Pathologic Classic HD

Pathologic is a weird and miserable Russian game from 2005 about getting the plague and dying. It’s slow, and frustrating, and off-putting. The English voice acting is awkward at best, even in the re-cast Classic HD version. The town and all its houses look awful, everything is grey and brown, it takes you an hour to cross the street and you halfway starve in that time, the combat sucks, your hits inexplicably fail to register half the time, and you hear terrible crying children sounds whenever you commit crimes. I like it a lot.

Alternatively: It is a first-person CRPG with a day-night cycle and three playable characters, which tasks you with surviving 12 days in a small, remote town (set maybe in the early 1900s, but with a lot of backward local superstition) while managing health, hunger, exhaustion, and your keeping your immune system strong, none of which is trivial to a new player.

To get some potential misconceptions out of the way, let’s start with what it’s not (besides “not fun”). It’s not a hugely fulfilling challenge to overcome, as it’s frankly more tedious than hard, especially when you lean into the incentives to save-scum any time you actually catch the plague, or to reroll bad loot from a corpse. It’s not one of those meticulously-interconnected reactivity-heavy RPGs where everyone remembers what you did to them the last time you met (like Alpha Protocol). If you don’t finish a quest, it’s assumed someone else did it in your absence; if you refuse to help someone dump a body, the body is gone the next day anyway, and the person you asked doesn’t seem to care that you never helped. You can’t kill named characters or do whatever you want, and you’re occasionally railroaded into doing something stupid. You won’t find robust systems for emergent gameplay. Crimes lower your “reputation” meter regardless of the presence of witnesses, and good deeds — like ruthless vigilantism — cancel out bad deeds — like knockout-gaming some innocent lady on the street. In other words, it’s got the kind of crude one-axis system of moral judgment we all got tired of and begged The Witcher to save us from in the years since.

But in absence of these grand and ambitious designs few can deliver upon, Pathologic takes a seat at the table on the strength of its writing and meta-intent, or whatever you want to call it. That’s not to call it a small and simple game. In fact it’s so complicated that it’s difficult to pick an angle to approach discussion from.

On its most immediately apparent layer, it’s a game that often subverts expectations and doesn’t hold the player’s hand. Characters who are at cross purposes with the player will give you pointless quests which don’t pay off just to waste your time, or they may ask for your charity and simply have nothing of comparable value to give you in return. It’s quite clever with little details, like the skyrocketing of food prices during a pandemic, encouraging the player to profiteer in a time of need. There are endless mysteries and layers of lies and character motives, many of which never get explained from one playable character’s perspective, or perhaps at all. Even by the end of my first playthrough I didn’t know what if anything was supernatural in origin and what could be explained away rationally, if certain characters really could commune with the dead or prognosticate, if monsters from local folklore really existed. Even in the case of a totally bizarre work of architecture which defies gravity and warps space, one rationalist in town still dares to suggest that it’s all just smoke and mirrors, suggesting that what you see with your own eyes may not necessarily be true.

There’s widespread consensus that the Bachelor is the ideal protagonist for the first playthrough. As a visiting doctor from the capital, he’s the best player surrogate, as he’s as uninitiated in local customs as you are, and can ask all those questions. When people say insane and cryptic nonsense, the Bachelor is the one most likely to have a “What the fuck are you talking about?” dialogue option, and when people claim they can see the future, he can openly doubt them. His questlines also clearly got the most development time, and make the most robust use of characters and locations.

The three protagonists aren’t taking on the same jobs. When you’re playing as the Haruspex or the Changeling, the Bachelor is still there, doing the quests you already did when you were playing as him. (Well, sort of. You don’t actually see him shuffling around town cramming meat in his mouth, but he’ll often have dialogue about his own tasks.) Sometimes their quests intersect, and on Day 1 as the Changeling, you might approach a sidequest you remember from Day 1 as the Bachelor, only from another angle. One might provide aid to an NPC injured by another. And they don’t always do what you remember them doing when the roles were reversed.

The further you go past that first playthrough as the Bachelor, the more off-the-rails things get. The ambiguity of the supernatural becomes overt. The other protagonists are progressively stranger themselves, more initiated in the customs of this weird place, more exposed to its secrets, and less rooted in the objective facts of the civilized world. Soon, you’re the one saying insane shit that doesn’t make sense. The story becomes less concerned with what’s literally going on. By the time you’re on the third protagonist’s route, you’re more of a symbol than you are a human being, and the fourth wall is constantly broken. All the while you come to a better understanding of what the Bachelor’s route was really supposed to be analogous to, what its themes were. Well, maybe.

It also starts to feel a lot rushed and sloppier, with fewer interesting sidequests or characters involved in each day’s events, and the devs readily admit to being pretty rushed in the back half. It was already a pretty jank game in the best of times.

Pathologic is dense with thematic experiments and open questions about the nature and utility of games, which surprisingly feel more fresh and funny than trite in their execution, even after over a decade of continued academic pontificating on this subject. It’s not just about choice and agency, but, as one NPC describes it, “constructing a sarcophagus for a miracle”… trying to seize something that was meant to be fleeting, overcoming “inevitability”. This could mean overcoming death but also the permanence of dreams, or capturing a moment in time, and probably explicitly the presence of the player in the game itself, until one has exhausted it of all possible options and moved on. In a more abstruse and philosophical way, I think it touches upon some of the same ideas Undertale had. I don’t dare to say I have a perfect deconstruction of all of it in my mind, but despite all its riddling and refusals to speak plainly, I think the game ultimately wants to be understood. In a sort of epilogue to an absolute victory condition, the creators explain many of their intentions to the player outright.

I did sometimes find myself not sold on these intentions. The three protagonists are not empty vessels for the player, but each have their own agendas, whether you are currently inhabiting them or not. But I couldn’t shake my bias that if a game intends for something to be convincing to its protagonist, it should convince the person controlling them. Although the game is very frank about the limits of your control in this medium, I don’t wish to give it undue credit, and I think I should be on the same page with my character, for the purposes of, well, basic storytelling things like empathy and engagement. The game runs the risk of biting off too much allegory at the cost of these things, affecting my interpretations of the endings in literal terms and generally muddling things up for me.

It seems somewhat ironic to me that the Bachelor’s “Utopian” ending only took on some value for me with later, less literal interpretations of events, while it seemed to appeal to the character himself immediately. There’s a lot of subjectivity in these hang-ups of mine, of course — whether the ideas that are less than entirely grounded in what is actually happening were rolled out at the right pace, whether some symbolism should have been traded for frank answers — but these are the sorts of rabbit holes you’re likely to go down in discussing Pathologic. I’ll admit that any of these offer a richer discussion than whether it’s still any fun to climb a building in Assassin’s Creed games, and also that I’m less qualified to have them. I’m trying for brevity here anyway — if I start talking about humanism or Leibnizian optimism or whatever, I’ve failed — but you can easily waste four hours watching video essays about the game on Youtube if you want.

It dissolves into chaos. Unspoken agreement between game and player is broken. NPCs who represent the game’s creators mock you for being unable to say things other than your proscribed dialogue options, or because you’re not allowed to go back to an earlier part of their dialogue tree and ask a different question instead of the one you asked. In turn, you might antagonize those NPCs for not really being the creators, but echoes, a series of programmed responses left behind by some writer who “left this place a long time ago”, while you as the player have the gift of being the only real person present. It’s all very silly but occasionally some character would realize something they weren’t supposed to, or would be frightened out of their wits by you spoiling the nature of the game a little, and I couldn’t help but bark out a laugh in these moments.

So I’m fond of this game, even the inaccessibility of it, given all the insanity. But, good god, one can’t review this game and brush aside just how agonizing it is just spending whole days slowly walking around the map, getting obstructed by fences you can’t climb over. So many quests are simply about delivering messages to people who live on opposite sides of town — “these people need to get a fucking phone” quests, as I like to think of them. I almost gave up on Pathologic a few days in. At many times I wanted to skip the tedium and use console commands to jump straight to my objectives, but fought off this urge for my Bachelor run, feeling that the game would only become more boring if I no longer had to be calculating. I think I was right not to, to fully commit to what the game was asking of me at least once. Properly learning the ins and outs of the mechanics, discovering things that weren’t even written in tip guides I read online, when and how to sleep, finding the arbitrage in trades with NPCs, ultimately allowing myself to get infected and managing it with drugs instead of save-scumming every time I ran into a plague cloud, embracing misery — these were things I found most rewarding, outside of the story and writing.

But for the record, I cheated constantly in my second and third playthroughs. I was already many dozens of hours deep on a game with awful gameplay, and felt removing all of the fucking walking was the only way I could bring myself to uncover the rest of the story. I’m happy I did, because it would have been a shame to quit there. Do what you gotta do, I guess.

This game was thoroughly enjoyed by the reviewer. It is an excellent game that may be too simple or not ambitious enough to be a 5, or there are design flaws meaningful enough to prevent it from enduring as something truly beloved. Highly recommended.

Assassin’s Creed Origins

It’s 2017, two years after the last Assassin’s Creed game, and more notably, two years after the success of The Witcher 3. Ubisoft has taken further steps to reinvent the series. Ten games in now, and the last string of titles (excluding Rogue) have all tried to refine the basic mechanics, but this one is far more obvious about it. Even the “low/high profile” action modifier button from the original 2007 game is gone — and unmissed, as it turns out. The Arkham Asylum-inspired cinematic timing brawls are no more, replaced by a lock-on & shield/parry system similar to Zelda, or Dark Souls, though without the stamina mechanics. This is the first and probably most important thing to come away from the game with: There is a very effective, basic appeal in shooting people in the head with arrows, parrying big attacks, or dodging around an enemy’s swing and slashing into their exposed back.

There are no menu percentages to tell you about the sync objectives you fucked up or treasure chests you’ve missed. It’s mercifully free of the pointless bullshit gewgaws. Just a massive map full of question marks — unexplored animal dens and bandit camps — and a massive pile of sidequests, each with its characters and conversations. It’s built around the open world pretty well, and you only rarely have to worry about the game scolding you for “going out of bounds” during a quest. A lot like The Witcher 3, then, only without the magic signs and potions, and with war elephants as the closest thing to dragons.

The elephant fights aren’t bad, though.

Frankly, the core combat feel is probably better than the Witcher ever got, but the game still doesn’t quite measure up. Those sidequests? Most are boring. And without Zelda’s tree-surfing & paragliding mechanics, or other reality-defying tricks in other open-world games, you’re working with something of a handicap. As a game set two thousand years ago, what has Assassin’s Creed got to offer over other open-world series, aside from meeting Cleopatra and Caesar, atrociously ahistorical encounters anyway? This far into antiquity, you may as well have given Bayek a permanent Apple of Eden that lets him do Dishonored ghost mode stuff, and claimed that all first-hand accounts of his magic burned with the Library of Alexandria or else faded into folklore.

Stealth has seen better days. Basic mainstays like the hidden blade (apparently far older than Altair’s days, as it turns out) often fail to work, as it seems you can neither be too close nor too far away. On the micro level it’s quite easy to be spotted — especially when your bow is drawn, which makes you so highly visible to guards that it’s not only pointless to hide in the bushes, but I was even seen through walls a couple of times. (Even so, the stealth bows are so overpowered for one-shotting enemies at range that it doesn’t even matter if you’re seen, as long as your aim isn’t atrocious.) On the macro level, guards are so spaced apart, facing the wrong directions, and otherwise dumb that it’s usually trivial to clear an encampment without alerting the whole place, even if you start a few loud fights along the way. I would prefer it to be the other way around: difficult to be spotted once if you’re stealthing by the book, but once you are, those guards should start screaming and lighting signal fires immediately.

I miss those silhouettes that would appear when you broke line of sight, but you hardly need them here. It’s a small shame. There are also a few other moves that are pretty janky, like chain assassinations and adrenaline combo finishers, which often hit like a wet fart due to anything that can happen between the time you start your kill animation and finish it.

Areas have level ranges, and a higher level skull enemy will shrug off a hidden blade stab with barely any damage, which is pretty cool. I love it in Fallout games and the like when I’m freely allowed to run straight into the hell zones at low level and die in one hit, but they screwed up here by having level scaling on treasure chests, and nothing to gain from these ventures. Even if you managed to cheese a strong enemy to death with fire or by knocking him off a ledge or something, it wouldn’t do you any good. If you can’t suicide-run for some overpowered tool at the beginning of the game, or at least to get a faster camel or something, what’s the point in all that freedom? Where’s the thrill?

You can unlock skills as you level, but you can’t get enough points to learn all abilities by the time you’ve finished the game and all sidequests. Many are useless or have terribly imbalanced costs. 3 skill points to hold your breath longer underwater, or to buy chariots? Completely worthless. Animal taming? Fun gimmick until your animal decides ten seconds later that it wants to attack you again, or you quick-travel away and it disappears. Some classic overpowered tools, like Berserk darts, have become an amusing gimmick which only works from close range, probably for the best. Smoke bombs are pretty good at stunning a dangerous enemy at close range, but can no longer be thrown as an all-purpose stealth tool. I like the change, though half the time I was throwing them accidentally while trying to loot a corpse, as both are on the same button.

A few other neat features. There’s a fun thing where you can find the bodies of other players, and get “revenge” for them by killing the enemies who killed them, which was a satisfying source of extra XP for a while. There are also high-level map-roaming “Phylakes”, who would respond to the lighting of a fort’s signal fires. It was pretty cool, one of the more emergent systems in the game, and you could even try to lure them into a trap by lighting the beacons yourself, and killing them with ballista on the walls of a keep, or shooting jars of oil to burn them or something. It worked, but most of the game’s efforts to accommodate such outside-the-box thinking were thwarted simply by being less effective than a series of predator arrows into every guard’s head. Loading screen tips would clue you into some ideas, like poisoning a corpse with Flesh Decay, setting it on the back of a horse, and scaring the horse to run into a group of enemies, spreading poison to them. Which is brilliant in theory, except it’s a huge pain in the ass, the horse is unlikely to run in a straight line even if you do set it up without being seen first, and the poison damage will probably wear off before killing anyone. The reward simply isn’t commensurate with the effort.

Northern Egypt in 49 BC, at the end of the Ancient era, isn’t bad to explore. Buildings don’t get as tall and grand as those in Revolutionary France, but the view of the pyramids in Giza in the distance can be gorgeous, and they’re among the more fun things I’ve climbed (or slid down the side of) in any of these games. Although obviously scaled down (and better that way), a massive amount of real geography is covered, pretty much everything west of the Nile, from the Mediterranean in the north, into the desert south of the Faiyum. But once you’ve seen your first Roman fort, you’ve seen them all. Most sidequests tend to have the same objectives, too, and I lost count of the times I was sent to carry some guy out of a cage in a fort somewhere.

