Look, okay, I know it sounds bad on paper. Also, it's kinda bad in practice for an hour or so. Yeah, I know there's not a lot to chew on here, that it's just 3D Farmville without the microtransactions, that on some consoles it runs like hot garbage.

Sometimes you just need a stress ball, alright? For me, I gotta feel like there's some kind of long-term planning, so I can't just fire up an aim trainer or Minesweeper or [third example].

This game is very carefully tailored to the person who wants to:
1. Create a personalized cartoon farm for its own sake.
2. Repeatedly return to the game at their own pace and have their dedication rewarded with constant progress.
3. Play a stress-free hangout game with their friends without needing to schedule a game night. No advanced mechanics, no fail states.

Because this game is married to real-life timers, the early game suffers badly. You've picked up a new game and this is likely to be the peak of your interest in it, only to find that you can't do very much because you're short on money and the crops you can plant right now don't make very much. If the aforementioned design goals don't sound like you, you're probably going to bounce off this thing right here. Sorry! There's no catch, it's not a "secret masterpiece" that asks you to push past the tedium. What you see at hour 2 is what you get at hour 200, just on a smaller scale.

Mechanics:
What I've learned to admire about it in the past week of playing with a newbie is the way each element of the game contributes to an ever-shifting economy. There are five main sources of income - Fields, Trees, Animals, Flowers, and Fish. Each income source strikes its own balance between required effort, payout, and frequency, and since each crop has its own level, crops can scale differently as you go - something that has excellent gold per minute at the start may be quickly outpaced if you show a little dedication to a lesser crop. There is no wrong choice - you will always be rewarded, but efficiency freaks will always have something to consider.

The other reason why this works is that different functions use different currencies. I know we're all exhausted by hearing "currencies" in the plural, but this actually serves a gameplay function. Gold is used for crops, diamonds are used for cosmetics, medals are used for major convenience upgrades, and tickets are used for automation. The mention of "crop levels" might have caused some to wince, but it allows for this evolving sense of progression where animals seem like a huge money pit for a new player, but their products convert nicely into tickets that make larger farms easier to run. Second example: Trees fall off very quickly as gold generators, but late-game trees start yielding rarer resources like spices instead, keeping you from bulldozing your orchard.

Quests ensure that you'll always have several plates spinning to meet their diverse needs, but since there are no time limits and no fail states, you can straight up ignore all of this and just let your kid walk around in splitscreen planting whatever they like, ignore the thing for ten minutes/a day/three weeks and come back to show them the fruits of their labor.

What I will say regarding the economy is that some crops do become functionally useless as time goes on - the game rewards you so much for unlocking new crops that the oldest ones cannot possibly scale enough to compensate. Everything gets better with dedication, but once you've made enough progress to unlock 2000-profit-per-seed chard, you probably don't care about the 15 profit lettuce, and your farm is likely too large to benefit from its fast grow time since you've got other stuff to do.

Conclusion:
It's not a lot, but there's value in it. It's good for kids, it's good for chilling in a Discord call and chatting, it's good for when you're slightly too high and staring at your Steam library like you're sorting a to-do list. I know it shares an aesthetic with 500 different App Store games called some shit like "Harvest Heroes" but you gotta trust me on this one! It's me, your Backloggd friend! Let's hop on a voice call together and plant leeks for six hours straight! Please help me harvest leeks

Did anyone else try the multiplayer in this? Not the sniper assassin minigame, but the actual, on-the-ground Agent 47 vs. somehow paler Agent 47 mode where you had to race an opponent to a target. It's not in the same realm of quality as the main game, but how could it be? These levels aren't designed for multiplayer, aren't designed for semi-random targets that wander around areas where the usual target is hunkered down, aren't designed to exist in an ecosystem where you can't hoard 600,000 muffins. That being said, I had some actual-ass fun playing it, which is more than I can say for most multiplayer affairs in recent years.

It only existed in the first two non-tutorial levels, Miami and Santa Fortuna - one of which is a pretty solid level, the other is among the worst in the trilogy, notable in the campaign for spreading 3 targets across three thirds of a map that is only one-third interesting. Two players spawn in with no equipment and are drip-fed a series of targets that do not normally exist in the level, and you are given a point if you can take them out without being detected, at which point the other player is given a couple seconds to do the same or forfeit the point. Equipment spawns in chests around the level - the first player gets their pick of three items, leaving only two for the other player.

