RocketPunches
In short: A mechanically rough game, with an utterly nonsensical story, set in a bizarre and grating open world.
AC Brotherhood is the pinnacle of rose tinted glasses, and a return to it almost 15 years after its release reveals that, not only does it not hold up, it's impossible to see how it was ever considered good to begin with.
Structurally, Brotherhood feels disjointed and held together by fraying string. Gone is the strong underlying narrative of the rest of Ezio's three game narrative stretch, replaced instead with a vague, bland narrative of building the Assassins and fighting the nebulously evil Borgia heirs that jumps from subplot to subplot with only a bit of running around the open world to tie things together.
This is not a unique problem to Brotherhood, Assassin's Creed II similarly comes apart at the seams late on as it blitzes through an array of new characters who fail to stick around, but Brotherhood does even less. There are simply no characters in this game that matter in any way. No intrigue, no relationships, barely the faintest hint of a story lightly dusted over top.
I played this game a little over 7 months ago and I would struggle to reproduce all but the faintest, most meme'd elements of its mostly absent narrative.
Perhaps more importantly in this, however, is just how poorly constructed Brotherhood's world is. Brotherhood might have been the first Assassin's Creed game to explore the concept of a cohesive open world space, but even accounting for that it's array of uniformly cubic buildings is equal parts confusing and jarring.
New gameplay mechanics largely detract from the experience, dulling it down to a rote, 20hr-30hr slog of open world box checking. Some of the series' worst instincts also coalesce here, with the game becoming more forceful in its demand that players complete sections in very specific, often outstandingly annoying, ways in order to check the completion boxes at all.
I long held Brotherhood as my favorite game in the series, but revisiting it for the first time in years suggested the younger version of me was an idiot who liked bad things. Considering that's been confirmed by various other similar experiences, I feel safe suggesting that Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is simply a bad game that got lucky.
AC Brotherhood is the pinnacle of rose tinted glasses, and a return to it almost 15 years after its release reveals that, not only does it not hold up, it's impossible to see how it was ever considered good to begin with.
Structurally, Brotherhood feels disjointed and held together by fraying string. Gone is the strong underlying narrative of the rest of Ezio's three game narrative stretch, replaced instead with a vague, bland narrative of building the Assassins and fighting the nebulously evil Borgia heirs that jumps from subplot to subplot with only a bit of running around the open world to tie things together.
This is not a unique problem to Brotherhood, Assassin's Creed II similarly comes apart at the seams late on as it blitzes through an array of new characters who fail to stick around, but Brotherhood does even less. There are simply no characters in this game that matter in any way. No intrigue, no relationships, barely the faintest hint of a story lightly dusted over top.
I played this game a little over 7 months ago and I would struggle to reproduce all but the faintest, most meme'd elements of its mostly absent narrative.
Perhaps more importantly in this, however, is just how poorly constructed Brotherhood's world is. Brotherhood might have been the first Assassin's Creed game to explore the concept of a cohesive open world space, but even accounting for that it's array of uniformly cubic buildings is equal parts confusing and jarring.
New gameplay mechanics largely detract from the experience, dulling it down to a rote, 20hr-30hr slog of open world box checking. Some of the series' worst instincts also coalesce here, with the game becoming more forceful in its demand that players complete sections in very specific, often outstandingly annoying, ways in order to check the completion boxes at all.
I long held Brotherhood as my favorite game in the series, but revisiting it for the first time in years suggested the younger version of me was an idiot who liked bad things. Considering that's been confirmed by various other similar experiences, I feel safe suggesting that Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is simply a bad game that got lucky.
2020
In Short: A game lacking the charm of its predecessor while expanding on some of its least appealing elements.
There's something missing in Rogue Legacy 2, deep at the core. Despite not being a huge metroidvania fan, I was hooked by the relative simplicity of the original game. It built up its mechanics carefully as you delved deeper, presenting the player with just enough different options to feel varied without digging itself too deep into a systemic hole. Even bad runs felt like progress, and even the worst downside felt at least manageable.
Rogue Legacy 2 does not build upon its predecessor's achievements, however. Systems are overly complex out of the gate, with the game expanding its system of items and equipment in a way that feels like a chore to manage, and that undermines sense of progress regularly as a fairly successful run ends and offers little in the way of upgrades thanks to an inanely complicated array of different items and shops.
This division interacts negatively with the game's reduced emphasis on boss fights, as the overall power gain available to the player appears much lower - likely to avoid players blowing through a game that no longer requires multiple big boss fights every run. This more compressed power curve is then filtered through a wider array of stuff to buy, leading to the game feeling like a slog of grinding reliant on luck to break out and make progress.
In combat, the previously "nice to have" secondary weapons feel vital in a way that distracts from actually playing the game. A handful are too finicky, or too useless, to bother with. Still more feel too integral to the success of a run to ignore, despite offering little enjoyment to engage with or a frustrating amount of micromanagement to avoid being left helpless. Very rarely did they feel fun or rewarding to use, however.
Compounding the latter is an overall worse set of classes to work with. Some basics return, but the advanced classes have been reworked almost entirely, and almost entirely for the worse. Almost half of the classes feel like taking them on a run is setting yourself up for failure, without any subsequent reward. Ranged classes reveal themselves to be mostly bad, at least in the earlier portions I managed to get to before my interest wore thin.
This isn't necessarily a new phenomenon, the first game had a similar vibe at times, but it was far fewer and further between, and no class felt as far off of viable as so many of Rogue Legacy 2's do.
This sensation isn't helped by a design mismatch between the game's negative character traits, and its new focus on traversal instead of combat. Things that presented a challenge, or annoyance, in combat in the original game, are now capable of rendering a run entirely pointless - or so annoying that continuing to attempt it is simply a waste of time you could be having fun with some other game.
Where the latter game used to gate you by your ability to clear bosses, or persist long enough to overpower them, Rogue Legacy 2 demands instead that you tediously poke blindly around the map for special items - a feature borrowed from its inspiration that results mostly in runs feeling like a total waste of time as, again, no real progress is achieved thanks to your not finding an item. There's also far more platforming focused areas in Rogue Legacy 2, an element rendered infuriating when combined with the aforementioned negative traits.
Perhaps some people will find navigating Axis Mundi with a blind or movement reduced character a fun challenge. As profound hater of any platforming experience that isn't absolutely exceptional, I threw myself into the void and ended the run instead of wasting my time.
While the original Rogue Legacy offered its share of platforming, it felt marginal, and designed with the rest of the game in mind. Like an extra challenge, not a fundamental roadblock to continued enjoyment. Platforming was a vehicle for exploration, a necessity in a 2D world, but as with the best of its classic inspiration, rarely the focal point. Even contemporary counterpoints, like Dead Cells, manage to avoid this fundamental pitfall and use the platforming to make the game more engaging instead of just providing roadblocks.
This feels like a failure of design, as does much of Rogue Legacy 2. Like a game whose new elements were constructed in a black box, and then quickly rushed out and balanced on top of a stripped bare version of what already existed before anyone really sat down to hammer out the details of how it all fit together.
The visuals only soured me further. Clean and smooth, ultimately nice looking, but empty feeling. The simple charm of the first game, which evoked classic metroidvania games, is replaced here by something more akin to contemporary entries like Hollow Knight; which in turn makes the game stand out less. They aren't so much bad as they are uninspiring, and I was hoping for more than "good enough" for the followup to one of my favorite games of all time.
There's something missing in Rogue Legacy 2, deep at the core. Despite not being a huge metroidvania fan, I was hooked by the relative simplicity of the original game. It built up its mechanics carefully as you delved deeper, presenting the player with just enough different options to feel varied without digging itself too deep into a systemic hole. Even bad runs felt like progress, and even the worst downside felt at least manageable.
Rogue Legacy 2 does not build upon its predecessor's achievements, however. Systems are overly complex out of the gate, with the game expanding its system of items and equipment in a way that feels like a chore to manage, and that undermines sense of progress regularly as a fairly successful run ends and offers little in the way of upgrades thanks to an inanely complicated array of different items and shops.
This division interacts negatively with the game's reduced emphasis on boss fights, as the overall power gain available to the player appears much lower - likely to avoid players blowing through a game that no longer requires multiple big boss fights every run. This more compressed power curve is then filtered through a wider array of stuff to buy, leading to the game feeling like a slog of grinding reliant on luck to break out and make progress.
In combat, the previously "nice to have" secondary weapons feel vital in a way that distracts from actually playing the game. A handful are too finicky, or too useless, to bother with. Still more feel too integral to the success of a run to ignore, despite offering little enjoyment to engage with or a frustrating amount of micromanagement to avoid being left helpless. Very rarely did they feel fun or rewarding to use, however.
Compounding the latter is an overall worse set of classes to work with. Some basics return, but the advanced classes have been reworked almost entirely, and almost entirely for the worse. Almost half of the classes feel like taking them on a run is setting yourself up for failure, without any subsequent reward. Ranged classes reveal themselves to be mostly bad, at least in the earlier portions I managed to get to before my interest wore thin.
This isn't necessarily a new phenomenon, the first game had a similar vibe at times, but it was far fewer and further between, and no class felt as far off of viable as so many of Rogue Legacy 2's do.
This sensation isn't helped by a design mismatch between the game's negative character traits, and its new focus on traversal instead of combat. Things that presented a challenge, or annoyance, in combat in the original game, are now capable of rendering a run entirely pointless - or so annoying that continuing to attempt it is simply a waste of time you could be having fun with some other game.
Where the latter game used to gate you by your ability to clear bosses, or persist long enough to overpower them, Rogue Legacy 2 demands instead that you tediously poke blindly around the map for special items - a feature borrowed from its inspiration that results mostly in runs feeling like a total waste of time as, again, no real progress is achieved thanks to your not finding an item. There's also far more platforming focused areas in Rogue Legacy 2, an element rendered infuriating when combined with the aforementioned negative traits.
Perhaps some people will find navigating Axis Mundi with a blind or movement reduced character a fun challenge. As profound hater of any platforming experience that isn't absolutely exceptional, I threw myself into the void and ended the run instead of wasting my time.
While the original Rogue Legacy offered its share of platforming, it felt marginal, and designed with the rest of the game in mind. Like an extra challenge, not a fundamental roadblock to continued enjoyment. Platforming was a vehicle for exploration, a necessity in a 2D world, but as with the best of its classic inspiration, rarely the focal point. Even contemporary counterpoints, like Dead Cells, manage to avoid this fundamental pitfall and use the platforming to make the game more engaging instead of just providing roadblocks.
This feels like a failure of design, as does much of Rogue Legacy 2. Like a game whose new elements were constructed in a black box, and then quickly rushed out and balanced on top of a stripped bare version of what already existed before anyone really sat down to hammer out the details of how it all fit together.
The visuals only soured me further. Clean and smooth, ultimately nice looking, but empty feeling. The simple charm of the first game, which evoked classic metroidvania games, is replaced here by something more akin to contemporary entries like Hollow Knight; which in turn makes the game stand out less. They aren't so much bad as they are uninspiring, and I was hoping for more than "good enough" for the followup to one of my favorite games of all time.
This review contains spoilers
In Short: Assassin’s Creed’s best story, paired with its best approach to open world storytelling, wrapped in a thick layer of the business model’s most destructive influences.
There’s a rare depth to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in a series full of shallow archetypes and fluffy, fantastical forays into the realm of the mythological. It’s not more accurate than its peers. On the deep end it dives eagerly into Norse lore, on the shallow it conveniently ignores little evidence of practices like tattooing among Viking clans for sake of character customization. Instead, where it shines is in its character, or specifically one of its characters.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to give Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt when the male version of Eivor is a cookie cutter nobody ripped straight out of the same premium television viking epics that muted enthusiasm for this release. Swap the lens around for his astoundingly gruff counterpart though, and suddenly, as with Kassandra in Odyssey, life flows through the narrative again. Something different and less predictable, a better delivery of lines with more to ponder - if still unfortunately neutered by the Pilsbury Snowboy’s inherent influence on the writing. An element of the narrative team is clearly dying to write female leads, and while this review isn’t the place to explore that one does wonder if they’ll ever be given their chance without some asshole fucking it up.
The fuzziness of the period’s historical figures does a lot of heavy lifting in Valhalla, allowing the writing team to break out of boxes and do more with their narrative over a broader cast. For past games, set in better documented eras, the writers at Ubisoft were occasionally forced to construct tortured parallel fictions. Massive conspiracies of fictional characters vying for the levers of power despite little interaction with the hands who pulled them in our reality. Here, historical characters like Ubba and Ivarr Ragnarson are free to fill vital, central narrative roles instead; escaping the little boxes that can only rarely be disturbed lest Assassin’s Creed unwrite the same history it relies on.
More importantly, though significant within the game’s mythological framework, Eivor is not the same world altering pivot point in Valhalla that previous characters have had to be. Valhalla’s version of southern Britain churns forwards without, and occasionally in spite of, her. She seems less the driver of action, and more someone drawn to it. A sense helped along by easily the strongest cast of characters the series has constructed since Black Flag’s tales of piracy in the fuzzy history of the Caribbean was similarly allowed off its leash.
The result is a narrative that flows better moment to moment than in the series’ more recent endeavors - even if that flow is slower and more deliberate than past games. Eivor’s relative inexperience as a character presents a more interesting story to explore, with the narrative allowing her to fail in ways the series has been unwilling to in the past. She's not a highly trained Assassin, in fact she cares little about them beyond where their interests naturally intersect hers. She’s also not particularly good at what she does aside from the fighting part. Her allies are not uniformly rallied around her, she doesn’t succeed constantly or deftly outsmart all of her foes, and her prose-like asides disguise an abrasive attitude that often gets her in trouble.
In the process Valhalla’s more grounded narrative weaves together plots into an eerily oppressive story; one that masterfully conveys the weight it places on a young character unwillingly forced into a role of leadership and grappling with its unavoidable realities. More importantly, one that stitches together that narrative into a pattern the series has never managed before. A world where the good versus evil, occasionally disrupted by comic treachery, plot simply does not exist. Valhalla’s conflict is messy and poorly defined in a way that actually revitalizes what had previously grown stale and stuffy.
Beside this are Valhalla’s true game design coup, a dismissal of the standard quest in favor of small, seamless little storytelling events. While large and expansive, Valhalla's rarely ties players down in a side story for much longer than five minutes. These don’t all hit, but for the few tortured tales - like an excruciatingly liberal-brained endeavor of whataboutism involving a greedy merchant exploiting his neighbor - there are many more that shine. In particular, a girl sat waiting for the last leaf to fall from a tree, in hopes it heralds the return of a father who promised he’d be back before said event.
This approach to micro storytelling alleviates much of the sensation of slogging through narrative quagmire the series has suffered from as it’s expanded, while still conveying the same vital bits of world building that make the map feel like more than just a sandbox. They represent a rare case in which someone, somewhere in Ubisoft looked at the rest of one of their games and decided that they didn’t need to shove a bunch of pointless gameplay into the middle of an experience that should expand the player’s understanding of the world.
Overtop of this is a decidedly Assassin’s Creed tinged mythological narrative, drawing heavily on ideas explored in Odyssey and its expansions. The primary thrust of this falters heavily - largely due to the fact that Norse mythology is a near inescapable pop culture touchstone and proximity to a more ambitious take in God of War - but where these elements weave back into that already strong core it produces some of the best writing Assassin’s Creed has ever seen, and likely ever will.
Few games pull off the slow sensation of creeping dread as well as when Eivor and Sigurd “ascend” into Valhalla. Few games confront their core themes as tactilely as Eivor laying down her axe in her escape. Few games so pointedly construct a palpable sense of loss of friendship and of faith, or the intersection of those two, as the Raven clan’s conquest grinding to a halt in Pyrrhic victory while the glory they chased turns to ash on Eivor’s tongue in the game’s brutal final act.
This game should have felt like a culmination of a new approach, a trimming away of the bloat in service of a game that demands attention. Unfortunately, there’s no more grim a tale in all of Valhalla than that of business interests.
Ironically enough, it’s the game’s namesake that represented the canary in the coal mine for Valhalla’s over-stuffing. Odyssey’s DLC leaned on its Greek mythological overtones and expanded them by throwing Kassandra head first into that era’s most important settings. Most importantly, as with Origin before it, Odyssey confined this to DLC. Valhalla does not, putting it front and center as optional side content that, in addition to pointlessly padding playtime with the game’s most grating, and mechanically worthless gameplay, sets up the mythological overtones of the main story.
The biggest problem with Valhalla’s dropping of Eivor into the metaphorical boots of Odin isn’t that the gameplay presents players with a mostly worthless series of annoying environmental puzzles and vapid collecting, but that it plays as straight as an arrow with the story. There is almost nothing in the side content that breaks from convention in any way. Those with even a passing familiarity with the source material, which again seems likely considering Norse lore’s prevalence in contemporary pop culture, will find almost nothing they haven't been thoroughly assaulted with before.
