Dead Island 2 is fine. In our state of gaming discourse, where anything below an eight or a nine out of ten is automatically bad, it was always going to be somewhat of a pariah. The extended development cycle featuring three separate developers certainly hasn't helped its perception, either; the expectations that come from a game in the oven for that long are on either side of an extreme, and reality rarely meets it.

The funny thing about that, though, is that if Dead Island 2 was released in 2015, I don't think it would have been as fascinating. Released a year after the overly ambitious sequel to its spiritual successor, it's almost refreshing to have a game this scaled-back. There isn't an Open World here; if you thought the original game kind of played like Borderlands, the immediacy with which you're asked to leave to the second area so soon after stepping foot in the first only cements that further. Unlike Borderlands, the appeal of this is pretty straightforward. With or without friends, you kill zombies in increasingly violent and silly ways. That's it. There's character building through a Skill Card system, but everything boils down to whacking the flesh off the undead while you drop-kick them in the head. The physics can use some fine-tuning, but the gore is a work of beauty. The question of, 'When was the last time you saw an action game try to sell itself on its gore?' is answered succinctly the first time you decide to keep hitting a zombie after you've downed it. But that question also has another answer attached to it: Dead Island 2 is decidedly low-stakes entertainment. It's aware of how silly its predecessor was, and it doesn't do anything to change that. It's just a better, more consistent thrill ride with genre enthusiasts who couldn't care less about having a prestige-worthy script attached to their games in mind. The worst that the nearly decade-long wait has done for this game is that it's fooled many into thinking that this either isn't enough or that there would be more to this. But I've been having a blast with this so far, so I really don't mind it.

Where your mileage will absolutely vary is in terms of this game's writing. I've heard many comparisons to last year's Saints Row, and while I can't personally make that connection, I can see where it comes from. From the offset, the team behind this was very open about the angle they were taking with this. You don't call Los Angeles 'Hell-A' if you're trying to tell an emotional, engaging story. It's pure camp, down to dated references and goofy caricatures you'll either find bittersweetly nostalgic or downright embarrassing to listen to. I'm finding the chatter to be less annoying than your average Borderlands character and I actually like the cast of characters in this so far. But if you were unable to play Borderlands 3 without muting the dialog, I wouldn't consider this an improvement.

If you want a throwback to what games were like a decade ago and you're going into this without expecting the world of it, this is a pretty enjoyable time. This is definitely not the bargain bin game some are making it out to be; at worst, I think it's worth waiting for it go on sale if you're curious but skeptical. If Dambusters keeps it at or above this level of quality, they might be developers to keep an eye on.

Here's an opinion that'll get me kicked out of the Rockstar fan club within a second: I think Max Payne 3's aged better than GTA V. Come at me if you want to; I don't care.

Rockstar's output has always been staggeringly linear, with a few rare exceptions. Those exceptions, of course, don't come after the year 2001. They like to brag about the scale and minutiae of their worlds. But if you actually play the games as intended, you'll find an existing conflict between the open world aspect and the "follow the yellow line" approach to mission design compounded by (at this point) nearly two decades worth of stagnation. I suspect one of the reasons that so few people have finished Red Dead Redemption 2 is that the mechanical upgrades it received from its predecessor only serve to highlight the mechanical follies that it keeps retroactively chained up without questioning their context and purpose in a game that's not longer running on PS2-early PS3/360 hardware. I'm sure it's a similar story for GTA V, too, and I don't suspect it will change when their next game drops.

And this is where Max comes in. Max Payne 3 has no pretensions about what it is: it’s a linear, level-based, cover-based shoot-em-up that suggests at the greater freedom Rockstar usually affords their players but not once, for a moment, pretends it's ever more than a backdrop. What stops Max from being beholden to its console generation is that it has all of the polish and care of its more ambitious siblings, however. Ten years on, it’s still a striking game to look at. Environments may not have the same level of interactivity, but on a visual level, they’re staggeringly detailed. Cutscenes ooze style out of every pore, aided by performances that are directed to near perfection. Max might not come out of it feeling like the same person he was in the first two games, but there’s so much passion behind James McCaffrey’s performance that it’s easy to ignore that.

But undeniably, it’s the gameplay that seals the deal. Anybody who’s put a significant amount of time into F.E.A.R. knows the feeling of reloading checkpoints over and over again to see all of the ways in which you can approach a given scenario. Max Payne 3 captures this feeling and then some. It’s exhilarating to jump off of a staircase, cap five guys on your way down, and then finish off the last one as he tries to square with you. Outside of the game-feel, though, Max Payne 3 is shockingly violent. Like, more violent than the game that proceeded it. Bullets leave entry and exit wounds, which, along with death animations and blood decals, makes every gun feel about as brutal as it sounds. As a result, there isn’t a single gun in Max Payne 3 that doesn’t feel like a veritable killing machine. Given the game’s weapon limit, that’s one hell of an accomplishment. And on the subject of that weapon limit, I think it might be one of the few times it’s done right. It’s not that you have only two guns or three guns. You have two side-arms, which you can switch to at any moment. But you also have a big gun, like a shotgun or a machine gun. You can dual-wield your side-arms, but it comes at the cost of your big gun. There’s a layer of risk and reward that makes the system fun to engage with, rather than the grating ways in which it’s typically used. Since each gun has its strengths and weaknesses, you’ll find yourself trying to read situations. You could, of course, use only your big gun until it runs out of ammo. But say you’re dealing with close-quarters combat and you want something that’s quicker. Dual-wielding uzis absolutely shreds. Both work, and although they’re not equal, it’s the different feeling of both options that’ll keep you coming back.