While I never for one second considered playing this with an internet stranger, I did play tens of hours of this with an old high school friend, during which we took this game - a game whose single-player mode we had independently reduced to a digital chore list, noting each item's placement and coldly, surgically eliminating targets in increasingly efficient ways - and found new ways to plumb the depths of the other person's sociopathy. That's so weird that you don't have a silenced pistol yet, I've got six of them already. Are you waiting carefully, calculating the best time to poison the target? You have five seconds, I just gunned him down in broad daylight so you couldn't get the point. I hope you have the announcer voice off because I'm killing every single person in the level so that every target kill is undetected. I'm sprinting around behind you, throwing coins into your world so you can't play the game.

For some reason, IOI gave up on the unenviable task of adapting these levels for a multiplayer game mode that four people played, each of whom offered a resounding... "eh, not really my thing". Really a shame, to be honest, because it was a spectacularly interesting shitshow to play, and I think it only would've been more so if we got a chance to see levels like Mumbai or Whittleton Creek. I never expected Hitman to have that kind of up-too-late-during-the-sleepover multiplayer experience - the kind where you spend more time fucking over the other person and laughing than actually trying to play the game - but I've tasted it, and now I need more.

In all seriousness, it was intriguing to see IOI's attempts at tweaking these levels for non-standard game modes. Contracts mode is kind of self-moderating, since players ideally pick only the contracts that match the exact level of challenge they want. A real-time versus mode is a whole different beast, and while this was a decent stab at creating an alternate game mode, I'm mostly curious to see what lessons IOI takes from this for things like their upcoming Freelancer mode update for Hitman 3 or the as-yet-untitled James Bond game they're working on. In fact, I suspect that the success of Freelancer will largely depend on the lessons that they take from this. IOI have toyed with using limited replays to create stakes with the Elusive Target system, a system that still uses the traditional setup of giving each target a single, scripted path through the level. Creating stakes by having the level itself change every time you return is a different kind of challenge, and this alternate game mode is really the only thing I can think of that's similar within the Hitman series.

One the one hand, IOI has made a lot of baffling decisions over the years - I think Absolution is the easiest example of this, with IOI leadership openly admitting in interviews that they were chasing trends they had identified in other games to try and make Hitman more "modern". On the other, they seem to have really locked their focus in recent years on what's truly crucial to creating a Hitman game and have used their missteps in previous games/modes to make the core experience stronger. It's easy to forget that something that feels like a natural fit - the use of "Instinct" in the trilogy - began as a resource bar in Absolution that often made things harder to see and would show you the exact point on the map someone was walking to. Most of the PVP mode's most severe weaknesses have already been removed from the equation by virtue of Freelancer not being PVP, so I've got some confidence that IOI will be able to make something worthwhile out of the update. Not much left to do now but wait and see.

I just can't say that this is any better than the demo I played years ago. Sure, it scratches a particular kind of high-octane violence porn FPS itch that's pretty rare these days, but what does that really count for? While sliding and landing headshots feel great, there's no connective tissue here at all. Even if you're willing to accept that the story is a no-show, the mechanics of combat are tuned in such a way that the end product is little more than an aim trainer.

Stealth options are completely useless, stamina is strictly an annoyance, and anything that isn't a headshot may as well be a light breeze. I just... a game that looks like this should not be putting me to sleep, but I need something, anything to chew on. Humor me! Pretend that there's something more than a slo-mo button and a DOOM soundtrack and a reference to the Backrooms. If you can't do that, I'm just going to play Severed Steel instead.

It's easy to forget what Steam was like ten years ago, even if you were there. Steam was still using the Greenlight program at this point, requiring that indie developers beg the Steam community for votes to improve their chances of being manually approved by Valve for sale on the platform. While the selection would start improving rapidly in the next couple years, I bring this up because I think Payday 1 benefited tremendously from the platform's limited catalog. If you were shopping for something like Payday, there wasn't anything else on Steam that would scratch that itch. It's easy to feel like Payday: The Heist got much more attention in 2011 than it would today, given that it's essentially a bunch of heist movie references stapled onto Left 4 Dead. Hell, one of the most popular levels from the original game is a Left 4 Dead level.

