Mad Max is a decent open world game born into a year of many exceptionally made open world games. Combined with the critical acclaim of the Fury Road movie released this year, the expectations leveled against this game were just too much. In a vacuum, Mad Max is a competent enough game with a lot of pieces that are good, but almost nothing great. It's well worth your time, but with tempered expectations.

The world of Mad Max is the world as imagined by 7-year-old boys playing in the sandbox. Rather, it's what the world would look like if civilization came crashing down and those same boys got to decide how the rest of human history would play out. Everyone has silly, gross-sounding names. Everyone hangs out in little clubs that each have their own bitchin' fort. Most importantly though, the entire social hierarchy is determined by how cool your car is, how much cool stuff you've stuck on it, and how big its flamethrower is.

In short, the Mad Max universe is pretty much the perfect setting for an open world sandbox.

We play as Max, who is the very definition of your prototypical video game protagonist. He's a tough guy loner with a tough outer shell that may or may not have a soft inner spot. The real flavour comes from the setting, the other characters, and the cars. Cars are a huge part of this game. In the very beginning Max's Car, The Black on Black, is stolen from him by ultimate bad guy Scrotus (seriously, that's his name). After wandering stranded in the desert for a while he joins up with a dog named Dinki-Di (yup) and a hunchback mechanic called Chumbucket (mmhmm).

Whereas Max is a simple man with a simple name for his simple car, Chumbucket takes the whole thing as a major religion, and he's not the only one. He wears a spark plug necklace, he sees Max as the chosen one, and he offers to build you the ultimate vehicle of destiny, which he aptly names The Magnum Opus. The vast majority of the game's mechanics and story revolve around preparing and upgrading both Max and the Magnum Opus in preparation for the final battle against Scrotus.

Cue generic open world gameplay here. You run around climbing towers to unlock new parts of the map, except instead of running you're driving and instead of towers they're hot air balloons. There are small camps to take over, large camps to take over, boss vehicles to take out, convoys to hijack, races, etc. All the normal stuff you expect in an open world game is here, and it's all done.....fine I guess. It's absolutely not bad at all, there's just nothing exceptional about it either. There were times I just wanted to advance the story and skip all the side stuff, and there were times I found some relaxation in aimlessly knocking over towers and clearing out camps.

The melee combat is a pretty big part of the game, and in a word, it's Batman-esque. Unfortunately it's not very well done. The Batman (and Sleeping Dogs, and Shadow of Mordor, etc.) combat is all based on timing and counters. I personally found the counter timing in Mad Max to be not very responsive. I frequently would get locked into an animation and be unable to counter an attack I could easily see coming. I eventually negated this by upgrading Max enough that I had a good health cushion and just overall trying not to get surrounded, but the controls felt sort of....muddy.

Car combat is the other big pillar, and I had similar issues with it. It feels very clunky and you feel pretty helpless and incapable at first. Eventually you just upgrade your way out of that issue by brute force and everything is fine. It's not that the upgrades made things more dynamic, it just made you more able to weather the clunky systems. Getting more armor and upgrading the harpoon you use to spear enemy vehicles is a must. To upgrade your car, and also to upgrade Max, you need scrap.

Scrap suffers yet again from the same issues. Getting enough scrap to buy all the upgrades you need is agonizing at first, but much of this pain can be negated by power-upgrading your way through it. My style in games is to always spend currency early on upgrades that will yield me more currency. I did that here as well, boosting Max's scrap-finding as much as I could. I can't imagine how rough the game would have been had I not done that, because even with the upgrades I still found myself strapped for scrap almost constantly. There are so many different upgrades in this game you couldn't possibly dream up ulocking all of them during the main course of playing. If you really wanted to take your sweet time going through the game and clearing out everything you might have enough scrap to to a ton of upgrades, but I didn't do that. I didn't exactly blast through the game either, I put a solid 18-20 hours into it.

Max Max picked up a lot of steam for me when I realized that I'd upgraded my car enough and decided to go straight through the main story. There are quite a few cutscenes in the game, and many of them are actually pretty good. I like a lot of the side characters like Chumbucket, Gutgash (seriously, with these names!) and the main female character, Hope and her daughter Glory. The character work around Max is pretty nice, and I thought the story was actually going some pretty good places. The ending, however, was duuuuuummmmbbb.

I'm not going to give it away, but I'll just say a character dies right at the end of the game, and then once the credits roll they dump you back into the open world and there that character is, alive and well. Literally like 10 seconds after you saw them die they're back. I never go back and clear things out after I've finished the main story anyway, but it was so jarring and utterly dismissive of the dramatic ending it was striving for I couldn't help but laugh at how absurd it was.

In fact, that's a great headspace to be in while playing Mad Max altogether. There's definitely some good fun to be had here, but don't fall for any indications they're giving you that this is supposed to be a serious, well thought out story. Just sit back and laugh at the line Mad Max consistently balances between being self-serious and absolutely ridiculous.

I score games significantly more harshly than many others. By following a 5-star scoring system, I waste only one score on games I don't like (1-star), and one score on games I'm indifferent about (2-stars). That leaves me with three scores left to help me differentiate the games I like. Let's get one thing out of the way off the top. I like The Witcher 3, so the only question I have to ask myself now is: How much do I like it? To figure this out I'm going to have to make some odd comparisons to some of my favourite games. So let's get started.

