Trading guns for magic, you play as one of the special few who can wield all three colours of the arcane. You are armed with Blue (a Rifle), Red (a Shotgun), and Green (a Machine Gun) to mow down your foes. The writing is fun, and the voice acting is good. Although, you might struggle to find a character you actually like, as they are all different shades of asshole. The game claims you can build your character to fit your playstyle, focusing on powering up one colour or evenly spreading your points across all three. However, it then throws you encounters that require specific colours to defeat enemies, spitting in the face of those claims. Sometimes, a game can simply be "good". They don't have to all be masterpieces.

Pretty great game, I like the hand holding physics (take notes dead rising) and the animations. The music was nice too. Give it a try.
…
April fools! What did you really think I, the great one and only elkmane would have just one sentence as my final review before my retirement? No. I’m gonna give a nice good long review.

Ico is a really nice game. It's a video game stripped down to its bare essentials and then stripped down even more. Theres no health bar or weapon switching or hud or prompts or any tutorial of any kind. Which is pretty cool and can lead to moments of discovery in puzzles which are really fun, like when i found out i could swing on chains or something. The puzzles in this game are so simple but can be so much fun. They often span a whole room or multiple, and mix cool platforming in and it always left me wanting to play more.

I did something new while playing this game. You see, the PS3 doesn't have a headphone jack on its controller, and I live in a house with other people who can't rly be quiet. Why don't i get a house for myself? because I live in ontario! FUCK YOU DOUG FORD! FUCK YOU WITH THE FREEST OF SPEECH THIS DIVIDED STATES OF EMBARRASSMENT WILL ALLOW ME TO HAVE! FUCK YOU AND THIS DEMOCRACY OF HYPOCRISY! Anyways, I decided every morning I was free to get up super early in the morning like 5 or 5:30 to play Ico. It was usually dark when I started but the sun rose through my window on the side and it was completely silent aside from the birds chirping both ingame and irl and it was a fun experience. Don't worry about me tho, i'm used to waking up at 5 to commute to uni. THANKS AGAIN DOUG FORD... FUCKING IDIOT. Anyways, the 5am complete silence helped me think a lot about what feelings this game was trying to give me. And I do feel it. It hit me when I, Ico, was trying to solve this puzzle by climbing up on this structure. Yorda was looking off into the ocean and occasionally glancing back at me to see how I was doing (yorda is the girl u escort around.) And I think I understood. This game is trying to recapture the greatest years of our lives, that being grade 3. And maybe 4 if you were lucky and privileged. Because there's such peace in meeting someone within 3 years of your age at a playground and not knowing how to speak the same language but still playing together. Hey let me show you something cool on top of this tree. You wait down there. I don't know, it was really evocative of that time for me. Like the time I was at the park at 9pm and met some guy from my class I never spoke to and we talked about owls while sitting on a tree and he told me owls are spies for demons and I believed him. This has nothing to do with the game, i'm rambling... sorry.. in my old age i've gotten sentimental for the happier days back before doug ford was premier. Maybe its good im retiring after this. im losing my marbles. Let me get back on track. Basically, this game is like meeting a new friend and helping her escape from her evil mom who wants her to stay inside and practice piano or multiplication tables.

the environments were all also great. If you liked undead parish/burg this is that but for like the whole game. Gorgeous visuals and the camera placements make this a very unique looking game. No prop or interactable item has any kind of glow or yellow paint marking that its usable or anything like that. Boxes are boxes, chains are chains, ropes are ropes, ladders are ladders, it has no regard for readability except for the fact that there is so little detail in the environment (which adds to its isolating abandoned castle atmosphere) that it really doesn't feel like a hassle or like there was something that shouldve been interactable. It's cool. The camera placement also highlights where you should go. Stepping onto a ledge brings the bottom tip of a chain into your view, prompting you to move the camera and investigate the room further. Now i'm gonna talk about the combat.

