"You know about death, that it's just a change, not an end. Hawk. It's time. There's some fear, some fear in letting go. Remember what I told you."

Darkest Dungeon 2 is the second darkest dungeon to conquer.

While the first will still be the first.

Let’s just get this out of the way. If you would like to enjoy Darkest Dungeon 2, then go into your save file and simply with a .txt editor of your choice and unlock all the heroes abilities. You’ll thank me later.

Darkest Dungeon 2 is different to its predecessor but also it really isn’t that different at the same time. Fascinating how the synthesis of difference works.

So what is the difference between the two? Well, for starters—DD2’s combat isn’t the equivalent of a vapid mobile game from the early 2010s. There’s a lot more going on with it, alas the tokens/statuses, i.e the inclusion of “combo” and “dodge”. As well as the heroes being designed to hold more variety in their abilities, like most can do some utility (self heals, stress heal, debuffs, etc.) Paths play into it and can drastically change the hero's abilties for better or worse—it matters what you're looking for. (There are paths that should probably be reworked.)

People enter this game thinking “I need a stress healer, a party needs this role” which is incorrect, you can take whatever you think will help you, as long as you’re doing damage. This comes up with plenty of other turn based combat games—video game or not— damage is the end all be all . The only way to reach the end state of this game is to kill every single enemy that comes in your way during your run. Sure, is having a dedicated healer/stress healer nice to have? Occasionally, yes. But, this is where combat items come into this mix. Why lose out in damage when you can take care of a lot of statuses and missing health with a combat item, it’s a free action to use them. Of course it’s another resource to think about during your run but the right combat item, at the right situation can be a game changer. (This isn’t even that different to DD1 but combat items—I would argue are more powerful, and significant in this one.)

What else is different? Nothing.

You see DD2 is if I picked up DD1 and shattered it into a pile of shards and told you to put it together again.

You see, a lot that people think is “missing” in the sequel that was from the original is in this game. It’s just somewhere else than it was before. It is an image, an idea, a problem, reconstructed into something entirely else.

“Where’s Hamlet, where is my simulation of taking care of mercenaries during the darkest of times???!!!” The inns and candle of hope, as well as the relationship system (which is a lot better than it was before. Polyamory was a REAL problem back in the day.)

“Where is my dungeon crawling!! Fuck this stage coach.” The world is a dungeon, it’s just big enough for your stage couch. There’s plenty of forks in the roads and perhaps at most three routes, for a difference of navigation. Oh—right. We’re going up, instead of going sideways Wow, what a difference. Oh and we can’t back track anymore?? NOOOO DROPPED!!!

“WHERE’S THE CRUSADER!!!” In the fucking grave.

Here’s a question: What is the difference between bringing four Antiquarians in a run to make a lot of gold for your town and bringing four heroes with the wanderer path so you can make a lot of candles for your candles of hope? The only difference here is one is four Antiquarians and the other isn’t.

You see, boys and girls.. Darkest Dungeon 1 and 2 still— fundamentally LOVE to waste your fucking time filling out lists and doing groceries. So with Darkest Dungeon 2 you’re going to be at the crossroads, picking out your party comp and going “what am I going to do today? Going for candles, are we trying to waste our time finding hero shrines, what boss are we doing. Do I even fucking bother doing a boss?” Wow, what fucking game does this remind me of? This is why, and I’ll admit it here, right now. Because this is almost exactly how I feel about the first one. This game— at it’s best is when you are using heroes who have their skills all unlocked so then you can theory craft and strategize a party comp that will synergize their way to fucking victory.

(Also adapting when bullshit happens but the thing is you have to have the ABILITY to adapt in the first place—making it more difficult to do that when you begin the game. But you also have HighwayMan and MAN AT FUCKING ARMS-AKA THE BEST CHARACTER IN THE GAME so if you die it's kinda a skill issue, sorry lol jk kinda.)

If it wasn’t for the fucking hero shrines I would say this is what DD2 does better, it does it better in every way until the fucking hero shrines. Listen, I like the backstories, don’t get me wrong, I think that’s fantastic and works well with it’s themes of the game but holy shit WHAT A TIME SINK it is to unlock all the abilities for ELEVEN characters! Life is too short! I’m too sexy for this! Fuck you!

DD2 is just shards of familiarity that was DD1, moments of reminiscence, pure past of the original darkest dungeon displaced into a sequel. DD2 is making a mistake and reminiscing that mistake, then allowing other mistakes from the pure past into the present. Forgive yourself or don’t— I don’t give a shit.

vampirism gives you yaoi hands

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I wish I could just start and end with that joke, but unfortunately I feel compelled to say more. I truly do not think the hate this game is getting is merited. Redfall is not good, but it will not be the worst game you play this year. I think it is tempting to say that Arkane Austin was meddled with and their vision was compromised by corporate overlords, or that the release was too rushed, which I’m sure is all true to some degree, but I’m not convinced that these are the core issues with Redfall. I think the issue is that this game is just too many things. This game is trying to be at least three completely different games and is none of them well. The loot system is a cavalcade of junk, the co-op is hectic and empty, and the open world stuff, the only stuff that comes close to succeeding, is bogged down by those other two. The vampires aren’t enough of a threat to be exciting to fight by the late game, and some of your powers are sort of busted. The fact that co-op was marketed so hard on this is utterly baffling, because I truly think this game is only ever fun playing solo. Any of the friction that arises from playing carefully vanishes when you’re running around with three other players. You can’t read diaries or look at environmental storytelling when your friend is just bee-lining to the next waypoint. There are a few really cool moments in this game that would be utterly ruined in a four-stack. If they hadn’t been trying to make that work, maybe they could have devoted resources to making the weaker elements stronger. (Though I still think the game shouldn’t have done loot the way they did.) There are moments where I can see a version of this game that works, when I’m skulking through dilapidated mansions or scoping out a cultist camp. I also think there is a legitimate novelty for a vampire story to not have the vampires be sexy socialites and instead just be straight-up ghouls. The vampire gods in Redfall are capitalist Nosferatus who run a version Theranos that is even more evil somehow. Each of them is shitty in their own way and you do definitely want to see these fucks dead by the end. And I did play it to the end, because I have brain problems. Do I regret it? A bit. I think I would have gotten more out of another game, but I do not think Redfall is a horrible, unplayable game. I had some fun here and there. It’s just such a mess of competing design paradigms that it turns into a giant pile of oatmeal. And boy, am I stuffed!

A game of peaks and valleys. While Shin Megami Tensei 2 has some amazing moments the sum total experience was a step downward from its predecessor, especially in the gameplay department.

In terms of art this is a really beautiful game, with incredible sprites and many demons looking significantly better and more unique than their SMT1 incarnations. There's such a vast number of enemies and the backgrounds of save rooms, shops and other various locations show vastly more detail than those in the prior release. The UI has also seen some improvements and, while not perfect, is a step up from the very rough interface in SMT1 on SNES.

While overall I preferred the modern day post apocalypse of SMT1 this game's future setting of Tokyo Millennium is incredibly well realized, with a lot of effort going into establishing the culture and various levels of society therein as the player progresses, giving us the chance to put a magnifying glass to each of them. The environments you visit were all a joy to see and some of the late-game areas truly shocked me with some amazingly fun and cool sequences and locales.

Dungeons here were solid overall, roughly on par with SMT1 and maybe even a bit more inventive with some of its designs. There are some puzzle dungeons which are tricky and fun to navigate and there was usually a good sense of pacing throughout them.

The fusion system is as fantastic as ever and the huge number of new demons benefits it tremendously. The addition of an inheritance system (even if a simple one compared to later games) also brings it up a whole notch over the previous releases, as you now can put a whole lot more thought into what sort of combinations you're going for. The weapon fusion system from the prior game has also been expanded in a way that gives it far more use throughout the game.

One of the biggest faults this game has is how poorly signposted progression is. In SMT1 I generally felt that, outside of a few instances, the game did a good job of either expressly or subconsciously leading the player toward whatever their next goal was. SMT2 loses this completely though and there are so many sections of the game where in order to progress you have to return to a seemingly already completed area for what feels like no reason just to trigger whatever event will allow the story to actually move forward. Even when the game is guiding you properly it feels much more reliant on NPCs telling you precisely where to go and what to do, rather than SMT1 which strung the characters along with a more natural chain of cause and effect.

And while we're talking about this the layout of the map, which has a sort of central hub for large portions of the game, requires you to spend so much time moving back and forth through the same areas in a way that simply didn't happen to this degree before. It's a tiresome and draining experience to have to walk back through the same connecting tunnel over and over again. This presents gigantic pacing problems especially for the middle sequence of the game which feels like it puts the plot on pause for an unrelated and uninteresting side story.

Combat balance feels slightly better here but is still broken and exploitable. Once you figure out one of the handful of winning strategies there's very few things that will ever challenge or punish you for abusing that endlessly or push you out of your comfort zone. This is a problem with many of these games and not at all a unique fault of SMT2 though.

On top of this the negotiation and demon summoning systems are outright downgrades over the SMT1 system. No longer can you directly ask demons for money or magnetite, which means that you're much more limited in your capacity to summon allies for stretches of the game. In SMT1 I negotiated constantly throughout the game, in SMT2 I barely used it outside of recruitment. Maybe it was a bit too easy to become loaded up with cash or MAG through this method, but I would have preferred some light rebalancing over just removing these options. This might have one of the worst negotiation systems in a mainline game, it feels somehow even less robust than MT1 and 2 on the NES! And being unable to use my demons as much as I would have liked really sucked some of the fun out of the greatly improved fusion and team-building options.

The worldbuilding and payoff therein is where this game picks itself back up though and proves to be a real winner. It's full of intriguing characters and revelatory moments, all this with the quick pacing of an SNES rpg rather than the plodding, exposition heavy slog you might expect a more modern Atlus game to deliver these story beats. The themes of Law and Chaos are explored in even greater depth here, with the former philosophy in particular truly codifying itself in this game. And this time around every alignment has a satisfying and complete feeling ending, whereas in SMT1 it always felt as though the non-neutral routes were half-assed in their conclusion. It's a truly incredible journey that culminates in one of the greatest climaxes and ending sequences I've ever experienced in a video game, though there are so many other fantastic moments peppered throughout.