The story’s a bit messy, although I don’t have much to say about it. Obvious plot holes and silly reveals aside, it’s wonderfully presented and inoffensive unless you’re opposed to the direction they’ve decided to take the series. The only big stick-up I have is that, unless you have a mod installed on the PC version, all of the cutscenes have arbitrary load times. If you’re playing the game for the first time or revisiting it after a few years, you probably won’t complain too much. But if you’re trying to 100% the game, I can see having to rewatch the same footage ad nauseam being somewhat of a nuisance.

Thankfully, there's a mod that addresses that and removes the wait times. If you’re going to get that mod, you might as well get the first-person mod, too. It’s janky as fuck; you rarely see the guns you’re holding in a way that almost harkens back to Goldeneye 64. Movement that feels solid in third-person can feel a bit clunkier in first, as well. Your head isn’t so much a different part of your body as it is removed from it entirely. And if Max’s character model has a hat on it, it’ll obscure damn-near half your screen. But the combat is good in that it transcends the jank, and the new perspective adds to everything in a surprisingly organic way.

Overall, I think Max Payne 3 is a ridiculously entertaining game and deserves more credit than it's gotten over the years. It's not just "the game that inspired GTA V's combat mechanics." It's its own can of worms, and each is fun to play with.

The easiest way I can describe this type of open world design is this:

I like instant ramen a lot. Is it as good as actual ramen? Hell no. But it's easy, reliable, and makes for a good breakfast in the morning.

Just because I like instant ramen does not mean I love two packages of instant ramen cooked in the same bowl. I mean, I don't hate it. It's more of what I like, up to a certain point. Past that point, it's chewing, chewing, chewing, and then there's the broth. Fuuuuck, the broth. By the time I'm done with the noodles, I feel like I've committed a cardinal sin of some type and my stomach ain't having it. It wants to go on strike, but I can't resist the alluring temptation of the broth. By the time I'm done with a bowl, I never want to touch the shit again. I'm getting too fat, Jesus Christ, I should eat, like, broccoli or something next time.

I know how arbitrary and stupid that metaphor is, but really, that's what these massive open worlds feel like. I'd love to say that it's a Ubisoft problem, but Just Cause 2 did the same thing in 2010. These clutter-boxes just aren't to my appetite, and that's a shame.

I think it's pretty easy to take for granted how much official controller support can add to a game. I'll give you an example: Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 on the Steam Deck is an unmitigated nightmare that, at best, is barely playable unless you have a mouse and keyboard plugged in. But the version for the Nintendo Switch works surprisingly well. Further case and point: anyone who has ever tried rebinding the buttons on a controller so they could play any of the three S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games developed and released between 2007-2009 probably came to the same realization that the developers of System Shock 2's canceled Dreamcast port did: there just aren't enough buttons on any controller for this shit, man. Unless you want to sacrifice your ability to lean around corners, turn on your flashlight, change the firing mode of your weapon, or have quick access to healing items, trying to play the PC versions of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with a controller is inadvisable until further notice.

Like Rollercoaster Tycoon 3's Switch port, what drew me to the Legends of the Zone Trilogy bundle currently on sale for the Xbox and (surprisingly) PlayStation isn't that I had never touched these games before, but I was genuinely curious to see how a franchise that has never had official controller support before would handle the task of running on console hardware. And surprisingly, it works. It works about as well as you would expect it to, anyway. It is still a little finicky in some regards: sensitivity between aiming regularly and aiming down sights differs to a distracting degree, the weapon wheel doesn't pause or slow the game while you're using it, and navigating the inventory without a cursor slows things down, which isn't aided by the fact that using the inventory, too, does not slow or pause the game for you. Some of that clunkiness aside, though, these control fine and are perfectly adequate ways to experience the vanilla versions of these games if you've either never played them before or simply want a reason to play them again. They've added achievements to all three games, as well, which is always a nice touch. Multiplayer modes aren't present, but it should be common knowledge by now that multiplayer doesn't tend to carry over when an older game gets re-released unless it was a notable part of the package (and here, it was not).

This is sort of reminiscent of that time they ported Half-Life 2, FEAR, Far Cry, and Doom 3 to seventh-gen systems to accommodate for the fact that neither the PS2 nor original Xbox could manage stable/struggled to manage stable ports of either, except they've done it two console generations later. I don't really mind that though; I find this sort of re-release nostalgic. On the subject of this being released on last-gen hardware rather than current-gen systems, perhaps they didn't have the resources for that? That distinction does make this feel a bit lazier than it should to prying eyes, but on a PlayStation 5, it emulates just fine, looks great in 4K, and feels fine enough with a DualSense. I am a bit bummed that they didn't consider porting this to the Switch, but I can see where technical barriers and monetary incentives would have prevented such a port from happening. Oh well, maybe next time.

There are a couple of interesting differences I've noticed so far:

- The Energy Drinks you'll find in-game now have the branding/product placement that they apparently did in the original European releases.
- They've done their due diligence, and the Chernobyl in Shadow of Chernobyl is now spelled in Ukrainian fashion, with an O instead of an E. They've also gone ahead and done this for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, so it's not too surprising, but what is is that they've gone ahead and edited the original menu images to accommodate for this change.
- As has been common with these re-releases since Whoopi Goldberg introduced the Looney Tunes (probably), there's a disclaimer in here about these games being historical artifacts (no pun intended). While you could point to something like the use of the R slur in these games for that disclaimer, the most likely explanation for what they're referring to is that these games have never had a particularly positive outlook on the Ukranian military. Preeeeetty bad timing for that, I'd say.

