Even with Game Pass, the amount of new games I’m playing is pretty low compared to previous years. But I’m keeping myself busy with my horrendous backlog.

As usual, I write this post over a period of time, please excuse any weird changes in writing style.

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Another year, another Like A Dragon game. Although this is actually the third one I’ve played in the last 12 months, I think I could do with a break from the series for a bit. I do love these games, but Jesus Christ, Sega, let me breathe a bit.

Anyway, Ichiban and crew have found themselves in Hawaii after a whole bunch of nonsense involving VTubers, getting cancelled, Japan’s insane anti-Yakuza laws, and religious organisations. There they meet a slew of whacky characters, including Kiryu, who now joins the party and is also playable during the bits where you hang around Japan again.

I won’t prattle on about the story; quite frankly, it goes in some really stupid directions. Jumping the shark territory even. It’s definitely one of the weakest stories they’ve told. Which is a shame considering how good 7 (Yakuza: Like A Dragon) was. And Kiryu seems very out of character at times, but I suppose he’s getting old and getting tired of this shit.

Let’s talk about everything else the game has to offer.

Starting with the combat, they’ve added a positional element to it. You can now move the selected character during battle and line up your attacks in order to hit them into other enemies for maximum damage output. There’s also tag team special attacks you can do with your party members. And as a cherry on top, Kiryu can literally break the turn-based UI and just start wailing on people with real-time brawler combat. Plus, there’s a bunch of new jobs, and it’s much easier to swap around the skills, meaning there’s more reason to grind them all out and mix and match the skills.

It’s a huge improvement over the previous turn-based game. My only complaint is that it still doesn’t mark in the skill list which skills enemies are weak to, like Persona.

The usual side quest hell returns. Although, I must admit, it hasn’t been that interesting this time. A good chunk of it is spent on Kiryu reminiscing about things that happened in the previous games and catching up with people. Ichiban’s side of things repeats a lot of the stuff from his last game, including multiple encounters with a giant Roomba.

Sujimon are back, of course, but with a far more in-depth combat system, making it actually worth doing this time. Plus, there is a side story where you fight other Sujimon trainers around the Hawaii map.

There’s also Sujimon Snap, a Pokemon Snap rip-off where you hop on a tram and take pictures of degenerates doing silly things. I didn’t do it that often; it wasn’t that engaging.

The newest addition is Dondoko Island, which is yet another management game. This time you’re the owner of a small island holiday resort, starring these two children’s TV hosts.

They’re being harassed by pirates who keep dumping trash everywhere, and one of your jobs is to clean that up. You then gather the materials from those, along with rocks, wood, fish, and insects, and then build new buildings that guests can visit.

It’s probably the most tedious and restrictive minigame they’ve made. The money you make is called Dondokobucks, and you can only convert about 6 million Dondokobucks into about $300,000. And that’s per day. So if you bank a crap tonne of fake money, you’ll have to spend multiple days to convert all of it. It’s a very boring process, and it seems to only exist to put the brakes on people trying to grind out cash. Believe me, you need money in this game.

As for the arcade games, well, there’s some new ones. SEGA BASS FISHING is the headliner for me personally. I do like a good fishing game. Other games include Spike Out, a third-person brawler, which I can’t say I like all that much, and Virtua Fighter 3tb. I didn’t play much VF this time around, unfortunately.

The loss of the Sega branding on the arcades still hurts me. It’s just not the same.

Well, to round off the minigame, there is, of course, karaoke. We now have a total party size of about 10, and each of them has at least 1 song; a lot of them have 2, and the two main characters have a few songs each as well. That’s a lot of music. My only complaint is the lack of “Pure Love In Kamurocho”. It even gets name-dropped while talking to Seonhee, which put my hopes up that maybe she’d do a duet with Kiryu. Alas, that is not the case. But there are still some great songs in there.

Plus, to top it all off, they finally added a music player to the game that you can listen to while walking around. Believe it or not, Zero actually did this first, but it was a Japan-only DLC. Alongside the fact that a lot of music was originally cut from that game when it came out in English.

That’s Infinite Wealth in a nutshell. I like it, but the series needs a kick up the arse a bit. Or at the very least, a long break.

Half-Life

Believe it or not, I’d never finished the original Half-Life. Hell, I never even played the original GoldSrc version. I played Half-Life: Source, the rebuild of it in the Source engine. But with the 20th anniversary of the game, Valve decided to update the original version of it, making it easier to run on modern systems, along with adding a whole bunch of fixes and features. This gave me an excuse to give the game another chance, and this time I finished it.

Despite some rough edges, it’s still fun overall. It’s definitely a lot harder than I remember, but I’ve also gotten very impatient with games these days; I tend to rush them. I’m not sure if that’s because I started streaming my playthroughs or not. Either way, there’s certainly a lot of things that instantly kill you. Which seems to be a common trend in older games. Player is doing something they shouldn’t? Murder them.

The amount of first-person platforming probably doesn’t help. It wouldn’t be worth complaining about if the character didn’t feel like they were on ice when moving. It makes those sections a lot more difficult than they need to be, and even pressing the walk button doesn’t really help that much. Plus, crouch jumping is mandatory in several places. Remember that shit? I don’t think it’s been a thing since the early Halo years.

And yes, Xen sucks. Jesus H. Christ, it is bloody terrible. The final boss is an utter pain.

And if you want to see this pain for yourself, you can watch my playthrough here.

Sifu

Finally freed from the trash fire that is the Epic Games Store, I can finally play Sifu. A game where dying makes you older and weaker. It’s got some roguelike elements where you can upgrade your character during your run to get new attacks or better stats, and if you upgrade them enough during that one run, they become permanent and carry over to other runs.

Unfortunately, if you play on an easier difficulty like I did, you won’t ever get enough XP to unlock the permanent upgrades. But you won’t exactly need them either. Normal difficulty is an irritating experience. Healing isn’t much of an option, and your first time through a level is going to be long and harrowing. The idea is to have multiple playthroughs where you use items gained from previous runs to gain access to shortcuts. But I found it so frustrating that I knocked down the difficulty to easy with modifiers that heal you and age you down.

It greatly reduced the amount of time my playthrough took and was a better experience overall.

The combat itself is mostly fine. When you can land attacks and finishers, it looks satisfyingly brutal. But blocking is a coin flip as to whether or not it wants to work. A latter boss fight requires an understanding of parrying, and having it not work about a quarter of the time gets awfully frustrating. This is the Kuroki boss fight, by the way. A bloody terrible boss. They constantly use ranged attacks at you and fly around whenever you get in range to attack her. They’re an utter pain to fight if you don’t know what you’re doing on your first time through.

There’s two endings to the game; one of them you get normally, and the other one requires you to not kill the bosses but to spare them instead. The game gives no hint or explanation as to how you do that, so I had to look it up. But I got there in the end.

If you want to watch my playthrough, you can do so here.

Stranger Of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin

I haven’t gotten as much time with this game as I would have liked, so there will probably be a continuation of my thoughts in a future post.

But let me get to the point: this game is weird. It’s like a time capsule to a 2005 PS2 game, but with better graphics and better controls.

The main character, Jack, is obsessed with chaos. Sorry, let me write that correctly. CHAOS. His obsession with it leads to some of the funniest unintended hilarity in his dialogue. Whenever a character wants to have a monologue, he butts in and tells them to shut the hell up or get to the point. Whenever he meets someone, he demands to know where CHAOS is. It’s pretty great.

As for the gameplay, I would describe it as a Nioh-lite. It takes some of the combat ideas from Nioh and shoves them into Final Fantasy’s job system. Your characters can play as a mage, thief, samurai, and so on. It’s pretty neat. You also have allies with you most of the time, which helps draw attention away from bosses, making things a bit more manageable.

The combat itself works well, as should be expected from the Nioh developers. Level design is OK, with some light puzzles, some branching paths for hidden items, and so on.

My only gripe with it so far is that you don’t get more than 9 healing items, and resting at a checkpoint will only refill it to 5. This can make some of the bosses really difficult at times, especially later in the game.

I’ve still got a lot left to see, so watch this space.