More galling is the deployment of these same elements later via DLC, almost all of which is purely a waste of time. From combat trials that demand the player trudge through encounters in recycled areas with tedious limits tacked on, to the game’s largest expansion - a bland, massive, nearly story free return to the already boring realm of the gods with a roguelike progression mechanic slapped over top. It’s hard not to see where the storytelling utility of Valhalla’s Valhalla ends, and the monetary utility of a second setting begins.
The free-to-play feeling of previous games’ loot and progression has, thankfully, been heavily toned back for Valhalla, with the player never really hitting a wall and a set pool of upgradeable weapons and armor replacing the ARPG style drops of Origin and Odyssey. That said, this system is still a victim of needless padding. None of it feels perfunctory in the moment, but it’s easy to see how someone might look at a map full of upgrade materials and items to collect and feel overwhelmed by it all. It's hard to argue all of these are necessary in an already massive game.
Perhaps this wouldn’t feel as staggering if it wasn’t paired with the game’s bevy of side content that actually does tie the player down. The series’ inane floating parchment chase nonsense is somehow back here, offering the player tattoo patterns in a pointless resurrection of the series’ most profoundly awful recurring mechanic. Mini-bosses also litter the map, offering little of value aside from a bland power level check. An annoying man in Ravensthorpe demands you collect silly Roman mask artifacts for him. Circles of mushrooms throw Eivor into a handful of boring puzzles and challenges, none of which is the least bit fulfilling.
The prevailing question here is why? To what end? Who fucking cares? I want to kick the shitty fake Roman dickhead out of Ravensthorpe the second I see him, so why doesn't Eivor?
Cairns represent the most tedious of side content, although I’m willing to be less harsh on them as they exist primarily as a storytelling vehicle. The same can’t be said for the game’s take on the classic Brotherhood era rifts, mind-rendingly boring platforming puzzles that serve as an obfuscation of vital narrative information. As someone irrationally attracted to Assassin’s Creed as a guilty pleasure series, few things it has done have managed to crawl under my skin and cause the same excruciating pain. I’d rather replay all of the series’ worst low points in their entirety before doing any of these ever again.
With a wealth of actual storytelling in the world, and a critical path that would take even the most focused player sixty hours to roll credits on, it’s hard to see where any of this cruft has value beyond keeping people hooked in and potentially buying cosmetics. And that's with a half dozen other pointless distractions left out of the discussion in this review.
The wheels of the business model must keep turning, however. While it’s sad that this nonsense turned a bunch of people off a genuinely well written game, no part of the broader Valhalla experience was harmed more by the business model than its two story focused DLC.
Wrath of the Druids and Siege of Paris are full of good ideas, but short on execution. It would be easy to sit back and point at the time these two small expansions were developed and write off their troubles as the fault of COVID. And while it definitely did play a role here, such as moments where voice actors couldn't be brought back, it’s Ubisoft’s business model that put them up against the wall to begin with.
The cessation of the yearly full Assassins’ Creed release was only a fractional lifting of Ubsioft’s collective foot from the series’ metaphorical gas pedal. The plan was clearly to replace that with a drip feed of content support for Valhalla, and that content must flow. Paired with the pandemic, the result is a pair of DLC rife with assets that needed second passes, narrative that needed tweaking, and takes that needed retaking.
Even without that, however, it would be hard to see where either of these two expansions would fit in a story so tonally focused and consistent in its pursuit of building its growing sense of unease over an already long runtime. The narrative is lesser for their inclusion, unless the player ignores them until a point at which their content is rendered trivial, as these detached blobs of distraction inject themselves at key turning points and shred them in the process.
The growing sense that something is wrong remains intact even with them there, but its focal point shifts from the inner machinations of the Raven clan to Ubisoft itself.
Something is wrong here, that Ubisoft would be so willing to bury its creatives’ best work under a mountain of bullshit. Unfortunately, like its Hollywood peers, Ubisoft seems unwilling to prioritize quality over quantity. The business model reigns supreme, even if that means cutting its own legs out from beneath it.
There’s a rare depth to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in a series full of shallow archetypes and fluffy, fantastical forays into the realm of the mythological. It’s not more accurate than its peers. On the deep end it dives eagerly into Norse lore, on the shallow it conveniently ignores little evidence of practices like tattooing among Viking clans for sake of character customization. Instead, where it shines is in its character, or specifically one of its characters.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to give Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt when the male version of Eivor is a cookie cutter nobody ripped straight out of the same premium television viking epics that muted enthusiasm for this release. Swap the lens around for his astoundingly gruff counterpart though, and suddenly, as with Kassandra in Odyssey, life flows through the narrative again. Something different and less predictable, a better delivery of lines with more to ponder - if still unfortunately neutered by the Pilsbury Snowboy’s inherent influence on the writing. An element of the narrative team is clearly dying to write female leads, and while this review isn’t the place to explore that one does wonder if they’ll ever be given their chance without some asshole fucking it up.
The fuzziness of the period’s historical figures does a lot of heavy lifting in Valhalla, allowing the writing team to break out of boxes and do more with their narrative over a broader cast. For past games, set in better documented eras, the writers at Ubisoft were occasionally forced to construct tortured parallel fictions. Massive conspiracies of fictional characters vying for the levers of power despite little interaction with the hands who pulled them in our reality. Here, historical characters like Ubba and Ivarr Ragnarson are free to fill vital, central narrative roles instead; escaping the little boxes that can only rarely be disturbed lest Assassin’s Creed unwrite the same history it relies on.
More importantly, though significant within the game’s mythological framework, Eivor is not the same world altering pivot point in Valhalla that previous characters have had to be. Valhalla’s version of southern Britain churns forwards without, and occasionally in spite of, her. She seems less the driver of action, and more someone drawn to it. A sense helped along by easily the strongest cast of characters the series has constructed since Black Flag’s tales of piracy in the fuzzy history of the Caribbean was similarly allowed off its leash.
The result is a narrative that flows better moment to moment than in the series’ more recent endeavors - even if that flow is slower and more deliberate than past games. Eivor’s relative inexperience as a character presents a more interesting story to explore, with the narrative allowing her to fail in ways the series has been unwilling to in the past. She's not a highly trained Assassin, in fact she cares little about them beyond where their interests naturally intersect hers. She’s also not particularly good at what she does aside from the fighting part. Her allies are not uniformly rallied around her, she doesn’t succeed constantly or deftly outsmart all of her foes, and her prose-like asides disguise an abrasive attitude that often gets her in trouble.
In the process Valhalla’s more grounded narrative weaves together plots into an eerily oppressive story; one that masterfully conveys the weight it places on a young character unwillingly forced into a role of leadership and grappling with its unavoidable realities. More importantly, one that stitches together that narrative into a pattern the series has never managed before. A world where the good versus evil, occasionally disrupted by comic treachery, plot simply does not exist. Valhalla’s conflict is messy and poorly defined in a way that actually revitalizes what had previously grown stale and stuffy.
Beside this are Valhalla’s true game design coup, a dismissal of the standard quest in favor of small, seamless little storytelling events. While large and expansive, Valhalla's rarely ties players down in a side story for much longer than five minutes. These don’t all hit, but for the few tortured tales - like an excruciatingly liberal-brained endeavor of whataboutism involving a greedy merchant exploiting his neighbor - there are many more that shine. In particular, a girl sat waiting for the last leaf to fall from a tree, in hopes it heralds the return of a father who promised he’d be back before said event.
This approach to micro storytelling alleviates much of the sensation of slogging through narrative quagmire the series has suffered from as it’s expanded, while still conveying the same vital bits of world building that make the map feel like more than just a sandbox. They represent a rare case in which someone, somewhere in Ubisoft looked at the rest of one of their games and decided that they didn’t need to shove a bunch of pointless gameplay into the middle of an experience that should expand the player’s understanding of the world.
Overtop of this is a decidedly Assassin’s Creed tinged mythological narrative, drawing heavily on ideas explored in Odyssey and its expansions. The primary thrust of this falters heavily - largely due to the fact that Norse mythology is a near inescapable pop culture touchstone and proximity to a more ambitious take in God of War - but where these elements weave back into that already strong core it produces some of the best writing Assassin’s Creed has ever seen, and likely ever will.
Few games pull off the slow sensation of creeping dread as well as when Eivor and Sigurd “ascend” into Valhalla. Few games confront their core themes as tactilely as Eivor laying down her axe in her escape. Few games so pointedly construct a palpable sense of loss of friendship and of faith, or the intersection of those two, as the Raven clan’s conquest grinding to a halt in Pyrrhic victory while the glory they chased turns to ash on Eivor’s tongue in the game’s brutal final act.
This game should have felt like a culmination of a new approach, a trimming away of the bloat in service of a game that demands attention. Unfortunately, there’s no more grim a tale in all of Valhalla than that of business interests.
Ironically enough, it’s the game’s namesake that represented the canary in the coal mine for Valhalla’s over-stuffing. Odyssey’s DLC leaned on its Greek mythological overtones and expanded them by throwing Kassandra head first into that era’s most important settings. Most importantly, as with Origin before it, Odyssey confined this to DLC. Valhalla does not, putting it front and center as optional side content that, in addition to pointlessly padding playtime with the game’s most grating, and mechanically worthless gameplay, sets up the mythological overtones of the main story.
The biggest problem with Valhalla’s dropping of Eivor into the metaphorical boots of Odin isn’t that the gameplay presents players with a mostly worthless series of annoying environmental puzzles and vapid collecting, but that it plays as straight as an arrow with the story. There is almost nothing in the side content that breaks from convention in any way. Those with even a passing familiarity with the source material, which again seems likely considering Norse lore’s prevalence in contemporary pop culture, will find almost nothing they haven't been thoroughly assaulted with before.
More galling is the deployment of these same elements later via DLC, almost all of which is purely a waste of time. From combat trials that demand the player trudge through encounters in recycled areas with tedious limits tacked on, to the game’s largest expansion - a bland, massive, nearly story free return to the already boring realm of the gods with a roguelike progression mechanic slapped over top. It’s hard not to see where the storytelling utility of Valhalla’s Valhalla ends, and the monetary utility of a second setting begins.
The free-to-play feeling of previous games’ loot and progression has, thankfully, been heavily toned back for Valhalla, with the player never really hitting a wall and a set pool of upgradeable weapons and armor replacing the ARPG style drops of Origin and Odyssey. That said, this system is still a victim of needless padding. None of it feels perfunctory in the moment, but it’s easy to see how someone might look at a map full of upgrade materials and items to collect and feel overwhelmed by it all. It's hard to argue all of these are necessary in an already massive game.
Perhaps this wouldn’t feel as staggering if it wasn’t paired with the game’s bevy of side content that actually does tie the player down. The series’ inane floating parchment chase nonsense is somehow back here, offering the player tattoo patterns in a pointless resurrection of the series’ most profoundly awful recurring mechanic. Mini-bosses also litter the map, offering little of value aside from a bland power level check. An annoying man in Ravensthorpe demands you collect silly Roman mask artifacts for him. Circles of mushrooms throw Eivor into a handful of boring puzzles and challenges, none of which is the least bit fulfilling.
The prevailing question here is why? To what end? Who fucking cares? I want to kick the shitty fake Roman dickhead out of Ravensthorpe the second I see him, so why doesn't Eivor?
Cairns represent the most tedious of side content, although I’m willing to be less harsh on them as they exist primarily as a storytelling vehicle. The same can’t be said for the game’s take on the classic Brotherhood era rifts, mind-rendingly boring platforming puzzles that serve as an obfuscation of vital narrative information. As someone irrationally attracted to Assassin’s Creed as a guilty pleasure series, few things it has done have managed to crawl under my skin and cause the same excruciating pain. I’d rather replay all of the series’ worst low points in their entirety before doing any of these ever again.
With a wealth of actual storytelling in the world, and a critical path that would take even the most focused player sixty hours to roll credits on, it’s hard to see where any of this cruft has value beyond keeping people hooked in and potentially buying cosmetics. And that's with a half dozen other pointless distractions left out of the discussion in this review.
The wheels of the business model must keep turning, however. While it’s sad that this nonsense turned a bunch of people off a genuinely well written game, no part of the broader Valhalla experience was harmed more by the business model than its two story focused DLC.
Wrath of the Druids and Siege of Paris are full of good ideas, but short on execution. It would be easy to sit back and point at the time these two small expansions were developed and write off their troubles as the fault of COVID. And while it definitely did play a role here, such as moments where voice actors couldn't be brought back, it’s Ubisoft’s business model that put them up against the wall to begin with.
The cessation of the yearly full Assassins’ Creed release was only a fractional lifting of Ubsioft’s collective foot from the series’ metaphorical gas pedal. The plan was clearly to replace that with a drip feed of content support for Valhalla, and that content must flow. Paired with the pandemic, the result is a pair of DLC rife with assets that needed second passes, narrative that needed tweaking, and takes that needed retaking.
Even without that, however, it would be hard to see where either of these two expansions would fit in a story so tonally focused and consistent in its pursuit of building its growing sense of unease over an already long runtime. The narrative is lesser for their inclusion, unless the player ignores them until a point at which their content is rendered trivial, as these detached blobs of distraction inject themselves at key turning points and shred them in the process.
The growing sense that something is wrong remains intact even with them there, but its focal point shifts from the inner machinations of the Raven clan to Ubisoft itself.
Something is wrong here, that Ubisoft would be so willing to bury its creatives’ best work under a mountain of bullshit. Unfortunately, like its Hollywood peers, Ubisoft seems unwilling to prioritize quality over quantity. The business model reigns supreme, even if that means cutting its own legs out from beneath it.
This review contains spoilers
In Short: A Valhalla expansion similar in scope to its peers, chopped free of its context so it can be sold as a standalone game for double the price, inexplicably described as a “welcome change” by multiple critics citing outright falsehoods.
Note: This includes light spoilers for AC Valhalla as well.
Mirage appears to be an apt subtitle for Basim’s Assassin’s Creed side story, as this relatively conservative expansion convinced a gaggle of reviewers it’s a full game doing things it’s clearly not. Even excusing suspect pricing; how, exactly, a return to a formula run deeply into the ground over a decade of prior installments is a welcome change for some people is beyond me. Especially from those so supposedly fatigued by the series they skipped this game’s source material outright.
"The return of social stealth", "the purest stealth game in the series", "new progression systems", "the elimination of fetch quests", "rewarding non-lethality", "a map free from icon barf", "focused". These and more claims litter reviews for AC Mirage, and all of them are false in equal measure.
The inexplicably hyped return to only occasionally present social stealth ignores a couple vital bits of context. Following the original Assassin’s Creed social stealth was, in general, de-emphasized in the series. For some titles, such as the much maligned Unity, it was re-emphasized, but the general trend was towards giving players more tools - and in turn making the old ones less vital. In the larger, more sprawling games it fell into the role of a set piece item almost always superseded by more accessible environmental stealth.
With the introduction of larger worlds and an RPG twist, it mostly fell out of the toolbox for Origins and Odyssey, two games which had players taking on the roles of more high profile individuals in Bayek and Kassandra (no, no one cares about Alexios).
However, Valhalla brought the mechanics back with an upgrade: the introduction of a cloak. While more sparsely distributed and easily lost in the flow of viking raids, large portions of Valhalla did ask the player to move more shrewdly through them than an axe wielding raider normally would. These mechanics hold over in a more dumbed down version for Mirage, as the, again inexplicably lauded, disguises in the game appear too infrequently and too late to make the same impact. They also lack the nuance of Eivor’s cloak, simply granting immunity to being spotted in some areas rather than mobile cover for stealthy endeavors.
Mirage makes little attempt to live up to the series’ most dedicated adherence to its pioneering stealth formula, likely because the bones of the expansion were not built for it. This game might have been extricated from Valhalla’s executable, but it’s not free of it entirely.
The underlying tech at the core of Mirage lacks the detailed contextual crowd systems of previous games, making utilizing them for stealth an exercise in doing something that feels wrong. Blending lacks the ideal stickiness for navigation, occasionally causing it to drop at inopportune moments. Basim also clumsily bonks into crowds of NPCs instead of deftly navigating through them like Ezio and others, making them as much an impediment as a resource.
A pursuit system designed for larger areas makes for inconsistent escapes, with enemies sometimes appearing to see through buildings, and the decay rate for open combat lasting about twice as long as it should. I regularly found myself depositing Basim in a hay bail or some other hiding place, and turning to a different task entirely while enemies a half dozen streets away dinked around for minutes at a time before giving up the hunt. This is clearly a system meant for Eivor’s horseback retreats through English forests, an idea supported by the least competent pursuers the series has ever seen. Basim’s foes regularly fail to even leave the ground, and even when they do struggle mightily with pathfinding to his last known location.