A few stood out, like the Final Fantasy XV tie-in, some stuff involving the “First Civilization”, and some others, like a Seven Samurai-inspired quest about preparing a small village to ward off a bandit attack. But they’re bound to get stale unless you have more ways of interacting with your environment. You can climb stuff and you can kill stuff. Sometimes you “inspect” a crime scene, but as with the Witcher, there’s not much gameplay here. You can examine stuff from the air by calling for your pet eagle, but this usually just means waggling the control stick to add some objectives to your HUD, and it’s tedious. Some tombs really like to remind you that you’re not playing a game full of cool interactive systems like Breath of the Wild, such as when you can only tediously carry blocks onto a platform to provide counterweight to an elevator, and sometimes you’re not allowed to move said blocks at all. (In BotW, you’d be able to drop some crap straight out of your inventory for an outside-the-box solution.) There’s also no “conquering the map” like there was in Syndicate, or various other open-world games. No replacing the guards in a keep with your own men. No establishing extra fast travel points. No faction rep… in short, many systems are lacking.

Load times were pretty good again, thankfully, but I had several crashes to desktop, and terrible issues with texture pop-in unless I set the game’s priority to “high” in Task Manager every time I opened it. Not the first game where this has been an issue, but there’s been enough of these games that you’d think Ubisoft would have figured out how to do a PC port by now. Not even close to the buggiest AC game I’ve played otherwise, but I’ve definitely seen my share, including dialogue lines getting cut off, or even one time an NPC had roamed to somewhere the game didn’t expect when I initiated a sidequest with him, so I had to slowly walk behind him in silence for five minutes until he exited the city and went down the road to his villa. You can do a lot of great stuff with day-night cycles and roaming characters, but… not like this, please.

The story has also taken on a darker and more cynical Witcher-esque tone, with many sidequests seeming to end with you finding the tortured body of the person you were sent to rescue and other such tragedies. But it’s not exactly smart, and many of the usual AC problems persist — ridiculous motives, leaps of logic, and needless complexities. Sometimes when I’m on a quest to kill some middle-manager I can’t even remember why I’m doing it. The game has things to say about colonialism, the tragedies caused by Greeks and Romans fighting for their slice of Egyptian wealth, but it’s funny then how you choose to support Julius fucking Caesar for a while, putting down rebels who seek independence in what turned out to be the end of Egypt as world power, all due to some fake proto-Templar nonsense. A long-recurring problem with this franchise: the historical figures are the bad guys, but also your friends.

I don’t know what I expect from these games anymore, or why I keep playing them, but is that “build a whole game around Apple of Eden magic powers” idea of mine really off the table? Gimme something, man.

The reviewer finds this game hard to get excited about, but still has a positive opinion of it. It may be somewhat fun, having good features or ideas counterbalanced by a few boring parts, bad design or other fundamentally irritating qualities that can’t easily be overlooked. Alternatively, it could be pleasant, but with nothing new to offer. Worth a little money if you’ve got the time for it.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

On to AC9. I really gave this one the benefit of the doubt at first, but it’s gotta be the buggiest and most aggravating AC game I’ve ever played, which is no small feat. Unity had a worse reputation for that stuff at launch as far as I know, but here’s the thing: they released some patches for Unity.

Syndicate stutters and crashes, load times have strangely ballooned, and you can rarely expect an NPC interaction to go as it’s supposed to. The game is cruelly non-deterministic in its use of checkpoints: I would restart a race with someone, and it would apparently begin while the game was still loading, giving my opponent a greater head-start than they had on the first attempt of the quest.

In one clearly very poorly-tested sidequest, I got trapped in a fail loop, and thought I had doomed my save: it placed a checkpoint right after the moment of a the target getting hit by a train, rather than giving me the intended few seconds to tackle him off of the tracks. Since you can’t pause while in a “desynchronizing” fail state, all you can do is terminate the application and open it again, loading your save from the main menu, which, as it turns out, only has an option to continue from the last mid-mission checkpoint. I guess they expect you to first load that and then abort the mission from there if you want out, but this meant I had no way out of the fail loop. Either by chance or because of my random alt-tabbing during loads, after about an hour I got it to load into a different state where I could still pause for a moment and abort, averting the bug, which is why this review isn’t already over, but the mission gave me some delightful footage:

Anyway, let’s get on with it. This time we’re in Victorian London, 1868. It may as well be the setting of the Dishonored games, just without the cool magic, unless you count Eagle Vision. There are now poor little exploited (unkillable, etc.) Dickensian child NPCs running around, and other period elements, but it’s window dressing, and I’ve learned by now not to expect any meaningful view of history from these games. It’s more about historical cameos than it is about history. Marx is there, which is cool; say hi to Karl Marx. You also get to be friends with Queen Victoria.

You play as Evie & Jacob Frye, twin protagonists, which is purely a gimmick, as you don’t get to do any cool gameplay stuff like toggling between the perspectives of both characters mid-mission, positioning them for cooperative moves or having AI control the other, or anything of the sort. Jacob just gets some missions and Evie has her own. If you’re wondering why you’re able to play as both in a genetic memory machine, well, I have questions too, but before you go wondering if these siblings fucked each other, we also inexplicably cut away to cutscenes of the villain doing evil monologues and being a psychopath in his own house, so they’re clearly playing pretty fast and loose with the whole Animus thing at this point. Maybe they’ve constructed a linked narrative from three sources of DNA? Who cares, anyway?

Some changes gave me a good first impression. You loot much faster, and crouch without Unity’s shoddy velcro-cover. It’s far easier to climb into windows, and entrances are specially marked in a way that makes it much easier to assess your options during certain quests. You have a “stealth ring” around you that indicates the presence of nearby enemies, including whether they’re above or below, which is great considering that Eagle Vision can no longer instantly tag everything on the map through the walls… at least, until you buy the Eagle Vision upgrade which lets you do exactly that again, and promptly start ignoring the stealth ring.

Skills often seem to disappear from these games only to come right back in the next installment, which is a bit strange. Throwable firecracker lures are gone, but whistle-luring is back. Smoke bombs are as powerful as ever, especially since throwing knives are back and can be free-aimed at heads, silently one-shotting guards. This might have been balanced if you could only carry one and had to retrieve it, but you can carry fucking twenty. Do I have to explain to Ubisoft how to make balanced stealth mechanics? It’s been nine games. Maybe you should choke on your own smoke bombs, huh? Maybe Eagle Vision shouldn’t exist? You can also now twist a guard’s arm and force them to escort you into places as a kind of portable cover, which I think is a first, and a bit ludicrous too. It’s remarkable how compliant everyone is when you twist their arm a little.

You even get an Arkham-esque grappling hook this time, which is nice, as I’ve been saying for several of these games now that finding ways to slowly scramble up pretty historical buildings brings me no joy anymore. It’s a bit finicky to aim and use, and I would have preferred some more mechanical complexity to climbing, rather than a shortcut to skip climbing, but at least they’re trying something. It’s evident though that they didn’t really know where to innovate, or what they want the Assassin’s Creed games to be. I kind of liked the RPG-like considerations on which bracers to wear in Unity, but that’s been streamlined into something uninteresting.

A major gameplay feature of Syndicate are the hijackable horse-drawn carriages, as if they wanted in on the Grand Theft Auto market this time. (You even start and manage a gang called the “Rooks”, which feels like a bit of a flight of fancy, considering you’re already in a gang called the Assassins.) I guess it didn’t cross their mind that driving a horse carriage isn’t really that fun.

It kinda sucks, actually. Do you know what it’s like to stealthily kidnap your target and throw them into the back of a carriage, only for something to spook the horses, dragging the carriage off without you, causing you to fail because you got too far away from the target? It’s not great. At least in the old games, you didn’t have to worry about a mission-critical NPC getting hit while crossing the street during a chasing or tailing mission.

But they also venture into directions that feel a little more pure to the spirit of where they should be going. The actual assassination missions, with multiple points of entry and “unique kill” opportunities, should probably be the whole game. Of course, they’re kinda just ripping off Hitman for those, but at least it makes for some good levels when they do it right. In execution I think about a third of these were good, and my favorite moments in the game. Like taking the place of a corpse to kill someone during a medical demonstration, or breaking into the bank to kill a Templar bank robber. (Though I gotta say, I’d rather be robbing the bank.) The rest were plagued with bugs, or otherwise just weren’t very robust encounters. NPCs would get spooked in the middle of a scripted walk, and would then just stand still acting scared, forever. Some didn’t have any sort of interesting level design or fun objectives, so you’d just fall back on throwing a smoke bomb and hitting everyone in the head with your massive stockpile of throwing knives.

It was kinda fun having wide river regions on the map, and jumping across or robbing moving boats. Train heists too. I’ll give them that.

As usual, I gave up on gathering all the collectibles, as Ubisoft still thinks there should be two thousand of them, each offering virtually nothing on its own. But I did more side-content than I did in Unity, which speaks to the way side-content has more structure, and is portioned out. It was a lot easier to say no to the “Paris stories” when they just put a hundred markers on my map. I also owe it to the presentation that I wiped out all the strongholds; the map zones change color and everything. Is this side-content actually better than it was in Unity? God no. But I suppose they did more to trick my brain.

There’s little good to say of the story. The modern-day stuff has been streamlined to a few cutscenes sent to the player from Assassin drone feeds, though it’s really questionable why the Assassins would be showing any of it to some gamer initiate they barely know. Back in 1868, Jacob and Evie spend 8 sequences bickering, fucking up every objective and routinely helping the bad guys by accident in cutscenes. They sort of work together at the end but not due to any sort of narrative arc.

The big bad villain is somewhat of a fun character to get to know, if cartoonish. He talks like he’s more about law than about evil, but it’s a little hard to say if that can make him a bad guy in a game where you’re friends with both Marx and the fucking queen, so we also get to see him freak out and murder his own employees. Spoiler: He wants to steal a magic immortality shroud from Buckingham Palace, the queen apparently owning a map to its exact location, but not caring. When the twins are done fucking up and killing everyone else in the city but the villain, they finally kill him too, and put the shroud back where they found it, so the modern day protagonists can get a lead on where it is some 150 or so years later, still in the exact same spot, completely untouched and forgotten. Then the Templars get it anyway, as part of a plan for some stuff with those Apple of Eden precursor race people, a storyline which is Definitely Going Some Place, We Know It’s Been Nine Games But Eventually Something Will Happen, We Swear.

But hey, in one sidequest you get to beat people up who try to disrupt a Karl Marx speech, so it’s not all bad.

The reviewer believes this game stands above total mediocrity. It has something going for it, but ultimately few real merits. Most of the time, it isn’t fun, and doesn’t otherwise provide any sort of emotional payoff. Even though it does some cool things, you should play something else instead.

Assassin’s Creed Unity

Unity — the eighth one — leaves a very good first impression, coming from Rogue. The graphics are much better, especially the huge crowds of NPCs. The UI is nicer. More of an effort is made to tell a dramatic character story. And Revolutionary France, right in the epicenter of a Cool Zone, is a hell of a place to visit.

The controls have received a much-needed rework. For one thing, you have a crouch button now, something I’d complained about as recently as Rogue. Much of the basics haven’t changed, but there are now additional buttons held while moving for “upward” and “downward” actions. This means you no longer constantly fail to scramble up random walls in the middle of a chase. Getting down was always a much harder problem than going up, and if you ever accidentally climbed up onto some fence, in trying to drop down you’d most likely end up just hopping across to another one. Now you just hold B while specifying a direction and you’ll hop straight down.

Well, usually. It’s a better change in theory than in practice, and I hope to see refinements in the following games, because the up and down buttons seemed to be taken as a mere suggestion. I’d still climb onto small objects like chests I was trying to open, jump off things unintentionally, and so on. Trying to climb down a ladder or through a window can be a real fight. I want to respect the tweaks, but admittedly, the controls frustrated me far more than Rogue’s ever did. At least there, I knew what to expect. Probably the last time the control scheme saw any substantive change was when AC2 added swimming.

You can also velcro yourself to cover now, but the feature seems very buggy, and I learned to only try to rely upon it for easy cover-kills in relatively straightforward conditions, like door frames. Ledge assassinations are still in the game as well, but are far more finicky than they used to be. One thing I didn’t use very often but am a little sad to see gone are those parkour moves where you’d scramble up one wall and then get a couple sideways steps off before falling, which let you sometimes reach some interesting positions without following the scripted path of climbable ledges.

There are some other cool changes for stealth. When you exit line of sight, you leave behind a cool little silhouette to indicate where a guard last caught sight of you. Individual guards “remember” you without need for a wanted-level system, so if you kill someone in front of them on a public street, escape the area long enough for everyone to calm down, and then come back, they still know to attack you. As for smoke bombs, they’re still always extremely useful, but they aren’t quite as overpowered as they used to be. They make a bit of commotion when thrown, and it takes a second. If you poke out from cover to lob one into a crowd, you’ll likely be seen doing so. You won’t get the free kills by fighting in the smoke that way, but you will get several free sword hits without interference from sniper fire. There are also stun bombs, and the difference is underexplained, but they don’t alert other guards and only last for a couple seconds, so they’re very good for closing the distance on two or three guys for stealth kills, but won’t stop anyone else from seeing you. It opens up some more tactical options.

It is actually pretty hard to stay undetected, unless you really work out a route, because the areas are usually quite open, and you’re easily spotted doing parkour. But it’s also not terribly necessary to stay hidden when you can just start a big combo and kill everyone until no guards are left, which is far easier. As I said with Rogue, “best not to think of these as dedicated stealth games”, but killing 25 guards who surround you and take turns attacking is very tedious and unstimulating, compared to luring them around with small fireworks. (When that works, anyway.) The problem is, there are usually so many guards around that looking for blind spots seems like a huge waste of time, and I found that my brain would be eager to go for the easy way out. Several missions felt less like “level design” and more like a flood of randomly placed guards with some beautiful real-world architecture to appreciate just incidentally. I’m sure there were some cleaner approaches to be made on some levels that I never found, but I didn’t love that feeling.

I found many mission objectives frustrating, far more so than Rogue’s relatively straightforward ones. There were some instant restarts from a checkpoint because I was caught in stealth. One mission desynchronized because I left a single room too fast, and it said the person I was escorting got “too far away”. One time I desynced while following a boat along a river: the game decided that this boat getting over 70 meters or whatever away from me meant the “target was lost”, even though I had a clear line of sight to it, and it had no real way to lose me. One time in a free-roam mission, I was told to “escape the area”, and I noticed quick-travel hadn’t been disabled, so I used that and the mission failed. One time I was tasked with capturing a guy, but the game wasn’t ready for me to actually catch him until he arrived in his fortress for the next phase of the mission, so when I actually managed to tackle him on the street first, it said “the target spotted you” and forced a restart. There were also the occasional bugs — one mission had to be started over because I got stuck in a bush.