Killer Is Dead

Grasshopper games, and Suda51 games in particular, can be an utter crapshoot in terms of whether or not the gameplay is going to be functional, let alone fun. Killer7 is janky but mostly functional; the No More Heroes games are arguably their best-playing games; and Travis Strikes Again is god-awful on every front. And Killer Is Dead is more on par with No More Heroes.

A basic combat system with combos, guard breaks, guards into parries, and perfect dodges. The last of which lets you wail on an enemy with a flurry of slashes. You have a robotic arm that can turn into a drill, among other tools, but I can’t remember if I used it much in combat at all. It’s fun for the most part; there’s a rough edge to it, but I finished the game without major issues in that regard.

The other part of the game is dates. The main character is a gigolo and goes on dates with multiple women who have their own personalities and tastes. You can get them gifts. And raising their affection high enough will reward you with a weapon.

Unfortunately, this is where the problems begin.

The game, by default, is limited to 30FPS. You can change some settings around to unlock it to 60Hz or higher, but it makes the game incredibly unstable. The UI is tied to FPS, so playing at 144Hz makes it several times more difficult to select menu items as they are sped up considerably.

On top of that, the game will crash a lot, whether you modify the framerate or not. But it is several orders of magnitude worse at higher framerates. Even to the point where the game would softlock in missions due to the script breaking or just outright crashes when starting or playing a level. For example, one of the dating missions would crash during the opening cutscene. And I ended up not bothering to play it until I had finished the main story and lowered the FPS back to 30.

As for the story, well, it’s a mess. Involving vampires, the undead, Moon people, and much more. If you’re the type of person who’s into Suda51’s specific brand of “weird shit”, you’ll probably enjoy it.

Here’s my playthrough of it.

I Expect You To Die 2

The original I Expect You To Die is a neat little puzzle room game. With a handful of different solutions and hidden gags to find, I enjoyed that quite a bit. The sequel is a bit disappointing.

One of the complaints I had with the original was that the puzzles could occasionally have some very obtuse solutions that, at face value, had no logical sense. And that’s something the sequel improves on. Generally speaking, you’ll look at an item, have a general sense of what it can do, and then spend a bit of time figuring out where the hell it is in the environment in which you use it.

But on the other side of the coin, it’s also easier because of it. Don’t get me wrong, the game is more than happy to kill you for screwing up, but generally speaking, I was screwing up less.

This means the levels are a lot shorter this time around. I often finished them in 10-15 minutes. They’re still fun levels despite that. Particularly the one where you’re managing the mechanics of a stage play.

My other complaint about the game is that it lacks subtitles, despite having them in the first game and also being present in the now-released third game. An oversight, perhaps? Either way, it’s a bit annoying seeing as my hearing continues to get worse and it’s becoming more and more difficult to hear people.

Overall, fun, but a bit lacking. You can watch my playthrough here.

Dragon’s Dogma 2

I love Dragon’s Dogma 1. It’s the most “11/10”, 7/10 game I’ve ever played. Which is to say that it is a very flawed game with some ideas that it absolutely nails. The combat and vocations specifically. Climbing monsters, setting them on fire, picking up and throwing things, it was really fun. It was a breath of fresh air for action RPGs for me. I had no interest in turn-based stuff at the time, and other action RPGs had combat as an afterthought. As you can probably guess, I really dislike Skyrim.

Now, 12 years later, Dragon’s Dogma finally has its sequel. Although there was an MMO at one point, but I’ll get back to that later.

Let’s start with my first impressions: the character creator is fairly in-depth, more expanded than Monster Hunter World, but in some ways a bit behind the original. Pawn personalities are directly linked to voices this time, and there’s a lot less variety. Same with the player character’s voice, although less of an issue as they never say anything.

As for physical customisation, it’s better in most ways, but still a bit too easy to make weird-looking creations. Although once you’ve packed on the armour, you don’t notice as much.

Once I got into the game, I very quickly noticed how badly it ran. And I upgraded my PC specifically for this game. I did lower the settings a lot, and that certainly helped a bit. But there’s a lot of stuttering, especially in towns. My understanding is that it’s mostly the AI that’s eating up the processing, and killing every NPC apparently greatly improves it.

It’s disappointing, but after a while and a few patches, it did somewhat improve. And overall, it didn’t detract from my willingness to continue.

And continue, I did. There is a lot of exploring to do. There are a good amount of nooks and crannies to find and plenty of chests filled with crap to eat your weight limit and bog you down. But it’s not just the open world that you can explore freely now; I can pretty much enter every interior in the game, in multiple towns. Which actually reminds me, there’s multiple towns now.

You still need to walk everywhere, but there are now things like oxcarts and overhead trolleys to help speed things up. Although they are still at the mercy of monster spawns, the trolley, in particular, has a habit of being preyed upon by the local griffin. Of course, if you want to avoid that altogether, you can still use Portcrystals placed throughout the world and Ferrystones to be instantly transported. That said, there is no Eternal Ferrystone like in Dark Arisen; they are consumable items again.

Escort quests are still a thing, unfortunately, but you can now pick up the subjects and use a Ferrystone to instantly teleport where you need to be. Although there are instances where you have to escort multiple characters and have to take the long way around.

Side quests overall are a lot more in-depth now. Often featuring cutscenes and even a few branching narratives. Hell, even once the game tells you the quest is over, you can often visit the characters again to get further details or even additional rewards. I was genuinely surprised by the effort put into them. The side quests from the first game were abundant and often pointless, again mostly padded out with side quests. So although there are fewer quests now, they are of much higher quality.

The main story has some interesting things in it, but kind of ends just as it starts to get semi-interesting. If you mainlined the story, you’d probably be disappointed by its length.

I mentioned monsters before. There are only a few new ones; most of the types from the first game return. Especially goblins. The rate at which monsters spawn is ridiculous. I can’t go 20 paces without encountering yet another group of goblins, and in some cases, ogres. It’s a slog, especially early on when you don’t have enough Portcrystals and Ferrystones to just teleport where you need to go. You do get some respite if you return to an area you’ve previously cleared out, but overall, it gets really tedious dealing with monsters constantly.

One of the complaints about the original game was that it only had a few dragons to fight on set spawns, with the exception of the post-game. This time around, there’s a lot more to fight. They still have set spawns, but there are many more of them. And you have to fight them this time, as the story requires it near the end of the game. They’re not particularly difficult to deal with if you have the right gear.

But you might want to avoid fighting them, as the developer’s had the wise idea to add a hidden mechanic to them: Dragonsplague. This shit can ruin your entire playthrough. It causes your pawn to misbehave and gives them a more sickly appearance, and then after a while, when you rest at an inn or your home, your pawn will go berserk and murder everyone in town. You can easily avoid this by killing your pawns by throwing them in water when you know they have it. The tricky thing is knowing when they have it. The game only tells you the first time one of your pawns catches it; if it happens again, you don’t get that warning. So you have to be vigilant around your pawns to see if they misbehave or start looking off.

To be fair, they did patch the game to make Dragonsplague happen less frequently but also increase the visual effect on the pawns. The glowing red eyes are usually a giveaway.

Getting on to the combat system in general, it’s much weightier than the original Dragon’s Dogma. I don’t know if I prefer it or not. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed the combat a lot. I’m just struggling to figure out which one I liked more in terms of feel.

What I am annoyed with are the vocations. Although they did add some new ones, the overall number of vocations hasn’t increased. And there are actually fewer hybrid vocations. Plus, the ones that are there offer significantly limited weapon usability and a lot fewer skills.

For example, there is no Ranger class now. You can’t equip a bow and daggers at the same time with multiple skills for each weapon. You can either be a thief or an archer, with one weapon each and 4 customisable skills. Compare that to the original, where something like Ranger would let you have two weapons and 8 skills.

That said, there is the Warfarer vocation, which lets you switch weapons on the fly and assign any skill from class to it as long as you have them unlocked. Plus, if you unlock every class and then switch to Warfarer, you will gain XP for all of those classes even if you don’t use them. I personally used it to have both a bow and daggers. Unfortunately, I can only use three additional skills alongside the required one to switch weapons. So the class is basically useless.

Dragon’s Dogma Online had 11 vocations with even wilder skill sets, like Alchemist, which lets you punch people with massive gold fists, and a crap load of monsters. Very little of that has made it into Dragon’s Dogma 2. And that’s ultimately what is disappointing me. The cutback in skills, hybrid classes, and considerably less crazy vocations than Dragon’s Dogma Online really let me down.