ETA: Easily the roughest bit of transition from PC to Consoles is that I don't think any of these ports allow you to quicksave. Given that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has always been firmly in the camp of "quicksave every five minutes in case you die instantly", this means that your manual saves will fill up quickly. There's also the fact that these being straightforward ports means that there are no quickslots for any game that isn't Call of Pripyat. Prepare to be sorting through that inventory a lot just to use one energy drink! That being said, I stand by my assessment thus far: these are accessible ports that mostly work out of the box. If that's what you're looking for, it's forty bucks well spent.

ETA2: Lowering my score for this by a star. Everything I said is true, but the faithfulness of these ports also extends to their notable technical shortcomings, including crashes, bugs that have never officially been patched, and inconsistent spawning/despawning. These games are still playable and fine, evidenced by the fact that I just spent 22 hours in Shadow of Chernobyl with very few issues. But if you're coming in expecting these ports to have been polished for consoles beyond their controls and presentation, they're somewhat disappointing, although the likely explanation is that there might not have been much to work with.

I don't think it's possible to make a "true" sequel to Postal 2 nowadays.

I'm not talking about the offensive humor or the minutiae of its small-scale sandbox and the chaos it lets you indulge in. What makes Postal 2 an exceedingly tricky game to follow up on is the era in which it was produced. Postal was created in the era of outrage. The finest example of this would be Grand Theft Auto and the numerous outrages it spawned at the time. But GTA never let you put a cat's ass on the barrel of your shotgun or go around peeing on people until they vomited. For all of its attempts at humor, Postal 2 was made in poor taste purely to get attention, and it worked wonders. Its content has slightly more historical merit in this medium than, 'hey, wasn't that the game that got banned in several countries?'—at least, if you're in America. It's thanks to Postal 2 that the M rating comes with two separate labels for violence outside of the Cartoon and Fantasy parameters, 'Violence' and 'Intense Violence.'

The problem now is that things don't "work" that way anymore. If there's any game in the past fifteen years that changed how Americans look at the way their games are rated, it's arguably Manhunt 2, and that's only because of how many politicians petitioned for it to get an Adults Only rating. Outside of that, which is small-beans compared to the irreversible change to the American rating system caused by Postal 2, there hasn't been much on offer. In the past ten years, you'd be hard-pressed to find another game like that. The closest analog is Hatred, which caught fire for treating Mass Shootings with more leeway than Uwe Boll. In a sense, Hatred almost surpasses Postal 4 in terms of relevance, if only because it mirrors the hellscape many Americans have constantly lived in fear of for over two decades at this point. Making a game about a mass shooting on that scale and not marketing it to outright weirdos who get off to the sight of Japanese school uniforms is like a cheat code for making your game controversial. Twenty years ago, it was easy to assume that any game that let you kill droves of nameless, faceless NPCs was a straight ticket to hell, much, in the same way, D&D was for the greater part of the 80s' Satanic Panic kicked off by the detestable con-woman Beatrice Sparks. All you have to do now is go through a Post Malone phase and put on this façade of having to say something "important", even if the only words you're saying constitute little more than shock value printed on the half-price pulp that the National Economic Registry hastily rejects in secret, and people will try their damnedest to take you seriously. Jack Thompson is dead.

This is the precise predicament that Postal 4 finds itself in: after its developer sold its soul to the Russian equivalent of Electronic Arts, an act only decried by ardent fans and the developers' post-mortem, the goalpost had moved. When your live-action adaptation only makes headlines because very few people find it funny, and the quotes you're cherry-picking from for marketing revert back to calling it a weaker version of South Park... what's the point? By the time Postal 4 was released in early access, it had been several years since a room full of critics applauded the Kevin Smith movie where Dante Hicks and Randal Graves argue about whether or not going ass-to-mouth is justified for minutes on end. Good Boys, a 2019 movie about children, had a trailer so perverse and explicit that I could see my dad physically recoiling in his seat whenever a trailer for it showed up in the theater we were at. To say that the shtick that worked in 2003 is something that would only spark protest from The Vegan Teacher in 2022 is being exceptionally polite.

On top of all of this... Postal 4's just not very fun. Okay, I'll admit that Postal 2 isn't exactly a high watermark for the medium as a whole. But to say that that's all it is is a reduction. It's dumb fun dry-aged in gold leaf. Once you crack through its shell, the center you're left is with is something that doesn't have much appeal outside of being a digital stress ball with piss-and-shit jokes and a cameo from Gary Coleman, but cutting right to the center is missing the point. It's fun to look around and find new weapons, find your way across the labyrinthine map to buy a Christmas tree in the middle of July, and play around with the surprisingly reactive world in front of you. Sure, it doesn't have the taste of something like Grand Theft Auto, and shivering behind all of the things that I like about it is just about the trashiest game I've ever played, but it's got replay value. What value does riding a mobility scooter across a map that's too large to entertain for more than a second have? "Grand Theft Auto had cars, and now so do we" is the exact mindset that Running With Scissors mocked in Postal 2, and it's something that's shamelessly regurgitated here without any of the wit or subversiveness seen previously; it's in here because Postal 2 had it, and if it's something they can reuse, self-awareness is off the fucking table. The combat's fun, but the AI somehow lags behind a game twenty years its senior. If you really, really want more Postal 2 to the point where you barely have any standards, look no further, but this is the exact kind of reduction that I warned against with nothing to dress it up.

It's not much of an Emperor's New Clothing for Running With Scissors to be met with derision, it's what they based their brand on. Hell, they're marketing this game right now with the 1/10 that GameSpot gave it. Here's where I suggest something completely different: Postal 4 is not only a weaker game than its predecessor; it's also a lazier one. Right down to flaunting the critical reception like a badge of honor! The more things change, the more they stay the same, but in this case, boy howdy have things not changed at all.