The sidequests and diversions aren’t as bad as Rogue’s, but many still aren’t worth doing at all. The “Murder Mysteries” and “Paris Stories” have had some real effort put into them, often involving meeting various historical figures, complete with full voice acting. But the gameplay repetition got to be a little too bad, with a lot of sneaking back into buildings I’d already parkoured my way through before, just to interact with something on a table or kill a group of people and return, and they began to feel like chores, so I didn’t do all of them. Here is where it gets most clear that although many of the core controls and abilities have seen refinements and changes, the game doesn’t really offer much new: the last two had the naval gameplay, and here we’re strictly back to climbing around buildings, so in a way, it’s a step backwards. The buildings look more beautiful than ever, but at the end of the day, you’re just prodding for the next ledge that can be grabbed, and that’s very dull by now.

They certainly could have looked further outside of the box. I’ve discussed some ideas before, like swapping between multiple ancestors in the same city in the same game. I think cues could also be taken from the likes of Shadow of Mordor as well, assassinating members of an organization in free roam and replacing them with people loyal to the Assassin cause, but I suppose they’ve gone and patented that gameplay mechanic now, haven’t they.

Co-op multiplayer gameplay was the big new touted feature of Unity, and I was skeptical of it, but some of my favorite experiences of the game were actually in multiplayer. I started a guild (called “MarxWasRight”) and some French guy joined. There were hiccups — it can be nearly impossible to find a public party for some missions, no matter how long you queue — and the only content that can actually be played in co-op are a few missions specially designed for it, with all the story missions (and even the free roam sidequests) unavailable while playing with others. But when you can team up, crouching next to some other player and jumping on a group of guards in tandem is very fun. Admittedly, most randos in public parties did just rush into open combat with every guard they saw without trying to group up, and in several cases died doing so. But even that was more fun than doing the same thing alone. As long as they can’t fail an objective for you, I’d be happy to see more like it in the future.

What’s more bothersome is how the microtransactions and other “game” elements are integrated. The game offers to sell “Boosts” from the pause menu, or to buy “Helix Credits”, which can be spent to “hack” items, letting you purchase or upgrade them without spending the normal currency. (I don’t know about you, but using a different, stupider currency is not really in line with my idea of “hacking”.) The player character doesn’t really train and learn skills from mentors in-game or anything either: the modern-day handler who sends messages to the player simply “unlocks” new skills for you as you progress through the story. (It kinda makes me miss the days when Ezio had to run to Da Vinci’s house to pick up a new gadget.)

There’s some mess in menus from terminated companion app services that no longer do anything. The map is terrible and has almost zero filter options for its clutter, making it impossible to find anything, too.

The story is at best hard to take seriously, and at worst, offensive to my political views. Arno can be annoying, but he does stand apart from the other Assassins we’ve seen. His love interest Elise never gained my sympathies. She’s a “bad idea from the start” romance that never gave us, the players, any reason to try to make it work in spite of that. (He’s an Assassin, she’s a Templar, and it’s clear that while she likes him, he’ll never be her first priority.) Likewise, when Arno drinks himself into a stupor acting like a baby, and then loses his pocketwatch, I wanted to tell the game, “That sounds like a You Problem dude, not a Me Problem.” This isn’t a movie. I don’t share his sentimental attachment to that watch, so why am I being asked to retrieve it?

He also has some sort of super eagle-vision that lets him read peoples’ memories when he kills them, and they never really explain that one. You’d think it’s not to be taken too literally, like those Animus chats where you argue with someone you’ve already killed for several minutes, until in one cutscene Arno says “Yeah, I read that guy’s memories and I saw the guy I have to find next.” It’s the first confirmation we have that it’s real, and none of the other Assassins say, “Hold up, what the fuck did you just say?”

I do love the setting. There’s something very satisfying about equipping “sans-culottes trousers” to reduce my running noise stat. But it quickly becomes clear that they’re trying to both-sides the fucking French Revolution. They try to be very apolitical about it of course, but this is a politics in itself. If you think seriously about what Ubisoft is proscribing, their French Revolution would have been Occupy Wall Street. It’s cowardly, and it’s incoherent, based on what little ideology we know the Assassins to be about — the Assassins are anti-authoritarian and prefer freedom to stable order, and don’t have qualms about killing lots of people. Seems like a no-brainer that they’d be the Jacobins then, but no, you get quests to butcher a ton of those guys, to “End the Reign of Terror”. It seems clear to me that someone in charge at Ubisoft had their feathers ruffled by the thought of producing a game where you do a working-class revolution.

It gets worse the more you think about it, but it also becomes more foolish to do so. At any time you want to debate about the politics or representation of history in an Assassin’s Creed game, anyone can just say “They gave Robespierre a lightning sword,” and the conversation’s over.

I like Unity’s multiplayer, its experiments to core stealth and movement gameplay, and its vibe, in no small part because of the exploration of late 1700s Paris. But not unlike 1700s Paris, the series needs more radical change.

The reviewer finds this game hard to get excited about, but still has a positive opinion of it. It may be somewhat fun, having good features or ideas counterbalanced by a few boring parts, bad design or other fundamentally irritating qualities that can’t easily be overlooked. Alternatively, it could be pleasant, but with nothing new to offer. Worth a little money if you’ve got the time for it.

Assassin’s Creed Rogue

My Assassin’s Creed playthrough continues, after taking a break for some time. Rogue brings us to the seventh in the flagship series. It was released on the same day as Unity (AC8), but Rogue was released for older consoles, whereas Unity was developed for the then-new, PS4/Xbone generation. It’s fair to assume then that any new technical advancement was only happening for Unity. Rogue was just being concurrently cobbled together from Black Flag‘s existing parts.

It shows. The core gameplay and even many of Black Flag’s assets return with virtually no changes. You have a new silent ranged gun and grenade launcher, but the sleep/berserk effects of its ammunition have been around for some time. Everything I complained about for getting stale in Black Flag is all the more stale here. The velcro ledge-climbing has been the same forever, and is dull in comparison to the likes of Breath of the Wild‘s free climbing, which had management of stamina and puzzle-like usage of tools and objects in the environment. If there were any tweaks to the core combat, I barely noticed — you can still just stab everyone after throwing a smoke bomb. The guards are still utterly stupid, and will not turn around despite all the commotion created when you stab the coworker standing one foot behind them, no matter how hard they seem to hit the ground in their heavy armor. But to balance that out, trying to stay hidden also quickly gets frustrating, particularly on rooftops, where you can’t even crouch to break line of sight. Best not to think of these as dedicated stealth games.

It’s not the buggiest AC game I’ve ever played, but I did die once from falling through the deck of a ship I was standing on, and another time got stuck on an object while parkouring, and had to quick-travel away to get down.

None of this is particularly enjoyable anymore except perhaps the naval combat, which is still kinda fun, but I also didn’t feel keen on completely repeating the grind for a maxed-out fleet, especially when it was by no means necessary to beat the game. I sampled everything, but completed nothing, as I had no intention of spending another hundred hours in Black Flag’s leftovers. And I have to say, when an Ubisoft game tells you, “Okay, time to collect all the animus fragments, templar maps, crosses, native pillars, viking swords, cave paintings, chests, shanties, blueprints, gems, emails, war letters, complete all the renovations, and beat every mission challenge objective for 100% Sync,” there’s something very freeing about saying “Nah.”

The “Naval Campaign” gameplay mode still has that “Babby’s First Flash Game” quality to it, is tediously slow, and the less time one spends on that, the better.

The story was surprisingly and mercifully short, and I wrapped up after about only two full days of play. To its credit, I don’t recall any NPC tailing missions, which were a source of annoyance for me in the last one. Several missions played to the strengths of the naval combat, though I have to say the Seven Years’ War is dull subject matter, and sailing the West Indies during the golden age of piracy had a natural appeal that just isn’t present in the likes of Colonial-era New York and Halifax. The war was very clearly only chosen because it filled the gaps between the Connor and Kenway generations, and not because there was really anything cool to take part in there besides seeing the British and French hate each other, which you can pretty much do anytime anyway.

Following the linear path up a series of uniquely climbable rocks through a cave, though — who still thinks this sort of thing is cool? Aren’t you tired yet? I tend to mock the Naughty Dog style of cinematic games, but at least I’ve been told they sell you quite well on their story and characters.

Rogue‘s angle is that you are an Assassin who turns Templar, and get to fight for their side for once. The suggestion is that things aren’t so black and white, and Templars can sometimes be on the right side of history, but if you’re expecting a more nuanced picture that stretches backwards into the earlier games, you don’t really get that. Near as I can tell, it’s simply that at this point in time, the Assassins had a world-historically stupid idea to cause a bunch of earthquakes and kill tons of people in the hopes that something good might work out if they kept doing it. I kept waiting for some reveal where they had evidence of the bigger picture that the protagonist wasn’t yet privy to, but it turns out that no, the leader of the cell eventually concurs that they were wrong, and it was in fact Their Bad, and Sorry About All That, Man.

Can’t say I got much out of it, but there’s little to cry about when I got through it so fast. If I had forced myself to pick up every pointless bullshit gewgaw, I’d have really hated this game. You’re still probably better off skipping it and looking up a story synopsis on Youtube, but then again, you could probably say the same of all the games up into the “modern” installments, if that’s what you want. If you’ve made it to the seventh Assassin’s Creed, you more or less know what you’re getting into, and a bad review won’t stop you from attempting to satisfy that weird part of the brain that wants to return to stale installments of an old franchise instead of trying something new and interesting.

The reviewer believes this game stands above total mediocrity. It has something going for it, but ultimately few real merits. Most of the time, it isn’t fun, and doesn’t otherwise provide any sort of emotional payoff. Even though it does some cool things, you should play something else instead.

Cyberpunk 2077

The writing was probably on the wall. When I wrote about The Witcher 3, my leading remark was “cynically AAA-standard design”. A million paragraphs later, I ended that review by saying “For now I remain a loyal acolyte of CDPR.” A few years later, where are we? A shooting-and-driving open world RPG, with hundreds of hours of busywork, a symbol of some of the worst practices in the industry, and that concept of loyalty is looking pretty funny. The special elevated status of this crazy team in Poland has been revoked, leaving them somewhere in the mud with the likes of Blizzard, Bethesda, Bioware — overdogs, the sort you pay big attention to, but in a jaded way, because they never give you exactly what you want, and sometimes fuck things up catastrophically in their attempts to take your money.

It’s a goddamn shame, not least of all because Cyberpunk 2077 is a good game, at rare times an incredible one, but it would take more than a couple months of engine optimizations and bugfixes to get back the good faith they’ve lost here. Maybe with expansive free content updates, realizing some of the promises of the ambitious 2018 sneak peek. More likely, they’ll never get it back. People will probably be asking what went wrong for some time, but it takes serious mismanagement to get here with the kind of talent these devs have.

I was never at Hype Level 1000 as some gamers were, but I walked in with high expectations of my own. In the weeks before launch I’d talked myself down from wanting an Eternal Fallout Killer to merely “A big Deus Ex game with good hacking, and a story that doesn’t have a completely gormless vision of the world as the Eidos ones do.” It has its strengths, to be certain, but on the gameplay side, it’s questionable if it even met my lowest expectations.

Hacking

Apart from a few flashy combat skills that hijack mechanical limbs to make people shoot themselves or detonate the grenades in their pockets, the hacking offers absolutely nothing. It’s actually a step backward from Deus Ex or Watch Dogs titles I’ve played. The early footage showed an approach to hacking that held the potential of the system I had always wanted:

Every time I played some stealth game where hacking was just lockpicking for electronic doors, I begged for a visualization of a base or company’s internal network, where I could navigate the connections between everything from the thermostat and the lights in the hallway, all the way down to the reactor core. I might start by cracking the machines that are directly connected to the internet and chaining from there, using a toolkit of exploits to gradually expand my privileges, combined with continued physical intrusion of machines deeper in the base whenever something simply wasn’t penetrable from what I had. It would pose some ambitious level design challenges, but at its core is the sort of thinking that dates back to 1987’s Metal Gear: Find a Level 1 access keycard, and then, somewhere, past a Level 1 door, find a Level 2 access keycard.

We got none of that. The early footage was a “fake it til you make it” situation, constructed to imply the presence of more than what had been directly shown. The average AAA game with hacking typically involves pausing the real action to play some kind of unnecessary minigame, ranging from reasonably fun ones like rearranging pipes in Bioshock, to rolling dice to buttress folders in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and boring memory-matching in Mass Effect. Cyberpunk wound up with something around the “complete trash” end of this spectrum with its “Breach Protocol” minigame, where you alternate rows and columns in a hex editor, trying to match the “7A 55 1C BD” snippet that shuts down all turrets for a minute. By endgame, this is a loathsome chore that entirely comes down to your skill perks, cyberdeck equipment, and whether the RNG gave you an easy pattern. These are the guys who snuck fucking Gwent into The Witcher 3, and this is all they’ve got?

Hacking serves simply as lockpicking for computers, but also as another type of gun, one that lacks the satisfaction of a well-aimed headshot. It all feels very pointless: if you can point at a camera and shoot it with a silenced pistol, what’s the use of also being able to point and push the quickhack button to turn it off? Warren Spector would be rolling in his grave at this shallow variety of play… oh wait, he’s not dead.

Quickhacks also made a lot more sense in the initial demo, where the player performs a stealth takedown on one guard and then uses him as an access point, unlocking quickhacks for use on rest of his squad. They were never shown as a direct substitute for weapons, instead providing utility, namely by jamming a guard’s gun. I think it’s far better under those limitations. When you can just ping a guard through the walls and trigger a spreadable Contagion that nonlethally incapacitates every single person in the enemy base, you may as well just skip the enemies altogether and roll the end credits, because there’s nothing fun about it. I think the only directly lethal applications should be environmental in nature: like when a guard walks past some heavy machinery and you have it suddenly go haywire.

I have little doubt that the big brains at CDPR know what’s good. There’s a reason the 2018 demo didn’t have the boring hex editor minigame: as with a lot of substandard game design, it was a product of compromise and time limitations, not a lack of vision. But if they never catch up to that vision, we were just sold a pack of lies.

