t, don’t.

It bears outlining my experience with the Pokemon franchise before discussing my thoughts on Sword and Shield. Pokemon Blue was the first video game I ever played at the age of four. My Blastoise, who I had cleverly named “Blue,” was my best friend, and we fought long and hard to make it through to the Elite Four and become champions. Since then, Pokemon has been a very central part of my life. I played every game in the series as it came out with the exception of Gen IV and V because at that time I was in high school and was way too cool for video games.

Of course in college being a nerd became cool again, and I distinctly remember the launch of XY when I was a junior. My roommate and I went to Gamestop on launch day squealing like actual children and each bought a 2DS and a copy each of X and Y. I was so unbelievably happy to be back. Pokemon has always been a place I felt I belonged. It’s a place of friendship, collecting fun and cool monsters, learning the power of teamwork, and becoming the best like no one ever was. My brother and I pretty much only ever played with Pokemon toys as kids. I had tons of plushes, played every spin off game, watched every episode of the show dozens if not hundreds of times. What I’m trying to say is that there is no media franchise more important to me than Pokemon.

Pokemon Sword and Shield is a Pokemon game. That may seem like a non-statement, but it’s perhaps the best summary I can muster. Pokemon is something that, because of its status as biggest franchise in the world as well as the biggest commonality between all of our childhoods, is impossible to review unbiased. If you reviewed Sword and Shield without having any prior experience with the series, I likely wouldn’t care about your review. Not because it’s invalid, but because we’d be seeing the game through two incomparable lenses. I am going to try and review this game as well as I can, but I want to confess up front it will be biased. As I said, I love Pokemon. It’s a huge part of my life. The main problem with trying to review this game is that no matter how bad it was, it was always going to be fun. Pokemon will never not be fun, no matter how bad it is. Such is a truth of the universe, and we’d all be happier if we’d just lay back and accept it.

The biggest negative of this game is not, in fact, the missing National Dex; Perhaps this is a bold statement, but Pokemon Sword and Shield would have been no better if it had featured all 900-something monsters. No, it is the frankly unacceptable visual and technical quality of the game, particularly the wild area. Already, here we are, exhibiting my previous point. This game’s quality is unacceptable, yet here I am accepting it because it is Pokemon.

The animations of Pokemon in the Wild Area (the open world online portion of the map) vary from unbelievable attention to detail to something that would have looked out of date in 2009. One minute you notice that Zigzagoon runs in zig zags like its name suggests and chuckle at it; the next minute you notice that Gyarados turns at sharp 90 degree angles as it swims like it’s a Disney World animatronic. The Wingull are floating on the breeze without flapping their wings like they’re supposed to, but, oh, that Hawlucha is running like a human man instead of flying. Pokemon based on prey animals run when they see you, those based on predator animals chase you when they see you to attack, and those that fit into neither category get confused and pause when seeing you. But once you move ten feet away from any Pokemon it vanishes in a puff of almost comical smoke.

The infamous image of the “N64 Tree” from the trailers is not a nitpick or out-of-context image. Every tree in the Wild Area looks like it’s straight out of Halo 2. The grass is rendered so badly I felt embarrassed for GameFreak while looking at it. The rocks, the dirt, rain. It all would have looked pretty bad in 2009. In 2019 it is, again, unacceptable. To use common parlance, this game looks like hot garbage. This is the biggest franchise in the world. The main series games should not look like hot garbage.

In the overworld, Pokemon are scaled appropriately to their recorded sizes. Step into a battle, however, and suddenly Caterpie is half the size of Wailord. Pokemon Colosseum, a game from 2002, had properly scaled Pokemon in battles. The graphical capabilities of the Switch are not the issue. Alongside Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8, Dragon Quest 11, Mario Odyssey, and Luigi’s Mansion 3… how could this game even be on the same system as those technical masterpieces? I can think of no explanation besides that the Galar Region’s map was made for 3DS and just blown up to 1080p as an afterthought.

The National Dex missing did not have the negative impact I had anticipated. I didn’t even notice, to be honest. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the game might be better for it. The smaller roster did allow for some forms of balance. I am upset my old team isn’t coming forward with me from Sun and Moon, but I left them on the Poke Pelago. They’ll be hanging out, eating beans, digging through the mines, and chilling in hot tubs for the rest of time. There are worse fates for the creatures I care about so deeply.