The Witcher is absolutely not a perfect game. There are issues aplenty with it. Some of them are the types of issues you would expect and usually tolerate from an open world game. It's got some janky bits. You can get caught on terrain here and there, some of the open world systems like character movement or scene triggering can occasionally break down, and overall not as much polish can be given to every square inch of a game world so vast. That being said, The Witcher 3 does a relatively admirable job of, for lack of a better descriptor, keeping its shit together.

There are definitely things to poke at. The race mini games are borderline infuriating because your horse, Roach, decides to hit an invisible wall and stop completely about 2-3 times per race. I can't even explain how frustrating this was. It's even making me a little mad right now. This was especially egregious in relatively long races with invisible walls right at the end. You can almost always tell when it's going to happen too. Any bridge or narrow arch was bound to be a stopping point. This problem was particularly bad, but there were many others that weren't disastrous, but perhaps somewhat annoying or immersion-breaking.

There are a ton of things to collect in this game. From weapons and armor, to potions, notes, books, and crafting materials. Considering how much there is to collect in this world, the inventory system is pretty abysmal. Finding out what items you have, what items you need, and how many is a chore at best. Figuring out which notes you've read is impossible, and often important to progress to the next stage of a quest (NOTE: Post-release patching has actually made the inventory MUCH better, but still not perfect). Additionally, you get the same annoying and often arbitrary limitations on carry weight and vendor funds you see in similar games like Skyrim. Managing inventory when you're out in the field isn't fun. Running around to 10 different vendors looking for one with enough money to buy your stuff isn't fun. These issues are made even worse by the lack of any kind of off-character storage (NOTE 2: Storage was also added post-release, good on you CDPR!)

Another bad part about The Witcher that actually turns into a good part is NPC dialogue. I know it's unavoidable, but hearing the same lines over and over again when talking to vendors and other inconsequential NPCs is really dull. Every open world game has this issue, and The Witcher is no exception. Where the Witcher DOES separate itself is in the variety of character voice acting. I can barely remember a single instance of hearing the same voice actor doing the same voice for multiple characters. This is a big pet peeve of mine that Skyrim was extremely guilty of. The Thieves Guild questline alone in Skyrim had the same voice assigned to two different major characters. The Witcher is an absolute gold standard in this category. Not only was there amazing variety, but the individual voice acting performances were incredible. From major characters down to single-visit side quest characters, the performance of the voice acting was truly amazing.

The quality of the voice acting and the craftsmanship of the world combine to make The Witcher all about the characters. The story is quite good, but it's all in service of the characters and your relationships with them. The classic debate will be about who you choose between Triss and Yennefer, but it extends well beyond that. There are literally dozens of memorable characters that I found myself deeply emotionally attached to. It even speaks to the quality of the character development that a Reddit poll asking "Triss or Yennefer" came back almost exactly 50/50 (Although half those people are crazy. Yennefer is the only true choice). I even liked that Geralt himself was a somewhat pre-defined character and not a blank slate for the player to define. Most RPGs let you BE the character. When I played Skyrim, I WAS my character. When I played Mass Effect, I played Shepard as if I WAS Shepard. When I played The Witcher, I felt like Geralt was separate from myself, and I made decisions based on how I thought HE would have made them. That, in my opinion, is why Yennefer was an obvious choice for me. I really REALLY liked Yennefer, but Geralt loved her, so she was the only choice.

Through the reviewing process I found myself naturally drawing comparisons to Skyrim frequently. This isn't a surprise, as they're both quite similar games. Skyrim is a 5-star game in my books, which is a score I only assign to my all-time greats. Skyrim is definitely one of my all-time favourites, and I keep finding myself comparing The Witcher quite favourably to it. I think I'm a bit of a Skyrim apologist, but I can also admit it had its flaws. Keeping that in mind, and looking at how much I enjoyed and was completely immersed in my time with The Witcher 3, I'm more than happy to welcome it to the pantheon of my all-time best. It truly belongs right alongside Skyrim, Bastion, Dark Souls, Mass Effect 2, and several others as one of the best games I have ever played, flaws and all.

And that's not even mentioning Gwent. Aww yeah, Gwent.

I've been having a ton of fun for the last 6 months or so as I make my way through the Metal Gear series for the first time. MGS 1 plays pretty well for such an old game, and I was absolutely blown away by the HD collection versions of 2 and 3. MGS4 was absolutely incredible as well, despite an ending that was a bit too long. Through the course of playing through MGS4 I came to a sudden and unexpected realization. One that many may be surprised about. Now I'm ready to admit it to the world.

I like Raiden more than I like Snake.

I totally like Snake, don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with him whatsoever. Raiden though, wow. I liked him just fine in MGS2. Sure he was a little bit of a whiner, but can you blame him with all the nonsense going on? His presence in MGS4 is nothing short of absolutely incredible from start to finish. So imagine my excitement to start playing Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, where you play as MGS4 Raiden the entire time. On top of that, the gameplay looked is similar to the new DmC: Devil May Cry, which I loved. I was REALLY excited for this.