Mechanics, sidequests, and the open world

Many of the things I focus most on in pure stealth games (Deus Ex, Dishonored) aren’t in sharp focus here. Sometimes a sidequest gives a bonus payout if you don’t get spotted or kill anybody, but generally no NPCs ever care, and in this context the game can feel mediocre: cameras turn themselves back on without warning, and there’s no clear indicator in the UI that an NPC is dead or just knocked out, among other issues. There’s also nothing revolutionary about guard AI here. In fact, they’re quite stupid. But trying to play it as a pure stealth game seems like a mistake when you can remotely incapacitate the security systems and all the guards in one swoop. It’s more fun just to pretend you’re playing Doom, leaping around and shotgunning people in the face. Why go through the tedious hassle of reloading a save to try and ghost a mission, when you can bounce your SMG fire off a wall and hit a guard in the back of the head, and the badass combat music starts playing?

Many of the typical sources of dynamic or emergent gameplay are absent here. In place of a real crime system, hack-proof cops spawn in nearly instantly and gun you down if you kill a civilian. The concept of stealing doesn’t really exist. You can sometimes draw your weapon and shoot people mid-conversation, which is an incredibly satisfying way to resolve a sidequest, but only when you get the game’s say-so, as your gun is automatically lowered when you put anyone important (or shopkeepers) in your crosshairs. I can’t say I’m too surprised or disappointed about this in a game with a relatively on-rails, narrative-driven story. There are some instances of hand-crafted reactivity where someone reappears as a friend or enemy due to your actions in a previous quest, but there’s no faction rep, and no systems in place for tracking these things on the basis of your everyday actions, such as killing hundreds of Maelstrom gang members in the open world.

It’s questionable whether the game is served well at all by the GTA-style open world with cars and rare loot caches, when the player could have been restricted to a series of carefully designed maps. Cars aren’t terribly fun to drive, compared to bunny-hopping over rooftops, and I only used them as a last resort. Fixers constantly call you up with jobs while you’re passing by the locations of side gigs on the way to something else, which is very annoying, and results in an overflowing quest log, often of jobs you’re too low of a level to even take on. By the time you get around to them, you don’t remember the conversations about what you were supposed to do there or why. While I see some appeal in getting job offers on-location, it would have been far better if the player was simply prompted to call the fixer while in range of the job, and could avoid starting the deluge of quests until they actually wanted to.

The role of “fixers” in giving you work sometimes feels like a limitation, as your role is pretty much always to carry out the wishes of your original client, instead of hearing about problems from random people, and switching who you support on a whim once you’ve uncovered all the facts, as one might in a Fallout game. Sometimes your client doesn’t care, and you have options, but this is rare for the lower-quality gigs. If you’re tasked to eliminate the head of Pinkerton-like force that intimidates prospective unionists, you do so, and if a cop tells you to kill a bunch of workers who’ve illegally occupied a factory after the expiry of their lease, that’s the job. You can always just not finish the quest, but… really?

The way skills are leveled is a bit clumsy (and grindy), and holds too much incentive over how I play, but a small advantage of the open world environment is that there’s no risk of running out of guards to kill, so I was at times able to relax a bit and play how I wanted, without trying to minmax my skill gains, knowing I could make up the difference on randomly respawning enemies later. Losing this pressure is nice. But there are other ways to accomplish this, and I don’t think it justifies the open world. I see many ways Cyberpunk might have benefited if scaled down as a more locked-down and fine-tuned experience.

Skills and anything involving pure numbers are in quite a messy state, though balance patches are possible, and quite likely in the future. Presently, many equipment stats don’t even function correctly and do nothing, such as movement speed. Most equipment upgrades and skill perks result in very negigible armor or damage gains, which makes me feel that I should have to deal with these things far less often and really get to notice them when I do. I’m thinking the level cap should have been 20, not 50, or that at the very least, I should not gain perk points every time, and the skill trees should have been much smaller.

There is one other mode of interaction you have, which is in the form of braindances. This is more of a cool story device than a gameplay one, as the braindance segments are quite dull from an interactive perspective and thoroughly scripted, but essentially you’re given the ability to relive the memories of other people, if they were using technology to record their brain patterns at the time — maybe not their thoughts, but their feelings, the things they could see and hear and taste. Have you ever seen the 1983 movie Brainstorm with Christopher Walken? No? Well, the idea is entirely lifted from that, and it’s one with loads of unrealized potential. This game doesn’t particularly realize it either, but I like its inclusion in theory.

_{Well, at least they managed to shrink the tech down.}

Story, romance, and choice

Though I’m no expert and don’t intend to write a whole essay about it, Cyberpunk, as with punk subculture in general, is not just an aesthetic, but something inherently political: dystopian visions of the future under capitalism, where corporations become the government, income inequality reaches a new level of grotesque, and technology has played a central role, be it through mass surveillance or whatever else. The role of the punk then, as I see it, is to exploit that same ever-present technology to subvert the system. Your landlord is AI that controls the smart lock on the door to your apartment, locking you out the second your rent payment is late? Hack the lock, or hack the database to say you’ve paid.

Although I’m sure many writers in the genre have a shallow view of it, it’s a left-wing, class-conscious premise. These things are understood to be bad, after all: corporations should not have this power. Cyberpunk 2077 is not so different. Prior to the start of the game, in an act of terrorism, Keanu Reeves’ character literally nukes a Japanese corporation’s local headquarters. That’s not exactly “Neonliberal”, as one someone on Twitter put it, derisively describing this fence-sitting approach, which tries to borrow the aesthetic trappings of the setting, without acknowledging anything politically real, such as that billionaire CEOs (including the one leading CDPR) should have their taxes raised. But it is true that Cyberpunk’s potential conclusions often come with bizarre caveats, and seem to stop short of examining things too closely, lest they say anything obvious. “The problems are bad, but the causes of those problems? Who said problems have causes?”

It’s hard to say exactly how good or how bad the game’s politics are without bringing personal interpretation into it. After all, it’s very incongruous. Police, for example, are described at one point as underfunded, under-equipped, and doing very dangerous work, the thin blue line against you getting raped and murdered by violent gangs, rather than the cops themselves being the biggest and most violent gang of all, highly overfunded and militarized, and honestly quite a safe profession. But perhaps this is a bad-faith reading, because their world is not one-to-one with ours, and the role of a public police force has been largely supplanted by the presence of private military contractors on the city streets who carry out corporate will far more effectively. It also may have just been tongue-in-cheek, because the cops are also described as trigger-happy murderers, wholly corrupt and working directly alongside said gangs, who leave all the truly dangerous problems to people like the player instead of ever putting themselves at risk, despite their near limitless legal powers to indefinitely detain people at whim, and to shoot people in the limbs and have it classified as a “warning shot”. So why does this seem to bounce all over the place? Was it just written by committee? I don’t think I’ll be the one to answer this question, but it’s a subject I would love to read up more on, if others should take up the challenge.

The plot itself isn’t too unreasonable, and has some very great explorations of tech without bloviating stupidly for hours about souls and what it means to be human like the Deus Ex games do. It is at times obvious. I expected some early characters to die and wasn’t moved by their sad little death scenes when they did. I sometimes felt railroaded into certain plotlines, such as when I was made to cooperate with someone who tried to have me killed, but once our cooperation came to an end, I was able to whip my gun out and shoot them in the head, and I still felt damn great doing so. You have to follow three story branches to their end points before you make your decision about how to proceed in the endgame, even though finding Alt Cunningham and playing political with Arasaka are really opposing solutions to the same problem, which makes me think things could have been resolved a lot sooner if you just made up your mind earlier. It might be clumsy, but I’m not totally against this. CDPR tried their avant-garde experimental questing with The Witcher 2, and all it did was make people feel pretty clueless about what had really been going on unless they played the whole game twice.

But all the best stuff, the parts where this game is absolutely phenomenal, come in mid-game sidequests, and in the late-game, in the endings. These are the parts that make this game difficult to review, because how do you say a game is just a 3/5 or whatever, when it hits you like a truck and you don’t think you’ll ever forget it? These parts ruin other games for me, because I have good reason to suspect the next big game story I turn to, from Ubisoft or Bioware or whoever it may be, will compare as a mess of cringe that doesn’t even deserve to live in CDPR’s shadow. These greater moments make me forget that I’ve been robbed by an $80 game with gameplay trailers that straight-up lied, instead leaving me wistful and sad because I see a glimpse of the game that I hoped for. Surprise, the people who wrote all that Witcher stuff with Geralt and Triss and Yen and Ciri and Dandelion and all the rest of them, they’re still here. Sometimes.

There are many great characters here, most notably Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves), and Judy Alvarez. Takemura was a favorite of mine too. Moreover, all of the potential love interests are very worth getting to know, even if you only really have four of them: one for straight men, one for gay men, one for straight women, and one for gay women, which doesn’t exactly give your typical non-bi player pick of the litter. But this was something I appreciated. A greater scale, a longer development period, six fuckable characters for every combination of gay or straight, all that would have been nice, but given the characters we had, and the stories centered around them, I’m really glad they didn’t just go with the easy Bioware route where half the characters or more are “bisexual for player convenience”.

For my part, playing a straight male V, I technically didn’t pick a love interest. For my protagonist as I imagined him, the far more compelling narrative was being hung up on Judy, even knowing she was gay and that there was destined to be nothing between them. Jumping to help her whenever she needed it, truly caring about and wanting the best for her, but with a bit of crazy and hopeless pining thrown into the mix. Occasionally there’s even a line of dialogue for Male V to reinforce this idea, though sadly at the endgame when V is given one last opportunity to call someone, he instead calls nobody at all.

_{Yeah, that’s right, she’s gay. Gonna cry about it, you straight bitch?}

It’s hard to say what makes a character so effective without long speculative lectures about creative writing, but the best ones are really brought to life through the story and the quality of the acting, the animation, everything. Johnny’s story has wonderful depth and helped along by the gameplay — when it feels so damn good to be Johnny Silverhand, to drive his car and shoot his guns, there’s great consonance with the fear of losing your sense of self to him. With Judy, it’s harder to say — but seeing her kindness, her pain, all of that really helps endear you to her. And it’s in the details. For a cool tattooed virtu-porn editing chick, she could have easily come across as another caricature — Panam felt a bit like one, although I still cared for her well-being — but Judy’s also someone who has entered the profitable version of a creative field that she is really passionate about, which is something any artist slaving away in the jpg mines should probably empathize with.

The ultimate direction and outcome of Judy’s sidequests was a real gut-punch for me, a tragedy beyond the likes of Bioware games, and actually quite reminiscent of how I felt at the end of Witcher 3’s Blood & Wine. I also realize it was a consequence of several of my own choices, but set up in such a way that it didn’t really feel right (or feasible) to reload a save and try to get a different result. When a game can give me control but still get me to accept tragedy, it’s really done something right.

But the endings. Damn. There are several of them, including at least one that I wasn’t qualified for. If you simply choose to kill yourself, your ending is rather short, but it’s one of Johnny and V’s best scenes, and as the credits roll you hear from various characters reacting to your death, and Judy’s part there made me feel as if I had been destroyed. People will tell you that getting help from the Aldecaldos is the “best ending”, and for V’s life I think it is, but I almost didn’t bother picking the Arasaka ending as it was so diametrically opposed to my intentions as a character, and it turned out to reveal so much, to be so brutally exhaustive, and memorable, that I’ll be thinking about it years from now as one of the best game endings of all time. It’s almost as though if you were to strip away the pointless open world busywork, half of this game would be endings. And a lot of players will probably never even see the greatest ones.

How could things have turned out this way? Did they recall the controversy with Mass Effect 3, and think, “Whatever else happens, let’s not fuck that part up?” Because, congratulations to them if so. They fucked up nearly everything else, failing to deliver on all their promises, even if that still left them with a pretty fun first-person shooter. But good god, when it’s at its best, it is brutally beautiful.

As things stand, I hope there will be much to come for Cyberpunk, both in the way of free updates and as paid expansions. I’ll probably write an addendum to this post if anything significant changes. A version that is a 4/5 is possible, particularly since the story already has moments of such perfection. But this is my review of a game, not a story, and at this point, unless I get a complete retooling of the hacking system, I’m likely keeping it at a 3/5.

The reviewer finds this game hard to get excited about, but still has a positive opinion of it. It may be somewhat fun, having good features or ideas counterbalanced by a few boring parts, bad design or other fundamentally irritating qualities that can’t easily be overlooked. Alternatively, it could be pleasant, but with nothing new to offer. Worth a little money if you’ve got the time for it.

Yakuza 0

The Yakuza series, as I’ve come to understand it, is quaint and funny, incredibly stupid, has wonderful characters, and is awkward as shit. This is my first. It all started with a 2005 game for the PS2, which is interesting, because when I started playing this one, my first impression was, “This feels like a janky PS2 brawler.” It looks a lot better, but I’d wager a guess the core mechanics haven’t changed much over time.

I’m not sure what the first impression came from — maybe the awkwardly fast movements while you move around the town, or the way your inputs can start to feel out of sync with your character’s actions during an elaborate combo move. But there’s no shortage of jank. It’s in the long delays when some street thug flags you down and you transition into combat mode, without the ability to just seamlessly start some shit by punching someone. Or how your camera switches to an exterior view of any important building you run past, causing your control stick direction to suddenly reverse on you. Or it’s the way that you can’t craft a piece of equipment without an empty slot and you have to run across the street to a pay phone to access your item box, or how it takes five goddamn minutes in the menu to upgrade your Legend skill tree by a full rank. And what is it with Japanese games that make you reload saves over and over until the RNG cooperates…? I could go on.

I think it’s necessary to give a brief proper introduction, so: you play as two protagonists, Kiryu and Majima, both of whom are, sort of, part of the Yakuza. As far as the story goes, neither of them have committed murder, a line that’s still significant to cross in the Yakuza 0 version of 1988 Japan, but both use violence to solve roughly a thousand problems per day. I say “as far as the story goes” because it’s got that Arkham Asylum thing going on in gameplay, where Batman might non-lethally break someone’s spine and leave them face-down in a pool, in obvious need of medical attention and none coming. Hell, in this game you can even obtain guns and shoot people. They just get back up after the fight is over, too injured to keep threatening you, but apparently not too injured to walk away. You’re not supposed to worry about it.

Combat
In some ways, I do like the combat system. I like the heat actions, which are kind of like the environmental attacks in Sleeping Dogs, where you can hit a button when an enemy is next to a car and slam their head in the door. I don’t like how common some of them are — ones that don’t require anything special in the environment to perform, especially when they run several seconds long. But some are really funny and require some really niche setup, like hitting someone while having a mandarin orange in your inventory: you won’t get sick of that one unless you set out to do so. Some would also be better served by requiring some directional input, such as when I intend to do one that would take out three enemies, but the game decides I’m too close to a wall and I end up burning my whole heat bar on one guy who was already half-dead.

