For many years, if you asked me what my favorite game series was, I probably would've said Splinter Cell. This is like you sent a team of scientists to develop the polar opposite game.

It is unabashedly loud, stylish and raucous. There is no stealth, because you are a fuck-huge monkey. You are given no tools but your hands and the speed to run at them, because you are a big, fuck-off monkey. The tutorial is three button prompts. There's music to accompany you on your quest for freedom, battling with you to see who can best embody this frenetic energy. You don't need more.

It's pretty easy to be skeptical of this given that the description is a horrendous little salad of exhausted buzzwords - immersive sim, cyberpunk, open world, procedurally generated, dystopian, early access, voxel graphics - but it's actually pretty damn good, even better than expected after their Steam NextFest demo.

Going to get this out of the way early: This game is buggy - you'll get some framerate hitching and some pretty severe pop-in, not to mention the bugs that can occur when something is too close to a wall. I'm sure there's a chance of running into something game-breaking, but I haven't seen it - the closest I've encountered is a single instance of falling through the earth when trying to enter a building (which just resulted in some hospital bills that I... decided not to pay).

If you're not falling through the earth, though, it's magical. You gotta do the actual legwork of piecing everything together, and the game is not going to make any connections for you. Maybe you'll be a little frustrated when your case board fails to connect the address for "K. Zoungrana" to the existing entry for Keyon Zoungrana, but it's a very easy quirk to work around. Once you learn how to arrange the board in a way that suits you, you can begin knocking out these cases like clockwork. Sometimes a murderer may as well write their name at the crime scene, but sometimes you pick up a "freebie" photography assignment only to notice that the only "clue" you have on your target is that they're a 26-year-old security guard... somewhere.

As a detective in a world run by the Coca-Cola Cops, you're treated more like a hobbyist or a DoorDash driver than someone with any authority, and it works pretty well to encourage player creativity. The first time someone spits in your face after you offer them two hundred dollars for their name, you'll probably wonder what else you can even try. There's actually some pretty creative evidence trails and potential solutions I've seen pop up, so your problem is likely one of two things: 1. You haven't explored more creative solutions, or 2. Your conscience is too clean. I, on the other hand, have learned that I have no morals whatsoever. Try this: Knock on the suspect's door, and ask if they'll let you in. You can stand there for ten minutes trying to bribe them with ever-larger sums of cash, or you can close the door in their face and ram through it, knocking them unconscious with the impact, rummaging around in their apartment while they sleep it off. Is it court-admissible evidence? I don't even know if they're taking these guys to court! Not my problem!

Even the largest cities here are pretty small, but they make up for it with their depth. Every person has a place to sleep and something to do during the day, and this alone allows for so many angles of attack on any given case. You might be schlepping back and forth across the city just to collect pieces of paper, but with such a broad tool set it rarely feels tedious when every search is fruitful - at worst, you're building up your database so future investigations are easier.

It does settle into a formula with time, and once you start seeing patterns it's easy to feel like some of the magic is lost. NPCs suffer the most, because you only get a handful of interactions with them - I'm not sure why you can ask someone for their fingerprints but not their occupation, for example. The core investigative loop, though, is still pretty fun even if you feel like you've seen it all. Again, your arsenal of data gathering options is so large that just determining the right approach feels like you've done something clever, and finally being able to clean up a completed case board at the end of the day remains satisfying from hour 1 to hour 20.

For now, I should get back to it. I've just learned that my next door neighbor was murdered while I was searching my unconscious landlord's apartment for a burger that ended up making me sick.

Spoiler-free

I didn't want to do another list format review but I have so many thoughts about so many different elements here that I'm not going to even bother trying to try writing this out. Oh well! I didn't intend to binge this game but when I started this review I'd put 40 hours into the game over 2.5 days. You'll see a lot of comparisons to DS3 as it's the most recent entry (and the one most fresh in my mind).

- Don't be fooled by the name, it's Dark Souls 4. The bones here are clearly DS3's, but if you're a Souls fan who hated DS3 you should still give it a shot - most of DS3's most objectionable traits are either irrelevant here (due to being a different IP) or have been buffed out. There's a surprising amount of DS2 DNA here as well, from the theming, to the gameplay (power-stancing), and the exploration (Pharros' Lockstones)

- I'm not the type to get riled up by the idea of Souls games getting easier in the first place, but there are so many QOL improvements here that make the game better to play without necessarily being easier. Changing your character's name/appearance at any time, modifying armors to remove cloaks/capes, changing weapon/scaling affinity at any bonfire (without grinding materials!), more throwables/weapon arts blurring the line between melee users and mages. There are so many more options here that allow for more creativity without turning the game into a joke.