Unfortunately, I found myself not enjoying Revengeance as much as I had hoped. The story, and more importantly the spectacle, is certainly unique and has that signature Metal Gear craziness. It's just not presented in as cohesive and interesting a way. The main bad guy, or the guy I assumed was the main bad guy is completely uninteresting to me and feels really poorly imagined. He looks less like a murderous force and more like a drunk 45-year-old from your softball team that found a combat suit and decided to try it on. You fight him at one point in the game and he gets away, setting the stage for him to reappear in the final battle.......except he doesn't. That's the last you see of him. The actual end boss kind of just drops into the story out of nowhere near the end.

Some of that might be slightly inaccurate. I'm not 100% sure to be honest because I found the story in this game really boring. I didn't skip cut-scenes because I thought those were pretty well done, but I was starting to skip a lot of in-mission dialog by the end. It was just so slow and uninteresting, and really wasn't contributing to a compelling narrative. With most MGS games I care deeply about the story, but can't always figure out every detail. Revengeance is exactly the opposite. I'm able to understand it, I just don't really care.

I mentioned the gameplay as being similar to DmC and it is....sort of, but that's giving Revengeance too much credit. The key to the combat is definitely the parry mechanic. If you don't get very proficient at parrying very early in the game, you're going to be in for a great deal of trouble. This became very frustrating because parrying was very touchy and inconsistent. The timing and directions didn't work the way you expected, and attacks chaining multiple strikes were almost impossible to properly defend against. This all came to a head about 30 minutes into the game when you square off against a robot dog similar to Crying Wolf from MGS4. You've barely finished being tutorialized at this point, and you're thrown into a battle against a very fast enemy you MUST parry consistently to conquer.

A unique gameplay mechanic is the sword-time slow motion slashing. You manually control where you're slashing Raiden's sword with the analog sticks. It's pretty fun, but not when you need to do it quickly and with precision. The final battle features multiple such moments where screwing up results in an instant fail-state. Failing on a boss fight over and over again on what amounts to a poorly laid out quicktime event is really frustrating, especially when that quicktime event comes more than halfway through the fight, making you start all over again every time you mess up.

On the other hand, Revengeance is a game featuring Raiden kicking ass swiftly and consistently, and that's pretty great. The spectacle definitely reminds me of DmC, and I imagine it would remind me of Bayonetta if I had ever played Bayonetta. That's probably the best I can say about Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance in general. I really like getting to play as a badass Raiden, and it makes me really want to pick up a WiiU to play Bayonetta, so I can see this sort of thing done properly.

Far Cry 3 was a fantastic game. Sure it had its problems, namely the kind of disgusting story, but it was one of the best open world games I had ever played. It was graphically incredible, the gameplay felt pretty good, it actually decently pulled off 1st person stealth, and the side content was in most cases actually worth doing. The hunting/crafting system from FC3 is one of the rare cases of really effectively incentivizing the player to deviate from the main content. I enjoyed Far Cry 3 so much that I was even willing to tolerate the stinking cesspool that is uPlay in order to pick up and play Far Cry 4. I can not overstate how much I hate uPlay, it's goddamn terrible. THAT'S how much I wanted to play Far Cry 4.

Far Cry 4 takes a lot of the concepts of Far Cry 3 and runs with them. Well, not runs, more like slowly inches forward with them. There are some definite improvements to basic gameplay concepts in this game. Many of them are relatively minor, but offer a lot in the way of conveniences. For example, there are a lot of grapple points on cliffs and mountains, making it a lot easier to traverse the landscape. Also, and this is a really small thing, when you kill an animal a small "X" appears on the map where their corpse is. I can't count how many times I killed an animal with a long range arrow in FC3 only to lose the body in the long grass once I got up there. It's small stuff like this that's easy to take for granted, but makes a nice difference in moment to moment gameplay.

The hunting/crafting system is still here, and I'm still a fan of it. Giving players tangible and measurable rewards is the perfect incentive to engage in side activity. This is also true to a lesser extent of climbing towers and liberating outposts. Completing these gift you the odd free gun, and there's actually a pretty good amount of fun and variety in completing these tasks. If they had split up side content into hunting, towers, outposts, and a few collectibles I'd be happy. Unfortunately, they piled on WAY more side content than that, and quite frankly it's really overwhelming. The map is more littered with waypoints than a Google Maps search for Starbucks in Seattle. The amount of content falls a little bit on the "too much" side of things.

Also, while we're at it, I have a major bone to pick with Ubisoft about finishing side content. There are some pretty nice guns in Far Cry 4 called signature guns. These are unlocked by finishing set amounts of side content. One that caught my eye was a really nice sniper rifle. In my first few hours of playing I saw that and thought "Well, I use snipers a lot in these games. I'm going to go unlock this right away". Unfortunately unlocking this weapon meant liberating all 24(ish) outposts in the whole game. This was going to take several hours, but I was okay with that.