Beyond this, enemy AI fairs little better. Even in restricted areas, guard reactions to fights are erratic. Sometimes it's possible to deftly dispatch a pair of guards in open combat while avoiding a bigger fight. Other times the series’ typical running sword fight kicks off and you’re murdering your way through a fort. Even between these there’s strange amounts of variation. Enemies are just as likely to ignore an obvious fight, even within a confined space, as they are to notice an action from unexpectedly far away.
In an especially egregious misstep, enemies can also respawn in areas over the course of a mission, meaning you may be punished for stealthily slinking about by returning to find dead enemies miraculously reincarnated as if you hadn’t stuck a blade in them five minutes earlier. A decidedly annoying occurrence in the large, late game spaces. In a stealth series, especially in a stealth series that has never had this problem before, this is an absurdly massive own goal.
All in all, the game is no more pure in its stealth as you hug a corner, piling up guards’ bodies as they stupidly wander into the same trap over and over, than any previous game in the series. A few old ideas make a comeback, but they’re not used any differently than they had been or updated in any meaningful ways - and in the case of things like tools, are used far less ambitiously. Insofar as stealth’s importance is emphasized here, it is only by the underwhelming quality of the mechanics around it in relation to its relative stability.
Mission structure also does little to break with the open approach of more recent games, or replicate the cinematic set pieces and flair of the era the game seeks to evoke. Story-centric assassinations are regularly flat affairs, putting more effort into seeming like the player has options than actually providing said options. The most structurally ambitious of the main missions, The Great Symposium, ends with a beat for beat, more poorly executed, recreation of a mission from AC Valhalla; something I personally couldn’t help but find profoundly underwhelming.
The return of factions, and introduction of contextual infiltration sequences like recruiting rebels to do the fighting while you slip past should be welcome additions, but in their rare appearances are too often gated behind a trio of currencies earned through the supposedly non-existent open world busywork of Mirage’s “contract” system.
Want to bribe someone for information? Lower shop prices? Open a valuable chest? Hire mercenaries? Well, you’ll have to steal something, babysit an idiot, or stab someone for the privilege. Even in the game's closing moments, I found myself locked out of options by this inane currency system, forced to find my own way because I hadn't given Ubisoft enough of my time to earn a little jade colored bead.
In an actual game, perhaps the factions would be fleshed out enough narratively to justify these diversions; however, Mirage’s expansion-sized scoping means these people are all faceless resources annoyingly gated behind nonsensical baubles the player can only make use of if they allow Ubisoft to pad playtime stats with pointless fluff.
What little is left of Valhalla’s commitment to bite-sized world building, just a half dozen side quests, is dwarfed by this hollow resource grind.
As an aside, Kotaku’s claim of a rewarding non-lethality is especially strange, as its functional non-existence and the series’ title essentially being “Murderguy Way-of-Life” would suggest to most writers this is not a claim worth making. Non-lethality in this game exists as more of a design decision, with the inability to permanently take guards out of the equation used early on to increase challenge.
Like many games, the potential of Mirage’s non-lethal options fizzle out into a loose thread of a system that dead ends without any meaningful gameplay support. This is, unfortunately, not an immersive sim - as much as I wish it was. There is no Dishonored style “low chaos” route. Basim is going to kill people, and the game is still designed to encourage this. Sure, you could upgrade your sleep darts and send a guard to dream land, but when the game doesn’t acknowledge it and there’s a hay bail or stalking zone right next to them, what’s the point?
A broken take on the classic notoriety system contributes to the AI’s often dense responses, rarely spawning the unique enemies it’s supposed to. Enemies in the street often fail to notice a player walking past them even at maximum notoriety, and occasionally when open combat is still in its decay phase. More frustratingly, however, is some enemies failing to reset their alert status, detecting and attacking Basim even if he is not in combat or a restricted space and has no notoriety.
Said combat is the soap flavored icing binding together Mirage’s stale leftover layer cake of gameplay. An attempt to accommodate systems like armor and weapons being unceremoniously hacked down to nubs, the game gestures at a return to the series’ roots with lock on rock paper scissors combat. The result is the clumsiest the series has ever felt in a fight.
Even though tools have never been less useful in open combat, enough elements like skills and mechanics bleed through from the new Assassin’s Creed games that Basim still retains a large advantage.
While they hit marginally harder, Mirage’s enemies aren’t tougher, or more difficult in their design than any other game. If anything they’re significantly less challenging than a lot of basic baddies the trio of RPG style games came up with and never approach the same level of punishing as Unity’s snipers. Instead, fighting here is simply more boring and tedious, revolving around four to five exceptionally simplistic archetypes.
The primary challenge is, instead, wrestling with the game’s unruly camera angles and inconsistent inputs. While early games in the series lent themselves to a “fight to run” approach, Mirage lacks the fluidity in any system to make this fun. And so the optimal approach when combat breaks out is expedience, retreating and picking enemies off in the same inane dance, over and over again. By the time the player has familiarized themselves with the systems, and leveled up or upgraded up a bit, the only real driving force behind avoiding combat is the accompanying frustration and boredom.
UX, or user experience, design is a similarly tortured exercise in fiddling with things that worked fine. Mirage attempts to hide its still extant Ubisoft brand of map marker barf by dynamically fading markers as the player zooms out. To their credit, this seems to have fooled some critics, but anyone who actually cares will find that the more dense set of markers they may need are on an absurdly over-zoomed, fixed map setting that makes finding anything a pain in the ass.
Similarly, map markers for main quests take players to the “Investigation” tab of the menu instead of marking them for tracking, regularly eliciting an inane bit of menu fumbling while trying to mark them and then fast travel nearby. Rounding out the user hostile decisions is an out and out perverse over obsession with the games industry’s wildly misguided attempts to hide their user interfaces in the name of a gag inducing idea of “immersion” that only exists in the heads of detached middle managers. Mirage regularly fails to display necessary information in a timely fashion, especially for things like held button presses and Basim’s stamina, disrupting gameplay in the process.
Visuals are easily Mirage’s most even core competence, but they still come with notable faults. Baghdad looks amazing when standing still, and holds up laudably in motion in a world where performance issues in new releases abound (again, likely a downstream effect of borrowed tech). Things fall apart a bit in cinematic sequences, with animations falling short of series high points, and some character models looking like they needed another concepting pass.
Outside the city, the game’s object fade struggles, producing noticeable pop in of vegetation that simply didn’t exist in Valhalla, Odyssey, or Origins. This is likely due to the density of Baghdad demanding a shorter draw distance, and though small it’s still noticeable.
Story progression shows the most interesting attempts at evolution. Contemporary Assassin’s Creed’s adaptations of Shadow of Mordor’s nemesis system grew a bit stale by Valhalla, with even Ubisoft’s devs failing to find compelling reasons beyond completionism for Eivor to carve through the story irrelevant bits of the massive target tree.
Mirage attempts to solve this problem by recontextualizing the system to be about investigating people of interest. While this does present an interesting change in that sometimes non-enemies, and even non-characters, appear on the Investigation menu’s atlas, the user experience is unfortunately altered little. As with previous versions, clues are less sought out than incidentally obtained through normal play, and progression requires even less care than in any prior iterations - likely due to the game’s reduced scope. There’s a good idea here, at least, and that’s worth highlighting, but the suggestion of investigation rarely produces a sense that it’s being taken part in.
The actual narrative, however, fails to make a case for itself as in any way essential - even for fans of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. While the game should be lauded for representing the Middle East and Islam through a lens other than Christianity or Christian tinged secularism, the composition of the rest of its narrative is broadly flat.
It’s fairly well established at this point that attempts to introduce female leads in Odyssey and Valhalla were undercut by leadership at Ubisoft - and, let’s be honest, it certainly seems like that could also be the case for Origins and Syndicate - making the centering of one of Valhalla’s least interesting characters in the form of a cookie cutter lead from the series’ first decade feel like a wasted opportunity.
Basim’s original appearance was, for me, the least compelling part of a winding story about Eivor’s loss of faith, leadership, and place in a changing world. An important part of a story that delved deeply into the nature of the tales we tell, and ponders what might be missing from the ones we elevate. But a part that was let down by Valhalla’s relatively flat adaptation of Norse lore. The result was a character that felt more like a binding thread between disparate elements than a defined villain, as the game turned to ponder Eivor’s less tangible demons in its closing moments.
This is not the same character, though. There is no reason for Mirage’s far less ambitious version of Basim to be a main character of anything, even this overpriced expandalone, beyond his proximity to a better executed story in one of the series’ main entries. Gone is the plotting and scheming, the ambition and wit, the quintessential Loki-ness of the character. Mirage’s Basim instead embarks on a facile tale of revenge so overwhelmingly bland and devoid of intrigue that it fades into the background of the simple action of playing the game. The occasional teasing of Assassin’s Creed’s light dusting of the supernatural can’t save Mirage from a bar napkin draft level of narrative complexity.
While I’m normally not one to harp on length, it seems a fair assertion here in a “game” not aspiring to any higher artistic endeavors. Especially one asserting that it is a full game while obviously being an expansion for Valhalla, and being supported in that claim by feckless morons.
Even with extended amounts of time sat idling in menus and tackling completionist tasks, Mirage barely ticked over the 20hr mark for me. Baghdad, and Mirage in general, is larger than what’s on offer in either of Valhalla’s narrative expansions Siege of Paris or Wrath of the Druids, but only in terms of the complexity of the task required to build the city. When compared to its peer expansions, Mirage’s offering at double the price is dubious. When compared to similar projects like Spider-Man: Miles Morales, it’s almost insultingly shallow.
In general Mirage earns its namesake. It’s not really a full game, even though it pretends to be one and a handful of people have convinced themselves it is. It’s also not as committed to anything it’s doing as it pretends to be. It’s not a return to some old form, because it’s built on the foundation of the new. It’s not even a fun representation of a historical city, thanks to the general lack of interest the game has in actually exploring Baghdad. It's not a satisfying prequel to Valhalla when its central character is unrecognizably altered.
This could have been an opportunity for Ubisoft to test the waters with new ideas, new approaches to game structure, a new vision of what they’ll let their characters be. A chance to let go of whatever inane internal metrics drive them to annoy the piss out of their players in search of arbitrary increases in play time. To find a way to blend old and new.
Instead they retreated entirely into the shell of past successes, attempting - and unfortunately succeeding - at getting a bunch of people that their own design decisions pushed away to cape for a half-hearted release schedule plugging stopgap out of searingly misguided nostalgia.
The result is hollow. A bland, unessential tale of nothing, wrapped in the shredded remains of a more entertaining game. I can recall at least bits and pieces of every other Assassin’s Creed game, but for the life of me I can’t pinpoint anything in this slog that I’ll be able to recall a year from now.
Note: This includes light spoilers for AC Valhalla as well.
Mirage appears to be an apt subtitle for Basim’s Assassin’s Creed side story, as this relatively conservative expansion convinced a gaggle of reviewers it’s a full game doing things it’s clearly not. Even excusing suspect pricing; how, exactly, a return to a formula run deeply into the ground over a decade of prior installments is a welcome change for some people is beyond me. Especially from those so supposedly fatigued by the series they skipped this game’s source material outright.
"The return of social stealth", "the purest stealth game in the series", "new progression systems", "the elimination of fetch quests", "rewarding non-lethality", "a map free from icon barf", "focused". These and more claims litter reviews for AC Mirage, and all of them are false in equal measure.
The inexplicably hyped return to only occasionally present social stealth ignores a couple vital bits of context. Following the original Assassin’s Creed social stealth was, in general, de-emphasized in the series. For some titles, such as the much maligned Unity, it was re-emphasized, but the general trend was towards giving players more tools - and in turn making the old ones less vital. In the larger, more sprawling games it fell into the role of a set piece item almost always superseded by more accessible environmental stealth.
With the introduction of larger worlds and an RPG twist, it mostly fell out of the toolbox for Origins and Odyssey, two games which had players taking on the roles of more high profile individuals in Bayek and Kassandra (no, no one cares about Alexios).
However, Valhalla brought the mechanics back with an upgrade: the introduction of a cloak. While more sparsely distributed and easily lost in the flow of viking raids, large portions of Valhalla did ask the player to move more shrewdly through them than an axe wielding raider normally would. These mechanics hold over in a more dumbed down version for Mirage, as the, again inexplicably lauded, disguises in the game appear too infrequently and too late to make the same impact. They also lack the nuance of Eivor’s cloak, simply granting immunity to being spotted in some areas rather than mobile cover for stealthy endeavors.
Mirage makes little attempt to live up to the series’ most dedicated adherence to its pioneering stealth formula, likely because the bones of the expansion were not built for it. This game might have been extricated from Valhalla’s executable, but it’s not free of it entirely.
The underlying tech at the core of Mirage lacks the detailed contextual crowd systems of previous games, making utilizing them for stealth an exercise in doing something that feels wrong. Blending lacks the ideal stickiness for navigation, occasionally causing it to drop at inopportune moments. Basim also clumsily bonks into crowds of NPCs instead of deftly navigating through them like Ezio and others, making them as much an impediment as a resource.
A pursuit system designed for larger areas makes for inconsistent escapes, with enemies sometimes appearing to see through buildings, and the decay rate for open combat lasting about twice as long as it should. I regularly found myself depositing Basim in a hay bail or some other hiding place, and turning to a different task entirely while enemies a half dozen streets away dinked around for minutes at a time before giving up the hunt. This is clearly a system meant for Eivor’s horseback retreats through English forests, an idea supported by the least competent pursuers the series has ever seen. Basim’s foes regularly fail to even leave the ground, and even when they do struggle mightily with pathfinding to his last known location.
Beyond this, enemy AI fairs little better. Even in restricted areas, guard reactions to fights are erratic. Sometimes it's possible to deftly dispatch a pair of guards in open combat while avoiding a bigger fight. Other times the series’ typical running sword fight kicks off and you’re murdering your way through a fort. Even between these there’s strange amounts of variation. Enemies are just as likely to ignore an obvious fight, even within a confined space, as they are to notice an action from unexpectedly far away.
In an especially egregious misstep, enemies can also respawn in areas over the course of a mission, meaning you may be punished for stealthily slinking about by returning to find dead enemies miraculously reincarnated as if you hadn’t stuck a blade in them five minutes earlier. A decidedly annoying occurrence in the large, late game spaces. In a stealth series, especially in a stealth series that has never had this problem before, this is an absurdly massive own goal.
All in all, the game is no more pure in its stealth as you hug a corner, piling up guards’ bodies as they stupidly wander into the same trap over and over, than any previous game in the series. A few old ideas make a comeback, but they’re not used any differently than they had been or updated in any meaningful ways - and in the case of things like tools, are used far less ambitiously. Insofar as stealth’s importance is emphasized here, it is only by the underwhelming quality of the mechanics around it in relation to its relative stability.
Mission structure also does little to break with the open approach of more recent games, or replicate the cinematic set pieces and flair of the era the game seeks to evoke. Story-centric assassinations are regularly flat affairs, putting more effort into seeming like the player has options than actually providing said options. The most structurally ambitious of the main missions, The Great Symposium, ends with a beat for beat, more poorly executed, recreation of a mission from AC Valhalla; something I personally couldn’t help but find profoundly underwhelming.
The return of factions, and introduction of contextual infiltration sequences like recruiting rebels to do the fighting while you slip past should be welcome additions, but in their rare appearances are too often gated behind a trio of currencies earned through the supposedly non-existent open world busywork of Mirage’s “contract” system.
Want to bribe someone for information? Lower shop prices? Open a valuable chest? Hire mercenaries? Well, you’ll have to steal something, babysit an idiot, or stab someone for the privilege. Even in the game's closing moments, I found myself locked out of options by this inane currency system, forced to find my own way because I hadn't given Ubisoft enough of my time to earn a little jade colored bead.
In an actual game, perhaps the factions would be fleshed out enough narratively to justify these diversions; however, Mirage’s expansion-sized scoping means these people are all faceless resources annoyingly gated behind nonsensical baubles the player can only make use of if they allow Ubisoft to pad playtime stats with pointless fluff.
What little is left of Valhalla’s commitment to bite-sized world building, just a half dozen side quests, is dwarfed by this hollow resource grind.
As an aside, Kotaku’s claim of a rewarding non-lethality is especially strange, as its functional non-existence and the series’ title essentially being “Murderguy Way-of-Life” would suggest to most writers this is not a claim worth making. Non-lethality in this game exists as more of a design decision, with the inability to permanently take guards out of the equation used early on to increase challenge.
Like many games, the potential of Mirage’s non-lethal options fizzle out into a loose thread of a system that dead ends without any meaningful gameplay support. This is, unfortunately, not an immersive sim - as much as I wish it was. There is no Dishonored style “low chaos” route. Basim is going to kill people, and the game is still designed to encourage this. Sure, you could upgrade your sleep darts and send a guard to dream land, but when the game doesn’t acknowledge it and there’s a hay bail or stalking zone right next to them, what’s the point?
