It was inevitable.

Games we played this week include: Quantum Witch (11:50) Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Legends (22:25) Witchfire (24:20) UFO 50 (29:40) Dustborn (40:31) ---

News things talked about in this episode:

Balatro racks up huge sales numbers on mobile (47:05) https://www.eurogamer.net/balatro-has-made-almost-44m-from-its-mobile-release-alone

Sony making a bid to buy Kadokawa (50:00) https://www.eurogamer.net/fromsoftware-owner-kadokawa-acknowledges-takeover-interest-from-sony

Phil Spencer says nothing is off the table for Xbox properties on other platforms (51:45)

https://www.eurogamer.net/phil-spencer-says-no-red-lines-over-any-xbox-game-coming-to-nintendo-or-playstation

---

Buy official Jimquisition merchandise at https://thejimporium.com

Find Laura at LauraKBuzz on Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and Patreon. All her content goes on https://LauraKBuzz.com, and you can catch Access-Ability on YouTube every Friday.

Follow Conrad at ConradZimmerman on Twitter/Instagram/BlueSky and check out his Patreon (https://patreon.com/fistshark). You can also peruse his anti-capitalist propaganda at https://mercenarycreative.com.

I genuinely didn't bring the whole "what they DID" thing back last week because of this. It is the most horrible of coincidences, but yes, Dynasty Warriors Origins has done it again. Look what they DID to Zhang He!

Angel At Dusk

Released:  November 7th, 2024

Developer: Akiragoya

Publisher: Akiragoya

Systems: PC, Switch (reviewed)

If David Cronenberg’s last five wet dreams were turned into a shoot ‘em up, you might have something like Angel at Dusk. While fundamentally a rather straightforward shmup, this game is so full of fleshly horrors it absolutely stands out as something.

You’re a bunch of amalgamated flesh and bone, flying around and shooting at different amalgamations of flesh and bone. There is a story, but it’s fucking bananas and it’s delivered intermittently in large text paragraphs that aren’t onscreen long enough for you to read them fully. 

Look, I need to talk about a lot before I start detailing the actual gameplay, so I’ll get the cliff notes out of the way now - it’s a solid vertical shooter with an aggressive and fun combat style.

Now about that story…

From what I’ve gathered with my excellent sight reading skills, humanity tried to create a perfect state of being by eliminating all sources of conflict and dissatisfaction. They removed “bad thoughts” from criminals at first, then did away with various sensory inputs, then they decided the very notion of different sexes was a problem, and eventually concluded even having intelligence was a bad idea. 

So it was that Angels were created. So far, so sensible!

Angels were thoughtless, driven purely by a desire to feel happy, and they were also so much skin and bones and eyeballs. They started to divide themselves, and consume each other, and divide again, and merge together, and basically become flesh soup and they fucking loved it. Some were massive, there were living “forests” of the things, and all was chill because nobody with a working brain was around to think it was gross. 

Then one day, an angel registered pain after being bitten and didn’t like it, which snowballed into the return of self-awareness and a bunch of teeth n’ eyeballs shooting the fuck out of each other. 

There’s more to it - so much more - and in order to piece together the entire opera you’ll have to complete many stages across two modes of play. It’s fucking wild shit, written in a style reminiscent of that one guy at a party who’s clearly on something he took before turning up and is loudly sharing his ideas about what’s “really going on.” I wouldn’t be surprised if, buried in all that text, there’s a worryingly sincere manifesto of some kind. 

Loads of cool ideas are stuffed into it though, I must say. The idea of these Angels rediscovering themselves and evolving in a way that their creators would deem regressive makes for a genuinely neat narrative, even if it’s delivered the way it is. 

Of course, the writing is just part of it. How about those visuals? The Thing by way of Hieronymous Bosch is one way to describe it. Everything, from the player character to the enemies to the backdrops to the HUD, is a screwy meat nightmare. Even the more recognizable humanoid figures are to be found submerged and malformed among twisted piles of tissue. It’s grotesque, unsettling, and it’s a sick kind of pretty. 

As gruesome as they can look, one can’t deny the designs are amazing. Some of the bosses in particular are gorgeous in their own disgusting ways. Alluring feminine forms and handsome faces are buried among obscenely fascinating networks of limbs and glands. Yet, for all the allusion to orifices and protrusions, there’s something inherently sexless about the more suggestive elements. 

After all, even the most boobified Angel in this world lacks the impetus to do anything remotely sexy. Organs and holes and even entire faces just exist as a small, often vestigial part of a writhing mass of biology. Even the most phallic imagery is presented as a disaffected matter of course. 

I’m investing far too much into the art direction here, so let’s just go with “it’s fucked up, mate.” 

The various HUD elements are bony things with eyeballs that creepily follow your avatar’s onscreen movements. Said avatar is like a weird vertebrate dragonfly vessel that gets bigger and more complex as it levels up. Even basic enemies are often exquisitely detailed. Some of the backgrounds are so grotesque, however, they may genuinely qualify for phobia warnings. 

I don’t consider myself very easy to squick out with imagery, but a few of the backdrops make me feel wrong. 

So yeah, it’s a decent shooter too! 

Angel at Dusk plays pretty much exactly like your average top-down shmup. You fly up a vertical playfield as enemies buzz their way down and you all exchange a ridiculous amount of brightly colored projectiles at each other. As you level up throughout a run, you get more and bigger projectiles, and collectible stuff falls down at you throughout. The usual schtick. 

One differentiating factor is the way Angel encourages players to press an attack as far as it can go. Unlike other shmups, there isn’t any contact damage, the only risk being that of bumping off an enemy and into bullets. Further, you deal a lot more damage and get important resources by attacking as proximally as possible. Ideally, this is a game played directly in the enemy’s face, which feels pretty good. 

As well as your general spew of missiles, you’ve got a charge attack that isn’t just about dealing damage. Charging is predominantly used for pushing away or outright eliminating enemy projectiles, and a big part of combat is knowing when to ready that move to protect yourself. Naturally, charge moves aren’t infallible, and will weaken with every projectile they come into contact with. 

There’s also a super move that you fill up a meter for. How they behave varies according to what you equip, but they always involve a shield of some kind for added temporary protection. Beyond that, some of them may heal you while others deal significant damage to opponents. 

There's a large variety of weapons you can equip for your regular, charged, and special attacks, each one altering their behavior in significant ways. From classic pew-pew bullets to shorter range needles to big bouncing balls, you have a solid slate of options for outfitting your damage output. 

Some are more useful than others, with charge attacks especially varying in terms of usability. The charged missile is powerful, but it only stops enemy fire when it explodes, which isn’t defensively sound. Meanwhile, the bubble makes big bubbles, which I like because they’re bubbles. It’s swings and roundabouts, and just as much about objective practicality as about personal taste. Some weapons are just kinda shit, and some aren’t. 

Exactly what kind of equipment you access, and how you access it, is determined by the gameplay mode you select. As noted earlier, there are two main modes, Arcade and Original, each with their own twists. 

Arcade mode is the more straightforward option. Here, you play a linear sequence of stages with a preset vessel. You unlock new vessels as you play, but the weapons they have cannot be changed or upgraded in any way. As you complete runs, you’ll open up more stage sequences, each pertaining to one of several sarcastically described difficulty settings - Very Hard is claimed to be the easiest one. 

Original mode lets you outfit your own vessel with the myriad weapons dropped throughout play. There’s a linear Story mode and a Chronicle mode in which you choose different routes between stages, Darius style. Whichever mode you go with, the general idea is that enemies will get stronger and stronger until you’re inevitably overwhelmed, at which point you equip stronger gear to push ever forward. 

Naturally, weapon stats get higher as you obtain them from deeper into a run. You’re encouraged to keep switching out your gear for stronger stuff and to eat your lower level gear to obtain nutrients. Of course that’s what you do. Nutrients can be spent on passive upgrades, boosting your health, your pickup radius, and other such fancies. 

Combat is fast paced and about as bullet-hellish as one could expect. It does need to be emphasized that, despite the neat gimmicks, Angel does little fundamentally to set itself apart from a ton of other shooters. That’s not a bad thing, per se, but it does eventually wear a little thin.

Longevity is threatened by the amount of replaying you’ll likely end up doing. There’s a large number of stages, but not enough enemies and bosses to cover them all, so expect to see the same fights again and again. While you can start a run from any previously beaten stage, you start at level one every time so it behooves you to backtrack at least several stages each run. This doesn’t help the repetition. 

It’s a shame you’ll encounter the same bosses over and over, as repeated exposure rubs off the effect of seeing such bizarre monstrosities the first time around. 

Despite its own snark about how players will wet themselves and run away crying, Angel at Dusk is actually one of the more accessible shmups I’ve played. I’m terrible at the things despite enjoying them, yet I’ve been getting along with this one quite well. That’s not to say it’s easy, and it is definitely designed to end your runs with sheer force, but it’s playable. 

That said, a few moments feel less like a challenge and more like luck-based hurdles. Some enemy attack patterns are arranged in such a way that certain charge moves just aren’t the right shape to keep projectiles from sweeping in at an unprotectable angle. 

Enemy bullets are usually some shade of red or orange, which can make them hard to see against all the similarly hued backgrounds. They’re not against sneaking in from offscreen either, which can be a real pisser when you’re encouraged to get close to enemies and your primary defensive measure requires a charging time. 

Nevertheless, none of my issues make for a bad game. At its very worst, Angel at Dusk is a strong vertical shooter that will provide a satisfying amount of entertainment for its admission fee. 

As well as the remarkable visual style, credit must also be given to the music. There’s a beautiful soundtrack here, characterized with a lot of gentle synth and piano that contrasts the frantic combat nicely. When it does up the tempo to match the onscreen energy, it does a bang up job. 

Angel at Dusk may not be up there with the most essential shooters, but its bonkers concept and sickeningly beautiful visuals help it to stand out while the aggressive combat provides plenty of fun. Well, until repetition starts to set in. An enjoyable time, especially if the average shooter isn’t enough like Videodrome for you.

7.5/10

Let Commander Stephanie Sterling guide you through a celebration of... Commander Stephanie Sterling.

We'd stop the world and rot with you.

---

Buy official Jimquisition merchandise at https://thejimporium.com

Find Laura at LauraKBuzz on Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and Patreon. All her content goes on https://LauraKBuzz.com, and you can catch Access-Ability on YouTube every Friday.

Follow Conrad at ConradZimmerman on Twitter/Instagram/BlueSky and check out his Patreon (https://patreon.com/fistshark). You can also peruse his anti-capitalist propaganda at https://mercenarycreative.com.

Photo Credit: Swiertz / CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Little Big Adventure: Twinsen's Quest

Released:  November 14th, 2024

Developer: [2.21]

Publisher: [2.21], Microids

Systems: PC, PS5, Switch (reviewed), Xbox

My brother and I had a copy of Little Big Adventure when we were kids. We never got particularly far, predominantly because its controls were absolutely bloody terrible. Even for 1994 the thing felt clunky as hell, so I dare say a remaster of Little Big Adventure with a more wieldy interface would be ideal. 

Ideal is not what we have. 

What we have is Little Big Adventure: Twinsen’s Quest, an unfortunate remake that does more harm than good to a game that, nostalgia aside, was never really all that great to begin with. The titular Twinsen is still an absolutely simpering dweeb though, so it gets points for accurate character portrayal.