After liberating about 15 outposts I was flying a glider to the next one and I hit an invisible wall in the sky. The message appeared on the screen "Complete more story missions to unlock Northern Kyrat". FFFFFUUUUCCCCKKKK that! I had just spent HOURS knocking down all the outposts for the express purpose of getting this sniper rifle early in my playthrough, and now the game's telling me I need to finish like 3/4 of the main story before I can finish unlocking it. I was pissed! AC: Black Flag did this too. I went out of my way to unlock a set of armor in that game, only to find out that the last step in the unlocking process was on an island you can't get to until the last eighth of the game. I HATE this. At least tell me up front that this will be the case before I waste a bunch of my time.

Sigh...with that frustration set in, it was time to stop flying around doing needless side content grinding and get to the main story. I've pretty universally heard that the story in FC4 is much more palatable than in FC3. Let me be the first person to say I disagree completely. The main villain, Pagan Minn, is pretty decent, but he just doesn't have much of a presence through most of the game. The main character has zero personality, and his motivations are never really clear. For example, why the hell does he keep getting drugged and dumped in the woods by two stoners, yet he keeps voluntarily coming back to do it again? The whole thing is just pretty by the numbers and dull, but that pales in comparison to my main issue with the story.

Throughout the campaign there are main quests where you must align with one of the two rebellion leaders, Sabal or Amita. Sabal is deeply rooted in the culture and history of Kyrat and wants traditions upheld. Amita has a vision for the future of Kyrat and wants to enact change. They're both unbelievably petty assholes, and wholly unlikable. Whichever one you don't side with turns into anything from a pouty child to accusing you of negligent homicide. Oh and the one you actually DO side with seems much more interested in telling the other one to suck it than being happy about the progress you've made for the rebellion. They're both horrible people, and I was curious how it was going to end. It ends by one of them telling you to straight up murder the other. Holy shit guys, chill!

Say what you want about the FC3 story, but at least it had some really cool moments (burning the pot farm, anyone?), an unbelievably awesome villain in Vaas, and characters who, albeit kinda shitty people, mostly were just understandably scared and wanted to go home. Even the protagonist had a steak of likability to him. Every once in a while he got a little too caught up in the action and you could tell he was giddy with excitement at blowing up a tank or jumping off a cliff. The FC4 protagonist can be entirely summed up by his response to most people "I don't like or trust you, but I'll blindly do what you're asking me anyway".

Is Far Cry 4 a good game? Absolutely. From a gameplay standpoint it's a more polished FC3, and Far Cry 3 was incredible. FC4 isn't incredible though. The story, amazingly, took a step backwards and the changes to gameplay, while certainly welcome, are little more than tweaking of the original formula. If you're willing to brave to shitpile that is uPlay, give Far Cry 4 a try, just don't expect any more or less than a slightly improved and slightly less interesting Far Cry 3.

Find your Zen, achieve Nirvana, or otherwise get your head in the right space, because it's time for Bloodborne. Playing a "Souls game" requires a mental preparation unparalleled in most other game experiences I undertake. In recent weeks I can't say I was in the right space to play Bloodborne, but after seeing some initial impressions, I MADE myself get in the right space. I wasn't missing out on this one. There's a special experience to playing a Souls game (I don't know how else to refer to them) when it's new. I never played Demon's Souls, I came to Dark Souls pretty late, and I waited for the PC release to play Dark Souls 2. As such, I had never played one of these games during the magical discovery period. There's a brief window of time when the internet hasn't solved all the riddles the game has to offer. I wanted in on that.

I definitely got what I wished for, and the result was initially very frustrating. Over time, however, that frustration built into satisfaction and an immense feeling of triumph. There are some key fundemental differences to Bloodborne from previous games, but the ultimate hurdle is just getting yourself back in the groove of things, which admittedly took me several hours.

The big talk coming into Bloodborne was the removal of shields. The Dark Souls games heavily featured shields, and I certainly used one at all times as the ultimate safety blanket. I probably wore out my left shoulder button by having that shield up at all times. While many will say playing with a shield wasn't the "true" way to play Dark Souls, those people can kindly crawl back up their own ass. The Souls games were about finding the playstyle that suited you the best. If shields work for you, go ahead and use them. Bloodborne isn't about that. Bloodborne is about mastering the playstyle they've pre-determined for you.

Everyone in Bloodborne will be using the same weapon set with a couple variances. You'll be using a gun in your left hand, and a trick weapon in your right hand. Guns are the closest analog to a shield, being primarily used to stagger opponents to follow up with a counter-attack. The trick weapons are really cool, and provide some neat diversity in your playstyle. My weapon of choice was Ludwig's Holy Blade, which was a standard sword that fit into a massive scabbard which was actually also a sword. Being able to switch between a smaller, faster weapon and a massive claymore was really handy. Other examples of trick weapons include a cane that turns into a whip and a saw-cleaver that is essentially a massive switchblade.

Everything is pared down and simplified on the weapons and armor side. There's only about a dozen weapons in the game, so it's less about finding new weapons and more about upgrading and mastering your existing weapons. It's very plausible that you'll fight the game's final boss with the same weapon you fought the first boss with. Armor is also simplified. There's not really an element of armor weight. Your character moves at the same speed regardless of what they're wearing. Rarely is a set of armor a straight upgrade from any other gear. Instead, the armor specializes in certain defenses and resistances. Picking the poison resist gear in the swamp will certainly help, but there's no Havel's Armor equivalent on offer here.