The combat is okay I guess, it's interesting and a fun idea to have the playable character be under no threat at all and have yords (me and yorda are on nickname basis) be the target. Theyll try and knock you away, but theyre going for her. Like ashley in re4 kind of. But it's more like ashley in re4 remake. The problem is theyre kind of slippery and can fly- and you have no air attacks. So, lets say I attack and they fly up. I repeat this like 20 minutes. But- if they grab yords then they stay still for a few seconds which lets you hit them as much as you like til they die. It's like re4 remake because ashley gets kidnapped 10x more in that game than she does in re4, and once she IS kidnapped then the ganado or whatever holding her is open to a stealth attack which is a one hit KO. So in that game, I didn't really mind her getting taken five times a fight because it was kind of beneficial to me. Double edged sword though. On one hand, its a way for your sidekick to be useful in their uselessness, but on the other hand it makes the times they DO get taken way less stressful. Honestly I think I would've preferred if they were just less slippery and didn't fly all the time.

I think thats pretty much all i have to say. The review is over now, so newcomers please feel free to drop your like and be on your way. My following message is for my loyal elksters regarding my retirement from backloggd.

Hey buddies. How's everyone doing? okay? i hope so. I know I'm addressing a crowd of hundreds, but honestly you're all my sons and daughters and children to me. All of you are appreciated by me equally. But I have to go now. Why? well, it's because I had a dream. What was my dream? well, I'll tell you now. I had put my copy of breath of the wild on sale in kijiji. What's kijiji? oh kiddo its like canadian craigslist. I wanted to sell my copy of breath of the wild or trade it for a copy of bayonetta 2. I did this in real life, so its interesting that it carried over in my dream. Anyways, I recieved a message (in my dream) saying they would trade me a copy of starbound for botw. I said no, considering starbound is worth like 15 dollars and I was selling botw for 45. The guy didn't like that. Not one bit. He took to backloggd and he posted something. He somehow managed to find every bad thing I've said on the internet, every weird search i've ever made, every guy i've yelled at on rainbow 6 voice chat. My elksters know I have a dark past. The comments were my beloved elksters; all of them felt so betrayed. Comments like "i cant believe elkmane would do this to us." "i can't support him anymore" "he was my idol." I tried to go back and give him my game, hoping for him to take it down but he didn't budge. It was over. My fans hated me. And that dream made it known to me that i can't be elkmane anymore. It's too much. This role isn't something i can mentally handle. The past 6 presidents of the united states have all gone on record as to saying that their job is 2nd hardest in the world right before being elkmane. And they're right. It is tough. So i've decided to hang up my elk hat and retire. And I know some shit's so hard to swallow, but I just can't sit back and wallow in my own sorrow but I know one fact: I'll be one tough act to follow. One tough act to follow. I'll be one tough act to follow. Here today, gone tomorrow - M.M

Here is my goodbye song!

wait, no. sorry. wrong one.

THIS is my goodbye song.

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


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

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

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

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

Except I didn’t.

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

But also so, so much more.

What’re ya buyin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that reminds me, speaking of the battlefield…

Got a job for you, 621

Oh boy!

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

There’s a greater horror beyond the scorched skies.

A winged mutt

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

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

Welcome to Rubicon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are Raven.

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

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

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

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

Great potential but it feels a bit like playing a beta rather than an actual released game. The building, the mechanics, the content, the interface - everything feels incomplete and un-tested. Every few minutes someone from the group would take turns asking “Did anyone actually play this?”

Additionally, coming off of Terraria didn’t really do this game any favors. In Terraria, there are so many items, armor sets, weapons, and cosmetics to collect and deck out your customized character with. In LEGO Fortnite, there’s no armor and if you want to change your appearance, your only option is to spend real money. So is the nature of F2P games.

Luckily, it has a high player count and, knowing Epic, they’ll throw money and resources at this thing. One year from now, I’m sure LEGO Fortnite will be a fun game worth playing. It’s certainly got promise but, as it is, it’s more of a beta with a sad empty world and I don’t think it’s really worth investing time into.

+ Good foundation and great potential
+ Solid visuals

- Feels like a beta
- Stark, empty world with nothing to find or explore
- Travel options are slow and limited
- Building feels terrible
- Missing basic quality of life features that exist in other survival games
- No armor, special weapons, or any kind of unique loot to find
- Appearance changes are locked behind skins that cost real money

hypothetical life partner walks into the room

"Vee, what are you doing?"

"Playing Balatro."

"It's 4 o'clock in the morning. Why on Earth are you playing Balatro?"

"Because I've lost control of my life."