The sequel attempts to become more than that, to be its own game and improve upon the parts of Payday 1 that resonated the most with players. I started a job at a local grocery store the day before Payday 2 released, and I bought it immediately after they handed me a paycheck - and I was happy! The small selection of launch heists felt a little too "safe", but everything else was a massive improvement when it came to creating a personal connection with the game. Customize your own masks, your guns, the skills you want to take (separate from the heister you picked!) and play some heists in actual, real stealth.

This is not the game Payday 2 is today.

Ten years of updates has rendered the game horrifically bloated, each update adding new heists, heisters, masks, gameplay systems, cosmetic systems, progession systems, currencies, balance changes, enemy types, ammo types, melee weapons, weapon mods, grenades, and an arsenal of guns so large that I can't really think of anything outside of H3VR that beats it. The only way you can keep up is by being an early adopter, because the onboarding process for Payday 2 nowadays mostly relies on having a friend that will drag you through 2-5 hours of heisting before you start to understand how all the moving pieces fit together.

Many of the community's running jokes about the game's more unwieldy elements have a basis in reality as well. Yes, it "runs on a racing game engine" in the same way that DotA 2 can trace its lineage to Quake's engine. Yes, it's a "bag-throwing/drill-repair simulator". Overkill Software realized that the most popular heists in Payday 1 asked players to manage some other resource and introduced bags of loot that the cops can reclaim from inattentive players. This loop has been repeated in basically every mission since Payday 2's release, and while I think you could criticize this for being a lazy way to add gameplay to missions that should be radically different, in my experience the players of Payday 2 tend to feel like they haven't really done a mission if they're not managing some kind of tangible loot.

If you can sift through all the nonsense, though, the game has its allure. Payday 2's gameplay - in its current form - is about putting together a "build" with skills, weapons, and perk decks that synergize so you can clear some of the more sadistic content in the game. However, if you're playing on difficulties for people that leave the house, the possibilities open up a lot more and the game's variety really shines. Run a melee build, run a "summoner" build that uses turrets and converted cops to fight for you, sprint around the level at light speed using a shotgun to light everyone on fire. It's all fine, but it really takes off when you're playing this with a friend or three and all of you are engaging with these systems at the same time. Sprinting over to a teammate to revive them with a shout, keeping a lookout while they answer a guard's pager to maintain stealth - while some games are better at actively encouraging teamwork, each mission completed in Payday 2 feels like a bonding exercise through the little ways you're constantly looking out for each other.

So sure, you could play Payday 2 with bots, but even if they improved the lackluster AI you'd find that the game loses a lot of its magic. The game is at its worst when it's not doing anything to encourage collaboration (this is where that "drill repair simulator" joke comes from), but the reason it's still in Steam's Top 25 by concurrent players is because the rest of the game gets it right. Despite all the updates and the bloat, the allure of Payday 2 remains the same since its release: It retains the best parts of Left 4 Dead as a game bundled with a social space, letting you shoot the shit with friends or strangers in a purely cooperative environment, wordlessly providing assistance in the form of a trigger pull as you remove the helmets from an army of cops.

I'd played a few routes of this a while back and wasn't really sure what to make of it, but decided to give it another stab after Hazel had positive things to say in her summer recap video, and...

I was... pleasantly surprised by this? Takurou will always be a bit of a womanizer by nature, but he's surprisingly funny and it's possible to play him relatively respectfully, if you so choose. There's an absolutely insane amount of text in this game dedicated to inspecting items or parts of the scenery, and it's what gives this game a lot of its charm - forcing horndog Takurou to closely investigate and repeatedly comment on the underside of a table in a cafe instead of taking the opportunity to look up someone's skirt.

I don't really want to oversell this, because it's still fundamentally an eroge from 1992, but I do find myself wishing that other, similar games had a similar commitment to character consistency and granting their female cast some sense of interiority. I think the interwoven "routes" are one of this game's biggest strengths for the same reason, where pursuing one character's route might have you making time for three or four other girls in an approach that is less a sleazy "wine-and-dine everyone", instead forming a more natural social dynamic where getting to know someone means occasionally interacting with the people they're close to. Taking the battering ram approach and repeatedly interacting with the same character is not the way to find anything fruitful here, and it's refreshing to find a dating sim that tries to complicate the process - although it's not my favorite method, it's a damn good attempt for such an early entry in the genre.