A broken take on the classic notoriety system contributes to the AI’s often dense responses, rarely spawning the unique enemies it’s supposed to. Enemies in the street often fail to notice a player walking past them even at maximum notoriety, and occasionally when open combat is still in its decay phase. More frustratingly, however, is some enemies failing to reset their alert status, detecting and attacking Basim even if he is not in combat or a restricted space and has no notoriety.
Said combat is the soap flavored icing binding together Mirage’s stale leftover layer cake of gameplay. An attempt to accommodate systems like armor and weapons being unceremoniously hacked down to nubs, the game gestures at a return to the series’ roots with lock on rock paper scissors combat. The result is the clumsiest the series has ever felt in a fight.
Even though tools have never been less useful in open combat, enough elements like skills and mechanics bleed through from the new Assassin’s Creed games that Basim still retains a large advantage.
While they hit marginally harder, Mirage’s enemies aren’t tougher, or more difficult in their design than any other game. If anything they’re significantly less challenging than a lot of basic baddies the trio of RPG style games came up with and never approach the same level of punishing as Unity’s snipers. Instead, fighting here is simply more boring and tedious, revolving around four to five exceptionally simplistic archetypes.
The primary challenge is, instead, wrestling with the game’s unruly camera angles and inconsistent inputs. While early games in the series lent themselves to a “fight to run” approach, Mirage lacks the fluidity in any system to make this fun. And so the optimal approach when combat breaks out is expedience, retreating and picking enemies off in the same inane dance, over and over again. By the time the player has familiarized themselves with the systems, and leveled up or upgraded up a bit, the only real driving force behind avoiding combat is the accompanying frustration and boredom.
UX, or user experience, design is a similarly tortured exercise in fiddling with things that worked fine. Mirage attempts to hide its still extant Ubisoft brand of map marker barf by dynamically fading markers as the player zooms out. To their credit, this seems to have fooled some critics, but anyone who actually cares will find that the more dense set of markers they may need are on an absurdly over-zoomed, fixed map setting that makes finding anything a pain in the ass.
Similarly, map markers for main quests take players to the “Investigation” tab of the menu instead of marking them for tracking, regularly eliciting an inane bit of menu fumbling while trying to mark them and then fast travel nearby. Rounding out the user hostile decisions is an out and out perverse over obsession with the games industry’s wildly misguided attempts to hide their user interfaces in the name of a gag inducing idea of “immersion” that only exists in the heads of detached middle managers. Mirage regularly fails to display necessary information in a timely fashion, especially for things like held button presses and Basim’s stamina, disrupting gameplay in the process.
Visuals are easily Mirage’s most even core competence, but they still come with notable faults. Baghdad looks amazing when standing still, and holds up laudably in motion in a world where performance issues in new releases abound (again, likely a downstream effect of borrowed tech). Things fall apart a bit in cinematic sequences, with animations falling short of series high points, and some character models looking like they needed another concepting pass.
Outside the city, the game’s object fade struggles, producing noticeable pop in of vegetation that simply didn’t exist in Valhalla, Odyssey, or Origins. This is likely due to the density of Baghdad demanding a shorter draw distance, and though small it’s still noticeable.
Story progression shows the most interesting attempts at evolution. Contemporary Assassin’s Creed’s adaptations of Shadow of Mordor’s nemesis system grew a bit stale by Valhalla, with even Ubisoft’s devs failing to find compelling reasons beyond completionism for Eivor to carve through the story irrelevant bits of the massive target tree.
Mirage attempts to solve this problem by recontextualizing the system to be about investigating people of interest. While this does present an interesting change in that sometimes non-enemies, and even non-characters, appear on the Investigation menu’s atlas, the user experience is unfortunately altered little. As with previous versions, clues are less sought out than incidentally obtained through normal play, and progression requires even less care than in any prior iterations - likely due to the game’s reduced scope. There’s a good idea here, at least, and that’s worth highlighting, but the suggestion of investigation rarely produces a sense that it’s being taken part in.
The actual narrative, however, fails to make a case for itself as in any way essential - even for fans of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. While the game should be lauded for representing the Middle East and Islam through a lens other than Christianity or Christian tinged secularism, the composition of the rest of its narrative is broadly flat.
It’s fairly well established at this point that attempts to introduce female leads in Odyssey and Valhalla were undercut by leadership at Ubisoft - and, let’s be honest, it certainly seems like that could also be the case for Origins and Syndicate - making the centering of one of Valhalla’s least interesting characters in the form of a cookie cutter lead from the series’ first decade feel like a wasted opportunity.
Basim’s original appearance was, for me, the least compelling part of a winding story about Eivor’s loss of faith, leadership, and place in a changing world. An important part of a story that delved deeply into the nature of the tales we tell, and ponders what might be missing from the ones we elevate. But a part that was let down by Valhalla’s relatively flat adaptation of Norse lore. The result was a character that felt more like a binding thread between disparate elements than a defined villain, as the game turned to ponder Eivor’s less tangible demons in its closing moments.
This is not the same character, though. There is no reason for Mirage’s far less ambitious version of Basim to be a main character of anything, even this overpriced expandalone, beyond his proximity to a better executed story in one of the series’ main entries. Gone is the plotting and scheming, the ambition and wit, the quintessential Loki-ness of the character. Mirage’s Basim instead embarks on a facile tale of revenge so overwhelmingly bland and devoid of intrigue that it fades into the background of the simple action of playing the game. The occasional teasing of Assassin’s Creed’s light dusting of the supernatural can’t save Mirage from a bar napkin draft level of narrative complexity.
While I’m normally not one to harp on length, it seems a fair assertion here in a “game” not aspiring to any higher artistic endeavors. Especially one asserting that it is a full game while obviously being an expansion for Valhalla, and being supported in that claim by feckless morons.
Even with extended amounts of time sat idling in menus and tackling completionist tasks, Mirage barely ticked over the 20hr mark for me. Baghdad, and Mirage in general, is larger than what’s on offer in either of Valhalla’s narrative expansions Siege of Paris or Wrath of the Druids, but only in terms of the complexity of the task required to build the city. When compared to its peer expansions, Mirage’s offering at double the price is dubious. When compared to similar projects like Spider-Man: Miles Morales, it’s almost insultingly shallow.
In general Mirage earns its namesake. It’s not really a full game, even though it pretends to be one and a handful of people have convinced themselves it is. It’s also not as committed to anything it’s doing as it pretends to be. It’s not a return to some old form, because it’s built on the foundation of the new. It’s not even a fun representation of a historical city, thanks to the general lack of interest the game has in actually exploring Baghdad. It's not a satisfying prequel to Valhalla when its central character is unrecognizably altered.
This could have been an opportunity for Ubisoft to test the waters with new ideas, new approaches to game structure, a new vision of what they’ll let their characters be. A chance to let go of whatever inane internal metrics drive them to annoy the piss out of their players in search of arbitrary increases in play time. To find a way to blend old and new.
Instead they retreated entirely into the shell of past successes, attempting - and unfortunately succeeding - at getting a bunch of people that their own design decisions pushed away to cape for a half-hearted release schedule plugging stopgap out of searingly misguided nostalgia.
The result is hollow. A bland, unessential tale of nothing, wrapped in the shredded remains of a more entertaining game. I can recall at least bits and pieces of every other Assassin’s Creed game, but for the life of me I can’t pinpoint anything in this slog that I’ll be able to recall a year from now.
2023
In short: An arcade racer vastly outclassed by its flashier sibling, playing at being a sim without any apparent attempt at improving its core issues.
Something feels off about Forza Motorsport. Somewhere between the inexplicably unruly vehicles and curiously small track selection, is a void that shouldn't exist in a game that's spent the last half decade and change supposedly attempting to find itself, and returned with a branding reset that suggests a fresh start.
Forza Motorsport is a game that has no identity. The cover art featuring Cadillac's Le Mans Hypercar, selection of tracks, and game progression's commitment to upgrades and setups, suggest it wants to be a sim. The swimmy car physics' persistent power slides, inconsistent feedback, and still woeful racing wheel experience suggest the opposite.
The result is a game that feels worse as a sim than its primary competitor, Gran Turismo 7, and fails to match the casual fun or flair of its sibling, Forza Horizon - despite offering blessed freedom from that series' profoundly grating festival shtick. The same over-wrought self-seriousness tempered by GT7's general mechanical competence becomes positively abrasive in a game where even slow cars regularly feel like an unpredictable handful. Absent Horizon's more engaging structure, and menagerie of vehicular monstrosities, every vehicle being as likely to break loose mid corner as wallow off into the trackside mud like a two ton pig transforms from slight annoyance into glaring frustration.
Pair all of this with a game that feels like a yearly sports title's annual refresh, rife with performance issues and lacking any obvious refinement in the execution of its foundational elements beyond fine, if underwhelmingly thin, alterations of its single player offering and you're left with a game that fills no niche.
It doesn't play in the same league, mechanics wise, as Sony's hallmark racer. It's not a good enough racing game, or a fun enough single player experience, to elevate itself above Horizon as a destination casual racing game.
Of the racing games you could play, this is certainly one. Beyond that there's little to say.
Something feels off about Forza Motorsport. Somewhere between the inexplicably unruly vehicles and curiously small track selection, is a void that shouldn't exist in a game that's spent the last half decade and change supposedly attempting to find itself, and returned with a branding reset that suggests a fresh start.
Forza Motorsport is a game that has no identity. The cover art featuring Cadillac's Le Mans Hypercar, selection of tracks, and game progression's commitment to upgrades and setups, suggest it wants to be a sim. The swimmy car physics' persistent power slides, inconsistent feedback, and still woeful racing wheel experience suggest the opposite.
The result is a game that feels worse as a sim than its primary competitor, Gran Turismo 7, and fails to match the casual fun or flair of its sibling, Forza Horizon - despite offering blessed freedom from that series' profoundly grating festival shtick. The same over-wrought self-seriousness tempered by GT7's general mechanical competence becomes positively abrasive in a game where even slow cars regularly feel like an unpredictable handful. Absent Horizon's more engaging structure, and menagerie of vehicular monstrosities, every vehicle being as likely to break loose mid corner as wallow off into the trackside mud like a two ton pig transforms from slight annoyance into glaring frustration.
Pair all of this with a game that feels like a yearly sports title's annual refresh, rife with performance issues and lacking any obvious refinement in the execution of its foundational elements beyond fine, if underwhelmingly thin, alterations of its single player offering and you're left with a game that fills no niche.
It doesn't play in the same league, mechanics wise, as Sony's hallmark racer. It's not a good enough racing game, or a fun enough single player experience, to elevate itself above Horizon as a destination casual racing game.
Of the racing games you could play, this is certainly one. Beyond that there's little to say.
2023
This review contains spoilers
In short, the video game equivalent of a prosaic sports coach's platitude laden pep talk prior their team getting steamrolled.
You'd be forgiven for going into Starfield expecting an ambitious game. All the marketing spoke of exploration and wonder on the edge of space, of Bethesda's biggest ever game, and of harnessing the spirit of early human space exploration. Everyone wanted us to believe this was a massive undertaking, something new for Bethesda after a quarter century of middling fantasy and a purchased IP.
Starfield is none of that, however, choosing instead to cling so tightly to the vine the game was grown on that the only result is rot.
At its core Starfield is the cynical combination of Fallout's mechanics teetering on top of Skyrim's narrative structure. The amalgamation presents itself as if a checklist of features from those games was simply devised in a conference room and worked through with little else in the way of thought.
Combat and exploration behaves almost identically to Fallout, with the added wrinkle of RPG-esque aim sway on all the weapons for the purpose of annoying, but rarely hindering, players who have not put points into combat categories.
Like Fallout, melee weapons are useless, no matter how heavily the character is built for them. All but the weakest enemies in all but the smallest groups will chunk away enough health to send even committed players ducking for cover and resorting to ranged weapons - if the lack of variety in a game 5+ years in the making doesn't see them simply falling back to whatever is easiest first.
Stealth in melee range is similarly broken to its predecessor, becoming mostly useless thanks to a game design that does not support that type of play. Even the game's seemingly powerful cloaking armor is fairly useless, having no appreciable impact on whether or not an enemy detects the player. At a distance stealth remains the most powerful option in the game, with the only reason to forgo attempting a sneaky approach being general apathy or impatience on the part of the player.
The weapons even fall into the same categories as Fallout, with a couple of weapon types forced to the forefront due to a lack of ammo for the others. Starfield even replicates the uselessness of automatic weaponry in its immediate gameplay predecessor, with the prospect of chewing through your entire supply of ammunition impotently plinking away at enemy health bars feeling vastly inferior to high damage single shot weapons with stealth bonuses. Dumping 50+ shots into a guy when you could take him out in 2-3 has never been less appealing a decade on.
Insofar as there are any changes to the systems designed for Fallout 4, the changes presented are mostly aesthetic or simply outright bad.
The digipicking mini game at least replaces lock picking and hacking mini games with something more engaging, although replacing both with the same thing all but guarantees it will become a loathed element of this game in time.
The changes to how Persuasion works in conversations, however, are a significant downgrade. An impressive feat considering the process in previous Bethesda titles, or adjacent games like Fallout New Vegas, varied from straight skill check to invisible dice roll. The brainless back and forth, often involving NPCs responding to head scratching player options with equally nonsensical generic voice lines, not only makes the process more tedious, but also succeeds at somehow making talking your way into and out of ridiculous situations even more absurd and unbelievable than in past games; it is hard to take the feature seriously when it almost always involves the other party in the conversation turning into an absolute fool, easily fleeced by the rhetorical equivalent of "got your nose".
At least the days of a single skill check or dice roll let me imagine a more complex conversation occurred, instead of asserting that no, in fact, a pair of absolute goobers engaged in a madlibs skit instead.
The most disappointing mechanical failure comes in the form of the game's building system, something so stripped bare and thoroughly neutered it's a shock Bethesda touted it as a selling point at all. A true achievement considering Fallout 4 settlement building was notoriously ropey and under designed. Even Fallout 76's building offers more variation and interest than Starfield, a game that's willing to charge you 235,000 in game credits for a space so small that it makes the notoriously tiny Dugout player home from Fallout 4 seem palatial in comparison.
It's rather absurd a system vital to the longevity of the studio's previous big release is so functionally inert here. Building options are so few, and limitations so strict, one wonders if even the actually ambitious elements of Bethesda's modding community will attempt to construct something fun, or even less profoundly annoying to engage with, than the desiccated corpse of a concept Bethesda kicked out the door as if attempting to kill desire for it in their player base.
Still more elements are downgrades by way of simplification. Character creation is an unwieldy system of morph target mixing that actually makes constructing a character harder, while aiming for simplification. The UI is simplified to the point of the user experience suffering as a result of its consistent vagueness. Gone are the actual RPG inventory and equipment systems of previous Bethesda games, replaced by a gear spread more resembling the original Mass Effect with all of the players stats tied into a single armor element and a helmet.
Perhaps I'd care more if anyone but the people working on assets for Starfield cared, or the simplification afforded more variance and customization of what is available, but the simmering disappointment in the systemic simplicity of the game faded to apathy when the "grounded" sci-fi world of Starfield handed me a soviet era special forces rifle (a VSS) named "Old World Hunting Rifle" without any sign of irony. Why care about the gear in this game when the game clearly does not?
A good deal of new mechanics seem relatively pointless, or at least under cooked. The zero gravity combat works well enough in the exceedingly rare instances where it appears. The jump pack adds some minor verticality to the combat, but is held back by being bound up in the skill tree and thus relegated to a design afterthought. The same questionable player hitboxes that have made climbing through windows or over any object in an interior space a near impossibility in past Bethesda games render the boost pack mostly useless indoors. It's all well and good a boosted jump can propel a player up to the second story of an outpost atrium, but relatively pointless when they can't fit through the gap between the railing and the ceiling to take advantage of it.
Similarly, the bare-bones bounty system in the game offers little meaningful gameplay outside of make work missions for pitiful amounts of money. Ship combat is shallow to the point of being boring. The contraband system is more an invitation to rote circumvention than meaningful play vector. The vast procedurally generated planets are full of a handful of repeating plants and features, offering little worthwhile interaction.
Although I did get a laugh when I exited a cave that had literally nothing in it to find a man pointing a shotgun at me a screaming about me stealing his claim before turning to fire a mining laser at a worthless rock without another ship or structure anywhere else on the planet.
More importantly though, all of these gestures at systems that don't actually exist feel like things that should be the core of this game's gameplay loop. Excluding the poor balancing of weapons, one can see a world where the limited alteration of systems inherited from previous games was paired with a new layer of interactive elements in the world. More things to do, more ways to roleplay, more customization, and deeper interaction.