As is often the case for me, I found Bloodborne started really hard and actually got easier over time. I had a great deal of difficulty with the very first boss and ended up summoning in another player to help me past it. I beat the second boss on my own, but it took quite a few tries. After that I settled into a groove where I finished most of the remaining bosses in 1-3 attempts. It really is an amazing feeling the first time you defeat a boss in one try. I did actually have quite a bit of difficulty with the last boss, but bosses 3-9 or so went down with little trouble for me.

In terms of ranking this game I can't help but feel that it's somehow lesser than the Dark Souls games, particularly the original Dark Souls. Namely, I can't think of many good reasons to want to replay Bloodborne. When playing Dark Souls I would do one run as a spellcaster, one as a heavy armor/2-handed player, and maybe one as an archer/katana player. Sometimes Id' get one of the special boss weapons like the Moonlight Butterfly Horn and play through with that. I just don't see that level of variety in Bloodborne. I know there's a lot of debate about the removal of shields, but to me their absence is just symptomatic of a larger issue: lack of variety.

Still, Bloodborne continues a trend of immersion, and in my case obsession with this series. I'm absolutely absorbed in these games while playing them, and they harbour discussion among my other friends currently playing the game that few other franchises do. While there is a bit less variety to Bloodborne than Dark Souls, they did a great job building a cool and challenging world. At the end of the day, Bloodborne probably isn't as good as Dark Souls, but is probably a bit better than Dark Souls 2, a position that still qualifies it as one of my favourite games in recent years.

Few forces in gaming are more powerful than word of mouth. If the discussion turns on you, look out, because you are in for a proverbial shitstorm of trouble. Bad word of mouth can be largely to blame for the massive head start the Ps4 got over the Xbox One when both consoles launched. It's an immense force, and that's why a game that generates a burst of positive word of mouth is really heading places, and usually for good reason.

Enter Ori and the Blind Forest, a game that I'd heard nigh an unflattering word about heading into my time with it. A game that had been described with exuberant adjectives like stunning, heartfelt, and gorgeous. With a dearth of quality AAA releases we as a community can sometimes get a little hyperbolic when we get too excited about a smaller game, so did Ori live up to the hype?

In my experience, yes. Absolutely. Ori and the Blind Forest is aesthetically nothing short of a work of art. The visuals are mind-blowing. The music is fantastic, and the gameplay is vastly more varied and interesting that I had imagined. On top of all that, Ori starts you off with a prologue sequence that will have you nearly in tears and completely hooked emotionally before you've even really started playing.

When talking to others about this game I've heard many comparisons, most commonly to Super Meat Boy, Dust: An Elysian Tale, and Castlevania/Metroid. All those comparisons have definite merit. All platformers going forward will always be compared to Meat Boy as they rightfully should. Meat Boy set the standard for control tightness in a platformer. Does Ori control as tight as Meat Boy? Absolutely not, but there's a lot of wiggle room there. A game's controls can be worse than Meat Boy and still pretty good. Ori's controls are almost always as responsive as you need them to be. They're not perfect, in many cases I found myself over-shooting very short distance jumps, but they're pretty good overall. It's not really a fair comparison either, because there's much more variety in Ori's gameplay than their was in Meat Boy.

In Meat Boy largely you ran, sprinted, jumped, and slid. That's it. It did those things perfectly, but it did only those things. Ori and the Blind Forest is far more complex than I imagined. Over the course of the game you learn to double-jump, wall climb, wall run, stomp, launch, float, and several more. Once given a new power you're almost immediately required to put it to practical use in very difficult sequences. For all its gorgeous looks, touching story, and cutesy looking characters, this game is actually pretty darn difficult. Things get pretty challenging pretty quickly and only escalate from there.

The Catlevania/Metroid comparisons are fairly obvious, this is a classic case of Metroidvania. You go through areas the best you can, but there are doors, ledges, and collectibles you can't reach on your first trip through. Only after having gained a new power or ability will you be able to go back and get everything or access a new area. It's handled well here. They make you work for valuable upgrades to your health and energy, but putting points in certain areas of the ability tree can make tracking these upgrades down much easier. The art is so unique in this game as well that you never feel like you're going through the same bland areas over and over again.

The art is the main thing that reminds me of Dust: An Elysian Tail. It has a similar style, and the fidelity of both almost took my breath away. It's just so sharp and so vibrant. This is certainly an early contender for best looking game of the year, and I wouldn't hesitate to nominate is as one of the best looking games of the decade. Another aspect it shares with Dust is having a rather innocent looking setting, but underneath lies a deep and unexpectedly dark story. I won't get into specifics, but it definitely blurs the lines between good and evil and really makes you consider the motives and justifications of all the characters. It also has some absolutely heart breaking moments.

In the end, control responsiveness are what holds Ori and the Blind Forest back. It sounds almost ridiculous saying that, because the controls are pretty darn good. When I say they hold the game back, all I mean is they knock it down from Game of the Year favourite to only a serious contender. The story seems like it's missing a couple small pieces to make it feel a bit more complete and the controls are only very good and not phenomenal. Those are the biggest complaints I can make about Ori, a game that I absolutely recommend you give a try.