Don’t get me wrong, the game is good, but we did not go to the moon.

Ender Lilies

I went into this game with high expectations. People were falling over themselves, saying how good of a Metroidvania this was. Well, I played it. And I wanted to like it, but it just kept getting worse.

It’s a difficult game, probably not as challenging as Hollow Knight, which is also a game I didn’t like that everyone else seemingly does, but the issue is that unlike most Metroidvanias, you don’t really get any stronger. You’re a glass cannon pretty much the whole way through. This is hammered in by the fact that your primary attack is unupgradable even half a dozen hours into the game, even after obtaining various key items that unlock multiple pathways.

Combat kind of reminds me of Hollow Knight, but you do have more attacks. You take damage very inconsistently and have no invulnerability frames that I can remember, so you can get absolutely riddled very quickly. And you will, as most of the enemies have ranged attacks while most of the player attacks are melee-only. Plus, you can only use those abilities a specific number of times because they’re limited. You get more when you rest at a checkpoint.

Getting back to health, the amount of damage you take is extremely variable. One attack might hit you for maybe 1/8 of your health bar, and then the same attack might hit you for 3/4 of it. It’s really annoying, as enemies can rinse you while you’re just trying to explore.

I’ll step away from the negativity for a bit to say that the art is really picturesque. There are some really great-looking backgrounds and some really well-done visual effects. The music is also pretty good, but it can sometimes be ill-fitting for areas where there’s a lot of combat.

Back to the critique and on to my last point: The map screen is awful. The map is broken up into areas with interconnected lines. Each area is just a square, with no detail telling you what that area looks like or how it’s laid out. It’s a pretty useless map screen that makes backtracking an utter pain, as I have to try and remember the layout of these areas while also trying not to die.

Overall, I’m really frustrated with it. I am doing a playthrough of it, but I have no idea if I’ll ever finish the game at the time of writing this.

Star Wars: Jedi Survivor

This game got lampooned on release for its performance and technical issues, particularly the PC version. There was apparently a lot of stuttering and crashing occurring for players who played it during that window. It ended up getting a reputation for being one of the worst PC ports of last year.

Well, it’s finally on Game Pass, more than a year later, so how is it?

In short, I haven’t had any major issues. Most of the problems I’ve had have been visual-related. Things like sparks being overly bright, flickering textures, broken animations, and occasionally characters missing bits of their bodies. And the game has only crashed twice on me.

Performance is adequate. Most of the time I’m getting above 60FPS, but I do see drops and stutters semi-frequently. Especially going into newer areas. That said, it certainly seems to have improved compared to the footage I was seeing on release.

Animations, and particularly platforming, have been the most concerning issues. There is a substantial amount of jank to the game. I often find that I can bully my way into new areas or places I’m not allowed to be in yet. And often, normal platforming stuff would just break because Cal would refuse to wall run or grab onto ledges. Sometimes my input would get eaten, Cal wouldn’t double jump, and I’d fall to my death. Thank goodness for the accessibility feature that removes fall damage.

Even with these issues, exploring is still an entertaining experience. Even the smallest planets end up feeling dense thanks to all the pathways and hidden items thrown about. The ability to fast travel to different checkpoints and animal mounts makes backtracking through previous areas much easier too. The map screen could still be better; it’s a bit of a pain to navigate. But on the plus side, they now highlight where all the collectables are after interacting with various computer panels throughout the game.

Combat has been iterated on with more combat stances. So along with the single, twin, and dual-bladed movesets, there’s now a heavy moveset and a Lightsabre & Blaster combo moveset. I quite like the latter of those two and use it with the dual-bladed sabre. There’s a whole bunch of new enemy types, including battle droids and many more monsters.

There’s a bunch of hidden bosses around as well, some of which are sometimes unfairly difficult. Plus, a bunch of challenge rooms where they take those enemies and throw multiple of them at you. Although, by the time I get to those challenges, I’ve had my fair share of those enemies and know all their attacks and tells.

The hub area the game has is a lot more lively than the Mantis, featuring a host of characters, many of whom give you side quests or sell you cosmetic items. The more NPCs you meet, the more filled it gets. There’s also a DJ that plays a whole playlist of original songs.

There are a few mini-games. There’s a garden on the roof where you can grow a vast array of plants. And there’s a “Holotactics” table where you pit enemy units against other units and see who wins. There’s a handful of rewards you receive if you win those fights, so it’s worth doing.

As for the story, it’s a bit barebones. You spend the whole game looking for items that help take you to a place called “Tanalorr”. A hidden dimension that supposedly would act as a haven for Jedi. And there’s little else going on besides that. I don’t care that much about the characters. The writing in modern video games is awful, and characters talk too much in them, and it’s no different here.

You basically go to a place to find a thing, then go to another planet, find another thing, go back to the previous planet to find something else on a different path, and rinse and repeat. I don’t really care; I’m more focused on the gameplay. I’ve been playing it while listening to podcasts anyway.

The only annoying thing that does bother me about the story is all of the activities the characters reference that happened between the previous game and this one. Events that, quite frankly, sound far more entertaining than what I spend most of my time in the game doing. Honestly, whatever the hell happened in the time gap would have made for a more interesting game.

I’m enjoying my time with it, bugs and all. And I’m almost done with it. Hopefully, the ending is better than the previous game. The ending kinda blows.

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2

After 8 years in development, Hellblade 2 came out. You probably didn’t even realise.

Anyway, it’s about 6 hours long. It’s slow as balls, mostly made up of walking sequences and cutscenes. When the combat does play into it, the segments last way longer than they need to. The combat is on par with the first game, but that’s not a particularly high bar. It’s still quite sluggish, and enemies take forever to kill unless you pop your slow-mo high damage mode.

The puzzles are somehow even more dumbed down than the first game, with the only real challenge being the lack of HUD. Even then, it’s virtually impossible to get stuck or lost.

At least the graphics are nice, but they’re insanely demanding. On my Ryzen 7 5800X3D and RTX 3060, I have to lower everything to the absolute minimum with DLSS just to maintain 60FPS. Unfortunately, the game is a hell of post-processing effects and letterboxing, which ruins the quality of the picture and makes it an eye sore to look at. But it still isn’t as bad as the first game.

It took me 6 hours to beat, and I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. It’s just really shallow. If you want to check it out, play it on Game Pass, or just watch my playthrough.

Return To Castle Wolfenstein

Due to being unable to progress further into the game Singularity and rage-quitting Ender Lilies, I decided to switch to this game instead.

Made by the same devs as Call Of Duty: United Offensive, albeit prior to that, Return To Castle Wolfenstein is a tough game to go back to.

First of all, you need to patch the game to support modern resolutions. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck playing it at 1024p at a 4:3 resolution. Other issues have more to do with the gameplay. Mandatory Stealth Sections are the biggest pain in the backside. There’s only 2 missions where stealth is required, but it’s a terrible experience. Enemies are overly sensitive to sound and also spot you from miles away. It doesn’t help that the first level of the two has very open areas that you can very easily get spotted in, and any alarm is an instant game over.

Furthermore, in that last level, if you get any kind of alert in the last area, you literally cannot finish the level because you need to keep the last guard alive, but if they’re alerted, the level end script cannot be activated. The second stealth level is a bit easier to deal with as there are more cover points and fewer open areas. Although there are still snipers and things to avoid, it is generally a better experience.

The next point is the gunplay itself. Damage and accuracy seem wildly inconsistent. The guns don’t have terribly tight groupings and often will not go where you’re shooting them. Enemies can be very bullet-spongy at times, particularly late into the game when you get the super soldiers. What’s more baffling is just how much more damage the enemies seem to do with the same guns you have. There’s a late-game weapon that shoots out arcs of lightning. In the player’s hands, it doesn’t kill opponents all that quickly. But when a super soldier uses it, your rear end is toast in record time. The FG42 is also a weird one. It does 10 points of health each hit, and considering the accuracy of enemies can vary wildly, you can sometimes enter a room and get instantly minced because there happened to be 2 or 3 guys in there with them, and their aim just happened to be set to God Tier mode.