Want to make a proper sequel to Postal 2? Forget the apocalypse, forget a contemporary setting, forget mobility scooters and jokes about Karens and that one Tiger King guy and also COVID. None of that is relevant, and you might as well be making a game in another series if you believe it is. Postal built its brand of regression, and the funny thing is, it worked. Not one-hundred-percent, but I guarantee you that the first two games in this series are far more timeless than this will ever be. As I said, it was the era of outrage. 3D had only been a thing for one-and-a-half generations prior, and with video games only being readily available to the consumer for two to three decades, it's easy to argue that aspects of the medium were still in their infancy. Postal wasn't infamous for how good its gameplay was or how particularly shocking it was, it was part of a wave of digital entertainment that set a precedent. Decades apart, speaking about how regressive the series was is speaking about history.

If they wanted to make a true Postal 4, they had to embrace that. Set it back in the early 2000s, or, hell, late 90s. Make it a commentary on the crazed American politics that fueled both games with the stunning insight that such a large gap in time has caused, while also paying mind to the new wave of gaming it was a part of. You don't need a massive map or aspects that feel appropriated from other, much better contemporary titles. Fuck struggling to catch up, this should have been behind.

I know it comes off as pompous and arrogant to readily assume that you could do better than someone else when creativity is involved. Especially in game development, dick-swinging is what typically leads to developers slaving away for years and, in some cases, over a decade on something that might not work out in the end. But consider how fascinating it would have been if Postal 4 actually embraced its roots instead of chasing the bitter aftertaste that III left in everyone's mouth. I'm sure the developers would know; their CEO was unironically tweeting before the 2020 election about how Joe Biden should be thrown in Guantanamo Bay for crimes that haven't been proven.

At least I bought these games before discovering the developer's Twitter...

I have put maybe an hour or two into Silent Hill 2, and I know it's a game that I need to finish at some point. I know the great twist, I've had that spoiled for me god knows how many times. I honestly put it into the same camp that I have movies like Alien in: even if there's something in there that surprises me, having the big moments ripped off like a band-aid purely through pop culture osmosis dampers my curiosity somewhat. All of this is to say, while you may not personally be excited for new Silent Hill games, I'm just curious to see something new. Since I was only really around for P.T. once that was spoiled for me, too, I'm not counting it—which leaves me with the newly released The Short Message.

I did not get the hate that this got over its leaks, and having finally played it, I still don't. Having seen those leaks, I actually have more of an appreciation for this; I know now that this was pretty cohesive in its themes and intention when it needed it to be and never deviated from that. I don't mind a lack of subtlety, as long as the bluntness of what you're working on is there for a good reason, and I found the reasoning for it here to be acceptable. It's laser-focused on what it wants and needs to say from beginning to end, and this focus is echoed throughout the spaces you explore. Although I can see someone being a little irritated that this is linear to the point where doors don't unlock unless you read certain notes, most of those notes serve the story and not the lore. There are notes that serve the lore, but they all feed you the right amount of information while giving you space to think. What impressed me on an immediate level were the cinematics. I genuinely can't tell if they were live-action or rendered, although I know that they were likely rendered. It's uncanny as hell, but it's equally impressive. What impressed me throughout, however, is how well this serves as a mood piece. Each and every location, whether it was important or minor, made me feel something. This is more of a vibes game than something substantive or scary, and while that might be disappointing if you're going in expecting serious scares, it kept me hooked. One concern I do have, if this is the playable teaser many are making it out to be, is that the only area where I noticed evident performance issues was when I was near fog. If the new Silent Hill games are all going to lack the fog or run like shit because of it, we might be in for a doozy. But regardless of that one scene, the rest of this was pretty solid! ...for the most part.

Yeah, those chase scenes, man. I'm a little biased because I already don't like chase scenes, but something about them here felt either like filler or downright infuriating to deal with. If it weren't for the last chase sequence, my rating for this would absolutely be three-and-a-half stars because the vibes were just that immaculate for me. But no, god, no. I don't know if I ever want to go through that again. Put it this way: the game doesn't make a big deal about which rooms you go into because of its linear trajectory until the final chase sequence, where it expects you to remember the layout of the map like the back of your hand while elements of it feel completely different. It expects you to find five photographs in this mess without giving you a map or checkpoints. At a certain point, the stress I was intended to feel gave way to frustration. The only reason I didn't stop playing there was because I wanted to see the ending. That was it. The ending was nice, and there was a cute little tune that played over the credits (way more people worked on this than any other free game I've ever played), but I don't think that forgives it. It was that bad. At least the creature design was cool, though—although I found it to be scarier in the leaked concept art than I did in the final product. Consequences of having that kind of stuff leak, I guess. Whoops! Feel bad for the developers on that front, because I'm probably not alone in that.

What I liked about this, I really liked. If a new Silent Hill game is made from this mold, I wouldn't mind, actually. The Silent Hill 2 remake being a horror game that needs to have a trailer dedicated to its combat should say something about how skeptical I am of that, but I might also check it out when it's on sale. If this and that trailer is Konami's way of getting people back on the Silent Hill hype train... I mean, I wouldn't call this embarrassing. This was cool. But, 7/10.

"As a French studio addressing a global audience, the game does not engage in any foreign policy and is not inspired by any real-life events."

Oh no.

What's the point, then? If you're going to be telling a story through the perspective of a bodycam, should the medium not be the message?

I'm willing to give these developers the benefit of the doubt, maybe there will be more to this than that. But as it stands, that kind of statement attached to a game with a premise like this is only slightly less on the nose than EA or Ubisoft making a game adaptation of Bumfights with hyper-realistic graphics where you play as both the cameraman and aggressor and then claiming that the only bit of reality mirrored in it is that the homeless exist.