It’s more than just button mashing — managing your heat bar can be interesting, and there are counterattacks and so forth — but I found that it can be incredibly frustrating as well, when you take one hit to the back and no amount of mashing the block or dodge button will do anything while you’re exposed to the rest of an enemy’s combo. Fighting big groups of enemies sucks the most, as all it takes is one guy in the rear shooting you with a gun to put you in a long stun animation. While there are really cool fighting styles, and it feels great for a bit to unlock Majima’s Mad Dog style and start ripping into crowds like a fucking vampire, I find most enemies to be pests that aren’t deserving of my time, and typically dealt with crowd fights in about one second with a shotgun. I tended to prefer the 1v1s, my favorite being the boss fight against Nishitani, but probably mostly because I liked the character and I didn’t get stun-locked too much there. There are also QTEs, but they tend to just be surprise attacks where you take a lot of damage if you’re too slow — no instant game-overs. They don’t require a lot of rapid button tapping, and they have really cool animations whether you win or lose them. I’m philosophically opposed to QTEs, but as they go, these ones are pretty good.

Perhaps it’s just not to my taste, but I think the combat would be better off if it were a little slower paced and more dodge and counter-oriented. The fights against Mr. Shakedown could be a step in the right direction, in that you pretty much have to dodge everything, but his attack patterns are a little simplistic and he blocks too often for you to whittle him down with regular attacks, so it mostly comes down to bringing powerful weaponry and using items and heat actions.

The way money is earned per battle never really sat right with me either. Although this ceases to matter at all in the latter parts of the game when you’re rich, big battle payouts require big heat finishers, which caused me to settle into a routine of using the same high-reward group takedown move in every fight early on, even though this was kind of boring. I think this reward system should be connected more to your speed or skill in avoiding damage. Or better yet, for a game with 8 combat styles and more moves in your skill tree than I can keep straight, it should disincentivize repetition, by rewarding less money for taking out enemies through means you had already used in the last few encounters.

Open world and side-content
I like that Yakuza does away with a bunch of driving gameplay that a ton of other games would have done better anyway, and instead scales its traversable world down to a few city blocks explored entirely on foot. (If only it would cut away its pointless and expensive excess elsewhere.) It’s a nice bonus that these few blocks are densely packed with story and sidequest destinations, as well as restaurants and convenience stores with modelled interiors, rather than painted-on doors you’re expected to be driving past at 60 km per second.

What I’m less thrilled about is what a stroll through these streets entails: packs of gangsters every two steps, who carry nothing of value for you, but who want to kick your ass for unexplained reasons, as if they’re random battles in an old-school JRPG world map with its encounter rate set too high. But what’s worse are the gangsters who are content to ignore you, because they’ve already got some poor woman surrounded, and are loudly declaring their intention to drag her off to some hotel room against her will, as long as no badass steps up in the next minute or so to cave their troglodyte skulls in. Like, I can’t look the other way from that. But are you seriously putting random encounters in your game that occur like every five minutes, provide next to no reward, and would make me feel like shit for skipping them? It’s like emotional blackmail and boring at the same time.

I’m generally against the philosophy of filling a jank game with miscellaneous poker and bowling activities to try and justify its value, but there’s some good side content here. None of it is perfect. Equipment searches are RNG hell. Real estate property management is rather slow and pointless when you can earn trillions of yen by fighting Mr. Shakedown. Pocket Circuit racing is pretty cool early on and in principle, where you mod little cars which drive themselves on-rails according to your specs, but it unfortunately hides a lot of equipment stats, and turns out to be pretty RNG-based where you’d think it would be straightforwardly deterministic. As for “Catfights,” an awful Rock-Paper-Scissors game, don’t even get me started — I never even tried to get the achievements or completion points for it.

The best of the major expressions of side-content is Cabaret Club management, which involves Majima recruiting women and raising their levels to better suck money out of men’s pockets, during friendly conversation abetted by overpriced alcohol. The sessions involve directing your hostesses to the customers according to their tastes (cute, funny, etc.), as well as getting glasses and replacing ashtrays according to their hand signals, although the minigame starts to get old before you’ve maxed everything out. The women also have their own stories and sidequests, and are quite fun to chat with in your training sessions with them. An interesting thing to learn was that these hostesses are modeled after and voiced by Japanese porn stars… with the exception of the one I liked most, Yuki. That’s no slight against the others or anything, but it probably shouldn’t shock anyone that a professional voice actor can bring more life to a character.

The usual bowling and pool games are here, and not bad, but not much to speak of (I do enjoy 9-ball). There are arcades with actual ’80s Sega arcade games, which I can’t say are any more fun when you have infinite quarters. Dice games and card games like blackjack and baccarat are shitty in real life, and aren’t any better in Yakuza either.

Mahjong is the real winner, because it’s very complex, a little exotic or at least rarely seen, and a lot more fun in a single-player video game than Texas Hold’em, where bluffing is rather meaningless against an AI that makes its decisions apparently randomly, at least when you don’t have the character faces and interactions that you’d get in Poker Night at the Inventory. Unfortunately, the game provides almost no clue whatsoever about how Mahjong (and specifically Riichi Mahjong) is actually played, forcing me to find guides online. But this was honestly one of my favorite parts of the game, going for those Mangan and Haneman wins.

There are various sidequests (or “substories”) which can involve anything from pulling toys out of a crane machine for a little girl, to disco-dancing with a Michael Jackson parody, or just beating up a lot of people. These can be where the real humor of the game shines through, or just tedious busywork, depending on the substory in question, but any of the ones with multiple-choice dialogue options are unfortunate, since you risk fucking them up. Usually, it doesn’t matter what you pick, and the “wrong” answers often make things funnier, but sometimes it affects your reward or causes you to fail (I got pretty ticked off when I was doing one of the “telephone date” substories and found out I’d have to initiate the quest from the beginning). The only way to know if it’s one of the ones that requires a guide is to check a guide each time anyway.

Story
I like the characters of Yakuza 0, I like the jokes, and the overall story is really compelling at its best, if awfully roundabout. Sometimes it’s earnestly sweet, and other times it’s eye-rolling melodrama. There’s definitely a stereotypical male power fantasy thing where the women never have any agency, but it’s more the clumsiness that really gets under my skin if I’m being honest.

The pacing and scene direction can be truly torturous. Cutscenes stretch for hours, barely advancing the plot. Everything takes whole minutes longer than it should. Characters stop and chat with the worst timing, or take so long to capitalize on an opportunity in front of them that I feel like shouting or throwing my controller. It’s not like things are running in Prince of Tennis time either, where people can spend five minutes discussing a character’s tennis serve before the ball crosses the net: People fucking die while the protagonist lounges around like a dipshit listening to someone’s backstory. Even in a substory where the stakes are certainly going to be low, I got pissed off about this stuff, like when one of Majima’s cabaret club rivals kidnaps a hostess and he goes on like it’s business as usual, getting her back by challenging the guy to see whose club can make more money in a night. He just kidnapped your fucking girl and you have no idea what condition she’s in! You have a baseball bat! Hell, I gave you a gun! Stop fucking talking and break his kneecaps!

Yet there are also poor justifications for combat at every turn. Because you’re playing a brawler, you constantly have to stop and fight someone, even if they aren’t opposed to your goals, because Kiryu can’t take five seconds to explain himself, or because the character wants to “test your resolve” by having you send thirty-five dudes on their payroll to the hospital. It’s the only thing to break up a million hours of cutscenes during the main storyline, but the game would have been better served by cutting out scenes and characters entirely.

There’s plenty of dissonance to be felt all around. For one thing, you make money far too easily in gameplay. You’d think it might affect the situation when you have more money than all the bad guys combined. I honestly began to tell myself my money was fake Monopoly money, a sort of scrip currency accepted by local restaurants and used in the casinos, but which couldn’t be used to buy land or employ a private army. That was the only way to make sense of things. There’s no such answer for why that gun in your inventory vanishes during a cutscene, though. Not to be the guy who says “Why don’t they use a Phoenix Down on Aerith after Sepiroth kills her?” or anything, but it does make it harder to take things seriously.

The bigger issue with the whole “our protagonists don’t kill anyone” thing are the contrivances it requires in a world where cops are apparently non-existent and all problems are solved through violence. Whenever someone really needs to die, and the writers can’t dirty Kiryu’s or Majima’s hands, someone else is there to kill them for you. Cheap, convenient shortcuts.

As a prequel to a long-running series of games, while I haven’t played the others, it’s plain to see that the writers have had a bit of work cut out for them in coloring within the lines. A lot of excellent original characters tend to die in this game, which can really suck, but I think it’s no coincidence that it neatly explains their absences from Yakuza 1, Yakuza 2, or Yakuza 5 for that matter. I was happy that one character in particular avoided this fate, but generally, once you realize the framework the story is operating under, things become a bit more predictable.

Conclusion
This shitty game drives me fucking mad and I hope to play the next one!

Well, maybe. In all seriousness, I am a bit torn. It speaks to the quality of the characters that I still want to see where Kiryu and Majima’s “real” stories start, continuing with the remakes of the Yakuza 1 & 2, which followed the release of this prequel. For all the nitpicking I’ve done, I’ve probably undersold how good the Majima-Makoto scenes are, with voice acting and animation doing most of the heavy lifting. Those will probably stay with me longer than anything else I’ve discussed here, even if they were subject to the same frustrations as the rest of the story. But when I think of how this game was probably ten times longer than it should have been — even after giving up on 100% completion — I don’t think I could do another like it anytime soon.

I’m down for more Mahjong though anytime, that’s a good game.

The reviewer finds this game hard to get excited about, but still has a positive opinion of it. It may be somewhat fun, having good features or ideas counterbalanced by a few boring parts, bad design or other fundamentally irritating qualities that can’t easily be overlooked. Alternatively, it could be pleasant, but with nothing new to offer. Worth a little money if you’ve got the time for it.

Grand Theft Auto V

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Wikipedia’s leading paragraphs on GTAV note that (some) critics consider(ed) it to be among the best games ever made, which is about as embarrassing as calling Marvel’s The Avengers the best film of all time. It may allow for some decently fun criminal action, but let’s not push it.

So why the accolades? I can’t speak for others, but I know why I played it: it was free, I felt due for another huge-scale city sandbox game, and the 2018 Spider-Man game was unavailable. That doesn’t really answer the question, but scale is something. Scale requires money, and few have the resources to make that game. I went in mostly thinking I wanted a city that felt lifelike to drive around and listen to good tunes in. And it does provide that.

Once you have that big city, though, you’ve got to fill it with something, and you can either develop great core mechanics that make it fun to be there, with AI that allows for complex emergent gameplay… or you can just keep adding stuff, which is the path GTA takes. There’s always more “content” than I care to know about — golf, tennis, talk radio, news segments about your personal escapades, tweets and other websites — hell, even the film one of your characters produces will show up in the theaters, though I couldn’t be made to sit through a screening. I ignored most of this content. I did play 18 holes of golf, but if I really wanted to play golf, I’d find a golf game. I could have spent ten times longer on the game by doing all the collectible hunts, trying to achieve all challenge objectives on every mission, and so on, but such a grind would have only further soured my experience. I’d have resented the time sink.

The music is nice, especially when I can add my own, and I was kind of astonished with the voice talent they lined up for the radio station hosts. Tangerine Dream even did the original background soundtrack which comes in dynamically during various situations, like at high wanted levels, and I appreciated that too. I really wish I could’ve had an organized music player app on my phone when I stepped out of the car, though.

Technical
Looking it up, the game’s budget is estimated to have been around $265 million, with maybe half of that going to marketing. In my eyes, putting that kind of money into this was a colossal waste. But you generally don’t have to pay much for original gameplay mechanics. All the money must have gone into sheer content, I assume mostly going to celebrity voice acting, music licensing, and whatever it costs to employ a zillion artists to model a full city.

The graphics, while certainly not bad, have fallen behind other releases from the last 7 years. The 2015 PC port updated frame rates and added enhanced lighting and some other odds and ends, but didn’t replace models or textures. It also feels like a rough port, maybe better than GTA 4 was, but taxing my system harder than much newer and better-looking games such as Monster Hunter World. It was unprepared for some of the graphics configurations I tried, like when I turned off vsync and everything came to a screeching halt. I had to go and raise the process priority in Task Manager every time I launched the game to avoid really awful pop-in issues. There was even a day where I couldn’t seem to get into the single-player story mode because the Rockstar Social thing was down — I feel like this would have been a huge controversy perhaps ten years ago, like when Diablo 3 had no offline mode and a lag spike would kill your hardcore characters. We seem to have collectively rolled over and just accept this shit from the big publishers nowadays, though.

I don’t tend to criticize visuals so often, and I think games are getting too expensive to make as it is, but I do think there’s a takeaway here, in that AAA games age much much faster than ones with greater substance: you won’t find me complaining about Minecraft’s graphics, because I have better reasons to keep playing it, but pure spectacles lose their value as soon as the next spectacle comes out, whether that’s GTA 6 or some other sufficiently high-budget competition. I don’t even remember GTA 4 beyond meme shit about cousin bowling. Well, that’s not entirely true. I remember some characters, not as people, but as vague racial stereotypes. And I remember some of the New York-inspired streets you could drive on. (Is that about what I can expect from this one in a few years?)

I had various problems with cars despawning, when I felt it should have been trivial to preserve in memory the cars most recently entered by each of my characters. The AI is also generally trash — play observantly and long enough, and you’ll encounter some driver getting jostled out of position, only to back his car up and ram into the same wall until he explodes or something else hits him. NPCs can act psychotically and suicidally. Enemies will pop in and out of cover in the same spot where you still have the last headshot position lined up, which I think was a problem cover-based shooters were supposed to have in like 2003. I apparently missed the days where a passing bird would count as a witness to a crime and call the cops on you — they patched this after about two years, from what I read online — but every time there’s no clear witnesses in sight and I suddenly get a wanted level, I still have to wonder.

Gameplay & design
There are some wacky scenarios, but gameplay is pretty by-the-book car driving and cover-shooting, with a surfeit of one-time gimmicks, like being asked to control a cargo crane, or to blowtorch a grate open. The best missions were probably the heists, with differing outcomes based on your approach and choice of hired crew members. But keep in mind: Payday 2 came out in the same year, with management of hostages and corpses, cameras and alarms, drills and key cards, low-profile scouting actions, physically carrying bags of money and boarding up windows, tactical skill trees, combat where you couldn’t solve everything with a headshot from any weapon interchangeably, and a million other things to complicate a job. What does GTAV really offer in the heist experience? Just whatever they’ve hard-coded a mission to do, plus getaways with the series’ traditional police evasion system (which has some very exploitable quirks of its own), and I guess a useless Skyrim-esque “stealth” stat you can raise by wrapping a rubber band around your controller.