Instead, seemingly no work was done here beyond the game's physical structure, which in and of itself resembles more a series of soulless boxes for players to move through, void attempting to be artifice disguising a game that, for its vast footprint, feels smaller and less cared for than any Bethesda game before it.
If Starfield is Fallout with slightly less salt on the mechanic side, on the narrative and world building side it's simply a retread of Skyrim. Two factions, the United Colonies (Imperials) and the Freestar Collective (Nords) coexist in constant tension, though without the impending civil war here. The player, a third party working with a group of independent actors, must collect space powers, one of which - yes - is literally just Skyrim's Fus Roh Dah, as they mediate the relationship between these two factions and the appearance of a third, the Starborn (Dragons).
Most areas lack the strong narrative threads crafted by Fallout 4's focus on more compact spaces, instead favoring Skyrim's loose generalized quest hub approach for cities and towns. The result is spaces with little in the way of tangible identity, never really managing to build a coherent sense of place as strong as the likes of Diamond City or Goodneighbor.
Even beyond that the writing and world building continue to struggle. Absent the well crafted underpinnings vital to the Fallout franchise, which Bethesda had no hand in constructing, Starfield's world presents a profoundly dim view of the future. As it lacks ambition elsewhere, so it lacks it here, not only incapable of constructing a believable post Earth humanity, but incapable of imagining it as being any different than our current times.
Obsidian can take heart that they're not worst of the people making "RPGs" in this vein when it comes to understanding the breadth of even our current political landscape or imagining alternatives. At least The Outer Worlds imagines corporations and the ultra rich as forces for abject harm wont to do it in absence of people resisting it, even as it constructs nonsensical versions of the real world opposition to the forces of capital in service of mealy mouth liberal status quo supporting bullshit.
Sure, they might have failed to come up with a reason for not siding with a communist faction in its game and deployed its only likeable protagonist to guilt the player into not siding with them; but Starfield sincerely trots out the "this corporation is like a family to me" bullshit used to guilt workers into accepting abuse, then heaps an out of character agreement from an otherwise compassionate companion (Andreja) on top, AND forcibly dictates the final word on the matter like my character - raised in the poverty being discussed - is somehow in the wrong for believing complicity in its existence to be a fundamental abortion of morality.
I, personally, would rather they'd given me no option to challenge the characters on the abusive practices of their massive corporation than have the game tell me, essentially, "well yes, they're abusing people, but it's justified because that abuse lets them take care of their 'family' and they pay slightly better". I'm generally happy to welcome characters, even ones with putrid worldviews, expressing those and disagreeing with mine in games. But if the end point of allowing this type of ideological expression is to shut it down when it becomes inconvenient, then there's no point in allowing that deep an ideological expression in the first place. I'd much rather this suit simply dismiss me out of hand without a second thought, than acquiesce to the argument and get bailed out by the invisible hand of the writer when the rhetorical limits of said writer's viewpoint are found.
This general inability to not only engage seriously with the real world concepts its building on, but to even recognize the world today in the breadth of its complexity as it projects it hundreds of years into the future is pervasive in Starfield. There is no deeper meaning to its use of aesthetics, no broader themes, no commentary deeper than a mall fountain.
The result is a game devoid of worthwhile world building, or really any meaningful intrigue. Beyond injecting nonsensical political assertions into loaded topics, and the regular appearance of completely incoherent quest lines, there seems to just be an utter lack of understanding of what elements in our real world inspire the stories from which the game's narrative draws its reference. No deeper thought, no attempt to build upon, just copy paste, find and replace.
Sure, there was a war between the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective, but that's in the past and no one really ever stops to explain why it even happened. Now there's really nothing going on. They're all too busy fighting generic space outlaws and the occasional bandit to butt heads with each other. Sure there's a big faction of mysterious religious people, better bake them into an unseen corner of the galaxy. Yeah we got pirates, but why would we interface with or tell stories about them beyond the pirate part?
It's a world where actually the corrupt cops are also a path out of extreme poverty for a bunch of gang members, presented unironically as a good thing. A world where an entire city's identity is boiled down to "we built some big walls to keep the mean space dogs out". A world where the billionaire is still a good guy, and corporations can be a family, even as they exploit the player and literally build towering monuments to their wealth over top of the poor in two of the three major cities in the game. Something the game recognizes but refuses to comment on, either for or against. A world where attitudes towards drugs and the homeless are no different from our own time, even in the place where people are purported to care more because they're willing to engage in clearly ineffectual charity.
It is a ponderous chunk of incoherent words, unable to navigate its way past the inherent lack of paths forward that don't conflict with its own assertion humanity's status quo will, and should, simply exist in perpetuity. A narrative that could have been saved by constructing literally any view of humanity, dystopian or utopian, outwardly progressive or virulently fascist, that isn't the vapid combination of corporate mush and stark inequality, but refuses.
Even the most cynical writers rarely manage a less ambitious view of the future than Starfield, especially in the world of science fiction, but in a way that's fitting here. In a game that's wholly unwilling to be anything more than the simple interface of an existing set of mechanics with an existing narrative, Starfield should be this profoundly devoid of broader thought about the human race.
At least its aggressive clinging to the aesthetics of a bygone golden age looks pretty, even if it makes me think about how much better the Fallout games - even the ones from Bethesda - are at utilizing the same type of aesthetic as more than just eye candy.
You'd be forgiven for going into Starfield expecting an ambitious game. All the marketing spoke of exploration and wonder on the edge of space, of Bethesda's biggest ever game, and of harnessing the spirit of early human space exploration. Everyone wanted us to believe this was a massive undertaking, something new for Bethesda after a quarter century of middling fantasy and a purchased IP.
Starfield is none of that, however, choosing instead to cling so tightly to the vine the game was grown on that the only result is rot.
At its core Starfield is the cynical combination of Fallout's mechanics teetering on top of Skyrim's narrative structure. The amalgamation presents itself as if a checklist of features from those games was simply devised in a conference room and worked through with little else in the way of thought.
Combat and exploration behaves almost identically to Fallout, with the added wrinkle of RPG-esque aim sway on all the weapons for the purpose of annoying, but rarely hindering, players who have not put points into combat categories.
Like Fallout, melee weapons are useless, no matter how heavily the character is built for them. All but the weakest enemies in all but the smallest groups will chunk away enough health to send even committed players ducking for cover and resorting to ranged weapons - if the lack of variety in a game 5+ years in the making doesn't see them simply falling back to whatever is easiest first.
Stealth in melee range is similarly broken to its predecessor, becoming mostly useless thanks to a game design that does not support that type of play. Even the game's seemingly powerful cloaking armor is fairly useless, having no appreciable impact on whether or not an enemy detects the player. At a distance stealth remains the most powerful option in the game, with the only reason to forgo attempting a sneaky approach being general apathy or impatience on the part of the player.
The weapons even fall into the same categories as Fallout, with a couple of weapon types forced to the forefront due to a lack of ammo for the others. Starfield even replicates the uselessness of automatic weaponry in its immediate gameplay predecessor, with the prospect of chewing through your entire supply of ammunition impotently plinking away at enemy health bars feeling vastly inferior to high damage single shot weapons with stealth bonuses. Dumping 50+ shots into a guy when you could take him out in 2-3 has never been less appealing a decade on.
Insofar as there are any changes to the systems designed for Fallout 4, the changes presented are mostly aesthetic or simply outright bad.
The digipicking mini game at least replaces lock picking and hacking mini games with something more engaging, although replacing both with the same thing all but guarantees it will become a loathed element of this game in time.
The changes to how Persuasion works in conversations, however, are a significant downgrade. An impressive feat considering the process in previous Bethesda titles, or adjacent games like Fallout New Vegas, varied from straight skill check to invisible dice roll. The brainless back and forth, often involving NPCs responding to head scratching player options with equally nonsensical generic voice lines, not only makes the process more tedious, but also succeeds at somehow making talking your way into and out of ridiculous situations even more absurd and unbelievable than in past games; it is hard to take the feature seriously when it almost always involves the other party in the conversation turning into an absolute fool, easily fleeced by the rhetorical equivalent of "got your nose".
At least the days of a single skill check or dice roll let me imagine a more complex conversation occurred, instead of asserting that no, in fact, a pair of absolute goobers engaged in a madlibs skit instead.
The most disappointing mechanical failure comes in the form of the game's building system, something so stripped bare and thoroughly neutered it's a shock Bethesda touted it as a selling point at all. A true achievement considering Fallout 4 settlement building was notoriously ropey and under designed. Even Fallout 76's building offers more variation and interest than Starfield, a game that's willing to charge you 235,000 in game credits for a space so small that it makes the notoriously tiny Dugout player home from Fallout 4 seem palatial in comparison.
It's rather absurd a system vital to the longevity of the studio's previous big release is so functionally inert here. Building options are so few, and limitations so strict, one wonders if even the actually ambitious elements of Bethesda's modding community will attempt to construct something fun, or even less profoundly annoying to engage with, than the desiccated corpse of a concept Bethesda kicked out the door as if attempting to kill desire for it in their player base.
Still more elements are downgrades by way of simplification. Character creation is an unwieldy system of morph target mixing that actually makes constructing a character harder, while aiming for simplification. The UI is simplified to the point of the user experience suffering as a result of its consistent vagueness. Gone are the actual RPG inventory and equipment systems of previous Bethesda games, replaced by a gear spread more resembling the original Mass Effect with all of the players stats tied into a single armor element and a helmet.
Perhaps I'd care more if anyone but the people working on assets for Starfield cared, or the simplification afforded more variance and customization of what is available, but the simmering disappointment in the systemic simplicity of the game faded to apathy when the "grounded" sci-fi world of Starfield handed me a soviet era special forces rifle (a VSS) named "Old World Hunting Rifle" without any sign of irony. Why care about the gear in this game when the game clearly does not?
A good deal of new mechanics seem relatively pointless, or at least under cooked. The zero gravity combat works well enough in the exceedingly rare instances where it appears. The jump pack adds some minor verticality to the combat, but is held back by being bound up in the skill tree and thus relegated to a design afterthought. The same questionable player hitboxes that have made climbing through windows or over any object in an interior space a near impossibility in past Bethesda games render the boost pack mostly useless indoors. It's all well and good a boosted jump can propel a player up to the second story of an outpost atrium, but relatively pointless when they can't fit through the gap between the railing and the ceiling to take advantage of it.
Similarly, the bare-bones bounty system in the game offers little meaningful gameplay outside of make work missions for pitiful amounts of money. Ship combat is shallow to the point of being boring. The contraband system is more an invitation to rote circumvention than meaningful play vector. The vast procedurally generated planets are full of a handful of repeating plants and features, offering little worthwhile interaction.
Although I did get a laugh when I exited a cave that had literally nothing in it to find a man pointing a shotgun at me a screaming about me stealing his claim before turning to fire a mining laser at a worthless rock without another ship or structure anywhere else on the planet.
More importantly though, all of these gestures at systems that don't actually exist feel like things that should be the core of this game's gameplay loop. Excluding the poor balancing of weapons, one can see a world where the limited alteration of systems inherited from previous games was paired with a new layer of interactive elements in the world. More things to do, more ways to roleplay, more customization, and deeper interaction.
Instead, seemingly no work was done here beyond the game's physical structure, which in and of itself resembles more a series of soulless boxes for players to move through, void attempting to be artifice disguising a game that, for its vast footprint, feels smaller and less cared for than any Bethesda game before it.
If Starfield is Fallout with slightly less salt on the mechanic side, on the narrative and world building side it's simply a retread of Skyrim. Two factions, the United Colonies (Imperials) and the Freestar Collective (Nords) coexist in constant tension, though without the impending civil war here. The player, a third party working with a group of independent actors, must collect space powers, one of which - yes - is literally just Skyrim's Fus Roh Dah, as they mediate the relationship between these two factions and the appearance of a third, the Starborn (Dragons).
Most areas lack the strong narrative threads crafted by Fallout 4's focus on more compact spaces, instead favoring Skyrim's loose generalized quest hub approach for cities and towns. The result is spaces with little in the way of tangible identity, never really managing to build a coherent sense of place as strong as the likes of Diamond City or Goodneighbor.
Even beyond that the writing and world building continue to struggle. Absent the well crafted underpinnings vital to the Fallout franchise, which Bethesda had no hand in constructing, Starfield's world presents a profoundly dim view of the future. As it lacks ambition elsewhere, so it lacks it here, not only incapable of constructing a believable post Earth humanity, but incapable of imagining it as being any different than our current times.
Obsidian can take heart that they're not worst of the people making "RPGs" in this vein when it comes to understanding the breadth of even our current political landscape or imagining alternatives. At least The Outer Worlds imagines corporations and the ultra rich as forces for abject harm wont to do it in absence of people resisting it, even as it constructs nonsensical versions of the real world opposition to the forces of capital in service of mealy mouth liberal status quo supporting bullshit.
Sure, they might have failed to come up with a reason for not siding with a communist faction in its game and deployed its only likeable protagonist to guilt the player into not siding with them; but Starfield sincerely trots out the "this corporation is like a family to me" bullshit used to guilt workers into accepting abuse, then heaps an out of character agreement from an otherwise compassionate companion (Andreja) on top, AND forcibly dictates the final word on the matter like my character - raised in the poverty being discussed - is somehow in the wrong for believing complicity in its existence to be a fundamental abortion of morality.
I, personally, would rather they'd given me no option to challenge the characters on the abusive practices of their massive corporation than have the game tell me, essentially, "well yes, they're abusing people, but it's justified because that abuse lets them take care of their 'family' and they pay slightly better". I'm generally happy to welcome characters, even ones with putrid worldviews, expressing those and disagreeing with mine in games. But if the end point of allowing this type of ideological expression is to shut it down when it becomes inconvenient, then there's no point in allowing that deep an ideological expression in the first place. I'd much rather this suit simply dismiss me out of hand without a second thought, than acquiesce to the argument and get bailed out by the invisible hand of the writer when the rhetorical limits of said writer's viewpoint are found.
This general inability to not only engage seriously with the real world concepts its building on, but to even recognize the world today in the breadth of its complexity as it projects it hundreds of years into the future is pervasive in Starfield. There is no deeper meaning to its use of aesthetics, no broader themes, no commentary deeper than a mall fountain.
The result is a game devoid of worthwhile world building, or really any meaningful intrigue. Beyond injecting nonsensical political assertions into loaded topics, and the regular appearance of completely incoherent quest lines, there seems to just be an utter lack of understanding of what elements in our real world inspire the stories from which the game's narrative draws its reference. No deeper thought, no attempt to build upon, just copy paste, find and replace.
Sure, there was a war between the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective, but that's in the past and no one really ever stops to explain why it even happened. Now there's really nothing going on. They're all too busy fighting generic space outlaws and the occasional bandit to butt heads with each other. Sure there's a big faction of mysterious religious people, better bake them into an unseen corner of the galaxy. Yeah we got pirates, but why would we interface with or tell stories about them beyond the pirate part?
It's a world where actually the corrupt cops are also a path out of extreme poverty for a bunch of gang members, presented unironically as a good thing. A world where an entire city's identity is boiled down to "we built some big walls to keep the mean space dogs out". A world where the billionaire is still a good guy, and corporations can be a family, even as they exploit the player and literally build towering monuments to their wealth over top of the poor in two of the three major cities in the game. Something the game recognizes but refuses to comment on, either for or against. A world where attitudes towards drugs and the homeless are no different from our own time, even in the place where people are purported to care more because they're willing to engage in clearly ineffectual charity.
It is a ponderous chunk of incoherent words, unable to navigate its way past the inherent lack of paths forward that don't conflict with its own assertion humanity's status quo will, and should, simply exist in perpetuity. A narrative that could have been saved by constructing literally any view of humanity, dystopian or utopian, outwardly progressive or virulently fascist, that isn't the vapid combination of corporate mush and stark inequality, but refuses.
Even the most cynical writers rarely manage a less ambitious view of the future than Starfield, especially in the world of science fiction, but in a way that's fitting here. In a game that's wholly unwilling to be anything more than the simple interface of an existing set of mechanics with an existing narrative, Starfield should be this profoundly devoid of broader thought about the human race.
At least its aggressive clinging to the aesthetics of a bygone golden age looks pretty, even if it makes me think about how much better the Fallout games - even the ones from Bethesda - are at utilizing the same type of aesthetic as more than just eye candy.
2020
In short, a game of meaningful choices and deep, winding narrative threads.
There's little truly groundbreaking in the content of Baldur's Gate 3, but it's structure and delivery are something worth experiencing even for people with no fondness for the CRPG/TRPG genre or Dungeons & Dragons. All of the praise lavished on Fallout New Vegas for open ended storytelling - despite that game's taxing lack of meaningful narrative structure - is actually deserved in the case of Baldur's Gate 3. Paired with a compelling set of impressively diverging core story lines, the result is a game much greater than the sum of its parts.