- Good GOD the environments in this game. DS already had a way of making you feel tiny, but the sense of scale here triggers something ancient in your brain. Climbing a mountain for hours only to reach the top and see walls as tall as modern skyscrapers overpowers the part of my brain responsible for video game logic and triggers an instinctive feeling of unease. I've played many games, but FromSoft is the only developer capable of eliciting this reaction.

- The new system that lets you chain successful blocks into a followup attack makes defensive playstyles a little more interactive/interesting without simply parry spamming. If you get good at it you can turn some bosses with lower poise into a meme, but it's not going to carry you through the required bosses to advance the plot.

- So far I haven't seen anything as wacky as some of the DLC weapons in DS3 (Aquamarine Dagger, Crow Quills, Door Shield, etc.) save for one weapon. It would be nice to have crazier stuff (assuming I'm not just missing it) but the fact that you can freely swap weapon arts at any bonfire single-handedly makes up for it. Edit: There's plenty of visually weird content here, but nothing as mechanically weird as the above. EDIT: These exist, you just have to do some serious exploring to find them. With the number of weapons in the game, you're going to spend a lot of your time finding boring straight swords, but finding the shield that fires a cannonball or the buckler that unleashes a poisonous snake bite will always be worth the time investment.

- Instead of having DS3's paired weapons, dual-wielding two weapons of the same type gives you the paired weapon attacks on L1 - power-stancing is BACK. I'm dual-wielding twinblades atm (more blades per blade) and I don't think I've ever felt this cool in a FromSoft game.

- Flails! I will always advocate for adding flails to any game but nobody ever does. If I could've made any addition to DS3 it would've been a flail and now I've got my wish in the best form possible.

- Movement is a lot better. The dismounted jump isn't going to blow any minds but it's absolutely better than the absolute joke of a jump in previous games. I've seen people complain about how they chose to "add stealth" to the game and the reality is that stealth already existed in the Souls games, the crouch just makes it less tedious (instead of slowly pressing the analog stick).

- A small negative: With the open-world, the leadups to bosses don't have the same mounting tension that a single, themed level could (think Anor Londo before O&S, or the Grand Archives before the Twin Princes). Story bosses make up for this by being hunkered down in some elaborate complex, field bosses usually make up for it through some other kind of spectacle.

- Multiplayer! You can now set multiple passwords at once for playing with different groups, and there are designated markers to place summoning signs around (and an item to automatically send yours there). Haven't done any PVP yet, will have to revisit this, but co-op is easier than ever and not getting invaded in singleplayer (unless you opt-in via an item) is really quite nice.

- Crafting isn't nearly as bad as I expected and can basically be ignored wholesale if you want to. This will be a dream for ranged players, though, as my crafting menu is like 80% different types of arrows. Only complaint here is that I am now constantly running into situations where I'm poisoned and I can neither make nor buy the anti-poison item yet.

- Bosses have all been fun and fair so far (cleared 2 of the big 5, have fought 3) and have a clear flow of combat. Nothing really feels like bullshit. Unless something serious changes in the last region (and change) I've left to discover I'd say this is the best overall batch of bosses yet and the fights themselves look gorgeous too, from the stages to the movesets. Needs more Royal Rat Authority. EDIT: I probably wouldn't say this is my favorite batch of bosses any longer - large bosses in large arenas leave you feeling like you're constantly running to them instead of hitting them, and late bosses especially have a problem with large AOE attacks that get spammed (which is a bit tedious). It's still a mostly good set of bosses, but the experience is wildly front-loaded, since the bosses that aren't tedious to fight often get re-used elsewhere which ruins the sense of novelty a little bit.

- Lastly - NPCs and hub area: I really like this hub area! They have some intriguing interactions with each other and it's got me genuinely interested in their stories. NPCs in general seem to have more to say on average although I suspect it'll be a lot harder to finish their quests without a guide unless you're routinely visiting areas you've already cleared. Favorites so far are Millicent, and the place that gives you invasion quests that makes me nervous 24/7 even though combat is disabled there.