The game is not as long as previous versions, although that’s mostly due to the fact that it is the easiest game in the series — and that’s a pretty low bar. In fact, the only way I could create a challenge is to specifically avoid grinding at all. Fighting every trainer I saw, ignoring the wild area until the post game and never fighting wild Pokemon set me consistently at the perfect level to make each gym challenging and barely beatable. I slid through every gym on my last Pokemon with this method and felt that rush you only get when you beat that goon’s last dude with your guy in red health. Even for a children’s game, Pokemon Sword and Shield are much too easy. The permanent experience share unbalances the entire game and makes you much too powerful if you play the way you’ve played the other games. If you thought XY or Sun and Moon were too easy, those two are like hard mode compared to this.

The online experience has not improved much. Nintendo’s online functionalities continue to be lacking, and with the convoluted Y-Com and Link trade system set up here it’s hard to understand what your $20 a year is going to, however cheap it is. With the Global Trading System relocated to the smartphone app Pokemon Home, the online capabilities of Sword and Shield are actually a downgrade from the previous generation. But hey, Max Raid Battles are awesome.

The story is incredibly badly written. Not that I expect a lot from Pokemon stories, but this one was so purposeless and meandering that I started just skipping the cutscenes towards the end (at least they let you do that now). The characters are a mixed bag. Professor Ivy is so forgettable that I had to look up her name to write this review. I liked Sonia, Professor Ivy’s assistant, quite a lot. In anime we don’t often get female characters that are allowed to be both girly and very intelligent. Hop, your rival, is Hau from Sun and Moon but dumber and worse at Pokemon. Much more annoying, too. The champion, Leon, is his asshole older brother modeled after a professional English footballer. As much as he helps you out with a recommendation letter, he definitely has the presence of a hotshot professional athlete. Beating him is pretty satisfying, and he actually puts up a pretty good fight when you do take him on. The gym leaders are fairly interesting characters, and I remember like half of their names, which is better than usual. I definitely remember Nessa. And who could forget Ball Guy? Marnie, your other rival, is your cute teen goth girlfriend with a toxic fan club. Which is a good coaster into my next point.

Team Yell has set a new low for evil teams, and I say that with Team Galactic on the table. The follow-up for the brilliant Team Skull, is … a teenage girl’s fan club. They only reason they battle you is to try and deter you from the Pokemon League challenge so Marnie has a better shot at winning. They corner you, fight you, lose, get sad, and disappear. All without Marnie being aware of it. This is a 14-year old girl with a fan base of dozens of adult men and women, with nothing better to do than to humiliate themselves by losing Pokemon battles to a 14-year old kid over and over again. It is offensively dumb. They are weird, creepy, annoying, and we’d have been better off with no villains at all in Sword and Shield.

On to a few positive notes. After a year of jamming it out, I feel confident saying that this game has the best music in series history. All of the tracks, from the sleepy piano of the Slumbering Weald, to Toby Fox’s (Undertale) battle theme, to the rave party gym leader theme, are good as hell. It might be too good; the wild area theme evokes a sense of exploration and adventure that the wild area doesn’t manage to fulfill. There’s a wide variety of styles too, ranging all the way from ethereal folk songs to industrial metal. The punk aspects feel like a tribute to the UK’s stance as the birthplace of the genre, and it’s the small things that help to remind me a lot of people working on this game did care.

Gym battles are a massive upgrade, maybe my favorite new thing about this game. Instead of a small room with some lines drawn on the ground, gym battles are now a nationally televised spectator sport. You step into a full sized stadium packed with people, screaming and cheering. The EDM music pumps up. And the way that it builds, when the gym leader finally tosses out their last Pokemon and hits that Dynamax button, you can’t help but get excited.

I did not hate Dynamaxing as much as I wanted to. I was never a fan of mega evolutions because they were used in totally the wrong way. Salamence and Charizard and Gengar did not need megas. You know who did? Xatu, Octillery, Venomoth, Castform. Pokemon that are otherwise useless. Z-moves were fine by me, I liked that they evened things out even if I never used them. One thing they don’t tell you in the trailers — Dynamax can only be used against gym leaders and in online raids. That’s it. So 95% of the game, it basically doesn’t exist. If you’re offended by Dynamax, take a step back and try to figure out why you’re actually angry about this game. There are a lot of valid criticisms, as I’ve outlined here, but this mechanic that only pops up a dozen times in 40 hours isn’t the one to lean on. Some Pokemon get special Gigantamax forms, but I believe only ~30 so far. More are to come!