Moreso than most games I've written about, it's hard to articulate my experiences with Grand Theft Auto V. As the best-selling action game of all time and subsequently one of the most recognized pieces of entertainment of our time, there's not much new ground to cover. No matter your issues with the game, it's consistently made billions of dollars.

As somebody who likes to write about the games in my free time, a part of me feels like it would be safe to stop there. But honestly, that's an attitude that feels almost antithetical to the points made ad nauseam through this game's narrative. Caught somewhere between an old punk band playing their greatest hits to an aging audience that sees them as part of the establishment they once rioted against and a new punk band taking the opening slot to a welcome applause from the same crowd, Grand Theft Auto V is both beholden to the dirge of the formula that its predecessors helped popularize and bolstered by the effort it makes to move away from what was becoming stale at the time. As a playground for destruction, it provides the requisite tools. It allows players to create goofy scenarios of their own accord without ever fearing that the player might veer off onto a course that isn't related to the narrative or a side quest of some sort. It's no Saints Row 2, but it actually runs at a stable framerate and is more readily available, so it's much easier to play nowadays. The two pillars of its sandbox, driving, and shooting, wouldn't exactly make compelling games on their own. Of the two, the driving is arguably better. But there's enough there that, if a team wanted to take what was there and morph it into something more small-scale, it would hardly be a fool's errand to get it up to snuff. Combined as they are in a massive open-world sandbox, there's enough there to provide hours of entertainment away from the main quest. The driving strikes a perfect balance between weightiness and floatiness, never absolutely embracing either camp but providing enough of the goods from both to create something simultaneously challenging and approachable to someone who's never picked up a controller before. The combat feels like a watered-down version of Max Payne 3 with the weapon wheel and abilities from Read Dead Redemption, which is to say that it mostly works but isn't anything spectacular. Watered-down or not, Max Payne 3 was a really fun game, though, and that shines through here. You won't be diving off of staircases or doing any of the crazy action moves that you did in that game, which I do believe makes this the lesser game. But in exchange for the replayability that hurdling yourself off a ledge in slow-motion while systematically slaughtering everyone around you offers, there's a wonderfully eclectic collection of weapons on offer. Not all of them have as much use as others; outside of the one mission where it's required, using a jerry can and then shooting the gas trail feels jankier than Postal 2, and I mean that with sincerity. Almost everything else, though, is lots of fun to play around with, in and out of story content. Where things do start to falter a little bit is that the open world content is too inconsistently interesting for a 100% completion playthrough to feel like anything but a massive chore. I know this is the kind of opinion that'll get me downvoted off of Reddit within a microsecond, but I honestly think Cyberpunk 2077 plays with its setting in more interesting ways. "Look around the world and collect a ton of things" sounds like a lot of fun until you realize that you have to collect 50 of the fuckers, and that's just one quest. It begs you not to be too goal-oriented while asking you to see if you can complete as many of its arbitrary goals as you can. And none of that would be a serious issue if the things you were collecting felt tangible in any way. A torn piece of a letter is a torn piece of a letter. You don't get to see the letter as you're putting it back together, and the game doesn't use the letter in any mysterious way that might interest you in collecting all fifty shreds. Going back to Cyberpunk, the one piece of its world that did feel like a massive checklist, mini-boss fights, is used to expand its setting. It's not enough that you've killed or incapacitated someone who was bugging out; you have to look around to understand why they went haywire in the first place so the person you're corresponding with can find better ways to help that person if you kept them alive. It's intriguing, builds on top of, and, in some cases, recontextualizes what you know while leaving a fair amount of the event to your imagination. If even one of the exhausting number of spaceship parts this game asks you to collect had something similar, I'd be going under bridges all the time. That's not to say that there isn't anything of the sort that's interesting here. There's a side-mission where the game asks you to find places that look eerily similar to screenshots sent to you so you can track down suspects. If the developers kept it at that level or tried to do something that wasn't just "find all of the stuff!" I wouldn't be complaining. But for fucks sake, you could at least make a murder mystery interesting without asking the player to fetch an endless number of collectibles for it.

And then there's the story.

I honestly don't know how to feel about Grand Theft Auto V's narrative. It's entertaining in a few areas, anti-climatic in others, and a bit too much of one good thing in-between all of the cracks left over by both. If you intend to spend 30 hours with a lighthearted action romp that doesn't take itself too seriously, you probably won't mind this. If you can't stand it when characters in a story are just stand-ins for whatever the writer's beliefs on society are and barely have anything recognizable past that, I don't have very good news to tell you. The three leads do manage to surpass this through the physical and vocal performances of the actors behind them, but I don't believe the rest of the cast fares any better. The best it gets is Trevor's drug buddies, but that's because Trevor is a fun character to play straight off of. Everyone else falls into this slippery slope where if everything is satirical, it starts to lose its bite. The main missions are at least pretty fun, even if it has the Rockstar problem of "every mission needs to have a shootout, and if not a shootout, then a car chase, and if not a car chase, then something monotonous to play off of your expectations of both." I don't blame anyone for never being bothered to see this game to its credits because, fun as that may be, it's a little too obvious in its structure. And that's not even talking about the other massive insecurity Rockstar's singleplayer games have struggled with since GTA III. The most fun moments I've had in Grand Theft Auto V's main stories have been when I've found incredibly arbitrary ways to fail. Planting a bomb on the door of a clueless janitor's home, not seeing him react to it when he gets to said door, and then blowing it up in his face is some Looney Tunes shit, and the game telling you that the obviously dead janitor was just "spooked" is never not hilarious. There are missions in Grand Theft Auto V where the game accounts for what the player is doing in a given situation; none of the fun ones are part of the main quest.