On the subject of weapons, you don’t get a ton of variety early on. I spent most of the early levels with nothing but a MP40. To be fair, I didn’t need more than that, but it was disappointing. Once you get later in, you unlock things like flamethrowers, gatling guns, and the previously mentioned lightning weapon. Although only the gatling gun is even remotely effective at Nazi killing.

There’s also no shotgun in the PC version. Only the OG Xbox version has a shotgun in it. It is extremely disappointing considering id Software’s lineage.

Other than that, level design is OK. Some levels require a lot of backtracking to find the single items that you need to finish the level. There’s a good amount of secret and hidden rooms with goodies in them. There’s only a few levels that I really hated.

In conclusion, it’s tough to play these days, but it’s not completely awful. You can watch my playthrough here.

Other Stuff I Played:

Persona 3: Reload

For some inexplicable reason, they remade Persona 3. Specifically, they’re re-done to be more visually in line with something like Persona 5, especially the user interface. The menus and battle UI are very reminiscent of Persona 5. The music is still good; some of the new stuff is really good, but there are a few songs where I think the original is better. Plus, there are a few new battle mechanics and some new animations to go along with them. Unfortunately, I’m still very early into it (I haven’t even gotten to the first boss), so I don’t have much more to say other than that The Answer is a DLC episode. Which is a bit scummy.

Holo X Break

When I saw that the HoloCure devs were making a brawler, I thought it might be worth checking out. And although the visuals are on point, the gameplay is frustrating. It really isn’t a game you can play by yourself. The bosses are very difficult, and a lot of enemies use ranged attacks, which, if you’re soloing the game as a melee character, you’ll get really frustrated with it. I got to the last boss before giving up on it.

Warhammer 40K: Boltgun

Less of a DOOM clone and more of a Quake clone, possibly even taking ideas from Painkiller. It starts well but gets very tedious. Enemy variety isn’t great, the guns aren’t terribly fun to use, and then it removes your weapons every episode (Like DOOM, where episodes are multiple chapters). I tried to enjoy it, but got really bored with it.

Evil West

Cowboys hunting demons. It sounds like a great premise. And some of the visual designs are pretty cool. Unfortunately, the story fails to deliver on it, being pretty boring and quite frankly lacking some self-awareness or cheese. The gameplay is more God Hand than anything else, focusing heavily on melee combat but without tank controls. However, the controls are pretty messy, with a lot of directional button inputs and weird choices for inputs. That makes the combat a bit frustrating. One of the later bosses is especially crappy to try and fight, as it turns into a bullet hell while you try and slowly dodge all of it.

Manic Miners

I’ve been wanting to play Lego Rock Raiders again for years. And I’d given up all hope. And then one day, I stumbled across some discussion about it, and someone posted a link to something called “Manic Miners”. And guess what? It’s a full-blown remake of the game with a bunch of added features. And I’m loving it. It has some pacing issues (One of the tutorials took me nearly an hour before I really understood everything in it), and there isn’t quite as much automation as I’d like, requiring some more manual direction to units to do things over water or lava. But I’m sticking myself pretty deep into the campaign and really enjoying it.

Anime Corner:

Dungeon Meshi

This anime is really entertaining and surprisingly dark. It involves a party going into a dungeon to rescue one of their party members, but due to a lack of finances, they have to survive by eating the monsters in the dungeon. The elf character makes a lot of humorous faces. It’s the kind of anime that makes me think about how a game with similar mechanics would be, not just the food part, but also things like “Mana Sickness” and some other things later in the anime that I don’t want to spoil. There’s some things in here that I wish Dragon’s Dogma would steal, or maybe a new game with the ideas of both mashed up.

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That’s everything. I wrote most of this post quite close to the June deadline; I’ve been quite busy as of late and put updating this post over time into the backburner. You might notice that there are a lot more videos associated with the games here. As part of my plans I made a while ago, I decided to start making more video content for the games I was playing, whether it be demos or the first parts of my playthroughs. It’s not really resulting in views in the way I’d hope, so I might change up the strategy a bit.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been playing. See you in January for the second half of the year and the usual Top 10 lists.

ADMAN

Another year, another list of games I played. As always, I write this over a period of months; please forgive any inconsistencies in my writing style.

Only Up!

This gained some popularity as a stream game, and it was cheap, so I decided to give it a go to see if I could get even a small morsel of an increase to my average viewer count on Twitch. I tried Jump King back in the day, which is a very similar kind of game, but I really didn’t enjoy it. But this game seemed easier, and it was.

That said, it’s pretty fucking jank. The controls are messy, and the collision detection is spotty at best. The physics are very much tilted against you. There are a couple of points where the game will forcibly knock you off and force you down to the bottom of the map to start again. Thankfully, the devs added a lift that gets you back to the midpoint if that does happen.

Another thing that’s annoying is the voiceover, which is a bunch of nonsensical motivational messages. And you can’t disable them, as the sound options do absolutely nothing.

It’s not that good of a game, and I kind of wish I hadn’t bothered with it.

Happy Game

Despite the title, this isn’t all that happy of a game. This is made by the same folks as Machinarium, which I didn’t play much of. But much like that game, it’s a point-and-click adventure type of thing with some pretty messed-up visuals and morbid puzzles to boot.

The game is about a kid having a series of nightmares around various objects and a pet, constantly trying to get back the items the dream is taking away from them. The one involving the dog was especially uncomfortable, and I went and petted my dog right after finishing the game.

The visual style kind of reminded me of the music video for “Welcome To The Machine” by Pink Floyd, although more bloody and gross.

It’s quite a short game; I think I finished it in under 2 hours. Worth playing? Kind of, but don’t spend too much on it.

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty

Well, since the last time I talked about this game, I have finished it. And it’s a pretty good game despite the technical issues, and probably the sole reason I had Game Pass as long as I did this year.

But yeah, I kept playing it and made my way through some pretty average bosses and a couple of decent ones. The highlight of which was Lu Bu, whom I fought twice. He has a deceivingly normal fight that seems harder than it actually is. But if you bait out his special attacks, you can exploit him pretty consistently and eventually get him in a critical state where you can deliver a high-damage attack. His second fight is definitely easier than his first, although most of that is due to knowing what to expect from him. But don’t get me wrong; it still took me a few tries to get him.

The other bosses can be interesting, but very few stand out. The only other example I can think of besides the last two main mission bosses is a boss that has three phases. Two phases are on one health bar, and then after defeating it, it revives and spawns another health bar, and then spams you with charge attacks that you have to parry and get the boss in a vulnerable state to do heavy damage.

The very last main boss is pretty fun. It’s a one-on-one fight against a human enemy, which is actually fairly refreshing considering what the previous fights were up to that point. It’s not difficult either; it only took me two tries. After that fight, in the post-end game, there’s not really much at all. There are a handful of more difficult missions and the option for new game+ and I think there is an endless mode as well, but I can’t remember.

Either way, technical difficulties aside, I had fun with this. Nioh is still probably a better game overall, but the additional platforming and verticality are nice additions. I like the parry system, although some instances of it can come off as bullshit at times. And the Chinese short sword and associated moveset are really fun to use.

Don’t pass on it; it’s better than you think.

A Plague Tale: Requiem

The second game I’ve played to completion on XCloud. And with my improved Internet speed, it was a much better experience than the last time. I could actually see what I was doing instead of getting excessive amounts of macroblocking.

Anyway, Plague Tale: Requiem is very similar to the first game, but with some refinements. You still need to avoid rats, and there’s now even bloody more of them. The stealth stuff has been improved, and you can now avoid a lot of combat if you want, especially with new tools that get rats out of the way. The tar mechanic is quite effective.

They’ve doubled down on the rats acting more like a liquid simulation, which has led to some additional mechanics for how they work. Although these mechanics are frequently used only once. There’s a section where Hugo is able to shoot out geysers of rats from the ground at will to stop incoming enemies. Late into the game, there’s a section where the rats pulse out towards you like waves, and you have to take over so they go around you. The game is full of these one-and-done types of game mechanics, and most of them are well implemented.

A new weapon you get is a crossbow, and as you can imagine, it adds a few more mechanics to the game, like shooting rope or bait to lure the rats away. You don’t get a tonne of ammo for it, but it’s pretty neat.