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EDIT: Everything after this point was added after finishing the game. I still stick by everything I wrote above, but if you'd like more in the way of criticisms, this might be what you're looking for. Still keeping things spoiler-free.

- Completed the game around level 130 after 100 hours exactly - this is at a pretty leisurely pace (plenty of coop, plenty of exploring) but by no means a completionist playthrough. My stats are all over the place (no more than 40 in anything, except for 50 Vigor) so you could probably do this a lot earlier with an actual coherent build.

- NPC questlines are still fantastic. I've fully finished Millicent's, Hyetta's, Fia's, and Ranni's, with one of these being especially notable for unlocking an ending, a whole new section of the map, and a kickass boss fight.

- I don't really need a quest log, but as someone who didn't think to keep a journal or anything about where I've run across these NPCs, I do wish I could at least look back on a log of things they've said so I could try to find them at future locations. I also think it would be nice to have some kind of marker that shows me whether or not I've beaten the boss at the end of a cave/catacombs/etc (instead of fast travelling there and seeing if I'm allowed to fast travel out - not the fastest solution!).

- It really feels like they want you to run some kind of hybrid build this time around - running pure dex/str/quality feels like you're really handicapping yourself, especially given how many melee weapons have relatively high fai/int requirements.

-The game really undersells how important it is to kill the white scarab beetles. They often have some stupid good Ash of War abilities that you can get for 5 seconds of time and two R1s. Absolutely goofy. I just ran right past so many of these things because I remember it being explained as "oh they replenish your flasks and shit!"

- It's still nice not being invaded when playing solo, but PVP is pretty miserable for invaders. It's sort of balanced out by the fact that invaders can run some of the busted madness/bleed builds (or that one bugged deathblight build) with the intention of using it in PVP, but I've seen plenty of gank squads in my limited attempts at PVP and that shit always sucks.

- The bosses continue being great for the most part, but the pacing is a little weird as the end basically makes you complete several bosses rapid-fire. Most of the most annoying boss mechanics are limited to optional bosses, but the late game bosses love AOE-ground-pound-bullshit which is pretty annoying, even if you learn to deal with it.

- There's a fairly major change in world state towards the end (similar to the arrival of night in Bloodborne) that fucks with how you use bonfires in one region of the map. It results in some really genuinely intriguing story beats, especially in the hub, but most annoying is how it messes with your ability to play co-op. I assume using the "send sign to summoning pools" thing is how you work around this, but sometimes the summoning pools are placed strangely. Whatever! EDIT: It's not! You're just boned if your friend wants to play co-op in the area most affected by the world state change.

- It is so easy to upgrade weapons in this game. I've managed to get 9 or 10 weapons to +9 or +24 (depending on what kind of upgrade materials they use - basically one step short of being maxed out either way). It takes a LOT of runes if you're buying them from the Maiden Husks, and the bell bearings to enable buying them are often only made available in the late game, but the ability to just straight up buy your way to an upgraded weapon is a lifesaver, especially if you're trying out a new build.

Flight simulators have always been a little underwhelming for me. It's always interesting to see them take technical leaps forward, to see how "real" they can make a city or a famous airport look, but as for me, I've never really cared that much about the fidelity exhibited in modeling ground support equipment at a particular airport. Faithful, digital depictions of urban areas will always be more exciting to me when I'm on the ground, admiring the effort of putting stickers for fake electric companies on utility poles - buzzing a lovingly rendered Eiffel Tower with a commercial jet covered in raytraced reflections isn't going to do much for me.

All this is to say that I'm in love with the mundane and the games that let you zoom way in on the stuff that isn't exciting enough to be depicted elsewhere or documented extensively by hobbyists. It's fortunate for me, then, that we live in an era where so many things are documented no matter how many hobbyists are paying attention, all because technology has afforded us the opportunity to do so. Despite its 100+ gigabyte install size, most of MFS2020 is being pulled from 2.5 petabytes of data in cloud storage, a figure that doesn't even represent the full scope of street and geographical data in Microsoft & Google's collections. Not even a tenth of it, actually, based on estimates from five years ago.

