Game reviews

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which is an absolute delight and one of my favorite games in a long time, has four main things going for it. The first and most immediately obvious is Metropolis, the glittering comic book city where Superman makes his home, an emblem of Silver Age comics if ever there was one.

Rocksteady, the developer who took us inside Arkham Asylum and then built an entire Gotham for their Batman games, has done it again. This time they’ve built a vast, dense, brightly candy-colored Metropolis…and then trashed it. An alien invasion has almost entirely depopulated the city. Its highways are empty and its flying cars are grounded. Walkways and rooftops are littered with the dead in the form of gray ash statues frozen in mid-panic. Drones hoover up hidden survivors to bring them to the mothership. Alien tanks trundle down the highways and patrols roam the streets or squat sullenly on rooftops. Occupation. An eerily abandoned, tattered and beaten utopia, brimming with shredded detail. And given that this is a morality inversion — in Suicide Squad, bad guys are good guys, and vice versa — it all carries the whiff of some dormant fascism. Bioshock: Infinite never had it so good. Now get in there and open-world to your heart’s content!

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One of my fondest early videogame memories is playing the 1988 adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It was just a point-and-click adventure game, but it had a cyberspace to hack into. Once you got in, you could subvert and solve stuff in the point-and-click parts of the game. This interplay between cyberspace and meatspace was my introduction to hacking. Real hacking, not that stuff in Matthew Broderick movies. Here was a way to sneak around guards, get through locked doors, activate switches, and generally get away with stuff I wasn’t supposed to do. Here was stealth gameplay that didn’t mean standing in the dark parts of the level design, memorizing patrol routes, and reloading the game when I got spotted. This was stealth for guys like me fascinated by systems within systems within systems. If I could handle the MFDs in an F-19, by golly, I could upgrade my deck to slip past some ICE!

It’s been an interesting stretch for hacking games, but hacking too often means “doing some minigames”. 

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What a great time to be a fan of ray tracing!  Whatever that is.  I couldn’t tell you what ray tracing is if my life depended on it.  Something to do with reflections and light?  I figure it’s like lens flare: if I notice it, it’s not doing its job.  But I’d have to know what it is to notice it.  So, hurrah, ray tracing has finally come to Ratchet & Clank thanks to the power of the Playstation 5!  And since I haven’t noticed it, it must be working!

Wait, hold on, what’s this setting in the options menu?

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Necromunda: Hired Gun is the best Spider-Man game since Spider-Man.  My magic web-shooter/grappling hook can get me anywhere I can see.  A quick thwip and I’m standing on a ledge high overhead!  The double-jump assist is just gravy.  But unlike Sony’s 2018 love letter to Silver Age superheroics, Hired Gun lives in a grim Warhammer world where I didn’t jump up to this ledge for thrills; I jumped up here to snipe a bunch of crazy dudes sporting plasma rifles, blue Mohawks, and skull flair.  Also, I’ve got a dog tagging along and I’m toting serious firepower of my own.  Frankly, the dog isn’t much of a dog anymore.  When I upgrade him, I swap out his dog parts for robot parts.  A paw here, a leg there, one side of his face, a jaw, another leg.  He may not be as furry as he used to be, but he’s still a good boy.  I summon him with a squeaky toy (Warhammer needs more humorous touches like this).  As for the guns, they’re not foolin’ around.  This is the Warhammer universe, so they’re absurdly large heavy hitters, even when they’re just pistols.  They have names like Deathbringer, Funeral Ball, Burning Sun, and Scars Machina.  They take up a lot of screen real estate.

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A colorful post-apocalyptic open world populated by intelligent mutated animals.  Tthe usual Ubisoft style open-world with a touch of Gamma World and a Secret of NIMH vibe.  Over-the-top brawler gameplay, intricate stat-based character development, and a hearty crafting system.  Mounts, vehicles, loot, exploration, puzzles, choice-and-consequence.  A robot cricket sidekick!  If games were bullet points, Biomutant would have a lot going for it.  But since games are games, Biomutant is only as good as the realization of these bullet points.

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Remember that time when Resident Evil tried something new and different?  Resident Evil 5 cast horror in a new light.  Africa’s equatorial sun blew the usual cobwebs out of the series in favor of something different and even controversial.  It finally played like the shooter it had been trying to be for so long.  It even introduced an exciting new character.  And that was back when representation was more a prerequisite for taxation than a cultural imperative.  But what’s become of Sheva now?  Why does Capcom keep going back to the white-bread familiarity of their Chrises and Jills?  Why are they all-in on the tragedy of the faceless Ethan Winters, aptly named for being as bland as the driven snow, searching for his wife and/or daughter the same way he searches for green herbs, handgun rounds, and whatever arbitrary cog, key, or crank handle unlocks the next heavily scripted set piece?  Mia, Rose, press X to Jason, all just meat for the refrigerator.  The shadow of Silent Hill looms over so many games, yet so few of them understand what made it tick.

Since Resident Evil 5, the series has alternated between updated remixes that work well enough and new stories that have been various levels of awful.  Maybe The Village can thread the needle between effective gameplay and a new setting, style, and characters.