I’m struggling to say too much about the game because I can’t remember much due to how much time has passed since I played it and when I started writing this post, but also because I don’t want to spoil the story. But I will say this: I think the ending is extremely underwhelming and abrupt. It very much soured my view of the whole game. You do all this work dealing with rats, puzzles, and stealth gameplay, and your reward is unfulfilling.

It’s pretty, at least, and looks pretty good via XCloud.

Chronicles Of Riddick

I’ve been meaning to play this Vin Diesel simulator for a while. Jokes aside, these games are considered cult classics. I’m a fan of this era of Starbreeze, being a big fan of the first The Darkness game. But this game is a bit mixed. Some highs, some interesting things, and then a good dash of bullshit thrown in.

The game is about Riddick, an extremely competent killer, going to a prison called Butcher Bay. This is a prequel to the movie Pitch Black, where the prison is mentioned in an off-hand comment. I actually didn’t watch the first two films until I was most of the way through Butcher Bay. There’s a lot of extra world-building that is quite interesting, but unfortunately gets put to the side in favour of everyone’s favourite baldy anti-hero.

But I digress. Riddick gets sent to prison. When in prison, you talk to the inmate and get side quests to do, including killing other inmates or getting specific items for them. Although The Darkness also does this, I wasn’t quite expecting it from Butcher Bay, considering how linear I was expecting it to be. There’s other optional stuff that’s worth doing too, and some of it can be missed as the game doesn’t always tell you that you can do it. There’s a bit early into the game where you break into the warden’s shower room. Here, you can change into one of their uniforms and go through the rest of the area without the guards bothering you. However, I didn’t know about this and proceeded to kill everything between there and the objective.

Stealth is a fairly major part of the game, but it’s kind of wonky. Enemies will often see you in the dark. Noise is a big factor as well, but it’s hard to tell how loud you’re actually being. Enemies’ sight ranges are pretty ridiculous as well. Especially once you get to the mines section, the stealth starts breaking down, and you’re turned into mince meat. And I died a lot. You get near bugger all health, and it melts away in a fraction of a second in most combat situations. For a while, I thought it was an issue with the unlocked frame rate, but it wasn’t. You just get rinsed on normal difficulty.

There is a section in the Dark Athena game that does have FPS-dependent physics, however. There’s a gravity chamber that will pull the player towards it if they don’t fight against it, but at a greater than 60Hz frame rate, the moment you enter the room, you’re flinged straight at the damn thing, killing you.

The game’s visuals still hold up for the most part. The environments look great, but the character models look a bit dodgy, and the animations can be a bit stiff.

Just to end on a high note, there’s some mech sections in the game that are pretty fun because it’s the only time where you’re able to obliterate enemies while negating most of their damage.

Good game, but a little rough these days.

Call Of Duty WWII

I played this as part of my WWII COD Marathon streams (Collection for this game here), with this being the last game of the marathon (I don’t own Vanguard yet) and the one previous being World At War. And the immediate difference between this game and that game is the order of magnitude improvement in the graphics. Holy shit, it looks good by comparison. To be fair, we are comparing an early-ish PS3 game to a late-PS4 game, and the changes in technology between the two games are pretty substantial, but playing them back-to-back was a bit jarring.

Playing through all the WWII CODs was a bit of a slog by the time I got to WWII. At some point, the repetitiveness of shooting Nazis (With some Italians, Japanese, and Socialist French thrown in for good measure) gets a bit tedious. WWII changes that formula by adding in some much-needed gameplay variety. Stealth sections, optional objectives, and changes to the pacing bring some much-needed diversification. In addition to this, allies have specific abilities that can assist you, whether it’s giving you health packs, ammo, or even artillery support. It’s a nice addition and kind of reminds me of kill streaks.

Generally, I found the gameplay to be a breath of fresh air compared to the other WWII games.

I also want to make a small note about the sound design. COD has always had some pretty good sound, but this game takes it a step further and really hammers in the audio detail. The bullets whizzing by, the sounds of metal hitting metal, lead hitting flesh, and the explosions all have much higher fidelity than the previous games I’ve played.

So what’s the bad part? Its inaccuracies.

There’s a lot of Russian guns in Normandy, and although the Germans did modify and use Russian weapons, there’s no evidence to support the idea that they made it that far west. There’s also a whole mission where you kill the guy running Paris alongside the French Resistance, but in reality, that dude surrendered without issue. Hill 400 is renamed completely, and you and your company go and take it. But in reality, The Big Red One battalion took that hill and was even covered in Call Of Duty 2. Some dude did a video on all the inaccuracies; I’d highly recommend searching it out if you’re interested.

The last negative point is just the story. It’s a bit shit. There’s a couple of dumb scenes that lead to characters getting killed, which didn’t really need to happen. Or rather, the setup for them is so bad you look at it and think, “If they had just used their head and done something a bit different, they could have lived easily”. There’s also some scenes regarding war crimes that are just far too short to be impactful.

Other than those negative points, I actually enjoyed my time with the game quite a bit. I was expecting it to be much worse based on what people had to say about it.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

I played Jet Set Radio Future some time ago and really enjoyed the aesthetic and music, but the gameplay is dated at best and clunky at worst. Very floaty jumping and getting speed were issues, and there were a lot of dumb platforming and combat sections. So when Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was announced, much like everyone else, I was stoked to play it. And after a number of years, it’s here. I played it, and I love it. It’s really damn good.

Imagine if Jet Set Radio made sweet love to the Tony Hawk series; this is the kind of game you’d get. You like skateboards and BMXs, along with the already existing stable of inline skates. Each has their own unique ability, which helps you get into specific places to get collectables.

But why do I say Tony Hawk? Well, besides the previously mentioned skateboards, the combo system is very reminiscent of those games. Pull off more tricks, get more combo multipliers, and get more points. Doing things like wall running and grinding into corners also increases the combo multiplier.

As a cherry on top of the movement option, you get a rocket boost back. Using it while doing tricks lets you do a special trick, which also has the bonus of renewing your combo timer while doing manuals and such. The entire suite of movement options is just perfectly tuned. It feels so good to play.

As for the minute-to-minute gameplay, you go from district to district facing off against rival crews, challenging their lines, and eventually having a face-off where the crew with the higher score wins. None of that is particularly difficult. The other side of the game is dealing with the ever-intensifying police force. Get a high enough heat level, and they will send freaking mechs at you.

The only three negatives I have with the game are: the combat is kind of blows; the police get really annoying later on when you’re trying to explore and do stuff; and once you finish the game and do all collectables, there is NOTHING to do but grind around. If they had nicked Skate’s Own The Spot feature or something or some kind of score competition between your friend group, that could help lengthen my playtime a bit.

And I really do want to play more of it. Since I finished it, it’s been on my mind since. Mostly the soundtrack, which I’ve been listening to almost every day since. It’s a damn good soundtrack.

The devs still update the game and have been adding a lot of quality-of-life improvements, and the modding scene is getting pretty wild. Custom maps are soon to be available too, so I might check in again once some good ones get made.

HoloCure

This is my first experience with this type of game. The genre seems to be referred to as “Auto Shooter Survival”. In other words, it’s something akin to “I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1” but instead of having direct control over when you attack, it does it automatically. You gain extra attacks and abilities the longer you survive and level up.

In case you’ve been living under rock, this game is a HoloLive fan game featuring VTubers and their greater “lore”. You play as the VTubers, and you fight against representations of each of their fanbases. Usually made of chibi versions of animals or objects. There’s a lot of references in there that someone more obsessed than me would likely appreciate. Especially a lot of weapons you get and the combination weapons you can craft from them.

The pixel art is really well done. The girls are very cute in their chibi forms, and the various enemies emote quite well in their simple animations. It’s got style.

However, once you get late into a stage, it becomes a complete clusterfuck of lights and colours. Not necessarily in a way that impacts gameplay. I never felt like it was getting in the way of me being able to see where I was going or what I was aiming for. But it’s certainly a little overwhelming.

When I started playing it, I did start to get a Tetris-Effect-like response from it. Seeing the play symbol pickups in my dreams, along with hearing the coin sounds. After a while, it stopped, but it was an interesting observation nonetheless.

The game is still in active development as of writing this, and I’m looking forward to more characters and weapons being added.