Although the art looks good, I can't help but feel like we're missing out by not getting the PC-98 art in some form or fashion, even if it's just a toggle (a la the Steam version of Umineko). In addition to matching my own aesthetic preferences, I think having more convenient access to the game's old artwork would make it easier to appreciate the game's early contributions to the dating sim genre instead of simply having it fade into the background among the more modern games that are standing on its shoulders.

I experience the full spectrum of human emotion every single game. Everything people say about Mario Party ending friendships is a way better fit for this game, where it feels like 30% of games are flipped on their head in the last turn. Mario Party for gambling addicts and masochists.

Arguably more fun when you only kind of have an idea as to what's going on, that way you're not sitting there seething because your friend is playing fucking Maynie again. If you can get a group of people together who aren't going to start screaming and shit, though, it's a fun game to kill some time. Unlike Mario Party, it never feels like a slog when the turns pass so quickly.

There's immense satisfaction in having a strategy come together, especially when it's so dependent on getting the right cards, although there's also some decent meme potential - some of the most fun I've had with the game has come from playing Lone Rider and zooming around the board three times faster than everyone else before getting one-shot by the boss.

(Not going to talk your ear off on this one, I just think this deserves more attention than it's currently getting)

This game is what I always wanted Dorfromantik to be - Dorfromantik can be relaxing, but trying to play the game well tends to make it deeply frustrating instead as you try to min-max the placement of each tile only to get another fucking railroad that you've gotta work with. Terrascape is less restrictive than even Dorfromantik's creative mode. Sure, it's an easier game as a result, but the game trusts that you'll look at your score and go "I can do better" and put a little more thought into your next game. You've got plenty of flexibility to make something that looks visually appealing without sabotaging your score since you're under no obligation to put your tiles anywhere near each other (and no obligation to leave them there - points are only calculated when a building is placed!). Game of the year? No, but it's doing a great job of scratching that "casual city builder" itch where other games have left me hanging.

Disappeared into the gacha game rabbit hole over the past few months and one of my first efforts to come back and play a "real game" led me, of it often does, to a city builder... which is also a Survivors clone, which is also a roguelike auto-battler dungeon crawler, which also has elements of plenty of other games glued to it in ways that are very rarely complementary.

It's extremely bizarre to me that it exists in this state as of its 1.0 release, because it's hard to shake the feeling that this game is horribly unfinished no matter how you choose to engage with it. The genres this game tries to pull from are very much dependent on robust systems or large pools of items/effects/abilities that would cost a tremendous amount of development time on their own, but because the developers have stapled three or four of these together it's pretty obvious that they didn't have the time to spend on making sure each of them was individually compelling.

The core of the game is the city-builder, which is actually more of a colony sim thanks to the fact that this is a cultivation game - you won't be placing that many buildings because your workforce is going to be pretty small, requiring a constant stream of resources to achieve these spiritual breakthroughs - allowing them to commute to their shift at the spirit stone mines by flying on their swords. Facilitating this requires a lot of work, most of which is micromanagement: you send people out into the world to scout out possible missions, then you do a mission (more on these in a bit), then you get a mobile game-ass loot chest that you have to manually open, then you can individually equip items or forcefeed elixirs to your various disciples using the "gift" system. It's... not great. The result of all of these games being attached to each other is a page for each disciple that is a huge mess of stats - most of which are irrelevant at any given time - being thrown into your face any time you need to interact with them.

Mostly, you'll need to interact with them for spiritual breakthroughs (which are just feeding them the necessary items and sending them to the Level Up Workbench) or for missions, which are locations that appear and disappear on the world map that allow you to dispatch disciples for a short bullet heaven or autobattler session. Neither of these have the variety of effects or loot to make them interesting beyond two runs, and if there's any meaningful metaprogression tied to the game's other modes then it's so drawn out that you could rightfully call it sadistic. I am not the foremost bullet heaven hater on this site - I've played my fair share of them and even think a few are quite good - but this game falls into the same traps that so many of these games do: it's often hard to tell when an enemy is doing an attack, your own attacks can be so visually busy that you walk into enemies, the upgrades you get aren't very interesting... All of the game modes present here indicate an understanding of the core elements of each genre but a lack of passion, funding, time, or analysis that would allow them to really shine. Does the autobattler really need so many pieces of gear that never meaningfully change the gameplay? Do either of these game modes justify each colonist displaying 13+ combat stats on their profile at all times? When you were testing this, was anyone excited to get a piece of gear with an 8% bonus to "critical resistance rate"?