So sure, you could fly through a semi-hand-crafted representation of Manhattan (it's neat! it genuinely is!), but I imagine that there are other simulations that could provide stiff competition, and in that light MFS2020 is probably less impressive. If your curiosity allows it, though, I recommend going somewhere else. Fly over Bao Bolong, around Futuna, visit Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, follow the Ohio River from the town of Ripley heading either direction. Pick a capital city of a country that you don't know much about and fly as far as you can tolerate. If you're feeling adventurous, go to Google Maps, right-click a random spot, and click the coordinates to paste them into the game.

We are so connected that you can now look at a map of the individual aisles of a Best Buy in North Carolina from the base camp at Mount Everest, so why not use it to visit places that never would've received your attention? The world is full of fascinating places that will never be on a list of travel destinations. Find something interesting, get lost in a Wikipedia rabbit hole, fall in love with the immensity of our planet.

Random Street View
Random Wikipedia Article
Listen to a Spotify song with zero plays

Detchibe's wonderful GeoGuessr review, the inspiration for what you're reading now

Feels like there's a decent enough narrative-focused game in here constantly getting distracted by what a prestige game should be. I feel like I'm shovelling sad dad story beats out from under a pile of AAA features that distract from the core experience. I don't want loot, I don't want to pick my axe moves and my axe handle and the enchantments on my axe handle and the material of my son's shirt, I don't want a faux single-shot gimmick (it's all rendered! it doesn't matter if it's a "single shot"!). It's all so overwhelmingly "game design by committee" that even things I wouldn't normally mind (puzzles, moveset customization) start to wear on me as well, because none of it matters. None of the gimmicks contribute to the story/setting, none of the customization matters because enemies aren't diverse enough to provide a meaningful test of your own skills/your Kratos' abilities.

Not sure Kratos would've put so much emphasis on the boy "not being ready" in the prologue if he had known just how much his own son was going to babysit him during this adventure.

I don't think less of people for enjoying this thing but I grow weary every time one of these movie games wins an award.

It really is Sekiro to Nioh's Dark Souls, but Sekiro is more careful about what it cuts and keeps from its sibling series.

One of the things that keeps Nioh playable despite all its cluttered menus and Diablo-like loot drops is the ability to press a single button that will explain almost anything on your screen. It's not perfect - Nioh's got a lot going on - but it will at least help you understand the value in keeping equipment with bonuses to "Tenacity" and "Low Attack Break". Wo Long doesn't even bother with actual explanations for game mechanics, resulting in a situation where you can read multiple paragraphs about the real life philosophy behind the Five Phases but the actual effects of morale, a central concept in the game, are never explained beyond "it increases your combat power". This lax approach to game clarity carries over into that Help feature too, with most explanations offering up "Health Recovery improves Health Recovery" or similarly enlightening statements.

Combat has been pared down a bit, with the complete removal of weapon-specific skill trees, stamina, and stances. Instead of stamina and limited charges for magic spells, your Spirit bar serves as as a combined mana pool and posture meter, depleting as you do bad things or special moves (dodging, taking damage, using magic) and replenishing by doing good things (successfully landing hits, deflecting attacks). It's a fine system, one that's more intuitive than it sounds because you're likely already avoiding damage and landing hits of your own. Spells, on the other hand, require such a large investment in their stat and the spirit costs are so punitive that hybrid builds are nonexistent for large chunks of the game. What this amounts to for most players is a game in which you have very little incentive to do anything other than light attack or deflect. The window in which you can deflect an attack is much larger than you'd expect - think of a Dark Souls roll that regenerates stamina when you successfully dodge an attack. When deflecting is so easy and actively benefits you, it's easy to forget that blocking is even possible.

And companions? Complaining about NPC companions is as old as NPC companions are, so we'll keep it short. The game is visually busy already, and the companions are as visually noisy as they are incompetent in battle. What's worse, the companions have collision - I was knocked off ledges multiple times while platforming due to my companion landing on my head. I also frequently found that if (and that's a BIG "if") my companions were able to survive more than one or two attacks from a boss, the boss frequently gets stuck in a loop of big, AOE, zoning attacks that make it harder to hit. It's hard to appreciate that you're fighting alongside Liu Bei or Cao Cao when they're getting one-shot by a horse demon within ten seconds of the fight starting.

It's a shame, then, that it feels great! Your character moves like they're in a musou game. Deflecting attacks is hands-down the most satisfying thing in this game despite its ease, emitting a ka-SHING with an impact that has more in common with a lightning strike than two swords meeting. The game feels so good that you can play for a long while on that alone, riding the high of scoring a fatal blow on the boss right when you were most desperate for it. That you can spend the entire game coasting on light attacks and deflects doesn't matter when you're still enjoying the novelty of trying out each weapon's Martial Arts.