Gun

Gun is Neversoft’s answer to Red Dead Revolver. But unlike that game, this one is actually open-world. It’s a little rough by today’s standards. It required some file modifications to get working on my PC correctly. It only runs at 30FPS, which feels pretty bad, but it’s mostly consistent, at least framerate-wise. The controls are not great by default, but with a little tweaking, you can make it feel a little better.

What I found surprising was just how violent this game was. I’m not talking comical over-the-top stuff either. Yes, you can blow limbs off and that’s all good, but you can also find people in agony after a gunfight and finish them off. Or scalp them, which you can do to pretty much every enemy. You can’t sell the scalps or really do anything with them, but you can do it. You also see some throats get cut, which are surprisingly more detailed than you’d expect.

I suppose in this day and age, some people might look at this game and condemn its “racial stereotypes”. But I found that it was only skin deep; once you actually look at the characters and see how they act and do things, you realise it’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s hard to explain in detail, but it ends up making sense.

I wasn’t super compelled by the story, and most of the side quests were pretty bad. But it’s kind of fun for the time I had with it. It’s also another game I streamed and you can find the collection here.

Star Wars: Republic Commando

Over the years, I’ve heard nothing but good things about this game, about how underrated it is, and about how everyone who played it desperately wants a sequel. And I fail to understand why.

The game has an interesting point of view. You’re a 4-man squad of elite clone troopers during the clone wars. You get to see a bunch of different battles from the films from that perspective, but you also get some original missions that fill in a few gaps between the movies. It also introduces General Grievous, although I don’t know if this is his actual first introduction into the universe as the characters seem to know who he is already. But it’s the earliest piece of media I’ve seen him in. Anyway, it takes you to all these places, but the actual story is very bare bones. I think there were a bunch of logs and notes that I picked up during the game, but there’s no cutscenes at all. So there’s a lot of detail that’s lost on me.

As for the minute-to-minute gameplay, well, it’s a lot of shooting. And the gunplay is bad. Enemies are really bullet-spongy, especially the Super Battle Droids. The guns lack recoil and weight, so shooting them feels really awful. You also can’t gauge their power. Throw that in with enemies that do not go down easily, and you just feel like someone trying to take on a tank with a pea shooter.

The game difficulty is a bit all over the place too. There’s often parts where you’re just blasting through, mowing down everything in your path, and then one section will bring it to a screeching halt and kill you and your teammates over and over again. There’s a section late in the game on a bridge that I had to do over and over because I just kept getting minced by the Supers that spawned there. There’s little to no cover on the bridge, and my teammates kept getting killed.

Another aspect of the combat and level design is setting up tactical positions for your teammates. Sniping positions and turrets specifically. These sections would be a lot better if my teammates were more effective at eliminating the enemy and if it played more like a tower defence situation. As is, they’re often quite short, and I don’t think the idea was fully fleshed out.

To top it all off, the game is just very repetitive. It brings very little to the table besides shooting people in corridors, even in outside environments. There are definitely some ideas here, but they just aren’t fully realised. I suppose those shortcomings are due to the time constraints of getting this game out in line with the Clone Wars TV series and Episode III. I’m disappointed, but it is what it is.

You can watch my playthrough here.

Dusk Diver

I’ve had this one on my to-play list for quite some time now. I first saw it during the Indie Live Expo, where I thought the combat looked interesting. Well, now I’ve played it, and I can say I’m a bit disappointed with it. The combat is probably a highlight, but it’s still only decent at best. It’s not terribly deep, but it’s responsive enough. The real problem is that every combat section lasts for WAY too long. A typical video game encounter might have a dozen enemies or so, right? And a typical game wouldn’t spawn more. Here, it’s more than that and usually spawns about 2 or 3 more rounds of them. So each encounter ends up being a massive slog.

The enemy variety isn’t too bad, but some of the bigger ones end up having way too much health. The boss fights end up being a highlight, but at some point I just wanted to finish the game and be done with it.

Outside of the combat sections, you get a Yakuza-lite experience. You run around a borough of Taiwan’s capital city, Taipei; unfortunately, the name is too long for me to remember. Around the city are collectables and side quests. You actually need to collect the collectables, known as Shards, to be able to continue the story. Thankfully, the game offers you the option to talk to a dude, give him money, and then they’ll be highlighted on your map. Even without that, I never got blocked from progressing.

As for the side quests, they mostly involve running around town, talking to people, taking pictures of things, or having more fights with the usual bunch of monsters. A lot of it is fairly meaningless.

To top it off, the story is excruciatingly dull. Basically, you gain a bunch of magical powers, you control some small monsters that turn into humans, and they assist you in combat. And you spend the whole game trying to stop the world those dudes are from and your world from merging. That’s about it. It drags that plot out quite a bit.

I’m a bit disappointed with it. I have no idea if the sequel is better or not. If you want to watch my playthrough you can do so here.

Sprawl

Sprawl makes a great first impression but gets worse as it goes on. With the highlights being the movement mechanics and the environment art.

The game is set in a cyberpunk world where machines have taken over control of the central government. You play as an assassin. And you work your way through the level, murdering dudes and robots.

As I said, the movement mechanics are pretty good, taking a page out of Titanfall’s book with wallrunning, sliding, dashing, and more. The larger environments lend themselves well to those mechanics, with a lot of space and height to run around in. Unfortunately, the game also spends a lot of time in smaller environments like apartment buildings and sewers. Plus, there are several places where it’s just open-space arenas.

That said, when it works, it works. But Titanfall is still king. And I mentioned that the environments look great. Very worn and filthy, full of Chinese characters as you would expect from a cyberpunk theme, despite the fact that no one actually uses the language. The atmosphere is definitely on point when you’re running around urban areas. The industrial places are a bit too dull. Like I said, they’re more or less sewers.

But how’s the shooting? Decent. There are a lot of difficulty options, including how much damage you take and receive. I would personally recommend that you ramp up the player’s damage output to its maximum, as the enemies are bullet-spongy as fuck, to the point where it’s a detriment.

The difficulty is all over the place in general. I got through most of the game without issue, but in a few places I would just die repeatedly and quickly. I’m not sure if it’s due to bugs or if I just wasn’t paying attention to my health.

The weapon selection is pretty crap. Nothing is all that crazy; nothing really does the damage you’d expect. And the shotgun is terrible. It takes about 2 seconds to pump and is a complete piss-up in regards to how much damage it will do. Some enemies will get minced in one shot at point blank range, and then another enemy will tank 2 or 3 shots under the same scenario.

I’m a bit disappointed in it, but I did finish it. And you can watch the playthrough here.

Like A Dragon: Gaiden – The Man Who Erased His Name

Despite their best efforts, Kiryu is back again as the protagonist of a Yakuza- Wait sorry, Like a Dragon game. Although this time he’s called Joryu. Why? Well, play Yakuza 6, and you’ll find out why. But due to those events, he is unable to return to the orphanage and is now working for the Daijouji faction, doing odd jobs for them.

Anyway, this game runs somewhat in parallel to Yakuza: Like A Dragon / Like A Dragon 7 / Yakuza 7 (Jesus fucking Christ, this naming system somehow managed to get worse). And I’ll stop talking about the story because you really should just play these games already if you haven’t. The story is such a huge part of it that spoiling it would be a significant disservice.

So let’s talk about the side stuff and general gameplay.

They brought back fighting styles, just two this time. You have the classic Dragon Of Dojima style, which I pretty much used exclusively as it does a lot more damage, and the Joryu style, which lets you use gadgets and is more focused on counters, grapples, and fast jabs.

Don’t get me wrong, Joryu style isn’t awful or anything; I just found the gadgets to be somewhat lacklustre in terms of power and a bit gimmicky. There are three gadgets to use: a grappling hook, which is probably the most effective, an explosive cigarette, and a swarm of drones.

Combat in Gaiden seems to call back to Yakuza 3 a bit, with a lot of enemies getting hyper-armour and blocking your attacks frequently. Compared to 6, where enemies got thrown around a lot from Kiryu’s punches, kicks, and getting walloped from a bicycle. Plus, Kiryu gets stunned and knocked down a lot more in Gaiden. You feel a lot less powerful over all. Furthermore, there are many more fights in general, which now take longer in general, which slows the pacing down. Considering the length of the main story, that’s probably intentional.