Twinsen’s Adventure is a bit of a mess. From pretty much the start I noticed how sound effects would often play twice in a row or otherwise seem out of sync. The entire audiovisual production features frequent and stunningly immediate instances of object clipping and character animations. It's not so broken as to be unplayable but it's consistently defective in a multitude of petty ways.

When Twinsen moves through a pipe, he sometimes faces away from the opening and crawls toward nothing, or face the right direction but not crawl forwards, or do both, or just go ahead and crawl through a solid wall. The screen will still transition to wherever the other end of the pipe leads, but the litany of rubbish animations look amateurish at best. 

It’s not just pipes - every time the game takes control of the protagonist from you, it fucks up. He’ll walk through objects, climb the air next to ladders, or drive vehicles into stuff. It needs to be stressed - these moments occur when Twinsen is acting independently of player input, these are prebaked animations, this is when Twinsen's Quest is in complete control... and it's totally out of control. It’s like the game is bad at the game!

Early on I had an NPC fail to do something for me because he started trying to walk through a bannister instead of going downstairs. I had to leave the building and go back inside to get the silly bastard working. Pathfinding in general seems to be a problem for every character, from background pedestrians to enemies. Once again, anything the player isn't directly handling has, at best, limited control of its faculties.

Parts of the HUD can displace itself. The most notable time for me was when my health bar shifted upwards so the top half of it got cut off beyond the limits of the screen. It wouldn't be the last time that parts of the UI would inexplicably shunt itself a little.

When I got off a bike, I couldn’t take a full step away without the game automatically interacting as if I'd walked toward the fucker. I had to constantly cancel a confirmation box while edging my way out of the bike’s radius in increments, all while Twinsen repeated “where shall I go now?” over and over with that simperingly dweebish delivery of his.

Bear in mind, all of this and more occurred within one hour and fifty-seven minutes of starting the game. Once again, none of it rendered the game unplayable but it nonetheless had me shaking my head in disbelief every few minutes.

So anyway, what's the damn thing all about when you ignore the many body parts phasing through solid surfaces with ethereal abandon?

Little Big Adventure was a French action-adventure game from 1994, and it was an interactive shitshow even in its heyday. It was a bit of a success, and now commands nostalgic respect, yet many would agree it needed dramatic improvement. You had to manually switch between different modes with bespoke commands in order to fight, jump, sneak, or act normally. Twinsen moved around like a lorry made of soapy feathers, animation took precedence over responsiveness, and combat was an absolute state.

Oh, and even as I child I cringed at how dweebesque Twinsen's simpering was.

Twinsen’s Quest has certainly made the controls less awkward, which is really the least it could do. To anybody mourning the loss of the mode system, I say come the fuck on. The fact you no longer need seperate control schemes when a single layout can easily handle everything makes for an objectively better interface. Animations have been wrangled for the sake of convenience as well - weird bullshit like Twinsen slowly whipping his entire head backwards before running is removed. When you tell him to do a thing, he does the thing without needing to make a flowery performance of it.

It doesn't just make the simpering dweeb more responsive, it makes him look slightly less of a fucking pillock to boot.

Parts of the story have been expanded, while others have been truncated. A good job’s been done of cutting out content that used to tread water while altering details to improve pacing or characterization. By far the biggest beneficiary of this is Zoé, whose role as a kidnapped girlfriend in the original reduced her to a prop. She has a lot more character - as in, she has a character - with a bigger role and a less mawkish voice.

The tradeoff is that Twinsen now has a Stock Little Sister to be kidnapped in the Stock Girlfriend's place, and honestly that one can stay kidnapped. Really though, while I have quite a few issues with the technical side of this release, many of the more creative changes are both bold and positive. I say this, admittedly, as someone who could never see the point in being too precious about Little Big Adventure of all things.

Unfortunately, overhauls to the rest of the game are either too minor to matter or just not evident, and Little Big Adventure doesn't feel pleasant to play despite all the streamlining. Twinsen might move a little swifter but he’s still a floaty, inelegant dipshit. His dodge roll is laggy and far too wide, his melee attacks amount to inaccurate flailing, and as for the ball throwing, well, it's more like ball torture.

So if you didn’t know, Twinsen has this magical ball that bounces toward enemies and damages them. It's a far better form of offense than his dweebish melee attacks, but that's really not saying much, especially since the ball is fucking shit. While [2.21] were making sweeping new changes, they really ought to have given Angry Tennis far more of an overhaul than it got.

You can switch between two arc trajectories and lock onto targets with an indicator that turns green when in range. The indicator is unreliable on a moving target, especially if the enemy AI craps out and it just runs around in circles. Also, if an opponent is too close, the ball will harmlessly pass through them. Once you're in range and ready to hope for the best, you throw, you wait, it hits or it misses, and then you throw again.

While you’re limply tossing a very slow moving ball, the enemies have guns.

Guns, if you didn’t know, are better than a shitty little glow-in-the-dark bollock. The evil Dr. Funfrock may be a dictator, but he at least arms his clone soldiers appropriately. He's figured out that guns have fire rates that far outpace the average dweeb's ability to throw a thing. It's not even like Twinsen gets any mobility out of it, since attacking and dodging are such disparate abilities to him. Throwing the ball is a commitment, one that almost always ends with a faceful of bullets because, again, guns are better than fucking bouncy balls.

That said, guns aren't better than simply walking away, at least in this game's world. Bullets move slowly enough that you can saunter past most enemies quite safely. If you avoid straight combat, enemies are a joke between their slow bullets, tiny aggro radius, and general stupidity. In fact, even combat can be cheesed by exploiting how dumb the AI is - your opponents have no concept of height differences, and if you can reach them from beyond their firing range, they'll usually stand there and take it.

At its very best, however, combat sucks just as much as it always did. Not only are the basic mechanics vile, it can take ages to whittle an opponent’s unknown HP to zero. Get used to hearing the same wibble-wobble sound effect as you toss a snail-like sphere over and over again, wondering when the sad repetition will end. 

Oh, and if you’re unlucky enough, enemies might just stunlock you for a while - it really depends on how the game’s feeling. Whether you're hit by traps or bullets, you’ll basically take damage until you’re randomly allowed to act or lose a life and take advantage of the resulting iframes. God damn is Twinsen's dodge roll the absolute bloody pits.

You’ve got puzzles to contend with of course, and by that I mean you’ve got blocks to push and levers to pull. It’s typical stuff from the early 90s, a time before games drove such puzzling into the ground, so I can’t be too harsh about how simple it is. I can say the isometric perspective really gets in the bloody way though, especially with all the added environmental details. 

There’s no excuse for the parts where you’re expected to grind money to afford certain items. Even collecting “Kashes” as much as possible wherever I went, I still needed to run in and out of a house repeatedly to spawn enough coins for a fucking catamaran before immediately having to raise money for a hairdryer in the subsequent section. 

Piss off, videogame. 

Anything that involves waiting for an NPC to do things is an exercise in twiddling your thumbs. All of them will casually saunter to wherever they need to be and take their sweet time doing shit when they get there. That is, of course, if they don’t decide to just bump into a wall over and over. 

Despite all my complaints, I can’t say Little Big Adventure is a truly terrible game, neither back then nor today. It’s mostly just boring. Everything moves like molasses, the gameplay is monotonous, much of your time is spent wandering around looking for the right person to talk to while Twinsen repeats the same questions with every interaction. The process of finding out where to go next is like if Shenmue was even less than Shenmue already is.

The story isn’t very interesting and the characters are little more than stock personalities with obnoxious voices. Twinsen’s titular quest to save his feminine counterpart and discover a magical legacy was old hat even in the 1990s. The “funny” cartoon voices everyone has are a bit less hateful in the remake, but they're still grating enough to make me want to claw my ears off.

Beyond streamlining controls, the biggest thing this remake’s done is completely change how the game looks. The original 90s graphics are all gone, and even the basic art style has been significantly changed. Twinsen’s Quest boasts a more colorful look now, with an angular cartoonish aesthetic that I honestly just find a bit weird. 

It’s a taste thing, really. I quite like the more vibrant colors, but otherwise I’m a little put off by how the world looks. It’s reminiscent of a children’s picture book but goes so far as to make characters appear lifeless, a problem not helped by the square eye pupils that really deaden Twinsen’s face. As a plus point, I'll say Dr. Funfrock looks a lot better than he used to. He resembles an evil genius now as opposed to a discount Fungus the Bogeyman.

The soundtrack has been redone by the original composer, and it’s… decent. Frankly, I feel it’s a bit too subtle compared to the original. I’m listening to the 90s soundtrack as I write this, and it’s a lot more bold, a lot less liable to quietly disappear into the background. I don’t mind a more ambient version, but I can’t say I prefer it. 

None of the changes, good or bad, make up for what a slopfest the game is on a technical level. The bugs I mentioned at the start were only a selection. Twinsen being softlocked because he didn’t go down with the elevator he was standing on is a particular highlight. I was glad of autosaves for that one. 

Gotta love it when entire floor textures disappear. Or when the map controls stop working and you can’t scroll through locations. Or when an NPC fighting alongside you repeatedly shoots at nothing, at you, or doesn’t shoot at all. 

We’re not done…

Gotta love it when dialog boxes repeat themselves without prompting. Or when dialog boxes need prompting twice before they’ll work. Or when dialog boxes randomly cut themselves off. Or when dialog boxes don’t match the voice lines. Or when dialog boxes... you get the point. 

I am in awe at how comprehensively this game screws up. 

Playing Little Big Adventure: Twinsen’s Quest absolved me in a way.

I no longer feel like I missed something when I gave up on the original as a kid. The streamlined controls got me further than I ever did in the 90s, but all to be found was tedium. The remake does little to liven it up, but at least there’s some crude entertainment in marveling at how shockingly buggy it is. It serves neither as a polished update nor an impressive reinvention, and confirms more than anything that Little Big Adventure is best experienced by watching a Longplay of the bloody thing.

5/10

After almost a decade in, we know what we’re doing.

Things we played this week include: PS5 Pro (05:35) Sorry We’re Closed (17:35) UFO 50 (28:15) Mario and Luigi Brotherhood (39:55) Super Mario Party Jamboree (43:30) LEGO Horizon Adventures (46:15) Death of the Reprobate (48:45) Vampire Hunters (53:05)

---

News things talked about in this episode:

Streamer taunts Nintendo into suing him for piracy (47:35) https://www.eurogamer.net/nintendo-sues-streamer-who-said-he-could-broadcast-its-pirated-games-all-day

---

Buy official Jimquisition merchandise at https://thejimporium.com

Find Laura at LauraKBuzz on Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and Patreon. All her content goes on https://LauraKBuzz.com, and you can catch Access-Ability on YouTube every Friday.

Follow Conrad at ConradZimmerman on Twitter/Instagram/BlueSky and check out his Patreon (https://patreon.com/fistshark). You can also peruse his anti-capitalist propaganda at https://mercenarycreative.com.

Sorry We're Closed

Released:  November 14th, 2024

Developer: A la Mode Games

Publisher: Akapura Games

Systems: PC (reviewed) Copy provided by publisher, colleague Laura Kate Dale consulted on game

Can one get away with talking about Sorry We’re Closed without mentioning how unapologetically queer it is? I’ve done it in the first sentence, so I’ve buggered my chance at such a feat.  

