spoilers

At first glance, this seems like a largely frivolous mashup, the Pride & Prejudice & Zombies of gaming, a modern successor to old b-movie fodder like 1966’s Billy the Kid Versus Dracula. Look a little deeper, though, and it’s clear that Undead Nightmare’s Weird West skin is a vessel for further analysis of the western as a genre. The ending in particular is quite damning of the whole idea of the western expansion and Manifest Destiny, the lingering effects of colonialism plunging the world into chaos. By the end, Marston returns the stolen Aztec mask which caused the zombie outbreak, and all seems well. However, the grave-robber character Seth rushes back into the crypt and steals the tribal artifact once again, reigniting the zombie plague. Even when there’s an easy, obvious solution to the problem, the settler population continues to desecrate native cultures and fuck everything up all over again, in a seemingly inescapable cycle.

One of the most striking moments in this expansion is the Sasquatch hunt sidequest. A farmer tells you that there’s a bunch of Sasquatches going around eating babies. Marston sets off in search of them, killing the mythical creatures without much second thought, as they are other and look more like animals than humans. Once you get to the final Sasquatch, though, he begs you to kill him, speaking quite fluently and maligning that his entire species has been hunted down and killed. It’s terrifying how easy it is here to dehumanise another group and wipe them out, a deeply disturbing allegory for the treatment of Native Americans throughout the western era (which continues today in a myriad of ways). It’s a totally surreal scenario, yet its underlying theme is just as real and relevant as anything the main game provided.

Gameplay wise, the basic mechanics are about the same as the main game: you have an array of bolt-action, lever-action, and semi-automatic weaponry, along with a couple of throwable explosives. The third person, auto-lock targeting system where headshots are top priority plays out basically the same as Grand Theft Auto V, aside from the different arsenal. There’s also a bullet time feature, as with the main game, but here you get it at max level from the start, encouraging you to use it far more. There’s a couple of new weapons, but most of them are in fairly short supply and don’t shake up the formula too drastically.

The other main difference from the base game in this respect is the zombies themselves. They’re slow, lumbering things that walk out in the open. Cover is basically useless here, instead you’ll be running and gunning your way through zombie hordes. The emphasis on headshots is even greater, as body shots don’t do much to keep the zombies down. I actually find this combat a lot more enjoyable than the main game, though it’s a tad too easy most of the time. The game claims that ammo is scarce and you should conserve your bullets, but beyond the first town or two that was never really an issue for me.

The main structure of the game involves you roaming from town to town, clearing out the zombies to help the survivors and then doing a variety of sidequests for them. There are a few “main” missions, and in typical Rockstar fashion some of these are quite heavily scripted, but overall this looser format gives the player far more gameplay freedom than their other recent titles. It does get a little repetitive at times, though, especially once you get to Mexico and there’s not really much further amping up the stakes. The structure of the narrative as a whole feels somewhat slapdash and thrown together, leaning heavily on established relationships from the base game, giving each major player a quick quest or two, and then on to the next town.

Even though there’s plenty of great individual moments here, they don’t really form much of a coherent whole, at least from a character or plot perspective. The one thing that ties it all together is how most of the survivors, instead of banding together, dig themselves even deeper into their own prejudices, blaming the apocalypse on everything from Mexicans to Jews to African Americans and beyond. It’s an eerie echo of increasing tensions in the world right now, decades of prejudice and mistreatment once again bubbling to the surface of popular culture.

It’s also quite entertaining to see how fed up with all this shit Marston is, he even deliberately lets a couple of racist dickheads get eaten by zombies when he easily could have saved them, and threatens people at gunpoint several times. Unlike the main game, where he was framed as a redeemable character trying to be a better person, he’s just totally done and letting his violent instincts takeover, and this characterization fits way better with Rockstar’s misanthropic satire. There were many annoying characters who I just wanted to pull a gun on and get it over with in the main campaign, and it’s very satisfying to see Marston finally line up with that (does this make me a bad person?).