Story progress is actually gated behind getting a certain rank on a casino boat (Long story, play the game), which unlocks new areas of the ship to progress the story. How do you get higher ranks? Akame’s Requests and Colosseum battles.

Akame’s Requests take the place of side stories from the previous game. There’s quite a few of them; some of them are simple, like giving a person a healing drink, and some are more complicated, involving getting pictures of certain monuments, finding rare materials, and, in one case, doing a series of quizzes. They can get really tedious, and some are downright a pain (Karaoke and Pool specifically). But, if you’re already familiar with the series’ side quest stuff, it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

The Colosseum battles are pretty dull. There’s some variation, but for the most part, you fight the same enemies over and over. There’s also team battles, where you use teammates that you get from various side quests, DLC, and recruiting. These fights are a bit different as your teammates use special abilities, plus you can play as other characters if you want. But I just found the whole thing to be a drag, notably near the end of the game where the Platinum fights require your teammates to be levelled up to be strong enough to stand a decent chance. And the way you level them? Either talk to a trainer and pay an obscene amount of money to train them, which can also fail, or do the lower-ranked fights over and over.

In terms of other side stuff, karaoke is back, of course, but so is pool, which is surprising as I thought the Dragon Engine couldn’t support it. That said, considering how it behaves, I suspect they took the code from Zero and jammed it in there like some unholy blend. However, thanks to that, something else has returned. Pocket Circuit.

I spent an alarming amount of time playing Pocket Circuit, as is per tradition when I play these games. I’d wager it added about another 10 hours to my play time. There’s not much more I can really add to that because it’s not that much different from its previous incarnations. The surrounding characters around it aren’t really all that noteworthy either. But hell, I still did all of it.

And for the last thing, it comes with a demo for Infinite Wealth. It’s pretty rare for a game to come with a demo these days, let alone a demo for its own sequel. It’s not terribly long; you play a bit as Kiryu and then play as Ichiban for the rest. You can walk around town and collect trash, and then you continue the story and get a boss fight. There’s actually two experiences in the demo; what I just described is the story demo. There’s a “Hawaii” demo, which is just an exploration demo where you can do various side quests, whizz around on a Segway, and do a small handful of mini-games. One of those is karaoke, and the other one is a Pokemon Snap-esque thing where you take pictures of perverts from a tram car.

And don’t worry, I will rarely ever mention Pokemon on this blog.

Anyway, if you want to see my full playthrough of Like A Dragon: Gaiden, you can view the collection here. But I’ll warn you now, a lot of it was Pocket Circuit.

Atomic Heart

Atomic Heart has been in development for what seems like eons. Every once in a while, I’d see a bit of a tech demo of it, whether it be a weird shader, some really neat mechanical animation, or horrifying monsters. And in 2023, it finally did come out. Although I didn’t get a chance to play it until very late in the year.

The whacky art style is certainly retained in the released game. The mechanical animation is excellent, and the Soviet-era utopia art design is pretty interesting. The music is fantastic as well, especially the choices in licenced songs, which of course include a couple of songs from my favourite Russian band, Kino.

Now, I did stream the game, and it does come with a “streamer mode”. So why did I hear the licenced songs? Simple: The streamer mode doesn’t work. Weirdly, none of the songs got me muted on Twitch, but the music that plays when using the upgrade machines did.

As for the gameplay, it’s a very weird genre mishmash. You’d be forgiven for thinking that it takes its ideas from Bioshock, and in some ways it does. But there’s other influences, like Far Cry, thrown in. Let me explain.

You get a bunch of Bioshock-esque powers that you can upgrade, as well as a bunch of weird weaponry. But then you get outside, and suddenly there are a variety of other small housing areas you can visit and do stuff in. Much like Far Cry 3 onwards. You can even drive a shitty red Lada to each of the places while listening to the radio.

There is a point to going to these places; there’s a series of dungeon-like areas you can access that have a series of challenges or puzzles to face. As you progress through them, you find chests that contain upgrade parts for your weapons. Which you’re going to need, but I’ll get to that later. The dungeons can vary from OK to dreary. A couple of them have annoying boss fights in them, while others (If not all of them) have stupid puzzles involving magnets, valves, or both. They’re neither interesting nor difficult, so near the end of the game, I was really sick of them. Thankfully, there’s only about 8 of these places.

But getting back to the gunplay. In a word, it sucks. Particularly early on when they do near bugger-all in terms of damage. Enemies feel bullet-spongy as a result, and I spent most of my resources early on crafting ammo. The shotgun in particular, is disappointing. Often taking 4 or more shots at point blank range to kill a standard enemy, regardless of where you hit them. With upgrades, it does eventually become the 1-hit wonder you’d expect it to be at close range, but you’re basically at the end of the game at that point.

The bosses could be better. A lot of them aren’t actually difficult to deal with, but rather just eat all of your ammo. More often than not, I would have to reload a save before a fight, stock up on rocket launcher ammo, then go into the fight on slightly more even ground. However, none of them stood out that much.

The most interesting part of the game, which only comes up a couple of times, are the surrealist dream-like sequences where you’re platforming around a bizarre looking environment filled with odd architecture and clown versions of military equipment. These segments really remind me of some of those earlier tech demos, and that’s what I was expecting more from this game.

The last thing I’d like to mention is that the main character occasionally calls people “Crispy Critters”. This doesn’t mean much in English. But apparently the original Russian line is a bunch of nonsense that translates to “Fucking Pies!”. A friend who was watching my stream let me know about this, and now I’m trying to find a way of using it in my general vocabulary.

You can watch my playthrough here.

Gal Guardians

Originally called Grim Guardians, Gal Guardians is a Classicvania-style game featuring characters from the Gal Gun series. Which, admittedly, I haven’t played much off. And for once, I’m not lying for a joke; I really haven’t played much of the games. I played a bit of Gal Gun VR, and that was about it.

Anyway, you play as two characters, kind of like Portrait Of Ruin (A Castlevania game I still haven’t played), with two very different weapon sets and sub-weapon sets. Maya uses slashing attacks and magic; Shinobu uses a submachine gun. Yes, you read that correctly.

The art is pretty good, the player characters animate well, and there’s a lot of neat details. The enemies look pretty good too, although they’re fairly standard types. They would not look out of place in a Castlevania game. Then again, Castlevania has even crazier enemies, like maids and mirror monsters.

As for level design, well, like I said, it’s Classicvania. Mostly linear levels with a boss at the end. But there are branching paths like Rondo Of Blood, but most of these either lead to additional secrets or just loop back around. Once you get to the ending section, even more pathways open, and you can unlock even more stuff and find more students to rescue. And there is one alternative version of a boss. These additional pathways do make replaying the levels a bit more tolerable as they provide differences in level design, environments, and enemies.

The endings are worth noting, as there are three of them. One is a “Normal” ending, one is a “True” ending, and one is a very direct reference to Gal Gun. Getting the first of the three is easy; the second one requires you to find some machine parts; and the third requires you to find every student in the game.

Endings being gated behind collectables can be a mixed bag at times, but here it’s not too bad. At least compared to the endings in some of the Castlevania games, which require you to obtain some pretty arbitrary items hidden in some rooms and break some random wall somewhere.

Pretty good game, you should check it out. And if you want to see my playthrough, it’s here.

Other Stuff I Played:

Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae

I remembered people talking about this game some years ago and how good the combat was. And the combat is pretty decent; however, in every other respect, it’s awful. The camera is bad, it’s really repetitive, and the bosses have really cheap attacks. I played it for about an hour and never touched it again.

Metal Wolf Chaos

I could tell you in words how I feel about Metal Wolf Chaos, or you could watch me play the whole game in three videos.

But I think it’s fair to say, it’s a life changing experience.

Hi-Fi Rush Spectra Doors

There’s one last thing for me to do in Hi-Fi Rush, and it’s the Spectra Doors, a series of challenge rooms you can find throughout the game that are only accessible in New Game+. The first 8 aren’t too bad, but the following 8 that unlock after that are considerably more challenging. Unfortunately, to get the secret ending, I need to finish these, but as of the time of writing, I still haven’t done that.

Need For Speed: Unbound

I played this on Game Pass, first via XCloud, but then I downloaded it so I could play it at a higher framerate. Unfortunately, the improved frame rate doesn’t solve the problem of the cars handling like boats. It also doesn’t solve the problem of the God awful voice acting and shit music that plagues it. This is another game I played for a couple of hours and dropped. I’m not surprised it didn’t sell well.