In fairness, you’d have to try so hard to not acknowledge it that I’d suspect an unsavory motive for it. Nevertheless, one cannot assume queerness is all this game has going for it. 

Sorry We’re Closed is a love story. It’s a love story filtered through the lens of psychological horror and informed by angelology, all with a pop-punk aesthetic. Is it pop-punk? It sounds like something that might be correct, but I’m very out of touch and can’t speak with authority on the matter.

What I can speak confidently about is fucked up horror imagery, and there’s plenty of it found between gorgeous splashes of pink and blue. Comparisons to Silent Hill are downright unavoidable, from the 90s horror sensibilities to the rusty, dingy, germaphobe-baiting environments that contrast against the many more vibrant elements. 

Sorry We’re Closed joins a subgenre of games explicitly invoking 1990s survival horror. It comes complete with fixed camera angles, PSX-flavored graphics, and gameplay that involves both combat and inventory-based environmental puzzles. 

It’s really rather good, too.

Michelle has a shit job and a small flat with rent she can barely afford - the millennial dream, essentially. She can’t get over her ex but she’s got incredible taste in jackets. Anyway, there’s a demon called The Duchess who is basically the very culmination of gender as a concept, and they’ve ordered Michelle to love them or face the consequences. 

A millennial romance, essentially. 

I very much enjoy Sorry’s writing. It maintains a witty tone throughout and features a cast of really likable characters. Through her journey to break a love-starved demon’s curse, Michelle meets eccentric celestial entities of both demonic and angelic persuasions. They’re visually incredible, and their unique views of the world are super enjoyable.

There are a few other love stories on the side. Humans stumble through messy feelings, demons and angels fall for each other, all kinds of star-crossed stuff’s going on. Michelle can have a direct hand in the outcomes of these relationships, meddling to wreck them or working to fix them. You’ll get to make such decisions along the way to your choice of ending. 

Progress runs along a routine of waking up, talking to folks on your street, going to a monstrous shitshow of what I’ll call a dungeon, then returning. Dungeons are where the survival horror chicanery takes place, coming with a few conceptually neat mechanics. 

First off, Michelle’s curse has planted a third eye on her head which, when opened, reveals a secondary world in a radius around her - the mortal world or the demonic one, depending on her current location. This is used for several environmental puzzles, as what may be a physical part of one world may not be in the other. 

At its most basic, one use of the eye will be to walk through masses of thorns found in the demon world by rendering them incorporeal within the eye’s radius of normalcy. Just don’t try to run, as it’ll make Michelle’s eye close and you’ll get a thorning. 

Demonic monsters will stagger their way to Michelle as she runs around doing her business. They’re taken down with either an axe, handgun, or later on a shotgun. When aiming to attack, you enter a first-person view and cannot move. From here, it’s a straightforward issue of getting the enemy in your sights and firing - unless of course, you use that whole second sight dealie.

If you open your ol’ third eye while monsters are within its radius, they’ll be temporarily stunned. Should they merely walk into it while it’s active, closing and reopening will stun them as many times as you like, though you’ll want to consider repositioning yourself to keep them away. 

Crucially, the eye makes enemies incorporeal but their hearts will be exposed, the destruction of which deals lethal damage. Most demons contain multiple hearts which’ll need shooting in sequence. They’re stunned a little each time you hit one, and getting them all in accurate succession nabs you a perfect rating. 

The catch is that shots to anywhere other than the colorful heart targets won’t do anything while the radius is active. 

It’s a cool system, and together with its art style, the search for weak points in first-person puts me in mind of Killer7. It’s never a bad time to think about Killer7. While most comparisons rightly focus on Silent Hill, there’s no way the Grasshopper classic had zero influence here. 

I really dig the combat mechanics as ideas, but I struggled somewhat with the way they’ve been implemented. 

Even with settings altered and some upgrades that increase enemy stun times, enemies recover from heart shots incredibly quickly. The problem is that hearts are pinned to specific body parts, so if an enemy is frozen in position after hitting one, you’ve a split second to shoot the next before it jolts out of your sights. Many is the time I’ve lined up a shot, only to have the target damn near teleport and cause me to miss. 

It’s not so bad if the hearts are mostly contained to the torso, but those fixed to limbs move around so much it’s a bloody hassle. If you can play a third-person game with a mouse, it won’t be quite as bad, but it’s still really annoying, and the accessibility menu’s sticky targeting to make shots easier feels pretty useless.

Of course, the option to forego hearts in favor of just dumping bullets into demon flesh until they jerk over remains, but even basic enemies can become a huge resource drain if killed in this way. Going for the heart is obviously the intended method, around which combat is designed. 

When one does make it work, it’s very pleasing. Hearts make progressively more rewarding noises as you take them out in order, and there’s just something inextricably cool about it. It’s a shame I struggled with it, because it’s a fundamentally great system. 

Not long into the game you’ll acquire a special use weapon, the Heartbreaker, which gradually charges as you shoot enemy hearts. When fully charged, the entire world freezes as the surroundings turn solid pink and enemies become frozen silhouettes with a huge heart inside them. One blast from the Heartbreaker wipes them out. 

The sheer audiovisual spectacle of it is worth the price of admission, though it’s wasted on regular enemies. It’s best use when exploring is to take out the largest of the demons, since they can’t be killed conventionally, only temporarily knocked out. 

It’s also required for boss fights, which are all about charging the weapon in between avoiding a boss’ attack patterns. 

These huge monsters - typically monstrous versions of the Duchess’ past “affections” - don’t just have the usual weak points, but multiple large hearts that can only be restored by the Heartbreaker. Their regular weak points are often kept out of the Third Eye’s radius until they attack, at which point they should be avoided and shot. 

Bosses are huge, imaginatively designed body horrors, and they’re theoretically well designed. Michelle’s lack of evasive move and the tight windows in which to shoot hearts can make them a bit more annoying than they ought to be, though the less frustrating ones actually feel more manageable than regular mooks. 

Where Sorry We’re Closed shines brightest is in the stuff not related to survival horror gameplay, joining those few games I’ve played where I feel I’d like a little less game. It’s not that the gameplay is bad - even at their least appealing, I enjoyed the proper horror sections - but if I could choose between more of that or more character interactions, I’d immediately opt to rebalance the ratio in favor of the latter. 

My favorite part of the whole campaign is Michelle’s street, talking with characters each night to advance their own development and regularly visiting such locations as Marty’s record shop or Darren’s bar. I particularly enjoy talking to the demons, many of whom have no real plot relevance but provide fun comments regardless. 

Some of the minor characters have a little sidequest attached to them. A shadowy figure that appears in each dungeon wants to eat disgusting things, while a demon chef in The Duchesses’ employ wishes for new ingredients to make its food compelling again. Neither creature tells you exactly what they want, they can only describe it, so you’ll need to suss out which item to give them - it’s not hard to figure out though. 

I’d have enjoyed more of these requests through the game. Not only do they provide a little more to do, they provide a fun glimpse into the deeper workings of the celestial world. They’re often a bit of a laugh, too. 

One particular subplot involving an angel who’s gradually losing their divinity due to a relationship with a mysterious demon is particularly good. Here, we get to fully examine one of Sorry’s most prominent themes - how love changes a person, and what can happen when you try to love without that change. 

The angel, Chamuel, is a compelling foil to The Duchess. Both want love without anything else altering, but Chamuel’s relationship is sincere in contrast to the courtship being forced on Michelle. For Chamuel, love means losing the status of angel, a pain the demonic counterparts know all too well. The Duchess doesn’t want to lose the power they’ve accrued through demonhood, but wants the pain of being a demon to go away, and thinks being loved is the answer. 

Love is give and take. As soon as you let one or more people get that close to you, compromise will always be needed. In a way, your life isn’t entirely yours anymore. Sorry We’re Closed is, in part, about what it can look like when someone’s idea of love is nothing but take, when a person refuses to make a sacrifice that is, ultimately, worth trading in for.

Through Michelle, you get to decide what love is worth. This isn’t a game full of big dramatic choices, but what forks to be found in the road are worth mulling over, especially when there can be unforeseen consequences - relationships aren’t straightforward, after all. 

I’ve mentioned the visuals already, but I really enjoy them. The horror segments don’t hide their inspiration, what with all the rusted metal, alien geometry, and distinctly grimy environments that do the original Silent Hill’s Otherworld justice. It contrasts against the gorgeously bold colors of the UI and characters. Michelle’s bright blue hair and searing pink jacket really stand out. 

Her assortment of weapons are fantastically designed, too. Not only are they colorful, their vaguely canine attributes make something as simple as a pistol look exotic. It actually growls as you reload it, and I’ve not once gotten sick of hearing it. 

On the subject of sound, there’s quite a memorable soundtrack, from the chill vibes in the normal world to the demonic locations’ threatening eeriness, it’s all good stuff. It’s the boss fight music that steals the show, though. I’m a big fan of when a game soundtrack starts throwing lyrics into the mix, it’s almost always a perfect mix of cool and corny, a combo Sorry We’re Closed pulls off with style. 

This a game with an art direction that simple speaks to me. Sometimes it literally sings to me, too. 

Sorry’s inherent queerness is far from the sole reason I enjoy it, but I gotta admit - it helps. Pretty much every relationship is some flavor of gay, and that’s fine by me. Not only is it deeply baked in, it’s all just there, a casual and natural normal that I’ve been fortunate to have in my own life long enough that I often forget it’s seen by others as “different.” 

That’s one of the game’s most personally compelling traits. It’s not merely “representation” like you see in other games. It’s reflection. It’s us. It’s the world as I see it, and while I’m all about that gay rep, Sorry’s world means more than a big name title letting a queer or two onscreen as a treat. 

Sorry We’re Closed not only pays homage to classic survival horror, it provides a truly unique love story that delves into the very nature of romance itself. For all its theming and grisly imagery, however, there’s a script with a pointed sense of humor and a cast of fun characters to match. Combat has good ideas set back by some awkward implementation, but the moments of annoyance aren’t enough to pull down the sum of all parts. 

Now I simply must know where she got that jacket!

8/10

Slitterhead 

Released:  November 8th, 2024

Developer: Bokeh Game Studio

Publisher: Bokeh Game Studio

Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S

The name Slitterhead promises all sorts of freakiness. There’s something evocative about it, and knowing the game to which it’s attached has been noted for its body horror only makes the title more promising. 

Promise is certainly what the game is full of, with some terrific ideas and an earnest attempt to do them justice. The uniquely grotesque imagery is a real highlight in particular. Unfortunately, it falls short in significant ways, not least for how it just doesn’t have enough going on to justify a campaign that lasts far, far too long. 

Oh, and its script repeats the word Slitterhead so much that any impact the title might have had completely evaporates.

Slitterhead,

Slitterhead,

I wanna eat some pita bread,

Slitterhead.

Sorry, had to get that out of my head. Pardon the expression. 

Slitterhead’s story is convoluted nonsense, and that’s not an inherently bad thing. Indeed, for a while it manages to be interesting before treading narrative water. You’re a spirit who can possess people in your mission to kill monsters that take over human bodies and bore holes through their victims’ faces. Also you can travel back in time, because why not?