Once you've beaten Grand Theft Auto V and seen all you intend to see, there's not much to do outside of playing the aggressively monetized online mode. Except for using mods to swap all pedestrian models with Goku, replacing the textures of one specific building in the world with the shittiest looking McDonalds you've ever seen, replacing several of the ads in the open world with weeb shit, and then installing a mod menu to make every car start at a thousand miles per hour so you can steal a bus and make Speed 3 a real movie. Is that a run-on sentence? Probably. But I don't care. The modding scene for GTA games has always been out there, and it's no different here—which is why ennui runs through my system when I say you shouldn't buy this game if you intend to support the creators of such projects. In short: Fuck Take-Two Interactive. To elaborate, Take-Two Interactive likes to dick over its fans who dare to modify their game, seeing their contributions as blasphemous if they don't align with their corporate aspirations. It's ironic that I brought up Cyberpunk earlier because these motherfuckers would fit right in with that universe. But most ironic of all, the CEO of Take-Two said that his company would never release a game like that and that they're focused on quality, yadda yadda yadda. Less than a year later, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy—The Definitive Edition was pooped onto store shelves. Whoops! It turns out that when you talk out of your ass like that, people are less likely to trust anything you say going forward. Especially when you remove a lot of the wonderful work your fans are creating because you see it as "competition." What a sick joke!

The "objective review" does not exist.

There's an ongoing debate about whether or not the current cycle of praise for Cyberpunk 2077 is blatant revisionism or valid. Either the game was always good or it was always sucked. The game's in a better state, no doubt. But it's still unpolished in really small ways that add up to a greater whole. There are still no gender-neutral options, and while the one trans character in here is well-written, the in-game ads are still a bit tasteless to anyone not comfortable with that line being crossed. If you want to spark a divisive conversation with your friends, talk about Cyberpunk 2077. If this review brings those same responses out of the woodwork, so be it.

I really, really like Cyberpunk 2077. About a year ago, I called it a diamond in the rough; "the best damn 7/10 I've ever played." The issue with that statement is that it's misleading. If review scores are subjective, what good is a 7/10 if the game you're giving it to is something that's earning high praise from you? Cyberpunk 2077 is a diamond in the rough, no doubt. But it's the kind of scratched-up jewel that still holds beauty to me.

Underscoring its bleak world and grim atmosphere, there's a beating heart inside Cyberpunk 2077. For a game that has most of its side-quests involve killing people, it's a game that treats the individuals at its core like people. Whereas most games of this sort would cut the fluff and get straight to the killing, there are several side-stories here that just involve... talking. Two out of my three siblings practically dropped this game because they got sick of skipping dialog, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Pyramid Song, the quest where you uncover a sentient vending machine, hell, the five minutes you spend fixing a roller coaster in Pacifica so you can ride it are among some of my favorite gaming memories from the past five years or so, and those are all small fish in comparison to the much larger questlines stuffed in here. Most of it is, at the very least, intriguing. As for the quests that involve fighting people, I actually enjoy the combat here. I love the way Double Barrels knock people on their asses, the feeling of a rip-roaring machine gun in my hands, piercing through walls with a charged shot to deliver a killing blow, and slicing and dicing my way through a crowd with a katana. I love the dynamic that hacking brings to the party and all of the unique ways you can play the game just by saving your money to chrome up. Double jumping around Night City is the sort of fun very few games capitalize on. Seriously, try turning off your mini-map so you can get to your objectives by jumping around. It's a delight that rarely gets old. I swear to god, I'm not bootlicking here. I just really can't get enough of how much fun this game is to play.

And yes, it is buggy. The police system is barely there. You can chalk that up to the hilariously absurd solution they have cooked for that in there currently. But while I've praised this for being a very fun time, its mild GTA-flavoring belies that a lot of what's adjacent in here feels like it's been included out of obligation and not desire. The police system is a great example of that, but I'd also argue that the ability to steal cars is also indicative of this. Unlike GTA, you almost always have a car in your possession that you can have spawned right next to you at any time. You can technically level your specs high enough to steal some of the most debonair cars in the city, but by that point, you've probably unlocked a few of those from sidequests. Likewise, while I'd argue that unlocking the cars of certain characters by doing quests related to them is a delicate touch, the fact that you can't customize any of the cars you own makes it so a few of the cars you unlock feel obsolete past a certain point. But the kicker is this: if you want a decent example of what this game succeeds at, it's the gigs. They can start to feel like a case of quantity over quality at a certain point. But a majority of them stress the far less linear aspects of this game to the point where they almost make this feel like it's as much of an immersive sim as it is an Open World Crime Game in the Wake of Grand Theft Auto III™. I wouldn't say it excels at being an immersive sim; owing to the linearity of its main quest and a few areas where the player's agency is reduced outside of it, going into Cyberpunk expecting Deus Ex will only yield disappointment. But it apes the basics successfully enough for me to say that the bulk of what makes this a great experience outside of the story-centric quests are those gigs. It's a bummer that that's not the exact impression many had going into this, and it's a huge stinker that that's the way they marketed this, but that's that. I hear they're patching this to include a better police system and drive-by mechanics, which is neat enough for me to maybe reconsider my stance on this when it drops. Until then, though, don't think of Cyberpunk as a Grand Theft Auto and Blade Runner crossover if you want to value your experience with it.

However long it takes for CD Projekt Red to make a sequel, I will try my hardest to be here. As long as the developers are treated right and the game isn't rushed out the door in a questionable state, and they hone in on the very obvious immersive sim inspirations more, Cyberpunk 2 could have some serious heat attached to it.

And yeah, I thought Edgerunners was cool.