The wild area is nice — there was a lot of potential in this idea and they build on it well for the DLCs. If you connect to the internet while in the Wild Area, you’ll see avatars of hundreds of other players running around, creating a momentary illusion that you’re in the Pokemon MMO we’ve dreamed about since childhood. That illusion is shattered the moment you try to talk to anyone; the only thing that results from an interaction is a stock catchphrase and a random food item.

It may have taken 20 years to get here, but I can’t emphasize how much Pokemon Sword and Shield’s Wild Area is improved by the ability to control the camrea. The open world aesthetic, featuring Pokemon wandering around in the overworld feels amazing when it doesn’t look like Halo 2. I love seeing a herd of Koffings free floating while a Stonjourner watches in silence, plotting. A stoic-looking Beartic mother watches over its Cubchoos as they hunt for fish in the frozen lake. The freedom feels nice and for a few hours you can pretend they really did do a Pokemon: Breath of the Wild.

I love most of the new Pokemon. Some of the top tier designs are Toxtricity, Grapploct, Cursola, Stonjourner, Centiskorch, and Galarian Weezing. However, the starters were probably the worst Pokemon of the bunch. I love Sobble, and ended up picking it to continue my tradition of water starters over the last 20 years. The final evolutions are disappointing at best. Intelleon looks way too much like a person and approaches the uncanny valley; its animations are also laughably bad. Cinderace, Scorbunny’s final evolution, is actively bad. Rillaboom is probably the best starter final evolution and it’s still pretty bad. Some designs, like Mr. Rime, are downright upsetting. But all in all, it’s not a bad haul. Probably the best batch since Ruby and Sapphire.

EV and IV training is a lot easier now, as is breeding. You can just check IVs in your PC now and alter EVs either the standard way or with berries. You can also have like Pokemon teach egg moves to each other and use mints to alter a Pokemon’s nature. All in all, competitive has never been easier. Get into it!

I love the art style and designs of the new towns. Hammerlocke City has an awesome medieval aesthetic, Motosoke is cool and steampunk, and the ice town Circester is gorgeous. While the cities aren’t much bigger than they have been in the past, there’s a lot of background inaccessible area that makes it seem like thousands of people could actually be living there. It’s not much, but it’s something. And it’s worth noting that the visuals inside the towns look like a nice 2016 game rather than a 2006 game. Nothing impressive, but an upgrade for Pokemon for sure.

Out in the open world, there are Max Raid Dens where super powerful Dynamax Pokemon live. Group up with your friends (if you can figure out the convoluted online system) and co-op against a giant Gyarados, or whatever. I have done ~40 raid battles, all but a few online with at least one friend. Honestly, this rocks. In particular, the 10 or so battles I did a full team of four on voice comms were some of the most fun I’ve had all year. Trying to coordinate who gets to Dynamax with how many hits the shield has left is exciting, and everyone will end up scrambling to try and be the one in charge. Because of the shield mechanic in which the boss builds up shields every few turns, coordination is pretty much required for five star raids. At the end of the battle you get a chance to catch it, and out of the 40 raids I did only 2 Pokemon escaped.

In the first DLC, the Isle of Armor, you’ll travel to a nearby temperate island that I believe is based off the Isle of Mann. You’ll join a dojo, get a new incompetent and annoying rival, and run across the island doing quests for an eccentric martial arts master named Mustard. It was tedious and disappointing. The quests were honestly pretty tedious here, but the Isle of Armor offers a lot in the way of the whole island being a Wild Area. Full control of the camera and Pokemon walking around the overworld is worth the price of admission. It does at least provide some more content for endgame, but getting Urshifu at the end kind of feels like little reward for the tedium of battling a less-than-exciting new rival and chasing Slowpokes around the island. After you get Kubfu, however, also note that your lead Pokemon will walk around the overworld with you, so do that as quickly as possible. If you’re a fan of collectibles they’ve added hidden Digletts that act like Koroks seeds in Breath of the Wild.

I enjoyed the second DLC, The Crown Tundra, substantially more than the Isle of Armor. Although I disliked working with Peony, I kind of enjoyed Calyrex’s quest for the carrot and such, plus chasing the legendary birds around different areas was hilarious and way more rewarding than chasing Slowpokes. It was a lot of tedious backtracking but it kind of paid off with the Regi puzzles and discovering new areas. I once again lament how awful the environments look; they wouldn’t be out of place in Halo 2. Still, I am very happy that my Pokemon got to walk around the overworld with me again and that the whole Crown Tundra was wild area.