While it might sound like I've been harsh on the game I still felt the experience was worthwhile, even if not incredible like its predecessors. The ways in which it disappointed hold what is a good game back from being an all-time classic like many of the games in the series it's derived from. This is the first time in the series that I felt like playing my first playthrough without a guide hindered instead of enhanced the experience. The reward of figuring out what to do when I did almost never was enough to counter the frustration I felt as I wandered the entire game world figuring out what arbitrary NPC it wanted me to talk to. But at the same time playing with a guide at your side and constantly referencing it instead of becoming absorbed into the world isn't exactly fun either.

(This is petty but I also couldn't help but complain about this game being, what I view, as the beginning of this series' weird obsession with Masakado. He was present in some previous releases but this is the first time a game seemed almost fetishistic in its portrayal of this dude.)

My hope is to revisit this game if the PS1 version ever receives a retranslation and hope that the improved interface and updates will lift up my opinion of it, as there's something monumental here that was slowly chipped away at by a mountain of small grievances.

If during the seventh gen the market was flooded by indistinguishable boomer shooters instead of corridor shooters, then AMID EVIL would fit right in. Just like Bioshock Infinite or Resistance or Killzone, nobody will be talking about this in a few years. The only reasons AMID EVIL got any attention at all was because of its striking visuals and the novelty of being one of the first new retro shooters, since it sure as hell wasn't the quality of the gameplay.

The gameplay is irredeemably bland for three key reasons:
1) 90% of the enemy cast are either melee rushers or ranged projectile-based enemies which you all dodge in the exact same way, i.e. circlestrafing.
2) AMID EVIL rarely shakes up enemy placement in any meaningful way: enemies typically come at you from only the front instead of multiple directions, enemy groups often consist of only one or two enemy types, and enemy groups are usually too small to ever effectively pressure you on space or time.
3) The levels are often very spacious and open, giving you plenty of space to keep circlestrafing or backing away from enemies forever.

So even though the game keeps throwing new enemies at you, new level design styles, new level gimmicks, the combat ends up playing out the same each time.

The enemy cast has some interesting enemy types here and there, but then AMID EVIL bizarrely decides to keep them exclusive to their own 4-level episodes. This means that the actually interesting enemies that aren't merely reskins of Doom's Imp or Pinky, such as the ones that throw bouncing explosives, fire continuous laser beams, fire a burst of short-range hitscan nails, or pull you towards them, are never used in tandem. It makes absolutely no sense why you would kneecap your own game like this. Imagine if Doom never paired zombie grunts together with the hell enemies for lore reasons--there isn't much you can do with zombie grunts alone, but it's when they're combined with other demons that they really shine. Instead, each episode in AMID EVIL gets one interesting enemy type at most that's only mixed with that episode's reskin of the Imp and Pinky. If each episode is going to reskin the basic enemies from the last episode to fit this episode's visual theme, then they might as well reskin all the cool enemies from the prior episodes as well while they're at it.

Some enemies have elemental weaknesses/resistances to incentivize using other weapons, but elemental weaknesses/resistances are only any interesting if whether taking advantage of them being a good idea depends on the situation. For example, exploiting them could make them explode on death and deal damage to everything nearby, which is useful if you're far away, but dangerous to yourself if you're in blast range. The Golems in E3 have something like that going on where they're weak to your rocket launcher, except the rocket launcher deals negligible self-damage when used up close anyways, and levels rarely place them in a way where you can't easily create some safe distance between you and them. A bigger problem is that AMID EVIL will often pit you against homogeneous groups of enemies that have the same weakness, so it's really not a choice as to what weapon you should be using.

At the very least you can theoretically get some mileage out of basic straight projectile throwing enemies and melee rushers through clever enemy placement, but it is here that AMID EVIL just haphazardly throws them in front of you in a big open field, or throws one enemy at a time at you in a section where space is limited. There are some exceptions, such as the start of E6M1 where you're dropped in a space with enemies surrounding you, or E6M2's start on Warrior Mode where you need to run past high-tier enemies to get some better weapons first. But even so, AMID EVIL is primarily a circlestrafe-fest--which is not what Doom and Quake 1 were. Doom employed hitscanners to make you think about when and where you should break line of sight to avoid damage instead of holding A or D for the whole game, and Quake 1 used tanky enemies in claustrophobic levels make you use the most out of what little space you have. AMID EVIL ain't got nothing like that.

Even supposing the enemy cast were good, whether the weapon arsenal could make even better use out of it is another question. AMID EVIL's arsenal is functionally identical to your standard melee/pistol/shotgun/machine gun/rocket launcher (the game is just very good at covering up this fact by giving each weapon a cool visual design). So you've got the Whisper's Edge which functions like a slow and unsatisfying projectile-based shotgun, the Star of Torment that's an actually satisfying-to-use Super Shotgun, the Azure Staff that's like a machinegun with slight tracking, the Voltride that's a heavy machine gun, the Celestial Claw that's a rocket launcher, a melee weapon in the form of the Axe, and the Aeternum which is this game's BFG. Most of the time you're going to be using the Axe, Star of Torment and Celestial Claw anyways, because they're the only ones that can deal any decent damage anyways, and ammo restrictions aren't too big of a deal in AMID EVIL, even on Warrior Mode where you start each level with only the Axe. DPS is the only meaningful attribute you want to consider (on top of enemy weaknesses) when it comes to choosing the right weapon for the right situation. The Whisper's Edge/Azure Staff are weak compared to the SoT/Voltride, and because they share the same ammo pools respectively, there's generally no reason why you would choose to use the weaker weapons save for some edge cases. You can get away with a lot of shit with the Axe in the early episodes, because even on the highest difficulty the enemies there will just do fuck all damage (the difficulty in AMID EVIL is more balanced in a way where enemies in later episodes deal more damage, which the difficulty setting doesn't affect as strongly), and health pick-ups are everywhere.

There are some unique attributes to AMID EVIL's weapons. The Axe pulls in nearby enemies when you swing it for a guaranteed hit, which neatly gets around melee hit detection being a problem in most first-person games. But the rest isn't all that interesting. The Voltride has a mechanic where it can chain lightning to other nearby enemies when you overkill something with it, but you rarely ever face large groups of fodder in AMID EVIL that would make you consider using that. The Aeternum is just a boring BFG. Instead of looking at how Doom's BFG actually functioned like a shotgun with a very wide horizontal spread which could do insane damage at point-blank range or spread damage evenly across multiple enemies from medium range, AMID EVIL just made its BFG equivalent into a Skip Encounter Button. You point it at an open space, click fire, and it fires an orb that instantly deletes most enemies in line of sight. There is little skill involved in using it, and only serves to let you skip encounters outright.

The Big Gimmick of AMID EVIL is Soul Mode, which is like Heretic's Tome of Power, except instead of finding it as pick-ups you have a gauge that needs to be refilled by picking up the souls of fallen enemies, much like in Painkiller. When you activate it, all your weapons temporarily get supercharged and behave differently (the Star of Torment fires homing balls, the Whisper's Edge fires penetrative projectiles, the Axe becomes a blender, etc.) for an extra burst of power. There's several problems with this, however.

One, first-time players will have no idea when it's appropriate to activate Soul Mode. This leads to prematurely activating it in situations that turned to not be that intense after all. It's made worse by the fact that Soul Mode takes so much souls to charge up, so using it at the wrong moment stings pretty hard. The only way the player can know for sure that it's a good idea to use Soul Mode is when the level places a Mega Soul that refills your entire Soul Gauge in anticipation of a big fight (because why else would the game place something so powerful in the open), which begs the question if it's even a good idea to allow the player to use Soul Mode whenever they want, if it's not made clear when it's a good time to use it. This is why it might have been a better idea to make Soul Mode faster to charge but less powerful (much like DMC's Devil Trigger) in order to make the player more willing to use it without it feeling like they wasted it, and without trivializing certain fights in the game once activated.

Two, having to walk over enemy bodies to pick up their souls is incredibly tedious and does nothing except waste your time. This is even more problematic with flying enemies whose souls can be stuck several feet in the air that you can't reach, or when you kill an enemy with the Star of Torment only for their body and soul to be launched across the room and stuck on a faraway wall that you can't reach. The only reason the way this is the way it is is because in Early Access Soul Mode could only be activated whenever you picked up enough souls instead of manually activating it when the Gauge was full, which everyone rightfully considered to be a bad idea, because having no control over how and when you control such a core mechanic means you can't consistently activate it when you want to, and are more prone to accidentally activating it in spots you didn't want to because you accidentally bumped into a soul (which was the devs' intended way of balancing Soul Mode (?!)).

In terms of navigation/exploration, AMID EVIL's level design also makes several blunders. AMID EVIL has this tendency to sprinkle minor ammo and health items around the edges of a room (instead of placing one major pick-up at the center of the room), probably because it admittedly looks aesthetically pleasing. The problem is that having to move next to every edge to get all items is bad for the pacing of the level. Trails of minor pick-ups are fine when they're on the main path, decorating edges of the room with them just wastes your time. Another is that while AMID EVIL's levels make good use of verticality, there are no shortcuts. This means that if you accidentally trip and fall, you're gonna have to walk aaaaaaall the way back up, which is especially the case in later episodes where platforming becomes more of a thing. This could have been prevented with shortcuts, but it seems the devs designed the platforming around savescumming.

Speaking of platforming, there's Episode 5. What I like about Episode 5 is its willingness to use more environmental hazards and traps in combat arenas, but what I intensely dislike is its platforming. Not because there's platforming at all, but because it's platforming of the 'wait 10 seconds for the platform to move towards you' and 'run all the way back up the stairs again if you fucked up the platforming' kind that involves copious amounts of downtime and doing nothing at all. There is even a sign near one of the first major platforming sections E5M1, that reads 'Patience is a virtue'. All that message was missing was a :^) at the end.

The combat part of AMID EVIL's level design is a failure, but I want to stress that the aesthetic of the levels, especially in later episodes, really are the bee's knees. While the combat may not be memorable, the level architecture and aesthetic certainly is. The earlier episodes suffer from the incongruous UE4 look of low-poly assets being mixed with high-fidelity lighting and visual effects, but past Episode 3 things actually start looking more appealing. Episode 6 is a highlight with its Arcane Dimensions-like buildings and giant floating water bubbles, and Episode 7 with its completely abstract areas where every platform is skewed and platforms spontaneously pop in front of you. It is only unfortunate that, except Episode 5, these changes in theme hold little to no ramifications for the gameplay.

That's honestly the best way to sum up AMID EVIL: it's some basic bitch-ass shit, but boy, it sure is pretty.