If there's any fault of design over execution, it is the relatively minor quibble that even on the game's default difficulty, it is easy for players to find their way into truly punishing scenarios.
Make no mistake, Baldur's Gate 3 is a great game, more than worth your time. Insofar as I focus on faults from here on out, it is only because I feel that the rest of the game would fully justify a 5 star rating in their absence, and almost without question of any kind.
Larian seems dead set on mimicking classic Obsidian in other, less compelling ways though. While there's gameplay depth enough for hundreds of hours and multiple playthroughs, likeable characters, and hateable villains in spades the framework tying it all together is rough in places.
Later areas in the game, at least prior to any major patches, suffer from progressive performance degradation during play capable of slowing even an RTX 4090 powered system, suggesting deeper technical problems in need of solving. Much of the game's performance feels like it was released early as Larian attempted to get out of the way of Starfield, despite the studios insistence on the contrary.
Several relatively rare and insignificant, but none the less annoying, visual bugs accompany the performance issues on the "they'll get to it at some point" pile - including meshes that weren't cleaned properly between completion and deployment and missing or mismatching skin textures for cosmetic items.
Most problematic, however, are the dialogue and quest systems - which account for the docked star in this review. While the choices present a massive array of options for players, the actual mechanical underpinnings of the system regularly come apart at the seams. The result is a dialogue experience that is what we would call in gamedev "non-deterministic".
Normally this is reserved for simulations, especially physics, that run at variable rates and therefore might not produce identical results every time they run. It should be obvious why this is undesirable when it's a fitting descriptor for the main storytelling vehicle in a game dedicating so many resources and so much player time to storytelling.
Notifications of conversation events like party member approval changes or skill checks regularly break in such a way that they don't remain visible long enough to read. Dynamic events in conversations sometimes fail to trigger, and at times dialogue - especially towards the end of conversations - cuts off when it clearly should not. A reliance on NPC characters as vehicles for most dialogue trigger zones in the game frequently places an unintended character front and center for dialogue.
Companion dialogue is the most noticeably rough, regularly resetting and playing again multiple times. The game often becomes "confused", for lack of a better word, about events that have clearly been accounted for by the developers - delivering lines that contradict choices or quest outcomes.
Normally I would brush this off as a combination of unavoidable conflict with Starfield and Larian's need to expand in breadth and complexity beyond their prior experience. However, this persisted through to the final dialogue of the game, where multiple scenes seemed to play out with no awareness of what was going on around them - including the appearance of a character who had just died.
The subsequent hard cut to credits with no fanfare or resolution of other significant storylines despite the presence of relevant characters seems to suggest a fundamental breakdown in the dialogue sequence, or more perturbing a lack of implementation of any kind of narrative recap at the close of a long game.
For as much good as there is, and as much as I find the broader state of the dialogue system somewhat understandable, I have to knock the game when a core system compromises elements of the narrative in a narrative-centered game regardless of my sympathy for Larian in regards to the lose/lose choice they had to make in regards to release timing.
The same, however, can't be said for the quest system. If I had to knock Divinity Original Sin 2 for anything, it would be that quests can be easily broken and the broader system as a whole in OS2 is relatively undercooked. Some of this comes with the territory. Allowing large scale sequence breaking and implementing granular player choice is going to introduce conflicts. This is simply unavoidable, no matter how much some know nothing on social media suggests otherwise.
I would be surprised if a team anywhere, of any size, could build a game with the structure and scope of BG3 that doesn't break at some point. The act of developing these systems is simply at odds with the act of ensuring they continue to function correctly at every step.
That said, the bigger problem here is not that BG3 has quest related bugs, it is that these bugs are largely holdovers from Divinity OS2.
Previously tracked quests disappear from the quest log despite still being active. Inaccessible quests sometimes fail to clear from the log. Quest markers regularly persist on the game's map in spite of the objective they mark being completed. Despite featuring so many options Larian had to up the memory allocation for storing choices, there's no way to manage which quests are actively being tracked, regularly leading to scenarios where an array of mostly useless yellow diamonds render the minimap mostly non-functional.
None of these were a deal breaker for me in Divinity OS2, but their persistence in Baldur's Gate 3 is disappointing in light of the massive expansion of Larian's headcount and funding over the course of the game.
While BG3 is technically still indie, it's not fair to treat this game like the rest of the indie dominated CRPG space. Even compared to other larger developers in the space, such as Pathfinder developers Owlcat Games, Larian is massive.
They've officially entered the same space as groups like CDProjekt Red in developing at a scale that is traditionally only possible through large, legacy publishing. As such, it's both head-scratching and disconcerting in equal measure to see such an important part of the game make little to no progression in comparison to their previous work.
None of this should distract from what an achievement Baldur's Gate 3 is, however. Larian has done something special here, if predictably imperfect. I only hope the allure of ever greater scale and complexity does not distract from necessary refinement, whatever their next endeavor entails.
There's little truly groundbreaking in the content of Baldur's Gate 3, but it's structure and delivery are something worth experiencing even for people with no fondness for the CRPG/TRPG genre or Dungeons & Dragons. All of the praise lavished on Fallout New Vegas for open ended storytelling - despite that game's taxing lack of meaningful narrative structure - is actually deserved in the case of Baldur's Gate 3. Paired with a compelling set of impressively diverging core story lines, the result is a game much greater than the sum of its parts.
If there's any fault of design over execution, it is the relatively minor quibble that even on the game's default difficulty, it is easy for players to find their way into truly punishing scenarios.
Make no mistake, Baldur's Gate 3 is a great game, more than worth your time. Insofar as I focus on faults from here on out, it is only because I feel that the rest of the game would fully justify a 5 star rating in their absence, and almost without question of any kind.
Larian seems dead set on mimicking classic Obsidian in other, less compelling ways though. While there's gameplay depth enough for hundreds of hours and multiple playthroughs, likeable characters, and hateable villains in spades the framework tying it all together is rough in places.
Later areas in the game, at least prior to any major patches, suffer from progressive performance degradation during play capable of slowing even an RTX 4090 powered system, suggesting deeper technical problems in need of solving. Much of the game's performance feels like it was released early as Larian attempted to get out of the way of Starfield, despite the studios insistence on the contrary.
Several relatively rare and insignificant, but none the less annoying, visual bugs accompany the performance issues on the "they'll get to it at some point" pile - including meshes that weren't cleaned properly between completion and deployment and missing or mismatching skin textures for cosmetic items.
Most problematic, however, are the dialogue and quest systems - which account for the docked star in this review. While the choices present a massive array of options for players, the actual mechanical underpinnings of the system regularly come apart at the seams. The result is a dialogue experience that is what we would call in gamedev "non-deterministic".
Normally this is reserved for simulations, especially physics, that run at variable rates and therefore might not produce identical results every time they run. It should be obvious why this is undesirable when it's a fitting descriptor for the main storytelling vehicle in a game dedicating so many resources and so much player time to storytelling.
Notifications of conversation events like party member approval changes or skill checks regularly break in such a way that they don't remain visible long enough to read. Dynamic events in conversations sometimes fail to trigger, and at times dialogue - especially towards the end of conversations - cuts off when it clearly should not. A reliance on NPC characters as vehicles for most dialogue trigger zones in the game frequently places an unintended character front and center for dialogue.
Companion dialogue is the most noticeably rough, regularly resetting and playing again multiple times. The game often becomes "confused", for lack of a better word, about events that have clearly been accounted for by the developers - delivering lines that contradict choices or quest outcomes.
Normally I would brush this off as a combination of unavoidable conflict with Starfield and Larian's need to expand in breadth and complexity beyond their prior experience. However, this persisted through to the final dialogue of the game, where multiple scenes seemed to play out with no awareness of what was going on around them - including the appearance of a character who had just died.
The subsequent hard cut to credits with no fanfare or resolution of other significant storylines despite the presence of relevant characters seems to suggest a fundamental breakdown in the dialogue sequence, or more perturbing a lack of implementation of any kind of narrative recap at the close of a long game.
For as much good as there is, and as much as I find the broader state of the dialogue system somewhat understandable, I have to knock the game when a core system compromises elements of the narrative in a narrative-centered game regardless of my sympathy for Larian in regards to the lose/lose choice they had to make in regards to release timing.
The same, however, can't be said for the quest system. If I had to knock Divinity Original Sin 2 for anything, it would be that quests can be easily broken and the broader system as a whole in OS2 is relatively undercooked. Some of this comes with the territory. Allowing large scale sequence breaking and implementing granular player choice is going to introduce conflicts. This is simply unavoidable, no matter how much some know nothing on social media suggests otherwise.
I would be surprised if a team anywhere, of any size, could build a game with the structure and scope of BG3 that doesn't break at some point. The act of developing these systems is simply at odds with the act of ensuring they continue to function correctly at every step.
That said, the bigger problem here is not that BG3 has quest related bugs, it is that these bugs are largely holdovers from Divinity OS2.
Previously tracked quests disappear from the quest log despite still being active. Inaccessible quests sometimes fail to clear from the log. Quest markers regularly persist on the game's map in spite of the objective they mark being completed. Despite featuring so many options Larian had to up the memory allocation for storing choices, there's no way to manage which quests are actively being tracked, regularly leading to scenarios where an array of mostly useless yellow diamonds render the minimap mostly non-functional.
None of these were a deal breaker for me in Divinity OS2, but their persistence in Baldur's Gate 3 is disappointing in light of the massive expansion of Larian's headcount and funding over the course of the game.
While BG3 is technically still indie, it's not fair to treat this game like the rest of the indie dominated CRPG space. Even compared to other larger developers in the space, such as Pathfinder developers Owlcat Games, Larian is massive.
They've officially entered the same space as groups like CDProjekt Red in developing at a scale that is traditionally only possible through large, legacy publishing. As such, it's both head-scratching and disconcerting in equal measure to see such an important part of the game make little to no progression in comparison to their previous work.
None of this should distract from what an achievement Baldur's Gate 3 is, however. Larian has done something special here, if predictably imperfect. I only hope the allure of ever greater scale and complexity does not distract from necessary refinement, whatever their next endeavor entails.
This review contains spoilers
What a profoundly polarizing game. Three Houses is, frankly, uneven in almost every way. A game that feels like it was concepted entirely from the starting point and built from front to back in a way that would normally be impossible. At once endearing and ridiculous, well written and nonsensical, carefully considered and maddeningly slapdash.
Mechanically, I think this is the weakest of the Fire Emblem games that I've played, as it's clearly been stripped back to be more welcoming to people who might be drawn towards the fantasy high school / light dating sim aesthetic.
The Combat Arts system at the core of the tactical game is a weak replacement for strategic positioning and strong class roles - both of which are highly minimized in this game. Perhaps this is different on higher difficulties, but early on when the Combat Arts are useful, most characters lack the support ranking necessary to boost them. By the late stages of the game, however, their diminishing returns and high cost in weapon durability relative to the total durability of higher end weapons renders the offensive options mostly useless.
Battalions, also part of this broad restructuring of tactical importance for Fire Emblem (at least in my experience), suffer a similar fate. Tied to a stat that must be cheesed with exploits - or reliant on dumb luck on higher difficulties - Battalions' utility is mostly in their ability to control enemy units. However, with little in the way of hazards for the control abilities to take advantage of, low output in damage and healing broadly, and a generally poor presentation of what Battalions do outside of their lackluster abilities they are almost purely stats or backup replacements for things like healing.
The result is a game that devolves into one of two modes. Blitzing across the map with high damage flying units to quickly kill off the necessary enemies to end a fight, or grinding across it with tanky units as you wipe it clean, an initially satisfying task that becomes a late game chore on lower difficulties.
Pair all of this with a durability system that is poorly supported by a small, and regularly exceedingly rare, set of crafting components used for upgrade or repair and you're left with a game that has given all it has to offer by the halfway point. Your best weapons mostly remain in storage to preserve them for trickier late game fights, and your units primarily loaf into most battles in Chapters 10 through probably 19 with the same weapons and equipment.
A recipe for tactics brilliance this is not.
The monastery's systems meet a similar fate, petering out around the game's halfway point and devolving into a mindless slog of watching bars go up and listening to a couple dozen small chunks of dialogue about the upcoming mission for all but the most aimless approaches. The game's signature tea parties and other downtime activities wear themselves out around the same time as the rest of the game's system. If you care at all about what you're doing, the end of the game becomes mostly training or simply skipping through to get to the next big fight.
The characters and story are where Three Houses shines. Although not without its faults, particularly in its unwillingness to have Edelgard explain her reasoning for suddenly going rogue to kill all her friends purely to preserve the appeal of playing through for different paths, Three Houses broadly constructs a compelling world with endearing characters. Not every member of the cast is a winner - Petra's tortured portrayal and Ferdinand's, well, everything stand out - but there's enough of them that I'm confident saying most players will find characters that click with them.
Three Houses isn't a master class in subverting expectations, but I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying a fair few characters that I didn't care about at all to begin with by the time I was done. And while the overarching narrative is nothing spectacular, it's well executed enough to convincingly carry the rest of the experience.
The game's strongest point is probably its visuals. While it's far from the prettiest game around, regularly employing environments that would be at home on a PS2 - excepting for some textures and general geometric density - the game is still quite visually polished. The world feels broadly cohesive (with the exception of one late game level randomly yanked out of Tron and paired with cringe inducing dubstep) and the characters feel like they fit in it. The only real exception to this being the bad guys employing magical nukes of a sort via what looks like literal modern missiles late in the game. There is broadly very little to complain about in most of the design work, similar to its other sibling post-Awakening works.
So what does this all boil down to? A good, but not great, game that wants you to replay it, but is probably only worth that effort for the most dedicated Fire Emblem fans.
Mechanically, I think this is the weakest of the Fire Emblem games that I've played, as it's clearly been stripped back to be more welcoming to people who might be drawn towards the fantasy high school / light dating sim aesthetic.
The Combat Arts system at the core of the tactical game is a weak replacement for strategic positioning and strong class roles - both of which are highly minimized in this game. Perhaps this is different on higher difficulties, but early on when the Combat Arts are useful, most characters lack the support ranking necessary to boost them. By the late stages of the game, however, their diminishing returns and high cost in weapon durability relative to the total durability of higher end weapons renders the offensive options mostly useless.
Battalions, also part of this broad restructuring of tactical importance for Fire Emblem (at least in my experience), suffer a similar fate. Tied to a stat that must be cheesed with exploits - or reliant on dumb luck on higher difficulties - Battalions' utility is mostly in their ability to control enemy units. However, with little in the way of hazards for the control abilities to take advantage of, low output in damage and healing broadly, and a generally poor presentation of what Battalions do outside of their lackluster abilities they are almost purely stats or backup replacements for things like healing.
The result is a game that devolves into one of two modes. Blitzing across the map with high damage flying units to quickly kill off the necessary enemies to end a fight, or grinding across it with tanky units as you wipe it clean, an initially satisfying task that becomes a late game chore on lower difficulties.
Pair all of this with a durability system that is poorly supported by a small, and regularly exceedingly rare, set of crafting components used for upgrade or repair and you're left with a game that has given all it has to offer by the halfway point. Your best weapons mostly remain in storage to preserve them for trickier late game fights, and your units primarily loaf into most battles in Chapters 10 through probably 19 with the same weapons and equipment.
A recipe for tactics brilliance this is not.
The monastery's systems meet a similar fate, petering out around the game's halfway point and devolving into a mindless slog of watching bars go up and listening to a couple dozen small chunks of dialogue about the upcoming mission for all but the most aimless approaches. The game's signature tea parties and other downtime activities wear themselves out around the same time as the rest of the game's system. If you care at all about what you're doing, the end of the game becomes mostly training or simply skipping through to get to the next big fight.
The characters and story are where Three Houses shines. Although not without its faults, particularly in its unwillingness to have Edelgard explain her reasoning for suddenly going rogue to kill all her friends purely to preserve the appeal of playing through for different paths, Three Houses broadly constructs a compelling world with endearing characters. Not every member of the cast is a winner - Petra's tortured portrayal and Ferdinand's, well, everything stand out - but there's enough of them that I'm confident saying most players will find characters that click with them.
Three Houses isn't a master class in subverting expectations, but I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying a fair few characters that I didn't care about at all to begin with by the time I was done. And while the overarching narrative is nothing spectacular, it's well executed enough to convincingly carry the rest of the experience.
The game's strongest point is probably its visuals. While it's far from the prettiest game around, regularly employing environments that would be at home on a PS2 - excepting for some textures and general geometric density - the game is still quite visually polished. The world feels broadly cohesive (with the exception of one late game level randomly yanked out of Tron and paired with cringe inducing dubstep) and the characters feel like they fit in it. The only real exception to this being the bad guys employing magical nukes of a sort via what looks like literal modern missiles late in the game. There is broadly very little to complain about in most of the design work, similar to its other sibling post-Awakening works.