As a kid, I was absolutely obsessed with subways. Whenever my family and I traveled to a new city, my immediate fixation was not the city’s many attractions but rather the intricate infrastructure linking all these various locales. While my family handled the destinations, I handled everything in-between. I wanted to know the most efficient way to get from point A to B, if there were any loopholes or special conditions necessitating an off-the-beaten-path itinerary, and most of all, I kept tabs on any planned changes regarding the evolving transportation so I could make notes of where to adjust and prioritize for future trips. I never realized it back then, but there was a certain satisfaction to memorizing every station and optimal route and running the simulations in my head that eventually led me down the path of engineering.

Mini Metro is essentially my childhood fascination with subways conceptualized as a video game. It’s super easy to pick up thanks to its minimalist design and intuitive controls; passengers are depicted with geometric symbols headed to corresponding symbolic destinations, distinctly colored subway lines are constructed by dragging your mouse between stops, and you can easily manipulate existing lines without disrupting progress by simply clicking and dragging sections of a line to new stops. At the same time, it can quickly become challenging, but this skill ceiling feels fairly approachable because the game is less about memorizing specific formulas and more about understanding implicit guidelines. For example, having a line that hits every stop in the area sounds appealing, but what’s less appealing is how much more time is subsequently spent traveling and loading/unloading passengers; you can at least somewhat account for this by toggling specific stations as “no-stop” to create express lines. The AI is fairly predictable and will always calculate the shortest path to the corresponding destination, but this also means that there’s real potential for them to overload the capacity of certain stations while in-transit between different lines. Alongside this, the game is great at organically iterating upon its basic formula to escalate difficulty by introducing more stops, altering the shape of stops to create more unique passengers and necessitate different routes, and increase the system’s load with more passengers while forcing the player to juggle their already limited number of lines, cars/carriages, and tunnels/bridges as also dictated with newly unlocked maps. At its core, it’s a game that’s great at subtly teaching players how to recognize bottlenecks and micromanage individual elements to fully understand how minor changes can quickly ripple across the fully intertwined system.

My only real nitpicks are that picking apart subway loops can get a bit annoying since you can only fiddle with one exposed end at a time while in loop form; it’s a minor complaint considering that you can pause the game at any time to more carefully reconstruct lines, but adding extra steps to reconstruct common subway loops is fairly noticeable considering Mini Metro’s elegant interface. Also, I do wish that there was a way to construct slightly longer paths along rivers instead of automatically building across them between certain junctions and using up my already limited supply of tunnels and bridges. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that this last gripe is mostly personal, and I think this game absolutely delivers upon its premise with precise execution. With so many different maps and daily challenges to boot, there’s plenty of content to exhaust within the game, and if one finds the basic experience too stressful or is more interested in sheer experimentation, then they can simply turn to endless and creative modes instead. For an accessible yet deceptively deep management game that gives great bang for your buck, I’d say Mini Metro is a fantastic entry point into the world of optimization simulators that more than holds its own against its more daunting peers.

I'm not usually one to hop on trendy flavour of the month multiplayer games of my own volition, but I adored the first Helldivers and word-of-mouth for this game was positive, so once my IRLs took the plunge I happily saluted the sky and fell backwards into hell.

Helldivers 2 is simple: It's a third person shooter, I assume you've played one. Every now and then you do a series of fighting game inputs to summon a nice gun/big explosion/several explosions/your dead friends back to life/a nuke/etc and they're on cooldown until you do them again. You do all of this to kill lots of insects, or very angry robots, usually in service to an objective or three. The controls and movement all feel very fluid and snappy, there's no mechanical or physics-based resistance at play here.

Where Helldivers stands out is in the capacity for things to go wrong, and the potential for situations to break a team's resolve. If you advance slowly, only fire while standing, use your strategems on big swarms, and never split up? This game is easy. Very easy.
The game knows this, and its idea of 'challenge' is trying to hammer you against an anvil with different implements. Difficulty levels don't bloat the stats of enemies, but you'll suddenly experience enemies flanking you and firing from cover in ways that're meant to make you panic. It's telling that the Machine Gun you start with has a fire selector for those especially terrifying moments.

The highlights of this game aren't really the easy victories. Clearing harder difficulties without much bother is boring, honestly.

No, the highlights are the skin-of-your-teeth victories where you and your team get scarily into the role. Moments that are... Filmic. That's the only word I can use. This game gets very filmic when the action kicks in.