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When it comes to gaming the spread of infectious disease, everyone loves Matt Leacock’s Pandemic.  Not me.  I think it does a terrible job of modeling the outbreak, spread, and containment of an epidemic.  It’s all gamey abstraction loosely held together by a strained disease motif that makes no sense.  It’s not even a very good design.  It speaks volumes about Pandemic that for all its iterations — diseases, dikes, empires, cultists — the best version of Leacock’s design is about puppets and plastic models.

But then there’s Raxxon.

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Racing isn’t just about speed.  Speed is the goal, sure.  But the important part is knowing when to relinquish speed.  The important part is figuring out when and how much to slow down.  It’s hardly surprising most racing videogames downplay this part.  In most videogames, you mash down the accelerator, feel the exhilaration, and have a win!  But what’s distinct about Project Cars 3 — at least among consumer-friendly racing games — is that it downplays speed.  It emphasizes precision, consistency, calculation, practice.  Project Cars 3 has plenty of speed, but that’s not what it’s about.  Instead, it’s a game based on driving well.  And it’s about more than that.  It’s ultimately about something too few racing games know how to express.

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One of my favorite boardgame designs is Troyes.  Although it relies on dice, it’s not about chasing sixes.  Normally, dice games are all about seeing how many high numbers you can roll.  Over the course of the game, you have to work through the peaks and valleys of sixes and ones, which feels more like following the course of a river than actually planning anything.  Luck pulls the game, but your strategy is an oar you can use to splash around in the water.  Troyes is different for how it’s never about seeing how many high numbers you can roll.  In Troyes, a one can be just as welcome as a six.

Under Falling Skies works on this same principle.

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I kept waiting.  At some point, it was going to do something to disappoint me.  There was going to be some misstep or oversight or shortcut, something that wasn’t fully developed or that should have been cut.  Something that didn’t seem to fit.  Something weak or wrong.  But Immortals Fenyx Rising is one of those rare games that never let me down.  Not once.  Every time I played, I ended up smiling at its insight, confidence, charm, and humor.

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Speed is a cheap vulgar thrill.  It has none of the tension or innate drama of torque.  You cannot savor speed the way you can savor the interaction of traction and mass.  Speed wants nothing to do with the earth.  It wants to leave it.  But torque wants to defeat it, to prevail over it, to wrestle with it and throw it down and then tear loose from it to declare the victory of forward motion.  Torque is determined to triumph.  Torque is a battle.  Torque grapples and struggles.  Speed was barely even here.

That’s the premise of Snowrunner, and Mudrunner before it, and Spintires before that, all games about trucks wrestling with bad roads.  Videogames have been letting us go fast for as long as they’ve been around.  But the unique contribution of the Spintires line, which has its fullest expression in Snowrunner, is its intimacy with the ground.  If you’ve ever driven a manual transmission, you know what I’m talking about.  

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I was done.  I was finished with head-to-head card battling.  So little has changed since Richard Garfield invented it with Magic: The Gathering back in 1973 or thereabouts.  Build up mana, spend it to bring out cards with an attack and defense value, tap the cards to attack, win when you’ve done 20 points of damage to the other guy.  All these decades later, so little has changed.  Consider Hearthstone, a gleaming nugget of integrated game design and business model, polished nearly to the point of featurelessness.

Sure, there have been variations and even innovation.  I’ve recently enjoyed Faeria for how it situates the action on a board built by the players as the match unfolds.  Pretty clever.  But even that only goes so far.  If I’m going to match attack and block values, I need something more.  And no game has enough something more to keep me interested.

Until now.

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It’s been an, uh, interesting year for rally games.  Dirt 5, which was already kind of superfluous given the amount of content in Dirt 4, took a new direction…and then drove right into a ditch.  WRC9 continued that series’ remarkable campaign mode, which shifts the traditional caRPG structure from RP’ing as your favorite car to RP’ing as a rally team that’s not necessarily concerned with any specific car.  But what’s been most interesting this year is a joyous and seemingly tiny rally racing game unlike any other.

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It would be easy to fire up Code Vein, run around some of the early game areas, and conclude that it’s a Dark Souls soul in an anime body (amply bosomed ladies and androgynous boys with spiky coifs and freakishly large eyes).  You wouldn’t be wrong.  But to appreciate Code Vein, you have to wrap your head around something that’s initially confusing.  Obtuse, even.  Certainly not like anything I’ve ever seen.  It’s not going to be easy to understand, and before you fully comprehend it, you might have decided to just return to whatever other Dark Souls clone you prefer.  Its inscrutability in Code Vein won’t stop you.

But it’s the main reason I’ll be playing this weird little thing long after I would have given up if it were just a Dark Souls clone.

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To appreciate Desperados III, you have to understand that videogame time is not linear.  Videogame time allows you to rewind and try again.  Over and over, if necessary, until you get it right.  In most games, I’ve seen this as a failure, on my part and on the part of the design.  I already played this bit and it didn’t work out, so why would I want to replay it?  Why would I want to replay it over and over?

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