So what does this all boil down to? A good, but not great, game that wants you to replay it, but is probably only worth that effort for the most dedicated Fire Emblem fans.
2021
This review contains spoilers
I didn't intend to play Far Cry 6, if I'm being perfectly honest. But sales got it around the $20 mark and I decided to give it a go while I'm off work for the holidays.
I'll get the rote stuff out of the way first. It's almost quaint how little has changed in the world of Far Cry since the third game. In a world where everyone is chasing lootboxes and time savers and shoving garbage in your face at every turn, I don't think I saw a single piece of that. The series' oddities and design pitfalls still exist here, however.
On the intended difficulties, enemies pose little threat as long as you're using one of the two meaningful ammo types. When armor piercing ammo still kills with headshots, and blast ammo shreds helicopters pretty easily, there's really no point in using anything else. I mostly just made sure I was carrying three different types of primary weapon for max ammo and rarely felt threatened unless I was getting very sloppy.
Vehicles remain somewhere between basically functional and outright broken. Planes aren't a nightmare to fly, which was good for when it made me do that after I quit 5 from having to fly its planes.
Tanks and helicopters are functionally worthless, which is ironic considering their role as damage sponges when in the hands of enemies. At least on PC, aiming with helicopters is broken, and the default keybinds are bad enough that using them requires the input pop-up.
This would be a bigger problem if they didn't die so fast that getting in them is pointless. The tanks are especially egregious, as in your hands they cease all function at around half health, while remaining a threat to the player on the enemy side with even a sliver remaining. A handful of other vehicles like the hovercraft are nearly uncontrollable in motion.
The open world sure is a Far Cry open world, although the need to create a more urban setting really shows how little gas is left in the tools and techniques used to make this game. The spline based roads, for example, regularly show noticeable mesh stretching in many places as the geometry fails to support the topology being asked of it.
While big, obviously, the world feels small, even without consistent or enjoyable transportation. And moving around it gives a distinct impression of it as a thing and not a place. The removal of rote hunting nonsense for upgrades was appreciated, but little is added to justify any engagement with the world beyond obstacles to your movement like the AA guns.
I'm actually surprised people seem so dissatisfied with the story. Personally it was the only reason I finished this game.
I think we're long past the point at which being annoyed Giancarlo Esposito's role is somewhat limited is a reasonable critique. If you don't know that the budgets for these games don't allow for big name actors to play more than a small part at this point, that's on you for having absurd expectations after years of evidence to support their absurdity. It's also not that limited, and a bunch of people just don't remember the previous games particularly well and don't care to inform themselves before running their mouths.
Everyone loves Vaas and I think that's justified, but a lot of people have this oversized impression of how much he was there for. Anton Castillo's screen time is about double Vaas' (and about 10 minutes more than Pagan Min), and while he's not chirping in the player's ear quite as much, he's still there for every key juncture.
Esposito's performance was solid, if a little on the flat side overall, and the game perhaps spent a bit too much time trying to humanize Castillo, but overall he was an effective villain. Charismatic, but hatable, and not too far down the "he wants the right thing and is going about it in the wrong way" pratfall circlejerk games like these tend to get trapped in.
For my money, this is the best the series has been since 3. I couldn't get behind Pagan Min as a villain in 4, especially not voiced by Troy Baker doing digital yellowface. Far Cry 5 was just a mess, including the mealy-mouthed plot that was uninterested in interrogating any of its chosen subject matter - or even portraying parts of it at all - for fear of offending the "Gamers" and puritanical scolds.
So consider me pleasantly surprised that Far Cry 6 has a much firmer grasp on its subject matter. And as a result a far more coherent tale to tell.
I think a lot of the problem with Far Cry, and by extension its broader player base, is that Far Cry 3 broke a lot of people. It hit at such a specific time, with such a specific approach, that attempting to replicate it was always going to be an exercise in futility. I'm not sure the developers were fully aware of what they were creating, as a unified work, so perhaps that explains why the subsequent games have all felt like trying to remember that little riff you wrote on guitar last week.
We'll never live in a moment where you can so thoroughly toy with the players through writing a character as profoundly stupid as Jason Brody again. As a main character he's a being of perfection, a pinpoint precise interrogation of genre pitfalls and the fundamental flaws with the fantasy it was selling to players.
We'll never live in a moment where simply sticking a high fidelity performance captured face right up in front of the player's camera is as effective a tool. Or where watching a cast of absolutely loathsome trust fund kids get owned has quite the same impact.
And so, with that in mind, Far Cry 6 does the best it probably could have done with this formula. Divorce itself from the past games, reinforce the player character as a meaningful character again, and focus on more than the big bad.
Far Cry 6 largely succeeds at this. It has some rote tokenism, some cringe moments, but overall it presents a cast of characters that are broadly enjoyable.
Dani, as a main character, is a revelation for the series overall. Acted with conviction and sincerity in a way that Far Cry has not to my memory ever seen, it's a shame Ubisoft still seems incapable of simply committing to a female lead; as AC Odyssey, AC Valhalla, and Far Cry 6 have produced far better acted and written female characters than their male start screen toggle counterpoint. To such an extent that I would suggest that playing as the alternative is simply choosing to play an inferior game - literally in the case of AC Odyssey.
Her presentation isn't without other issues, however. The game's free form structure hurts it at times, especially as you draw deeper into the story. There's a world where the Dani we see lives through the game as we play it, but it's not here.
It was jarring to play through a sequence which involved the intentional brutality of the deaths of regional story characters El Tigre and Jonron, both of whom I quite enjoyed, only to have Dani revert to a version of herself that had to be played as if she hadn't just experienced something that inspired me, the person playing her, to stop playing the game stealthily and just start shooting almost every soldier I came across.
Speaking of supporting characters, I found them to be a high point for the series since the third game, where they were successfully written but mostly unlikable. The Monteros and Philly are ultimately forgettable, unfortunately, which is likely why so many people bounced off this game as it points you to them first. Showing a fundamental lack of confidence.
El Tigre and Jonron stole the show for me, with the interleaving story of the Legends of '67 and La Moral resulting in one of the game's more refreshingly clear-eyed sub-stories. Not only are they enjoyable sincere and genuine in their expressions, but the game avoids sidestepping the idea that Americans in a fictional Cuba would be the villains and that American corporations would be at the heart of exploitation there - even if it can't quite bring itself to present the core cast as the same variety of politically left they clearly flirt with throughout.
The trio of Paolo, Talia, and Bicho are more hit and miss, and at times feel like things were pulled out to avoid the pitfalls of a non-linear story in a large game with development spread across multiple teams and countries.
The structure makes a token character out of Paolo, a trans man who for sake of brevity has to come out and say he is trans and then have constant references to the trials of being a trans man in this environment brought up; likely to support a world in which players can not be as directly guided through the story being told.
It's an especially unfortunate result of the game's design, as Paolo's story contains some truly affecting scenes - particularly regarding his relationship to the political revolution being fought for and its disconnect from the additional social revolution necessary to win his own justice and equality.
Aside from the relatively straight forward story of the Monteros, it always feels like there's just a few more threads around that needed attention with any of the supporting cast. And every time I wished I'd had more time with Jonron, or Clara, or Juan to really understand them better, I also felt the tension of an aging approach to game design weighing down a narrative with a lot of promise.
Because for all its faults. All the little nonsense lines like the CIA providing second hand funding to what is a nominally leftist revolution, Far Cry 6 understands what its writing about better than the series has since 3.
It gets why people in these situations fight, it gets the tactics used by those in power and their goals in deploying them. It understands the intersection between commerce, particularly American commerce, and oppression.
The tension between the old revolutionary and the new. The idea that sometimes a fight was always going to happen and that violence is not an unwarranted response to oppression that is always already born of violence. It has the knowledge that revolutions are comprised of many groups, and that attempting to subsume them into one organization is stupid and petty.
It gets that the person pulling the trigger, the person the game is most capable of idolizing - and did idolize in Far Cry 4 - cannot be the person who leads people forward after the gunfire stops.
Far Cry 6 is a game about the fight that comes after the peaceful protests are met with bullets, after the political statements fall on deaf ears, after the organizers have been snatched off the streets, and after the spoils of the last fight have eroded and decayed.
It's a shame then, that the only part of the Far Cry formula Far Cry 6 can liberate itself from is Hurk, one of the most unlikable characters in video games. At least he didn't show up in the time I spent with this game.
I'll get the rote stuff out of the way first. It's almost quaint how little has changed in the world of Far Cry since the third game. In a world where everyone is chasing lootboxes and time savers and shoving garbage in your face at every turn, I don't think I saw a single piece of that. The series' oddities and design pitfalls still exist here, however.
On the intended difficulties, enemies pose little threat as long as you're using one of the two meaningful ammo types. When armor piercing ammo still kills with headshots, and blast ammo shreds helicopters pretty easily, there's really no point in using anything else. I mostly just made sure I was carrying three different types of primary weapon for max ammo and rarely felt threatened unless I was getting very sloppy.
Vehicles remain somewhere between basically functional and outright broken. Planes aren't a nightmare to fly, which was good for when it made me do that after I quit 5 from having to fly its planes.
Tanks and helicopters are functionally worthless, which is ironic considering their role as damage sponges when in the hands of enemies. At least on PC, aiming with helicopters is broken, and the default keybinds are bad enough that using them requires the input pop-up.
This would be a bigger problem if they didn't die so fast that getting in them is pointless. The tanks are especially egregious, as in your hands they cease all function at around half health, while remaining a threat to the player on the enemy side with even a sliver remaining. A handful of other vehicles like the hovercraft are nearly uncontrollable in motion.
The open world sure is a Far Cry open world, although the need to create a more urban setting really shows how little gas is left in the tools and techniques used to make this game. The spline based roads, for example, regularly show noticeable mesh stretching in many places as the geometry fails to support the topology being asked of it.
While big, obviously, the world feels small, even without consistent or enjoyable transportation. And moving around it gives a distinct impression of it as a thing and not a place. The removal of rote hunting nonsense for upgrades was appreciated, but little is added to justify any engagement with the world beyond obstacles to your movement like the AA guns.
I'm actually surprised people seem so dissatisfied with the story. Personally it was the only reason I finished this game.
I think we're long past the point at which being annoyed Giancarlo Esposito's role is somewhat limited is a reasonable critique. If you don't know that the budgets for these games don't allow for big name actors to play more than a small part at this point, that's on you for having absurd expectations after years of evidence to support their absurdity. It's also not that limited, and a bunch of people just don't remember the previous games particularly well and don't care to inform themselves before running their mouths.
Everyone loves Vaas and I think that's justified, but a lot of people have this oversized impression of how much he was there for. Anton Castillo's screen time is about double Vaas' (and about 10 minutes more than Pagan Min), and while he's not chirping in the player's ear quite as much, he's still there for every key juncture.
Esposito's performance was solid, if a little on the flat side overall, and the game perhaps spent a bit too much time trying to humanize Castillo, but overall he was an effective villain. Charismatic, but hatable, and not too far down the "he wants the right thing and is going about it in the wrong way" pratfall circlejerk games like these tend to get trapped in.
For my money, this is the best the series has been since 3. I couldn't get behind Pagan Min as a villain in 4, especially not voiced by Troy Baker doing digital yellowface. Far Cry 5 was just a mess, including the mealy-mouthed plot that was uninterested in interrogating any of its chosen subject matter - or even portraying parts of it at all - for fear of offending the "Gamers" and puritanical scolds.
So consider me pleasantly surprised that Far Cry 6 has a much firmer grasp on its subject matter. And as a result a far more coherent tale to tell.
I think a lot of the problem with Far Cry, and by extension its broader player base, is that Far Cry 3 broke a lot of people. It hit at such a specific time, with such a specific approach, that attempting to replicate it was always going to be an exercise in futility. I'm not sure the developers were fully aware of what they were creating, as a unified work, so perhaps that explains why the subsequent games have all felt like trying to remember that little riff you wrote on guitar last week.
We'll never live in a moment where you can so thoroughly toy with the players through writing a character as profoundly stupid as Jason Brody again. As a main character he's a being of perfection, a pinpoint precise interrogation of genre pitfalls and the fundamental flaws with the fantasy it was selling to players.
We'll never live in a moment where simply sticking a high fidelity performance captured face right up in front of the player's camera is as effective a tool. Or where watching a cast of absolutely loathsome trust fund kids get owned has quite the same impact.
And so, with that in mind, Far Cry 6 does the best it probably could have done with this formula. Divorce itself from the past games, reinforce the player character as a meaningful character again, and focus on more than the big bad.
Far Cry 6 largely succeeds at this. It has some rote tokenism, some cringe moments, but overall it presents a cast of characters that are broadly enjoyable.
Dani, as a main character, is a revelation for the series overall. Acted with conviction and sincerity in a way that Far Cry has not to my memory ever seen, it's a shame Ubisoft still seems incapable of simply committing to a female lead; as AC Odyssey, AC Valhalla, and Far Cry 6 have produced far better acted and written female characters than their male start screen toggle counterpoint. To such an extent that I would suggest that playing as the alternative is simply choosing to play an inferior game - literally in the case of AC Odyssey.
Her presentation isn't without other issues, however. The game's free form structure hurts it at times, especially as you draw deeper into the story. There's a world where the Dani we see lives through the game as we play it, but it's not here.
It was jarring to play through a sequence which involved the intentional brutality of the deaths of regional story characters El Tigre and Jonron, both of whom I quite enjoyed, only to have Dani revert to a version of herself that had to be played as if she hadn't just experienced something that inspired me, the person playing her, to stop playing the game stealthily and just start shooting almost every soldier I came across.
Speaking of supporting characters, I found them to be a high point for the series since the third game, where they were successfully written but mostly unlikable. The Monteros and Philly are ultimately forgettable, unfortunately, which is likely why so many people bounced off this game as it points you to them first. Showing a fundamental lack of confidence.
El Tigre and Jonron stole the show for me, with the interleaving story of the Legends of '67 and La Moral resulting in one of the game's more refreshingly clear-eyed sub-stories. Not only are they enjoyable sincere and genuine in their expressions, but the game avoids sidestepping the idea that Americans in a fictional Cuba would be the villains and that American corporations would be at the heart of exploitation there - even if it can't quite bring itself to present the core cast as the same variety of politically left they clearly flirt with throughout.
The trio of Paolo, Talia, and Bicho are more hit and miss, and at times feel like things were pulled out to avoid the pitfalls of a non-linear story in a large game with development spread across multiple teams and countries.
The structure makes a token character out of Paolo, a trans man who for sake of brevity has to come out and say he is trans and then have constant references to the trials of being a trans man in this environment brought up; likely to support a world in which players can not be as directly guided through the story being told.
It's an especially unfortunate result of the game's design, as Paolo's story contains some truly affecting scenes - particularly regarding his relationship to the political revolution being fought for and its disconnect from the additional social revolution necessary to win his own justice and equality.
Aside from the relatively straight forward story of the Monteros, it always feels like there's just a few more threads around that needed attention with any of the supporting cast. And every time I wished I'd had more time with Jonron, or Clara, or Juan to really understand them better, I also felt the tension of an aging approach to game design weighing down a narrative with a lot of promise.
Because for all its faults. All the little nonsense lines like the CIA providing second hand funding to what is a nominally leftist revolution, Far Cry 6 understands what its writing about better than the series has since 3.
It gets why people in these situations fight, it gets the tactics used by those in power and their goals in deploying them. It understands the intersection between commerce, particularly American commerce, and oppression.
The tension between the old revolutionary and the new. The idea that sometimes a fight was always going to happen and that violence is not an unwarranted response to oppression that is always already born of violence. It has the knowledge that revolutions are comprised of many groups, and that attempting to subsume them into one organization is stupid and petty.
It gets that the person pulling the trigger, the person the game is most capable of idolizing - and did idolize in Far Cry 4 - cannot be the person who leads people forward after the gunfire stops.
Far Cry 6 is a game about the fight that comes after the peaceful protests are met with bullets, after the political statements fall on deaf ears, after the organizers have been snatched off the streets, and after the spoils of the last fight have eroded and decayed.
It's a shame then, that the only part of the Far Cry formula Far Cry 6 can liberate itself from is Hurk, one of the most unlikable characters in video games. At least he didn't show up in the time I spent with this game.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint is marginally better than its direct predecessor, incorporating more elements of the superior The Division series, but ultimately feels like the wheels finally coming off Ubisoft's live service experiences.
A technical mess, plagued by strangely stiff controls and frequent lip syncing problems, Breakpoint breaks at many points. When it's attempting to convey it's slightly more ambitious but still flat story. When it's trying to convince you that the combat should be enough to carry it, despite a wild power imbalance between the game's drone and human enemies. When you feel underwhelmed despite slapping on a podcast and not particularly caring.