I guess many people are satisfied just to play a game where you can murder hookers or push a button to give people the middle finger, so there’s that. But it all feels very outdated. There are things like failing missions for stepping outside the boundary zones. We should be past that.

Steal a car and the cops don’t even make a note, so once they give up the active chase, it’s yours forever. You can go shoot up a cult’s mountain compound and they’ll fight back, but kill them all, save, and reload, and they won’t be mad at you anymore, even though you’re still carrying the heavy weaponry you stole from them. Why not get a little Fallout in here, with factional reputation? Isn’t it a waste to have all these gangs like the Vagos and Ballas with none of that? Does everybody have to be so dumb and consequence-free? Consequences create impact.

GTA has a funny relationship with realism, in that Trevor can survive being shot by a tank, but he “realistically” takes like ten seconds to get his ass back off the ground from the ragdoll state. What fun. Say what you will about Saints Row — I lost all patience for the franchise myself — but I liked how you could cartoonishly dropkick through a windshield when you wanted to steal a car. I’m not sure who’s really served by frustrating controls where you get knocked fully onto your ass because you hit the jump button too close to a wall. It’s certainly not making the story feel any more grounded or respectable.

Now that I think about it, as soon as you exit a car and have to jog somewhere, it’s like the fun just instantly stops. You scan the road, hurting for a nice car. Being on foot almost feels intolerable. I remember when Saints Row 4 gave you super powers, so you could just sprint and fly faster than vehicles could take you, and that was awful too, because you didn’t have to navigate traffic or anything, and it just trivialized all travel and looped back around to being boring. This is only slightly better. I think maybe Just Cause had the better approach in this respect (or at least the one I played): your own physical momentum wasn’t much to speak of, but they gave you a goddamn grappling hook.

I don’t want to write two thousand words about helicopters and submarines, but there’s no control scheme for this game that doesn’t seem terrible in some way. Which is strange, given that there are two million games where you run around, shoot guns, and climb into vehicles, so why are we pretending this isn’t a solved problem?

GTA is fundamentally about people trying to get rich by any underhanded means, and one of the things I did bother to do was max out my characters’ money, though I couldn’t really tell you why. Unfortunately, earning money is fairly brainless, but extraordinarily tedious. What I want is the opposite: challenging, but never a chore.

The stocks promised to be one of the cooler things in the game — a simulated network of values potentially tied to real things, like airline stocks plunging when planes get blown up. Unfortunately, they only seem to randomly fluctuate when not hard coded as responses to story events, and have crucial differences from real stocks, in that there is always a buyer when you want to sell, and always a seller when you want to buy, and everything rebounds eventually. This means you can use cheaper stocks like a bank, put all your money in them, and be incapable of financial losses. Combine this with a save/load system, and you’d have to be an idiot to lose money day trading. Only, it also takes forever for them to meaningfully rise, and the only way to pass time in the game world is through sleeping, which involves unskippable bed cutscenes and, well, this kind of fucking sucks.

Car storage is another big let-down. Building a car collection would have been a lot more fun than picking up sheets of paper or underwater trash, but garage cars aren’t preserved better than anything else on the road. All you have to do to lose a precious car you saved is to take it out of the garage and play the game normally. Start a mission, swap characters for a second, walk too far away — anything can make those cars vanish on you.

Given that, the mod shop is rather pointless as well. Prior to endgame, the one car I actually tried to soup up of my own volition was Michael’s personal vehicle. All those modifications ended up being wiped, because Michael’s car gets changed during a story event where his family runs out on him. When the car eventually comes back, Michael’s son has made several modifications of his own, which in my case actually turned out to be downgrades.

The character switching should have been the game’s crowning feature. It should be the best thing GTAV does, but it’s a frustrating mess that always tends to obstruct the player. It’s useful as a story device, certainly, but entirely unhelpful for dynamic gameplay, only serving interesting purposes in story missions, where they’ve hand-tooled the conditions, scripting exactly what the other characters do when you’re not using them, and where you’re allowed to switch. Even in these situations, it can annoyingly lock you suddenly, so you can’t switch from Michael to Franklin to put the better driver behind the wheel.

Having clear divisions of money and property for each character initially makes some sense, as these characters realistically wouldn’t give everything they own to each other, but at the end of the day, you are still making choices for all of them, including the choice to invest their life savings into dubious stocks, and these divisions needlessly get in the way of business. Is it so hard to imagine that Michael would allow Franklin to take cars out of his (non-family) garage? It gets even sillier when it comes to stuff like earning flight school medals, but by that point I’m nitpicking.

The cool ideas that spring to mind as a result of the character-swapping system are numerous, and none of them work. One heist asks you to choose and modify a getaway vehicle, and after finding one as Franklin, I thought I’d hand the car off to Michael somehow — my richest character — and have him pay for the modifications. I wondered if I could waypoint the garage as Franklin to see if he would autopilot along the route while I wasn’t using him. I swapped back to him after a minute to see how he was coming along. He was exactly where I’d left him; the car he had been driving had despawned, and he was standing in its place in the middle of the road. I then tried to test this waypoint trick again, as Michael, in his personal vehicle. When I swapped back to him, my waypoint was still marked and he was still driving, but in the opposite direction.

Here’s another failed bit of fun I tried: I gave all three of my characters an armory’s worth of weapons, put them on the same hospital rooftop together, and opened fire on some pedestrians below as Trevor, hoping I could still get to swap between the others due to their close proximity, or at least have them get involved as AI, taking up defensive positions. Instead, Michael and Franklin calmly walked away to the nearest ladder, as if they had only gone up there in the first place due to being in a fugue state, and it was time for them to get back to daytime drinking or whatever the hell they do off-camera.

I once spent like 25 minutes trying to get some fancy sports cars off the back of a car hauler I hijacked, for no particularly good reason other than to make my own fun. The game did everything in its power to keep me from opening the hauler, and I was ultimately forced to give up, when I reloaded a save to repair the vehicle damage, and the load full of cars hitched to the back had completely despawned.

Open-world games like Breath of the Wild give you all kinds of dynamic and interacting systems, and players likely end up missing half of the cool things these tools allow you to do, because it’s almost too creative for any one person to sound out. In GTAV, if you try to do anything fun that’s even a little outside of the box, you’re stopped. There are plenty of secrets on the map, but these are just little hidden easter eggs you can read about online and travel to. It’s just not on the same level.

Story
I’m trying hard not to use words like “ludonarrative” here but the idea of a five-star wanted level seems completely unheard of to the characters when you’re not controlling what they do. We’re sociopaths playing a sociopath game, and every ten minutes we’re told we can’t kill someone we hate, or at least not yet. Most of them we do end up killing anyway, and in many of these cases nothing has seriously changed as far as the foreseeable consequences go. What’s the point of any of this if you can’t do what you want? You’re not breaking laws, but following a different set of them.

But I enjoyed myself enough with the main missions. I liked the three protagonists, particularly Trevor, and was more than willing to get into their shoes, try to sort their shit out, and make them rich. In the story’s better moments, the friction between them was compelling.

Michael is the only one with a real arc, dealing with his family and midlife crisis or whatever you want to call it. Even Trevor’s fixation on revenge arguably has more to do with what Michael’s got going on. The characters around Trevor are mostly irrelevant or end up dead; the naive juggalo kid he abuses just ends up permanently seated in a strip club. And Franklin? He gets rich, but there’s no real resolution there; his role is as Michael’s protege. He has Lamar, who repeatedly causes trouble, but neither of them seem to come to any understanding they didn’t already have, only more dead bodies. I think it would be charitable to identify this as a theme.

Not that Michael really changes himself for his family. At some point they just seem to warm to his psychotic lifestyle, when it benefits them. But what kind of resolution are we supposed to expect? One that scolds players for playing the game they got into to carjack people and do miscellaneous crimes? It’s almost as if the prospect of GTAV telling a mature story was doomed to fail before it was written.

Many if not most conversations in the game are a vehicle for some kind of gripe or soapbox position — the writers clearly were not fans of therapy, for instance — and I certainly wouldn’t say they take the wrong position on every issue, but politically it’s weak and avoids any meaningful commitment in critiquing the American condition, instead typically making dated jokes about American Idol, Scientology featuring Tom Cruise, “hipsters”, and truisms about the vapidity of Hollywood and social media. It has some funny ideas in places too, but I don’t think it’s ever truly clever or incisive, and is more often just vulgar for the sake of it. It’s very South Park in that passe “equal opportunity offender” way.

Nearly every character you don’t directly control is utterly unlikable. You can’t really sympathize with anyone, but Michael, Trevor, and Franklin always end up helping them, often hanging lampshades with lines like “Man, I don’t know why I’m helping you,” instead of finding valid reasons. These characters usually don’t even pay you. The only real reason to help anyone other than yourself is because it’s The Content, but said Content is always some minor twist on driving a car several blocks while the assholes talk to you, and then maybe you click a few heads at the destination. It’s just not a compelling reason for me to do anything, when I could be replaying The Witcher 3 or something.

As shitty and irritating as the male characters are, the women seemed to be especially portrayed as awful shrill and stupid bitches, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some divorced guys on the writing team. There are some recurring bits about women losing their value as they age and existing only to leech off men’s money and so on, and it’s hard to say exactly how much of this is just coming from misogynist characters or what’s faux-ironic soapboxing; the game doesn’t offer much of a counterpoint. At the risk of sounding too Male Feminist Ally, and speaking as someone who proudly made Geralt fuck every woman in the Witcher universe, it’s also fairly obvious — through the strip clubs and everything else — that the game wasn’t designed with female players in mind. There’s nothing to keep women from playing it, but it’ll never be for them. That’s most of the industry, but this is a bit more egregious than usual.

GTA Online
As a brief addendum, I also spent a day with GTA Online, which actually offered numerous gameplay enhancements. Money gets slightly more complicated with the implementation of a bank balance separate from carried money; held funds can be stolen, but also can be used for illegal purchases. Stolen cars are actually reported, and police will run the plates well after the initial theft. Random liquor and convenience stores can be held up at gunpoint. Cars can be permanently saved and even delivered to the player via phone, which would have been a massive game-changer in story mode.

But I didn’t stick around for long. Though team-play missions are potentially very cool, the community is bad, and the wait times when transitioning from free-roam into missions are intolerably long. There are fully voice acted missions with characters from the story mode, but unlike the single player content, when you fail a mission (and you will, because you’re very reliant on your team’s skill level), you’ll have to re-queue for ages and watch the cutscenes again with the next parties you try it with. The best cars can’t even be stolen for good, as there’s “too much heat” on them, which feels a bit like missing the forest for the trees in a game about stealing cars. The only real theft is Rockstar bilking rubes for shark cards.

Closing thoughts
I struggle to think of one truly new thing here, or something that isn’t done better somewhere else. Just restricting things to AAA standards — in other words, resisting the smug temptation to measure how many clever indie games this game’s budget could have funded — I’d pick a messy and unfinished MGSV or FFXV over a GTAV, any time. MGSV was a mechanical masterpiece. And FFXV at least let you pull your car over to fight a Cactuar. None of it made a lick of sense, but at least it was an original vision.

The reviewer believes this game stands above total mediocrity. It has something going for it, but ultimately few real merits. Most of the time, it isn’t fun, and doesn’t otherwise provide any sort of emotional payoff. Even though it does some cool things, you should play something else instead.

Dragon Age: Inquisition

Much like The Witcher 3, the third Dragon Age game offers value in (1) storytelling and (2) its core gameplay loop in unequal proportions. In other words, the gameplay can’t quite keep pace. But while the proportions may be similar enough that DAI could invoke The Wild Hunt in my mind, less value is present in DAI all-around.

The Witcher’s story was phenomenal, but the gameplay was staid; refined, respectable, but by-the-book. Likewise, the better parts of DAI’s writing are its best quality: I have a lot of praise for the character writing, and its approaches to relationships, romantic and friendly. If that’s expanded to include the player’s relationship with the world they’re trying to save, and the tensions within the player’s organization, I think it’s even more true. At the same time, the story, the plot, is trivial; the bad guy is a monster of the week with no character, and your fate is to fight him, because, before the game started, you apparently walked into the wrong room while looking for the bathroom or something. Amnesia is involved, and not even as a device to explain the world to unfamiliar players. Placing that tripe on the same pedestal as The Witcher would be frankly unfair.

And that’s the good side of this story-gameplay dichotomy I’m pushing. The central loop of exploration and combat is mediocre, tedious, physically dissatisfying, even frustrating. To describe it, there are a few parallels with Dragon’s Dogma: both are content with some crude and absent systems playing out in their open-worlds, though DAI lacks even the passing of time. Both games have you loot and level up (and give too much influence to character level in a world where you’re ostensibly encouraged to explore for yourself and to be challenged and find useful rewards as you go). Both have you unlock skills and fight with a maximum of 6-8 abilities that can easily be mapped to a controller, along with those of some NPC followers, who can be dressed up to your liking. But in DAI, there’s no value in the moment of what you’re doing. Combat is a slow exchange of numbers. Shooting an arrow from a bow in DDDA had more impact than a big blow from a heavy sword has in DAI. Fighting a group of DDDA’s bandits was a vastly different experience from a pack of wolves, or any number of huge mythical creatures with distinctly targetable body parts. In DAI, you go about fighting anything the same. Sure, as a warrior, you might hook and drag an enemy over if they can be hooked. Kill the mages before the tanks if you can be bothered. But generally, you clash, dump the skills that are off cooldown, and let the computer do the math. (Then someone knocks you down, and you draw out a sigh for 4 or 5 seconds, unable to do anything with your active character.)

Mechanics in depth: combat & exploration
DAI was generally easy and unengaging, despite playing on Hard. My party got wiped out occasionally in some tougher areas, but I still never had to bother using the tactical view and controlling my whole party, which I thought was even more tedious, especially in trying to get my followers to avoid engaging enemies. I only played on Hard in the first place to avoid getting to a point where it wouldn’t matter if I was fighting 5 or 50 enemies, and losing narrative tension as a result (I talked about this a bit recently when talking about AC4). Usually these games are more enjoyable if you actually have to get invested in your party’s composition and skills, and I don’t regret picking Hard over Normal or Easy in what would have been some misguided attempt to blow through it faster. It rarely mattered in the moment of a fight, but even if it just got me to pay a little more attention to weapon crafting, that counts for something.