Doom 64 can be best described as "inoffensively OK". I do prefer it over the rather basic level design in most of Doom 1 and the creative but quality-wise inconsistent Doom 2, although there was definitely a lot more Doom 64 could have done with its enemy roster, even if the Chaingunner/Archvile/Revenant were cut due time/technical constraints. This becomes clearer after playing the new The Lost Levels add-on (seven new levels that were included in the rerelease of Doom 64 on modern platforms), which is a noticeable step up compared to the original campaign in terms of visual detail and encounter design, for reasons I will get into a bit later.

The most standout thing about Doom 64 compared to other Dooms is its psychological horror atmosphere, one that's more in the vein of Quake 1 than Doom 3 with its jumpscares. So Doom 64's color palette is darker and more desaturated (while still being willing to use primary colors unlike Quake 1 and its endless Brown), but it's the oppressive dark ambient soundtrack that really hard-carries Doom 64's atmosphere. It's not even an understatement to say that the soundtrack is the atmosphere. It fits unsurprisingly well with continuously slaughtering demons by the hundreds in abstract industrial/hell-mazes without ever stopping to take a break. I find myself wishing that Doom would lean into the psychological horror more from a narrative and level design perspective as well (without turning the gameplay into a generic corridor shooter á la Doom 3), because as it stands the horror is exchangeable window dressing. But damn it's some good window dressing.

In terms of the new models and animations in Doom 64, it's kind of a mixed bag. I don't have an issue with the enemy sprites being pre-rendered early 90's 3D as opposed to the scanned clay models of the original, but a lot of expression has been lost on the new enemies. You can barely make out the angry grimaces on enemies like Zombiemen, Imps, and Mancubi, which did a lot to give them some extra personality. On the other hand, the redesign of the Arachnotron feels like a straight upgrade (its design was even used as the base for Doom Eternal's Arachnotron), making it looks more murderous and lethal that's better in line with its role in combat than the goofy "fatman on a chair" look it had in the originals. The biggest loss by far are the new shotgun reload "animations", which instead of the legendary original reload animations now just do the Quake 1 thing of moving the shotgun sprite back and forth. On the other hand, the Chainsaw now has twin chainsaw blades. It deals the same damage as the original, but it is twice as cool now.

Doom 64 plays near-identically to the first two Dooms, but there have been some tweaks. The SSG has a slightly higher RoF (1.77s -> 1.53s), and Cacodemons now consistently go down in two instead of three SSG blasts when the RNG felt like screwing you over. This helps speed things up in parts where there's not a major challenge going on (like fighting lone Hell Knights in tight corridors or the clean-up phase of a major fight where you're finishing off the last heavy demons) without making stronger weapons like the Plasma Rifle or Rocket Launcher useless, so I do welcome this change. You can no longer prevent Pain Elementals from spawning Lost Souls by hugging their face, now you will take a rocket's worth of damage if you try to do that. A new weapon has been introduced called the Unmaker, which on its own is like a hitscan Plasma Rifle and a redundant addition to your arsenal, but becomes an OP joke weapon once upgraded. You're better off pistol starting each level (yes, all Doom 64 levels are designed around pistol starts, and for maximum enjoyment you should play with pistol starts as well) so you don't have to pretend you can't just Unmaker your way out of a tight spot.

There are no new enemies in Doom 64 (not counting the Mother Demon), aside from the Nightmare Imp, which is an Imp reskin that moves twice as fast and throws out fireballs that move twice as fast, but I do dig its inclusion on paper. On paper this allows regular Imps to pose more of a macro-level threat with their slow fireballs cutting off your movement in the long-term, whereas the faster Nightmare Imp fireballs create micro-level threats that you need to immediately evade. In practice this distinction is kind of pointless since Imp fireballs are small and easily avoidable either way, and Arachnotrons, Mancubi, hitscanners and Revenants (if Doom 64 had 'em) are generally a better fit for that kind of setup anyways.

Lost Souls have been changed the most, they charge much faster and attack more frequently, but (thankfully) now take only one instead of two shotgun shots to take down. In a vacuum, I do prefer this change of Lost Souls being a high-threat enemy that screw you over harder but are easier to kill (outside of Lost Souls becoming unable to move around corners because of how frequently they try to charge at you in a straight line), as opposed to a tankier annoyance that always came in large numbers and took a noticeable amount of time to get rid of. The problem is how this change affects Pain Elementals. A weaker Lost Soul means Pain Elementals also pose less of a threat, which you could stunlock more effortlessly. This is probably why the Pain Elemental in Doom 64 now spawns two Lost Souls at once instead of one. However, this opens yet another can of worms, especially when the Pain Elemental is triggered into infighting (something more likely to happen in D64 since a Pain Elemental failing to spawn Lost Souls can now damage other nearby demons). At best, you get lucky and manage to kill the Pain Elemental with two rockets before it spawns two super-sonic Lost Souls that are in your face the next frame and cause your rocket to blow up in your face. At worst, the game grinds down to a halt as the sheer amount of coked-up Lost Souls create so much unpredictability that picking them off from a safe corner becomes the only viable survival tactic. Not that this never happened in the originals, but there Pain Elementals didn't tend to escalate things as fast. When looking at the Lost Soul changes in the grander scheme of things, I do prefer the original implementation, as it doesn't make fighting Pain Elementals as much of a chaotic fustercluck.

Doom 64's level design usually doesn't do stuff that's downright offensive (f.e. death pits, giving you almost no breathing room against an enemy horde, surrounding you with hitscanners, etc.), but at the same time its combat encounters aren't particularly outstanding. There's a general lack of time/space pressure in most encounters (i.e. being given too much space to move around in and/or there being not enough enemies to restrict that space), nor is there much of a Double Impact-style resource management pressure to justify the overall laidback intensity of the levels (doubly so if you are playing without pistol starts). Aside from that is the EXTREME overreliance on Hell Knights/Barons, especially in the "do the SSG dance against one or two Knights/Barons in a tight corridor" setup that gets reused for about a hundred times with little variation. I don't believe that the absence of the Revenant/Archvile is the cause here, because you can still get some good mileage off Arachnotrons and Mancubi (as The Lost Levels show). This brings me to my second point, which is that Arachnotrons and Mancubi are woefully underutilized in the main campaign. In the main campaign they primarily appear in some of the later levels and most of the climax setpiece levels (Dead Simpler, Cat and Mouse, Watch Your Step), but for most of the game it's Knights/Barons, (Nightmare) Imps, Pinkies, and Cacodemons. Even then Pinkies/Cacos are used similarly to the Knight/Barons where the winning strategy is doing the SSG dance while slowly moving backwards. Usually Pain Elementals, now an Archvile-level threat, and Lost Souls will be deployed to shake things up Although as I stated before, I have mixed feelings about them.

The Lost Levels fare a lot better level design-wise. So (Nightmare) Imps tend to be more effectively utilized for long-range harassment, the levels are more willing to make you fight demons from multiple directions, Arachnotrons tend to be used more often as turrets and just in general, and Knights/Barons aren't spammed as much. There are some tedious parts, like the blue key room in Thy Glory and the room design making you slowly take out major enemies one by one, but not every map can be a winner. Overall, definitely a good inclusion for Doom 64. For those who are interested, my favourite maps would be map 9, 15, 16, 22, 34, 35, and 37.

In terms of navigation, Doom 64's levels do have a tendency to fall in the "go backtrack and find out what this switch opened on the other side of the level" trap, where at best you find the newly opened gate or door by accident, and at worst you're running circles in an empty level trying to find out where to go next. The navigation in Doom serves to create small navigation puzzles between fights to keep players from tiring out (much like the platforming in Doom Eternal); it shouldn't be what you end up spending most of your playtime on. To prevent this, colored keycards should be used when the distance between a switch/key and the corresponding gate is large, as colored gates are easier to remember as a place you need to eventually go to, than if it were a locked generic door. But since Doom only supports three keycard colors (and because the more you add, the harder it gets to keep track of these colored gates), regular switches should be used when the distance between a switch and a corresponding locked gate is short. Alternatively, extra enemies can be spawned in to form a breadcrumb trail towards the now-opened gate, or the corresponding gate can be placed in your line of sight when hitting its switch. Not to say that Doom 64 never does this, but it's not always consistent in doing so. So there is even one level in Doom 64 which has an interactable Build Engine-style camera to show you what just opened in another part of the level.

Overall, a decent map pack. Try it out if you want to see what playing Doom with a Quake atmosphere feels like.

TAG2 itself is an anti-climax that represents a concerning change in direction for the Doom reboot series, which hits harder given how on-track id Software already was with Eternal and TAG1. I am also fully aware of its troubled six-month development cycle where both TAG1 and 2 had to be out within a year of Eternal’s release to fulfill legal obligations, whose production schedule did not originally account for blizzards and power outages striking Texas (where id Software’s offices are located), and a whole freaking pandemic. I am not particularly upset that TAG2 feels rushed or that most of its new enemies are reskins (if anything, I think more games should be willing to reskin and reuse enemies), but what concerns me the most is its new gameplay direction, one which would have persisted even without the world breaking down. To properly understand why this is concerning, and considering parts of the base game and TAG1 have been changed with the release of TAG2, it is necessary to go back to the previous entries and establish some context.

With TAG1, the core players were pretty satisfied with its intensity and challenge, but the consensus amongst casual players (according to Doom Eternal director Hugo Martin) was that TAG1 was too intense pacing-wise, and thus exhausting to play even on lower difficulty settings. Here I disagree; TAG1 definitely does not run at 200% at all times. When breaking the structure of TAG1 down, there are still many downtime segments in the form of platforming segments, minor puzzles, minor combat encounters, story segments, or (quite frankly overlong) underwater swimming sections inbetween all the major arenas. The difficulty has definitely escalated, but the escalation is necessary to avoid running the risk of only repeating the ‘white belt’ encounters of the base game that the player has already proven their mastery over.

I believe the real culprit here is that most casual players were also returning players who had grown rusty in the six months between the base game’s and TAG1’s launch. Considering TAG1 starts off with several Cyber-Mancubi and Barons and no warm-up and it only escalates from there, it can make the entire DLC campaign feel overwhelming when you have yet to remember how everything worked; something that might not have been a problem if you had only just finished the base game. This is where in retrospect I believe that TAG1 would have been better off if it was balanced around a shotgun start and finding all your old weapons again, instead of balancing around your full loadout. This would allow returning casual players to get a quick crash course on all your old abilities and weapons over the course of a level or two instead of having to remember everything at once, and it would also allow for some interesting encounter design for returning core players as well where you’d have to face off against enemies without the weapons you would normally use against against them (like dealing with Shieldguys without a Plasma Rifle, or Whiplashes without Lock-on Rockets, or a Tyrant without any of your power weapons). The Super Gore Nest Master Level already features a Shotgun Start mode, so this shouldn’t have been technically impossible. And, while I personally don’t see any value in this type of argument but know that many others do, you can also cite historical precedent as a justification for taking your weapons away by pointing out that Doom 1 would also take away all your weapons at the start of each episode. Nevertheless, id Software declared the pacing guilty, and so decided to correct this in TAG2.