Dishonored is one of the few games I've ever played where a direct recommendation of "play this with a controller/keyboard and mouse" cannot be made. Generally speaking, I enjoy playing stealth games with a controller. Stealth, like racing games, is a genre that benefits greatly from analog sticks. At the heart of a great stealth game is nail-biting tension and suspense. Vulnerability is stressed through risk outweighing reward. On a keyboard, all of your inputs are static. Are you pressing up? Good, you're moving up. Jolting an analog stick up can mean the difference between shuffling silently and bringing in nearby ears for inspection. Even in games where this choice tends to be an illusion, it heightens the already high stakes of weaving in and out of crowded spaces as little more than a specter in the night. If that's how you choose to play Dishonored, I recommend it. Leaning and inventory management can feel a little less natural than they would on a keyboard, but they're functional and aren't as distracting as they could potentially be. In the words of Godd Howard himself, "it just works."

The other side of the coin is this: combat-based playthroughs require vastly more precision than two analog sticks can allow. Far from the stealth game half of this game is, aggressive playstyles in Dishonored turn the game into a psychotically frenetic action-platformer about style. The ability to teleport goes from a neat tool for traversing large areas undetected to a weapon that allows you to change your position on the fly. Double jumping allows you to exploit the verticality of each level, creating moments where countering an attack means raising a blade from above as often as it does parrying a swing. Grenade kills are a gory spectacle that separates torsos from limbs and then torsos from themselves. But this brutality exists for more than shock value alone. Each decapitated body part can be picked up and thrown to be used as a distraction or to stagger oncoming attacks. Being of the same lineage of Dark Messiah, Dishonored features a host of supernatural abilities to go alongside teleportation, one of which allows you to throw enemies to the ground with a gust of wind. Paired with the ability to stop time completely, falling bodies go from quick executions to rather grim bridges used to access nearby rooftops. Also paired with the ability to turn the weapons of your enemies into your own, it allows you to disintegrate unaware platoons. As both a stealth game and a power fantasy, Dishonored succeeds.

As a narrative? I don't know what to tell you. This is where things start to get a little bit more complicated. At the heart of Dishonored isn't its cast of characters or the journey you go on but the morality of your actions. The choice to go silent or to leave bodies in your wake is one not only made for your character but the world he lives in. Going on a murderous rampage causes everyone to hate you while the world falls to shit. It's daring and bold, and I can't say it works entirely because this game loves to give you tools to just murder the fuck out of everyone. Your supernatural powers can be used to sneak around guards. But when upgrades can make my powers deadlier while others encourage me to go on thoughtlessly violent killing sprees, I don't know if I feel like the game is trying to instill any morals in me and succeeding in its job. Especially since the detail of this setting only makes me care about the characters I'm told to get rid of, the non-violent approach to Dishonored's narrative can feel a bit hollow.

Outside of that, though, this is one of the best immersive sims I've ever played. This is one of those quintessential 'reload your save every five minutes' games, and it's always a blast to revisit. I do wish its attitude toward women were a little friendlier. I wouldn't say it's the most misogynistic game I've ever played, but averypaledog's review hits the nail on its head.

Dreams is not a LittleBigPlanet sequel. On its surface, the game-engine-within-a-game-engine-running-on-proprietary-consumer-hardware is reminiscent of LittleBigPlanet and its renowned sequel. But consider for a moment that describing LittleBigPlanet purely as a tool for creativity neglects the fact that, as a tool, it was kind of janky. Even its sequels, with their expanded scope and toolsets, could not compensate for the fact that trying to create anything with more than one person usually devolved into the random bouts of deathmatch usually saved for Halo's forge mode--albeit much stupider and silly than that game ever was. Fifteen years later, LittleBigPlanet stands out because it was a fun tool to play around in and also because the atmospheric, pop-music-flavored vibes are still as immaculate as ever.

You can create experiences like that in Dreams, no doubt. But if you try to play Dreams on the basis of vibes alone, what you'll find is an exceedingly vacant and wanting experience.

Dreams understands the counter-cultural angle of LittleBigPlanet's creation tools but, in execution, is more akin to a Net Yaroze spiritual successor. Net Yaroze, for those not in the know, was a brief attempt by Sony to turn their aging PlayStation 1 hardware into a hobbyist's wet dream. It may not have had all of the bells and whistles of that professional developers were afforded at the time, but given that anyone could still make a game with it, that hardly mattered. Net Yaroze's output can charitably be described as the demo scene on a smaller, more niche scale. Those invested in putting full-3D first-person shooters on the floppy disks that Doom would have shipped on weren't concerned with pushing the limits of hardware as restrictive as the PlayStation. But those who simply wanted to know what a PlayStation could do happily sent 700 dollars to Sony in the year of our lord 1997 (I'm citing Wikipedia, and there's nothing you can do about it). In much the same way, Dreams is chock-full of demonstrations. "What if I made Fallout 4?" is a sentiment you'll find throughout its community. If Dreams were as laser-focused on its target audience as Net Yaroze was, it would likely end there. But in the vein of it being a spiritual successor, those demos exist to the extent that they do in part because Dreams is more than just an accessible variant of the past. A fine line is walked between accessibility and depth. Custom music, for example, feels less like the gimmick it was in LittleBigPlanet 2, and more like a fully-fledged feature. It may not be the copy of MTV Music Maker that Jim Guthrie composed Morning Noon Night on, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone in Guthrie's elk found Dreams to be of great use. The end result is that, alongside a multitude of tech demos, Dreams is also filled to the brim with the kinds of microgames you used to see on platforms like GameJolt whenever a developer was bored or participated in a game jam. There isn't a sense that there's a broader market that these creators need to work towards; Dreams strips the bullshit away from prestige indie games and lets indies be fucking indies again.