The whole experience is disappointing because it's pretty easy to see what they were going for, but they really needed a project director who was willing to tell them "no" more often, or at least to help guide their efforts. I genuinely think cutting the bullet heaven components of this game and replacing them with the other combat minigames would've given them a substantial amount of time and effort back that they could've used on punching up the gameplay of the other game modes, of refining the menus for the rest of the game, of making sure the translations correctly explain the interactions between systems. Making these fixes now is a losing proposition - people will freak out if you try to do something like remove a game mode, but future projects from this team would benefit greatly from taking some time to really examine what you're putting into the game and asking how the player benefits from tying research progress to real-life timers.

"Time is wasted when one views it from a subject position whose ambitions the time in question was not dedicated to fulfilling." -Paul McAdory

CSGO is the first game I ever hit 1000 hours in, a feat I admittedly hope I will not replicate even one more time, as I've not yet fully reckoned with how significant a chunk of my life I've spent on beaming the same light patterns into my eyes over and over again. That being said, I've definitely made some progress in accepting its consequences.

At 26, I'm not old enough to reasonably be called "old" by anyone who can legally drive. I am, however, old enough to regret life decisions that prevented me from experiencing new things when I was younger. Those 1000 hours of Counter-Strike spread out over my handful of high school years seem unfathomably wasteful. I didn't go to prom. I didn't really try to make more friends or date anyone, and when I did I didn't really go out of my way to organize things involving those people. In college, I began dating an old friend from high school, and she had plenty of money saved up from her high school jobs. I had spent all mine on keys, cases, and skins.

What did I gain from it? I can tell you at least two stupid meme callouts from each map. I can tell you from memory how to create ridiculous, multi-phase keybinds in the console. I can tell you about the AUGpocalypse, or about watching Segura vids and debating whether or not it was phoon. I can tell you all about the stupid tricks you used to be able to use on Vertigo to out-meme the other team.

What did I gain from it? During a time where I was horribly depressed but failed to realize it, I was able to squeeze genuine joy out of booting up the same program over and over, one of the few that would run on my shitty laptop. It provided me an opportunity to feel like I was an expert on something at a time where I felt useless in every way that I thought would matter.

What did I gain from it? I have close friends from CSGO that have outlasted most of my high school friends. Even after dropping the game, I've made new friends and even furthered my career by talking about it with others who are familiar. Fond memories of the game have helped me break the ice with new people and serve as a reminder of how strong my friendship still is with people I met all those years ago.

I said earlier that I don't really want to hit 1000 hours in another game at this point, and I'm sticking to it. At this point in my life, I value varied experiences too highly to dedicate that much time to one thing. But I do think I'm finally able to believe that all that time wasn't wasted, that the things I've done can have value even if you're not checking items off a bucket list or generating profit for someone. It's about damn time I stop worrying about this.

Bits and pieces of this are pretty interesting, and I'm happy to see (between this and Heat) those running the NFS series identify the open space for a racing game that leans hard into the spectacle of street racing. Heat felt like EA (and Ghost Games) dipping their toes in the water, and this feels more like jumping right in - a greater commitment to a street art aesthetic, streetwear, music (didn't really expect to hear clipping. on a Need for Speed soundtrack), the whole nine. Does it work? Kinda.

It's definitely the closest thing to NFS Underground that has existed since the release of those games, and I do genuinely believe that the cel-shaded style of the people (and some mid-race effects) works really well to give the game some character. There's still a feeling of sanding off the rough edges that might scare off the suits, but overall it feels like the developers have tried to make something that they think is cool, and they are a lot closer to the mark than most AAA games get. I do wish they cut back on the talking - especially notable is the fact that the game alludes to municipal politics WAY more than you'd expect from a game that is trying to be trendy, but if it surprises you that "the mayor fucking HATES racing" is a plot point in a Need for Speed game, then I'm not really sure what to tell you.