Advancing through wide open plains while a fog slowly sets in, obscuring your visibility and forcing you to blind fire into the mist at shapes that could be either your death or some background detritus. Eternally afraid to turn around because what once provided comfort via visibility is now an endless murky sea of potential ambush spots.

Summoning your 3 dead teammates back to life at the cost of your own, screaming "LIIIIIIIIIIIIVE" as you throw the beacon out of the fight, using your last reinforce and watching as someone picks up your grenade launcher and avenges you.

Walking out of a brutal fight in closed spaces, dashing to 'freedom', and seeing a sea of enemies descend upon you. Forcing your weapon off of burst fire and emptying your magazines into the swarm one by one, unsure if you're doing anything but agonizingly aware of just how finite your resources are.

Those mad dashes to extraction once enemy hordes appear, dodging your allies' artillery fire and explosions more than any enemy. Sprinting towards an ever-louder chorus of explosions, gunshots, shouts and screeches.

More than any game that actually tried to do 'war is hell'', Helldivers exemplifies it with missions that leave me needing a 15 minute break after they conclude regardless of victory or defeat. The sound design really adds to the effect; the explosions and gunshots here are on par with Killing Floor 2 or ARMA 3, but used to arguably more terrifying effect.

Progression moves at a smooth pace, within the few hours I played I'd already acquired a decent amount of stuff just from doing objectives and mowing things down. I'll admit to not liking the pseudo-battle pass format that much, but after my time with Helldivers 1 I do admittedly like having some say over what I unlock, and mercifully both Strategems and more specific ship/player upgrades are separate from it.

I think the best indicator of how much this game hooked me is that my "first quick session" went on for 4 straight hours with nobody taking a break besides the obvious snack/drink pickups. It's rare for both me and my regular crew to get hooked so easily.

10/10 would kill my best friend with rocket launcher backblast again. Please nerf rocket robots.

Despite my love for it, I don't have much to say about this one in depth.

Feels like stepping back in time to 2016-2017 where every game was obsessed with setpieces, and given the game started development under Platinum it's not unlikely some older DNA bled into this game.
Granted, unlike AAA titles from the 2010s and Platinum's mediocre back catalogue, setpieces are used cleverly in GBFR and they don't ever repeat.
The first turret section is the last, and the one time it reuses the rising lava gimmick setpiece it's as a ludonarrative character capstone to make you go "OH SHIT".

The story is, at its core, the most quintessential JRPG-ass JRPG ever made, which fits given it's a Granblue Fantasy game and its parent title is mostly the same. It's a breath of fresh air in its simplicity, not shooting for the moon but instead the familiar horizon and all of its hits land because of it.
In an era where Naoki Yoshida and other big JRPG franchises are ashamed of sincerity and keep making edgy ~subversive~ bullshit, it's doubly nice to see something sincere without being an obvious 'tribute game' like the other side of the Modern JRPG Coin.
If you've ever seen a Shonen Jump movie you'll be familiar with GBFR's format: It's not an adaptation of Granblue's story, it's an original work sandwiched between existing arcs with a cast of fan favourites and wholly new supporting cast. Arguably it works better for games than movies, for while the One Piece movie villains are boring as hell I think Lilith might be in my top 5 Granblue characters alongside Vira, Apollonia, Shalem and Belial. Yes, I'm gay, what made it obvious.
There isn't much to spoil because it's so straightforward, and while I think simply calling it "good" defeats the purpose of even having a backloggd, it is. The emotional beats land, it doesn't waste any time, it managed to turn FF1's "go kill these primals" plot into an excellent GBF title, Narmaya is there. Perfect all around.

Gameplay is the star of the show though and wow. It's like a mirror into a world where Platinum Games regularly make titles that aren't garbage.
Their influence is clear, aye, but with GBFR having 19 characters it's opted to sprinkle mechanics onto each of them to keep it fresh.
You're baited into assuming this is yet another piece of licensed Platinum slop by Djeeta/Gran's boring Dynasty Warriors-esque combo mechanic only to stumble into Narmaya's infinite stance combos, dodge cancellable iai draw attacks, and butterfly stacking mechanic.
Or Siegfried, who plays like Hi Fi Rush and actually made me better at that game due to having a rigid but reliable timing mechanic that can actually be dodge offset.
Or Secret Character, who has a devil trigger.
Or Lancelot, whose attacks are centered around mashing and also gave me a minor RSI which still hurts a few days later.