I did like the potion system, given that it was a little different, with its automatic refills and slots that could be used for either defensive tonics or grenades. There are some pretty cool options in the skill trees, too, and looking at a few builds online, while some options definitely come out ahead over others, players definitely had some room to be creative. I think that’s nice, but then I spent most of the game rolling into every enemy because it would do five times more damage than a big, slow swing from a two-handed maul while leaving me less vulnerable to enemy attacks. It felt extremely clumsy to have worked out that way, but “clumsy” is a recurring theme here. The controls felt unresponsive: I would try to turn off a buff that would drain my stamina while it was active, and I would have to hit it 3 or 4 times before it would finally turn off, possibly because my character was in some kind of subtle post-attack animation phase, possibly because the game hates its players. And the same button is used both for interacting with objects and jumping, which usually meant I would jump around like a lunatic when trying to open a chest. Occasionally it also meant I couldn’t jump onto a platform because there’s something interactive next to it, which is as ridiculous as it sounds.

More to the point, I found myself asking why there even was a jump button. There are no aerial attack skills. Jumping sucked. You run into invisible walls trying to climb onto rocks. You can’t climb steep surfaces except with a ladder. Open-world without any real means of traversing the environment — apart from walking, or trying to awkwardly parkour around the game’s intentions by rapidly jumping and rolling — is joyless and pointless. There’s one very beautiful landscape of an oasis among canyons in the desert, and all the verticality those canyons offered would have been really cool in a totally different game, like Breath of the Wild. In DAI, every surface you need to climb poses the most boring possible question: “Will it be less tedious to find a ladder/ramp if I try circling around from the left, or from the right?”

It’s also buggy — not just of the game-crashing sort (I did have my share of those), but even just a certain level of jank in the background. When 6 horses in a stable all lift their heads at once because nobody thought to insert some randomness into their animation timing, you notice these things, and it shows a kind of carelessness. Just as you’d (hopefully) notice the opposite in the Witcher 3, by no means a game without bugs, but staggeringly fine-tuned in its little details. Bioware is just falling behind on technical sophistication: I have some ridiculous M.2 SSD and not only was I getting load screens that were 15 seconds longer than I’d have been seeing in the Witcher 3, but they showed lore and tooltips for about 2 of those seconds, and spent the other 13 on a black screen. Let’s not get bogged down talking about the exploits, either, which practically fell into your lap and were never patched out. The only reason I didn’t have infinite skill points a third of the way through the game is because I showed what I feel was remarkable self-restraint.

I could write ten more paragraphs about problems in exploration, but it boils down to dissatisfying feel, and the vast emptiness of it all. It feels bad when you have to bend down and play an animation to harvest an herb, or pick up a tiny amount of gold. And it’s empty because there are no systems beyond yourself clashing in that space. Time does not pass; there’s no wrong time or untimely weather to influence your crossing of a bridge or hunting of wildlife. You aren’t worrying that your appropriation of a village’s goods will make them less cooperative to your inquiries. The lands you pass through aren’t changing hands as you make political decisions. Instead, most of the time, you collect trinkets, wiggling a control stick around to see the glimmer that gives away the location of a “skull shard”. It’s not as if I didn’t try to stop and smell the roses, either: I look at the grand vistas, and the old, crumbling statues. But it was worth little when I couldn’t enjoy moving through and interacting with these spaces. Who would think this is fun? Or that a completely isolated activity like drawing lines in the sky would be the one mechanic that would really tie the game together?

There was one thing in the exploration that I really appreciated, though. I have a fascination with the idea of “colonizing” wild spaces in a sense, by taking a place that is hard to traverse, and then making your mark there; imposing a little order. DAI actually (sort of) does this: you might come across a broken bridge or collapsed tunnel, and you can mark it for your Inquisition’s engineers to come by and fix up. I think they should have run further with the idea. The only limit is that it’s never used for shortcuts; just places that can’t be accessed at all otherwise. The act of making your way through some temple and then knocking down a few walls for the next time you have to come through can be strangely satisfying. Or even just kicking down a ladder after making your way up with a much longer route.

Some of the sidequests out in the wild are incredibly dull. If you’re familiar with “single-player MMO” drudge work, there’s plenty of it in DAI. I stopped taking requisition quests as soon as I realized that they repeated infinitely, just asking me to gather more junk, but even some of the quests with named and voiced NPCs can be kind of galling. One guy asked me to find and disarm 5 traps by sight, and then sent me back to rearm the same traps again. That was a low point. Not that there weren’t good ones: one quest tasked me to vanquish a demon (a member of a group who have apparently made an appearance in every Dragon Age game thus far), and when I cut through his minions and walked into his room, he started talking to me, out of cutscene, about how he could offer me a deal. I just started swinging my greataxe at him and to my surprise it actually interrupted his speech and flustered him, and started combat prematurely: that was hard-coded, the only time in the game I was allowed to do anything like it, but in that moment it was exactly what I needed to actually enjoy myself. The game can be good when it really tries: there’s just so little trying.

The last purely mechanical thing to talk about is the war table, which is alright, I guess. You could consider it a different take on the war preparation mechanic from Mass Effect 3, being more hands-on, and used to unlock the main missions rather than just to get a better ending. Essentially these are assignments that are nothing more than a paragraph of text and a choice, and then a real-time countdown until the task is done, maybe 10 minutes, maybe 20 hours. I just went with my gut on these, rather than using a guide to extract the best treasures, as I might have driven myself crazy otherwise. What’s awkward about it is that you get quest chains at times, which are just another paragraph following up on the paragraph you read 20 hours ago. Naturally, by then I’ll have forgotten what the hell the job was about, in part because I was doing several others at the same time, but there’s no history of past assignments. The war table’s inclusion makes the game a little more unique, but had to have been a rushed feature. If it interacted with other mechanical systems — say, Leliana gaining too much organizational power over Josephine and Cullen, or Cullen’s brute-force approach changing the interactions with NPCs in the region the assignment involved, or having to fight denser packs of enemies because you sent Inquisition troops elsewhere — that would have been great. But once again, systems were not much of a consideration for DAI.

If this had been a shorter game, I probably could have written one or two paragraphs about the core loop instead of however many I’m up to now. I would rather talk about the writing. But it’s not a short game, and it would have been dishonest to keep the review’s focus off of where I actually had to spend the bulk of my attention and energy. If the gameplay had been sharper, I’d have happily wasted all that time on it, but if DAI had been 20 hours and called “Telltale Games Presents: Dragon Age Without The Combat And Exploration Parts“, that wouldn’t have been so bad either.

The writing: lore, dialogue, characters, & story
I wasn’t able to jump into DAI with the enthusiasm I had for Mass Effect 3 back when that came out. To put it in perspective, I was 19 and 21 when I played the last couple Dragon Age games, and only played them once each. I’m 28 now and just hitting the third. In other words, I barely remember this stuff. And it’s extremely dense with terribly dry high fantasy nonsense lore. I read a lot while playing this game, but I didn’t even attempt to read every last codex entry. My brain thanks me for making this decision. On the one hand, I feel that if you suffer through enough trivial crap about anything, you’ll be grounded in some sense, and it’ll be that much easier to be invested in the story the next time they bring up the Second Blight or Emperor Drakon or whatever. (This may be called Stockholm syndrome.) On the other hand, if I pick up a book and I see that it’s the third recounting I’ve found of some Orlesian succession dispute or that the constellation Fervenial may represent the elven goddess Andruil and the tenet of Vir Tanadhal, my eyes just kind of automatically glaze over in protest. They don’t make it easy to find the gems when the series is so dense with shit nobody cares about, but some of it is good, and even just knowing Nevarra from Antiva can help the player settle into the rest of the game.

The first real point where I took a deeper interest in what I was playing was probably after settling into my own base in Skyhold, and maybe not really until heading into the Winter Palace, a lengthy quest that mostly revolves around talking to snooty nobles and my own party members at a masquerade ball, while also doing some snooping around. Seeing Morrigan from the first Dragon Age there (and in the process realizing that there actually would be more of a thread of continuity between the games than I first thought) certainly helped, but it’s no coincidence that you spend most of this quest out of combat. I do think the main questline is better than the side-offerings, but even it has a terribly cliche structure. Most of my positive associations come from getting to interact with my party members in more substantive ways than I ever could while traipsing around the Hinterlands. Likewise, the final postgame DLC had several opportunities to just chat with your associates, and lacked wide-open areas, and it was quite good. That said, the Jaws of Hakkon DLC was the most open of the bunch, but since it had a little town to come back to and a lot of interesting characters to meet and see new cultural and historical perspectives from, I enjoyed it considerably more than the DLC set in the Deep Roads.

The dialogue isn’t without flaws. Of course, it is a Bioware game, and that means most of your interactions involve cornering someone to ask twenty questions in a row of “What can you tell me about [opposing political faction]?” “What can you tell me about [this city]?” “What can you tell me about “[You]”? It’s clumsy, and they never quite have figured out how to do exposition, or to get a specific character’s opinions without flat-out interrogating them.

I wouldn’t call the non-expository interactions perfect, either. Even putting aside Vivienne (who appears to be engineered to be the most unlikable one), the humor feels forced and cringey. Sera’s “wacky” character traits are grating, despite some good voice acting and the reasonably interesting ground-up commoner’s movement she’s involved in, a kind of anonymous network of Robin Hoods. (And thank the Maker it has no former power structure, as she’s far too unqualified to be making choices for anyone else.) The mage Dorian is charming, with an engrossing personal arc, but his “funny” lines were in the same vein as Sera’s; just when you thought he was a person, he’d suddenly say some wacky internet mainstream subreddit level shit. You could also take Cole, a great character, but whose disjointed dialogue is a poor and annoying introduction when the game still has earned little currency with the player, and feels like no more than a gimmick. I didn’t necessarily come to see a full eye-to-eye acceptance with every last member of the Inquisition, but they’re all at least highly interesting once you come to know them better (again, maybe excepting Vivienne): at one point I found myself saying, “Well, Blackwall is just a Warden,” and that was right before his character arc took a big step forward and proved me wrong.

I’ve forgotten most of the companions from the previous Dragon Ages, but I don’t think they were as complicated or endearing, nor do I feel as strongly on average about the party members in other Bioware RPGs, including the Mass Effect series, where the vast amount of time spent with some of the cast breeds some lingering affection that other games would have trouble finding. Mass Effect certainly had some legitimate high notes, but nonetheless had some real dud characters too. I’ve played quite a few CRPGs, from Bethesda and Obsidian and elsewhere, and I’ve come to expect gimmicks and clashing perspectives in every big party that assembles to save a world, but I really felt like DAI brought an unusually consistent level of substance there. Even your non-party member advisory team are fully realized individuals. (And Scout Harding is cooler than anyone who’s actually in your party, for whatever little that’s worth in terms of character substance.) And I have absolutely no complaints about the voice acting from any of them.

Apropos of nothing, I’d love to say something nice about the card art shown for each of the followers when you choose who to bring with you on an outing. The art changes as they go through momentous events in their personal lives, and I think there’s nothing quite like it to really drive the nail in on some of those changes in their circumstances, and how they might feel about the Inquisitor, or how they might regret getting involved in the plot at all. It’s a great touch.

There are numerical “approval” scores for each of your followers, which I think is unfortunate, but in my one playthrough, I didn’t get the impression that this system caused anything particularly unjustified or absurd to happen, such as being permitted to shack up with someone who opposes everything you stand for by racking up easy points with “Nice Guy” politeness. I still think this is a bad system, but I think a nuanced execution has mitigated the inherent faults of it here. The characters are well-realized; they tend to know the difference between the nicest thing you could say to them and the thing that might affect a change they want to see, and they won’t allow their grievances to be cancelled out later with gifts of flowers and chocolates. Some followers do have quests with options for massive approval gain to outweigh anything said to them, but crucially, that too is character-driven. You can probably more than make up for any bitter conversations with Blackwall by hunting darkspawn or taking him artifact-hunting, but it makes sense, because those things are clearly just more important to him than friendly words. The same can’t be said for someone like Solas, to whom ideology is paramount. I can’t say for sure if my experience was universal here, but I kept the respect of my entire party just by trying to apply my beliefs consistently.

My approach might have varied a little more in the one-on-one conversations, allowing myself to swagger and claim to chase glory a little more with Iron Bull than say Cassandra, where it was all for the righteousness of the cause. But I think that level of changing yourself depending on who you’re talking to is normal, and I didn’t go directly lying to anyone about what I felt was the right thing to do. Sometimes there were great disapproval penalties, and I didn’t always want to suck up to Vivienne, or Sera when she was being petulant, and I was never punished for being true to myself in this sense. I romanced Cassandra despite my generally acting in the interests of mage rights and being open-minded about interactions with spirits and demons. But because I respected the vision she presented as a reformist of no half-measures, and because I took responsibility in my own dealings as well, I neither saw it as out-of-character for my Inquisitor to be interested in her, nor out-of-character for her to reciprocate (although it might have taken longer to get there as a result of some of my choices). And I would like to believe that the various individuals and histories encountered while travelling with her in my party helped her own perspective grow as well. Anyway, she’s a fantastic character, and has the best accent too, whatever the hell it is. (German? Austrian?)

When I used to play these sorts of games, I felt more pressured to save-scum for the best outcomes. It would take someone out of my party if I was going to do something they didn’t like, which is manipulative, but also unrealistic, seeing as you’re making choices with peoples’ lives and entire countries, and word is obviously going to spread. (Thankfully in DAI, a person doesn’t have to be in your party to take approval penalties.) My approach with DAI from the outset was to jump through no weird hoops to minmax everyone’s love for me, and if that meant I ended up hated by a character, all the better. If anything, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get at least one person bailing on me, but I did feel like I had a healthier relationship with the game this way. Ultimately, I still prefer an approach like The Witcher’s, which never reduces your relationship with a human being to “+20 points”. At times, talking to non-party members like the advisory staff felt like “purer” interactions, because you aren’t getting “Slightly approves” messages popping up in the corner of your screen. If I didn’t just happen to like Cassandra more than non-party characters like Josephine, I’d have rather avoided the points-based romance entirely.

Another flaw these games often stumble into is a halt in the romance after a “courting” phase, as though getting to fuck someone was an end goal and there was far less of value to explore with that partner afterwards. Mass Effect 3 had been partly forced to confront this by setting an entire game after you’d already been through these decisions with your (second) party, meaning they had to at least try to do something interesting with existing relationships from the start of the game. DAI introduces a new protagonist and new characters, but it didn’t have much of a problem here: you can hook up with a companion well before the endgame, and the real opportunities to chat with them in cutscenes after major missions contain spouse-locked dialogue choices that do help flavor the relationships afterward. There may also be entirely extra cutscenes for romanced characters, but this is unclear to me, as not every member of the team would get a new cutscene at the same time. Bioware also previously had the issue of some companions’ scenes running out early because they weren’t romanced, while unromanceable characters continued on with content until the end of their games. I would not be entirely surprised if this happened in DAI, but if so, it wasn’t as overt. The postgame DLC definitely had some interesting content about the romance my Inquisitor had with Cassandra as well, particularly as I supported her in becoming what was basically the pope, which kind of got in the way of the relationship, but seemed to be the right choice both for her and for the state of the world.