I don't really want to hype this up too much - your car typically feels like the tires are made of either ice or glue, the game itself often looks fuzzy due to the way effects/filters are used, and even gentle curves often require that you hit the brakes pretty hard - but the core is pretty interesting and I'd really like to see them try to build on what's here for future games. Right now the game simply cares too much to be truly cool, but they're on the right track for giving modern NFS an identity separate from other big-name racing series. I still kinda hate the way cars handle in the newer NFS iterations, but I'm seeing a lot of people offering praise for that specific element of the NFS Unbound experience, so maybe in a few years we'll see this franchise (re-)develop an even larger, dedicated audience of people who are less interested in sleek, unmodified hypercars and more interested in turning the car itself into a form of expression all its own.

You're telling me that two years after this game was unceremoniously shoved into its "Former Game of the Week"-themed grave, we're trying to bring it back? I won't stand for it.

I would've assumed that a game like this needs a hook, that the minigames need to actually be good, but after two years you can now play Tip Toe with friends and I'm not really convinced that that's enough to redeem the experience. Winning is still primarily the consequence of lucking out and not getting griefed into the sun, rather than a reward for actually doing anything right during the course of the minigames.

Maybe I just hate fun? Definitely a possible answer, but I'm mostly tired of streamers as tastemakers. I don't care about the latest Free-to-Play battle pass, no matter how many Hatsune Miku cosmetics or Lebron Jameses you put in. Release my friends, demon, I want to play games with them again.

I think a lot of the reception to this game is from the sheer weight of expectations - many fans came in expecting more of the same mechanics and story beats that FromSoft clearly isn’t interested in anymore, and others still came in expecting something new and fresh that would justify its existence as a whole new game in the Dark Souls series. FromSoft seems to have done a lot more for the first group than they did for the second, but they’re still close enough to straddling the line for both to have some significant complaints. Compared to DS1, the path to a boss feels much more like a gauntlet that you just have to get through, instead of needing to respect each room for providing its own threat. The bosses definitely got more attention - they still feel like Dark Souls bosses, but the (over)abundance of multi-phase bosses makes it feel like this is really where the challenge was supposed to lie this time around.

The combat is definitely faster than previous entries and while I know a lot of those who played Bloodborne felt the speed wasn’t suited to this game, I never really felt that there was a problem with it. The increased speed of the bosses makes me actually feel like I have to pay constant attention to the bosses since they’re able to keep the pressure on at all times, instead of getting little reprieves here and there as you get some space between you. This seems to mostly come down to personal preference, but there’s a lot here that works in favor of the increased speed, including the decision to actually let you move around (at a much faster speed) while using your Estus Flasks - that teensy bit of movement rarely makes a difference between life and death, but it does factor a little bit into your calculus of when healing feels safe.

What I respect DS3 the most for is its world. I’ve seen a lot of complaints about hollow fanservice and while some callbacks fit better than others, I think From has done a good job of integrating the old items, locations, etc into the story. Dark Souls 3, better than any other entry, really sells that the world is crumbling. Part of it is the callbacks, showing you things you’ve seen before and realizing that I just walked right through old Firelink and I didn’t even recognize it. Part of it is that the story feels tired right off the bat - not in that it’s trite, but in that from the second your character stands up at the beginning of the game, there’s a sense that everything around you has already been there for uncountable years, and that if it were to blink out of existence tomorrow it would only make sense. While this sensation of the game “playing the hits” seems to have turned many off from the game, it feels like the perfect encapsulation of the games themes about unnaturally prolonging a natural cycle - the hollow imitations of characters, institutions, and ideas from previous games feel like the world and its inhabitants holding it all together the only way they know how - by grasping at the past, taking these legendary figures and concepts and only being able to produce a shallow facsimile.

It makes me feel as if I’m seeing a different game from the others. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to enjoy this game just because I enjoy it. But I wonder if people who suggest the game doesn’t know what it’s doing with these callbacks were so blinded by this recognition of previous locations that they missed obvious markers all over the game. Linking the fire produces a pathetic, withering flame instead of the overwhelming explosion that we saw in DS1. The game retreading a location you already saw in the same game by bringing out a version of the Cemetery of Ash where everything is just...wrong. Showing you a half-eaten Gwyndolin, dodging modified versions of his own abilities, playing a corrupted version of his theme. While it’s all an excellent continuation of themes present in the games, it feels like the game itself is showing you what happens to everything with time, including the games you’re playing - do you unnaturally prolong the series against its will until it’s just a parody of its old self, or do you let it die with dignity and be replaced by new, unknown things?