Overall, if you just want something else to do with your Pokemon, might as well grab the expansion pass. I recommend if it’s on sale — not really worth $30. It does help fill out the game, but the problems I had with the base game persist into the DLC.

Despite being unimpressive, rushed, or downright disrespectful to the brand at times, Pokemon Sword and Shield was probably the most fun I had with a game all year. The gym battles, Pokemon League system, and Raid Battles were all excellently done. The Wild Area, while looking like a PS2 game, had a lot of great ideas that could have been executed well with a few more months in the oven. The visuals an animations of this game are downright unacceptable in a 2019 game, let alone the biggest franchise in the world. But you won’t care about any of that when you get chased by Grapploct, the big blue wrestling octopus, into a lake as it tries to actually punch you. Because it is fun. This is a bad game. But after 40 hours traipsing through the Galar region, you’ll realize you don’t really care how good it is — it’s Pokemon. And that’s enough.

A 16-year old Japanese schoolboy sees a woman being assaulted on the street one night. He intervenes and defends her from the assailant, but when the police arrive it’s the young man who’s thrown in jail. The attacker in the alley was a very powerful, very important man, and his friends in the police department have kicked this boy hard to make sure he stays down. Injustice. For a 16 year-old to experience injustice of this magnitude is sobering, perhaps even disgusting. Is there such a thing as justice in a world where the rich eat the poor and spit them back out, where the strong tread on the weak, where the sadistic take from the noble?

And there it is, right from the start. There is no justice in the world unless we make it. The young man is sent to Tokyo to live with a family friend and begins attending a new school. On the very first day, you and a classmate wander into an alternate shadow world overlaid on our own called the Metaverse, and find yourselves in a medieval castle full of demons and ruled by a particularly shitty teacher at the school. Accompanied by a talking cat with a sword, you’ll sneak, battle, and style your way through this massive dungeon to figure out what the hell is going on. I’ll leave it at that for the plot. No spoilers!

Persona 5 is the only game ever made that lets players truly live out the super-hero fantasy. You’re thinking of Arkham, Spider-Man, Infamous — these games allow the fantasy of being a super-hero, yes, but they end there. In Persona 5, the hero work isn’t even half the fun.

By day you’ll attend school, do homework, hang out with friends, do the laundry, work a part time job, clean the house, etc. You will have to manage your time wisely, making sure you have time to study because you’ve got a big test on Friday. But you also need to hang out with Ann on Tuesday night because she specifically asked, and Wednesday you were supposed to work out with Ryuji at the gym. Weren’t you supposed to do the dishes?

By night, you and your friends will don the masks of the Phantom Thieves, a superhero team that dives into the metaverse to steal hearts and bring justice back to the world. No one at school knows who you are, and no one in the world knows the identity of the Phantom Thieves. This is the true super-hero fantasy. There is no Spider-Man game where you are looking forward to playing as Peter Parker. It’s unprecedented, and it’s what made me fall in love with it just hours in.

The super-hero parts of the game involve exploring giant palaces in the metaverse, manifestations of the hatred in the hearts of people. The Phantom Thieves track down targets who are rich, powerful and evil and break into these dungeons to steal the hearts of these targets, causing them to have a “change of heart” and confess to their crimes. One person at a time, the Phantom Thieves bring justice when all hope has been lost. There are no murder teens here, no sir. In fact, the characters are quite conscious about not killing anyone because, well, they’re teenagers.

Each dungeon contains different Personas, spirits that you collect by battling and then succeeding in dialogue trees with. The Personas are not your slaves; they are partners you’ve formed a contract with. They can be anything from tiny imps to forest sprites to ancient deities. The turn based combat and collectible monster angle often bares comparisons to Pokemon, and I’ll grant to a degree that’s true. Even as a Pokemon aficionado myself, however, I have to admit the combat system doesn’t hold a candle to Persona 5.