Rather than balancing the learning curve around one playthrough like with the base game and TAG1, for TAG2 id Software decided to take the Platinum approach to difficulty. In short, the first playthrough is an extended tutorial meant to keep casual players invested by introducing something new every 30 minutes while forgetting about the last thing, whereas the second playthrough in the form of the (yet to be released at the time of writing) Master Levels is the ‘real’ game where aforementioned new elements are combined with each other and pre-existing elements to actually test your mastery over them. In the context of a game like Doom Eternal that’s not designed around being replayed repeatedly to get a decent grasp of the gameplay (like with a roguelite or an arcade game), this approach is terrible because of the following reasons:

Firstly, it defeats the point of having difficulty settings that you can switch between on the fly. When you select Hurt Me Plenty difficulty, you expect a comfortable breeze, and not something as demanding as TAG1 was. When you select Nightmare difficulty, you expect to be pushed into using all of the game’s systems. TAG2 on Nightmare absolutely does not do that, because most TAG2 arenas are intensity-wise on par with Arc Complex in the base game, except in Arc Complex you did not have all weapons/upgrades yet, whereas in TAG2 you are fully upgraded and then some (see: Hammer). Even if the Master Levels were already out, you would still have to trudge through 3 hours of white belt encounters on Nightmare before you can actually get to the Good Stuff, because in DE you cannot access Master Levels unless you complete the regular levels first. Using cheats to skip the regular levels for the Master Levels wouldn’t be ideal either, because regardless of skill level you still need the time and space to learn TAG2’s new gameplay elements, and Master Levels are the worst place to learn them considering MLs are designed around you already having a full grasp of them.

Secondly, you basically have to run through the same content twice to get the ‘full’ experience, and even then it’s not a given that people will even bother playing the Master Levels. Amongst the majority of gamers, “beating” a singleplayer game usually involves playing once up to the credits roll, unless each playthrough promises new content (like in roguelikes and whatnot). Having to replay the same content but remixed once or twice until you get to the Fun Zone will feel to most like uninspired padding, who will just drop the game out of boredom before they get to the Fun Zone. The base game deftly avoided this and successfully appealed to both casual and core gamers by showing you the majority of its content and making you experience the depths of the gameplay--i.e. the Fun Zone, over the course of one playthrough no matter what difficulty setting you picked. Master Levels were for those who were already satisfied with the base game but wanted even more. Only after getting hooked to the gameplay will make people feel like playing remixed content; the actual hook was not in the Master Levels themselves. Meanwhile if you want to experience what it’s like doing Meathook platforming or fighting the new enemy types in a situation that actually makes you think about what you’re doing, then you’re going to have to slog through this 3-hour long pseudo-tutorial before you can even get to that point.

Thirdly, changing direction like this in what’s probably the final piece of official DE story content is the worst place to do it in. Most of the people who will play TAG2 are most likely those who already managed to get through the base game and TAG1 and liked it for what it was and wanted more, so suddenly hitting the metaphorical brakes with TAG2 feels incredibly out of place, what with its tendency for simple fodder-only enemy waves. Narratively this also creates a massive whiplash, where you finally arrive at the True Big Bad’s Lair, but it’s mostly populated by these Demonic Troopers that explode if you so much as hit them with the Meathook, so your archnemesis ends up feeling underwhelming and like a bit of a joke.

Fourthly, I hear TAG2 is supposed to be a ‘victory lap’ or a ‘power fantasy’, but that is, quite frankly, cope. A power fantasy only works when you have something worthy to exercise your awesome power against. Whenever you’d pick up a power-up like the Quad Damage in a game like Quake 1 (or just Doom Eternal itself), it would throw a greater amount of enemies at you that would normally be bullshit to deal with without the power-up. It feels good because now you’ve got the power to pull one over the foes that have been making your entire life miserable up until now. Being given a power-up and the game throwing even less enemies at you than before is not a power fantasy, but an anticlimax. Being given a full loadout and an overpowered hammer that can stun groups of enemies, and then have the only opposition you face be on par with what you faced in the middle part of the base game, is an anticlimax. And as far as I can tell, TAG2 isn’t trying to be anticlimactic for narrative reasons that could possibly justify this direction in gameplay.

There is also another issue that plagues TAG2’s pacing, one which would persist even without the aforementioned changed in direction--namely: You’re introducing five new enemy types (Riot Soldiers, Cursed Prowlers, Screechers, Armored Barons, Stone Imps, I’m not counting the Demonic Troopers LOL), a new equipment item in the form of the Hammer, and Meathook platforming in a DLC consisting of three levels (or looking at Immora, it’s more accurate to say two-and-a-half). Where are you going to find the time and space to let the player get acquainted with all these new gameplay elements, while also delivering a climax gameplay-wise that’s befitting of the last piece of official main story content?

Well, you don’t.

Save for the Hammer, every new element in TAG2 is tragically underutilized. New enemies like the Armored Barons and Stone Imps tend to largely appear by themselves and are rarely accompanied by other Heavy demons, whereas the new support demons like Screechers and Cursed Prowlers are only used in relatively low-intensity encounters, and almost never in something major. Having new enemies appear by themselves or with only minor support makes sense for when you encounter them for the first time and have yet to learn how they work, but that’s about the only capacity said demons appear in. Meanwhile the actual major encounters in TAG2 barely use the new demons at all. Meathook platforming is also mostly used to traverse large gaps, but almost never in combat. When it is used in combat, it’s usually as a single Meathook point above a largely flat and sparsely populated arena that already has tons of space to move around in. I can only imagine this all being a consequence of the “we’ll properly flesh this stuff out later in the Master Levels” philosophy.

You really shouldn’t be introducing too many new things at the very end of the game, as it gives you very little space to flesh out said elements. The base game stopped introducing new enemies and weapons after Taras Nabad (bosses and Makyr Drones excluded), and dedicated the remaining four levels to realizing its own potential by combining the existing enemies in different ways to create more demanding but also more unique encounters. TAG1 did introduce Spirits in its second level and Blood Makyrs in its third and final level, but TAG1 got more mileage out of both enemies individually than all new enemies in TAG2 combined, on account of not having to juggle a dozen new elements at once. It also helped that everyone knew that TAG2 was on the horizon, and that we might see even more interesting usage of the TAG1 enemies there (we didn’t). If we knew there was a TAG3 coming, then I wouldn’t be writing this paragraph.

What’s even weirder is that TAG2 already provides a solution for there not being enough time and space to play around with all the new elements, in the form Escalation Encounters. Casual players that prefer having an uninterruptible flow can simply ignore the optional and more intense second wave, whereas core players can get the challenge they crave and see aforementioned new elements being used to more interesting extents. This is also why it’s so unfortunate that Escalation Encounters aren’t used that much (only three times in TAG2), and that even then the second waves barely use any of the new TAG2 enemies.

As for the new enemies on their own; some are good, some are undercooked. The Screecher is a great addition, as it makes you be extra careful with where you shoot and how you use your AoE weapons if you don’t want to unintentionally buff all surrounding enemies and screw yourself over. The only qualm I have about this buff is that on top of buffing enemy attack and movement speed (á la Buff Totems), it also buffs enemy damage resistance. This isn’t a problem in TAG2 itself, since most Screecher encounters don’t have Superheavy demons as support, but for larger encounters in possible future (custom) Master Levels where several Superheavies are involved, accidentally getting a group of Superheavies Screecher-buffed would basically cause a massive death spiral, at which point you might as well reload your save. It’s for this reason that, just like with the Marauder, the Screecher doesn’t scale upwards well; the level designer needs to put a damper on the heavier demons when using the Screecher so things won’t spiral into absurdly difficult territory, which limits how the Screecher can be used. I believe that forgoing the damage resistance buff would make the Screecher more flexible in this regard.

The Cursed Prowler is another such enemy which introduces an interesting and unique dynamic that works well within TAG2’s levels, but wouldn’t scale upwards well in future Master Levels. Being cursed with limited mobility and having to seek out and Blood Punch a moving target that keeps running away from you is great, as it makes you improvise using a more limited toolset in the same way that the Screecher makes you reconsider how to use AoE weaponry. The problem is that this dynamic can only occur so long as the Cursed Prowler hits you. This means that an arena that holds back on enemy spawns to account for the possibility of being cursed runs the risk of being too boneless if you kill the Cursed Prowler without getting cursed, whereas an arena that doesn’t hold back at all is liable to turn into a death spiral if you do get cursed, and basically makes memorizing Cursed Prowler spawns a requirement. This is a similar problem that Buff Totems faced in the base game, where you were better off memorizing Buff Totem spawns and beelining towards them instead of dealing with the buffed enemies, which TAG1 got around by locking Buff Totems away from you and forcing you to deal with buffed enemies. Similarly, Cursed Prowlers would work better if being cursed was an inevitability (like being automatically cursed whenever a Cursed Prowler spawns, with this being telegraphed well in advance). This would make dealing with the status effect more predictable if you know when it’s coming, but this predictability should also allow designers to create encounters that are better tailored around being cursed, instead of having to design encounters around simultaneously being cursed and not being cursed. Even with that in mind, being unable to dash while cursed means you’re basically screwed against enemies like Tyrants, Doom Hunters, or Whiplashes where you absolutely must dash in order to avoid their attacks (the Meathook also works as a means to quickly GTFO, but it has its own cooldown), so to better allow for encounters where you end up being cursed against enemies like that without it becoming complete bullshit, it would be better to create some leeway by having dashes just recharge relatively slowly when you are cursed.

On another note, I also wish being cursed didn’t automatically give you a BP charge to always prepare you for killing the Cursed Prowler, and would actually deplete your BP gauge to begin with. Part of the dynamic of being cursed involves having to suddenly adapt to a limited moveset, and having to find other enemies to GK for BP’s while cursed (instead of immediately beelining towards the Crowler) could have played a great part in that.