If the main game drove home that by 1911, the west is pretty much dead and the cowboy life became totally unsustainable, this explores the one way in which cowboys could’ve been relevant again: a total stop in societal progress by means of a zombie apocalypse. As grim and fed up as Marston becomes, there’s a perverse pleasure in returning to the gun-slinging and horseback-riding ways of old that’s not lost on him, nor the player (nor on Rockstar, it would seem, who had to rewind time itself to for Red Dead Redemption 2 to be possible). The apocalypse destroys the very world which Marston, Dutch, and co are hopelessly railing against, giving them one last chance to be outlaws again, even if it costs the entire world.

an even better version of an already 5/5 game. an adventure game, a crpg (in the vein of planescape: torment), a detective sim, a sprawling choose-your-own-dementia jamboree, a dreary mucking-around in self-destruction, inner dreams, despair, love, hope (?!), and loads of politics. you're the sorry cop, the hobocop, the broke-dick disco king of dire debauchery. an absolute scumbag who, just maybe, wants the world to be better. you have the coolest partner, kim kitsuragi: a moral anchor of sorts—sympathetic, albeit amply capable of becoming... displeased with you. it all depends. there are many ways to blaze your trail through revachol. in the milieu of computer games, disco elysium is a rare flower reeking of human life, history, and the yearning of loneliness in a capitalist shit-world. breathe in the stink and let the heartless wind run its fingers through your hair.

Harry Whatsapp
Kim Kitsuragi: You should kill yourself NOW.
Titus Hardie: You should kill yourself NOW.
Kim Kitsuragi: I NEED cock detective
Cuno: You should kill yourself NOW.
Garte: You should kill yourself NOW.
Sans Undertale: Can I borrow 500 réal

My only real exposure to Armored Core was this MAD I had somehow stumbled into back in 2011, so I honestly couldn’t say that I fully knew what this series was about (aside from laser lightshows and missile contrail carnivals) until I finally gave AC6 a shot.
Game good! With courteous thanks to how easy it is to fall into builds that turn enemies into drywall it kind of eliminated all concerns I had about spending more time diagnosing my mech in the equipment menu than actually playing the game. Moreover, the straight-from-the-tap gameplay delivery system of a farcking mission select screen, it’s so lean and mean in a way I had long since given up on the idea of FromSoft ever going for.

In all honesty more than anything I just think this game is beautiful. Such a fully-fledged and well-rounded exploration of what “mech” means. You have your piloted robots run the gamut from sleek and amphibian Metal Gear RAYs, to cubic mili-utilitarian Mechwarriors, to plastic-looking Small Soldiers. There’s an impressive devotion to building a sense of historicity and design ethos for each of the factions and corporations.
I love the sheer depth, detail and scale put into the environs. There is a relatively understated mission where you go down into a mine and it had me gawking at the set dressing for nearly half an hour, just this absolutely painstakingly realised devotion to depicting ‘Industry x1000’. One thing that always gets me is these overhanging industry locales, like an impossibly large train junction hanging precariously miles above the ground, city-wide of tracks landing on the factories below and standing bolt upright. The smell of lead paint absolutely fucking HUMS off this game man. With little human-sized walkways and doors and staircases peppering the landscape for good measure the illusion of scale is thoroughly sold to me. Incredibly illustrative quality to this game. Just gushing with calamitous industrial might, a world suffocating itself in an iron eggshell. Architecture that commands tone and mood. It's cooler than the mechs themselves.
also holy shit allmind‼️‼️‼️

This trash website decided to yeet my good, proper ACVI review so you get the cliff notes

- Gameplay good
- Difficulty and balance is a complete mess
- Rusty gives me very pleasant ace combat Zero flashbacks
- Am i the only person who thinks this game is absolutely beautiful
- Fromsoftware really knows you'll just listen to a melancholic feminine voice
- Story is a surprising highlight, bit less bite on the anti-capitalism as a gameplay concession but good exploration of some neat sci-fi concepts and vibes
- Why'd they ever stop making these?