While the spirit completely overwrites the mind of most people, he encounters a few known as Rarities who retain their consciousness and gain powerful abilities when possessed. They also manifest weapons such as claws, swords, and oven mitts out of blood. Yes, oven mitts.

Such absurdity is contrasted against the sheer grotesquery of the Slitterheads, who reveal themselves by bursting out of skulls as swollen masses of what can only be called stuff. After this, they may fully transform into huge creatures with animalistic traits while their host bodies dangle nakedly behind them as approximate vestigial tails.

I hate that the game housing all this bonkers shit didn’t seem to have the resources to make it as awesome as it sounds on paper. 

Gameplay is at least imaginative and I wouldn’t describe it as bad. A typical mission sees you pick two Rarities and investigate one of the few locations you repeatedly visit with the general aim of taking down head poppin’ beasties. You won’t just be fighting them, as you’ll have rudimentary investigation, stealth, and environmental navigation to perform.

It’s worth mentioning that, for all one may assume this to be a survival horror, it really isn’t - it’s very much an action adventure, with even its horror elements largely restricted to an overall premise and some moments of squick. You’ll spend a lot of time fighting or chasing Slitters, and between that you’re mostly looking for clues. 

You’ll be able to squirt your way from one person to another at any time unless restricted by story, controlling them in a typical third-person fashion. While Rarities are much stronger than regular pedestrians, you still need to switch around a lot. 

In combat, you rely on your main characters’ attack power to deal the most damage, but civilian bodies can summon their own blood weapons and have access to two Rarity skills. They also have a pair exclusive to NPCs - a rather effective blood bomb, and a loud shout that’ll draw enemy attention. 

Slitterheads are dangerous even in their basic forms, becoming utterly deadly once going Super Slitter on you. Even the most hardened Rarity can be Slittered in moments if they’re not careful. Defensive options are rather shit - either a near useless dodge roll, or a directional blocking mechanic that I’m sure is meant to be good but isn’t.  

While focused on enemies, you’ll block regular attacks but take some damage. Icons appear to tell you which direction an attack’s coming from and if you tilt the right stick to match it, it’ll be fully deflected. Icons show up long before the attack connects, and that misleading blow is often followed by a fast combo where subsequent icons appear really quickly. Combined with outright unblockable offense and multiple foes, I lost interest in the whole mechanic. 

Nevertheless, fighting is built on a really neat process of flitting from body to body, protecting your main characters by drawing enemies off them and closing in with the kind of cheap shots that games usually reserve for their players. You can’t be too confident though, as the Slitters sense the spirit’s location and won’t stay distracted long enough to do a lot. 

Civilians are fragile, and with fights isolated to cordoned spaces, they’re not inexhaustible (unless you use Anita, who summons more). Those knocked down can be revived if gotten to in time, but between enemies and friendly fire, people will die. 

Should someone’s taken down while you’re possessing them, you have a limited window of time in which to move house, and it’s game over if this occurs more than once. Making sure to get out of dodge before “dodge” is mercilessly slaughtered becomes an essential consideration. 

The morality of using regular civilians as meat shields and human sacrifices is glossed over, addressed almost as if the writers felt obligated to do so. Considering the tutorial mission has you get down from a building by throwing your host off it and possessing another before you hit the ground, you’d think it’d be a major plot point. 

Still, it’s a fun gimmick for doing hacking n’ slashing!

Every Rarity has their own main weapon and three abilities that’ll inform their role as either damaging or supporting fighters. One of their powers will also be usable by the other, rounding both characters out to four each. Abilities cost HP, replenished by sucking up the blood that’ll splash the floor during a fight. I very much enjoy the concept of using spilled blood this way. 

Julee fights with giant claws that she can charge up for extra damage, and has a mass revive ability. Alex, meanwhile, compliments his sword with a blood shotgun and the disturbing power to turn possessed people into time bombs. One of the more overpowered characters creates a tommy gun that decimates Slitterheads with a negligible penalty if there’s enough blood on the ground. 

I won’t describe the optional unlockable character, save for how hilariously strong they are. I was very, very entertained by them. 

Chase sequences similarly use possession as you throw yourself into civilians ahead of you to keep up with your target and get through obstacles. While you can damage a fleeing Slitterhead during a chase, almost all of them end with the creature reaching a scripted destination. Plus the often sluggish attacks make trying a pain in the ass. 

Some Slitters are able to hide by getting out of view and taking a new human form. You track and expose them by following a misty trail, and can see through their eyes via a Sightjack power that’s been taken right out of the old horror game Siren. Such a sequence is a great idea, but it’s overdone to the point of exposing its tedious simplicity.

Combat suffers from this exposure as well. You’ll be fighting many Slitterheads, often more than once thanks to that time traveling conceit, and there’s just not enough to keep it fresh. While initially a pleasingly creative endeavor, such fights - often rather lengthy ones - grow exhausting as they relentlessly occur. 

The rest of the gameplay isn’t offensive but it’s threadbare in presentation and interaction. 

Stealth’s as skeletal as it gets, with incredibly stupid guards who don’t follow you if you’re spotted. Break their line of sight and they’ll instantly think they imagined you even if you were a few feet away. Sneaking sections try to spice things up by occasionally having you possess your way past guards, but with plain corridors and no tension whatsoever, it’s a mere routine.

The inability to possess anybody hindering your progress is a really convenient coincidence for the gameplay, huh? This, much like the fucked up way you’re using innocent people, is mostly breezed past with a bit of bullshit reasoning. Fair enough, at least it’s there. 

Missions feature a lot of walking and talking with a handful of moments where you possess specific people to get information. Other sections involve clambering up stuff and using blood tendrils to fling yourself to preselected grapple points like an extremely discounted Spider-Man. 

Very little AI is running the NPCs. They simply don’t react when you leave their bodies, no matter where they’re taken. Instead, they just stand there as if waiting for a bus. Similarly, passers-by aren’t bothered by anything other than actual violence, so they won’t be worried if someone they were talking to just wanders off. 

Just a little animation would have stopped the lack of reaction feeling so completely unbelievable. Make NPCs act groggy when departed, and have their pals call after them when you take control. Hell, just make them shrug if anything more is too much. Give them a little something to breathe life into otherwise robotic surroundings. 

After missions there are lots of dialog scenes between the spirit and Rarities to explain the meandering plot. Dialogue is poorly written for the most part, but there are some cute exchanges. While the main story drags on, it dabbles with interesting themes regarding identity and the medium’s favorite story concept, revenge(™). 

The Slitterheads themselves are capable of full speech and feelings, just as likely to communicate fear and pain as they are mockery and intimidation. They’re surprisingly humanized despite appearances, and their humanity or lack thereof is a big part of the plot, even if said plot goes back and forth on the conclusions it draws. 

While we’re here, I must strongly complain about something others will find trivial. Uncharacteristic of me, I know.

Not only is this one of those frustrating games that accompany dialog text with stock voice lines unreflective of what’s being said (hate that), Slitterhead might be the worst ever offender. It’s not just a few words per line - the spirit will repeat lengthy sentences that aren’t even in the same ballpark as the text. These lines are also mumbled to an annoying degree. 

Maybe they were trying to be weird on purpose, but it sucks. 

In one scene, an antagonist does the same thing but worse. For one line only, he speaks something of a similar vibe to the text, but still completely different. It only happens once, which means they could easily have written or recorded the fucking things to match. It's silly to a jaw-dropping degree, and I'm not even sure that poor localization fully explains it.

Anyway, the time travel is largely an excuse to have you replay levels with slightly different events. There are also items and Rarities to find, including those vital to progression, that you might miss the first time around. This means replaying missions, boring bits and all, with loads of dialog boxes to skip through, the only saving grace being the choice to exit a mission and keep what you’ve found. 

As well as talking scenes, the menu between missions is where you can level up each Rarity, using skill points to upgrade their weapons and abilities alongside a bunch of passive skills. Some of the passives are quite interesting, such as generating shockwaves upon possession or grabbing your arm and instantly sticking it back on if it gets sliced off. 

Oh yeah, that can happen. The slicing. If you can’t get it back immediately, you’ll have to wait for it to regenerate. 

A few optional fights are found in certain missions that award new clothing when beaten. I love my cosmetics, but the ones here are practically never worth it. Mostly basic recolors or slight clothing alterations in exchange for tough battles. One of the hardest fights in the game unlocks a beige reskin of a face mask. Beige. That fight sucked, and I can’t help feeling like it’s a joke at the expense of the player’s time. 

Controls are straightforward but a bit wonky and the graphics are thoroughly unimpressive. Notably, there are so few NPC character models that you can be surrounded by doppelgängers. The game has an undeniable “budget” vibe to it, further compounded by sparse audio that feels downright alienating. While a budget feel isn’t necessarily condemning, it’s hard not to feel like we’d have a much better game if it had the resources to do the premise justice.

One thing deserving of unequivocal praise is the way the Slitterheads themselves look. The bulbs of writhing flesh, chitin, and gelatinous sacs that billow out from the burst heads of their hosts are not just gross but visually inventive. When fully unfolded they’re a sight to behold, huge twisted things vaguely resembling creatures like insects or octopuses. They truly live up to the body horror billing, not least for those still-humanoid bodies flopping around behind them. 

Another noteworthy thing about the monsters is how disturbingly beautiful they can be. Slitterhead might not boast impressive graphics, but it’s got some visually complex creatures with vibrant color schemes that serve to underscore how alien they truly are. I’m impressed by things so gross being so pretty. 

What aren’t pretty are the weaker mook-like monsters that also show up. They’re essentially walking penises, easily the most phallic things I’ve ever seen in a videogame outside of literal genitalia. They’ve got nude human legs, then it’s just a shaft, a cock-like head, and a “mouth” that isn’t trying to hide the fact it’s meant to be foreskin. They have foreskin mouths, people! 

If you're really unlikely, they might swallow your entire head with their foreskin mouths, and that's a sentence I just get to say.

They’re not just disgusting, they’re downright distressing to look at and I hate them. So congratulations to whoever designed it, because damn your horrible violation truly unsettles me, and I’m legitimately impressed. 

Slitterhead is full of great ideas and some truly memorable examples of body horror despite not feeling like much of a horror game. Perhaps with more of a budget behind it, those positives could’ve been done justice, but sadly this isn’t the case. The possession gimmick allows for imaginative action scenes that are let down by repetition, lacking variety, and a bunch of less thought out gameplay that bogs the action down. 

Someone throw some money behind this concept, please. It deserves to be in a much better game.

6/10

Setting out to laugh at scalpers who tried and failed to sell PS5 Pros at inflated prices was a good start... then I just talked about Empire of the Ants.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Released:  October 31st, 2024

Developer: BioWare

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S OMG Bias Note: Laura Kate Dale, friend & colleague, consulted on this game

I’m not entirely sure I’m the kind of person Dragon Age should be actively appealing to. 

It’s not as if I haven’t enjoyed BioWare’s games in the past - y’know, before Anthem and Andromeda - but its particular brand of roleplaying action has never been entirely my thing. Slowly plonking baddies with a stick while acting as my party’s Mission Control isn’t my idea of a good time, but it’s been loved by fans since at least Knights of the Old Republic. 

In Dragon Age: The Veilguard, I can pull a gigantic mortar cannon out of nowhere and rapidly jizz a hail of ordnance before tossing the weapon like a huge explosive frisbee… while wearing a giant crow’s head. 