For me it broke most profoundly when an early game mission required me to inexplicably land next to high level enemies, something almost impossible to tell when an engagement hasn't been started - especially when in vehicles. Thinking they were simply part of the mission, I told my AI companions to act like the killing machines they are, but instead of them laying waste to any enemy in range with pin point accurate headshots my helicopter got smacked out of the sky.
Upon respawning earlier in the mission, not only was every enemy in the base I'd just cleared back, but I spawned inside the base and trapped inside a locked room that could only be opened from the outside, ending my playthrough in the process.
I'm normally very bug lenient on big games, because I understand that they are functionally impossible to test and a few minor bugs don't hinder my enjoyment of running around in a big world doing stuff, but this is a profound failure of a very basic system.
1.5/5 because I probably would have finished it if it didn't break, but it broke.
A technical mess, plagued by strangely stiff controls and frequent lip syncing problems, Breakpoint breaks at many points. When it's attempting to convey it's slightly more ambitious but still flat story. When it's trying to convince you that the combat should be enough to carry it, despite a wild power imbalance between the game's drone and human enemies. When you feel underwhelmed despite slapping on a podcast and not particularly caring.
For me it broke most profoundly when an early game mission required me to inexplicably land next to high level enemies, something almost impossible to tell when an engagement hasn't been started - especially when in vehicles. Thinking they were simply part of the mission, I told my AI companions to act like the killing machines they are, but instead of them laying waste to any enemy in range with pin point accurate headshots my helicopter got smacked out of the sky.
Upon respawning earlier in the mission, not only was every enemy in the base I'd just cleared back, but I spawned inside the base and trapped inside a locked room that could only be opened from the outside, ending my playthrough in the process.
I'm normally very bug lenient on big games, because I understand that they are functionally impossible to test and a few minor bugs don't hinder my enjoyment of running around in a big world doing stuff, but this is a profound failure of a very basic system.
1.5/5 because I probably would have finished it if it didn't break, but it broke.
5 out of 5 stars because I clowned on my dad playing this game and he got mad. I later realized my dad was a manipulative asshole who doesn't care about hurting the people around him as long as he gets stuff he wants, and only ever cared about spending time with me to sate some narcissistic desire for validation. So props to the devs for allowing 13 year old me to ruin a bit of that for him.
2019
I, like a lot of people I assume, am reviewing this game because its director decided to post an absolutely unhinged theory for why it did poorly - which in this case is 8 million units sold because I guess half a billion dollars in sales on a first party game sucks ass these days. Just so, you know, there's one more voice in the potentially eternal record of why this game "flopped" that counters his.
Normally I'd be inclined to at least finish games like this, because I enjoy trophy hunting on PlayStation and am willing to endure bland open worlds and middling mechanics while listening to Well There's Your Problem, or Lions Led by Donkeys, or [INSERT PODCAST]. This should be the perfect game for me to engage with.
Instead I played it for most of an afternoon and uninstalled it. The problem, despite John Garvin's insistence, wasn't wokism or bugs, but fundamental design hiccups that impede upon the game's core experience, creating a clunky, frustrating open world hybrid stealth game instead of a focused experience.
To Garvin's point, I suppose, I did not play the entire game. However, four hours of Days Gone will see you well through the first half dozen or so missions, and if that's not enough to hook me when there's no one saying "ah but it gets good later" then I'd suggest some facet of its design has failed. And that's just if it didn't grab me. Days Gone's suspect motorcycle mechanics, overzealous resource restriction, and generally rote encounter design were also there pushing me away.
What got me however, was a classic: poor autosaves. I like to roam around big games, so I'm a perfect canary in a coal mine for bad autosaves as design that doesn't account for the freedom of the player or is inconsistent will invariably always see me lose a lot of progress. Days Gone was, in my experience, one of these games. This combined with a bug to punish me to the tune of about half an hour of exploration, hence the uninstall.
There's a somewhat random mechanic involving a snare that starts a mission. I can't tell if it's a recurring open world mission, or simply a one off that can start in multiple places, however instead of the snare functioning as intended (Deacon passes out and is transported to a small stealth encounter) nearby enemies killed me as I was yanked up into a tree as I ran away by a trap only denoted by a pile of leaves on the ground in a forest full of ground cover vegetation.
I suspect you're not supposed to be able to die there, but I found a way and respawned halfway across the map and a couple encounters from where I ended up, sighed as I exited to my PlayStation's system menu, and uninstalled the game without even bothering to close it first.
I stopped playing Days Gone because the save mechanism broke, managing resources was too cumbersome, it's kinda clunky, and it's willing to betray my trust that the game's mechanics are fair or consistent - which isn't necessarily impossible to pull off, but wasn't what I wanted out of a game only half intended to focus on.
I never even saw Deacon look at a butt, to my memory, and wouldn't have cared much if I had because it's fundamentally unoffensive. I'm absolutely baffled that a grown ass man thinks a carbon copy of a joke that has existed in every semi-premium network TV drama for the last 20 years is what sank his decade late to the party gritty, self-serious, open world zombie survival game.
Normally I'd be inclined to at least finish games like this, because I enjoy trophy hunting on PlayStation and am willing to endure bland open worlds and middling mechanics while listening to Well There's Your Problem, or Lions Led by Donkeys, or [INSERT PODCAST]. This should be the perfect game for me to engage with.
Instead I played it for most of an afternoon and uninstalled it. The problem, despite John Garvin's insistence, wasn't wokism or bugs, but fundamental design hiccups that impede upon the game's core experience, creating a clunky, frustrating open world hybrid stealth game instead of a focused experience.
To Garvin's point, I suppose, I did not play the entire game. However, four hours of Days Gone will see you well through the first half dozen or so missions, and if that's not enough to hook me when there's no one saying "ah but it gets good later" then I'd suggest some facet of its design has failed. And that's just if it didn't grab me. Days Gone's suspect motorcycle mechanics, overzealous resource restriction, and generally rote encounter design were also there pushing me away.
What got me however, was a classic: poor autosaves. I like to roam around big games, so I'm a perfect canary in a coal mine for bad autosaves as design that doesn't account for the freedom of the player or is inconsistent will invariably always see me lose a lot of progress. Days Gone was, in my experience, one of these games. This combined with a bug to punish me to the tune of about half an hour of exploration, hence the uninstall.
There's a somewhat random mechanic involving a snare that starts a mission. I can't tell if it's a recurring open world mission, or simply a one off that can start in multiple places, however instead of the snare functioning as intended (Deacon passes out and is transported to a small stealth encounter) nearby enemies killed me as I was yanked up into a tree as I ran away by a trap only denoted by a pile of leaves on the ground in a forest full of ground cover vegetation.
I suspect you're not supposed to be able to die there, but I found a way and respawned halfway across the map and a couple encounters from where I ended up, sighed as I exited to my PlayStation's system menu, and uninstalled the game without even bothering to close it first.
I stopped playing Days Gone because the save mechanism broke, managing resources was too cumbersome, it's kinda clunky, and it's willing to betray my trust that the game's mechanics are fair or consistent - which isn't necessarily impossible to pull off, but wasn't what I wanted out of a game only half intended to focus on.
I never even saw Deacon look at a butt, to my memory, and wouldn't have cared much if I had because it's fundamentally unoffensive. I'm absolutely baffled that a grown ass man thinks a carbon copy of a joke that has existed in every semi-premium network TV drama for the last 20 years is what sank his decade late to the party gritty, self-serious, open world zombie survival game.
This review contains spoilers
I don't think I've ever hated a game as much as I hate The Last of Us Part 2, which is ironic considering its intent is to make you hate the characters in it in the context of the story. Instead I hated the characters in it because they're part of an excruciating exercise in nonsensical violence. I can't rightly rank it 1/5 or lower, because there's some exceptional craft in the visuals as there always is from Naughty Dog, but these can and should be enjoyed in screenshots and trailers.
The premise alone would warrant immediately uninstalling this game if picked out of a bargain bin or on a deep PlayStation Store discount, sadly I paid more than anyone should and thus was compelled to at least be able to articulate what I don't like about this game.
A lot of people missed the point of the ambiguity at the heart of the end of the first game, I just didn't think one of them was Neil Druckmann. And yet here we are.
Instead of leaving well enough alone, what we get instead is a gargantuan retcon elevating the unnamed doctor Joel kills as he "rescues" Ellie in the closing moments of the first game to the pin on which the pendulum of an unnecessary story swings. His daughter subsequently hunts down and brutally kills Joel in front of Ellie, even though we're supposed to empathize with her later, and we're off to the races.
What follows is a profoundly tedious story of what would happen if you played through a choice driven game and purposefully made all the obviously bad choices. The amount of times this game has either Abby, Ellie, or an immediate companion in front of the obviously better choice - choices, mind you, that they textually express interest in making - only to divert them down the path towards disaster apropos of nothing is staggering.
Get there and it seems real dangerous? Nah, don't turn around. Friend gets sick? Nah. Friend is pregnant and another friend has shown up who can help you leave? Nope. Group of friends looking to gtfo of the hell hole that is Seattle? Nah. Found your surrogate dad's stupid brother? Nope. Just shot a pregnant woman to death and everything's going real bad? Let's hang out a bit longer. Said surrogate brother gets shot in the head, your other friend gets killed, and you get beaten to within an inch of your life but you came out the other side alive and with a family? Whoops, sorry, you have PTSD and bad dreams, time to leave everything good to go kill that bitch.
All of the game's nonsensical, contrived tilts towards knowingly self-destructive, pointless violence is layered on top of many of the previous game's existing narrative flaws, like its penchant for killing or brutalizing under-represented characters and being unable to problem solve within itself through any other means than killing or maiming characters.
The Last of Us gives you the death of a strong, charismatic woman, the death of a strong black woman in a position of leadership, the death of a young black girl who is Ellie's love interest in the DLC, the murder suicide of a black man and his infected kid brother, the graphic depiction of the aftermath of the suicide of the love interest of a character that is strongly suggested to be gay, and the suggestion of the threat of rape and cannibalism directed at Ellie (a gay co-lead).
The Last of Us Part 2 makes a sacred cow out of a young Jewish woman by making her pregnant, and refuses to touch her because that's what Niel Druckmann thinks of as purity, and then proceeds to do the exact same brutalizing.
TLOU2 kills an Asian character by shooting him in the head unceremoniously so that the game can justify a 1v1 fight between Abby and Ellie, constantly brutalizes a pair of atypical lead characters, crushes then amputates the arm of a young Asian woman and then kills her when a future story sequence needs to move faster than she reasonably could (wrapping up another lose end via gunshot within the same scene), kills a pregnant woman in cold blood, has the trans sibling of the maimed Asian woman get stabbed by their mother, and finally puts Abby and that trans child into the hands of slavers who brutalize them and tie them to stakes in the ocean to die.
And then the conclusion is that Ellie travels across the country, ruining her life in the process, to find Abby and Lev tied to those stakes, cuts them down and... still decides to fight a nearly dead Abby. In the process Ellie loses two fingers on her left hand, and the ability to play guitar as a result (aka the only thing she had left of Joel), and then somehow loses the will to kill Abby at literally the last second.
I yelled at my TV when the shot I'd called about Ellie fucking everything up and leaving landed almost an hour after I called it, and the game doesn't even commit to it. It still would have sucked, but to try to suddenly act like Ellie learned something at the brink of everything is as insulting as even going there in the first place.
And the point was what, exactly? What's The Last of Us Part 2 supposed to convey? The fallacy of hatred? The characters never seem to learn that, outside of Abby. And it doesn't line up with why Ellie goes to hunt Abby for a second time.
Was this really all for eye for an eye? Neil? Neil did you make a whole game to say "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"? Cause that seems ridiculous when the source of inspiration for this story was the Israel Palestine conflict, and especially when none of that "inspiration" brings along the fundamental incongruity of that source with it.
And why does it take so long for anyone to learn that lesson when it's dangled in front of them constantly? If the goal was to inspire in me empathy towards an enemy, it might have been a better idea to make anyone, anywhere, make a decision that doesn't seem like it was steered by the invisible hand of the writers down the most violent possible path purely for the sake of reveling in the fidelity at which modern games can render various forms of pain.
I genuinely want to know what the point of any of it was. Because I could not divine it, have not found a satisfying explanation, and the alternative is that the violence in this game is something someone wanted to make simply for the sake of making it - an even more distressing and depressing possibility.
This game is bad, and I feel like an emptier person for having played it.
The premise alone would warrant immediately uninstalling this game if picked out of a bargain bin or on a deep PlayStation Store discount, sadly I paid more than anyone should and thus was compelled to at least be able to articulate what I don't like about this game.
A lot of people missed the point of the ambiguity at the heart of the end of the first game, I just didn't think one of them was Neil Druckmann. And yet here we are.
Instead of leaving well enough alone, what we get instead is a gargantuan retcon elevating the unnamed doctor Joel kills as he "rescues" Ellie in the closing moments of the first game to the pin on which the pendulum of an unnecessary story swings. His daughter subsequently hunts down and brutally kills Joel in front of Ellie, even though we're supposed to empathize with her later, and we're off to the races.
What follows is a profoundly tedious story of what would happen if you played through a choice driven game and purposefully made all the obviously bad choices. The amount of times this game has either Abby, Ellie, or an immediate companion in front of the obviously better choice - choices, mind you, that they textually express interest in making - only to divert them down the path towards disaster apropos of nothing is staggering.
Get there and it seems real dangerous? Nah, don't turn around. Friend gets sick? Nah. Friend is pregnant and another friend has shown up who can help you leave? Nope. Group of friends looking to gtfo of the hell hole that is Seattle? Nah. Found your surrogate dad's stupid brother? Nope. Just shot a pregnant woman to death and everything's going real bad? Let's hang out a bit longer. Said surrogate brother gets shot in the head, your other friend gets killed, and you get beaten to within an inch of your life but you came out the other side alive and with a family? Whoops, sorry, you have PTSD and bad dreams, time to leave everything good to go kill that bitch.
All of the game's nonsensical, contrived tilts towards knowingly self-destructive, pointless violence is layered on top of many of the previous game's existing narrative flaws, like its penchant for killing or brutalizing under-represented characters and being unable to problem solve within itself through any other means than killing or maiming characters.
The Last of Us gives you the death of a strong, charismatic woman, the death of a strong black woman in a position of leadership, the death of a young black girl who is Ellie's love interest in the DLC, the murder suicide of a black man and his infected kid brother, the graphic depiction of the aftermath of the suicide of the love interest of a character that is strongly suggested to be gay, and the suggestion of the threat of rape and cannibalism directed at Ellie (a gay co-lead).
The Last of Us Part 2 makes a sacred cow out of a young Jewish woman by making her pregnant, and refuses to touch her because that's what Niel Druckmann thinks of as purity, and then proceeds to do the exact same brutalizing.
TLOU2 kills an Asian character by shooting him in the head unceremoniously so that the game can justify a 1v1 fight between Abby and Ellie, constantly brutalizes a pair of atypical lead characters, crushes then amputates the arm of a young Asian woman and then kills her when a future story sequence needs to move faster than she reasonably could (wrapping up another lose end via gunshot within the same scene), kills a pregnant woman in cold blood, has the trans sibling of the maimed Asian woman get stabbed by their mother, and finally puts Abby and that trans child into the hands of slavers who brutalize them and tie them to stakes in the ocean to die.
And then the conclusion is that Ellie travels across the country, ruining her life in the process, to find Abby and Lev tied to those stakes, cuts them down and... still decides to fight a nearly dead Abby. In the process Ellie loses two fingers on her left hand, and the ability to play guitar as a result (aka the only thing she had left of Joel), and then somehow loses the will to kill Abby at literally the last second.
I yelled at my TV when the shot I'd called about Ellie fucking everything up and leaving landed almost an hour after I called it, and the game doesn't even commit to it. It still would have sucked, but to try to suddenly act like Ellie learned something at the brink of everything is as insulting as even going there in the first place.
And the point was what, exactly? What's The Last of Us Part 2 supposed to convey? The fallacy of hatred? The characters never seem to learn that, outside of Abby. And it doesn't line up with why Ellie goes to hunt Abby for a second time.
Was this really all for eye for an eye? Neil? Neil did you make a whole game to say "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"? Cause that seems ridiculous when the source of inspiration for this story was the Israel Palestine conflict, and especially when none of that "inspiration" brings along the fundamental incongruity of that source with it.
And why does it take so long for anyone to learn that lesson when it's dangled in front of them constantly? If the goal was to inspire in me empathy towards an enemy, it might have been a better idea to make anyone, anywhere, make a decision that doesn't seem like it was steered by the invisible hand of the writers down the most violent possible path purely for the sake of reveling in the fidelity at which modern games can render various forms of pain.
I genuinely want to know what the point of any of it was. Because I could not divine it, have not found a satisfying explanation, and the alternative is that the violence in this game is something someone wanted to make simply for the sake of making it - an even more distressing and depressing possibility.
This game is bad, and I feel like an emptier person for having played it.