The Armored Baron is a great albeit underutilized addition. It’s basically the Marauder Done Right; instead of only being able to wait for the Baron to give you an opening to disable its shields (like with the Marauder/Blood Makyr), you can also force an opening by shooting it with the Plasma Rifle and its mods, which also makes the Heat Blast somewhat useful for once because of its burst plasma damage. Instead of the Armored Baron being a non-factor that you only deal with after clearing out all other heavy demons (like with the Marauder), you do want to prioritize parrying/dodging its morning star attacks when they occur, because their range and accuracy is massive. The Armored Baron also occupies a different niche from the Blood Makyr where instead of being able to insta-kill it during its vulnerability window in one shot, you need to commit more time and ammo to kill it while it’s vulnerable. This is why the Armored Baron works best in pairs or together with other (super)heavy demons; other demons get in the way of you easily being able to burst down an Armored Baron while it’s vulnerable, while the Armored Baron still demands top priority when it does its morning star attack. This is also why it’s unfortunate that Armored Barons are rarely used in this capacity. On another note, I wish the vulnerability window for the morning star attacks was made a bit smaller, so you’d have a reason to actually go destroy the Armored Baron’s armor the hard way when things are getting too intense for you to easily focus on parrying the morning star.

The Riot Soldiers are supposed to be like the Doom 2 Chaingunners, but here they are just undercooked no matter how you want to try and use them. Their fast low-damage projectiles are too inaccurate to pose any threat whatsoever, and their indestructible shields are easily circumvented with only one Remote Detonation or Sticky Bomb. Riot Soldiers could work as a long-range harassment unit, where they bully you with nigh-unavoidable chip damage into breaking line of sight or prioritizing them first, but this could only work if they could actually reliably hit you and if they weren’t so simple to kill from long-range with explosive splash damage. The Challenge Restored mod has the right idea here where Riot Soldiers have increased projectile speeds, and take way less damage from explosive weapons, with the intent of using explosives to setup falters and finishing them off with another weapon. That way instead of quickly being able to delete Riot Soldiers from any range, you need to commit dealing with Riot Soldiers either by waiting for your explosives to detonate and falter them so you can finish them off at any range, or by simply moving around their shields.

The Stone Imps seem like a lazy way to get you to use the Full-Auto, but they do pose an interesting dynamic (if they’re not used only by themselves). So here you’ve got an ubiquitous fodder demon that cannot be killed using regular means. While Full-Auto does easily kill them, Full-Auto is also a mod that requires commitment in terms of deployment time and reduced movement speed when using it, so if you had to fight Stone Imps alongside heavier demons intruding on your personal space, then using only Full-Auto would be much less of a dominant solution. You also can’t easily choose to ignore Stone Imps until you take out all the bigger demons first, because Stone Imps have this homing spinball attack that’s tricky to avoid. Their damage vulnerability to the Hammer is also a neat idea in that you can expend a valuable Hammer charge to easily get rid of them in one shot. At least this would be a cool dynamic if getting Hammer charges wasn’t so easy, but more on that later. I do wish that the Stone Imp also had a damage vulnerability for other high-commitment options such as the Mobile Turret, Microwave Beam and Destroyer Blade, so you have a bit more freedom in deciding how exactly you are going to commit to dealing with Stone Imps.

Lastly, TAG2 introduces the Hammer. The Hammer is your replacement for the Crucible, and is a way more interesting tool that should’ve replaced both the Crucible and Chainsaw from the get go. The Chainsaw simply isn’t very interesting to use; with one press of a button you insta-kill an enemy for ammo, and the dynamic of being left vulnerable after a Chainsaw kill often doesn’t get capitalized on by the enemies (except for Mancubi and Possessed enemies), and even then can be mitigated by deploying the Chaingun Shield right after the kill animation ends. Meanwhile there is more depth to how you can use the Hammer as a tool to regain ammo, as a tool to stun enemies, or just to clear out fodder (kind of like DOOM (2016)’s Chainsaw dynamic of “do I save fuel to insta-kill a Baron, or do I want ammo now”, except the Hammer takes a less insane approach that doesn’t involve insta-killing any enemy with no effort). Enemies hit by the Hammer shockwave drop ammo, so the more enemies you hit at once, the more ammo you get. But you can also opt to forgo maximizing ammo gains to use it more offensively by stunning (super)heavy demons or using it to increase the vulnerability windows on enemies like the Armored Barons and Marauders, or enemies that are resistant to everything except the Hammer like the Stone Imp.

This is all great, but in practice the Hammer is way overpowered (especially once upgraded), and needs to be tuned down by a whole lot. The ammo gained per hit demon is large enough that grouping enemies together on purpose isn’t something you would really consider doing, which on top of already having the Chainsaw means that ammo will never be an issue ever. Hammering enemies that are already frozen with an Ice Bomb or set alight with the Flame Belch further multiplies the health/armor gains to absurd levels. The absurd upgraded stun duration on enemies hit by the Hammer, on top of the debuff that makes hammered enemies take bonus damage, means that you can kill most (super)heavies in one cycle (if you know how to quickswap), and is already obscenely OP on its own. Yes, it lets you very easily one-cycle Marauders which is based because they’re a trash enemy type, but that is honestly just a band-aid fix. Furthermore, the Hammer is also quite spammable because you only need to destroy two weak points or do two Glory Kills to recharge it (sidenote: having something fill up based on destroying weak points is great because it gives you a reason to bother shooting off the Revenant shoulder cannons), and even then TAG2 levels tend to litter arenas with Hammer charge pick-ups that make using the Hammer with its sheer power a brainless option. I want to use the Hammer, but its sheer power makes other parts of Eternal’s resource gathering and faltering dynamic too redundant. The Ice Bomb/Frag Grenades are about as or less powerful than the Hammer, but they’re also less spammable because of their lengthier cooldowns, and so end up being less useful on their own unless combined with the Hammer. In short, the Hammer needs nerfs nerfs nerfs--to the resources you gain from it, to the degree it stuns enemies, and to how frequently you can use it. As it is right now, it’s only suitably tuned for slaughter map-tier encounters, and way too strong for anything below that.

Finally, there’s the Dark Lord fight, which is bad. It’s basically a Super Marauder, except the Gladiator boss fight was already a Super Marauder, so the Dark Lord doesn’t get any points for originality. It’s also a much worse Super Marauder fight in every conceivable way. The biggest one is that it’s just terrible at pressuring you and testing your mobility. Most of his attacks can be avoided by simply circlestrafing or circledashing in the case of his shield bash, which you can do because the arena for the fight is ridiculously large and flat, and the Dark Lord has no fast ranged options that actually lead your movement. Compare this to the Gladiator who could snipe you with his morning stars, his shield projectile, his jumping rope attack, or by just rushing you and smacking you up close, or how the DOOM (2016) bosses would have more ranged attacks that indiscriminately covered the whole arena.

In terms of offense, the fight doesn’t fare much better. Whereas you could deal some chip damage to the Gladiator instead of having to only wait to parry its attacks, the Dark Lord gets straight up healed when you attack it when its eyes don’t flash green, even when it whiffs a melee attack (?!?!). This means there is absolutely no choice but to wait for that green flash to come, and whether the Dark Lord will do the one attack where he does flash green is very much up to RNG. Once you stagger him it’s a matter of optimizing how much damage you get out of the vulnerability time window by using the Hammer to extend the window and equipment to deal more damage, but in this context that’s not an interesting dynamic on its own. Since the fight is mostly a 1v1, applying a close-to-optimal quickswap combo becomes the dominant strategy, which is also one that isn’t that difficult to execute if you have set up some reasonable keybindings. Here the solution is obvious, is easy to execute, and must be repeated several times (for a minimum of two times for each of the five phases) with no reason to change it up, so it becomes boring. What wouldn’t have been boring if you had to find a way to deal the most damage possible while other demons kept trying to interrupt you--much like how fighting Armored Barons should ideally play out. Now depending on the situation you need to shift your priorities between doing sick combos and dealing with other demons. Charging the Hammer so you can deal extra damage is also a shallow dynamic in this fight, where instead of having to set up Glory Kills or target weak points on other demons, the enemies that the Dark Lord summons will straight-up drop Hammer charges on any kind of death, meaning there is no real choices to be had between prioritizing enemies for resources and prioritizing the Dark Lord to deal damage (and even then you can easily Meathook towards any of the static Zombies at the edge of the arena for a free Glory Kill/Chainsaw Kill).

In conclusion, as a result of trying to cram in too many new things in a small mission pack and trying to expedite properly utilizing said things to subsequent playthroughs, TAG2 ends up primarily feeling like wasted potential, and I would have genuinely preferred if it introduces less and polished what little it did introduce, than to wave all these cool concepts in our faces and do nothing with it. While introducing as many new elements as possible is great for future Master Levels both official and unofficial, vanilla TAG2 ends up suffering because of it, and vanilla TAG2 is what most people are going to be playing. I do hope that in the future id Software goes back to the base game’s approach to the learning curve, instead of TAG1’s approach of assuming the player is still completely familiar with all systems, or TAG2’s obsession with flow and increasing the intensity only very gradually over the course of its campaign.

A supreme victory! Housemarque and twin-stick shooter genre pioneer Eugene Jarvis team up to create what might very well be the best twin-stick shooter to date.

One of Nex Machina’s strongest points is the immense variety in its room/enemy design. Rooms are not mere square boxes á la Robotron 2048, they can take on all kinds of shapes and paths of progression. This can range from winding linear stretches to ring formations, to dense rooms populated with (in)destructible geometry, to half-circles with enemies in the middle, to certain platforms being locked off until you destroy specific enemies, to the standard squares where enemies spawn all around you, to even a chase sequence where you’re being chased by a massive rolling boulder.

The variety in enemy design is just as amazing. Enemies can impede you directly or indirectly, by directly chasing/aiming towards you, aimlessly moving around the stage/covering the stage with bullets or lasers in a straight line or a sweep, and/or spawn bullets/enemies around them on death or kamikaze towards you. All archetypes can come in high-HP variants which demand more commitment to dispatch than others. Some turrets are invincible, which means that at times you just have to deal a sweeping laser across the entire stage. Then there’s all the enemy types related to scoring, which requires its own separate section to explain. Nex Machina makes all these enemies work by staggering enemy spawns behind intervals or certain triggers, while also pre-spawning in several enemies. This way the player has the breathing room to take in their surroundings and form a plan of action, but it also allows Nex Machina to recontextualize the same areas by simply spawning certain waves of enemies in certain positions.