My husband, a diehard Dragon Age fan, understandably feels left out in the cold by this shift in focus. They also really hate whatever happened to Dorian to make him look like that. 

Veilguard alters not just the combat but the entire tone, and I completely understand how that would turn off those who’ve been all-in on the series since the very beginning. As I throw out my art deco turret and admire my ostentatious octopus-shaped bow, however, I cannot deny this game is absolutely my business.

This latest installment is a full bore action game, and it’s grown on me more and more. That’s not to say it isn’t free of problems, however, because it is in fact littered with annoying quirks that hold back what could have been top-tier stuff. 

That mortar cannon though…

Regarding the premise, you’re called Rook this time, and you accidentally unleash two screwball elven gods while trying to stop that dickhead Solas from shitting demons everywhere. It’s a decent enough story presented in BioWare’s typical writing style - that is to say, it’s got some fun characters and excellent individual moments, but the narrative connective tissue is often awkward and clumsy. 

BioWare’s lack of subtlety will give away big plot points by dropping a loaf’s worth of breadcrumbs for observant players to pick up. The expectation is that you’ll be wowed by all the clues on a replay, but it’s just trying too hard to show how clever it thinks it is. 

There’s also no need for dialog to point out how funny it is when bad guys complain about everyday problems, but they can’t resist explaining the joke. One particular scene, in which your companions uniformly explain how they all have personal problems that need solving before the climax, is so infuriatingly unnatural they may as well look at the camera and start promising you the XP will be worth it. 

There is, however, an exception to the series’ literary gilding of lilies… 

Contrary to the whining you may see online, Veilguard’s dialog regarding trans and non-binary experiences is the most natural sounding stuff in the game. You can actively choose to create a trans and/or non-binary Rook, one who can speak of their relationship with gender roles and may use it to help Taash, a dragon slaying companion, figure out their non-binary identity. 

I was worried it would be as cringeworthy as some claim based on the studio’s prior attempts at writing marginalized characters, but I personally found the interactions impressively relatable. Some of Rook’s thoughts closely mirror things I’ve said to other trans people who are starting their own gender adventure and looking for advice. 

It’s an important step for representation in games done better than I expected. Well done.

Anyway, the game’s controls are rather rubbish.

Veilguard has an issue I’ve seen in many a big budget game, one of over-animation. With a focus on “realistic” momentum and flourishing motions, Dragon Age places form over function. It looks nice, but it doesn’t always feel so. 

Should you nudge the analog stick, Rook will lunge into a walk unless you’re really slow, and they’ll not stop moving until a moment after you stop telling them to. This compounds the conflict any game has when it foolishly maps the interaction button to the jump button, which is further compounded by items having a small pickup radius. Hope you enjoy hopping! 

You can remap buttons, but your controller’s layout is pushed to capacity and input conflicts are unavoidable. The default setup’s already doing the best it can. 

When games add a level of automatic parkour while sprinting, I’m always a fan… unless I end up accidentally jumping over a “guardrail” and plummeting into a chasm. Veilguard is one of the plummety ones, and Rook’s aforementioned momentum can lead you to gracefully hurdle over all sorts of things you didn’t mean to. 

Videogames, can we please start flagging barriers as barriers in games with auto parkour?

Falling off of things is pretty easy to do even without the enthusiastic hurdling. Combat often unfolds in high places, Rook has an awful jump, and there are bouts of shitty platforming. Luckily, pitfalls respawn you without any damage, and enemies are hilariously easy to instakill by flinging them into the same pits. 

I’m tempted to call that latter element an acceptable tradeoff for Veilguard’s hungry, hungry holes. 

As far as combat goes, it took a while to win me over thanks to the flowery animations impacting how responsive it felt. Once I got used to Veilguard’s rhythm, I started enjoying combat quite a lot. Took a while though, given how sprawling the controls are and how commands for your two chosen companions will have an asymmetrical hotkey layout at best. 

For ally commands, I stuck with the radial menu instead of memorizing a sprawl of hotkeys for anyone but Rook. The only problem there is that, unlike animations, this menu is too responsive. It’s a twitchy little bugger and I don’t like it. 

There’s no denying this is a heavily actionized sequel, as shown by simplified ally commands and an increased emphasis on blocking, parrying, and ranged headshots depending on your class. Things move way too chaotically for me to bother with precision moves, but I’m certainly not against the chaos itself. 

The flexibility offered when building a character means I could eventually make my bow more efficient as a hipfire weapon anyway. Chaos reigns. 

Battles rage swiftly and are startlingly aggressive - if you don’t have Davrin or Taash popping off taunts, prepare to have demons and darkspawn in your face as if you’re made of twatnip. Each fight is visually busy, full of enemies, special effects, and a perpetual spamming of AoE attacks. I can’t deny it looks cool, and only feels moreso when Rook grows stronger and their attacks get more grandiose.  

Lock-on targeting can help navigate the anarchy, but it’s not altogether reliable, chiefly because so many enemies break it by charging or fucking teleporting. This is remarkably frequent and makes me wonder if locking on’s been undermined on purpose for some bizarre reason.

While I have many little grievances with the mechanics, fighting in Veilguard consistently endeared itself to me as I built my character. It really has been enjoyable to dodge around and pop off arrows or rapier jabs in between abilities that are figuratively and/or literally explosive. 

As you gain levels and pump points into a freely respeccable skill tree, you’ll be able to equip a number of delightful cooldown abilities and pick an “Ultimate” move from which most of the game’s entertaining silliness comes from. It’s all very over-the-top, though the skill tree itself has a maze of a layout. 

Companions have their own - and far less complex - skill trees, serving the usual array of roles that compliment your chosen class. Spell Combos from previous games are reworked as Detonations, where some moves inflict special status effects on enemies that other moves can trigger to deliver additional punishment. True to the game’s action focus, Detonations are straightforward and easy to use. 

What look like a few vestigial remnants of the game’s original “live service” roots rear their heads, mostly extensively with the weird in-game economy. Some merchants belong to Factions and will sell more gear as you rank up your reputation with them. In any other game, you’d gain these ranks by buying items, but here you have to sell stuff. It’s not just any old stuff either - an entire class of item labeled as Valuables exist, and they’d just be typical RPG vendor trash if not for non-faction merchants selling the things complete with rarity levels as if they were loot.

While you pick up Valuables during play, the trash you buy for no other reason than to sell it (at a loss) will rank you up faster. It’s a system best described as fucking stupid. Convoluted and initially confusing, it has to be a holdover - only a “service” game would have such a moronically fucked up economy. 

While I’m at it, why can’t you preview the gear you’re buying? You can’t even make the small picture in the vendor’s menu bigger to get a better look. Considering the amount of cosmetic-only armor skins on sale, the inability to view them in detail or context is almost as dumb as the junkonomy. 

I have an opinion about Darkspawn I’d like to shoehorn in.

Their art design is great this time around. Darkspawn always looked a little dull to me in prior games, but the mutant ones in Veilguard are freaky body horrors. I can’t say the same for Demons, who are considerably more generic looking now. The dichotomy between these enemy designs emphasizes what a mixed bag this game’s visuals are. 

Some characters have good facial animations, while others have faces that ooze over their skulls with uncanny slipperiness. Combat animations - indulgent as they are - look very pretty, but people are charmlessly stiff in other contexts. Some environments are colorful and interesting, while others are thoroughly uninspired. At no point is the game horrible to look at, it’s just rather inconsistent. 

One thing that really stands out is the game’s pace. Veilguard moves along at a good clip, getting into the action right away and keeping things going through quests that largely feel more condensed than usual. While there are some lengthier objectives, the story does its best to not drag on too much.

That said, true to the Veilguard’s dual nature, there’s a level of repetition that can certainly slow things down. The main problem is how many bloody missions are padded out with simplistic “puzzles” in which you run around lighting braziers or turning statues to face different directions. It’s not exciting to begin with, much less after multiple occurrences. 

While there’s a lot of running back and forth through the same environments, a very convenient fast travel system keeps backtracking to a minimum. Travel points are liberally dotted around every location, and no matter where you are you can hop to any discovered point across the world. Combined with Veilguard’s fast loading, you don’t lose much time at all to covering the same old ground. 

One consistent positive is the cast of characters you align with. As well as capable fighters, the people you befriend are likable folks. Taash’s deadpan delivery and relatable story is great, and Davrin breaks the boring “serious warrior” archetype with his strong opinions on heroism and adorable griffon buddy. At the risk of objectifying men, I’m just gonna say it - Lucanis is hot as hell. 

Neve is a little directionless but not unlikable, and her artificial serpentine leg is bloody cool. I actually don’t find Belara as annoying as some do, though I can relate to her obvious ADHD, and Emmrich’s own brand of clear neurodivergence is adorably sweet, as is the love for his skelatally-inclined servant Mannfred.

Harding is Harding. She spends her time Hardinging around like the Hardinger she is. 

One more note, the various antagonists are delightful. They look incredible and play an active role throughout, never ending an appearance without mouths full of scenery. Ghilan'nain is easily the star of the show, an eldritch abomination who is perfectly portrayed as a self-styled god gone completely mad. She most definitely carries much of the plot as a memorable villain. 

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is heavy on the action, light on the bullshit, and gets progressively more enjoyable as you expand your abilities and get used to some wonky controls. Its tone, art direction, and exaggerated combat is most certainly not the Dragon Age of old, but what can I say? It’s the Dragon Age I’ve enjoyed the most, even if I can name a laundry list of things that piss me off about it. 

The fact that you can make it very gender is a huge positive, especially since the only people claiming it’s “forced” on you are lying through their stupid teeth. It’s there to help more players feel seen, and that’s only a good thing. 

All that said, character creation won’t let me make Rook’s tits even half as big as mine actually are. A true step backwards for representation, I think you’ll agree.

7.5/10

There are cishet men in Dragon Age: The Veilguard and that makes it the most offensive game ever made. I'm guessing I can say this and it's perfectly okay, since so many people are saying it about people like me.

Sonic X Shadow Generations

Released:  October 22nd, 2024

Developer: Sonic Team

Publisher: Sega

Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Switch, Xbox Series X/S

You know which Sonic game was really quite good? Sonic Generations. It had some infuriatingly bad moments, because it was a Sonic game, but it was one of the most consistent of the series in terms of design, quality, and entertainment. 

Most importantly, Classic Sonic did this little thing where he’d stomp around with pure squee if you got above an A rank at the end of a level. It was the single most adorable thing that has ever occurred in a Sega game, and it still is. 

Generations was always a gorgeous game, a testament to the underrated loveliness of the Hedgehog Engine, so I’d been waiting patiently for an updated release with a fresh coat of paint. Such is the predictability of this medium that I knew it was coming. All I had to do was wait. 

One thing I couldn’t have predicted was Sonic Generations returning with a Shadow-flavored expansion that contains some of the best level design the series has ever had. Despite some obligatory toss, I’ve been impressed by exactly how much Shadow steals the show. 

Sadly, there are no guns, and I’m not being sarcastic. I very sincerely hoped Shadow would pull out the ol’ assault rifles again. Ah well. 

Sonic X Shadow Generations consists of two separate entities sat next to each other. You have the original Sonic Generations in a remastered form, and a standalone game starring the hedgehog who has definitely asked more than one woman online why she’s blocked him even though he subs to her Patreon.