And it's dying. It's behind a paywall, there's a fairly steep learning curve so no one's really made the great American Dreams creation yet, it never got ported to PC, and it is no longer a priority of Media Molecule's. It wouldn't surprise me if the community on this is only slightly more active than the five remaining people who play LittleBigPlanet 3. And that's a shame! Dreams deserved waaaay better. I don't know if I can recommend it in its current state, but for what it once represented, it was great.

It's genuinely funny to me that so much discussion around hype these days is surrounded by the mantra of "I hope this isn't the next Cyberpunk!" because, while I get that, more games could seriously use the level of attention to detail that Cyberpunk put toward immersing you in its world, and I'm hardly being facetious with that statement. Case in point: You can only see your feet in Starfield if you're in third-person mode. It's such a minor detail that really shouldn't matter. But it's as close of a clue as you'll get to what the overall Starfield experience is within the first five minutes or so.

What you're going to hear a lot about Starfield, and what you've likely heard already, is that, yeah, it's a Bethesda game. It's buggy and kinda janky; its main story has interesting ideas but lacks enough of a personal touch to really engross you in the potential of its overall premise. It's predicated on the belief that exploration is BALLIN', and it would be if the overly mechanical interactions you have with the world here were more sparing. The stealth system is still laughably dated, utilizing duck-and-cover methods for combat that make it more a test of patience and your reliability to quicksave at the right times than most games with tacked-on Stealth systems do. And the absolutely bonkers scale here is really just an excuse to fast travel everywhere. I shit you not; you could move in the same direction for ten minutes and not be an inch closer to your destination from where you started. It is actually just egregious. If all of these are deal-breakers for you, then Starfield is best experienced as a bonus for subscribing to Game Pass and little else. But if you're a sucker for building characters and side-questing, Starfield has you more than covered. The icing on the cake here is that the combat is pretty solid. Shotguns in this game feel like shotguns, and the typical RPG thing of enemies being spongier until you put the right amount of points into your proficiency skills doesn't do much to hinder this. Put it this way: I'm twelve hours in, and I'm still having fun using the starter pistol. I'll be damned: the First-Person Shooter part of this First-Person Shooter ain't half bad! The quality of the side content occasionally suffers, but there are still some serious winners in here. It is right to call Starfield a Bethesda game because, like most of their output, it will have you hooked if you let it.

I really wish there was more to say about this than that. I'm sure that, when I inevitably interact with systems like base building and ship customization, I will either love or loathe my time with Starfield. My impression after twelve hours so far is that this is the quintessential 7/10 game: there are enough holes in this for me to understand and relate to both opinions regarding it without resentment or reservations. Before that riles anyone up: a 7/10 is a good score, and you're missing out if you automatically assume that means a game's bad or not worth your time in any meaningful capacity.

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Edit: Lowered my score for this by a half-star because Cyberpunk absolutely shits all over this, and it's not even funny. I hate to play the fanboy card, but revisiting that game has made me completely reevaluate how I scored this.

Lol no

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I stopped playing after those twelve hours and have had no incentive to return to it since. While my previous comment was less of a response and more an interaction with the bitter public reception this was garnering in the light of Cyberpunk's magnificent Phantom Liberty expansion, this one comes from the heart:

Starfield is 100 GBs and, outside of its shooting, is just kind of boring.

6/10.

It's weird to consider that Hotline Miami might be one of THE most seminal games from the 2010s'. It helped inspire a swath of artists, from game developers to musicians, for the decade to follow.

Do you want to know why I said that it's only "one of" the most seminal games of the last decade? Because Dark Souls has three games in its main series, one game that came before it and a remake of that one game, and at least three games by the same developer that play just like it.

We are no longer in the era of sequels being a neat addition—cinematic universes, television, and live services are all more popular than they've ever been before. Whether or not you're ready to brace a media landscape where the idea of discussion being finite begins and ends with "but I can't wait for the sequel" is irrelevant; this is where we're at, and we're too far in to course correct now.

For the moxie of the developers to not want to squeeze their golden goose too hard, I admire their work. It's not just that they've made two all-time indie classics, the likes of which helped define the scene in the late 2000s'. It's that they made a really good game, let people talk about it until they inevitably moved on, and didn't try to keep its relevance on life support for ten years. Hotline Miami is relevant ten years later because the artists it helped inspire wound up creating games like it, with more to come in the future.

In terms of the game itself, it's about as fast, brutal, and fun as you've been told it is. Its commentary on violence in video games might not be the revelation it once was. But compared to a lot of the meta-commentary that was being made in games at the time, it's surprisingly subtle and doesn't overstep its boundaries. The soundtrack is, of course, magnificent, and I still listen to it daily. Hotline Miami is the kind of game that I stop, start, stop, and then eventually finish just that one more time. Part of what makes that meta-commentary hold up slightly more than it should is that Hotline Miami is a genuinely fun game to play and revisit. Hell yeah, I'll bruise some bad dudes with my free time! Why the hell not?

I've played around three versions of this game, and that's mostly to test the waters. For my money, the best port for this game is on the Nintendo Switch. But the Vita version gets very close! Hotline Miami on the Vita uses the back touchscreen in a way that makes me proud to say that I'm a Vita owner, if only because nothing else feels like it. But it's those joysticks, man. They're too small, and their deadzones are pretty tiny, and my god, you feel it while playing Hotline Miami. It's a little better than the second game on the Vita, though. Good lord, hand me a Switch, and I'll blaze through the first few levels of that game, but I can barely dodge roll to save my life on the Vita port.

Anyway, five stars, and I regret nothing.