In the indie games world, sequels are hard. really hard. No matter what you do, everything about your new game will always be compared against your first one. This is true of AAA games as well, but they're working on longer timelines and bigger scale, so there's more they can iterate on. The important thing is to recognize what made your first game popular, and find a way to capture that magic again, it's no small order.

The original Hotline: Miami was special for a few reasons. First, the music was absolutely INCREDIBLE! The music perfectly matched the look and feel of the game itself. It nicely complemented the frenetic gameplay and the drug-fueled hyper violent 80's theme oozing from every corner of the screen. That 80's theming also made Hotline Maimi special. It was like some sort of mix between Scarface and A Clockwork Orange, yet somehow worse, and darker. The gameplay was fast and rewarding, making you think and plan ahead, only to have those plans hit the wall along with shards of your skull.

Hotline Miami 2 does the best it can to build on the strengths of the first game. Unfortunately, it often builds in the wrong direction.

In many ways, Hotline Miami 2 feels like a direct continuation of the first game. The difficulty ramps up almost immediately to the point where it's all but assumed that players of this game are already well versed in the controls and mechanics. I was amazed how quickly things escalated the become pretty darn difficult. I'm talking like the 2nd level here. I feel for anyone wading into the second game as their intro to the series, you're in for a bit of an adjustment period. Now, extra difficulty can definitely be a good thing. Its the way in which the game is more difficult that bothers me.

Things are a lot harder in Hotline Miami 2 simply because everything is so much bigger than in the first game. Each level is about the size of three original game levels, meaning you need to string together a longer run of perfection to actually complete a stage, as a single shot from any enemy can still send you right back to the beginning. More than that though, the rooms themselves are also WAY bigger. They're so much bigger that getting shot by an off-screen character is a very real worry at pretty much all times. Even when using the extended look function, you are often not able to see far enough to comfortably move forward.

This change in environment size leads to a few changes in the way you need to approach each level, and they're all to the detriment of the experience. First, you're going to be using guns a lot more. In the first Hotline Miami I used guns as a last resort. I much preferred to burst into rooms with my knife flailing, taking out everyone before they even saw me coming. That's not going to work in this game, because there are often six guys in a single room, the room is too big to burst into to surprise everyone, and the enemies at the far end of the room have one-shot-kill shotguns that they're deadly accurate with.

The other change to my gameplay style that I despised was passivity. When levels can easily contain 20+ enemies and each run takes several minutes, you're going to be MUCH more careful about not screwing up and dying part way through an attempt. Part of the fun of the first game was thinking up a crazy strategy, then bursting into a room and trying it out. When it worked it felt absolutely amazing, and when it didn't it was hilarious. When each attempt is hyper difficult and dying would mean having to start all over from 20 enemies ago, I'm just not going to take any crazy risks. This led to a lot of luring enemies around a corner and stabbing them in the neck. The basic body-pile strategy is very effective, but it also feels cheesy. I felt guilty when doing this in the first game. It felt essential in this game.

It might seem a little harsh. When it comes right down to it, the moment to moment combat still feels good. The aesthetic is still cool and unique. The storytelling is hypnotic and oddly intriguing, and that's not even to mention the music. The music is unquestionably the best part of Hotline Miami 2. I applaud them greatly for deviating quite a bit from the extremely well regarded music of the first game. Between the two games there's actually quite a bit of variety. Many of the tracks this time around are a bit more mellow and slow-paced than in the first, which actually mirrors the gameplay in some ways.

Overall, I'm a bit disappointed. I loved the first Hotline Miami and was really looking forward to this one. It was kind of a harsh epiphany this time around as I started to realize I wasn't enjoying myself as much. Usually beating a level wasn't cause for excitement, but rather exasperated relief that I was done with that particular ordeal. If beating a level in a game makes me think "Oh thank god! I'm so glad I don't have to do that again" there's probably something a little off.

The Arkham series of Batman games began with Arkham Asylum back in 2009. At the time I was fairly entrenched in World of Warcraft mode and didn’t pick up this game right away. When I first heard of it I heard nothing but absolutely stellar recommendations. By the time I rolled around to playing it in about 2012 it suffered from a bit of a problem. The main hook of that original game was its amazing melee combat mechanics. The problem is that by the time I played it I had already played several games that had “borrowed” and iterated on this mechanic, so it wasn’t as mind blowing as it was for early players. I definitely saw the appeal though, and the story telling and atmosphere was absolutely fantastic, especially for its time.

Fast forward two games and 4+ years and we have the next installment, Arkham Origins. For the record, I’d like to say that it’s absolutely incredible that we live in a time in which Batman games are actually good and highly anticipated. Throughout gaming history, Batman games have been nothing but absolutely horrendous. If Arkham Origins was the first of a new wave of Batman games we’d all be celebrating it as absolutely incredible. Unfortunately, as the third in its series and the 20,349th in the last few years with these mechanics, Origins just feels a little flat.