Shadow Generations is really good! 

After Sonic Frontiers, it’s such a relief to see that Sonic Team still remembers what real level design looks like. I was mostly interested in this package for the remastered content, yet the new campaign held my attention with a clenched fist. Shadow gets his brood on across a selection of mostly great stages that manage to be stylish and polished in equal measure. 

Sonic’s post-3D gameplay and presentation feature many combustible elements that don’t always play well together, but a lot of care’s been taken to ensure it all gels this time. There’s a sweet cohesion between the speedy movement, frenetic camera, layered environments, and mechanical gimmickry, allowing for a game that constantly switches perspectives and styles of play without confusing either the player or itself.

Shadow Generations features some of the tightest level design the series has ever had. 

There’s very little wasted space between the tracks, platforms, and rails, all of which flow into each other smoothly with clear visual telegraphing. While the camera is constantly changing distances and angles, it does a grand job of keeping the player and the road ahead in clear focus. That’s all before some immensely rewarding speed sections with all the obligatory loopies n’ springies.

There are certainly some bumps in the road, a few wonky areas, and the series’ usual slippery physics remain hard to trust, but for the most part it’s a hell of a ride. Well, at least until both acts of the last stage, a pair of horribly laid out shitshows with messy platforming and horrendous visual communication. 

Shadow’s terrific stages are embedded in a hub world that laughs at my dislike of wasted space. Unlike Generations’ scrolling screen of stage selections, this one is a sprawling void with clumps of platform sections scruffily strewn about. It‘s a boring hassle to navigate, not least for the fact that unlockable rewards for exploring scrape the bottom of the content barrel. Sorry, but concept art is never worth going out of one’s way to unlock.

There’s “fast travel” in the form of a proper stage selection menu, but it’s for levels you’ve already finished. Otherwise you’re wandering around a bland void that feels every bit like it’s there to inflate the game’s length via arbitrary barriers and pointless backtracking. 

In order to fight a boss, you have to platform your way to the battle’s entrance, which causes a bunch of special challenge stages to appear, then platform to those, beat them all, and return to the boss entrance once you’re done. There is no reason for the process to be such a waste of time, at least no reason that would suggest good faith. 

Similarly to the ones in Generations, challenge levels offer alternate versions of the main stages with extra gimmicks or new layouts. Some are about using Shadow’s time freezing ability to navigate rapid hazards, while others may task players with defeating a certain number of enemies or collecting stuff. Quite unlike Generations, most of them are fun. They’re also quite forgiving if you just want to blaze through them for the boss keys.  

Much as I like them individually, I’m disappointed these stages are obligatory hurdles that serve no purpose other than to hamstring the player. Not only do I resent the way they’re presented, it breaks the pace of the campaign to have such a stuttered sequence of playing levels, watching cutscenes, backtracking a bunch, replaying tracts of stuff you’ve just played, and backtracking some more. 

I’d have much rather had challenges as optional content with more worthwhile completion rewards instead of hurdles to story progress. If nothing else, the challenges themselves deserve better than to be used in such a vulgar fashion. Many of them are brilliant! I should be pleased by their presence, not annoyed at their imposition. 

Speaking of things that do not please me with their presence… what the fuck is up with those boss fights?

While latter day Sonic games aren’t exactly known for great boss encounters, and Generations itself has some rubbish ones, Shadow’s handful of battles are downright embarrassing. Not only are they super messy, they’re so rudimentary they barely qualify as “gameplay.” They’re slow, they’re clumsy, they’re almost no threat. The first boss, Biolizard, is such a lifeless slice of mediocrity I almost wondered if Sonic Team had left a placeholder sequence instead of a real fight by mistake. 

Shadow’s less edifying moments may be frequent, but they’re not detrimental enough to take too much away from what works. In addition to the usual platforming action, gaming’s angriest hedgehog acquires a suite of powers during his adventure, starting with time stoppage before adding electric projectiles, a stingray for surfing on water, and an alternate gloop form that turns him into gloop so he can gloop his way through environmental gloop. 

None of these powers are particularly brilliant, but they’re not bad either, simply offering some ways to mix up the gameplay a little. That said, the stingray controls a little too awkwardly, and I really dislike the violent way it shunts left and right when you attack with it. Otherwise, everything falls under the category of stuff I wouldn’t miss but don’t mind. 

Oh, and I reiterate that I really do mean it when I say I’m disappointed there aren’t guns. 

Look, 2005’s Shadow the Hedgehog was a bad videogame, but if Sonic 2006 could get its spotlight in Generations then Shadow’s literal solo game deserves a full dedication. The very point of this package is to celebrate games both old and new, so it’s downright glaring to not have Shadow spraying bullets and fucking up tanks. Despite how ludicrous the concept was, a Sonic-based shooter could absolutely be done well, and I’m gutted there’s no glimpse of it. One assumes Sega’s snub is for rating reasons, which only makes it sadder. 

You know, I think what I really want is a proper remake of Shadow of the Hedgehog. In fact, yes, yes that is exactly what I want. 

We ain’t getting a remake of Shadow today, but we do have the remaster of Sonic Generations to talk about and, yup, it’s good! For the most part, the game’s exactly as I remember it, with a mixed bag of levels ranging from brilliant to bullshit but mostly falling on the side of fun. 

It’s probably my age showing that I’ve been getting screwed by muscle memory when swapping between Modern and Classic Sonics, but aside from trying to do homing attacks with the wrong hedgehog I’ve had a lovely time going back to reimagined versions of such hit zones as Chemical Plant, City Escape, and the all-time banger that is Rooftop Run. 

Except for that bit at the end of Rooftop’s Classic stage with the clock and the mines, because that part can go to hell.

Stuff I hated from last time is still no better. Sky Sanctuary remains disappointingly sloppy, and even though the challenge levels aren’t quite as obligatory as Shadow’s ones, the fact you have to do any of them sucks because of how badly conceived most of the bloody things are. Those Rouge stages are a disaster. 

As one would expect, the visuals have been updated so an already beautiful game looks moreso. Interestingly, the original game’s script was rewritten and freshly dubbed, which I personally don’t have much of an opinion about because I can’t remember a bloody thing about the story and wouldn’t care if I could. 

Apparently some crueler dialog was altered, so I can only assume the game’s been called “woke” by angry men claiming to be lifelong Sonic fans despite never having played a Sonic game. Or indeed any game. 

The old Casino Night DLC is included, but it’d be supremely screwed up if it wasn’t so I’m not going to hand out a trophy for it. Good little pinball table though. Additionally, they’ve added the Drop Dash ability that first emerged in Sonic Mania, allowing Sonic to hit the ground rolling - a very useful boon considering how often I’ll take damage in Classic stages because Sonic missed an enemy by a nanomargin and uncurled. Is it just me?

Other than that, they’ve added collectible Chao to find in each level. So uh… yeah. That is also something. I guess. 

Sonic X Shadow Generations is a great remaster of a great game with a great new game tacked on. 

While the all-new Shadow portion is a breezy affair that attempts to look denser with cheap padding, it handily justifies itself with some of the very best 3D Sonic gameplay to date. The remastered side takes a very pretty game and pretties it further, adds a few new bells, and that’s all it really needed to do. 

Even though I famously hated Frontiers and still do, I want it to get a direct sequel because I want a version of the game I can actually love. That said, playing Sonic Generations X Shadow has me hoping Sega never forgets that kind of game either, because I’ve been reminded that when 3D Sonic platforming is good, there’s nothing quite like it. 

There’s nothing quite like it when it’s bad either, to be fair. What the fuck was that Biolizard fight all about?

8/10

Over time, the word "addictive" has been used positively when describing games, and it makes sense that a good game is one you can't stop playing. However, addiction is nurtured by bad games too, as evidenced by my habitual playing of Aeternum: New World.

I love how language can evolve but we need to be careful about the shape it takes, especially when there are others who will exploit a word's meaning for malicious purposes. We need our language to differentiate a good game you can't stop playing and a game that's designed to be addictive for financially abusive reasons, because right now companies such as Amazon Games are relishing in the obfuscation.

And you thought we forgot.

Games we played this week include: Metaphor: ReFantazio (11:00) New Worlds Aternum (18:35) Hades II (30:55) The Rocky Horror Show Video Game (35:19)

---

News things talked about in this episode:

Nintendo has their own secret online game with thousands of players pledged to silence (44:05)https://www.eurogamer.net/details-of-nintendos-mysterious-switch-online-playtest-leak

Bloober says they’re done making bad games (51:55)https://www.gamespot.com/articles/bloober-team-says-its-done-with-shitty-games-and-silent-hill-2-remake-wasnt-a-fluke/1100-6527269/

Ubisoft Montpellier disbands team behind critically acclaimed Prince of Persia game (57:40)https://www.eurogamer.net/ubisoft-responds-to-report-prince-of-persia-the-lost-crown-development-team-disbanded

---

Buy official Jimquisition merchandise at https://thejimporium.com

Find Laura at LauraKBuzz on Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and Patreon. All her content goes on https://LauraKBuzz.com, and you can catch Access-Ability on YouTube every Friday.

Follow Conrad at ConradZimmerman on Twitter/Instagram/BlueSky and check out his Patreon (https://patreon.com/fistshark). You can also peruse his anti-capitalist propaganda at https://mercenarycreative.com.

New World: Aeternum

Released:  October 15th, 2024

Developer: Amazon Games

Publisher: Amazon Games

Systems: PC (as New World), PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S

New World: Aeternum came out recently, bringing the “hit” Amazon game to consoles at last. Thanks to confusing messaging, people have asked me if it’s a brand new release, an expansion, or some sort of retread. Simply put, New World: Aeternum is the console version of New World, which released on PC in 2021. That's it, really.

I’ll tell you the only thing you really need to know about New World - it’s an MMO.

Aeternum could easily have been called MMO: The MMO, it’s such an MMO. It’s about as MMO as an MMO can get, MMO’ing its heart out to MMO as hard as any MMO could MMO. 

Admittedly, I’ve become very addicted to this game, but please do not take that as an endorsement. Aeternum is addictive because it is an MMO, using every MMO trick in the MMO book to get its hooks into a player the same way any MMO does. 

It keeps you dangling, giving and withholding in a delicate balance to provide just enough dopamine to keep chasing it when said dopamine is taken away. 

There are so many things to level up, so many ways in which you can feel invested, so many ways to sink your time to such a degree you’ll feel it’s wasted if you don’t sink more. So many ways to disappoint you, frustrate you, and leave you feeling shortchanged, all while promising more. 

And of course, it’s all built upon a foundation of grinding, because it’s an MMO.

There’s a narrative element, but because it’s an MMO, it barely even matters. You’re on an island where nobody can die but everyone’s dealing with The Corruption(™)  because of course they are. Modern videogames love their Corruption, after all. There’s also an angry man with a metal face over his regular face, and a bad magic lady called Madea (not that one).

Not much has been done to mask what an afterthought the writing is. Story arcs are breezed through without much development for the stock characters and you don’t even get dialog choices for flavor - talking to NPCs is a linear track where all decisions are made for you. The plot is such an obvious excuse that I just couldn’t muster a damn. 

New Worlds has an “Age of Discovery” vibe - y’know, colonization n’ shit. Don’t worry though, because the game’s disclaimer makes a point of telling you it’s very diverse and sensitive. I mean, there have certainly been worse games messing around with this kind of setting. At the very least, the admittedly prevalent diversity among the cast was a savvy move. 