Trash mob fights are almost always you and your party trouncing them while dodging ranged attacks. Fine enough, but the boss battles are the star of the show and their focus in the postgame is why you'll see other reference Monster Hunter. There's an excellent blend of mechanics and spectacle on display here that, again, puts other character action games to shame.
If you've ever played FFXIV you'll likely be right at home dodging AoEs and yelling at your party for something that so very easily could've been negated. God, I hate Siegfried mains who refuse to use his hyper armor.
They're all very lovely to look at, and towards the end of the story the spectacle starts approaching levels heretofore unseen in the character action genre besides Bayonetta (the one good Platinum duology). The final boss was just... Mwah.

On the presentation side, Cygames have long since been the kings of gacha presentation and with GBFR they're expanding that to the action RPG genre. Everything about this game is beautiful. Areas, outfits, characters, Narmaya's narmaya's, music, you name it.
The music deserves special attention though. Tsutomu Narita is one of the greatest game composers of our time and he's applying his decade of composing for GBF mobile to this game. The returning compositions are gorgeous yes, but the new ones for the original fights are jaw dropping and the final boss theme had me pause the game just to let it wash over me. It is some divine work, I hope they keep Zero (a 13 minute prog metal song) when Lucillius debuts in the next update.

Post-game is an amazing encapsulation of the browser game and I'm frankly astounded they managed to keep the experience intact but without the gacha/live service stuff. You grind to build up weapons, buff grids and other stuff ad nauseaum while tackling harder and harder fights that you meet with stronger and stronger characters.
Characters tend to really come into their niche here; you can get by with flailing before post-game, but if you're a Zeta main and you can't land your timed hits you gotta go play Percival or something. Buffs go from being useful accruements to utter gamechangers and I swear to fucking god if I run into another Cagliostro who's afraid of Phantasmagoria I'm gonna flip.
In short: The Monster Hunter comparisons are valid.

All in all... Psh, I really do wish I had more to say. I had the time of my life playing this game, man. I haven't loved a JRPG this much since Yakuza 7, and it's a nice reminder of what the genre can be like when it's not helmed by Naoki Yoshida's eternal shame at having made JRPGs in the past or endless nostalgia bait.

I wish Lilith was real. Happy that Maggie Robertson got to voice act in a game that wasn't terrible.

Clickbait intro: Game so bad it makes notorious diehard videogame preservationist pray that it's lost to the sands of time.

You know, I had about 1400~ words of an incomplete real review typed up for this one, but I tabbed back in to keep playing and just.

Man.

I try to be fair to the games I play, even if they're ass. I like to sit with them, ponder them on my morning walks, look into their creation. I believe that all art contains a variable amount of love and that love should be, if not appreciated, at least acknowledged. I think games are art, and my desire to treat them the same way I've treated music for decades is what made me create this Backloggd account in the first place.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands makes me wish I reneged on that personal promise.

It's difficult to describe this term using language, because the game just feels like pure hate. So much of it is steeped in contempt for someone or something that it actually borders on staggering.

If you care enough about videogames to even use Backloggd you probably already know about Borderlands Humor so I'm not gonna devote a mini essay to it. I'm also not gonna pretend I never liked Borderlands; up until around 2018 Borderlands 2 was a game I'd replay yearly.

Borderlands humor now grates on me in my old age, but the jokes at least have setup and punchlines even if those punchlines are of debatable... everything.

Wonderlands' jokes confound me, because oftentimes the punchline is "a thing exists". It has all the same energy of your debatably conservative uncle nudging you with his elbow at a wedding party and saying "Polish people, right?" except it's some quip about tabletop game/player stereotypes that the writer found by going on Tumblr and sifting through the TTRPG tags.
At least 95% of the dialogue in this game is jokes like this, or orphaned punchlines that feel as though they're responding to a nonexistent setup.
The other 5% is... Dated. Borderlands humor gets even more dated as each entry comes out and betrays the sad, unmoving time capsule that the directors live in, but Wonderlands is somehow worse than the prior entry because it feels like it came fresh out of 2012. I only played Portal 2 a month or so ago and this game could've been its contemporary.