It’s still as solid mechanically and visually as ever, but that’s kind of the problem. When you’re comparing yourself to a game that came out in 2009, saying you’re “on par” just isn’t that great. They introduced some new aspects lately, like the so-called open world aspect from Arkham City and the detective mode in Arkham Origins, but these two additions feel a lot less like additions and a lot more like inconveniences.

Everything about Arkham Origins just has an overall feel of fatigue. From the combat mechanics to the scenarios to the story, the whole thing just looks like the Batman peanut butter was just spread a little too thin over this three-game piece of toast. The most offending victim of this fatigue is the cast of characters you’ll be seeing. In Arkham Asylum we interact with The Joker, Commissioner Gordon, Killer Croc, Harley Quinn, The Riddler, Scarecrow, and Poison Ivy. In Arkham City we get to see Hugo Strange, Catwoman, The Penguin, Mr. Freeze, Ra’s Al Ghul, Talia Al Ghul, and Soloman Grundy. So who do we get in Origins? Um…… Bane. Pretty much just Bane. The rest of the cast is made up of every obscure character that could be dragged from the dregs of the DC basement.

I hope you enjoy fighting the likes of Deathstroke, Firefly, and Deadshot, because those are the new enemies you’ll face this time around. The story hook is that Black Mask has hired 8 assassins to track down and kill you, leaving the assumption that you’ll be fighting all 8 at one point or another. Here’s the thing. I think by the end of the game I’d really only fought like 5 of them. I seriously don’t remember fighting at least a couple of them, which means either I didn’t have to fight them or those fights were REALLY forgettable.

The epic fights play out in a way that keeps in step with the blandness of the rest of the game as well. One of the first fights was against Deathstroke, and it was actually pretty badass…..for the first quarter of the fight. That is until I realized that the fight was basically the EXACT same choreographed sequence four times in a row. It was NES-esque in its design. Melee attack the enemy for a bit until his health reaches a certain breakpoint, at which point he breaks off from the fight and lunges at you, generating a quicktime event. Once you fend him off, you go back into melee until another breakpoint, in which you are served the same quicktime event from before. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were maybe only about 4 different animations used in that entire 5 minute fight.

I struggle to say that Arkham Origins is a bad game. It doesn’t do a whole lot particularly wrong, it just doesn’t go out of its way to do anything new, or even improved from the previous games. Combine that with the plethora of other games that have utilized the Arkham melee mechanics, and this game just works out to a really big meh. If you are a huge fan of Batman then I’m sure you’ll find some enjoyment in this game, but if you’re new to the series and want to try it out I really suggest you go back and try the first game instead. It did all the things Origins did just as well, but with way better atmosphere, more creative story and encounter design, and far more recognizable characters. It speaks volumes that I got Arkham Origins a week before getting Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, and as soon as that game came in, I put Origins aside for almost 8 months.

The Wolf Among Us was about as close to an earned purchase as it gets for me. By that I mean a game that I’ll buy based entirely on the quality of a previous game. The most automatic reputation purchases I’ve ever made were both this year, for Dark Souls II and Transistor. Dark Souls and Bastion were so amazing that I was willing to throw their developers cash based solely on the trust that their new project would be excellent as well. I was willing to the the same with The Wolf Among Us based on a brief glimpse at the premise and my enjoyment of The Walking Dead: Season 1.

The character development, storytelling, and drama of TWD all in a modern Fables setting? Yes please! Having picked up The Walking Dead after all five episodes had been released, I was looking forward to experiencing The wolf Among Us as it was intended, one episode at a time. Having now experienced episodic games in both ways I can say this with impunity: Unless you have friends that will spoil the plot for you or you’re a VERY patient person, just wait.

Based purely on the story and gameplay experince I thought The Wolf Among Us was very good, but allow me first to share some advice for Telltale Games and any other episodic game developers out there.

Dear Telltale,

How are you? It’s hell of a game you made there! It didn’t quite live up to TWD Season 1, but almost nothing ever will. Great job! I really love how well you understand pacing. It is because I know you understand story pacing that I find it inexcusable that you released the 2nd episode of The Wolf Among Us almost 4 MONTHS after the 1st.

Now I know you were busy at the time. You released the 1st episode of The Walking Dead: Season 2 in that time and you also are presumably working on your new Game of Thrones and Borderlands series’ as well. You know who doesn’t care how busy you are? The people who bought The Wolf Among Us. That’s who. This brings me back to story pacing. You might have been able to get away with a 4 month gap between episodes 4 and 5 because by that point I’d have been invested in the story. What you can’t do is introduce players to a brand new story and set of characters for 2 hours and then ask them to wait the equivalent of an entire NFL season for the next installment.

We’re not a captivated audience yet, Telltale Games. We don’t have the attachment for these characters that we had for Clem and Lee. It will get there, but you have to take us there. The most committed of us either read a recap or (like me) played the first episode over again just before the 2nd episode was released. We’re not going to do that every time. Luckily you released your next episodes in 2, 1 1/2, and 1 1/2 months respectively, but for some the damage was already done.

I beg you, Telltale, if you ever find yourself in this position again, either delay the start of The Walking Dead: Season 2 (unlikely) or do your best to make the larger gaps towards the end of the series when most of your audience is already invested in the characters and story.