The gameplay never felt repetitive to me, except inside the much too long final dungeon. Historically I have not enjoyed turn-based combat, but the structure is so quick, flashy, and colorful that it feels just as exciting as live combat, if not more. The aesthetics and colors of the game are over the top, and they never slow down. Every single motion you make as the Phantom Thieves screams flamboyant and flashy, and it all contributes to making the player feel like a super-hero. Persona 5 is also the proud owner of one of the best soundtracks in gaming history. The sound design is worth mentioning too, punctuating moments with the exact right upbeat, jazzy, funky tracks you won’t be able to forget. You will feel stylish playing this game, whether you like it or not.

The RPG mechanics of Persona 5 run deep. Equipment, accessories, armor, weapons, guns, etc. need to be customized and upgraded along with items, potions and persona attacks to optimize your characters. I found myself hand-drawing diagrams to coordinate my persona’s movesets to create a perfect team, but Persona 5 also allows players to not care about these details very much at all. If players are searching for levels of detail rivaling old CRPGs, look no further. Managing your time during the day to optimize your stat levels feels better than it does in real life. I don’t get experience points in real life for making coffee, so why am I even doing it?

The characters… oh the characters. I legitimately fell in love with each and every one of the Phantom Thieves. Over 100 hours with them sounded daunting at first, but now I wish there was more. Even the characters I disliked at first I now love, and can’t imagine the squad without them. How did we ever get by? Morgana, even being a cutesy anime mascot, never gets annoying. He’s a core member of the Phantom Thieves, and his B-Plot to discover his origins is worked into the main story marvelously. Ryuji, Futaba, Ann, Makoto, Haru, Yusuke. I miss these kids, and I am going to miss them forever. You may have heard there’s a lot of romance options in this game; it can be gratingly difficult to pick one. The ending you receive with you romantic partner feels earned, however, after putting 100 hours into making that relationship blossom.

Why is this not a 10? I have a major issue with how homophobic this game is, and makes jokes at the expense of gay people and even paints them in a violent light. It's a classic case of a Japanese developer's ignorance towards the LGBT community. In addition, this game glorifies pedophilia by featuring a romance between your 17 year old player character and a 30 year old teacher. It's not okay. It's frankly pretty sickening.

The flashy colors, beautiful visuals, god tier soundtrack and amazing characters round out the host of reasons you need to play this game. Aside from the last dungeon being twice as long as it should have been, I have found no faults with this game. The entire time I was playing this, I could not shake the feeling that this was one of the best games I would ever play. If I was unsure before Persona 5, I now truly believe that there is no justice in the world unless we make it. We are all responsible for creating justice wherever we go. These themes permeate throughout every aspect of the game and are never forgotten or thrown to the wayside. There is a spirit of rebellion in all of us, and working a 9 to 5 office job every day, I think I had forgotten that. This game helped me remember the fiery passion for justice that I had in my younger years. It’s still inside me. It’s still inside you.

Astral Chain is something special. However, the story falls completely flat just a few hours in . Characters are also fine, passable to good. Get that stuff out of the way. This is an action game, and the action is impeccable, but I want to touch on the stuff supporting it first. The story and the fact that it had no greater implications was a little disappointing since Platinum’s last game, Nier: Automata, was super story heavy and is one of my favorite games ever. But N:A is about story, and this is about innovative action.

You pick to play as either the brother or sister who are both asked to join an elite task force and guard the world against the terrors of the astral plane. You begin by customizing the skin color, eye color, and haircut/hair color. It’s actually not too bad of a character creator, but no face sliders. Let me get my other big negative out of the way as well - the nonspeaking protagonist, while it works in Fallout and Skyrim, does not work here. I wish my character had some personality, but your sibling, Akira, kind of ends up speaking and carrying conversations for you. I’m a little sick of this trend RPGs have of silent protagonists so you can “immerse” yourself.

The world of Astral Chain really sells this way more than the writing quality for the characters or story. It is SO INTERESTING. Everything about this cyberpunk future is attention grabbing in the most subtle ways. The way the police are structured, the attitude of civilians toward you, the fact that so many NPC’s have something to say. Seeing Tokyo in 2065 is awesome on its own but it really looks like it would. Other than the police uniforms and actual legions, the actual cyberpunk aesthetic is subtle and closer to realistic. The game places you in small open world areas for each mission that you explore. Turning on your scanner on any NPC will give you a quick list of facts about them, including Name, Age, Sex, and Blood Type among others. It’s a neat little feature that makes the people feel real if for a moment and makes the world feel alive. For instance, i walked by a woman named Ikumi Dabrowski and thought “oh that woman is clearly half Japanese, but it’s the year 2065 so of course we’re more integrated.” I started looking around and noticed a TON of half-Japanese people, which was a neat little thing. Just an example.