Something tells me not every player would appreciate that though. At first I thought it was funny when my server was chosen for me and I received the message, “Entering Phoenix,” since that’s already one of my favorite things to do. I had to leave that server because the Global Chat was full of discussions about Romanian people and, well, players weren’t saying nice things. 

I think it would be helpful if Amazon could provide a list of servers in order from least to most racist so we know which ones to avoid.

Anyway, there’s fishing. 

Obviously there’s fishing, because it’s an MMO. There’s mining, and logging, and picking shit up off the floor. There’s crafting, loads of crafting, an MMO-sized amount of crafting. I’ve wasted hours doing all this nonsense, propelled by sheer compulsion. I’m not about to pretend I’ve had a terrible time doing it all, but this is nonetheless a cynical gameplay loop that’s been honed to arresting perfection. 

I do have positive things to say though. No matter how calculating a game might be, it’s got to have some good qualities to keep me on the reel. I’d have been even more positive, however, if everything hadn’t been monetized to all fuck. Funny how that tends to immolate any goodwill I might be inclined to have.

The combat and character progression is quite enjoyable, possibly the only aspects of the production that aren’t more convoluted than they need to be. You start off picking an Archetype, determining the attributes and weapons you begin the game with. Archetypes aren’t ironclad classes and won’t lock you into any set path. 

Improving stats is quite simple - when you level up, you only need to worry about putting skill points into the attributes that pertain to your chosen weapon, and each weapon will scale with either one or two stats. You want to use a bow? Go purely with Dex and you’re sorted. Until level 60, you’re free to respec and experiment at any time. 

Up to two weapons can be equipped and their own upgrades are straightforward too. As you fight, your equipped weapon types will level up, allowing you to unlock various special moves and passive bonuses. Both weapons will get XP, even if you only use one. Again, that’s all there really is to it. 

Every weapon is interesting in its own way and the cooldown abilities they get are pretty cool. The Great Axe, for example, can unlock an attack where you throw it to rip a hole in reality that pulls enemies in. It’s a ludicrous concept, especially for a pure strength weapon, but it’s fun. There are spears, muskets, elemental gauntlets, magic sticks, and all the ones I’ve tried are pretty entertaining. 

Unfortunately, any weapon you use will give you an immediately poor first impression thanks to one issue - their sound effects are fucking terrible. Even the biggest, heaviest armaments will sound as impactful as a loving slap on the butt, with some just coming off like wet farts. It’s genuinely stunning to hear how bad they are for the first time. A blade bigger than an Alsation shouldn’t sound like a pair of scissors closing. 

Naturally, your adventures are propelled by loot, with a whole bunch of offensive gear and wearable stuff being thrown at you as rewards for questing and crafting. There’s nothing Aeternum does here that’s really new - as with any RPG of this stripe, you just keep replacing your stuff with better stuff to keep making the Stuff Numbers go up. 

Gear has a really nice aesthetic. You’ve got all sorts of fancy hats, cool masks, pretty dresses, and badass longcoats. You can recolor items, but as with too many RPGs, the colored dyes are super rare considering how transitory one’s gear always is. 

You won’t be surprised to learn some of the coolest looking items are secured behind a paywall, but we’ll get to all that nastiness. 

I’m a big fan of vivid, saturated colors, and this game loves them as well. There are some incredibly pretty and vibrant environments that become especially pleasant depending on how the sunlight hits them. Animations are sadly not as good, with characters moving stiffly or flapping about with few facial expressions to speak of. 

I like the fishies. I wish you could do more with them than merely craft and use a few rare ones as trophies, but they look neat. I want to keep a big tadpole as a pet. 

The grinding is everywhere. From chopping down trees to tanning leather, every act has its own leveling system that requires a ton of repetitive chorin’ and lengthy animations to unlock stuff. The fact you have a separate skill for logging and woodworking should tell you all you need to know.

Yup, it sure is an MMO! 

As part of its addictive loop there’s always something to grind for, always something that’s out of reach. The carrot of a payoff is forever dangled, and forever it shall be. Just a few more hours and you’ll be able to mine that glowing ore you keep seeing! 

There’s a cute rhythm minigame where you play music to get temporary passive buffs. The tunes are great, the different instruments sound lovely, but even that involves a grind of leveling and upgrading. 

None of what I’m saying will surprise the average MMO player because Aeternum is as distilled an MMO as a game could be. Nothing less and certainly nothing more. It’s got all the PvP, raids, factions, and systems upon systems that you could find by picking any other MMO at random. 

It does that really shitty thing such games do where resources and enemies are offered on a “first come, first served” basis. Finding some rare trees and watching as other players get in first and chop them down is disheartening. Shooting an animal and having some opportunistic fuckface run up and skin it before you get there is just plain bullshit. 

If you have to kill a certain enemy on the map, you will either benefit from other people around to help fight it, or get there after it's already defeated, which means you’ll be waiting an unknown amount of time for the bastard to respawn. This is made worse by how there explicitly isn’t enough for everyone.

Then there are all the little ways in which the game is simply being a dick. 

Unreasonably convoluted fast travel, towns with individual instead of universal storage chests, resource/currency fees for everything from crafting to selling, daily limits, currency caps, massive activity cooldowns, just a parade of arbitrary penalties and petty restrictions. Y’know, MMO bullshit. Because it’s an MMO. 

All the waiting and tedium likely isn’t considered a problem by the designers, since feeling cheated is part and parcel of getting stuck on that dopamine chase. Plus, I can only believe Amazon’s executives are getting off on making customers compete for resources. Something tells me that watching others fight over scraps is their kink. 

Speaking of what makes Jeff Bezos’ boner dribble, Aeternum’s full of microtransactions. 

It’s sadly not a shock that the most exotic and fun cosmetics are paywalled. Some outfits cost vile amounts of cash obfuscated by a garbage premium currency. There are mounts, but if you want to ride all but the most basic of animals, you’ll need to pay. The ratio of in-game to premium mounts is fucking grotesque, so extreme that I’d say almost all the available ones require real money.

Any game that’s monetizing transmogrification, by the way, is acting like a total cunt. 

If anything is going to stop me playing, it’ll be all that nonsense. The discouragement of knowing you’ll never play enough to get the really good shit does a good job of souring an experience. Given how microtransactions are an ableist concept designed to target certain types of people, as a neurodivergent person I have to stop playing games like this anyway once the temptation to spend becomes too great.

It’s fucking sad that you can get so into a game you need to stop playing to protect yourself from it. Even sadder is just how normalized such malicious games have become.

Of course there’s a battle pass with the usual free and paid tracks, since no amount of money is enough for the vampires running videogames into the ground. You’ll be constantly reminded of the pass’ existence with pop up notifications, as everything you do relates to its progress in some way. 

I think I’d have been a lot more positive about some of the things Aeternum was doing if it wasn’t all being done in such dedicated service to evil. 

Also if it wasn’t completely broken.

Aeternum crashes so much you’d think it was doing so by design. It can’t last even a couple of hours without crashing, and sometimes it’ll do so even more frequently than that. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a big budget game randomly melt down to this degree, not even one made by Bethesda. It’s almost comedic, but falls just short of amusing due to it being fucking aggravating. 

If you’re going to have the nerve to charge sixty bucks and grasp for hundreds of dollars more, you should at least have the requisite scrap of decency to provide a game that isn’t borderline defective. 

Less severe issues are abundant. I’ve been stuck between the transition from dialog to gameplay, unable to speak or move. Animations can break completely, various actions might randomly stop before they’re completed, and voice lines can go missing. A recent patch only seems to have made things worse. 

One “fun” bug saw the game start with absolutely zero UI or HUD loaded. This not only disabled aiming reticles and onscreen information, but every single menu as well. Interaction prompts wouldn’t load, and without them I couldn’t do anything except attack. Not sure I’ve seen a game do that before. 

Despite the backing of one of the largest corporations in the world, New World: Aeternum is ultimately an “also ran” of a title that does far too little to stand out and pretty much relies on the Amazon brand for attention. Without the novelty of the name, there's nothing to give it an edge.

It’s got pretty environments, the combat is decent, and I admittedly became quite addicted to it. It’s specifically designed to be addictive though, so that on its own cannot be taken as a sign of true quality. Not only that, the calculated gameplay loops in effect are ancient psychological tricks, nothing Amazon Games could take credit for innovating in the slightest.

I really wouldn’t have minded getting sucked into the compulsion loop if it wasn’t there solely to exploit me for cash, but that’s the motive, isn’t it? It’s always the fucking motive. New World: Aeternum is just another game that does nothing to deserve its asking price but has the insulting nerve to try and charge even more on top. 

I’m so tired of this manipulative garbage. I can't wait to stop being addicted to it.

4.5/10

Credit Note: The Skyrim Shuffle clip was made by Manslayer the Gamerpoop. Apologies for lack of credit until now. Editor attempted to find the official source and came up with nothing, and I didn't know there was a thing that needed crediting until it was brought to our attention in the comments. Thank you Golecom2 for the spot!

As a lover of so-called Eurojank games, I have a high tolerance for bugs and roughness - within reason. Also, contextually. See, there's a difference between a scrappy game that needs some polish but did its best and... Bethesda's track record of blatantly unfinished nonsense.

A little encouragement goes a long way.

Games we played this week include: Life is Strange: Double Exposure (08:00)

Metaphor: ReFantazio (21:30)

UFO 50 (36:25)

Nintendo Alarmo (59:10)

Starship Troopers: Extermination (1:07:20)

Starship Troopers: Extermination

Released:  October 11th, 2024

Developer: Offworld

Publisher: Offworld

Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S

As a child, I loved Starship Troopers for how cool its killer space bugs looked. As an adult, I loved it for the satire. It’s a wonderful film, a deliciously sneaky mockery of fascistic military fetishism. And y’know, it still has really, really cool killer space bugs in it, so what’s not to appreciate?

Of course, a lot of people merely enjoy the movie as a big dumb action flick, and that’s perfectly valid too - there’s plenty of violence and outright silliness to enjoy. Starship Troopers: Extermination very much emphasizes the action factor over anything else, focused almost entirely as it is on shooting alien monsters. 

That is also valid, and very fun too.

It’s a shame Extermination plays it straight, keeping anything satirical well out of the way, but I suppose we have Helldivers for that. Still, it seems like a wasted opportunity to have the official license and make something so thoroughly serious with it. 

Given how Helldivers was inspired by Starship Troopers, a game literally based on it will draw inevitable comparisons. Both titles are cooperative shooters where players mow down hordes of insectoid creatures, but Extermination goes for scale over style. It’s nowhere near as tightly designed or polished as its alternative, but with 16-player action and a whole base building element, I’d say the game pleasingly earns its keep. 

Just about.

I mean, I genuinely love Starship Troopers: Extermination, having gotten very hooked on it, but dear lord is it janky as all fuck. 

What we have here is a first-person shooter where the main thrust of the action is all about holding out. With a simple building system that works exactly the same as the one in Fallout 4, players put up walls, craft bunkers, and add various fortifications to withstand massive assaults from cool killer space bugs - and I mean massive.