Keep making great games, and I’ll be sure to keep buying them. Although next time I’ll probably wait and buy them when they’re all out and on sale.

All the best,

Tarfuin.

All that aside, the game really was exceptional. Having never read the Fables graphic novel series, I found myself immediately immersed in the setting. I love the idea of all these fables forming together to try to assimilate into modern society. More than that though, I couldn’t get enough of seeing the humanized interpretations on some of the fairy tale characters. There’s one in particular that is absolutely perfect on so many levels. In the interest of keeping this spoiler free I’ll just say he owns a club. You’ll know him when you see him.

The investment in the characters is there after a few episodes. It doesn’t have the natural protective relationship that TWD had with Lee and Clem, but if anything that makes your decisions even more murky. In TWD I would always ask “What’s best for Clem?” as a moral fallback. You don’t have that here. The decisions are truly yours.

I absolutely recommend this game to everyone, especially if you’re either a fan of Fables/fairy tales or the first season of The Walking Dead game. If you’re the type that needs to know the story right away, the game was well worth a Day 1 pickup, but you need to exercise patience. In all, I think your best bet for any of Telltale’s games are to wait until Episode 3 is released and pick it up on sale. You’ll have time to play the first three episodes with just a bit of a gap before Episode 4 comes out. Then you’ll have a nice, small, hype-building gap before finally enjoying the finale.

The Wolf Among Us was about as close to an earned purchase as it gets for me. By that I mean a game that I’ll buy based entirely on the quality of a previous game. The most automatic reputation purchases I’ve ever made were both this year, for Dark Souls II and Transistor. Dark Souls and Bastion were so amazing that I was willing to throw their developers cash based solely on the trust that their new project would be excellent as well. I was willing to the the same with The Wolf Among Us based on a brief glimpse at the premise and my enjoyment of The Walking Dead: Season 1.

The character development, storytelling, and drama of TWD all in a modern Fables setting? Yes please! Having picked up The Walking Dead after all five episodes had been released, I was looking forward to experiencing The wolf Among Us as it was intended, one episode at a time. Having now experienced episodic games in both ways I can say this with impunity: Unless you have friends that will spoil the plot for you or you’re a VERY patient person, just wait.

Based purely on the story and gameplay experince I thought The Wolf Among Us was very good, but allow me first to share some advice for Telltale Games and any other episodic game developers out there.

Dear Telltale,

How are you? It’s hell of a game you made there! It didn’t quite live up to TWD Season 1, but almost nothing ever will. Great job! I really love how well you understand pacing. It is because I know you understand story pacing that I find it inexcusable that you released the 2nd episode of The Wolf Among Us almost 4 MONTHS after the 1st.

Now I know you were busy at the time. You released the 1st episode of The Walking Dead: Season 2 in that time and you also are presumably working on your new Game of Thrones and Borderlands series’ as well. You know who doesn’t care how busy you are? The people who bought The Wolf Among Us. That’s who. This brings me back to story pacing. You might have been able to get away with a 4 month gap between episodes 4 and 5 because by that point I’d have been invested in the story. What you can’t do is introduce players to a brand new story and set of characters for 2 hours and then ask them to wait the equivalent of an entire NFL season for the next installment.

We’re not a captivated audience yet, Telltale Games. We don’t have the attachment for these characters that we had for Clem and Lee. It will get there, but you have to take us there. The most committed of us either read a recap or (like me) played the first episode over again just before the 2nd episode was released. We’re not going to do that every time. Luckily you released your next episodes in 2, 1 1/2, and 1 1/2 months respectively, but for some the damage was already done.

I beg you, Telltale, if you ever find yourself in this position again, either delay the start of The Walking Dead: Season 2 (unlikely) or do your best to make the larger gaps towards the end of the series when most of your audience is already invested in the characters and story.

Keep making great games, and I’ll be sure to keep buying them. Although next time I’ll probably wait and buy them when they’re all out and on sale.

All the best,

Tarfuin.

All that aside, the game really was exceptional. Having never read the Fables graphic novel series, I found myself immediately immersed in the setting. I love the idea of all these fables forming together to try to assimilate into modern society. More than that though, I couldn’t get enough of seeing the humanized interpretations on some of the fairy tale characters. There’s one in particular that is absolutely perfect on so many levels. In the interest of keeping this spoiler free I’ll just say he owns a club. You’ll know him when you see him.

The investment in the characters is there after a few episodes. It doesn’t have the natural protective relationship that TWD had with Lee and Clem, but if anything that makes your decisions even more murky. In TWD I would always ask “What’s best for Clem?” as a moral fallback. You don’t have that here. The decisions are truly yours.

I absolutely recommend this game to everyone, especially if you’re either a fan of Fables/fairy tales or the first season of The Walking Dead game. If you’re the type that needs to know the story right away, the game was well worth a Day 1 pickup, but you need to exercise patience. In all, I think your best bet for any of Telltale’s games are to wait until Episode 3 is released and pick it up on sale. You’ll have time to play the first three episodes with just a bit of a gap before Episode 4 comes out. Then you’ll have a nice, small, hype-building gap before finally enjoying the finale.