The general structure is that for each mission there is a crime involving the astral plane somewhere in the city. You essentially have a detective phase and then a combat phase. During the detective phase you’re in a small explorable area with 5-6 side quests. The detective work is better done than any other action game. The Witcher 3 and Assassin’s Creed have light detective elements which consist of just turning on your scanner, walking up to the yellow object and pressing A. In Astral Chain, you have to question eye witnesses all over the crime scene area as well as collect hard evidence, and store each clue as a keyword. Then you report to your field officer who quizzes you on what happened, and you answer using the correct keywords. The coolest thing here is that you can’t trust eyewitness reports - not because they’re liars, but because like in real life they are unreliable. They will miss small details sometimes and you have to fact check witnesses against hard evidence.This is awesome and to my knowledge isn’t done often in games.

So, the action. This is what you come for. This is a brilliant design for action and I’m not sure that anything like it has ever existed before. You individually control yourself as well as your legion, an otherworldly entity bound to you by the titular astral chain. This is NOT a combo based game like Bayonetta, which I appreciate (I’m very bad at combos). Combat does involve a lot of mashing the Y button, sure, but the real fun of it is utilizing the chain between your two entities. Wrapping up an enemy in a chain by running around them in circles traps them momentarily. If an enemy rushes you, you can catch it in your chain and slingshot it across the arena. The main mechanic is rushing your Legion into the enemy and then either calling it to slide kick back to you or slide kicking towards it. Combat is 100% based on your positioning in relation to the enemy , and then added onto with new abilities and attacks you can unlock for your 5 different legions. It’s hard to describe. It takes a few minutes to pick up (I recommend going through the training stuff) but it feels amazing. It looks like you’re button mashing to an observer but as a player you can see yourself individually controlling two characters on the screen and the results of their interactions. So satisfying. I can’t speak enough praise for the combat.

Aside from that, music is A+ (I’d venture to say it’s the best score this year as well) and the cell shaded artwork looks beautiful even in handheld. Runs at a consistent 30 FPS, and since it’s got cartoon-like graphics its barely distinguishable from 60 FPS. 8 hours in and not one single frame rate drop even in handheld - That’s impressive. Plus, tsundere vending machine.

Astral Chain has perhaps the most innovative combat of the decade. In an awesomely constructed but mostly colorless cyberpunk world with a passable story and forgettable characters, 90% of the burden to carry this game falls on the action - and the action delivers. The combat’s dependence on movement and positioning rather than remembering combo strings sets it apart from the rest of its genre. This is one part Bayonetta, 2 parts Nier: Automata, and 1 part Psycho-Pass. Even though the story falls flat at the end, the time investment is an easy trade for the amount of fun you’ll have chaining, wrapping, dodge kicking, and blasting your way across the astral plane.

Last February, we were shocked and amazed to find that Luigi was on his way back! With the first game launching as a GameCube launch title back in 2001 to tentative critical acclaim and the sequel coming to 3DS in 2013 to less critical acclaim, many of us assumed this franchise was dead. Not so! Like the ghosts Luigi so diligently traps, Luigi’s Mansion is back from the dead. The first game is an absolute classic and I suggest you play it. The second game is good but nothing to write home about. The headliner for LM3 is that it takes all the best elements of both games, enhances them, and adds enough new content to make it my game of the year for 2019.

It seems downright impossible that you’d be unfamiliar with the Luigi’s Mansion theme by now, but regardless I encourage you to pop it on and get spooky. Still an absolute bop.

Luigi has of course always played backseat to his brother Mario, and the infamous “Year of Luigi” (2013) brought about the worst financial year in Nintendo’s history. But now, it’s his time to shine! If you’re not familiar with the basic plot of the first Luigi’s Mansion, Luigi gets a letter that he’s won a mansion in a contest he didn’t enter. He arrives to find that the whole thing was orchestrated by King Boo and that Mario’s soul has been locked away in the ghost world! Luigi must clear the mansion of all its ghostly inhabitants, solve some fun puzzles, and take down King Boo to rescue his brother. It’s an absolute blast, even though it’s only ~5 hours long.