While there might have been room for more complex stage hazards or enemies, one should consider that Nex Machina’s non-stop arcade pacing and “easy to pick-up” nature wouldn’t work as well with gameplay elements that aren’t immediately understandable. All new elements that Nex Machina does introduce rarely deviate from the basic “shoot everything to move on to the next area” setup. Sometimes your progress in an area is locked until you destroy a new enemy type (so you can get a better look at what it does), or they’re introduced gradually alongside previous elements in areas that lower the intensity a bit. Either way, both approaches allow beginning players to properly get eased into the systems, while returning players can simply speedrun through and remain engaged because of the scoring system.

Nex Machina’s core and stand-out mechanic has to be its dashing. These grant total invincibility, can be chained up to three times, let you shoot while dashing, and have a (relatively) noticeable recharge time once fully depleted. On this own this isn’t a terribly interesting system, but what makes it stand out is the Dash Explosion. Namely, each dash generates a small lasting explosion that can instagib any non-boss enemy and cancel any nearby projectiles. Enemies that will otherwise take a massive beating before going down can be deleted in a second if you simply dash into them. This is especially useful against enemies that spawn smaller enemies on death, since the lasting property of the explosion means that all its offspring and revenge bullets will also be immediately deleted. And even against bosses it remains useful by being able to dash in and out of bosses for extra damage. So dashing in Nex Machina has not just a defensive, but an offensive usage as well. Playing aggressive means phasing through bullets and enemies while one-shotting high-HP targets, and then getting out to safety as you spend your last dash charge.

While triple dashes + dash explosions make dashing immensely powerful, it remains balanced because of how crowded the stages can get with enemies, bullets, and lasers. The small AoE of the explosions means that dash explosions cannot reliably clear out entire crowds of popcorn enemies, and thus shouldn’t be used for that purpose. In larger rooms there can be a significant amount of distance between you and a high-priority target with bullets/enemies between, so spending several dashes just to gib that enemy can leave you in a terrible position with no leftover dashes and no hope of survival. Sweeping/aimed lasers, expanding energy circles, and dense bullet vomit regularly force you to dash at the right angles and moments, so you cannot always mindlessly spend all your dashes on offense. What’s more, in the later stages Nex Machina throws another curveball by having certain enemies fire distorted lasers, which cannot be dashed through at all! All these combined makes dashing a versatile yet situational tool that can be used creatively but must be used intelligently.

What makes Nex Machina really gel even across many replays is its highly optimizable scoring system. Each area not only keeps you occupied with a legion of baddies to shoot, but multiple layers of scoring objectives. The main one is ‘human chaining’, where you get more points the more humans you chain (a bonus which maxes out when having chained 20 humans). Here it’s not about grabbing all humans as fast as possible, but rather spacing out the rate at which you grab them so that your chain meter won’t go empty before you clear the area. This is then complicated by tankier enemy types that will try to capture your humans if left unattended for too long, making you prioritize either taking down those enemies or simply grabbing the humans right before they’re captured. The second major part of the scoring system is the multiplier, which multiplies the score you get from everything (Including humans) and is raised by killing enemies or finding multiplier tokens. Because the multiplier is global, you want to prioritize raising it and picking-up multiplier tokens where possible before picking up humans, which can be tricky given that your human chain meter depletes within six seconds. Some areas even come with pre-placed multiplier tokens (extra life spawns turn into multiplier tokens if you have the max. amount of extra lives, and some areas have ‘multiplier blocks’ which drop a token but can only be opened using a subweapon) which score-hungry players can risk prioritizing over all else. What’s more, each area gives you a Level End Dash bonus if you dash right before you get teleported to the next area. On its own, this may seem like a nifty and easy QTE to get some bonus points, but when you consider the context of trying to get the multiplier tokens and humans at the last possible second, where you are often dashing towards the last human before time runs out, cleanly clearing areas with a level end dash suddenly becomes a whole lot more complicated!

And then there’s all the secondary scoring objectives! Beacons are scoring targets placed near the edges of the screen, whose high base point value makes you want to delay destroying them as late as possible when your multiplier has been raised as much as possible. Visitors appear in the middle section of fights to move through the stage in a set path and drop a multiplier token when all of them are destroyed. Secret exits are hidden in some areas that require you to commit to shooting them either up close or with your subweapon, and upon being triggered will send you to a secret bonus area after clearing the current one. Disruptors are passive enemies that will try to run away from you of which only 4-5 can spawn per world and one per area, but the areas in which they spawn are randomly picked, with the intent to (as their name suggests) disrupt your precious route by introducing more chaos to the mix. Areas can also feature secret humans, which refill your chain meter by ~8 seconds rather than the standard 6, thus enabling more flexible chaining opportunities where you can grab the secret human first to get as many multiplier tokens as possible before the chain depletes or leaving the secret human for the last so you can enter the next stage with an overcharged human chain meter. You also receive a time clear bonus at the end of each world, so not only do you want to do all the above, but you also want to do it as fast as possible. And as for the micro-est of optimizations, destroying background objects also gives you tick points, so yet on top of all this again you want to cause as much background destruction as possible.

The result of all the above, combined with the existing legions of baddies coming at every direction, is gameplay where you are making a ludicrous number of micro-decisions per second. At any time and place there are multiple scoring objectives at different edges of the screen begging for your attention and enemies from every angle begging for your death. High-priority enemies that fill the screen with bullets are combined with high-priority enemies stealing your humans are combined with high-priority Disruptors/Invaders that are only on-screen for a limited amount of time are combined with secondary scoring targets that should be destroyed before the stage ends are combined with enemies that spawn revenge bullets/extra enemies on death are combined with an ever-depleting human chain meter that’s seconds short of running out. Replays of Nex Machina remain engaging because of just how intense and demanding it is, with almost no downtime to speak of. It’s pure and utter arcade.

What’s often the case with arcade games like these is that the spur-of-the-moment decision making they encourage eventually devolves into rote memorization as players try to beat 20-50 minutes of non-stop carnage more consistently, but Nex Machina remains chaotic to the point where improvisation is a more valuable skill to have. The way it accomplishes this is by combining highly volatile mechanics (i.e. mechanics where increasingly smaller differences in input create increasingly different outcomes) with minor (pseudo-)RNG-driven impulses in order to force a deviation in inputs, and so create unpredictability--or chaos for short.

Something similar was done in Ms. Pac-Man. While the original Pac-Man had a lot of volatility due to the way the ghosts would react to the slightest difference in movement, it was also 100% consistent, and the Ms. Pac-Man developers noticed how high-level Pac-Man play would revolve around executing the same ‘perfect’ route, thus largely doing away with the improvisation factor what drew most people in at lower and medium levels of play. To counteract this in Ms. Pac-Man, they had the ghosts move towards a random corner in the scatter phase at the start of each round, before resuming their standard non-random AI routines. This way, the player couldn’t solely rely on preset routes to survive but had to read and predict ghost behavior on the fly. It’s RNG, but it’s so minor that it’s only noticeable at higher levels of play. The minor RNG in Nex Machina serves the same purpose: making improvisation still relevant on higher levels of play, but without introducing too much inconsistency at any level of play. Of course, memorizing a strategy or a route still plays a large part when chasing high scores in Nex Machina, but it’s not all memorization, and that’s what helps keep it feeling fresh.

Nex Machina has volatility in spades. Because hordes of enemies and bullets moving towards you is a near-constant factor, the slightest deviation in inputs easily spirals out into unpredictable situations. The inaccurate nature of the twin-stick control scheme means that aiming or moving in the exact same directions each run is hard to consistently reproduce. The presence of long-term systems like the human chain meter and item bar means that micro-differences in input have future micro-consequences: entering an area with 25% chain meter left instead of 50% affects how long you can afford to delay grabbing humans or how much of a priority they are, which in turn affects future decisions and decisions after that. The item bar being filled by destroying enemies means that because of the massive and dense waves of enemies, you can only roughly predict where exactly an item will drop. Forgoing to kill optional enemies in turn makes it harder to memorize when said items might drop. Enemies that spawn bullets or smaller enemies on death add even more stuff on screen that makes things harder to control. On Master difficulty enemies will on death shoot revenge bullets towards you, thus making small deviation spiral out even more noticeably (in addition to enemy types that do on-death attacks on any difficulty), and both the player and the enemy move faster, increasing the pressure and making it more likely to make imperfect inputs. On Hero difficulty you must deal with even faster/denser revenge bullets and every power-up drop spawning an expanding laser circle, whose positions you can also only roughly predict.

Then there’s the little pockets of RNG. Some enemies move in random directions or have a slightly randomly offset spawn position, which combined with the way item drops work makes their spawns even harder to predict in advance. Humans don’t completely stand still but instead randomly and slowly roam about their spawn point, which then affects where human stealer-type enemies will go and which human they will prioritize, on top of you having to adjust your human chaining routes. Some enemy types begin bouncing or shooting in random directions or orientations on spawn. The most notable example of RNG are the Disruptors, whose placement and appearance are certainly randomly picked out of a handful of preset solutions.

What then prevents Nex Machina from feeling like uncontrollable chaotic nonsense is that the player has the tools to deal with everything consistently, and that Nex Machina does not demand absolute precision. The most notable example of this is how often Shield pick-ups are dropped (provided the player has all other item upgrades), which means that small one-off mistakes do not result in immediate death spirals. Similarly, the game is quite lenient with extra lives, which are completely divorced from scoring and can be found in secret spots, of which there are about 2-3 in each world. The human chain meter is also quite lenient in how fast it depletes (especially when compared to other chaining systems like those in the Dodonpachi series). Each area is designed to always have a close-by human near each starting point that you can always reach in time, provided you nail the level end dash of the previous area (which replenishes a bit of human chain meter when nailed). The triple dash gives you a lenient amount of i-frames to dash through bullets and enemies with, and recharges relatively fast. Subweapons allow you to dispatch multiple tankier enemies at once, and your primary shot with the spread upgrade is wide enough that aiming accurately isn’t that important. The RNG in Nex Machina does affect potential clear time and the potential end-of-world score bonus you get for clearing the world quickly, which might suck if you’re speedrunner. But thankfully, this score bonus always caps out at 4 minutes and 30 seconds. If you clear it under that time, you will get the highest possible score bonus, meaning that getting slightly subpar clear times (because of RNG) won’t be damning to your score. To conclude, even if some details are unpredictable or have random deviation, it’s well within your toolset to deal with them.