Kotaku's Levi Winslow repeatedly called it an "accessible" Souls-like in their review of the game, and I think I would agree with that assessment if we're speaking strictly about the combat. The main issue is that at some point you're going to have to interact with those menus and the loot and the Five Phases system as it interacts with leveling and magic and resistances and it's going to be a LOT to throw at someone who can't touch on reference points from Dark Souls, Nioh, and Diablo. Hell, the PC version displays Playstation button prompts when I'm using an Xbox controller, so something as simple as "the ability to match what's on the screen to my controller" is out the window too. I wouldn't go so far as to call this game "safe," but it's squarely in Team Ninja's comfort zone, and they've done very little to make this game stand out as its own IP and very little to offer an olive branch to new players, even those coming from Nioh. It's a fine time (especially early on!), but there are so many frustrations for a game that lacks a distinct personality.

EDIT: It's been pointed out that you can manually switch the button prompts from Playstation to Xbox in the settings - thank you to HazeRedux for the correction!

After finishing this, I'm completely at a loss for what I should rate it. On the one hand, by committing so hard to making a game about Fucked Up Shit, you're going all-in on your jokes landing with the audience and they definitely do not always land. It's pretty easy to see why people are comparing this to Always Sunny (especially early IASIP) but one of IASIP's big strengths is weaving together A- and B-plots while peppering in other jokes, and the truth is that Class of '09 never has as much going on as IASIP does in any given episode, so you kinda gotta be on board with whatever sociopathic shit Nicole is getting up to. There are entire endings whose comedic premise just did not work, leaving us grimacing for 15-30 minutes straight as Nicole accidentally gets roped into an actual hate crime. It's got some clever jokes but you're just as likely to run into a 5-minute bit where the entire joke is "this person is being horrendously mean for literally no reason". (Note: I haven't played the first game, so I've almost certainly got some misplaced sympathy)

I gotta admit, though, it was a blast to stream this thing in a Discord call. It's got some really solid voice acting and the auto-text does a lot for comedic timing that could've easily been ruined if you let players click through this at their own pace. The game loves presenting you with some wild-ass choices too, so a lot of the fun is clicking shit like "commit charity fraud" or "skip school with the violent alt girl" and watching things immediately spiral out of control into "multiple felonies" territory. Emily is the greatest character of all time.

(this whole thing has me wondering what we're in for when that 20-year nostalgia cycle really hits)

It's kinda... endearingly shitty? It's like a child's idea of what would be the best video game ever made: a completely absurd (and aggressively formulaic) mashup of your favorite elements from every other game, with no regard for how they interact with one another. There are dungeons, farming, cooking, a pokemon capture/breeding system that lets you breed anything with a health bar and pathfinding AI, base building, and it's so goofy and disjointed that the only real goals in the game do not even bother with making you touch these systems at all (literally).

It's mostly a strange experience because it's all like, 75% complete, spread evenly across every element of the game. You could spend all your time fishing and cooking, but for some reason there are like three core ingredients you can only get by breaking boxes on the beach, of which there is a finite, non-respawning number. Item descriptions are clearly machine translated but understandable, save for ~15% of items where the description is either still in Japanese, completely indecipherable English, or so vague that it may as well not exist. If it felt like progress meant anything in this game, I would almost be frustrated by how many times I've used a ridiculous amount of rare resources to build some mysterious rainbow-colored orb that seems to do literally nothing when placed/thrown.

It is a game made by people who very clearly love video games and very clearly have no idea what makes a good game work. There are games out there with satirical mechanics meant to parody time-wasting games, and yet none of them are as effective as Craftopia, which prompts you to do things like "craft one THOUSAND automated furnaces and cast them into the void" to permanently gain... +0.1 MATK.

And yet, I feel like it's worth noting that the game has never crashed. It's janky, but never has the experience completely fallen apart for me, despite this horrendous mess of features. I have done some really stupid shit, including breeding an entire farm of Anubis (the god), who exists on an island in the sky solely to help you gain permanent stat buffs, and the game never stopped me. Everything that is present works well enough that it's at least fun-adjacent if you can rope a particularly foolish person into joining you. I absolutely do not recommend any part of this experience, least of all if you have to exchange legal tender for the opportunity.