Wild Arms 5

I’m quite early in this still, but the hex-based combat system seems pretty good. I started playing this on my phone on a day when my power was out. I’m playing an undubbed version, so I get all the Nana Mizuki goodness. Or I would if the game had more voiced lines. I still need to finish the other games in the series, but I will play more of this periodically over the next year.

Heavenly Sword

I remember enjoying this game back in the day, but I never finished it. So I decided to finally rectify that. The combat is mostly fine, but I had forgotten how broken the blocking mechanic was. It simply doesn’t work. Parrying does work, but I only started using it in the last fight to fling projectiles back at the boss.

The cutscenes are a lot fucking weirder than I remember. King Bohan is extremely horny, and the behaviour of the other characters is borderline nonsense at times. Plus, the cutscenes often feel very disjointed with what you’re doing in the gameplay at times.

Nariko is a pretty crap character. I think the games industry is bad at writing women now, but this character back then has all the same issues as female characters now. Overly arrogant, borderline delusional, and completely unable to listen to reason. Every other character is more or less exploited in favour of her deranged worldview. I don’t really want to go on a rant about this, so I’ll leave it at that.

Finally, emulate this game if you can, it runs terribly on PS3. And you can watch my playthrough here.

Cultic

This one is still in “Early Access”, or, to be more specific, only Chapter 1 is available. Some people have compared this to Blood, which I can certainly understand given the movement mechanics both these games have and their love of throwing dynamite at people. The art style is pretty cool, quite dark, and retro-inspired. The guns are designed well but a bit wimpy to use, but you can upgrade them. I’ll be keeping my eye on this one.

Jusant

A game dedicated to rock climbing. The gameplay is pretty solid, and the controls work well enough. The rope-swinging stuff is really fun. I might try to emulate it for SandSurfer if I ever get to that point. It’s fairly linear, but there are some multiple paths and additional exploration to be had. It’s fairly short too; I got through most of it in a day. It’s pretty neat, and it’s on Game Pass. You can watch my playthrough here.

Kannagi Usagi

Imagine Sekiro, but with a bit clunkier of a combat system, as a boss rush game, and with anime girls. That’s Kannagi Usagi in a nutshell. For what it’s worth, it works quite well. The animations are stiffer than I’d like, and there’s no animation cancelling of any kind, but for what it’s offering, the execution is pretty decent. It is quite graphically demanding. I suspect that’s due to some advanced Unity features, high poly assets, and the fact that characters are VRM models. Which you really shouldn’t be using for characters in a game.

Did I mention it’s completely free? You can watch my playthrough here, here, and here.

Wild Hearts

Another game I haven’t played much of. It’s a Monster Hunter clone from Omega Force and Koei Tecmo that EA of all people published. It’s available on Game Pass, which is how I’m playing it. The combat is snappier than Monster Hunter, and the monster designs are a bit more grotesque. Unfortunately, it runs like absolute shit, even on the newer rig. I’ll play a bit more of it and see if I like it more or not.

My Top 10 Games Of The Year

It’s that time again. This year was better than last year for releases for me, but my top 10 might still surprise you. But before that, a bit of other stuff.

Released Games That I Wanted To Play Or Play More Of

There were so many games I missed out on this year due to lack of finances, so I’ll just list them in bullet points.

• Star Wars: Jedi Survivor
• Street Fighter 6
• Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
• Neptunia: Sisters VS Sisters
• Hogwarts Legacy
• Resident Evil 4 (Remake)
• Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising

There’s also Ion Fury: Aftershock which I do own, but I haven’t played yet because I’m still working my way through the base game.

Worst I Played

I think Only Up is probably my least favourite game of the year. It’s not hard to see why; it’s a streamer bait game, one I fell for hook, line, and sinker for. It didn’t really bring new viewers to my channel, just spam bots. And it just sucks. It’s jank as fuck, and the reward for finishing it is non-existent. Fuck this game.

That said, worse games did come out this year, but I did not play them.

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Right, now here is my Top 10:

1. Planet Of Lana
2. Kanngi Usagi
3. Jusant
4. Gal Guardians: Demon Purge
5. HoloCure: Save The Fans
6. Like A Dragon: Ishin Kiwami
7. Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
8. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty
9. Hi-Fi Rush
10. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

I actually managed to play 10 games I liked this year. 1 & 2 were very close for me. But Bomb Rush edges it out by a hair. The movement mechanics are just so good, the music is amazing, the style is great, and there’s so much potential for more. Hi-Fi Rush is excellent as well, and you should absolutely play it, but Goddamn, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is good.

Anime Corner:

Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta

This anime is bad for my heart. The two main characters’ interactions are cripplingly adorable. The character animation is also very well done. The backgrounds are 3D, but they’re not completely awful to look at. The whole plot of it is that an eccentric girl forgets her glasses, and the boy sitting at the desk next to her starts realising how cute she is as she has to rely on him to help her do things with her poor eyesight and gets closer to her to share textbooks and so on. Bit of a slow-paced show, but worth watching.

Uchi no Kaisha no Chiisai Senpai no Hanashi

A typical office romcom, but the girl is a short but buxom woman who is a senpai to the male character. Kinda like Uzaki-chan, but with less teasing and bullying. Instead, various characters are pushing the two together romantically, and the interactions and scenarios are pretty good. They don’t get too pervy either, which helps on the believability side, even if you’re the type of person who prefers fanservice. Worth checking out.

Under Ninja

It’s probably the weirdest show about ninjas I’ve ever watched. It’s got international conspiracies: a pregnant woman in a rubber suit disguised as a strange old geezer, a 20-something-year-old bum pretending to be a high schooler, and a cat riding a motorcycle. That said, the manga seems way crazier and more vulgar, with a lot less censorship. Maybe the BDs will add more, but I suspect they won’t. So check out the manga instead.

My Top 10 Anime Of The Year

Special Mentions:

Oshi no Ko

But only the first episode, which is technically a prologue movie. It’s really well done, and I enjoyed the show overall, but that first episode is really stand out.

Under Ninja

I already talked about it above, but it’s weird and entertaining. But again, read the manga.

Bungou Stray Dogs 4th & 5th Series

This is quite a long-running series at this point. But the 4th and 5th series really turn the status quo on its head. The gang is now wanted as criminals against a force so insanely overpowered that it seems borderline impossible that they would overcome it. However, the way they handle that situation is why this is only in the special mentions section and not the top 10. But I still enjoyed it.

Worst Anime I Watched:

Keikenzumi na Kimi to, Keiken Zero na Ore ga, Otsukiai suru Hanashi

The guy’s a virgin; the girl isn’t a virgin. Drama ensues, and it made me want to slam my head against the wall with how terrible the character’s responses to these situations are. Don’t watch this; it’s a waste of time.

Top 10

1. Uma Musume: Pretty Derby Season 3
2. Uma Musume: Pretty Derby – Road to the Top
3. Birdie Wing: Golf Girls’ Story Season 2
4. Kimi no Koto ga Daidaidaidaidaisuki na 100-nin no Kanojo
5. Tomo-chan wa Onnanoko!
6. Kaminaki Sekai no Kamisama Katsudou
7. Uchi no Kaisha no Chiisai Senpai no Hanashi
8. Princess Principal: Crown Handler 3
9. Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia
10. Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta

I’m going to clarify something. If you check my MyAnimeList page, you’ll notice that the anime I ranked the highest for 2023 is Birdie Wing, and yes, I enjoyed it a lot. But the anime that has had the longest impact on my mind and that I still think about is Megane. Insomnia was also really good, but some of the drama was a bit daft at times. My tolerance for teenage angst is still quite low, even after all these years of wasting my time watching Japanese high school anime.

Pretty interesting year for anime; there was a lot of stuff not even in my top 10 that I would still strongly recommend, like Pluto, Nier Automata, Dekiru Neko wa Kyou mo Yuutsu, and more. Some might not like a lot of the shows that came out this year, but you can safely disregard their opinions as they are likely casual as fuck anyway.

And that’s it. Look forward to a slightly more normal blog post soon-ish about 7DFPS and my plans for the year.

ADMAN