It's when you don’t have that toolset that Nex Machina feels like some straight bullshit, which the Single World mode nicely showcases. There you start each run in a world of choice without your upgrades--your triple dash, weapon spread, dash explosion and weapon range--leaving you only with a narrow peashooter and limited mobility. For the first world this is relatively doable since it’s designed around you starting naked, but in the later worlds (or starting the first world on higher difficulties) you are increasingly dependent on the random upgrade item order to give you the actually useful upgrades first (triple dash and weapon spread) because of how quickly things spiral. I often find myself having to restart a dozen times in the first world after making a small mistake that with all my upgrades either could have been avoided or compensated for.

Not all implementations of RNG in Nex Machina are ideal, of which the random upgrade item order is the most noticeable. Some upgrades are more helpful to the survival of your un-upgraded ass than others. Triple Dash and Weapon Spread, for example, make it much easier to control crowds than Weapon Range or Dash Explosion. Shields seem useful to have at first, but the other four upgrades are better at preventing you from being in a situation where you’re in danger of being hit to begin with. The upgrade order is completely out of the player’s control, and scoring/survival can deviate strongly because of that. For that reason, it would have helped if the upgrade order was static (where Triple Dash and Weapon Spread are preferably the first two), or if the player could control the upgrade order somehow, or if power-ups were styled a la Cho Ren Sha 68K/Crimzon Clover where it’s a spinning circle of all possible power-ups from which you can pick only one.

The chaos that Disruptors create is also not used as effectively as it could have been. If Disruptors spawn close enough when you teleport into a new area, then you can gib them in a second and deal with the rest of the enemies as usual, which makes Disruptors not disrupt much of anything. It then would have helped if Disruptors did not spawn immediately when the player enters a new area, and if Disruptors always spawned outside your range or behind other enemies, where it could then sow more chaos. It would have also helped if Disruptors could never spawn in the penultimate areas leading up to the boss fight of each world, which are intentionally always easy breezy to build up the boss fight coming after. Disruptors then spawning in those areas feels like RNGesus giving you a freebie, which is why they’re better off always spawning in the ‘real’ areas of each world.

Although the boss fights in Nex Machina are built up as the climax of a world, they ironically feel more like moments of rest compared to the intensity of regular gameplay. Human chaining and secondary scoring objectives cease playing a role during boss fights, so the only optimizations left are not getting hit and dealing as much damage as possible. The target prioritization and crowd control of regular gameplay barely play a role in boss fights, as bosses instead opt to throw bullet patterns at you. Combine the lack of scoring opportunities with the relaxed intensity, and you end up with boss fights in NM feeling like a lesser mode of gameplay. Arcade games with chaining systems do often relax scoring requirements during boss fights or slightly alter how it works for bosses only (since it’s hard to ‘chain’ a single enemy), but they make up for it by having the boss be more intense to fight. In Nex Machina, the only truly intense bosses are the TLB and the fifth boss; the former takes the kids’ gloves off the bullet pattern design and goes all out, and the latter attacks you from multiple angles using multiple destroyable parts, which is more in line with regular gameplay. It could have been neat if chaining humans was still a thing you had to do during boss fights, either by spawning more of them in as the fight progresses or by relaxing the depletion rate of the chain meter for bosses only. Having boss fights be designed around spawning multiple targets (like the Architect fight) would also make them more in line with the strengths of the rest of the game.

One downside of Nex Machina’s reliance on secrets for scoring is that it creates a massive knowledge barrier if you want to begin scoring semi-competently. While most arcade games feature scoring tricks that’s more a matter of knowledge than being able to apply them, at least you usually won’t know about their existence and what you’re missing out on. Secrets in arcade games can be useful for staggering the rate at which the player is taught about the game instead of overwhelming them from the get-go, but having too many secrets can turn people away due to the sheer amount of stuff they need to memorize. This is further exacerbated by the fact that you’re made very aware of the existence of secrets in Nex Machina. At the end of each world, you see all the secrets you missed, which is psychologically more deflating than if you never knew you missed some to begin with. Thus, it gives off the feeling that the game wants you to go look up all secrets beforehand. This goes double when you consider that extra lives aren’t tied to scoring, but that they’re placed in secret spots you must shoot. Even if you just want a basic survival clear, memorizing the spots of all extra life pick-ups becomes essential, and having to look up external videos or analyze replays just to learn about the secrets is a hurdle more suited for score-chasers than people who just want a basic 1cc.

Second problem is that the discovery of secrets isn’t that interesting either. Your main methods of interaction with the world are moving around and shooting things, meaning that discovering secrets for yourself involves having to keep the last enemy alive and shoot/explore all edges of an area (all 70+ of them) to see what yells and what doesn’t. It’s a tedious and boring process. Watching a YouTube video or an in-game replay speeds things up, though arguably not having to consult external resources for a basic survival clear at all would be more useful. Nex Machina doesn’t have much in the way of exploration or puzzles or hidden interactions to make the discovery of secrets feel more exciting, nor would there be much potential to make discovery interesting within Nex Machina’s limited design scope. If there’s no way of making discovery of secrets more interesting, then it might have helped to make the secrets more obvious or announce their presence in one way or another (like how the presence of a Disruptor is announced at the start of each round), or to rework them to no longer be secret (f.e. having extra lives no longer be tied to secret spots).

One curious thing about Nex Machina is that its human chaining system is objectively an arbitrary system completely divorced from survival or normal gameplay, yet wanting to save the humans seems to come almost intuitively. The rate at which you gain extra lives is fixed, and the rate at which items are dropped does not increase the more humans you grab. But even so, you still want to try and save them (or at least, I hope you do). Why is that? The trick is entirely psychological: you care because the objects you must grab appear like fellow humans, even if they are a completely abstract representation of a human being. Rescuing humans feels good, and seeing humans get captured in front of you feels worse. The fact that the subject involves fellow humans instills more feelings than if it had been some featureless geometric shape. Even if rescuing abstract representations of human beings wouldn’t instill any feelings by itself, having them be actively taken away from you and having that loss be shoved in your face is certainly a feeling you would go out of your way to avoid. It is this appeal to humanitarianism that drives people to engage with an otherwise completely optional system that rewards you with nothing other than extra arbitrary points, which just shows how powerful and all-encompassing the indomitable human spirit is (although Mars Matrix proves that appealing to human greed and having to grab gold instead of human beings is just as effective).

I bring this up because scoring systems, or any gameplay systems for that matter, can appear arbitrary and forced when they don’t come “naturally”, leading to people refusing to engage with it or even despising its inclusion. If the base game has a certain gameplay/narrative goal (f.e. staying alive, or looking cool), and the system involves doing something that has nothing to do with that or even the polar opposite (i.e. letting yourself get hit and killed, like in Battle Garegga), then it’s quite literally counter-intuitive. The scoring system could objectively make the game more engaging, but people would nonetheless bounce off it or believe it’s overdesigned. The issue here too, is entirely psychological.

There must be narrative framing or synergy with existing gameplay systems to make systems feel more intuitive and feel natural. In Nex Machina, if you are good at not getting hit and keeping your shield, you are rewarded with a wider primary shot. Narratively that’s arbitrary, but gameplay-wise being rewarded for not dying comes naturally, since ‘not dying’ is in part what you are trying to do the whole game. In JRPGs, enemies are usually not resistant or weak to arbitrary shapes or colors, but rather real-life elements like fire or water. That fire creatures take more damage from water attacks doesn’t appear as an arbitrary rule (even if it technically is), it’s just common IRL sense that fire is weak to water. That flying enemies in Doom Eternal take more damage from the Arbalest does on the other hand appear to be completely arbitrary, because there’s nothing to suggest why they would take more damage from it or what makes the Arbalest so special. But if you reframed the flying enemies as being perpetually on fire and the Arbalest shooting ice stalactites then suddenly it feels a lot more intuitive, even though the underlying mechanics haven’t changed. Appealing to intuition is important for helping a player understand the game and intrinsically motivating them to engage with systems. In Nex Machina, that intuition is “humans should be rescued” and that intrinsic motivation is “saving humans makes me feel good”, and sometimes that’s all you need.

Visually Nex Machina can be unreadable nonsense with its many enemies and particle effects, but the user interface and sound design goes out of its way to make the game readable. So the player and all enemies have outline highlights to make them stand out from the backgrounds, off-screen enemies are telegraphed with arrows at the edges of the screen, your dash and subweapon gauge are displayed around the player character when used and play sounds for when they’re empty/recharged, the last enemy of an area is always highlighted with pink (in case you need to grab all remaining human first), enemy spawns are always telegraphed with silhouettes, the positions of humans are highlighted with arrows stretching from the player characters towards them, those arrows will blink red when the human is about to be captured by an enemy, and the state of your human chain meter (normally shown on the top right of the screen) is displayed double on each human in the form of a ring around the human that slowly shrinks the more the chain meter depletes, so you don’t have to take your eyes off the action to check a bar in the corner of the screen. About the only thing missing is a progress bar showing you the % of enemies you have killed per area, to give you a better idea of when you should draw out grabbing humans and when you should grab them ASAP.

It must be however said that despite being visually readable, Nex Machina’s visual style really does not lend itself to this kind of game. There is a lot of detail in the background and enemy design that, because of the speed of the gameplay and zillion things demanding your attention at once and the crazy neat particle/voxelization effects on top of everything, the player simply has no time to really appreciate or even take in the visuals. Like driving 200mph in a racing car, all the background and finer details turn into a blur, to the point where I feel that all the effort in the backgrounds and enemy design has been wasted. Shoot ‘em ups like the Raiden or Darius games can afford to have beautiful, detailed backgrounds because their scrolling speed is usually slow enough that you have the time to take in all the background details. In Nex Machina, I only started to notice the details on repeat playthroughs or when watching videos/replays. The zoomed-out top-down perspective is essential for the gameplay to work, but it also means you won’t often get a good look at the backgrounds or the enemies from up close. Enemies are thankfully distinguishable enough because of their silhouettes, but design-wise most of them come off as red blobs, which in turn comes at the expense of character. Here I wish that Nex Machina had a more abstract art direction to allow its designs and backgrounds to be fully taken in even at high speeds and under multiple layers of particle effects filling the screen. It might have helped with getting the player to connect with the game at a more personal level.

In conclusion, Nex Machina is a wonderful example of how well-designed scoring systems, little bits of RNG, and a love for humanity can further elevate an already great set of core systems. It looked for a while that this might have been the final high note Housemarque was about to end on, but it seems that with Returnal they intend to continue to enrich the world with more of that arcade goodness.