"The Commission alleges that the company’s ubiquitous advertisements touting their supposedly 'free' products—some of which have consisted almost entirely of the word 'free' spoken repeatedly—mislead consumers into believing that they can file their taxes for free with TurboTax. In fact, most tax filers can’t use the company’s 'free' service because it is not available to millions of taxpayers, such as those who get a 1099 form for work in the gig economy, or those who earn farm income. In 2020, for example, approximately two-thirds of tax filers could not use TurboTax’s free product." -Federal Trade Commission

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"Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting 'encroachment,' Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has.

Under the terms of [the IRS Free File Program], Intuit and other commercial tax prep companies promised to provide free online filing to tens of millions of lower-income taxpayers. In exchange, the IRS pledged not to create a government-run system.

Since Free File’s launch, Intuit has done everything it could to limit the program’s reach while making sure the government stuck to its end of the deal. As ProPublica has reported, Intuit added code to the Free File landing page of TurboTax that hid it from search engines like Google, making it harder for would-be users to find." -ProPublica

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"The IRS brags that 70 percent of Americans are eligible for Free File, but for the 2019 tax season, only 4.2 million returns out of 157.2 million total were filed through Free File, or 2.6 percent." -Vox

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Intuit, H&R Block, and others like them make their money by pulling a bait-and-switch on people who would otherwise take advantage of the system you would expect from a wealthy, modern country - one that lets them file their taxes for free. They have paid for millions of dollars in lobbying over decades to keep taxes as confusing as possible, and their efforts to deceive you will continue until you find yourself one click away from being done with this whole nightmare and going to fetch your wallet to just get this over with.

I can't recommend in good conscience that you put your Social Security Number into some mystery program (even though I find myself agreeing with MSCHF). What I will ask is that you avoid giving Intuit or H&R Block a single cent if at all possible, because they will only use that money to make your life worse.

Uhhh Iris is cute. Who doesn't love an office lady! The backgrounds here are pretty good and I never found the soundtrack grating. Would be nice if they had a fullscreen option, but for something this short, I had a pretty good time! Didn't expect to laugh so much, hehe!

https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-for-free

The joy of hectic co-op missions - where you're just as likely to die to a friendly mortar as an enemy rocket - is only stifled by a progression model that becomes punitive in the late game and the ludicrous frequency of glitches, the latter of which is mostly confined to the downtime between games. You are just as likely to run into an enormous bug in the missions as you are in the menus. With no glitches, though, it's a great game. The developers deserve a ton of praise for nailing the actual experience of playing at any given moment. Guns and explosions sound great, and all the things that could be a real nuisance in a game like this are balanced so well that they're never a concern - guns have just enough recoil to make it worth some attention, ammo and stamina feel plentiful as long as you're being somewhat mindful, you get the idea. When combined with the number of stratagems (providing airstrikes, additional equipment, and turrets from the sky) and equipment options, you can easily drop into a mission with a loadout that ensures you will never ever have to think about ammo, or about watching your back, or about dealing with heavily-armored enemies.

The difficulty, though, ramps up pretty steadily until you're constantly bottoming out on your "plentiful" ammo and stamina, with the cooldowns on those airstrikes becoming excruciatingly long despite the fact that they never actually changed. In terms of the actual effect this has on team strategy and camaraderie, it's up there with the best - it's hard to mind that your pal's airstrike nearly killed you when it saved you from five other things competing for the honor. A teammate finding the time to call in a much-needed resupply as everything is going to shit will make them your real-life hero.

Comparing this to similar shooters will undoubtedly let some folks down as the smaller (but still important) differences in strategic flavor between games can be a turn-off. For one thing, the game is very quick to throw out the periodic lulls in the action that are common in games like L4D, PD2, and DRG - unlock the first of 6 new difficulty levels and you'll find that lingering slightly too long in a level can put you in a situation where enemies are permanently spawning faster than you can kill them as your team starts hemorrhaging their limited revives. Helldivers is also rather generous in that all of your stratagems are very good as long as you actually tailor them to the situation, but part of the cost is that you have to immobilize yourself and enter between 3 and 9 directional inputs without making a mistake, and then throw a beacon that actually places the thing. This is how you call in the extraction shuttle, this is how you summon more ammo, this is how your friends are telling you to revive them as you dive into a crater with rockets flying past your head. Some people are going to hate this more than their actual job, I think it's fantastic. Part of the fantasy is becoming so good at entering these codes that you barely have to stop moving at all to get the entire team back in action, and finding these small windows to call in support contributes strongly to the impression of constant enemy pressure, but also to the satisfaction of actually pulling it off once the mission's over.