Arachnid forces burst out of the ground in numbers that steadily increase as a mission proceeds, throwing themselves at the base. While there are a few different objectives throughout a mission, they all end with players desperately pumping every resource they have into repelling hundreds of monsters hell bent on breaking down the walls and overrunning the place. 

The building aspect is restricted to basic architecture and a few offensive erections. You can also create ammo stations, which are crucial considering how many bullets are spent fighting even mid-sized bug attacks. Any player can place, fix, and unbuild structures with their handy-dandy repair tools, though there’s a limit on how much can be placed. 

Surprisingly I’ve seen almost no conflict between players, most of whom aren’t talking to each other - they’re just getting on with it. I’ve seen bases both simple and complex, but most stuff gets built with common sense. I think part of the reason for this is that players who aren’t placing stuff can still help make it, and getting a base up quickly requires that help. 

Once a structure is placed it still needs to be physically fabricated using the tool’s repair mode, and the more players doing it, the faster it’s made. This allows everyone to take part, as those disinclined to playing the architect can still pitch in and earn a handful of easy XP at the same time. Hell, there’s a class based on building things and I felt like I’d not enjoy it because I’m not a good designer - the Engineer’s faster repair skills make it fun for me anyway. 

Since this game loves the movie’s iconic “I’m doing my part” line, it makes sense that all players are encouraged to pitch in. Whenever I’m zapping walls into physical being I’ve admittedly found it hard to resist saying the line myself. I am doing my part, after all!

Despite never caring much for the building in Fallout, the streamlined and specific presentation here has gotten me far more into it. I’m not laboriously managing a settlement and stressing too much over where everything should go. A fort is something I can get my head around. 

At first I simply helped, but after a while I started adding walls and towers myself. I also love to run around during a bug attack, keeping the base maintained and hurriedly rebuilding walls when Arachnids break through.

It can be quite a panic when the bugs get in. As well as tearing apart anyone they can, they’ll  attempt to strike at your base’s core and destroy it entirely, which ensures defeat. It’s pretty awesome.

Almost every gun feels heavy and effective, satisfyingly chewing into Arachnids with a real sense of impact. Not every armament is a winner - I personally hate the grenade launcher’s low ammo and disappointing damage - but with a host of rifles, handguns, and heavy weapons to try out, there’s plenty to like. 

Battles are frantic and reach a point of total chaos as more and more bugs join the fray. You’ll face a ton of Drones and Warriors before larger and more exotic Arachnids show up. Gunners, Grenaders, and Inferno Bugs all deliver different ranged attacks while the Tiger is an overgrown Warrior that endures piles of damage and gleefully fucks shit up the moment it comes into close quarters. 

Despite all the anarchy, Extermination does a surprisingly good job of visually telegraphing priority bugs with their colors. The bright yellow carapace of a Tiger or glowing orange patches on a Gunner are pretty easy to spot among the ludicrous amounts of death and debris. 

Gunners are twats, by the way. They should be killed both on sight and principle. 

Amusingly, bug corpses won’t disappear unless manually disposed of, meaning that before long the environment is saturated with chitinous corpses, a sight I’m endlessly entertained by. 

These bodies are also a gameplay component since you can’t just clip through them. They still take up physical space, blocking passages, keeping gates from closing, and piling up to the point where living Arachnids use them as ramps. While bodies aren’t always a problem, they do need clearing out with melee attacks or specialized equipment sometimes. 

There are six classes to choose from, each with their own unique skill as well as a bespoke set of perks and utility equipment.

Your class determines what weapon you start with and which ones are obtained as they level up. Some armaments are class-exclusive, like the Engineer’s flamethrower, and every class will have access to the regular assault rifle somewhere in their progression - it’s generic but useful if you like a class but aren’t fond of its more specific weapons.

The Demolisher and Guardian are your Heavy classes. Demolishers are all about ordnance and can effectively clear bug corpses with unique explosives, while tanky Guardians have a “siege mode” that anchors them in place with a personal defense structure, effectively becoming a human turret. 

Assault classes come in the form of the long-ranged Sniper and all-purpose Ranger. Both use jetpacks, the former’s allowing them to boost up to high spots, the latter’s giving them a horizontal burst of speed. Either class can also scan their surroundings in different ways to highlight enemies. 

Then you have Support. The Medic has a drone that can be commanded to revive fallen allies - a great tool when it actually works. The Engineer is a more effective builder and can also craft a small range of structures beyond the regular confines of a base. 

Every class is useful in some way, though not all of their unlocks are great. The Medic gets a lot of stuff that just isn’t good - a perk that lets them revive by shouting at players is one example, as it requires looking very precisely at a downed comrade amongst all the bugs and bodies while trying not to die. It’s just too fiddly to be practical.

Many interactions, in fact, are fiddly. Trying to revive or activate certain items can border on pixel hunting since the area of interactivity is weirdly restrictive - opening crates is particularly annoying since only one small part of it will bring up the required prompt. Especially for a game this hectic, it could stand to have wider detection for interactions. 

Another annoying thing is that Extermination’s one of those games that don’t recognize certain inputs until the animation for a previous action has played out in full. If you’re reloading, for example, attempting to aim down the sights simply won’t work if the reload process has so much as a millisecond left to go. This also applies to switching weapons or bringing out equipment, which can get really irritating when trying to pull out a healing stim and use it, both acts being a separate command.

Not many games have this strangely insistent disabling of input, and I never appreciate it when they do.

Aside from these issues, the controls are pretty solid. Both the shooting and the building commands are responsive and intuitive, working quite well on console as well as PC. 

I’ve had very few issues with matchmaking, the only consistent problem being that the first few moments of a game are always extremely laggy with nauseating stutters. It’s only temporary, but it’s nonetheless not a nice way to kick off. 

Regular missions involve incrementally capturing territory and building refineries in set locations, then ferrying resources to a base’s building site. This process leads to a big building session before an army of bugs turn up, after which point the players hold firm for a set period of time. Missions end with everyone running for an imminently departing drop ship. 

There are some optional missions that crop up, such as repairing generators in the field or eliminating particular enemies. Also, if the base is destroyed and the mission’s failed, the drop ship will still take anyone who’s alive and successfully retreats. 

Horde Missions present a classic wave-based affair where you need to incrementally build a base between Arachnid assaults. It’s a more streamlined experience, but can often be harder since build tools are disabled during a wave. In the early goings, you’re poorly defended, and by the time you’ve got a decent base going the horde will have become viciously intense. 

It’s a good time though.

There’s something I’d only begrudgingly refer to as a “single-player” mode. It’s more like a glorified set of tutorial missions with a useless trio of AI-led companions. Missions are so pointlessly brief that if you’re on the brink of leveling up and want some quick XP before a proper mission, you can do that. 

It’s not worth anything else though, and I barely cared to touch it. Getting orders from Rico out of the films isn’t much of a draw, not least for how he’s represented by a mere still image that looks like the kind of thing you’d see in a browser game. 

Despite its gameplay largely remaining the same throughout, I’ve been happily playing Extermination over and over again. Between the different classes, ever variable base formations, and the fact you never know exactly how overwhelming the bugs are going to be each time, I’ve found plenty to keep playing for. 

Some more Arachnid types would definitely be nice. As well as the bugs already mentioned, I’ve come across Royal Guards and little exploding pill bug dickheads, and had one single encounter with the iconic Tanker beetle. While mowing down hordes of Warriors is plenty engrossing, I’d love to see some flying Hoppers or more variants unique to the game. 

Speaking of variety, an area in which the game truly disappoints is its cosmetics. There’s hardly any, and what ones there are utterly suck. Most cosmetics take the form of mere color options and the colors available are fucking awful.

While I understand that hot pink clothing might go against the aesthetic, a particularly drab selection of muted greens and browns are so unappealing. Things like visor colors on the helmets offer more colors, yet they’re all so dark and desaturated you won’t notice much difference. The armor that covers most of you can’t be recolored at all, just the clothing under it.

To make matters more disappointing, a significant majority of the paltry selection is locked away inside DLC packs. Even then, the DLC skins are barely any more interesting than what’s in the base game.

While it’s no dealbreaker, it’s still a shame. Being able to personalize your Troopers beyond a single helmet decal and some truly miserable colors would be most welcome. 

Now like I said, this is one janky piece of software. It would be far too easy to say a Starship Troopers game is full of bugs, which is exactly why I’m going to say a Starship Troopers game is full of bugs.

This Starship Troopers game is full of bugs.

For the most part, Extermination’s roughness falls under the “charmingly janky” classification. It’s a messy production, but it’s still a load of fun and you can get a giggle out of the physics occasionally going haywire and sending bug corpses through the air in ways that defy gravitational convention. 

Unfortunately, Starship Troopers is prone to full-on fuckups that can cost a lot of progress. I’ve had the game lock up or crash during lengthy missions multiple times, and if a mission’s not fully complete all the earned XP is lost. Suffice to say, I’ve been screwed out of a lot of cumulative progress thanks to the game‘s instability. 

It says a lot that I’ve not been more put off by these crashes, often jumping right back in whereas with other games I wouldn’t want to play anymore. Still, as much as I’d love to praise everything fully, I can’t just look past it being broken to this degree. 

The graphics aren’t hideous by any stretch, but they’re far from the most lavish, having traded prettiness for scale. It’s the right choice, since a Starship Troopers game should be more concerned with getting as many monsters onscreen as possible rather than going all-in on fidelity. 

The Arachnids look perfectly fine, skittering out in vast droves and hacking wildly at whatever they can get near. When they die, limbs go flying and your vision will be routinely smeared in green from the bugs’ spilled goop. 

Also there’s screeching. So much screeching. It’s a very loud game, stuffed with bug squeals, explosions, and the stomping beat of endless gunfire. If you’re prepared for the sound to be as noisy as the visuals, then it’s all good.

One interesting thing is that you can’t choose your own voice when picking a character. In fact, you don’t make a character at all, with all customization being based purely on class. Your voice and/or gender changes every single time you start a match, which is… clever. 

It’s the one area in which Extermination is thematically on-point, hinting at the horrifyingly high turnover of Starship Troopers’ warmongering arc villain, the Federation. Of course you’re not making a character - you’re merely stepping into the boots of a random soldier, one of the hundreds of thousands that’ll die today. Next time you’ll simply be stepping into the boots of another. 

I wish more of the game had shit like that. While there are cute touches like propaganda posters on the loading screens, plenty of references to doing one’s part, and a pleasantly pointless ability to salute flags, it’s all surface level. It’s fine enough for that, Extermination totally works as a straightforward “dumb action flick” of a game, and that’s what most of the audience likely wants anyway. Nevertheless, I yearn. 

Starship Troopers: Extermination may share similarities with Helldivers, but it absolutely does enough to distinguish itself and I think I prefer it. With 16 players and massive hordes of Arachnids, the sheer scope of chaos is both intimidating and enthralling. Building a base from scratch is straightforward and lots of fun, as is trying to keep the thing from toppling over. 

It’s just sad that it’s so unstable. On the one hand, I’ve gotten so much enjoyment out of the game. On the other, it’s crashed to a degree that really isn’t cool. Such an experience is always hard to rate, weighing how much I enjoy it as a videogame against its quality as a product. 

Then again, reviews are inherently biased, and when it comes to ensuring they remain so, I’m doing my part! 

Take my score with the bias it’s intended to be taken with.

8/10