I couldn’t possibly talk about Dragon Age without talking about the way it addresses inclusivity, and matters of sexual orientation and gender. I never felt like the game was pandering or just checking off boxes for the sake of it: I suppose the difference would be if I felt that Krem (a non-party member) had no value apart from his being trans, but I thought that the player character’s gormless reactions and questions to his trans identity coming up as a subject was interesting in itself, even in not taking them (I often liked exercising my right not to ask dumb questions just because they were on my dialogue wheel). Apart from Dorian, I basically had no idea who was gay and who wasn’t until after beating the game and looking it up, as I made my pick and didn’t try to play the field beyond that. It was interesting to find out that my flirting options wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere with Sera, because she was gay, or Cullen, because he wasn’t. In Dragon Age 2, I think they just made everyone bi. That was interesting, but limiting in a ludonarrative sense: if you wish to make a no-judgments wish-fulfillment fuck paradise, go ahead and do it, but the real world has people who will say no to you on the basis of what you are, and that’s something to explore in itself. Most fascinatingly here, as a Qunari or dwarf you have a couple fewer sexual options in the Inquisition than a human or elf does, and that’s something I’ve always wanted to see attempted. It would be ballsier yet if the skin tone you picked during character creation could restrict you like this, but I could see how it would kind of suck for some players.

Generally, there are a lot of parallels in the series with real human rights issues, which is another thing that helps ground the series and make the moral choices thrust upon the player feel important if they care about these causes in real life. At the same time, mage rights thankfully aren’t a direct substitute for talking about gay rights. Nor do elves represent a skin color. Sure, it’s clear to see that people are born as mages; it’s not a “lifestyle choice”, and they’re often locked up, mistreated, even lobotomized. That said, crucially, the real gay rights analogue is simply gay rights: Dorian’s dad actually tried to use some fucked up magic spell to make his son less gay, like some fantasy electroshock conversion therapy. If you’re going to address the subject, who needs nuanced metaphor or layers of tactful abstraction? After all, it’s still a medieval setting where every old man of means is obsessed with siring heirs. It’s going to come up.

Choices & consequences
I don’t intend to play DAI a second time, but I have looked up a few things, and there have been some notably different outcomes to some of my choices. It was pleasantly surprising to see that I wouldn’t actually end up travelling into a hypothetical future where we didn’t save the world, for example, in siding with the templars over the mages, which really did have some reactivity — my expectations here were so low that I thought they would have cheated me around even that being unique to my playthrough. But even that choice doesn’t put you in a different place in the end, and no choice ripples out with meaningful consequences. Many options won’t even necessarily affect a single conversation; they’re the kind of illusory choices that I think can at best feel meaningful in the moment, as long as you don’t think too hard about what they mean. It’s not Alpha Protocol, and that goes without saying, because I can beat Alpha Protocol in 5-8 hours, and this game took me more like 140. But you can still import history from the earlier games, and the protagonist of Dragon Age 2 (who cannot die) even shows up for one mission. Just don’t expect anything to come from it. In the original Dragon Age, the player could die nobly or impregnate a witch with an ancient god and cheat death, which sounds like just about the most earth-shattering divergence you could possibly have, except that it of course means nothing, and the writers probably now regret ever allowing the player that choice at all. According to what I’ve only seen on youtube, if a save is imported, the ancient god baby really does come back into the series in DAI, finally, only to have his godhood neatly stolen away in one cutscene that has very little to do with the player’s quest. Still, it was good to see Morrigan again.

Mass Effect 3’s big trick was to have all these knock-off unkillable characters waiting in the wings — like understudies in a theatrical production — to jump in whenever you killed off the A-listers. Wrex had his brother Wreav, while Mordin had Padok Wiks, his fellow STG operative. That kept the story from ever having to diverge. DAI, on the other hand, is even more flippant in its disregard for your personal history: I completely forgot, or never knew, that the player could kill Leliana in the original Dragon Age by making evil bastard choices. Turns out she literally gets resurrected from the dead, which would make her about as much of a mythical Christ figure in the Dragon Age world as it would if it happened in the real one, and yet goes more or less completely uninterrogated. That’s staggering.

Conclusions, and the future of the series
Ultimately, as much as I may spit on this game for all its mechanical emptiness and filler, extolling other titles like Dragon’s Dogma as I do so, I still believe there is a very clear place in this world for DAI. DDDA, after all, was the game that clumsily invented a slave caste to solve a problem that didn’t really exist, and would make your fated significant other literally just about any NPC you had the best relationship with, including children and old shopkeepers who became your true destiny because you regularly bought goods from them. Great as it was in some respects, it wasn’t the game to tackle social issues, and it’s heartening that there’s at least one major developer making this a priority, and doing so with a bit more tact every time around.

Dragon Age 2 still had the best narrative structure of the series so far, and while they wore out the one city map where the game was set, it was a breath of fresh air to just be embroiled in local events instead of preventing the whole world from exploding. In the next Dragon Age, I wouldn’t mind a return in that direction, paring down the shallow-breadth approach, but with more of an emphasis on the feel of play in the moment. If they could do so, sticking to their strengths in character writing, while putting even half the effort into structural systems bigger than loot or crafting, they’d be off to a great start. There are already too many big franchises doing the open-world thing just to chase trends, and my advice to Bioware would be to avoid competing on a field where they can’t win.

The reviewer finds this game hard to get excited about, but still has a positive opinion of it. It may be somewhat fun, having good features or ideas counterbalanced by a few boring parts, bad design or other fundamentally irritating qualities that can’t easily be overlooked. Alternatively, it could be pleasant, but with nothing new to offer. Worth a little money if you’ve got the time for it.

 

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

AC4‘s big innovation is free-roaming naval gameplay, especially in how this is seamlessly incorporated into the existing mechanics of the series. It’s a little simple in some ways — you could definitely do more with the player’s fleets and cargo without turning it into a space trading game, which might alienate players with shorter attention spans. But even as it is now, you can step away from the wheel, leap off your own ship, climb onto a Spanish man’o’war, kill everyone on deck with a hidden blade, and then return to your own vessel, taking the enemy ship and its cargo without exchanging a single broadside. And I think that’s miles ahead of what AC3 was doing. Imagine if the first couple Grand Theft Auto games didn’t have vehicles at all and you just ran around doing crimes on foot and shooting people from behind cover. And then the third one introduced the car, but you’d only enter one by starting a mission that moved you to a distinct “street map” where you couldn’t leave the car. And finally a real GTA game came out and everything clicked together.

It’s a little silly, but sort of what it feels like to have ships in the mix here. At the same time, I don’t mean to say that future Assassin’s Creed games would never work again without sticking to the naval theme. But as I said in talking about AC3, I can see why they stuck with it for a while longer: the core gameplay of the series has been too thin. I criticized AC3 for making you do a bunch of miscellaneous pseudo-participation in a checklist of historical events that didn’t map to the gameplay mechanics at all. AC4 thankfully does none of that, and yet, 85% of the missions that take place on land seem to involve some variation on tailing somebody, which I now remember getting completely sick of during the AC2 trilogy. Let’s just say I took some comfort in the new feature where I could “rate” missions individually after completing them. Not that Ubisoft would still be looking at feedback from four games ago, but it’s the thought that counts, you know? Another tailing mission; two stars.

It’s not quite enough to sell a game on. But what else is there? For the most part, the series sticks to its underwhelming guns. There’s often more than one way to climb a thing, but it’s mostly fake. And combat is too simple. I’m not saying I’ve never screwed up fights in AC4, but for the most part it doesn’t matter if there’s one guy coming at you, or twenty. Sure, the big bruiser enemies don’t always cooperate with your kill streak, but throw them aside and hit them in the back once and they’re dead just the same; throw in a smoke bomb or something when you run out of room. And I don’t think this is in the game’s best interests, given the ludonarrative dissonance that pops up whenever some guy points a gun at Kenway in a cutscene and he’s expected to care again because there’s no player controlling him anymore. And let’s not forget that it’s ostensibly a stealth game. When I got one objective, “Sabotage all alarm bells,” I thought, “Oh, good. It doesn’t say I can’t let them ring the alarm.” And so I bodychecked a few guards so hard that even Mr. Magoo would have seen me, allowed them to ring it, quickly comboed together like thirty kills in the resulting hullabaloo, and only then cut the alarms. Complete success. I think this is ridiculous: they don’t seem to know what kind of game they want to make.

So, not really knowing anything about the subsequent AC games that have already come out, how might they fix this? Assuming they care in the first place, they could either turn up the threat so some fights become infeasible to win, or play right into it, and make every villain a simpering coward who shouts (from behind the equivalent of six NFL teams’ defensive lines), “Kill him, you imbeciles! He’s only one man!” At this point I think the latter makes more sense. Give enemies some more variations on how they attack, such as with horizontal and vertical swings that have to be dealt with differently.

The series could play around with time more, too. Who says you have to be the same ancestor the whole game? Visit the same city as three of them, swap around like it’s Ocarina of Time or Day of the Tentacle, and pick up an item with one character after burying it with another. Even if you’re cornering the market on the distant past, and as a consequence, your gameplay can’t benefit from the tried-and-true complex but satisfying mechanics of an aircraft or a car in traffic, there’s a lot more open to you than just listening in on people’s conversations and then stabbing them.

So far the position I’ve taken is that the gameplay isn’t deep enough, but to elaborate on that, I often think it’s not deep enough relative to the time a player is expected to put in. This is a common gripe I have with high-profile open-world games, but it’s no less true for that. Even if you make the wise mental health decision that there’s no way in hell you’re going to sail to every meaningless collectible gewgaw on every Far Side Island on your world map — I actually did follow through on that bullshit, but only after muting the game and putting on an hour or two of a podcast — if you’re going for the optional sync objectives, treasure maps, and contracts, I think the lack of respect the game shows for your time is clear. First there are sync objectives which, on rare occasions, won’t show up the first time through a mission, which is great when paired with unskippable end-mission cutscenes. But what really galls me is having to make two or three runs on the same deep-sea dive that was tedious the first time through, because I’ve found a map revealing buried treasure back where I’ve already been, or some assassination target took up residence in a little cave there. Swimming is really unsatisfying too, with Kenway refusing to dive in any reasonable timeframe, or turning poorly, or swimming on ahead past the reef I put him in to hide from a shark. And while taking away your equipment is intended to add to the challenge, I think even more importantly, it gives me fewer ways to have fun. I can’t stab a shark? I can’t get my blow darts wet?

There are also the Mayan stelae things, a bit of busywork which if forced to be called “puzzles” would be an insult to even a chimpanzee’s problem-solving abilities. And while they’ve streamlined the hunting from the last game, throwing harpoons at whales gets dull fast — at least in that Resident Evil 4 boss fight on the lake, you got to control a speedboat while you were at it.

Chests should be far rarer and more memorable, highly guarded or difficult to reach. Collectibles should always be unique; a point I’ve been hammering on about since Deadly Premonition — the only thing that satisfies the requirement here are the ship upgrade plans and the sea shanties, which are amazing, but probably make up about 1% of collectibles. I learned a lot of good sea shanties while playing the game, like Fish in the Sea, Hi-Ho Come Roll Me Over, Leave Her Johnny, Lowlands Away (my favorite), Padstow’s Farewell, Randy Dandy-Oh, Stormalong John… these are clearly the most substantive thing I’ve come away with for all the time I sunk in over the course of about five days straight playing.

There are little improvements; the map and UI for instance. I also like that there are alarm bells for guards to ring now — maybe I should have said that upfront — and I like the way they’ll try to tackle you to let their friends catch up during a chase. But they’re still far too dumb for any kind of system that involves meaningfully interacting with them outside of combat. They forget you instantly, and don’t react to gunshots that are well within hearing range, among other things.

There are a few proper sidequest chains with little stories this time, and that’s cool, but for the most part they’re just more tailing missions. I guess it’s about on par with what you did for the homestead villagers in AC3. While there’s probably a greater variety of side content when looking at the bigger picture, there’s nothing as good as AC3’s base building, which was one of the very few things I really liked about it, flawed as it was.

As for the story itself, I found it immediately more engaging than AC3’s. Connor wasn’t a bad protagonist — he had a great shouting voice on the seas — but Edward Kenway’s “I killed an assassin and took his hoodie thing, and I have no idea why people are talking about templars but I’m going to bilk these jerks for as much money as I can” plot is fucking good right of the gate. Even the Abstergo stuff outside of the Animus had me invested, giving me loads of questions right away. Was I still Desmond? Catching sight of Rebecca on the first floor was a great touch. Who was to say if she was undercover or if Juno pulled some Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure shenanigans on the whole universe? Having no idea what was going on (and for once it not being because I forgot who the characters were or how they got there) felt pretty good.

But the whole “fake assassin” thing came to an end I think sooner than it should have, because once the game settled into petty conflicts between pirates and templars, I felt that it was dragging its feet. A number of characters took a little too long to be dealt with. Apart from liking James Kidd and the Sage stuff, I didn’t much care about the sequence-to-sequence chain of events. Doing more with pretending to work for the templars would have been a better direction. At least the writing was generally snappier; Kenway had less patience for debating morality with dead guys than even I do, and the conflict was far more interpersonal than the usual philosophical, self-righteous drivel the series had offered. I enjoyed the Abstergo audio tapes too.

The main thing AC4 has is its open-world sailing and piracy, and while I’ve found a kind of mellow enjoyment in Windward, and played a few space games like Escape Velocity when I was younger — boarding ships and stealing cargo — I’ve never quite had this experience. And yet it’s disappointing to learn that’s all there is setting it above AC3. It’s a little less glitchy, but still glitchy. It has a more captivating story, but it doesn’t retain its momentum. Meanwhile, the climbing and fighting systems aren’t getting any younger.

Oh, and there’s a companion app, but it sucks.

The reviewer finds this game hard to get excited about, but still has a positive opinion of it. It may be somewhat fun, having good features or ideas counterbalanced by a few boring parts, bad design or other fundamentally irritating qualities that can’t easily be overlooked. Alternatively, it could be pleasant, but with nothing new to offer. Worth a little money if you’ve got the time for it.