With a full squad, there are 4 different perspectives on a mission that all share the broad strokes but each of which has different details. A teammate's attempt to save one of your comrades from being maimed by a building-sized bug may not notice that they just gave you a haircut with a ricocheted autocannon projectile. A dead teammate who checks their phone for texts likely didn't see that the effort to bring them back involved a creatively used stim, a head-first dive off a cliff, and a respawn beacon tossed over a crowd of enemies as you draw the horde away from them. The team chuckles at the idea of throwing down a minefield behind you to cover your tracks, but only the player who deploys it will notice that they've killed an entire enemy dropship without firing a shot. A teammate operating the terminal at one of the objectives can't tell that your efforts to cover them involve frantically switching guns as you mag-dump at a horde of silhouettes through thick, black smoke. Everyone completed the same mission, but there's still plenty of clever and hilarious details to discuss once you arrive back at the destroyer. Including the other consequences of that minefield.

Spent most of my play time wondering how everyone I've ever met or thought about gave this a 7/10, only to hit the point in the game where it goes "Let's get this shit over with" and flips everything on its head in the last 10% of the campaign. I stand corrected. This is what a 7/10 looks like.

But son, let me tell you right now, there is nothing better than shoulder-slam-express-mailing some stupid goblin into a wall at highway speeds. Actually, there is, and it's using the Gambler passive (making people leave the lobby) until someone sticks around long enough to let me play blackjack in the middle of their boss fight. The combat's just good, there's so much room for creativity and skill expression with the way you can mix and match skills and weapons and jobs and use the unique properties of these attacks and their "cancels" to fly through the levels like a caffeinated hurricane of blades and magic and bullets.

Jack rocks. Dude cares about one (1) thing. Talking about the past? Talking about the MacGuffin? Pipe down, pencil-neck. If it's not about killing Chaos I'm not hearing it. Multiplayer is actually made better by forcing the other players to dress up as your party members - watching Jed and Ash bop around the stage with you in a way that makes them feel like people instead of Pikmin. But, uh, just one thing. A lot of things, actually-

Why does Sophia show up and then only talk like twice? Why are the "quick" versions of the executions on normal enemies still 45 minutes long? Why is it so hard to see anything on some of these levels? This bloom got me feeling like it's 2008 again. Why is there NO gear variety? Why is auto-dismantling located in system settings when I've gotta update it every sixteen seconds? Why is the level design so... unambitious? What's up with that framerate? Why is the last act paced like that?

To be clear, I like more than just the combat - there are so many little things they get right that keep the flaws from sinking the whole project (despite the pacing, I like the plot, I like Kenjiro Tsuda, I love the soundtrack, I could go on). Can't say I'm smitten with it or anything but when it works, it really, really works. That pacing issue just keeps rearing its head when I think about this game though, how it feels like the game ultimately just gives up on proper execution of plot beats and goes "here's 'end game', this is what you're here for, right?" and drops you back into the menus assuming that you'll figure it out. Not really sure that the game holds up to that endgame grind either, unless we're giving bosses new attacks - the red/purple attack system is a little too generous to the player when the bosses already telegraph their moves so far in advance.

an extremely good attempt - much better than you'd expect at a glance - at recreating the mind games of fighting games without requiring that you grind your bones into dust against the controller to practice combos. it's a little opaque (would be nice if the game told me how to identify when the next turn happens instead of a steam guide) but is extremely rewarding nonetheless.

i understand why people keep throwing around the word "chess" when discussing this but i think for non-players this makes it sound like a game that lacks immediacy. you might spend a full 30 seconds planning for a "turn" that lasts 4 frames but those 4 frames can still be more rewarding than any single turn in normal chess would ever be, thanks to some chunky, bitcrushed sound effects. this kinda arrangement extends the satisfaction of a well-executed combo as long as possible and it rocks. game's funny too. nothing better than ending a turn, watching some completely innocuous shit happen for a whopping 6 frames, and then getting a message that just says "shit".

uh, play it with friends though, the playerbase is small enough that people don't always respect the "beginners only" lobby