I know riffing on a Gearbox title for not being funny is a bit redundant, it's like riffing on Gears of War for having cover or riffing on Skyrim for having dragon shouts or riffing on Halo for having Spartans or riffing on Baldur's Gate 3 for being bad. But I dunno, this game came out in 2022 and it's somehow a step backwards from everything before it. It boggles the mind. Even as I type this I find myself endlessly confused, wondering who they used as focus testers that anything in this game writing-wise got approval.

I think the sticking point for me is that this game is very ostensibly a parody of tabletop games and tabletop gamers, but there's a bit too much venom for me to really call it a parody. Many of the TTRPG related jokes feel mean-spirited and cheap, not unlike the Saints Row reboot. These don't feel like jokes for tabletop players, they feel like jokes about tabletop players.
The ones that aren't mean feel very... "How do you do, fellow kids?", to the point where even calling them "Reddit-like" is inaccurate

The spiel about games and love up above wasn't just a fillerbuster, it's something I genuinely have been pondering this entire time.

Wonderlands doesn't feel like it was made with any love.

I question who or what the target audience for this game looks like because just from observing the text, I get the feeling it just fucking hates everybody? It clearly has no love for tabletop players given both them and their hobby are the butt of the joke, it has no love for Borderlands players either because its parent series is barely present and is only wheeled out to keep the player awake, and it clearly has no love for sensible people because it forces you to listen to Ashly Burch's ulcer-bustingly racist Tiny Tina voice for a full game's runtime.

What really confounds me is just how desperate the game is, though.

In 2013, they already did this game. It was a DLC for Borderlands 2 titled "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep" and it was... Okay, I suppose. I'm not the biggest fan of BL2's DLC for numerous reasons, but it was this game down a T except with like... Not even better writing, it had writing to begin with.
I harp on the jokes so much because that's basically all this game has, besides Will Arnett phoning in a performance to get a paycheck now that the Arrested Development and Bojack Horseman mines dried up.
There's a story which, prior to playing the game, I'd seen hyped up as "Better than BL3's". After playing it, I wondered if I'd bought a secret copy that lacked any plot, because there basically isn't on.

Wonderlands does have gameplay which, as is the running theme here, is just BL3's but infinitely worse. God I miss Moze. What were they even cooking here? Were BL fans begging for less interesting gameplay?

All in all, I am struggling to come up with a meaningful conclusion here, or even say anything nice. Saying "it's just bad" is boring, and something any goblin with a keyboard can tell you over in the Steam reviews, but... It's just bad, dude. I got this game for £12 and I'm genuinely regretting not using it to get a nice haul from Greggs. A pack of sausage rolls for the fridge, a Mexican chicken oval bite for the evening and a packet of their spicy chicken bites for lunch... Mmm.

Some people, usually Bloodborne fans for some reason, will tell you that they wish they could wipe their memory and play a game for the first time all over again.

I wish I could wipe this game from my memory.

Which, given the next Honkai Star Rail update is all about memory, sure does feel prophetic.

I'm not one to blindly want 'More' from something, and I actually quite like endings.

Racing games are my one exception though. With them, I love 'more'. I'll take anything, dude. Courses, cars, characters, music, whatever. With racing games I tend to rack up triple-quadruple digit hour counts with ease, because they're what I play to get my mind going when I need to draft a story or a review or yet another piece of Honkai Star Rail fanfiction. 'More', then, benefits me in multiple ways.

And what game was begging for more than Mario Kart 8? A game so excellent it's borderline ubiquitous and so popular that describing it is a waste of words. MK, after all, did make Kart Racers into an accepted subgenre.

The Booster Course Pass, then, is more. More courses and more characters. There's really not much of a need to say much else, honestly. Quality is consistent with the base game and its own DLCs (back on the Wii U), though I would've liked more anti-gravity tracks personally. And hey, there's an added bonus of having Tour tracks, meaning you don't need to play a bad mobile game to experience some otherwise stellar course design.

Really, in an age where DLC tends be to deceptive, marketed vaguely/not at all or just plain bad, this pass stands out for being decidedly upfront. The developers promised to double the amount of courses in MK8 and they did that with no catches, and even threw in 8 new playable characters to boot - though I exclusively play Daisy, so they're moot to me.

I don't have a funny signoff for this one. I really like racing games, dude.