I don’t want another Dark Souls game. I like that the game chose to play us a few of the songs we already knew on the way out, that it still managed to give us a new-ish take on the same formula, and that it’s bowing out before becoming a mangled mess, exhausting anything interesting the IP had to offer. It is, to me, the perfect way to cap off this particular series, and I respect FromSoft immensely for doing it with dignity - before they had dispelled the mysteries of the world, before becoming a no-rough-edges yearly fixture, before anyone can figure out how multiplayer really works.

Weirdly, I think this is better than Vampire Survivors? This is mostly the result of scores of little changes, the kind of balance changes that would be too tedious to list in a review, but they add up to a product that is far less frustrating to play than normal Vampire Survivors. Most notably, evolving weapons isn't tedious, items have far more interesting effects, and characters are unique in ways that are interesting for longer than the first 15 seconds of a run (upgradable passive abilities). Thank god I'm not spending one passive slot every single run on spinach!

Really, the biggest downside to this game as a casual Hololive fan is that I am fiending for more characters, but given how big a head start Vampire Survivors had in producing content for the game, it's impressive that this game can hold a candle to the original at all.

I've been waiting for a spiritual sequel to SWAT 4 for a very long time. I have been so eager for this hypothetical game that 4 years ago I - a person who never preorders anything - spent $120 United States Dollars on this game when it was just a video. Please adjust your perception of me accordingly.

There was a long alpha period where I was too afraid to pay much attention to the game, save for reading a few excited emails about how they've finally implemented doors (and oh boy, have they). Now that it's finally purchasable for the general public on Steam, I've tried it and… it's pretty good?

Don't get me wrong, this is not even remotely a finished product. Within our first three missions, a friend and I already ran into a bug that forced us to completely restart the level because I couldn't interact with the only door out of a room. But the core of SWAT 4's gameplay is here and it feels pleasant and modern - most importantly, actually using the equipment you lug around doesn't feel like a chore anymore. There are tweaks to the formula too, welcome changes that modify the balance of the game or add features present in popular mods for SWAT 4. Turning the game into a joke by spamming the beanbag shotgun is no longer an option, a melee button allows you to subdue civilians who won't let you handcuff them (grandma), and the addition of trapped doors forces you to slow down and greatly adds to the paranoia that comes with being outnumbered in a hostile environment.

BUT

As much as I enjoy the gameplay at the core of the experience, I've got a couple gripes, and they can be real stinkers, depending on your perspective.

The first and most minor are the early access-related complaints. I don't mind a lot of the jank since I've been playing SWAT 4 for years now, but new players are going to have questions that the game doesn't answer, bugs that you're not sure are truly bugs or not, and a lack of features / equipment. The game also doesn't feel like it's trying too hard to stray from SWAT 4's formula (thus becoming its own thing), but it feels like it's too early in the process to say whether the end product will feel the same way.

The other big one is the game's politics. A game like this is going to be overtly political and frankly I wasn't expecting a lot, but the developers of this game have made some… interesting choices. Probably the most objectionable is the civilian dialogue, as most of them will say something after you handcuff them - again, like SWAT 4. The women have terrible voice lines, including at least two separate lines hitting on the cops, and one racist voice line that also just… doesn't feel like it even makes sense? Thankfully the game has very little story compared to The Other Game, since the trailers for this game very much leaned into the "careful, devoted cop heroes are the only thing keeping a tidal wave of crime from crashing upon this city" idea. I know the developers split with the publisher of the game, and I've only seen a single mention of it so far indicating that it may be due to the devs' intention of setting a future level in a school shooting. Not really thrilled about where this game could go in the future - as things stand I'm expecting the game from 2005 to be the more respectful of the two.

All in all, I think I'm mixed on Ready or Not as a consumer product. I'm not holding out hope that this will become something I can recommend in good conscience, even though everything in it feels great. Kicking in doors feels thunderous. Developing a system to conquer missions becomes a satisfying collaborative puzzle. Taking a room where armed hostiles are mixed in with civilians without anyone (friend or foe) sustaining an injury is as exciting as beating any video game boss, crammed into a couple tense seconds. But I just can't recommend it, not before you look into the game, the developers and decide if you'd like to support them with $40 of your own money.

Perhaps this game will change, perhaps the devs will respond to my complaints if they get enough feedback. I've been pleasantly surprised before. Watch this space??