This game has a similar premise — Luigi, Mario, Peach, and the Toads are invited to an all expenses paid resort in another contest they did not enter (yes, it’s been 18 years and he still hasn’t learned). The hotel manager welcomes them in and all seems well… until tragedy strikes! King Boo appears at the very beginning of the game and tries to consume your soul. Kind of a crazy start, but I’m in it right away. You’ll need to make your way up 17 distinct floors of the hotel, each with their own theme (varying from greenhouse to medieval castle to actual pirate ship), collect ca$h money, gems, and power-ups here and there, and reach the roof where you’ll finally have the big face off. You know what? King Boo > Bowser. King Boo is literally dragging Mario to hell to get revenge on Luigi.

Your friends are sealed away inside paintings (similar to how Luigi seals away ghosts) and King Boo swears his revenge on you. It’s kind of flattering, honestly. Finally, Luigi has a real, bona fide nemesis! A Bowser of his own. You then enlist the help of longtime Mario Bros. collaborator Professor E. Gadd (the scientist who made the original Poltergust as well as FLUDD from Super Mario Sunshine) as well as your ghost dog, Polterpup. Yes, you can pet the dog.

The great thing about LM3 is that it is just fun. Pure, uncut Colombian fun. This is one of those games where it’s immediately evident that the team absolutely loved what they were creating. The fully destructible environments are all gorgeous and so distinct from floor to floor you’ll barely be able to tell you’re playing the same game. The developers are clearly proud of their product, and their pride comes through in just how silly they’re willing to get in the pursuit of fun.

Luigi has lost his elemental abilities from before, but he’s been given new abilities to make up for it. Somehow, the devs managed to make each of these powers equally useful and had sections on every floor that required many uses of every ability in strange combinations. The Darklight (which for some reason I kept calling the Psychoscope) allows you to see invisible things or peer through ghostly illusions. The strobulb is the classic flashlight burst. The plunger can be shot and tugged by the Poltergust and used in an insane variety of ways. There’s a new burst attack for AOE stun when you’re surrounded or need to dodge attacks, and of course the big new mechanic of slamming ghosts to do damage, destroy the environments, and damage/stun other ghosts. It all comes together so seamlessly. But I would be remiss to not talk about the newest and most important mechanic — Gooigi.

Many, including myself, thought that Gooigi would just be a gimmick when first revealed, a way to shoehorn in co-op play. Absolutely not the case. Gooigi is essential for solving most of the puzzles in this 20 hour adventure, and is necessary for a good chunk of the boss fights as well. When you switch to controlling Gooigi, Luigi sort deactivates and will continue doing whatever you left him doing, and vice versa. This makes it possible to play the entire game either solo or co-op, and have roughly the same experience. No spoilers, but the penultimate boss fight required me to control both Luigi and Gooigi at the same time, switching between them every 2 seconds or so, and holy shit was it a blast. I am in awe of how cleverly designed each and every boss fight was.

Brilliant game design. Hats off. Anything that can possibly support co-op should nowadays, but you should be able to play games solo too. For the record, I played the bulk of this on my own but played co-op with my brother for about an hour. The game is probably more fun co-op, but if you don’t have a partner it can still be a 10/10 experience.

There is multiplayer as well, and it’s surprisingly … good? You can play online with friends or randos in the Scarescraper, a procedurally generated mansion that keeps on spookin’. There isn’t a ton of replayability to it, but the 2 or 3 hours you get out of it are actually a blast. I played with my friend online and we really got into it, coming up with strategies and ideas and coordinating with the randos we were paired with through emotes. Highly recommended, it doesn’t feel tacked on at all. I have heard that no single player DLC is coming for the game, but multiplayer DLC is on the way. It’s kind of just a nice icing on top of the cake of the campaign though.

Luigi’s Mansion 3 absolutely reeks of that Nintendo polish. I’d venture to say that it’s their best looking game yet, perhaps right up alongside Mario Odyssey. If you like having fun, you absolutely owe it to yourself to experience this firsthand, either with a friend or flyin’ solo. Every boss fight totally distinct and is a healthy mix of puzzles and combat, so you’re using all of your brain all the time. The ghosts have a real personality to them, so you’re not just sucking up endless mobs of blue dudes. The fully destructible environments are beautifully crafted and you can see the love and care put into them. This is my game of the year for 2019. If you have a Switch, this game is an essential right alongside Super Mario Odyssey and Zelda Breath of the Wild. Plus, the feeling of sucking up everything in the room into a tiny vacuum will never not be amazing.