Ne, ne, nex machine
Finland’s greatest arcade machine

An easy contender for one of the best sequels of all time, Fallout 2 manages to improve on the groundwork of its already phenomenal predecessor and then some.

While the general game feel is mainly intact and unchanged, Fallout 2 still manages to expand on it with a general increase in damn near everything. Locales and Quests are much more fleshed out compared to 2, Companions are actual characters with a multitude of ways to control them (that and the push feature are an absolute godsend) and most importantly the general balance is a lot more natural with so many options it can be overwhelming when coming directly from 1 (like I did). From seedier locales like The Den and New Reno to the more conventional Vault City, every part of Fallout 2 is just so much more interesting compared to the relatively basic 1 (though ironically the main quest is somewhat of a remix and retread of 1s). I think the highlight for me would be all of 2s late game areas, with Navarro being a fun little sidestop with lots of unique Enclave Interactions and the multitude of quests in San Francisco (such as stopping the local cult from dominating the area and sinking a decades old submarine). Just such a fun time in each area that losing hours in one will happen multiple times throughout the relatively long journey (35 hours vs Fallouts 10).

Only big issue I have with Fallout 2 would be how it can at times feel too similar to the first, with many of the key issues I had (general slow movement in the overworld and clunky menu's) being much more exacerbated in 2. Also while I do like the overall world more I feel the Enclave make for a much weaker villain compared to the Master and Mutants from Fallout 1 (though the final conversations with Dick and Frank are a ton of fun and make me wish the talking heads were more featured).

Playing through these older Fallout games has made me appreciate the CRPG genre as a whole much more and I would easily call both top tier entries that anybody who likes should give a shot.

9.5/10

Is it too easy to say “for fans of the genre” and move on? Probably.

The pace here might be Final Vendetta’s greatest strength; I think it’s a stage too short (though that might be because at 6 stages, I’m just thinking on how it falls just shy of GoufyGoggs's list) but it puts other titles to shame by being something you can clear in 30 minutes. I imagine it’s a byproduct of having designed the game around the 1CC mentality, so it seems conscious of the fact that you'll be playing through the early stages a lot and that it shouldn’t be something you need to like, plan your day around.

Especially compared to something like Streets of Rage 4, where half-an-hour in you still feel like you’re warming up, this is a huge improvement. Some criticism just falls by the wayside when the game moves this fast; bosses are generally pretty weak, but they do their job as pace-breakers between the rapidly increasing complexity of the standard enemy encounters- really does get into the heart of the action with an appreciated speed.

And speaking of Streets of Rage 4, in looking over interviews with the developers, I haven’t seen any reference to it, but it seems like it was on the mind during development- the big hang-up when I go back to that game is how punitive the scoring system is, where one stray hit can negate your entire combo, and in a game where scoring and survival are so fundamentally linked, makes those innocuous failures seem all the more disastrous. Final Vendetta adopts a pretty similar system, but you’ll only lose your combo if you’re knocked down, making those stray hits far less annoying, and your failures feel more justified; the result of poor positioning or a bad read on your part.

There's a great interaction that capitalizes on this, where you have a dedicated button for attacking enemies on the ground, but those same enemies often have wake-up attacks that can knock you down in turn- so there’s always the temptation to push your luck and go for a bit of extra damage. It all comes together remarkably well, particularly love the mobility options you can use to cover the entire screen, though it did get me thinking more on some of the constraints of the genre.

This applies to beat ‘em ups/belt scrollers more broadly, but Final Vendetta is the most trouble I’ve had with gauging whether or not I was going to be hit by an enemy that was slightly above or below me- StrayCat noted that it could be an issue of layering, and it makes me think that your defensive options are more of a necessity than they might initially appear, giving you enough distance that you’ll unambiguously clear of an enemy attack. The weird lane system of Guardian Heroes also makes a great deal more sense after considering this more, giving you total clarity as to whether or not attacks will connect. The more I get into this genre, the more I become vividly aware of this as an issue: maybe that means we need more deviations like Guardian Heroes or Ninja Warriors, maybe that means that there’s some approach yet to be taken.

(I don’t know, maybe something akin to Natsuki Chronicle’s bullet-trail warnings would help to highlight the range of enemy attacks, though that might veer too much into “red light, green light” combat design.)

Anyway, that’s a lot to place on a single game: intensely scuffed, but the more time I’ve put into it, the more I see the intent and the passion behind it. If we live in a world where something can quietly release that’s this solid, then nature is healing.

///

Stray thoughts:

- Pixel art is nice, but disconnected, like you're fighting the spritesheets from 20 different ArtStation accounts. This is also one of many titles that would benefit hugely from taking place dusk or night- I can't totally get behind a game that's set at 1:00 in the afternoon.

- Enemies are also uncommonly versatile; wait around long enough and they'll toss out a surprise ranged attack or gap-closer. It's a good kit, but I wonder if does make them a little homogeneous with each other, like they all roughly require the same level of prioritization. More research required.

When I started planning out my next run through the game while I was stuck on the final boss, I knew I was in. When I started looking up the utility of individual moves and philosophy behind Wude, I knew this had jumped to becoming something very special for me. It took a long time to get here- the joke being that it took the game being sold as a beat ‘em up for me to pick it back up again (thanks Raph!), but I’m glad I did.

One of the most telling things for me was when I started considering it alongside some of my favorite games: Thought a lot about ZeroRanger and the way it secretly primes you to see the appeal of going for a one-credit clear- and the basic logic of the death counter serves a similar function, getting you to really take note of your successes and failures as you plot out the best way through each of the levels: Take a shortcut, even if it means missing a few helpful upgrade statues, or try your hand at some of the tougher encounters, where you might take some extra deaths but end up improving chances of success long-term.

It’s a great tension, something that keeps the appeal of a 1CC alive over multiple levels, though I think some levels capitalize on it better than others- the third stage is the obvious standout, with immediate access to the boss and complete control over which encounters you want to pursue. Out of all the levels, it’s the one where those questions change the most on each new attempt, debating the merits of trying to hit every Shrine in order to best prepare for one of the toughest fights in the game. It’s a spike in complexity and difficulty that I don’t think the game is ever able to quite match again, and between it and the incredible production of Stage 2, as you flicker in and out of reality, I’m sort of inclined to say that the game peaks by the halfway point- though the latter half is still excellent, and further speaks to the way the systems here bolster so much of the action.

Even a fight that might seem inconsequential in the moment has ramifications that can really spiral outwards: what weapons you used, how much damage you took, whether or not you used your Focus meter and now have to build it back up again- and with the ability for some enemies to activate a more powerful second form if you perform a takedown on them, even the simplest interaction in the game carries some considerations with it. So often with action games, I find you need to set some intrinsic goals for yourself- the reality being that playing the game as-is never really pushes the mechanics far enough. I feel like I’ve spent more time on the structure of Sifu than on the granularities of combat, but that’s partly because it’s the framing of these mechanics that really pushes the game over the edge.

The game’s unusual cohesiveness reminds me a lot of Inaba discussing Hideki Kamyia’s directing- that the quality of his games wasn’t just the result of raw talent, but time and effort and a wide variety of inspirations. Reading on Slo-Clap’s variety of influences, from arcade games to martial arts cinema to drawing from the experience Pak Mei experts, it’s hard not to see Inaba’s sentiment borne out here as well- just a remarkable amount of consideration for everything here.

Some stray thoughts:

- I have no basis for this, but I feel like the destructible physics objects were something that someone fought like hell to keep, and if so, I’m totally glad they did. Running around and breaking chairs is legitimately one of the high points of the game- maybe made all the better by how measured the game is otherwise.

- The Arenas mode reminds me a lot of what originally liked about the Streets of Rage 4 DLC, a complimentary mode that’ll keep the game evergreen. Especially like the way cheats and gameplay modifiers are added to some of the scenarios, really distinguishes the fights from one another and shows a side of the game I’d never opt into normally. I think the biggest compliment I can pay the mode is that, when I needed a break from Sifu, I just played Sifu: Arenas.

- Camera is far better than most action games, with certain objects in the environment going transparent for the sake of clarity, but the few moments where it lapses feel far more devastating (especially given the penchant for being cornered in Sean’s arena) given the penalty for failure is so high- Oni once again reigns supreme among 3D action games with its camera design.

- And this is intensely pedantic, but I spent a lot of time wondering if the aging mechanic should have been framed a bit differently- I love the idea of becoming a wise old master, but in practice, getting that old is normally a sign of a lifetime of chronic screw-ups. Something that tapped into the sense that you were unnaturally re-animated, like the corruption of your character in Shadow of the Colossus, becoming more pallid and deathly over time (and as an added bonus, it could work as another cinematic reference in a game full of them- add The Crow to the list!), but at that point, when I’m workshopping some alternate way of visualizing these systems, it’s probably more a sign of how deep in I am than some major fault of the game.


All that said, there’s not really a clean way for me to close this out- I told myself I could only talk about the game if I could clear it at under 50 years old, but in doing so, I realized how little of the game I could really speak to- terrifying for the purposes writing on it, wonderful for the realization that there’s so much left to uncover. In a genre full of games with unspoken caveats and that hint at what could be, Sifu ends up being something remarkably fully-formed, unusually complete.

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References:

But instead of being some genius with ideas coming out of thin air, it’s more due to his nature and he gets ideas from a lot of different places and inspiration from diverse things and he thinks about things for a long time… his process needs space.

- Producer Atsushi Inaba, discussing Hideki Kamyia’s directing style, From 1UP

Both Oldboy and The Raid were inspirations for the design and art teams working on Sifu. In general, the game is filled with references and inspirations from many action & martial arts movies, such as John Wick, Sha Po Lang/Killzone, and Tom-Yum-Goong/The Protector… There were many different inspirations and references for the team, but for gameplay two good examples are Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice as well as God Hand on the PS2.

- From a Q&A with GameRant

The style we are focused on for Sifu is the Pak Mei style. Jordan (our creative director) and myself, as well as others in the studio have various backgrounds in martial arts but Jordan specifically trained in the Pak Mei style. We’ve worked closely with a sifu here in France to make sure the details of the Pak Mei study are represented accurately in the game. There’s so much history and nuance across all of the styles but we’ve been super inspired by diving deep into this one for Sifu.

- SloClap Executive Producer Pierre Tarno, on the martial arts depicted in the game, From mp1st

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Some additional resources on the game:

How to enjoy Sifu (thanks Ziad!)

Sifu - Why you should use... Charged Backfist